The New/s Initiative: Minding the Gaps
What’s needed right now to support innovation for equity in journalism? That’s the question we’ve been asking ourselves as we develop strategies for the New/s initiative at the Guild of Future Architects (GoFA).
Future architects in news must now navigate rocky terrain. After the past year, they are poised for radical transformation, but both weary and leery. And now, with the world opening back up, the pressure to speed up and “return to normal” is intense, leaving little space for new ideas to flourish.
On the one hand, we know that diverse innovators seeking to invent new forms of news always have some persistent needs: time, money, supportive leadership, a great idea, and the leeway to experiment. On the other hand, the past year has forced such innovators to run an unprecedented gauntlet, facing both new threats and opportunities every few months.
A rapidly shifting landscape
First there was the challenge of reporting on the pandemic itself, compounded by the need to rapidly improvise ways to report from lockdown. Then, protests sparked by the police killing of George Floyd spurred a wave of fresh approaches to reporting on structural racism, as well as self-examination (both forced and voluntary) in newsrooms across the country.
Elections always serve as a crucible for cooking up new forms of news, and this one was a doozy. Threats included the ongoing dangers of COVID-19, active misinformation efforts, and fears of election-related violence, all of which culminated in the unprecedented January 6 insurrection. Projects such as Election SOS—led in part by GoFA member Jennifer Brandel and her colleagues at Hearken—had their hands full in collaborating with reporters across the country to develop rapid-response plans.
All of this energy, ingenuity, and hustle has fed a groundswell of journalism models, outlets, and campaigns focused on health, racial equity, audience engagement, collaboration, fact-checking, and awareness of structural disparities. It has opened up new avenues of funding from philanthropy and tech companies, and forced difficult and necessary conversations across the field.
The NiemanLab predictions for 2021 offered a snapshot of these changes, with contributors calling for fresh solutions, including reparative journalism, mainstream coverage of Indigenous issues, the normalization of women’s political leadership, a rise in founders of color, and journalism just plain “getting its shit together” on embodying equity at every level. In my own prediction, I argued for “a media that’s not just diverse, equitable, and inclusive, but that positively revels in pluralism — and one that spends as much time reporting on what still functions as it does on what’s broken.”
All of this passion and urgency for reforming journalism has served as a welcome counterpoint to much gloomier headlines about worldwide cutbacks in the industry. But the relentlessness of these challenges has also taken its toll. Journalists are burning out after months of navigating crisis management—especially high-profile leaders who are women and people of color. This builds on the existing trend of journalists of color leaving the industry.
Despite all of the revelations of #MeToo, bullying and harassment continue to be live issues in newsrooms. Remote work in general has fostered new avenues for bias and work-related pressures. Journalists such as Nikole Hannah-Jones who make the case for structural reform are battling high-profile conservative backlash. And while there is a bump in funding for outlets and projects led by and serving people of color, as my Dot Connector Studio colleague Mark Glaser reports in this new guide for the Knight Foundation, the needs still far outpace new dollars.
Given this moment, how might GoFA’s New/s initiative provide a healthy and productive context for journalists who are women, people of color, or identify as LGBTQIA+ to rethink their practice and collaborate on new approaches? To explore this question, we have been both looking beyond the journalism field for parallel models, and looking more closely at the Guild’s own programs to understand how they might best serve the field.
Understanding the current ecosystem for supporting DEI in news
First, building on previous Dot Connector Studio research, Glaser and I took stock of the range of funding initiatives, membership organizations, networks, fellowship programs, publications, and academic centers that focus on supporting journalists and news outlets. This is a large and bustling field of activity, but only a subset of these organizations explicitly focus DEI in news. Fewer still emphasize innovation with these issues in mind.
In Dot Connector Studio’s previous work with the Democracy Fund’s Engaged Journalism Lab, we took a closer look at organizations that do have a DEI focus—see the Journalism DEI Tracker. We also detailed the range of possible approaches for funders seeking to support DEI in journalism in an interactive tool called the Journalism DEI Wheel.
But, again, this research confirmed that few programs explicitly support diverse innovators, and when they do, the focus is usually on providing support for a particular race, gender, or identity group.
Of course, such programs are valuable in providing a safe space for honest conversations, and helping participants to build skills, networks, and projects. But they can also leave participants feeling pigeonholed, and run the risk of reinforcing deficit-based framing. That is, focusing on perceived weaknesses of these groups rather than emphasizing that journalism is more compelling and accurate when produced by and for people with different perspectives and lived experiences.
Looking outside for inspiration
With these gaps in mind, Glaser and I decided to hone in on programs and organizations explicitly designed to support practitioners in developing new products, services, and approaches. We assembled a list of more than 30 labs, accelerators, incubators, and academic institutes to compare.
Some of these focus explicitly on journalism, such as CUNY’s Entrepreneurial Journalism Creators Program, the Lenfest Institute for Journalism, or the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute. Others focus on forms of media that are not explicitly journalism but share similar goals, such as Allied Media Projects, Black Public Media’s 360 Incubator+, or the Civic Media Fellowship at USC Annenberg’s Innovation Lab.
But the New/s initiative is designed to be interdisciplinary, mission-driven, and future-facing. So we also looked at organizations outside of media to see what we could learn from adjacent fields. For example, NEW INC supports people working at “the intersection of art, design, and technology,” MIT’s Senseable City Lab supports “urban imagination and social innovation through design and science,” and the Precarity Lab is a research collective examining the ways in which digital platforms can produce various forms of “insecurity, vulnerability, and social and cultural exclusion.”
Incubators typically work with early-stage startups or ideas, helping them birth a new product or service with seed or angel funding. Because we are hoping to adapt elements of the Guild’s flagship incubator for the New/s initiative, Glaser took a closer look at incubators in particular across our comparative sample. He found that there are no media incubators with a focus on futuring, and that while more media-related incubators are focusing on DEI given the multiple reckonings of the past few years, launching with such a central focus will help us fill a much-needed gap.
We’re not looking at this so much as a competitive analysis, but rather as a chance to identify allies and learning partners. We want the New/s initiative to be additive, and as a place to both share existing resources and identify and amplify promising talent.
We also don’t see these spheres of activity as static. Instead, we are trying to understand how each practice can lead to more profound outcomes over time. How can foresight drive transformation? How can DEI work move from prioritizing voice to deepening belonging for all? How can journalism move from its current state of frantic 24/7 reaction to one of intention and connection?
Looking inside for strengths
In recent weeks, given all of our research, we have been taking a look at how the Guild’s community and learning programs might fill other gaps for diverse innovators in journalism. For example:
- A gap in long-term-visioning: Too often, journalism has a focus on reporting about now or tomorrow, but does not reflect on longer-term implications, or historical context. One of the Guild’s signature learning programs is the Futurist Writers’ Room, which allows team members developing a project or organization to imagine the future they are trying to achieve, with help from multidisciplinary advisors. This aligns with other equity-focused futurism efforts in journalism, such as the Media 2070 project, which invites participants to “dream up media reparations,” or the Lenfest Institute’s BEYOND conference, a summit in 2020 designed “to build a collective vision of the future of journalism in Philadelphia.”
- A gap in mission focus: Concerns about objectivity and bias in journalism can shut out diverse reporters and editors who want their work to contribute to social progress or lead to equal treatment for all. Because the Guild is a values-focused organization, our incubator will create space for journalists who want to strategize around these tensions. This aligns with current approaches to reporting such as advocacy journalism or solidarity reporting.
- A gap in belonging: Many journalists of color, as well as LGBTQIA+ and female reporters, have written at length about their struggles to fit into a profession rife with outdated stereotypes about macho white men in fedoras elbowing each other aside for a scoop. The Guild is an intentionally diverse and inclusive community, led by and involving future architects of many different races, genders, sexual orientations and disciplines. We aim to make the New/s initiative both welcoming and representative. This aligns with projects such as the DEI Coalition Slack, recently launched by OpenNews, as well as broader conversations and research on the future of belonging, such as this newsletter penned by Vanessa Mason, the research director at the Institute for the Future.
- A gap in systems thinking: Systems thinking is central to Future Architecture—the guiding practice developed by the Guild’s founder, Sharon Chang. The Story/Rule/Money learning program in particular provides a framework for systems-level interventions. By analyzing guiding narratives, policies, and the resources aligned both for and against a particular vision of the future, workshop participants can gain perspective on their field of practice and work together to identify effective next steps. This mindset aligns with reporting approaches such as El Tímpano’s use of systems thinking tools to understand the structural inequities underpinning overcrowded housing in Oakland, as well as more holistic efforts to map local news ecosystems.
- A gap in embodied experience: The Guild’s incubator model is unusual in that it offers participants tools not just for ideating projects, developing organizations, or seeking funders and stakeholders — but also for personal reflection and somatic practice. By asking questions such as “What does radical imagination feel like when you experience it in your body?” and inviting participants to experience guided meditations on topics such as “discovery” and “cultivation,” sessions prompt participants to integrate what can be very heady and abstract reflections on the future back into their own body and psyche. Especially given the epidemic of burnout and COVID-19 related trauma in journalism, this aligns with recent calls for self-care in the industry, and best practices for journalists covering traumatic topics such as war, racial hatred, or sexual violence.
The Guild’s approaches also align with other vibrant communities of practice focused on reforming journalism to be more responsive, constructive, and collaborative. In past years, such organizations and networks have been Dot Connector Studio clients and allies, and we look forward to working with them again via the New/s initiative.
A central tenet of Future Architecture is that it’s not a closed practice. Instead, it’s a discipline shaped by the ways in which future architects practice it. By working to understand how these and other learning programs might best support equity in news, we’ll be collaboratively prototyping new forms of Future Architecture with incubator participants and other members of the journalism ecosystem. We look forward to continuing to build the field together.
