Civil Weekly Newsletter: 12/28 Edition

The best of Civil Newsrooms in 2018, and looking ahead to 2019.

Exposing political corruption. Establishing independent news organizations from upstate New York to Cuba to Singapore. Attracting thousands of paying subscribers. These are just some of the accomplishments of Civil-based Newsrooms in 2018.

This year, Civil became home to hundreds of journalists who’ve accomplished great things within their independent newsrooms, and as a community. To commemorate their accomplishments, we asked Newsrooms to share their most memorable pieces of 2018, along with some additional context about how the story came about. Read — in the journalists’ own words — their best stories from 2018.

Take a look where Civil is heading in 2019, and if you want to become part of Civil’s growing community, learn how to join here.

The Indian right gets involved in U.S. politics; navigating sobriety amid toxic family relationships; looking back at a brutal year for media: This week in Civil Newsrooms.

Here are a few highlights from Civil Newsrooms this week:

• The fourth person in 18 months to hold the top education position in Colorado is distinctly different than those before: for one, she’s the first woman to hold the position in 65 years. The first thing on her agenda? Respectful discourse. The Colorado Sun explains more.
• “How would you deal with underperforming schools?” “Do you support an elected school board?” Block Club Chicago answers these questions and more with the newly released education plans of Chicago’s mayoral hopefuls.
• It has been rumored that Tulsi Gabbard, who represents Hawaii in the House of Representatives, will soon announce her presidential campaign. However, Sludge finds she has taken thousands of dollars from an Indian right-wing group.
• “The Why of Cooking” by Sarah Miller was originally published in 2014. Then, the fairly controversial piece disappeared when its original publisher’s website was taken down. Thanks to Popula, the piece is now back online and permanently archived. Read it here.
• 2018 was the year of the “Second Great Die-Off” for publications, pens Hmm Daily. Read the author’s month-by-month commemoration of publications he calls “fallen comrades (and Lena Dunham’s thing)” of the closing year.
• Megan Koester recognized that toxic familial relationships were affecting her ability to stay sober. Read in The Small Bow how she comes to terms with resenting her parents — while still not drinking.

Civil en español

• En Cuba, el borrador final de la nueva Constitución está finalizado, y reafirma el rumba socialista con el término “comunismo.” Lee mas en 14ymedio.

For a daily feed from Civil Newsrooms, follow @CivilStories on Twitter.

The Random Musing Section

“You, Aaron, are what it’s all about. You’re real. Your room is real. Your friends are real. Real, man, real. You know? Real. You’re more important than all the silly machinery.”


That line, from Cameron Crowe’s immortal Almost Famous, has been bouncing around my head for the past few days — ever since I read this powerful and sobering NY Mag piece about how much of the internet, as we know it, is fake.

The gist of it (though it’s worth reading in full, as is this subsequent Hmm Daily piece it inspired): “bots” and other, non-human entities have proliferated so greatly across so much of the web that it’s now virtually impossible to accurately measure how many actual humans are creating/consuming/engaging content, as opposed to machines masquerading as real users. This means that the internet has effectively become a gigantic house of cards, and that we don’t know what its true value — or reach — is. And yet, we tend to carry on with our heads in the sand, largely due to the enormity of the issue, and the lack of any obvious, immediate solution.

I won’t pretend to have such a solution here, but I do believe that acknowledging the problem’s existence is an important step towards that end. I still believe in the internet as a force for good: it has brought about unprecedented levels of connectivity and collaboration that have significantly accelerated technological innovation and improved our general welfare. But as the line between human and machine increasingly blurs, it’s important that we not lose ourselves in the process. That we remember what brought us “online” in the first place — it wasn’t to be an anonymous data point that justifies ad sales. We did it to join a community that was greater than any single one of us, because incredible things can happen when motivated individuals gather to create and share information and take action.

The journalism industry is perhaps the best microcosm for this larger issue. It’s become painfully clear that today’s programmatic ad-driven revenue models, which rely on tough-to-validate traffic and engagement metrics, are not a sustainable path forward. Instead, newsrooms are increasingly gravitating towards a more human-to-human model, which relies on the support of actively engaged members and subscribers, many of whom regularly interact with the journalists they support.

Now is the time to support independent journalism — the type that keeps us aware of and thinking about issues like this. It’s resolution season, after all, so here’s an easy and feel-good one: support a new publication in 2019. You can do it for $5/month or less, and if you set up a recurring payment, it’s much easier to follow through on than to remember to floss every day.

Hope everybody has a safe, healthy New Year’s. Don’t drink and drive, don’t get in cars with people who do and, whatever you do, take care of your shoes.


— Matt Coolidge