What Could Happen If We Give Up Saving Journalism?

I’ve always been tempted to begin every meeting, every presentation, every article with this sentence:

“Friendly reminder: we are all going to die.”

Why? It helps level-set the importance, or lack thereof, for whatever is commanding our attention in that moment.

But with Artificial Intelligence exploding into use, that reminder of our mortality carries with it new context and urgency. The headlines are alarming, and even if you take care to avoid the news, the doom may be creeping into your inbox, as it has mine.

Actual screenshot of back-to-back emails in my inbox

And yet, death is natural. Every living thing goes through cycles of birth and death. Whether it’s the strawberries rotting in your refrigerator, or bigger living systems like forests or oceans, when the context shifts over time, everything naturally degrades if it’s not resilient to adapt quickly enough to the new context. This also goes for the living systems humans comprise: organizations, companies, industries, sectors.

A helpful visual way to think about it is what’s called Two Loops. There are always two loops going on at once, one that is descending into obsolescence, and one emerging into dominance, as Margaret Wheatley and Deborah Frieze describe in their white paper about emergence and social change.

For journalism — the signs are obvious and grim for what was once the dominant system and distribution of news. The attacks are coming from all angles — cultural, political, technological, economic, and personal. Combined, this toxic stew serves to poison the trust in the institution of journalism and in the newsrooms that remain. It’s hard to come back from that. Frankly, I don’t know how it can?

So I have to wonder: if journalism, as we’ve known it, is clearly descending in some kind of hospice, then what if we accept that, and give up trying to save it, as the recently published Roadmap for Local News provocatively asks? What could and should we spend our energy on instead?

First though, it’s only proper to take a moment to grieve.

And it’s un-American to spend more than a moment to grieve.

So, moving right along.

As we now reflect on the loss of journalism, it may be useful to revisit: What was journalism for, anyway? The answers often include: bearing witness, holding the powerful to account, providing context to current events, and helping people understand what’s at stake so they can make the best choices.

In reality though, those idealized purposes of journalism never manifested consistently — whether locally or nationally. And for so very many people and populations, journalism never fulfilled that promise or served those purposes.

Still, and despite the rapidly changing context, there remains the need for someone, somewhere to somehow provide what journalism, at its best and its most basic, could do. We know that the decline in quality local information that used to come from newsrooms leads to myriad problems for the health of the community and for democracy.

So what could rise up and take its place? The recently published Roadmap for Local News provides another way to name and frame it: Civic Media. The report states that “Civic media seeks not simply to ‘inform’ or ‘entertain,’ but to equip people with the information they need to make the places they live better: civic information.”

The roadmap defines Civic Information as: “High-quality, verifiable information that enables people to respond to collective needs by enhancing local coordination, problem-solving, systems of public accountability, and connectedness.”

OK, cool! Yes! But who, if not journalists, will be producing civic information? Well, this is where the imagination and experimentation is required. Currently, there are more local librarians than local newspaper reporters. And libraries enjoy much higher levels of public trust than news, so that’s a start. Could libraries and newsrooms collaborate? Yes. Hearken has been supporting newsrooms and libraries working together to expand their reach and efficacy, as have others.

And there’s a whole burgeoning network and community of practice that is taking the principles of what traditional journalism aimed to do, and doing it differently, and oftentimes more effectively.

Civic Media

Take El Migrante, from The Listening Post Collective. El Migrante fills the information void for migrants arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border through disseminating a printed weekly news bulletin and distributing to shelters and resource orgs. They also have a WhatsApp group for migrants answering questions and a podcast.

And there’s Outlier Media in Detroit, which uses SMS to essentially create what’s essentially a help desk for local residents. Through texting, they provide critically important information about basic needs like housing and utilities. And they even let people connect to reporters directly to report issues or ask questions. They treat civic information as a necessity — helping people get their foundational needs met.

El Tímpano in Oakland is going beyond typical reporting — they’ve developed partnerships and services with the local public health department, policy institutes, libraries, health clinics and even bike networks to create and disseminate useful information for Latino immigrants.

Across the country, the Documenters Network from City Bureau, is popping up in cities, enlisting the skills and time of local residents to do what used to be acts of journalism: attending and reporting on local government meetings.

And artists and poets are getting in on acts of journalism. For Freedoms News is an artist-led reimagining of television news. They are bringing news to museums and art fairs, taking formats of live installation, performance and conversation and transmitting civic information through active participation. Love Now Media reports information through the lens of the most powerful force there is: love. One of the many ways they report is through “Poets Press” — which invites poets to capture what’s happening in verse.

So in short: here’s a growing list of who can be and already is creating civic information outside of paid reporters:

• Artists
• Poets
• Policy workers
• Librarians
• Researchers
• Academics
• Students
• Local residents
• Really, everyone

Civic Media may be the right name for what we call this emergent system that has started to replace traditional journalism in more and more spaces.

But this budding movement faces a formidable new consideration: Artificial Intelligence. We know investment is already pouring into AI in every industry to capitalize on and create efficiencies for industries and institutions — and not just the ones who are struggling.

Eric Gordon and Gabriel Mugar have a stark and helpful warning for this juncture in their book, Meaningful Inefficiencies: Civic Design in an Age of Digital Expediency. They write,

“Efficiency, in the sense of charting a path to a goal with the least amount of friction, can be at odds with the goal of building trust in the institutions that mediate public life. In general, public-serving organizations seek a balance between transactional and relational models of getting things done. However, the promise of new technologies and the rush to implementation is creating a lopsidedness. As new digital tools compel people toward the transactional, and as publics grow increasingly distrustful of the role of civic institutions broadly, there is now more need than ever to achieve balance.”

In other words: AI could be seen as another threat to the kind of trusted relationships that Civic Media can create. That is, if we don’t put equal focus on the relational work as we do in the transactional tech.

So what would it look like to invest our time, money and energy equally into the complement for AI, something me and my friend and colleague Mara Zepeda have taken to calling A.E. — Actual Experience?

The Rise / Remembering of A.E.

Actual Experience is the human, three-dimensional, beating heart, sweaty side of life. Here, defining terms is useful:

• Actual: existing in fact; typically as contrasted with what was intended, expected, or believed.
• Experience: practical contact with and observation of facts or events.

Developing some kind of automated AI news service is not going to push the needle on growing trust in the media. If anything it adds to the backsliding.

But what has been proven to increase trust in information is human, face-to-face interactions and relationships. Activities that can include:

• Building relationships without an assignment or deadline
• Tabling at local events
• Holding community forums and conversations
• Listening groups and community advisory councils
• Partnering & co-creating content and experiences with local orgs & individuals
• Acts of micro solidarity to build the social fabric for shared infrastructure

Another word for this is: engagement — the kind of mutualistic engagement that is about building and deepening relationships and ultimately, problem solving. This is not the kind of media that treats the public as consumers from which to extract attention for profit.

Looking at the current jobs of most newsrooms, we know most outlets are still under-indexing in staffing the jobs that prioritize engagement. But in the not too distant future, that could all change.

A gross generalization to illustrate an idea.

Yes, AI might be coming for many of the jobs that journalists used to do. Perhaps the balance of surviving newsrooms will look something like this, in which technical, transactional and AI-related jobs create a lot of efficiencies, and drop the need for as many people gathering and editing civic information.

Another gross generalization to illustrate an idea.

And perhaps there will be even more investment into relational roles to help ensure that the information produced is used, trusted and informed by the people it’s trying to serve? A girl can dream, right? And an expert can confirm this dream should become a reality!

New Roles in News

UW Madison professor of journalism, Sue Robinson, recently published How Journalists Engage: A Theory of Trust Building, Identities, and Care. In it, she names the new roles and skill sets that those working in journalism need to invest in so that information can be used and trusted. They include:

• Relationship Builder
• Community Collaborator
• Community Conversation Facilitator
• Professional Industry Networker

But these roles and the trust-building, human, actual-experience and dialogical side of civic information creation and sharing cannot happen without investment.

I’m not arguing that no money should be going toward transactional technology and capabilities like AI, GLLM, AR, automation, synthesis and integrations, which has been around 70 years in the making.

I’m arguing that we have a ~521 million year-old technology called the human brain, which needs equal amounts of investment so it can optimize for care, compassion, deep listening, and fully embodied information gathering, co-creation and dissemination. These are things we’re capable of, but still don’t have the all of the psychological and interpersonal skills, let alone incentives and support, to do consistently.

We humans still have a competitive advantage when it comes to one dimension: care. AI couldn’t care less. It cannot intrinsically care. So journalists, or those doing acts of journalism need to make up for what’s lost, and care more. I created this bingo card with Monica Guzman, detailing acts of care you can start doing today, (for free!), while doing acts of journalism.

So as you may be investing time, money and energy into exploring what AI can do, I challenge you to ask yourself: how am I investing in AE (Actual Experience)? And how might I combine their powers to increase each one’s efficacy?

If the warnings of experts in AI are accurate and we do risk extinction level events, perhaps one safeguard to save humanity is by saving our own humanity?

This article is adapted from a keynote presentation given at Media Party 2023.

If you’re interested in being part of this growing community of practice around Civic Media and Actual Experience, register your interest here.

Here are just a handful of communities, sites, books, guides and articles for journalists who want to expand their efficacy in care and Actual Experience:

• Gather community of practice
• Modifier from Resolve Philly (subscribe to their newsletter!)
• Global Press Institute: Duty of Care
• Healthcare & Journalism Are Facing The Same Crisis
• Disability Language Style Guide
• Listening is a Form of Healing
• A Journalists’ Guide to Covering Homelessness
• 7 Tips for Journalists from Restorative-Justice Practitioners
• Philadelphia Media Founders Exchange
• High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped And How We Get Out
• Lessons for Journalists from Amanda Ripley’s Book, High Conflict
• I Never Thought of It That Way
• Feel free to comment with other recs!

For inspiration on platforms, technologies, economic models and social technologies that are designed for human flourishing check out:

• Mobius
• New Public
• Zebras Unite (Disclosure: I am a co-founder)
• Inclusive Capital Collective
• Start.Coop
• Logic School
• Platform Co-op Consortium
• Community.Rule
• Microsolidarity
• Feel free to comment with other recs!