Sarah Alvarez is the founder of Outlier Media in Detroit, where she remains editor-at-large. Journalism should be a public service, responsive to the needs of all people.
Welcome to all our newcomers! I'm glad you're here. Please share your questions and thoughts along the way. Just hit reply or email me at sarah@understated.com Thanks for your grace as I've been getting back to a regular schedule. A quick announcement
I got the kind of phone call we all dread last week, as soon as I hit publish on my last post. I was still sitting at my desk, and watched a voice mail transcription from a call I thought was spam scroll down my phone. My daughter was hospitalized,
Forgive me (thank me?) for keeping this short. I've been under the weather this past week. That's saying a lot here in Detroit, where the snow and ice have arrived with a vengeance. Cough drop wrappers are everywhere. Something giving me energy even now is that
Big day. We're celebrating the public launch of News Futures! The people and work now gathered under the News Futures name have been my most consistent and reliable source of creative energy, support, inspiration, and collaboration since 2018. Everyone involved then was like me; too much work, few
In a country where Fox News is the most watched network the answer is both yes and no. Fox's most watched show last month was The Five. Two of the five are Janine Pirro and Jesse Watters, who owe their broadcast careers to being embodied attitude problems. But
Know somebody else who needs respite from the attention economy or the doomscroll? Recommend they subscribe to Understated. Ideas on how to find, share and understand the information we need to stay engaged without being overwhelmed. Dispatches about once a week because that's plenty. A number of new
To all my LA folks now one week into these fires and worried about loved ones and communities, homes, things and futures, I'm so sorry. Most of us living farther away feel we can only pay attention for now. Our relationship with the news can change for the
It will hit the social networks I'm no longer on sometime later today that I've gotten a new job. I'm headed to Temple University to be the James B. Steele Chair in Journalism Innovation. I'll begin in the fall, and will leave
For most of us reporters, “no” is the only right answer. We can be upfront about having hopes (usually only if they are vague) for our work; that people should feel something, or better understand something or at least someone. At our most bold, we hope they might do something,
I've come clean already about my newly hard core news diet. How hard core? Pre-body positivity, 1980s grapefruit-diet. I'm off social media completely, checking local news online once in the morning, and national news one to two times a day. I work in a newsroom, so
One of my closest friends, Kate, is a financial advisor. She's very good at her job without accepting her industry's conventional wisdom that more money is the goal. Instead, she's all about wealth re-distribution. She recently had me try out an exercise she uses
Last week I challenged you to read a news story and ask yourself, sentence by sentence, if it was delivering information that was either valuable or actionable. It wasn't an exercise meant to denigrate storytelling. I know not everyone wants their news source to just inject info straight