Is your work in need of a harm matrix?

Good morning from the raft adrift in my personal chaos sea! Moving boxes are everywhere. My house is in disarray. I'm losing my keys, my phone or my mind every few hours.

Mess and disorganization make me feel a little unmoored. And still, I can't stop trying to undermine almost every structure I encounter. Even when the rules are our own, it can be difficult to stick to them. My husband and I make a conscious effort not to acquire stuff we don't need and give away things we aren't going to use. Yet, here we are clearing out an attic full of exceptions.

One of the reasons I find newsrooms dynamic and fun is because so many people who work in them have this push-and-pull relationship with structure. We like systems and clear expectations almost as much as we love breaking a rule. We want standards so we can question them.

But now is a time when all of us working in news need to build more discipline and structure, even if it doesn't come naturally. This post is longer than most. I hope you'll forgive me. It's not the disorganization (I hope!) but rather months of thought finally coalescing.

I wrote last November about the internal push for news organizations to double-down on niche audiences and agenda setting when an information environment becomes more crowded. New details emerging in two different global stories are pushing me further in my thinking. I'm now at the place where I think every news organization needs a harm matrix it is transparent about, that it shares with the audience, and that is updated.

Outlier's harm matrix is simple. When deciding whether we should spend serious time or resources on a story that comes our way from a tip, text message or a data dive, we try to evaluate the harm at issue. We dedicate resources and continue to follow a local story when:

There is significant and widespread harm. Investigations into electricity shut-offs and real estate speculation, for example, fit into this category.

Harm is not widespread but acute, and at the hands of the state or the powerful. This kind of harm has driven coverage of a lack of oversight at juvenile justice facilities, poor conditions at prisons and jails during COVID-19, and too few affordable and compassionate treatments for sickle cell disease.

An issue or practice appears to create disproportionate harm to Detroiters when compared to the rest of the state or country. We are suspicious when something is an outsized problem only for Detroiters, because this kind of localized harm can point to an accountability gap. Years of stories about tax foreclosure fall into this category, as do investigations into aggressive debt collection practices by our private utility company and Detroiters being charged the highest city auto insurance rates in the country.

Our harm matrix doesn't answer every question that comes up in the newsroom. It does not give us direction every time a reporter or editor questions whether we should keep poking at a story far outside the news cycle. It does, however, keep us grounded and focused. Because it puts the well-being of the audience in the foreground, it also pushes concerns about the consequences a particular reporter or newsroom may face for covering any particular story to the background, where they belong.

Here are two stories that could perhaps have evolved differently through the application of a harm matrix.

Story one: The cover-up of President Joe Biden's lack of capacity.

CNN's Jake Tapper and Axios' Alex Thompson have a new book, Original Sin, about former President Joe Biden's decision to run for a second term. The reporting points to many instances where Biden's advisors, staff, family and surrogates concealed signs of physical and cognitive decline from the American people. There was concealment was through stagecraft, like aides coordinating to surround Biden on the way to Marine One to obfuscate that he walked slowly and with difficulty. Through tightening access to Biden and through politeness, perhaps. George Clooney, a movie star at least as recognizable as Joe Biden, kept it quiet when the President, despite repeated prompts from aides, failed to recognize him at a high-dollar fundraiser Clooney hosted for Biden. Clooney mad his reservations about Biden's abilities public a few weeks later, after Biden's disastrous debate performance.

The Biden administration controlled and limited reporters' access to the President for years, but I feel almost certain that when I read this book, I will find anecdotes and examples of reporters pulling their punches or doubting their hunches. Thompson was on this story for years, but other reporters were not picking up what he was putting down. I did a quick date-bound search of the New York Times for stories about Biden's fitness from 2022 and 2023, and found only a few pieces, almost all of them in the Opinion section.

I am not a political reporter and could not be further from the events in these stories. I could easily be wrong when hypothesizing how so many political reporters missed the magnitude and contours of this story for so long. But it seems to me that access got the best of harm in this case.

When access is required for incremental stories, reporters have tremendously strong incentives to maintain good relationships with sources and shy away from accountability work. This can happen to any reporter on any specialized beat, from cops and courts, to politics, to education. Dean Starkman does a careful analysis of this dynamic and its disastrous consequences in The Watchdog That Didn't Bark. The book is a post-mortem of the late 2000's financial crisis and a takedown of the access reporting that pushed the reporters watching it unfold to hold their tongues.

I talk about this book all the time. It set me on the path of trying to build durable decision-making frameworks for reporting to stand up against the pressures all reporters face when deciding to pursue a story. The most reliable of these frameworks so far have been the information needs framework and the harm matrix.

Could the use of a harm matrix pushed reporters and editors to more directly question whether Joe Biden had sufficient mental and physical stamina to be President, and have depressed concerns about future access? I think so. What would a harm matrix adapted for a national newsroom look like?

Story two: Gaza

The brutality the Israeli government and military continues to unleash on Palestinian civilians in Gaza and throughout Palestine does not need additional context or table setting. The bombings, aid blockades, and civilian death toll make it clear we have been watching a genocide of the Palestinian people by the Israeli government and military for the last year and a half. America's financial and political support continue to provide significant fuel for the aggression.

Yes, the situation between Hamas and Israel remains politically and practically complicated. Yes, Hamas is brutal too, no question. But the scale of harm and the sheer numbers make it clear that Palestinians are most in harms way right now.

Reporters have been risking their lives to tell these stories and make the harm clear. The Committee to Protect Journalists says at least 180 reporters and media workers have been killed in Gaza since October 7. The story is out, and I have seen national coverage of Gaza most days. But it is not breaking through. There is little coverage locally, and almost no sense making.

Reporting by Katie J.M. Baker in the New York Times shined more light on the motivations driving "Project Esther," a Heritage Foundation precursor to Project 2025 aimed at crushing the pro-Palestinian movement by "branding a broad range of critics of Israel as “effectively a terrorist support network,” so that they could be deported, defunded, sued, fired, expelled, ostracized and otherwise excluded from what it considered “open society.”

Is this intentional suppression part of what is depressing coverage of such a significant humanitarian crisis? Is it the shrinking of the international press corps? Is it a lack of sophistication in our internal harm matrix's?

The news organization I was running until recently rarely reports on the harm unfolding in Gaza. Our harm matrix is, instead, localized. Can it be, and should it be, adapted to deal with this threat to our collective humanity? It's not my call to make. But it is becoming clearer to me how many reporters are not articulating the harm caused, to ourselves and our communities, when we witness brutality and say very little.

I continue to grapple with this issue and what to do about it in a news and information context that is helpful and community focused. If you are further along in your thinking, I would love to hear about it.

Thank you for indulging such a long piece. Send me your thoughts. I will be back in two weeks and take care until then.