News is often bad at connection. What would be better?

Our rethink of the essential functions of news is wrapping up this week. We’re now contending with the function I’ve spent the most time and energy interrogating during the last year and a half; community connection.

My thinking has shifted a lot on this function after much study, conversation, and reflection. Community connection doesn't make the cut. It is not in my essential functions of news going forward because it can too easily overpromise and underdeliver. I will be making the case for a replacement here after this post mortem.

The essential function framework sprang from my resistance to the idea that news organizations can fulfill their societal duty in modern times through informing alone. I want to see news reimagined and improved, but I also want to see news not take up more civic space than it needs to, so as critical as I am of “just” informing, I don't want to see essential functions go too far beyond informational functions. either. In that context, community connection has always had a “one of these things is not like the other” feel.

The strength of the other essential functions—record creation, record correction, meeting information needs, and filling accountability gaps—is their clarity and attempt at constraint. They invite imagination in the how of news but they also lessen the discretion about what makes news worthwhile. 

Still, for news to move beyond the idea that informing alone is sufficient to meet community needs, news producers will have to engage more directly with people in need. That is why community connection has value as a news function. It is engaged.

Connection is essential for a functioning society. It's ambitious, it puts the newsroom in the backseat. For all these reasons I loved the idea of community connection being an essential function. But in practice it never gelled in our newsroom.

Connection is hard

Real connection is difficult to facilitate under any circumstances. The degree to which information can facilitate connection varies tremendously. For years I tried to see if we could make our newsrooms facilitation of these connections more predictable. Our newsroom definitely connected people through our Detroit Documenters program. Hundreds of people were connected to each other, to the larger civic fabric of the city, and to its newsrooms. We could do this predictability and with tremendous civic benefit. But Documenters is a powerhouse program that can, and does, deliver on each essential function. It couldn't stress test the essential function of community connection.

I tried connecting people by increasing the number of features we did. Either these fell flat, felt fluffy, or were incredible but didn't activate an audience to do anything in the real world. They might be connecting with the work, but not with anybody else. Events seemed like a logical way to deliver on this function. We had plenty, and they were successful for plenty of reasons. But it wasn’t clear to me whether connections preceded the event or resulted from it.

In practice, “community connection” just became a catch-all category. In retrospect, I used it to justify projects where I was less certain if the work would create value for Detroiters.

These pieces or projects were well intentioned. The reporting was sound. They served other, and very important, professional development goals within the newsroom. But our newsroom, like most, failed at reliably using our reporting to create connections that could spin off any kind of additional civic benefit. 

One of the basic premises of the essential function framework is that it has utility as a decision-making tool. 

The essential function framework should help clarify—from the beginning—when a news producer is taking a risk. How much of our work do we want to be essential function work? How much do we want to be exploratory? These categories can easily expand and contract depending on the local resources, conditions, and needs. Using community connection as a function wasn't helping us make those distinctions. It wasn't useful as a decision-making tool.

I was reluctant to let the promise of community connection go, despite its flaws. I liked that it created an obligation to work directly with people outside the newsroom. I liked that it pushed beyond hard news, but that it was hard. It took me months of conversations and reading to realize that what I couldn't let go of was how attempting community connection explicitly put the news producer in service to the community. This was what set it apart from the other functions.

News is a profession like any other, made up of fallible people. We can so easily make things about us. (I write a blog for Christ's sake.)

Filling an information need, closing an accountability gap, and correcting the record are useful. They don't necessarily decenter the news producer, however. What I was looking for was a function as equally service oriented as community connection, but where quality and utility would be easier for news producers to achieve

I found one! But first let me be clear: newsrooms should aspire to connect their communities, especially across differences. 

People need to be less isolated and more equipped to work productively with each other. All of us working in the civic fabric, including news producers, have the responsibility to try to shore up or repair these connections. Just because it's hard doesn't mean we get to take a pass. 

jesikah maria ross is a hero of mine. She is one of the best connection practitioners in our business. We spoke the other day about, among many other things, the imperative of newsrooms trying to connect people. “I don’t want to see newsrooms let go of that,” she warned me. I don’t either. 

She did agree that perhaps connection is a next-level function. Newsrooms that seek to connect people have a responsibility to steward those connections. That takes staff, programs, and/or very solid plans. The other essential functions could be operationalized by news producers of varying resources and skills. Creating connections has a higher degree of difficulty. It's essential to society, but not to news. I don't think every newsroom can or should attempt it.I am still as eager to find more ways to cultivate connection as ever.

Responding to local needs

Responding to local needs is my candidate for the last essential function.

Let me make the case. This function is both responsive and service-oriented. It prioritizes local news. Most needs—most actual needs—are material and critical rather than intellectual, so there is additional prioritization built in here.  

News organizations already respond to local needs in many ways. There are news projects that prioritize crisis response. We saw newsrooms in Chicago and Los Angeles shift to prioritize the information and safety needs of people at risk of abuse by federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, for example.

But it goes beyond coverage. Newsrooms already often profile a family in need when they think amplification of that story will help that family gain resources. The New York Times has raised money for local nonprofits through its Communities Fund for more than a century. Newsrooms often set up food drives, toy drives, and blood drives in their offices. This is a muscle many reporters, editors and newsrooms already have. We can strengthen it and make ourselves much more useful. A newsroom that responds to local needs well is an essential newsroom.

What do you think? Should connection remain an essential function? Is there a better replacement than responding to local needs? Is there an additional function? I want all the feedback. Take care until next week, take vitamin C, and don't stress over gift-giving.

What I'm reading

I talked to so many people about connection and engagement over many months, and read a lot of very good work. Here are a few of my favorites.

Ashley Alvarado, another one of the best, on meaningful connection and engagement.

Lindsey Green Barber's work is cited above, and her Impact Architects has long been a beacon of how to approach concepts that at first feel squishy, like connection, with plenty of both rigor and humanity. I'm always talking about this report, but IA's needs assessment for Yolo County, California is incredible. Talk about a strong foundation on which to build some news functions.

jessikah maria ross was another one of the driving forces behind the Yolo needs assessment. I learned how to be comfortable with how much I care from jesikah. I'll read anything she does, but her Take Care/Make Care, Dispatches from the Care Collaboratory is a real winner.

Jenn Brandel is fabulous, a co-author of Take Care/Make Care, and has a very different perspective on how functions like connection are both essential and invisible. If you haven't yet listened to her Radiolab on The Interstitium, cue it up now.

What did I miss? Send me your touchstone readings on engagement and connection, I would love to take a look.