Reading up on public interest and private vulnerability

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Welcome back. I'm happy you're here.

Today's newsletter has a different format, and I'm hoping you'll take the poll at the end to tell me what you think. Using your feedback, I'll decide on how to put together some shorter provocations and conversation starters every other week. Alternating formats between weeks will allow me to add more reporting to the longer and more considered arguments I've been making here. 

The goal here has been to create additional space to grapple with how we can make the news more consistently useful to more people by changing the way we think about its purpose and engage in its practice.

My thoughts about utility are beginning to coalesce around a desire to define what it means to practice news in the public interest, and my recent reading reflects this push. Is there anything you'd like me to add to my reading list or tell others about? Just hit reply and let me know.

What I'm reading

Our News Futures study group will be reading this piece I found on why the legal profession has resisted defining the public interest. The law relies on the concept to do an enormous amount of work in both quantity and consequence, but without a strong framework. Once you Google Translate your way through the unnecessary Latin (“qua” means “in the capacity of”), it's a really interesting and instructive read. If you want to read it and join the discussion in a few weeks, just let me know. 

As a huge proponent of journalism moving to a need-based framework, I'm cognizant of how important it is to understand the emotional, practical, and political dimensions of human needs. Vulnerability politics by Kate Oliviero explores the political dimension. It's an academic but readable book, an expansion of a paper on how vulnerability politics led to "stand your ground" laws and a legally clear but factually absurd conclusion after George Zimmerman killed Trevon Martin in 2012. Between Zimmerman, an armed neighborhood watch captain who engaged in a willing pursuit of Martin, an unarmed child walking home in the dark, Florida law not only recognized but prioritized an idea of Zimmerman's vulnerability.

Oliviero explores how advocates and activists on the left of the American political spectrum used ideas of vulnerability to elicit popular compassion and pave the way for political action on issues from reproductive health to state violence. 

But feelings of vulnerability are as likely to spark fear and aggression as often as compassion and care. Oliviero writes, “Whether it is personal or institutional, feeling vulnerable incites politically potent emotions—empathy, anger, love, and fear among them. As a result, actors across the ideological spectrum attempt to harness both the compassion and the outrage accompanying these vulnerabilities to shape politics and policies.”

Oliviero's considered and historical approach to the political dimension is helpful in creating a more complete understanding of the dynamics emotion plays in news and the attention economy.

A place I would welcome collaboration

Can you recommend interesting readings and activities for a class?

I'm taking over an old news literacy course next semester and redesigning it completely. The goal is to equip students with the skills to navigate the overwhelming quantities of content competing for their attention and develop frameworks and skills to produce high-quality information themselves in whatever format they choose. I've found plenty of great pieces to either read, listen to, or watch but would love even more. I'm also running some “experiments” where students and I will learn alongside each other. For example, can we meaningfully deepen or increase our understanding if we read about a “newsworthy” event from different sources several days in a row, or is one story enough?

Here are the learning objectives we'll be working toward in this class, called “factfinding in today's media.” If experiments or readings come to mind, please send them my way.

• Assess the difference between high-quality and low-quality information considering source, framing, context and utility.  
• Understand the dynamics causing information to spread and have impact in the world including the role of economic incentives, emotion, technology, and politics
• Examine the role of newsgathering and news distribution in supporting healthy civic life
• Critically evaluate the terms misinformation, disinformation, “fake news,” and propaganda 
• Create a set of criteria to discern and produce high-quality information for your geographic community or community of interest.

If experiments or readings come to mind that might help students meet these objectives, I'd love to hear them!

Take care until next week, when I'll revisit whether helping create accountability is an essential function of news.

Before you go, help me understand what you want from these posts. I'd appreciate it.