We know this is not the best we can do

Need some respite from the attention economy or the doomscroll? Subscribe to Understated. Ideas on how to find, share and understand the information we need to stay engaged without being overwhelmed. Dispatches once a week because that's plenty.

Note added on Nov 9: It's best to start by acknowledging the elephant in the room. Or, as the case may be, the elephant invited back into the room to see how much of a mess it can really make. I started this project well before Donald Trump won his decisive second victory. His election will have serious consequences for the country and for the freedom of the press. What it doesn't do is change some of the bigger questions we need to contend with. Instead, our undone work is dragged into sharper relief.

It could not be more clear that high-quality news is marginal to most people's information diets.

It could not be more clear that our information landscape does not help people differentiate between urgent and emotional concerns.

It could not be more clear that the economic incentives of the attention economy are in direct opposition to a resilient social fabric.

What isn't clear yet is what we are going to do. But we have to do better. That's what this project is about.

What are we doing here?

I say "project" only lacking a better word. I'm gathering research, provocations, ideas, and examples to help create news and narrative forms that work better to accompany people through tough information, and better help us meet the challenges of our complicated world. I'd love you to help.

Why?

Is the news really working for you? It doesn't work for me.

Local news and recent coverage of the Yankee's used turtlenecks are bright spots, sure. But most of the time, I feel more upset and less hopeful after taking in a lot of news. The typical news article format is overused and overstuffed. I still find it hard to get information I really need. I hate stories that work hard to create empathy in the reader because I think they accept a premise that in a subject of a news article has less humanity than the reader, unless proven otherwise. But I work in news. My work is not free from these flaws. I want my work to be better able to inform people, without it oversimplifying complex ideas or being overwhelming.

Why now?

It's true that this isn't a new problem. Selfishly, I want to embark on some reporting around two emergent concerns in Detroit, climate and migration. Our formats are not up to this challenge. If they were, far fewer people in frontline communities would be ignoring climate change and far fewer people outside of them would be demonizing immigrants. Our collective risk analysis is way off.

Most stories about climate change and migration are longform narratives built around emotion, or incremental stories with specialized information for an already activated group. This work can't reach people with little time and a lot on their minds, most of us, in other words.

We'll need information and delivery formats that can equip and accompany us as we meet and tackle emergent concerns. We need to meet these challenges with humanity and good sense.

Is change possible?

Absolutely. Let me take a quick step back to offer an example.

I've worked in local news for about 15 years. A decade ago, I found myself feeling the same kind of frustration I feel now.

I thought reporting should make the most difference in communities where abuses of power are abundant and high-quality information is in short supply. I grew up in places like this; El Paso, TX, Kenosha, Wisconsin, a town so small in rural mid-Michigan that naming it here would make no sense.

These are the kind of communities where I wanted to work, but the people in these places are systematically devalued by national news in particular. This hasn't changed.

Those of us who work in news like to position it as an innate public good, something akin to education or medicine. We can easily frame Fox News or Elon Musk as bad actors because we assume the function of news is to inform and deliver a neutral and pro-social good, right?

Nope.

News is most often a business. News businesses exist to keep themselves going, full stop. The work might create positive effects in a society, but that is not its purpose.

Ten years ago I was working in local public radio; a nonprofit so explicitly positioned as a public good it's in the name. I covered low-income communities for the station. But the work wasn't actually for people contending with serious challenges and struggling to pay the bills at the same time. The stories were about these people and places, but were expected to be consumed by higher-income audiences. The idea seemed to be that the educated, well-connected, highly engaged audience might want to be made to care about these problems. Then, they might want to address them. These assumptions are old-fashioned, elitist, and for me, unacceptable.

I was lucky enough to get a fellowship at Stanford I thought was a moonshot (apply!). Armed with the research and encouragement of Jay Hamilton and his work around the economics of news, I had almost a year to design a news service for people who actually need valuable and actionable information to create accountability for themselves and their neighbors.

It was 2015, and the idea that news’ basic function should be to reliably identify and then fill local information gaps was considered radical. It isn't. We had just lost the thread of what it means for the news to serve.

The information gap ideas took off, somehow. The text message-based info wire I built that year is now the backbone of the newsroom I started in Detroit, Outlier Media. A constellation of other local news nonprofits around the country started around the same time and with similar orientations and complementary ideas. Chicago's City Bureau said newsrooms only trying to inform people were falling short of their duty, they should be trying to equip people to make changes. New York City's Documented is a thriving news organization built for people who have recently immigrated to that city from across the globe. MLK50 is unapologetic in its focus on using investigative reporting to create accountability for poverty in Memphis.

These newsrooms are the reason that I'm not overwhelmed by my frustration with the news. I think we can find some answers by doing some reporting and getting people together who have similar frustrations and a bias toward action.

What is the gap we need to fill now?

I feel good about the way news can to fill information gaps. Too few newsrooms make this a priority, but those of us who do have methods that work.

I feel pretty good about the way news can fill accountability gaps. A well-targeted and well executed accountability story can still create change. There are plenty of examples, but Documented and ProPublica's collaboration on wage theft is a recent standout.

I feel uncertain about the news’ ability to meet our needs when change and harm are on the horizon for us, but we're not in the thick of them. Again, climate change and migration are good examples of these kinds of concerns.

What we need now are information and delivery formats that can equip and accompany us to tackle emergent concerns with humanity and good sense.

What these informational tethers can look like and how it might work is the central question for this project/newsletter/moment.

I think we can figure it out. There are many more people willing to work through questions and ideas together and in public than even a few years ago, and we're starting with a set of informed questions.

If you want to join in, send me questions and your thoughts. If you just want to follow along for now, that's fine too. Each week I'll share something; a conversation, reading, idea, or some feedback that can serve as provocation or inspiration to move this collective project along.