Re:filtered #20: Finding the nerds while journalism finds itself

Welcome to the 20th edition of my monthly newsletter on civic media opportunities in a moment of systemic disruption.

Am I selling rotten fish?

In a conversation with a dear friend earlier this week, I found myself comparing the appeal of serious audience research in journalism to that of Hákarl, the Icelandic delicacy of fermented Greenland shark. Stay with me here.

Like Hákarl, audience research is most poisonous when fresh (or wrongly preparedly). To many newsrooms, audience research is often utterly gut-wrenching.

It lays bare the contradictions of a trade that is largely disrupted. It also runs against the identity of many audience practitioners whose authority has been built on tactical optimization (e.g., SEO, paywalls, traffic analysis, etc.).

Eating Hákarl has become a rite of passage for tourists traveling through the Nordic island nation, often just to be able to report back that they had tried and braved the pungent ammonia smell and cheesy flavor. 

Many journalism practitioners go through the same experience with audience research as a performative act to then go back to a life without the exotic disturbance.

What can you do when your only clienteles are the many one-time thrill-seekers and the few with identity ties to its ritualistic creation? I realize that I’ll never be able to bring something perceived as a rotten shark into the mainstream, make it the next cronut or crookie, or user needs model.

So where does that leave me? I don’t have it in me to peddle optimization consulting or tech to gradually declining commercial or civic ventures, selling them the hope of continued existence, just to extend their operations a little bit longer, through tactical optimization on the margins and political rent-seeking.

How do you engage with an industry lost in delusional denial? How do you create change in media when it still offers that tantalizing promise to the chosen few – that their self-expression somehow benefits the many who don’t get to self-express (although they actually do)?

I watch friends increasingly choosing not to engage at all and leave for other fields.

I’m the last one in my J-school class still practicing journalism (although the school in its outdated understanding would probably disagree that I do that). More than a decade on, all of my former classmates have found other occupations that hopefully bring them more joy, and that hopefully contribute to the public good in their ways.

But for now, I still find comfort in this work. The key, I think, is shifting focus. To torture my fish metaphor: I’m no longer trying to reach the tourist masses seeking their rite of passage thrill.

Instead, I’m looking for the few who want to understand the secrets of a fascinating field, then rebuild from there. (After all, even the obscure art of fermentation has found a mass market. Noma’s guide to fermentation is a New York Times bestseller.)

Finding that niche and rebuilding means asking different questions. I saw this recently when I reviewed a major journalism funder’s success criteria for media organizations they support.

It included (legitimate) questions around reach, credibility and how institutionalized these organizations’ editorial, organizational, and financial accounting practices are.

These are all valid criteria, but I offered them some alternatives to consider, centered on the social utility of the ventures they support.

I’m sharing some here in anonymized form:

1. To what extent does my media venture surface new information that helps people navigate their lives?
2. To what extent does my media venture create genuine spaces for community dialogue and ensure marginalized voices are heard?
3. To what extent does my media venture preserve community memory that would otherwise be lost?
4. To what extent does my media venture hold power accountable?
5. To what extent does my media venture help people understand complex information?
6. To what extent does my media venture’s work lead to greater civic engagement, i.e. people helping those near them?

Those aren’t perhaps all the typical questions that get asked when assessing a media organization, and the answers won’t be as satisfying as a comparative count of page views or social “follows”.

Fundamentally, they reset ambitions to a more realistic and healthier scale, placing media ventures not as arbiters of truth that guide information spaces, but as some of many actors that contribute to them (with no proprietary pedestals). That funder didn’t understand the paradigm shift needed and will likely stick to their quantitative measurements because they feel so professional.

While disappointing, it was fine. Such exercises always help me gain greater clarity. I will always be learning how to engage, when to engage and when not to, while continuing to create, do, and communicate. The universe is always bigger than one's expectations.

Questions on public utility also won’t transform institutional funding overnight. But I hope that they’ll gradually attract a different crowd, not the tourists seeking their audience research rite of passage, but people genuinely interested in rebuilding.

Finding the nerds

If traditional funders won’t shift their paradigms, maybe the answer is finding different allies who understand that the world has already changed.

Case in point: a new report by Anika Anand and Darryl Holliday that reframes the entire local news conversation. Instead of lamenting news deserts, they're conceptualizing that there are information stewards who already create and share vital community information, moving from scarcity thinking to one of abundance.

It's exactly the kind of paradigm shift we need to recognize existing information ecosystems rather than trying to resurrect dead institutions.

A kindred spirit (who remains anonymous for now) has been rewriting the series of posts about how Gazzetta conducts audience research, published by my colleague Rebecca and me early this year. 

Now, with time to reflect over that body of knowledge and how it has informed our ongoing process to date, it operates more as a how-to guide for journalism practitioners of any kind. 

Here too, we’ve learned that the goal isn’t to appeal to opportunistic, thrill-seeking tourists but to reach the niche-nerds who see the beauty and potential in these reflections. I’d love for you to explore and let us know what you think (via email - hit reply - or on Signal patrickb.01)

You’ll also notice a sign-up for a different newsletter – not my personal reflections in re:filtered that you’re reading right now.

We’re doing this separately because it has a different format and purpose: My team meets once weekly across all projects, and in these discussions we keep stumbling on media strategy questions big and small that we don’t have answers for. We thought you might want to be part of these conversations, and experiments, and that you may help us figure things out.

Our first question we’ll share soon is about the fragmentation of information discovery and how we’re experimenting both on- and off-device to formulate new d strategies. You can subscribe on the site.

There, you’ll also find the Audience Help Desk, now live with a booking calendar.

It’s a service Madison and I are offering to anyone genuinely seeking to brainstorm about any information service they provide (or want to provide). Incubated by the Lenfest Institute’s Audience Community of Practice, we’re hoping to help some journalistic ventures work toward greater product/market fit.

The beautiful thing about Hákarl is that once you get past the initial shock, you discover a centuries-old tradition of resourcefulness, turning something scary into sustenance.

That’s what good audience research does too: it transforms the raw, sometimes uncomfortable truths about our disconnection from people into actionable insights that can genuinely help people navigate their lives. 

I’ve seen newsrooms discover entirely new service models they never imagined, find audiences they didn’t know existed, and build sustainable ventures from what initially seemed like failure.

The Help Desk exists to accelerate these discoveries, to help you skip the months of fermentation and get straight to the nourishment, or at least learn to see the beauty of the process. 

Want to claim a slot? Here’s the calendly. 

Can’t find a time that works? Join the wait list. We’ll organize more calls and tailor them to needs expressed after our beta trial ends in October.

Looking back

We formally launched the Help Desk last week at a great Lenfest Institute workshop, in which some 70-80 media practitioners identified what what they saw holding journalism back from being more useful and relevant, and what’s forcing the field to evolve.

If you joined us, thank you. Here’s our deck. We’ll share a write-up of submissions and reflections in the coming weeks, then present everything at a follow-up discussion on Sept. 25.

“One thing that stuck out is how many people want to blame the public for their changed appetite for and interest in ’news,’” one participant wrote in her follow-up reflections about others’ responses. “That attitude won’t help journalists evolve.” 

Another was more blunt: “I was very surprised to see the ’fear of audience’ appear so often.”

I’d love to turn that fear around.

Madison and I believe our theory of service framing for media strategy offers a way forward. There’s something profoundly liberating about leaving the theory of change business to the public relations industry and instead offering something valuable that people can choose what they want to do with.

Our initial Lenfest conference write-up triggered plenty of critique. I responded to some in my last newsletter, but one criticism I didn’t adequately address was this: service as a foundation for media strategy is, one critic argued, excessively individualistic.

I tried to tackle this at Hackers on Planet Earth (HOPE_16) this month, building on Megan Lucero and Cole Goins’ “community news roles” taxonomy.

The presentation’s TL;DR: There’s enormous opportunity for technologists and journalists to contribute to often pre-existing information environments that are often very frail.

This isn’t just about philanthropy, it’s about rendering groups of people more informed, giving them greater agency to deal with their specific challenges, and there's plenty of commercial opportunity here too. (I'll share an example next month.)

Megan and Cole’s framework examining how people keep their communities informed is forthcoming from the Journalism + Design Lab at The New School. You can subscribe on the lab’s site for updates. I’ve gathered all other related links on a dedicated page.

Thank you to Anika for introducing me to the framework, to Megan and Cole for giving me their blessing to speak about their work, and to Robin, Madison, Viny, Chad, Scott, Zac and Ali for your feedback and advice.

HOPE generally was fantastic. I left the St. John’s University campus with an expanded horizon, new allies, and rekindled joy in experimentation. All sessions were openly accessible online through live streams.

Some of my favorite sessions:

• How a handful of location data brokers actively track millions, and how to stop them, by Lena Cohen and Bill Budington with the Electronic Frontier Foundation;
• Exploiting emergent property-based vulnerabilities in Large Language Models, by David Kuszmar;
• Bitpart: 5-In-1 platform for activism over Signal, by Josh King with Throneless Tech;
• Not your private army: On the trail of cyber ops, by Emma Best, co-founder of Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDoSecrets);
• and if you want to just watch one session that’s not too technical, I’d strongly recommend: Hacking the tech-industrial complex: Learning to see invisible systems, by Seth Godin;

Looking ahead

Missed the first Lenfest conversation on a theory of service for journalism? Register here for our next call, Sept. 25. This is also how you’ll get the write-up of our earlier discussions.

If you’re wrestling with audience questions (from tactical to strategy to existential), claim a free and confidential Help Desk slot with Madison or me. Your feedback will also help us ensure we can provide a meaningful service in the future.

This month, the inaugural round of the Newsroom Pivot Program begins in earnest, with JxFund and the Center for Sustainable Media. I’m excited about bringing exiled media ventures together for a few months of conversations around service and sustainability.

Anyone heading to Media Party in Buenos Aires in early Oct.? Let's get coffee. This means that I'll again miss the b° future festival for journalism and constructive dialogue in Bonn. I was hoping to be there to speak on media strategy in autocracies alongside Kevin Anderson, Fabienne Meijer and Ali Mahmood.

One more thing before I go: if you haven’t bought your ticket yet, now’s the time for the News Product Alliance Summit, Oct. 23-24 in Chicago. The full program is out.

It’s the best gathering this year on where the journalism industry is headed. I’ll be there for discussions on autocracy and AI. I particularly appreciate the organizers’ low tolerance for fluff.

That’s it for this month. If nothing else, I hope I’ve sparked your interest in niche cooking techniques.

To my fellow fermentation nerds: the smell means it’s working. Sometimes the most valuable things need time to cure.

Be well, be kind, and be true to yourself.