Re:filtered #21: Allies without press passes

Greetings from Buenos Aires and welcome to the 21st edition of my monthly newsletter on civic media in a moment of systemic disruption.

"I can't make murders happen."

A newsroom executive said this to me three weeks ago, half-joking. She was watching AI summaries eat her search traffic. Social traffic had already vanished. The only time she felt she had real reach was when something horrific happened in her community. She worried that only capital crimes could sustain her advertising and subscriber revenue.

She felt that she only had convening power during tragedies because that's the only time when her content stands a chance of getting algorithmic reach. The rest of her coverage just doesn't get amplified as much. (Interestingly, that reach is largely outside of her community.)

Fast forward to two days ago in DC: my friend Chris told me about a fellow parent at his children's school who organized the community to protect other families from ICE raids. He told me how this mother shares safety guidelines and information on what is happening with other parents in Signal groups. Real life information with immediate utility.

This contrast between the editor and the mother tells the story of our media moment: legacy newsrooms clinging to a broken model versus individuals (and new media ventures like Spotlight Schools) building what is actually needed.

While we legacy operators (having reached my fourth decade on this planet, I guess I'm legacy) continue to chase scale, they built trust that can scale. While we optimized for platforms in the hope of maintaining past scale, they optimized for humans. No wonder they own the relationships we're desperately trying to rent back from social media companies.

The work is already happening.

No one is talking about "horse carriage deserts." We instinctively understand that transportation evolved. So why, when it comes to news, do we cling to an outdated model? The concept of "news deserts" while well-intentioned can be misleading; it forces us to focus on the decline of legacy journalism and ignore all the other ways people are keeping their communities informed.

The reality is that a lot of the documentation and verification work once thought to be primarily done by newsrooms continues, carried on by librarians, parents, scientists, and community organizers.

They've been doing it all along—perhaps not in the mainstream, with our formerly privileged access to distribution, but especially on the margins, all while we gatekept "real journalism."

In the United States, independent creators from these sectors now launch news operations that outperform legacy outlets. The Spotlight Schools founder was a PTA parent. Lehigh Daily's founder was a developer. Germantown Info Hub grew from mutual aid organizing. Unicorn Riot live-streamed protests while we dismissed them, until George Floyd's murder made their work undeniable. They didn't wait for our permission. (Thank you, Madison, for these examples!)

And it's not just in the United States. Despite being dismissed as non-journalists by many newsroom folks, Wikipedia editors globally have maintained the world's primary information commons for decades and built the infrastructure we now desperately need and rely upon (just one ironic element of this: it's a huge factor in search visibility for legacy news sites).

This is particularly the case in autocracies. I just started watching the Chinese evening news broadcasts again in an effort to re-familiarize myself with the daily information supply in China. These shows reminded me how far away from real life this propagandistic creation of pseudo-news is. And that it actually doesn't really matter to anyone other than kremlinologists.

Across China, people inform each other on so many issues in so many other ways, despite the strict information controls and despite these evening news broadcasts being totally useless and detached from reality. These shows are just expressions of power, irrelevant to daily lived experiences.

The question for anyone engaging with the intent of doing journalism there or anywhere must be to focus on that real space, not the formulaic perversions of formerly privileged channels.

After my presentation at the Hackers on Planet Earth (HOPE) conference last month about reclaiming journalism from formulaic expressions, a librarian gave me critical feedback: "You're talking about what librarians do," she said. "It's the same thing." She talked about how she documents, preserves memory, and makes information accessible daily. She just doesn't call it journalism.

She's right. And she's not alone. While journalism schools empty and traditional media career paths collapse, the work continues, often performed by people with different motivations. They're doing journalism without our industry's fatal flaw: the obsession with reach over relationships.

Moving like a flock

It took me a while to come to terms with this. At first, I was thinking about how to create incentives to bring these people into the world of journalism.

Thanks to some feedback from likeminded colleagues (Thank you, C., M., E. and L.), I realized that it should really be the other way round. It is on us to contribute and support what is already there.

I also realized that there's something in this current fragmentation of information provision that is a superpower in withstanding autocratic co-option. It's less about the reach of a single newsroom and more about the diverse alliance of people invested in better information provision, with great potential in forming new divisions of labor among them.

These documentation networks already move like flocks of birds—independent actors adjusting to each other's movements, creating something powerful through coordination rather than command. No single bird leads the flock. Each responds to its neighbors, and patterns emerge that no individual could create alone.

Traditional journalism got this backwards. "Democracy dies in darkness," some of us proclaimed, perhaps imagining ourselves as the sun, a singular source of light. But democracy or any form of liberal thought were never about a single source. It's about thousands of small lights, connected, responsive, impossible to extinguish all at once.

We don't control information anymore. We never really did, but now it's obvious and unavoidable. The question becomes: how do we add value to the documentation, empathy-building and navigating that is happening anyway?

Journalists are often (not always) highly trained in specific and really useful skills— investigating and sourcing information, verifying claims across multiple sources, structuring complex information for clarity, protecting vulnerable sources, recognizing patterns across disparate events, telling stories compellingly.

These skills have immense value if we reconsider our role. Not as gatekeepers who validate "real" journalism, but as contributors to bigger systems, helping to strengthen existing networks, or as facilitators who connect isolated efforts into movements.

At Gazzetta, we've organized ourselves the same way: independent researchers and practitioners moving in the same direction, united by commitment to public service rather than hierarchy. We've learned that resilience comes not from central control but from distributed intelligence, multiple perspectives, skills, and relationships that strengthen the whole.

Where to start then? Below, I've drafted a motivational taxonomy of people contributing information to their communities to find some starting points.

The five flocks aren't waiting for our permission to fly. They're already in formation. We can choose to join their patterns or keep flying solo into irrelevance.

The rage network: the accidentally motivated

People driven by personal crisis to document what's happening to them or their community. Their motivation may be temporary, but it's intense and personal.

Who they are: Parents documenting ICE raids at their schools. Residents recording police violence. Patients capturing healthcare denials.

What they've built: Self-organizing networks that transform individual outrage into collective documentation. Parents reach other parents.

How we could collaborate: We know how to spot patterns across isolated incidents. That parent documenting recruitment may not know 50 others face the same tactics nationwide. We could map these patterns, connect these documenters to each other, help them see the systematic nature of what feels personal. We could support their intelligence network: surfacing similar cases, identifying policy origins, tracking corporate strategies. We could add context that helps transform individual rage into coordinated action.

The protection squad: the socially connected

People documenting conditions to protect their communities and not just in moments of crisis. They are motivated by social bonds rather than public recognition. They see it as care, not journalism.

Who they are: Community organizers gathering information about job opportunities. Religious groups checking in on the lonely and disconnected. Diaspora communities tracking homeland conditions.

What they've built: Trust-based information networks are pervasive, operating outside traditional media ecosystem, especially on WhatsApp and Telegram. No one here needs any press credentials, reach is built on validated community trust on specific issues at scale.

How we could collaborate: We understand legal frameworks for source protection and public records requests. We could share secure communication methods, help them file FOIA requests, connect them with lawyers who defend information gathering.

We know how to recognize patterns and turn them into news products for wider relevance, helping their documentation reach potentially allied communities facing similar issues. They maintain community trust. Our contribution could be to help expand their protective leverage and build coalitions.

The expertise underground: the professionally adjacent

People whose regular work involves documentation that exposes systemic failures without intending to do journalism. Their subject matter expertise gives them unique insights that generalists would not see or have access to.

Who they are: Lawyers documenting court proceedings. Environmental scientists collecting pollution data. Municipal employees processing public records. Small business owners tracking regulatory changes.

What they've built: Specialized accountability infrastructure a correspondent or beat reporter could not replicate: Court clerks catch procedural violations journalists miss. Environmental scientists identify pollution patterns media overlooks. They have access, expertise, and ongoing presence we lack.

How we could collaborate: We are trained in narrative synthesis: taking technical findings and making them accessible to broader audiences, communicating why something really complex matters.

We could help that environmental scientist's data reach beyond academic journals, translate that lawyer's procedural discoveries into public accountability stories. We link discoveries across jurisdictions, like one city's water crisis to another's. They provide expertise and access. We provide narrative power and cross-pollination.

The rogue technologists: the technically capable

People who build tools enabling documentation and verification, motivated by technical challenges and peer recognition.

Who they are: Developers building censorship circumvention tools. Data analysts creating visualization systems. Security researchers documenting surveillance methods.

What they've built: Critical infrastructure for information freedom that operates whether journalists use it or not. They solve civic tech challenges more complex than ad optimization, and so much more meaningful than engagement algorithms.

How we could collaborate: We're also users who understand the human side of their technical solutions. We could support real-world testing, gathering user feedback that helps them refine their tools. We may know other communities that could benefit from their innovations. We could also document the risks they address and how their code enables privacy or accountability.

The hustle collective: the economically motivated

Two groups here:

First, there are entrepreneurs running online services that provide information. They see commercial opportunities but may miss the civic ones that can expand their reach and revenue.

Second, there are many people who could document and verify information if there was a way to get paid for it, especially those looking to supplement their income without compromising their main employment or having to declare themselves as "journalists".

Who they are: Entrepreneurs who gather data that could also have social utility but often goes unused. University students with valuable research skills. Teachers who understand information literacy. Librarians with time outside their main jobs.

What they're missing: A market for their data and skills. They have the ability but no clear economic model.

Traditional journalism internships don't pay, and few are hiring for traditional roles. Freelance journalism barely sustains full-timers, let alone side-hustlers.

How we could collaborate: We could help entrepreneurs spot the social utility in their existing data, like delivery or cost tracking, or customer logs that reveal consumer protection gaps. For potential contributors, we could create paid research or verification or empathy-building networks, discrete tasks that don't require building a personal brand or taking political risks. (Inspiring projects in court monitoring and meeting documentation are already showing this is possible.)

Entrepreneurs discover new revenue in their data. Contributors earn income using their skills without the exposure.

The new terms

The journalist waiting for murders to drive traffic shows how broken our model has become. But the librarian preserving disappearing records, the Spotlight Schools founder documenting school conditions, the developer building privacy tools... they are already contributing to better information spaces.

For us, this means the terms of engagement have changed. We don't parachute in for quotes anymore (unless we're the privileged representatives of elite groups). We contribute before we extract. We share audiences rather than claim them. We show up consistently or not at all. We join Discords, attend meetings, learn to fit in. We stop asking "what do you need from us", and start asking "how can we join and support what you're doing?"

Like birds in formation, we adjust our flight to strengthen the whole.

Looking back

This month we started Field Notes at Gazzetta, our experimental new newsletter where we share the media strategy questions we're wrestling with. These are one-minute reads meant to challenge your horizon the same way they challenge ours.

We've shared two so far, one on ways of reaching people organically, and one on minority linguistic identities in AI models. Let us know what you think!

The Audience Help Desk beta wrapped up with great conversations at the Lenfest Institute about what service-oriented journalism could look like. We're gathering interest through the wait list for next sessions. You can book physical slots with us at the News Product Alliance Summit in Chicago on Oct. 24.

Finally, I wrote about resisting oppression for the first edition of my friend Sam de Silva's new magazine, Balance, which is "dedicated to exploring, challenging, and reimagining digital power." It has some good reads on app store censorship and platform moderation.

Looking ahead

The next few days I get to be in this beautiful city for Media Party (although I have mixed feelings about the journalism-support industrial complex that appears to converge). If you are here too, let me know! We're organizing no-donor-schmooze drinks on Friday. (Donors with no schmooze expectations are also welcome.)

In three weeks, I'll be in Chicago for the NPA Summit where I get to discuss media strategy under autocracy and AI in audience research with some super smart people. Aside from the Audience Help Desk slots that Friday, we're also organizing a breakfast near the venue, let me know if you're there and interested.

I'm very excited about the service design presentation I'm developing with Madison for the Rosenfeld Advancing Service Design conference in November. We're exploring how we move from abstract (and sometimes condescending) theories of change to concrete theories of service, and learning a ton from other industries.

The librarian at HOPE reminded me not only that the journalism pedestal doesn't exist but also that we're not alone in our still valid aspirations of community service, accountability and social progress. We just haven't been looking in the right places. I hope the motivations list above is as helpful for you in your search for allies as it is for me.

As illiberalism spreads through coordinated exploitation and performative tribalism, we must collaborate even more deliberately in expansive partnerships of liberally-minded peers. Overcoming the still growing illiberal tide will require supporting and working with people who never thought of themselves as journalists, but are already flying in formation. Let's join them! We have the skills to contribute.

Thoughts? Reply to this email or find me on Signal at patrickb.01. Thank you for reading and see you next month.