Re:filtered #22: Your suffering isn't a public service

Welcome to the 22nd edition of my monthly newsletter on journalism in a moment of systemic disruption.

This month: how we've built an industry that feeds on journalists' idealism while setting them up to fail and how we could be building systems that recognize and reward actual service to other people.

The trickle-down trap

Most serious journalists understand that trickle-down economics is a scam. We've documented the wealth gaps, traced how promises of prosperity never reach beyond elite circles.

Yet, we accept the identical logic in journalism support: money flows to organizations that take their cuts before offering sub-grants for things like content and collaborations, supposedly strengthening journalism everywhere.

The parallel runs deeper than funding structures. Just as trickle-down economics assumes wealth automatically creates prosperity for all, journalism support assumes any act of journalism automatically serves democracy.

We rarely ask: Who does this media venture actually help? Who would notice if it disappeared? Far too often, we've decided journalism is inherently good. The fourth estate! Case closed, no validation needed.

This unexamined faith creates extractive and harmful dynamics and perpetuates clientelism rooted in shared myths. Organizations capture resources by invoking abstract principles rather than demonstrating value, leading to output that exists in a relevance void.

When you never have to prove actual utility and your job depends on perpetuating this self-referential system, the temptation to resort to narrative theater becomes overwhelming. Suddenly, stories of struggle, claims of reach, and vague promises that "something will trickle down" become your primary currency.

In doing so, we've created systems that expose idealistic people to unnecessary risk, with little chance of achieving their valid aspirations.

I find myself in an industry that perversely also lives off this illusion.

Journalism schools teach that real journalists work impossible hours for terrible pay, that they're Davids who can beat Goliaths if only they commit to hardship. Foundations fund projects wrapped in narratives of heroic struggle. Support organizations frame grants around suffering overcome.

Question this dynamic and you're accused of undermining support for vulnerable journalists, rather than the system that by means of socialization and largely empty promises placed them in those conditions with mere illusions of support.

I need to be clear: journalists face genuine dangers and difficulties in doing important work. There are so many unknown/unsung heroes out there. But there are also so many faux heroes and institutions who perpetuate their own existence in a perverse symbiosis with them.

As we've built a system that confuses suffering with service, we’ve also assigned a different level of heroism to our own suffering.

But publishing a post (on a rigged platform) doesn't make that person's risk and sacrifice more meaningful than a nurse working through a pandemic, a legal aid lawyer taking cases no one else will touch, or a translator helping refugees navigate bureaucracy. They all face risks serving their communities, and their work is often far more closely tied to service than ours.

How suffering became currency

What makes journalism's relationship with suffering unique isn't the suffering itself - it's that we've turned it into a proxy metric for valor. Support organizations fundraise on it. Awards celebrate it. Grant applications require it.

We parade it in front of audiences too. Think of those enterprise stories announcing "we spent 80 hours analyzing records" or "our reporter drove 3,000 miles" as if the effort itself should make you care about the output. We don't just acknowledge hardship; we reward it, incentivize it, market it, and often depend on it for institutional survival.

The suffering narrative often exists because we can't point to actual value delivered, or we consider that value secondary. When your work genuinely helps people navigate school board decisions or track local development, you can still emphasize your hardships, but you shouldn't need to. The value speaks for itself.

But when you're publishing articles no one reads on topics no one asked about other than some distant funder, you need a different currency. Enter: the heroic struggle against impossible odds, the months spent investigating, the tyrants challenged. It’s process as a product, but the product has no pull.

In some really perverse (but prominent) cases that I've encountered, the worse your working conditions, the more fundable you become.

We're feeding so many journalists into a system designed for their failure, a slot machine for recognition. A few get fame; most are left with precariousness. Other people's suffering has become this support sector's worst imaginable sustainability strategy. 

Watch grant or award panels light up when they hear about the reporter working three jobs to fund their investigation, then watch them glaze over when someone has stable employment and just wants to expand their beat coverage (boring!). The precariousness should not be the pitch.

From abstract heroics to actual appreciation

I spend much of my time now telling my peers something that used to be uncomfortable even to me: You don't need to sacrifice yourself. The sacrifice doesn't advance anything. It doesn't help you fight autocracy. It doesn't make you a better journalist.

Besides, so much of the global journalism that is profoundly dangerous often only informs elites - embassies, Brussels, Washington, think tanks, banks and insurers - not the communities we so often seek or claim to serve. Should we risk that much for them?

That may be okay if it genuinely led to better governance, but I'm not sure that's often the case. Maybe we need to leave behind concepts of impact from a time when parliamentary hearings brought about change, when press releases reached beyond the comms departments of impotent organizations. Those systems are largely ineffective and, in any case, are most often self-serving first.

A service-based approach breaks this cycle. It demands specificity by tying support to intentional utility: Who are you helping? How? And how would they manage without you? These questions terrify an industry built on the premise that all journalism matters simply by existing.

Instead, we could intentionally praise, fund, and pay attention to actual journalistic tasks that matter to real people in their real lives:

• Documenting what happens in communities.
• Making sense of complex systems.
• Helping people navigate these complex systems.
• Answering questions people actually have.

Support should flow to those who deliver these (functional or emotional or social) services effectively, not whoever tells the most compelling tragedy.

I believe that journalism as a service can be valuable enough to justify a support ecosystem that doesn't need to build on its practitioners' misery.

In workshops, I ask: What would your readers/viewers/listeners miss if you disappeared tomorrow? If the answer is awkward silence, maybe we should think about that. Fund based on utility, not death threats received.

A new value framework

Establishing specific social value means abandoning comfortable abstractions.

Not every act of self-expression at scale qualifies as a contribution to the common good. Publishing your thoughts or investigations online doesn't automatically make you essential infrastructure for society.

A service framework forces us to articulate actual utility: This helps residents understand zoning changes. That tracks where their money goes. These investigations expose specific harms to specific people. When we tie support to demonstrated service rather than assumed virtue, the entire ecosystem shifts.

Over the past months, I had the opportunity to contribute to a policy paper on media funding for Liechtenstein by friend and former colleague Gerald Hosp. When does one ever get to think big and debate in the very unique context of an uber-wealthy Central European microstate?

I proposed a model in which the creator economy meets journalism in a diversified distribution of labor around acts of journalism (Inspiration: Journalism + Design and the New School) as an alternative to the trickle-down model where money flows through institutions claiming to serve everyone.

Establishing a greater specificity of social value beyond abstract notions of journalism as a force for good will allow us to reframe the remuneration conversations away from martyrdom and suffering, and would ultimately improve the industry massively.

The journalists who do the best work shouldn't have to harm themselves for vague causes. Imagine if they had:

• Stable housing to spend three months on investigations.
• Health insurance to focus on complex stories instead of quick freelance hits.
• The ability to say no because they're not desperate.

This becomes possible (outside of Liechtenstein) when support systems are focused on helping journalists find what their communities actually seek and build sustainable models around that real value – subscription newsletters people pay for, investigative work that local businesses sponsor, beat coverage that readers directly support; and not reduce them to advocacy tools.

No more grant panels for pity, but work that generates its own justification. Journalists as appreciated supporters of their fellow citizens' informed decision-making, not servants of abstract principles.

We're not there yet and while there are systemic reasons, we must also look in the mirror on why that's the case. The systems won’t change themselves.

There is still heroism in journalism, there are still reasons to take both calculated and audacious risks. But the link shouldn't be between publishing an article and heroism. The link should be between helping people navigate their lives better and accepting the risks that come with that service, within reason.

When we fund useful information services, we show - we don't just tell - how freedom of the press directly improves people's lives.

That's the new/renewed social contract we will need to work toward in the coming years: journalists appreciated as essential infrastructure by members of open societies, not victims/clients/bottom-feeders of a broken funding model that lives off the abstract idea of them as pen-wielding Don Quixotes.

(What a boon this would be for audience practitioners finally not being reduced to surveys, SEO, email list clean-ups and other tactical optimization tasks.)

Donors who gathered at the Paris Peace Forum, and others gathering in Kuala Lumpur for the Global Investigative Journalism Conference might want to pause and ask themselves: what non-abstract utility does the work we support provide? Who would actually miss it if it stopped? Am I supporting something because it serves?

Looking back

Media Party in Buenos Aires worried me. The growing scarcity of resources threatens to reduce more journalism gatherings to perpetuating the clientelist systems I, too, was part of in Hong Kong and Eastern Europe - so different from networks of mutual support and recognition we need that are rooted in service.

The News Product Alliance Summit in Chicago offered the opposite experience - an energizing, diverse community committed to being anti-gatekeeping. If you're not yet involved, I encourage you to join this community that has taught me much.

The NPA Slack is a good starting point. Say hi there, I'm most active in the #user-research channel.

Their AI Collaboration Lab is an initiative worth watching, and the News Product Management Certification program is a way to upskill in a difficult market.

And Gazzetta's tireless but anonymous editor wrote up some more of our work on our site, around civic scraping and how to think about relevance in data projects.

I also encourage you to subscribe to their Field Notes, one-minute reads with questions rather than answers on information ecosystems and media strategy.

Looking ahead

I'll be speaking at the Advancing Service Design conference Nov. 19-20 with Madison Karas about designing better information services. You get $75 off if you use the discount code BOEHLER-ASD25, or you can apply for a full scholarship (deadline Nov. 4).

Don't be the tragic hero in someone else's funding proposal. Your suffering doesn't make the work matter, the service does.

When journalism actually serves people, you get something better than abstract heroic narratives that feed a well-intentioned but ultimately extractive system: Gratitude for answers to questions people had that they couldn't find anywhere else, and, in the long-term, better governance.

Perhaps this is how being rested, paid, and generally okay becomes possible at scale, not as a luck-of-the-draw charity for your sacrifice, but as recognition of actual value delivered.

Just imagine journalism valued for what it does, not what it endures. Revolutionary, I know.