The reality, as you've chronicled in this (actually wonderful) newsletter, is that the levers controlling the organizational operations of news is what's broken. Totally agree. We need to be encouraging former reporters to pick up the baton again and start running with it out of a sense of duty -- rather than this current era, which consists of trained journalists constantly feeling like shit because they aren't savvy enough to maintain a career in the field. A single individual might not be able to replace a local newspaper, but one person with a journalism background can focus on a single topic to consistently cover in a way that isn't so intrusive it dictates the other parts of life. And when the Private Equity, conglomerated operators all kill over (or lose interest), it'll be those little dutiful side projects that'll become the seeds of superior news organizations run by the people making the news. I don't get the sense that this is being acknowledged at an event like ISOJ, which seems far more invested in preventing old news orgs from backsliding even if it maintains the awful status quo.
The reality, as you've chronicled in this (actually wonderful) newsletter, is that the levers controlling the organizational operations of news is what's broken. Totally agree. We need to be encouraging former reporters to pick up the baton again and start running with it out of a sense of duty -- rather than this current era, which consists of trained journalists constantly feeling like shit because they aren't savvy enough to maintain a career in the field. A single individual might not be able to replace a local newspaper, but one person with a journalism background can focus on a single topic to consistently cover in a way that isn't so intrusive it dictates the other parts of life. And when the Private Equity, conglomerated operators all kill over (or lose interest), it'll be those little dutiful side projects that'll become the seeds of superior news organizations run by the people making the news. I don't get the sense that this is being acknowledged at an event like ISOJ, which seems far more invested in preventing old news orgs from backsliding even if it maintains the awful status quo.