"In philosophy, we have a term for this: a logical fallacy. And right now, journalism is full of them."
Link: Journalism's Logical Fallacy, by Shirish Kulkarni
Journalism is in crisis, and it’s really easy (and lazy) to say that making a technology or process tweak will fix it: we just need to use AI to fill capacity gaps, or build stronger comments into our site, or we need a better business or distribution model.
None of those things address the underlying question of why we need journalism, why it’s important, and what it should be. By addressing innovation at the edges, newsrooms are avoiding the hard, existential work of revisiting their core value to begin with. But it’s only by understanding that core value that they will actually reset their relationships with audiences, build greater trust and loyalty, and pull themselves out of the rut they find themselves in.
Shirish Kulkarni’s findings from listening projects in Wales — with multiple dramatically different demographics — contradict a lot of the narratives newsrooms have been telling themselves. For example:
“The second finding challenges one of the journalism industry’s most comfortable premises: that audiences – particularly marginalised communities – are news-illiterate and need to be educated. The opposite is true. In fact, the communities we work with are forensically sharp about media – often more so than the industry insiders who talk about them.”
This mirrors something you often hear from mission-driven tech projects: “we just need to educate the user”. Usually the opposite is true: you need to educate yourself about the user and give them the thing they actually need. And in the case of journalism, at least as a finding of this research, the need turns out to be pretty simple:
“They want help making good decisions. For themselves, their families, their communities. Not drama, not outrage, not the next breaking story. Practical, trustworthy, usable information that helps them navigate their lives.”
It’s important, once again, to separate the work of news — breaking headlines, emergent facts — from journalism’s work to provide context and meaning. The first is a commodity; the second is both inherently community-driven and has always been more valuable.
Here I want to bang an old drum: newsrooms like to talk about audience strategies, not community strategies. It’s a meaningful difference that Shirish highlights well. The first implies an ivory tower broadcast approach: “we just need to reach people”. The second is an active relationship between a newsroom and the people it serves; a two-way conversation that requires trust and understanding on both sides.
The internet has always been a conversation. We’ve had the ability to build relationship-centric news organizations for 30 years, but most remain stubbornly set in a print mindset. This kind of research makes it clear how important that shift is, but, like Shirish, I don’t believe most existing newsrooms will evolve to actually meet this need. They can’t: the immediate commercial pressure is severe, and changing the model requires changing highly-ingrained cultural norms and assumptions that have been inherited from print. And in the midst of that panic, they’re jumping into bed with companies (AI vendors, proprietary social media platforms) that intermediate their relationships with their communities in exchange for some short-term wins.
So their outlook is not rosy. Instead, I think we’ll see new newsrooms emerge that reinvent what journalism is, are unafraid to build real, lasting, two-way relationships with the people they’re trying to serve, and eat everybody else’s lunch.