Is it time for journalists and newsrooms to become something else?

I’ve been dabbling at the edge of journalism for twenty years now — sometimes as a reporter, collaborator, leader or lecturer, but always as a question mark. I didn’t go to J-school. I wasn’t a news junkie. But journalism’s potential (the power to remember, to situate, to imagine) has kept my attention.

For the past 14 years I’ve been asking and finding exciting answers to questions like these:

• Q: Could flipping the model of journalism on its head so that the public has a say in what reporting is created expand the democratic imagination and improve outcomes for all involved?
• A: Yes — see WBEZ’s Curious City.
• Q: Could centering elections coverage on what the electorate wants politicians to be talking about (rather than what politicians want to say) increase trust in journalism and efficacy of political reporting?
• A: Yes — see The Citizens Agenda.
• Q: Could helping top-down institutions better listen and respond to the people they serve improve outcomes for all involved?
• A: Yes — see Hearken.

It’s been gratifying to have hunches, run experiments, have academics rigorously prove the thesis and for hundreds of newsrooms to adopt these models.

But what happens when even these questions and the practice shifts they’ve spurred start to feel like too small a container for what’s needed now? Maybe we need to start even deeper — somewhere in the brainstem where our mental models of the world have formed.

Because here’s what feels true in my bones: people are more overwhelmed, polarized, and precarious than ever. And yet beneath it all we still carry quiet truths many of us have yet to fully metabolize into the practices, promise and potential of journalism:

We all need each other. We are all connected. We all want to feel like we belong. We all care, and want our work to matter (even if we disagree on what that looks like). The stories we tell and how we tell them shape our collective realities.

So what if we designed for those deeper truths alongside the current spread of crises? What if we could braid together the best of journalism — needs-finding, sense-making, fact-checking — with the relational skills of organizing, healing, and worldbuilding? What if we could de-silo our sectors and compost the colonialist and capitalist logics of separation into something more coherent, resilient and true?

That’s what I’m holding as I begin my John S. Knight Journalism Fellowship at Stanford. The time and space of this academic year is providing a rare chance to step back from the day-to-day of leading Hearken to tune into signals from what could be a better future.

Though it’s only been a few months, this much-needed spaciousness has allowed me to start formulating the latest hunches I’ve been holding into inquiries.

Right now, they’re sloshing around in these buckets:

What might an unkillable newsroom look like? (AKA a resilient, ever-adapting method of gathering and supplying trustworthy local information and steering it toward improved outcomes)

If we study the forces that degrade and erase local news — from funding precarity to polarization to infrastructural collapse — what counter-patterns might we design toward?

My guess is: it wouldn’t look like a traditional newsroom at all. Maybe it’s more like a distributed trust network … an “interstitium” rather than an organization … and perhaps it’s not only charged with gathering and presenting solid information, but also enabling people to better organize, convene and take action.

Are the traditional roles journalists play actually helping people solve problems? Or are there more effective hybrid roles waiting to be born — something between journalist, facilitator, mediator, historian, weaver, influencer, and social worker?

Whatever this thing is, it might not even fit under the term journalist as we’ve known it — especially if the role breaks sacred cows like “we don’t solve problems, we just report on them,” or “we can’t be advocates.” The rise of phrases like “civic information” instead of journalism, and communities of practice like News Futures are gesturing at that possibility. Sue Robinson’s 2023 book: How Journalists Engage recommends new roles like: Relationship Builder, Community Collaborator, Community Conversation Facilitator, Professional Industry Networker.

Is the work to create new hybrid institutions, or to better connect and combine existing ones together through a layer of interstitionaries (people who bridge, translate and connect the dots in service of the whole)?

I suspect the answer is both / and. Initiatives like Warm Cookies of the Revolution (which positions itself as a “civic health club”) and CivicLex are inspiring in how they marry journalistic information, social weaving and action. They’re not born out of a traditional institution but are blending important roles and activities into something exciting and effective. Existing institutions whose work impacts civic health and local sustainability could also create inside/outside jobs that focus on listening, connecting, collaborating and create a meso-structure to follow John-Paul Lederach’s model to circulate, convene and weave deeply and strategically (outside of one-off projects).

In short, I’m thinking about the need to create new coordination layers and new types of coordinators. Journalists are naturally circulating in any given environment, but they have yet to take on the remit of coordinating insights. Instead they focus on creating content. How might they begin to lubricate the information and action streams between sectors, catalysts and movement in a conscious way?

These are my ontological invitations. And since I haven’t been in academic settings for decades or used words like “ontology” with any degree of confidence, here’s its definition for the rusty: a set of concepts and categories in a subject area or domain that shows their properties and the relations between them.

To help visualize what’s emerging for me, I’ve been sketching this draft chart — an attempt to name a shift I feel is already underway for some.

What Journalism Is, and What It Could Become

This isn’t a framework as much as an attunement away from the logic and outcomes of extractive modernity to relational possibility (and to how reality actually works).

This is not even close to a final chart … more like a compost pile that invites a thousand more questions. I offer it with humility, curiosity, and the hope that it might invite thought partners and collaborators. (You can find me at: jbrandel@stanford.edu.)

If you’re feeling this is too abstract and wonder: what could it look like in practice? Imagine a newsroom mating with a library, a continuing education club, a hands-on-problem-solving space, a community center and an arts studio. Childcare and food are part of every gathering. Intergenerational insights are present at each decision point, and people emerge with far more resilient ties to their neighbors and the place they call home. Neighbors are no longer scrolling alone, they’re collectively sensemaking, co-regulating and supplying mutual aid to handle the crises already here and quickly coming down the pike.

To sum it up: I believe journalism’s next evolution isn’t a new platform, product, or nonprofit model. It’s a shift in how we relate — to each other, to power, to land and other living beings, to time, to the unknown. Perhaps this is what’s called for in the new reality-based journalism.

Special thanks to Mara Zepeda and Adam Yukelson for providing inspiration, co-sensing and incisive feedback!