Journalism will break from the hero narrative

Journalism must embrace complexity to have an abundant future.

Our information infrastructure is built on the volcanoes of capitalism — a system that demands flattening, that rewards the derivative, that incentivizes stories designed to polarize rather than illuminate. This flattening doesn’t just distort our work; it enables erasure and makes authoritarianism’s job easier.

Authoritarianism thrives on main-character energy. It needs a hero story — a single person to valorize, platform, co-opt, discredit, or remove. Journalism has leaned hard into these toxic individualistic tropes, perpetuating a form of narrative kingmaking that creates a momentum of inevitability that feels impossible to escape.

But democracy is protected by an unglamorous counterforce: people power. Communities moving together. Neighbors showing up for neighbors. Collectives powered by volunteer Google sheets, group texts, phone trees, and potlucks. Real heroism demonstrated by people working collectively whose names we’ll never know, linking arms in solidarity. Hope is built together in a perpetual group project. This is expansiveness in action.

Democracy is an experiment of the collective. As that experiment faces direct attack, the future of journalism lies in covering the complexity of the collective — the many who make up this exercise in faith and abundance. We must complicate the narrative.

In journalism, we are living the story we need to learn how to tell.

The journalism industry is facing disruptions from many forces all at once, primarily driven by AI and emerging tech, moving at such a pace of change that is demanding collective organizing, communities of practice, sense-making, sharing knowledge and building power together. As peers and colleagues, we are enduring the erasure of entire verticals of journalism that cover race, marginalized identities, power, and inequality. As citizens, our communities have come together to protect neighbors from ICE. Survival is not met waiting for leaders or spokespeople, but through building networks of care, rapid response, and economic solidarity. These stories show democracy’s actual immune system at work: mutual aid, neighbors texting neighbors, ensuring each other’s safety, practicing radical hospitality, ordinary people showing up and making themselves ungovernable through collective action.

My prediction for the year ahead: Journalism will break from the muscle memory of the hero narrative. We’ll stop reflexively searching for a main character, a face for the movement, someone to put on the cover. Instead, we’ll seize the opportunity in this chaos to build a more expansive story of us. We’ll meaningfully cover communities working and building together — reporting not just what changed, but how ordinary people created that change collectively.

We can use this moment to innovate how we show up, hold space, tell stories, and bear witness. In doing so, we can push back against the forces trying to flatten us and tell a more expansive narrative that creates opportunities to remake systems for the better.

Surviving authoritarianism is an exercise in embracing complexity. Survival has no single narrative, no single story, no single hero.

This is my prediction and my hope: that we connect to the power of solidarity. That we stop looking for heroes and start seeing the collective strength already among us. That we cover communities the way we’re learning to be one — because journalism that reflects how democracy actually works doesn’t just inform people. It mirrors their own power.