We address the cracks in our foundation

I’m sitting you down and asking you to draft a definition of “news in the public interest.” How long do you think you would need? And how confident in your answer would feel?

Or, if I came to you, despondent and unsure what might make news essential, or even useful (I have been there!). Where would you point me for guidance or answers?

One last exercise; Do you think journalism needs a coherent theory of change? Would you feel equipped to participate in those conversations?

These questions about what we are doing in and with news and information don’t feel academic to me. They feel existential and urgent. We need more decision-making frameworks to rely on as we respond to needs and imagine what we can become.

A strong theoretical backbone is useful in any profession. It’s completely necessary in ours, when newsrooms must think so carefully about how to allocate their resources and even the most careful will leave information and accountability needs unmet. We need more decision-making frameworks to rely on as we respond to needs and imagine what we can become.

In the few other predictions I’ve done for this series over the years, I’ve been pleading as much as predicting. I’ve entreated others in more established newsrooms or positions of more authority to get on board with a different approach to news.

This is a different moment. There are enough people who came up in news and journalism after the easy money dried up. We understood things weren’t necessarily going to get any easier but kept our energy and creativity intact. Most of us did set about trying to meet urgent information and accountability needs, building new models and news products along the way. That foundational work, the well-informed theories and ethics, as essential as they are, were hard to find time for (we did manage to create a few that continue to serve us well).

But over the last few years those willing reporters and editors, leaders of newsrooms, builders of news products, documenters, civic builders, teachers, researchers, a smattering of media policy wonks, and even a few funders have started to cohere and mature into something else, a new field.

There are so many things the people in this field want to be able to do differently than the legacy newsrooms of yesterday, maybe even better.

That’s just the way these cycles work. But we can’t do better — reliably and as a group — without a more solid theoretical foundation and frameworks. We must have clarity about what might make our work matter in the real world. We have to make a case to the people to use our work, and even to rely on it in times of need, about the role we want news and information to play in our local communities so that these people can join us and hold us accountable when we miss the mark. There are sparkles and shoots all around us; News Futures, the work of Nicole Lewis and Lam Vo, local newsrooms in Los Angeles and Chicago working together (and separately) to oppose violent anti-immigration activity and occupation by the National Guard, Yolo County, California coming together to try to fund and build a new civic information system, the idea for a library newsroom project. There are so many more.

This year I expect to see more open discussion about theoretical frameworks we can learn from and adapt to our work in news and information as we build and strengthen and learn and refine. We don’t need a consensus. Our industry’s decentralization and low barrier to entry are two of its greatest strengths. We can instead build as many strong frameworks and complementary theories of change as we need to help form and then serve the pluralistic democracy we want. These are big questions with no easy answers. But the time is right.