Re:filtered #5: Google Zero isn't new to exiled media
Some newsrooms have been navigating the media apocalypse for a long time: exiled media organizations.
Google Zero really scared a lot of people this month.
That's Google expanding its generated search responses (much like Perplexity) and, eventually, no longer sending traffic to news sites via the ten blue links. The news folks I've met this month have been nearly uniformly in despair over this coming, irreversible loss of broad reach.
It is a massive shift, and it will hurt. Quite a few people, including Google's Sundar Pichai, have talked about a moment of magnitude on par with Wired’s 2010 claim of the death of the web.
But the web isn't dead. What's withering away is the current iteration of broadcasting models that operated through the now increasingly outdated user experience of ten blue links. We are mourning the disruption of a familiar model that we have learned to game, and that gave media immense visibility.
There are newsrooms out there that can teach us a ton on how to navigate the future information ecosystems disrupted by this change because they have been navigating these realities for a long time: exiled media organizations, such as Meduza in Russia or Confidencial in Nicaragua.
Over the past few months, I've been trying – in vain so far – to convince conference organizers in the United States to look at the exiled/dissident media space for inspiration, not just because of their experience in confronting anti-democratic movements and kleptocratic groups, but especially for reasons like Google Zero.
In many ways, dissident/exiled media have been navigating media environments where they don't benefit from the systemic advantages to distribution that media organizations in major free markets have benefited from for the past two decades, really successfully given the odds. That experimentation has led to innovative reporting and distribution ideas that could be just as useful in New York or Berlin as they have been to colleagues serving their communities in Rangoon, Beijing, or Minsk.
There are amazing journalists doing incredibly creative things while navigating publishing spaces that are all-around not made for them, (and often really culturally fraught newsrooms) and making it sometimes even look easy.
For many journalists in Russia and Belarus, for instance, the ten blue links disappeared when those regimes blocked their sites. Russia did this wholesale in 2022, Belarus started a decade earlier. For their readers, Google still remained accessible, just the search results of independent publishers didn't open. These media organizations were way faster and more effective than anyone in the United States or Europe to pivot to text messaging as a publishing strategy, and have built audiences in the hundreds of thousands.
Iranian journalists, forced to work overseas, have been doing super smart data digging (just read this earlier this month: "Estimating the Income of Iran’s Prisons from the Sale of Ankle Monitors"). That’s in part because it doesn't require a physical presence, and there’s still so much data out there.
There is a ton of data that can be found even in the most repressive regimes, the work tracking the death toll of Russian soldiers by various exiled Russian-language outlets is another great example. NK News is another, for North Korea.
Russian-language and Hungarian journalists led by Kristina Zakurdaeva won a special citation at the Philip Meyer awards last year for their work analyzing parallels in propaganda rhetoric. This was really special to me because I set up the short-lived but wonderful Levin Utkin Fellowship that enabled this reporting. Donors reading this: we need more data journalism fellowships!
Amid all the hope and hype around ActivityPub and other fediverse protocols that allow for decentralized publishing and social interaction, there’s already a lot of experience in decentralized publishing out there.
Chinese journalists in particular have been gaining valuable experience in this space because they have had to confront sophisticated exclusion mechanisms on Chinese social (and search) platforms. Matters Lab, initially out of Hong Kong, experimented early with decentralized publishing in Chinese using the really hard-to-block Interplanetary File System (IPFS). Read this love letter to Hong Kong. In this space, I’m now also watching Nostr, a protocol that uses relays much like the Tor Project.
There are so many more examples of great entrepreneurial spirit in the exiled media space, and a lot is not seen at conferences, in part because it’s not a clearly definable space, because challenges are really hard to explain to someone not living them, and in part because a clear community focus makes it sometimes difficult to see the work if you're not part of that community.
Based on my work with exiled newsrooms and my recent conversations, I thought it could be helpful to share five common themes I've seen that make this space so prescient.
Also, a shout-out to Sudeshna Chanda with Zamaneh Media and the wider Network of Exiled Media Outlets for doing a great job of introducing smart minds in this space on their Exiled Media Podcast.
#1 Gatekeepers are not your friends.
I used to despair when I learned of the sometimes questionable tactics that some newsrooms use to game distribution platforms.
Some examples that I’ve had to deal with: one newsroom posted their content on adult sites. Another one placed scripts on their sites so that additional windows with their reporting would pop up on user screens. One editor paid a server farm that tricked them into believing that tens of thousands of people were looking at their work when those clicks were just scripts. Another one is currently still using defunct domains to reach people who accidentally mistype a url. Quite a few are using pop-up screens on partner organizations’ services.
While much of this is largely ineffective, I've come to embrace the entrepreneurial spirit. When platforms aren't made for you, and you need them to get to people to compete with propagandistic state media, you work with what you have. Exiled media learned this early, e.g. when their search results stopped working because of national government website blocking.
We are all learning now that it is really hard work to be seen when you don’t benefit from benevolent gatekeepers.
(So much of this creative energy could be channeled for good if the big platforms were much more serious about taking a stand, e.g. caching of blocked search results, Apple Private Relay in more countries, etc.
Someone is going to write an article in a few years titled The Invention of Technological Objectivity. (Exhibit A: Threads)
#2 The best journalism is community service.
One of the most inspiring projects I witnessed at Radio Free Europe was a project that my Belarusian colleagues did on mental health.
They collected questions from their community on the emotional toll of the rigged 2020 presidential elections and the ensuing crackdown on the protests, and they put these questions to mental health practitioners on an Instagram live stream.
There weren't millions of people watching it. But it really helped those who did.
A sad truth is that awards largely do not incentivize this kind of work.
#3 There is widespread solidarity with other media organizations.
I can't claim the space is all kumbaya on an executive level. The competition for funding, awards, talent... the egos! It's exhausting just to think about it.
But there is organic collaboration on a few fronts that is inspiring, and growing:
- Solidarity in structured collaborations: At the Environmental Reporting Collective, we openly shared visuals, data, and reporting with each other, and anyone else on a Creative Commons license, which allowed newsrooms across Southeast Asia but also in China to pick it up with deniability. Collaborative journalism is now fully mainstream. The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) pioneered this model in some really tough places, and I'm in constant awe of how they keep herding cats so effectively.
- Solidarity on a technical level: OCCRP’s Aleph is an amazing resource for journalists everywhere. Samizdat also comes to mind. It is a great collaborative app that aggregates long-reads from across independent Russian-language investigative outlets. Russian independent media also share notes on the state censorship authority's latest efforts, and best practices to circumvent them, thanks to a lot of work done by Roskomsvoboda. The folks running the Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI) are doing amazing work, patiently helping journalists anywhere figure out censorship issues.
- Solidarity on a reporter level: a lot of collaboration is unseen because editors often would just not allow it in the race for exclusivity and clicks. But reporters will always talk to each other across newsrooms, and that's great.
#4 Security risks are digital, physical, and pervasive.
Exiled media are way ahead in terms of awareness of the technical capabilities of surveillance by state and private actors, even though the setups to protect them remain often abysmally inadequate.
Many journalists working in exile I have met have been much more mindful of the risks of public wifi, messaging encryption, location tracking, spyware, etc. These are real facts of life and have a serious impact not only on operational security but also on mental health for anyone.
I’ve been following the work of The Markup and 404 Media on this in the United States and Rest of the World has done a great job generating visibility for the social impact of technology everywhere.
Talk to Runa if you need help.
#5 Archives are identities.
Ten years ago, I coordinated and produced Voices of Tiananmen, a series of interviews, that were done secretly with key players in the 1989 democracy protests across China, including a general who refused to impose martial law. We were really lucky that this was still possible at the time, and that it got published by the South China Morning Post. It wasn’t easy. Now, it would likely be impossible.
I don’t think this work could get published in Hong Kong today. The vague and undefined risk of persecution or harassment is just too high.
And it's a miracle the work is still online. Anticipating its removal, Voices of Tiananmen has been submitted to Wayback Machine a few hundred times. If it were removed from the SCMP’s servers now, it wouldn't matter as much because it has been widely stored elsewhere.
But my reporting for liberal Chinese outlets has fully disappeared from the public internet, and is lost. These were stories that ranged from Civil War history to corruption in the Beijing Olympics, and rice smuggling from Myanmar. While my reporting is comparably insignificant, what matters is the wider loss of memory at scale.
Radio Free Asia reported a few weeks ago that a key internet archive run by researchers at Peking University that allowed users to perform keyword searches of more than 2.5 billion historical web pages from millions of websites in Chinese, is no longer accessible.
But some smart people in the exiled media space have been pushing back. The Russian Independent Media Archives folks have scraped independent media from the year 2000 through the present day. China Unofficial Archives gathers Chinese independent historiography. China Digital Times has an amazing archive of public debate in China.
There is great promise in preserving not only the reporting through AI model training, but just as much the spirit, tone, mood, and voice of this past work done. I have been lucky to meet and brainstorm with some really smart minds on this in the past few months, and we have some very exciting prototypes. If you’re in this space and interested, get in touch.
Also, if you have seen others or see inspiration elsewhere, please let me know! Just respond to this email, or a quick message on Signal (patrickb.01) will make my day.
If you have any other ideas you want to run by me or want to chat about, get in touch by responding to this email, messaging me on Signal, or claiming a slot in my public calendar.
Looking Back on May
I meant to share a more regular list of great reads, but I just lacked time this month. I guess that's a good thing. For one, I read Dan Oshinsky's advice that there are already too many link listicle newsletters out there. And being busy is what you want to be when you’re self-employed.
Over the last month, I held workshops for more than a hundred journalists on issues that I care and think deeply about, including future-proofing search strategy, impact measurement, and data journalism, and that had to come first.
My LinkedIn post on what could be done after Chinese media have been pressured to no longer submit their work to the Society of Publishers in Asia Awards led to quite a few conversations that I hope will lead to a way forward.
I suggested two steps that could be taken to address this:
- Make award submissions no longer the only path to consideration by award judges. Organizers can still ensure the visibility of contributions through the typical (paid) process, but organizers should be able to include additional reporting they've seen elsewhere.
- Create new researcher roles that actively seek promising reporting elsewhere, including through anonymous nominations. This would make awards much more competitive, increase the talent pool for recruiting editors, and provide newsrooms that are unable to submit for political pressure an opportunity to be seen.
All this to say: If anyone is forced to abstain because of political pressure but still wins, they will have a degree of deniability.
More fundamentally, across the industry, awards are too frequently focused on format (e.g., video vs. text) rather than the service that the journalistic work provides. The last edition of this newsletter had some suggestions for more service-oriented awards.
While I truly enjoy this new post-management life, there is a steep learning curve in building consulting relationships, so, inspired by a few folks in the product space, I wrote up a manual on working with me. I didn't get the tone right initially and have since been iterating and improving thanks to great feedback. If you have feedback, let me know.
I also stopped using AI-generated cover images for these newsletters; they get stale fast.
Looking Ahead to June
Next month will be busy. I’ll be starting a new project that has been long in the works and that I’m really excited about.
On Thursday, June 6, you'll find me in Philadelphia to listen and learn from a discussion about what local journalists can learn from the ways community groups come together, organized by Robin Kwong.
The following week, I'll be back in DC for a few days. If you're there and want to grab coffee, let me know.
Later in the month, a few friends and I are launching a series of conversations on newsroom leadership in Central and Eastern Europe. In our conversations, we found that there was a lack of connection and support on key issues in the region: product, revenue, organizational development, and mental health. We have all seen how these issues are holding back the next generation of media leaders.
So, based on our own experiences, scars, and laurels, as well as insights we gathered from more than 60 media managers and journalists from across the region in a survey we ran last month, we are organizing this series to see if there's interest in tackling these issues in some way or form across the region.
I'll be facilitating a conversation on product on June 21 to understand how to future-proof a newsroom tech stack for a post-social/post-search world.
From tools to apps to content management systems and analytics, there is so much technology out there that promises to help newsrooms operate. But what do we really need, what is nice to have, and what is essential to running an effective newsroom?
I feel very lucky to pick the brains of
- Jo Ilie on bootstrapping a newsletter business in Romania,
- Julia Hildebrand, Correctiv, on the tech required for a community-driven newsroom,
- Robin Kwong, WSJ, on putting processes before tools,
- Ali Mahmood, Zinc Network, on the state of newsroom tech stacks in media across the region,
- Kevin Charman-Anderson, Pugpig, on when having an app makes sense (and when it doesn't).
There will also be great conversations on financial sustainability on June 18, hosted by Peter Erdelyi; organizational development on June 19, hosted by Cristian Lupsa; and mental health and well-being on June 26, hosted by Boryana Dzhambazova.
If you'd like to share it on your social, please share this link. It's a shared landing page for all four conversations. If you do share, thank you!
All are off-the-record and informal. I hope you can join.
Inspiring in Media
One thing I'd really like to keep doing in this newsletter is highlight someone or something that inspired me, and this month it's this call-out for a new job by Annemarie Dooling, VP, Audience Growth & Experiences at Gannett:
We are hiring a community-focused editor to work on deep engagement within our local communities. If going out into the world and meeting audiences, and translating that to our platforms is your jam, this is for you.
A few examples: Coasters in restaurants that link to food guides, reddit AMAs with journalists, print voters guides for unhoused people, IRL prom photo galleries, eclipse glasses with Q&A links and in-newsroom reader listening sessions.
Thanks to Elise for sharing this Nieman write-up about the growing trend of IRL community engagement.
That's it from me. Thank you for reading. Did I manage to give you some hope and inspiration?