Re:filtered #14: 'Journalism needs to decenter journalism'

Welcome to the 14th edition of my monthly newsletter on civic media opportunities in a moment of systemic disruption.

Last month, I wrote about the urgent need to rethink international media funding following the U.S. freeze. To be clear: I'm not arguing against funding journalism – quite the opposite.

What I'm suggesting is that whatever comes next needs to be fundamentally different from what came before. The previous model too often rewarded generic content generation and performative metrics over genuine service, institutional perpetuation over community impact.

Simply shifting the same approach to different funders (from Washington to Brussels, for instance) won't address the underlying disconnection between so much journalistic work and the people it aims to serve.

What should replace it? Truth be told, I don't have many answers. There probably isn't any simple or single answer.

Then, I came across this LinkedIn post by Candice Fortman in which she sketched out a possible path forward. I reached out to Candice to see if she had time for a short conversation for this newsletter.

Candice was the executive director of Outlier Media, a non-profit newsroom dedicated to addressing the information needs of Detroit residents. She is currently a JSK Fellow at Stanford.

With her permission, I'm reposting her original post, followed by our conversation. I hope her insights will help you as much as they helped me.

Thank you, Candice.

Journalism needs to decenter journalism.

Saving journalism has never been the job. The mission has always been to protect communities from an onslaught of predatory, violent, and deeply unjustifiable policies, companies, and systems that exploit our neighbors and prioritize profit over people. We are also charged with uplifting the brilliance of our neighbors, the history of our places, and the creative pulse that lives all around us. This might not resemble the journalism we’re used to—though it is built on that foundation—and it may not align with a sustainable and sellable business model, but it must exist as a durable public good.

Our communities, our neighbors, are on the brink. The signs are everywhere. From my perspective, I don’t think any of us, myself included, fully grasp how inadequate our current tools and approaches are to meet these evolving needs, which appear to shift daily. Compounding this are the erosion of digital spaces, from search to social platforms; the isolation and disassociation many of our neighbors resort to as a coping mechanism; and the growing number of under-resourced newsrooms—lacking not just financial support but the human capacity to build for the future in ways that remind people why we exist while exciting them to reengage with us.

This might seem like a doom post, but it's anything but that. I hold an unwavering hope—not in journalism itself, but in the creative brilliance that emerges from natural collaboration, especially when it crosses disciplines. I believe in the lessons of history: that we can resurrect what worked while discarding our worst practices (and the most useless) and reimagine the path forward. And I trust in the power of listening and building, unbounded by the constraints of what was but instead grounded in the urgency of what must be. We must be agile in our approaches no matter how we touch this industry. Be ready to build and build again.

Courage is what we need in infinite supply for the days ahead. I am calling on all of us to build that muscle.

Below is our conversation. I asked her to start by sharing how she got into journalism.

Candice: I came into journalism—I didn't go to J-School—I came into journalism later in life. And I came from commercial radio and marketing.

When I came into journalism, which is a place I always wanted to find myself but wasn't brave enough as a young person to actually go for it, I immediately saw these things and I'm like, why are they acting like communication works differently once you put the word “journalism” in front of it? All the principles of communication, like how we learn to talk to humans, don't change because you are a journalist.

The first thing I immediately noticed was a lack of repeating a narrative until it is heard and it has an impact. Let me go back to my pop radio career. When a radio station switches formats——one of the first things you'll notice is that, let's say it's the new 98.7, you're going to hear "the new 98.7" for about two years.

That's what their research has taught them: it will take the audience about two years to actually recognize that a change has occurred because they're not paying that much attention to you. They have their actual lives to live.

Then when I got to journalism I'd say these things like, "Well, okay, so you told that story once and then that was that. The story's over?" "Well, yeah, we've got to move ahead."

"But the problem still exists! What do you mean you're moving ahead?" That immediately was like, oh, this is just bad for society. But if we want to get down to brass tax, to money, which is what many of my colleagues want to talk about, it's bad business. It's a bad business practice. If your customer, which is your audience, is not actually able to get the full use of your product, it's bad for business.

I hear too often journalists saying, "Well, people just aren't paying us any attention. They are turning away from us." Right, they're turning away from a product that doesn't work for them, which is a very natural reaction from a consumer base.

Because you haven't formed a relationship with them, they don't know you. This is why I think TV news is a slight exception to this because that face-to-face communication really does change the audience's relationship. I also think this in radio as well. People get very attached to people's voices even if they can't see them, which is why podcasting has been so successful.

But for print media and digital news as well, you don't have that same luxury. People don't look you in the face. People don't hear your voice. They see your words on paper. As a writer, I think words are incredibly powerful, but nothing is more powerful than when you sit in front of a person, look them in the eye or speak into their ear. What does digital print news have in the way of this kind of natural person-to-person communication? For a while, it was social, but X changed that quickly. 

For too long, reporters—well-meaning, I think, in their efforts, I don't say this to be cross at all—did not consider the importance of building an authentic relationship with their audience because they didn’t have to. 

Now, we need our audiences like never before; we need a two-way relationship. We need their financial support, trust, and attention, but after years of not needing to win them over, we are ill-equipped to serve the audience of the present and certainly not the one ahead. 

Patrick: What are the services that journalism, or that we as journalists, could be good at providing? To build on that, what are the signals you're looking for that you see—"Oh, this is useful," or "This is service"?

Candice: There are many forms of service because every community needs something different. Every person needs different services.

What I need from a newsroom is different than what perhaps someone who's raising kids, who works an hourly job, is looking for.

When we were building Outlier, and even my work at public radio at WDET, this was a question I thought about a lot. 

I had a person in my head because that's how I was trained to think, except for this time not to sell cars to people, thank God, but to think about who needs information and how you would deliver it to them in a useful way for their lives.

So I had this woman in my head. She's a single mother. She has two young children, and she is the morning shift assistant manager at Burger King. That means her children have to be dropped off at a relative's house around 3:30 or 4:00 in the morning before they go to school so she can go to work. Their day starts very early.

Her day is not spent scrolling through The New York Times and wondering what's happening. Her day is action, from the moment she walks into Burger King's door. She is moving.

Sometimes she decides to work a double shift. She picks her kids up, then she cooks dinner, she makes sure they get their homework done, they get baths, they get in bed, and they start that all over again. And she does it about six days a week.

This is an example I used from someone I actually met. This was a real-life human being who was in the middle of losing their home to tax foreclosure in Detroit. The challenge of meeting her information needs is both necessary and requires interventions that expand our use case for journalism.

Sarah Alvarez, the founder of Outlier—was also thinking about information delivery for similar reasons. The texting service, was built to serve those hardest to reach in our community and also have information barriers.

We text out to Detroiters and say, "Hey, are you having problems with housing, utilities, food insecurity?" We were looking at what people's highest  information needs are and feeding that text system with information that would help them survive.

We were not assuming that everyone had the time or desire to read our longer-form journalism, so we created different kinds of journalism for different audiences. Think about using the same ingredients to cook different meals for varying tastes. We want people to be satiated by the news to provide for it to be useful and easy to navigate. 

Patrick: When I was a reporter, I began to ask myself some existential questions on how extractive journalism can be, and whether I wanted to really be part of such an extractive practice. When you're reporting, you're telling other people's stories, essentially taking their experiences and narratives and repurposing them. Then you're also taking people's time away to read these stories, and all these kind of assumptions are extractive.

But then I also wonder, with the deep love that I have for journalism as a craft...  how do you preserve what's good about journalism without all of that—that rest—that just makes us want to run away?

Candice: One of my favorite reporters and editors is Wendi Thomas, the founder of MLK50. Wendi is a hardcore trained newspaper reporter.

She is fearless in her reporting. She's a serious, capital-J journalist.

One of the most important things Wendi Thomas ever said, and I repeat it all the time, is that one of the values of MLK 50 was to return material good back to the people of Memphis that had been taken from them by predatory actors and bad policy. She is still doing her capital-J journalism, but it has a defined purpose.

If you look at her reporting around the Methodist Hospital in Memphis, which is the largest healthcare provider in the city, and its aggressive debt collection practices you’ll see these values come to life and the impact. Her reporting resulted in the hospital erasing millions of dollars in debt. In many cases, this was a life-altering amount of debt.   

At the core, a newsroom has to have a purpose that is bigger than journalism. It is not journalism for the sake of journalism. What are we getting in the car of journalism for? Where are we going? What are we ultimately trying to discover? Are we trying to help people? Are we trying to help them navigate things? Or are we just—actually, I don't even know what the "just" is anymore. What are we doing?

I also look at Documented in New York, whose mission has always been worthy and important, but their mission today under the Trump administration as a newsroom reporting directly to and for immigrant communities is invaluable.

They were doing it before it was invaluable. They believed that that community deserved and needed good information to navigate systems that were already broken for them.

Patrick: In your post, you also spoke about some inadequate tools and approaches. I think a lot of us in journalism are asking ourselves, what of my skills and work should I hold on to, what should I let go of? A lot of our work is tied to our ego, our identity, our sense of self, right? What would you let go of if you had a magic wand and you could say, "This has to stop"?

Candice: I have read a lot of articles where I thought: "This could have been a five-minute video. This could have been an infographic. This could have been a postcard in the mail."

We are too tied to our delivery methods, which doesn’t make us agile enough for the audience of today, that can start a YouTube channel in the morning and by the evening be delivering information out to the world. If they can do it, I am sure they are wondering why we aren’t.

If you're helping people, you need to meet them where they are.

When we talk about unhoused people, who are we reporting for? Are we just telling people unhoused people exist and the systems exist? Or are we actually trying to talk to politicians, legislators, funders, banks that actually fund housing developments? Who is the audience for reporting on unhoused people? Are unhoused people ever the audience? Do they need information?

I'd argue they need information in mass because one of the most useful tools for getting out of a hard situation is knowing more about the situation or what's available. But I doubt it would be useful to post that as a thousand-word article on your website.

Patrick: To your point earlier with the person, the mother of two, that you have in mind, but also here with this example, I ask myself this one thing: We often have a pretty good understanding of what the information needs are, but at the same time, people have such limited capacity in their day to process additional information.

I often think, "This could be really useful for these people," but I recognize they may not have the mental bandwidth to engage with it. How do you think about emotional and psychological needs in this space? Are there ways of creating space in their very congested lives, and what are they?

Candice: Outlier launched a project led by senior staff reporter Koby Levin, helping Detroiters claim money that may be owed to them by the Wayne County treasurer. In late 2024, he wrote a guide that helped people navigate the process of finding out if they were owed money and walked them through the process of filing the claim form. 

Many newsrooms might stop there and call that good enough, and I might have as well, but the great thing is that journalists like Koby are always teaching us to push further.

Recruiting members of our audience and community, the Outlier team has been hosting a volunteer phone bank to call the people who are owed money to make sure they are aware and know how to go about claiming those proceeds.

This is how we lift the burden. We go the extra mile, which doesn’t have to be a weight we hold on our own. We can work with our audience, local organizations, and other newsrooms to make this work lighter. 

I’d also lift the work of the Mississippi Free Press and its Solution Circles. They gather a diverse group of residents to address challenges through deep listening and relationship-building across divides.

These convenings are meant to create sustainable and impactful solutions around urgent public-policy and community issues that can transcend partisan politics.

We’re back to that in-person community building, looking people in the eye. What might have been a war of words online is different when you have to look at a person in the face. Our ears listen better when we are sitting across from one another.

Newsrooms as conveners play an increasing role, allowing us to learn more about the audience while helping them get to know us and our methodologies better. 

Patrick: I think we journalists, especially those of us who've really committed to it, have given up a lot. We could have had easier paths, but we chose this community, this identity. Because of that, these journalistic values are so deeply ingrained.

Letting go of some feels like letting go of a part of who we are. I suspect you see that too. What advice would you give someone going through this? What, at its heart, is journalism? Or, put another way, what's your inner way of deciding, "This needs to be kept"?

Candice: I don't know if it's a matter of deciding what needs to be kept, but it is a matter of assessing what is actually creating movement. If there is energy around a thing, keep it. If your paper can write a thousand words and it turns people to action, keep printing a thousand words. 

I tell people all the time, we were not obsessed with text messaging at Outlier as a technology. In fact, it's a dead technology. There has not been an innovation in texting in years.

But if we thought that the best way to get information to Detroiters was to use messenger pigeons and we could have invested in a pigeon farm, we would have. We were unattached to the format but more to how it gets there in a useful way.

We were deeply attached to: when we send it out, do people use it? Does it create real material good in their lives? Can we track the impact of that? The impact is important because we're still a business at the end of the day.

I think people have a tendency to think that I'm just all butterflies and birds and roses. I love cheques. I love getting a cheque. A cheque I know will arrive is one of my favorite things in the world. It's deeply satisfying to know I'm getting paid. But I also know that there is a way to get paid and be useful.

The very first thing I read this morning, and I tried so hard not to post anything about it— The Washington Post declining that ad about Elon Musk. It's one of my favorite stories.

This idea that the press is somehow this sort of moral good, that it is always on the right side of history, that it is always utilizing itself for the best, which then journalists also attach themselves to—that good, their egos get attached to being heroes, that we are doing heroic acts—is just bullshit.

I'm not saying that there aren't journalists who haven't done heroic things, because there most certainly are. I'm saying that putting the word "journalist" in your title does not inherently make you a good human being, and it does not mean that you are doing work that's useful or that you are on the right side of history.

Patrick: But isn't that so hard right now when we have that fake certainty around digital metrics and digital analytics? We're like, "Oh yeah, we've got to be very precise," but they don't mean much. The moment you say that, people revert to thinking, "Oh, you're abstract, or you're not wanting accountability." How do you navigate that?

Candice: This is why, more than maybe any time in the press's history, a relationship with your audience is critical to understanding the performance of your work. You are relying on them to tell you if something is good.

You can see that in a couple of ways. For those of us on the nonprofit side, you can see it through membership dollars. That's a fine metric. It's useful. We track it.

But you can also see it in the narrative. People talk back to us all the time. It's a question of whether we're listening. When someone sends you a letter in the mail to tell you that you helped them keep their water on, to me that is a more useful metric than 50 people sharing our post on Facebook. I just think it's more valuable.

It's also about what people are comfortable talking to you about, what people come to you naturally to ask you about. City councils often keep records of the questions that come into councilors' offices. Newsroom should be doing the same thing. That is part of how we fed our SMS system.

We tracked the questions people asked us. We have every question that has ever been asked to us in what was once just an Excel sheet and now is a fancy system, so that we can understand what people come to us to ask questions about, how we answer that question, and eventually over time how the answer to that question evolved because of policy changes, because the city changes, the issues ebb and flow.

That's why I talk about cities as living, breathing things, because they change all the time. They are not stagnant.

The problems, the things that Detroiters told us they had the hardest time getting information about seven years ago, are different today. In contrast, others haven’t evolved, which is also helpful information.

As a newsroom, we have to be attuned to where we source our data and that it comes from diverse sources,. For our information needs assessments, we used census information, questions to United Way, and non-emergency calls to to 911, because we found that when communities don't have good information systems, they rely on whatever they can, including 911. However, we also polled a representative group of Detroiters via text message.

It’s not enough to depend on measures of popularity when assessing people's actual needs. 

I would love to see some research showing the news habits of the audiences that we get data (audience surveys) from digitally, who's sharing our content, who's reading our content, who's opening our newsletters, versus the people who need information to survive and navigate hard things but are not sought after news consumers.

I think the latter audience is often the most underserved and more susceptible to misinformation. through information neglect. How we choose to create the news will inform who will be the served audience.

Patrick: I see that in my work as well. Communities have built their own information systems, and you're there on the outside. You see flawed and bad information, but you also see strong bonds of belonging and identity. They’re giving each other hope based on bad information.

How do you step into that conversation? Can you offer alternative belonging, dignity, hope, and how do you do that?

Candice: I think there are two ways. If you've ever had to help your family members navigate something they read on Facebook or heard in WhatsApp, then you know the answer to that is probably no. I don't know if you've ever had to say, like I had to say to my aunt during COVID, "I work in journalism, so please listen to me. Not your pastor's wife. Don't listen to her, she's wrong." That's how I got my aunt to get a COVID vaccine, by the way.

Patrick: It worked?

Candice: Yes, because she ultimately trusted me as her niece more than as a journalist. Her church had told her not to get vaccinated, which was devastating for me. Her church community means a lot to her and that matters to me, but knowing its also the place she is being fed misinformation was eye opening. I sent her with a bunch of Outlier flyers the next week to church. We know the channels people are utilizing. That's why I'm bringing up some of my favorite actual journalism solutions to these problems.

Conecta Arizona is a WhatsApp newsroom in Spanish. They host La Hora del Cafecito. Once a week, La Hora del Cafecito is carried out on WhatsApp with a guest expert, to whom the group can ask questions. They’ve had the participation of experts in health, immigration, psychology, economics, art and entertainment, sports, meditation, digital security, social problems and leadership in organizations, among other topics.

She is on the platform they use, and she's in their community. If we talk about fixing the misinformation problem, you have to literally embed yourself where the information flows. Conecta Arizona is a shining example of this principle. Go where the problems, solutions, and people exist. 

If I was a funder, for instance, and I saw the results she was having, I'd be trying to create a Conecta Arizona everywhere. I would be trying to replicate that success.

But you would also then have to truly and honestly believe that the folks that are getting their information from WhatsApp and believing it is worthy of that investment.

That is a bigger conversation that I would love to have—and have had many times with funders—about who we actually value, because the value can't be just in people who can afford to pay for the news. That's a really poor way to run a civil and civic society.

Patrick: Many readers of this newsletter are running or working in newsrooms that have seen their funding cut in the last couple of weeks. There is almost no way of monetizing in this space. What is your advice? Should they move on?

Candice: My partner is a hospital chaplain, and I think about some of the stories he tells me about the questions people ask him on a day-to-day basis, people trying to understand the purpose and value proposition of life. I always think, that's a hard job.

That's how I felt with you asking me that question, because it's such an existential question at this point. If you had asked me this question maybe 15 years ago, I would have said, "Oh, well, you know, just re-monetize it in this way."

Patrick: Yeah, exactly.

Candice: But there are no easy answers anymore. Sure, you can ask well-meaning people with means for donations. That'll get you some of the way, but you need those connections.

You need to understand how those systems work. You need to be in a country that can accept donations from the United States or from other countries. Barriers exist there.

There are models I've seen that I think are interesting. I've seen co-op models pop up that are attached to non-journalism things.

In Spokane, there's Luke Baumgarten, who runs RANGE Media, which is owned by the Spokane Workers Cooperative, which means all RANGE employees are worker-owners of the news outlet and the other businesses that SWC owns.

That is cooperative economics and that is one of the most realistic and sustainable ways forward that I’ve seen emerge. These things are of course not built overnight and time is of the essence.

We've got weeks at best. I don't know, and that scares me, because I cannot offer those people a good enough answer. I also cannot in good conscience tell them to quit right now. I think we too often—Americans think of themselves in this sort of little bubble.

What is happening in the United States right now at the federal level is a good example that we are not unique in the world. That's why you have to be intersectional in your thinking about how information systems work. I need information systems all over the world to work. It is bad when those information systems break down. 

One thing I will always be steadfast in is that journalism is a record of history.

When I think of one of my favorite examples of this—and by "favorite" I mean, you’ll understand what I'm saying—had Ida B. Wells not been documenting lynchings in the South, we might not have believed that thousands of Black people were being lynched. That journalism has value.

There is no amount of money we could have paid her that would have been enough for what she did to bring an end to that practice. At the risk of her life.

I wish I could talk to Ida B. Wells right now. I have her autobiography sitting here on this bookshelf. I keep going through it like, "Maybe there's an answer in here. Maybe she told us the answer 80 years ago and we just didn't hear her."

I know how the Black press ran when there were no major ad dollars coming. It ran off the generosity of people who believed it had to exist, who didn't have it to give, and still gave.

I think that if our newsrooms can become necessary enough, people will pay for us to be around and yet I feel deeply unsatisfied with that answer.

Patrick: What you said really resonates. I'm doing these workshops this weekend, and I'm worried about participants feeling like their work has no value if we can't immediately monetize it. What gives you hope? What are the first steps or areas to explore so I can guide them toward those, even if the "answer" is still forming?

Candice: All of my hope sits in history. People have survived things that I can't even think about. People have created information systems in times of war, in times of oppression. The Black press came to be during enslavement, not after.

That is a kind of future focus that keeps me going and informs my work. I think that—it would be impossible for me to have been raised by grandparents who grew up in the Jim Crow South of the United States, who now have a granddaughter doing a fellowship at Stanford and not be deeply in awe of the power of staying the course. The amount of strength it took my ancestors for them to survive, for me to be sitting here, for me to be talking to you—their strength is immeasurable.

If they can survive that, if they could survive enslavement, then make sure that my grandparents got here, to make sure my mother got here, to make sure I eventually got here—the human spirit has a purpose, and I need journalism to match that.

We have to tap into that thing that we don't want to talk about. It's not about religion, but that internal mechanism that tells you to keep moving, that tells you to keep going forward. That your work is necessary even when it seems impossible.

As we did in the early days of Outlier when we were always at the end of our dollars, you make it work, you find other ways to bring in the dollars for yourself, and you keep doing this work because, for many of us, it’s our purpose in a world that needs us all putting our gifts to good use.

Patrick: Thank you. This conversation was such a gift. I aspire to have the clarity of mind that you have. I just wanted to ask, is there anything I should share in addition to what you mentioned?

Candice: You may want to link to my first JSK piece, which is called "Hopefully Pissed Off".

Patrick: "Hopefully Pissed Off." That's amazing. Thank you.

Looking Back

I got to join the News Product Alliance board, and am so thrilled about this. I have so much gratitude for this group of media thinkers, and really hope to be useful. If you have suggestions, let me know.

If you're not yet part of NPA, check out their product kit, join the Slack community, and subscribe to the Product Notes newsletter (Reese Oxner kindly interviewed me about our work). And if you can, save the date to join the NPA Summit in Chicago, Oct. 23-24.

Looking Ahead

My colleague Yanan Sun started to write about our work at Gazzetta, with several articles scheduled to appear on our still bare-bones website over the coming weeks. I’ll also link to them here in future editions. This is a cautious experiment. We'll be grateful for your feedback.

I'm currently in Taipei for RightsCon, preparing for my workshops and presentations. I'll share my work and impressions from the conference in next month's newsletter.

In March, I'll be back in Prague, and then back in New York for the Newswhip Publisher Summit on March 26 to speak about how social news-gathering can evolve, with some ideas on how to monitor closed messaging groups, and opportunities in the fediverse.

In April, I'll be at the International Journalism Festival in Perugia. In May, to the Hacks/Hackers AI x Journalism Summit in Baltimore to share some of our work, and some new audience research tools.

If you're there, let me know. And if you want to connect, discuss, or brainstorm, I'm only an email (hit reply) or a Signal message (patrickb.01) away.

Take care.