🔶 #20: "Why create a need when you can meet a need?"

What is journalism?

Over the last year and a half, I found myself asking this question time and again.

Within the industry, we feel like we know the answer. And yet, once we try to complete the sentence "Journalism is...", we all go in different directions – sometimes very different.

That's partly because, confusingly, we use the word 'journalism' to define simultaneously a field, a profession, a product, even a mission. But it's also because the way we think of journalism is evolving every day, along with people's hopes and expectations about it.

According to Wikipedia, journalism is "the production and distribution of reports on the interaction of events, facts, ideas, and people that are the 'news of the day' and that informs society to at least some degree of accuracy."

I might not go as far as saying that I disagree with this definition – but I do believe it fails to represent the richness of what journalism is, and should aim to be.

Journalism should not be defined merely by the act of producing and distributing content; nor its mission should be limited to informing society about the news of the day. Journalism is much more than that: from outputs that don't look like content at all, to a mission that goes way beyond the simple objective of 'informing' the public.

I've talked before about the need to expand the definition of journalism and to update its mission, if we want to renew the social contract with the public and find new avenues to financial sustainability.

If we don't embrace this expanded view of what journalism can be, and abandon old simplistic narratives, we have no chance at getting out of the crisis we've been navigating for years (decades?) already.

Last year, I created News Alchemists with the goal to "articulate a vision for change in the journalism industry, and advocate for it, in order to make journalism more user-centric, and more equitable and sustainable as a result."

That mission is in progress, and I continue to work towards it with this newsletter, and with the consulting work I do for organisations across the globe. And now I'm super excited to also continue this work as a visiting scholar at Northwestern University! 💜

I arrived in Evanston, Illinois, last week, and I will be here until the end of June working with 🧞Jeremy Gilbert (one of the original alchemists!) and the Knight Lab team on a project we've been developing behind the scenes for weeks.

It's called 'Rethink, Recenter, Redefine. Journalism in transition' (or JR3 in short) and it starts from the same question I opened this email with.

We believe that our joint objective of making journalism more people-centric requires us to reimagine what the mission of journalism is, what it means to do journalism, and what we consider journalism to be as a product.

👽 If aliens landed on Earth today and you could explain to them what journalism is – starting not from what it's been and all its flaws, but from what journalism *can* be if we were to make it truly people-centric – what would you tell them?

If you want to be involved in this 'reimagination' effort, let me know what you would tell the aliens.

Oh yeah, I got a little carried away: Hello and welcome back to the News Alchemists newsletter! I hope you will enjoy this week's links 📚