🔶 #33: Can one collaborative document turn into a space to debate the purpose of journalism?
Hello and welcome back to the News Alchemists newsletter!
It's been six months (plus one day) since I sent the first edition.
I just needed to write that down because it feels crazy to see what we've built together over the last 182 days. Whether you've been on this journey from that first day back in February or you're receiving this newsletter for the first time: Thank you.
Today is not only an arbitrary anniversary I decided to celebrate, though. This is a special edition because I get to tell you about an experiment I've been working on that I hope you will want to take part in.
You might remember that, four weeks ago, I shared an article I co-wrote with my friend Jeremy Gilbert about JR3, a project we've been working on to explore how journalism might better serve and be more useful to its audience(s).
It looked like an article, but it really was a conversation starter: through two forms embedded in the article, we collected dozens of answers to two questions:
- What is the purpose of journalism?
- What should journalism enable us to feel, think, or do?
Well, if something is a conversation starter, it means that more conversation should follow, right?
That’s what we're doing today by introducing JR3 Debate, which is... a Google Doc. Quite anticlimactic, I know. But it's a Google Doc with big ambitions:
Can one collaborative document turn into the biggest space on the globe to debate what the purpose of journalism really is?
We want to find out – and we hope you’ll help us discover that the answer is YES!
Open JR3 Debate to explore: