🔶 #63: The Circulator Model

Hello, and welcome back to the News Alchemists newsletter!

And a special first welcome to new subscribers from NHK, Outlier Media, Forbes, Public Media Network, Rappler, the University of Vermont, and all of you brave souls working independently.

Here’s a familiar story we tell ourselves in this industry: newsrooms share fact-based content, "the audience" consumes it, and the world magically gets better because informed citizens make better choices.

It's a comforting theory. It's also a failing one.

Informing the public is not enough if we don't also empower people to do something with that information, together.

Starting from this awareness, newsrooms all over the world are trying to do things differently. Just two examples:

🧩 Mutante invites the public to participate in conversation cycles, where difficult topics such as sexual violence, workplace abuse, and mental health are discussed, understood, and addressed together rather than just reported on;

🧩 The Green Line produces 'action journeys' rather than stories – with each action journey made of four parts: an explainer, a feature, a community event, and solutions/resources.

These approaches often require journalists to embrace different roles than what they might be used to – often acting as 'conveners', as the American Press Institute highlighted in one of the very first links I shared in this newsletter.

The premise is that to achieve real change, we must examine more closely how information flows, rather than assuming that broadcasting it online will inevitably yield positive results. We should also remember that the act of processing the news is much more effective when done collectively rather than individually.

🧞Jennifer Brandel, a pioneer of people-centricity, suggested in a recent article a framework that pulls these ideas together in an elegant way: The Circulator Model.

From “Something Else” to Something Specific: Journalist As Circulator

Dispatches from my JSK Fellowship

Ideas and Insights from the JSK Journalism Fellows at StanfordJennifer Brandel

This is a follow-up on another article by Jennifer that I shared weeks ago: "Is it time for journalists and newsrooms to become something else?"

The circulator is that "something else". Here's the premise of the model: