Journalism Wednesday 2021

Today is Journalism Wednesday - the annual day to pay for what you read / hear / see!

Journalism Wednesday is every year, the first Wednesday after Thanksgiving. This is now the 6th year. Oh, it used to be a real happenin’ time. You know, back when newspapers still existed ‘n’ such.

This year, I want to give my little spiel about what you should do and why you should do it and how to spread the word. Then I’ll add a little bit about how I feel about the current state of journalism - more specifically how consumption is changing. I’d be very interested in your thoughts.

This is what I do on Journalism Wednesday:

First, I renew existing subscriptions, whichever ones don’t renew automatically. Honestly there’s not much of this, because everything is automatic.

Second, I donate to nonprofit news sources. I have an expansive view of who all is providing journalism. I include things like podcasts and blog-format websites and even things like radio stations. I’m always open to ideas for places for dollars to go - and places to trumpet. A lot of what I give I use a site called NewsMatch which has access to matching funds, and I strongly recommend you do the same.

Third, if circumstances allow, I try to get out to something like a news stand, and I buy magazines or whatever else is out there. I look for unusual things, including gifts. If it’s a news stand, I’ll also look for other kinds of gifts to get there. When I started JW up, I was a regular patron at the venerable City News in the Six Corners neighborhood of Chicago. It’s a bit of a trek today though. What I found just last week though is Hinsdale News Agency - they don’t have a cafe like City News, but they do double as a candy store, which means…

And anything I do buy or donate (surprise gifts excepted!), I take it to Twitter. Twitter is a dumpster fire, but Journalism Wednesday declarations seem to work well on Twitter since you can direct them at the institutions you are supporting! So over the course of the day you’ll see me on Twitter - @PhilHuckelberry to you - recommending some excellent outlets and soliciting suggestions. I hope you’ll do some similar sharing, and use #JournalismWednesday when you do so.

It’s not that it’s about spending a lot of money. It’s that it’s about taking a lot of things that might happen smattered over the year and spotlighting them on a particular day. It’s also that with something like a digital subscription, you’ve got a solution for what to give that hard-to-shop-for person. Support people doing good work in a thoughtful way. That’s the idea of Journalism Wednesday.

When I started Journalism Wednesday up, I was especially interested in spotlighting excellent works of journalism. Not long after the first JW, I started sharing articles regularly via a Facebook group. I was reading a lot of things from a lot of places, and trying to generate interest on the part of the others in doing the same.

In the last five years, my reading habits have changed quite a bit. The biggest factor is probably time, but set that aside. A lot of other things have changed as well.

First, the state of the journalism field grows more perilous monthly. Institutions fold, downsize, go from weekly to biweekly, etc. Things were bad enough, and then the pandemic hit, doing particular damage to things like print weeklies which rely heavily on certain kinds of ads.

Related to this, online ad revenue is even more consolidated today by the likes of Facebook and Google. Worse, not only is that revenue consolidated, Facebook in particular has been so disruptive and destructive to actual journalism that it’s not even a feasible place to do things like share articles. Some of you may have noticed that when I share a META-SPIEL post via Facebook, I do it as a post, and then put the link in a comment. I do this because I’ve found it’s less likely to get buried that way. I only keep it up because I know I do get clicks through that way, but honestly, I’d much rather you all just subscribed. I’d just as soon dump Facebook altogether.

Facebook used to be a prime source of articles. Not today. I also used to rely on some other sources I don’t anymore.

For base daily news, I get morning emails from The New York Times and Guardian, plus The Athletic for sports content; and more locally, I read the POLITICO Illinois Playbook and Chicago Public Square. The local Riverside-Brookfield Landmark arrives by mail weekly, and the Chicago Reader comes every other week.

But it’s really about the email. Weekly updates from sites like Rest of World or ProPublica, a daily newsletter called Midwest Energy News from a site called Energy News Network, and an increasing number of niche newsletters, some daily, a lot of them other Substack writers.

The emergence of Substack journalism, I think, is the second biggest shift for me after the demise of Facebook as a site I actually use. These are of course interrelated - journalistic outlets have suffered immensely, leading some people to bail, and the early adopters like Walt Hickey of Numlock News have proven the viability of the independent newsletter model.

I find that I am overwhelmed with everything I have subscribed to. There’s no shortage of things I’m interested in. But then I feel like I’m reading and listening to things in a state of isolation. If it’s not some kind of breaking news, I tend to feel like well over half of what I find, it’s only me. Now this can’t be - people like Walt and Judd Legum have too many subscribers for it to be just me - but it feels this way. This no doubt is a factor of not seeing people! But I think too that this is related to the demise of Facebook as a source of information sharing. (Of course, it’s still a source of robust disinformation sharing… and all the revenue that comes with that.)

Let’s say that Facebook is expansive in its inclusivity - that it’s a “space” where my grade school classmates and distant second cousins both reside, and can interact with one another, the only commonality being that they all know me. Let’s also say that your email inbox is the ultimate in exclusivity - even my house is more expansive because two other people live in it!

I have to think there are multiple models for online spaces which are functionally moderately inclusive. But we’ve not really figured out how to organize these meaningfully. Or, maybe, some of us have. Ed Zitron, he of Where’s Your Ed At, writes of “ruthless curation” of his Twitter feed. Is that the thing we should all be aiming for?

I’d be particularly interested in something sort of halfway between my inbox and, say, Twitter-without-comments. I’d like to subscribe to more newsletters, representative of a more diverse set of topics, but not purely as an inbox model. I’d like to see algorithms that aren’t awful boost things I’d be especially interested in. And I’d like to know I’m readings things in concert with other people I know. Maybe this is less like a Twitter-without-comments and more like an Instagram-of-journalism?

Whatever it might be, I’d like to encounter a broader set of topics, but within a realm where I can do light engagement with others, preferably including people I already know who are interested in many (but certainly not all) of the same things. And I feel like something like this could be a direction not just for social media but for journalism generally - an evolution of the Substack model, as opposed to what we’ve been seeing which is other sites attempting to just outright copy it and embed it in existing problematic social media.

What do you all think? How would you like to engage with your content? What mingling of content and social media would feel about right to you? Something more like how Facebook sort of used to be, something a lot more like your inbox but with a tweak, or something totally different - like sitting around the coffee shop / news stand every morning?