In this letter:
If we live in a world where we can witness trends as they are happening and at scale, why do we need news organizations to analyze them for us? Here are 7 questions from my notebook on the subject of trends and news.
References:
Newsletter: Deez Links + backstory in Walk It Off
Newsletter: Gen Yeet
Newsletter: Culture Study
Newsletter: Fadeke Adegbuyi on Every
Study: Interestingness-If-True and the Sharing of True and False News
Good morning,
First of all, I never imagined the Wall Street Journal would become my source on what’s going on with gen-z but so far this week, I have learned that side parts mean you’re old and TikTok is contributing to an increase of Tourettes-like tics in teen girls.
To be fair, everyone’s covering the tic story and Wired wrote about it all the way back in March. But reading more and more about teens and trends in a paper like the Wall Street Journal? It feels like being on a weird, detached gen-z safari.
Juxtaposed with the trends I see on TikTok and Instagram directly—they come and they go without any language or analysis around them—it feels odd.
And it brings me to a question I’ve been grappling with for a while:
If we live in a world where we can witness trends as they are happening and at scale, why do we need news organizations to analyze them for us?
Frankly, I’m undecided, but this is a small question under the larger umbrella inquiry of: what is news and why do we consume it at all?
So here are a few questions I’ve jotted in my notebook the last couple weeks on the subject of trends and news.
When does a trend become news?
I’m afraid the answer is pretty much: when you get an editor to approve of the story and news peg, and then get enough sources to validate and illustrate the trend. For example, I read a piece in NYT this week titled: It’s Hard to Search for a Therapist of Color. These Websites Want to Change That.
It’s textbook journalism, and covers the story like so:
Opening anecdote about a Black woman struggling to find a Black, female therapist
Explanation of what cultural competence means in therapy and why it’s important, according to experts
Data comparing Black (13%) and Hispanic (18%) populations in the US to how many psychologists are Black (4%) and Hispanic (5%)
A list of new therapy organizations and services targeting these underserved markets with anecdotes and interviews from a few of their founders
Tips on finding a culturally competent therapist, from experts
What if you already basically knew about it because you’ve been watching it unfold on your feeds in real time?
When I read the story, nothing surprised me about it because I’ve already seen pretty much all of the above information on Instagram over the last year from a mix of 1) friends who care about this issue and post resources, 2) therapists and activists I follow and 3) ads served to me. So none of it was actually news.
If a journalist watches trends on social media, is it different than the rest of us observing the same trends?
Consider this preview of a Knight course for journalists on how to find stories on social media that allow you to monitor trends as they are taking place. It’s just a summary of social listening tools that let you look at content at scale, and also how to use social content legally. Do journalists have exclusive access to this type of content at scale? No, not necessarily, we’re all swimming in this together.
Who is “qualified” to cover this stuff?
I don’t know. It seems you can enter from any field. Here are a few writers I pay attention to:
Delia Cai, writer of the popular newsletter Deez Links, was hired as Vanity Fair’s vanities reporter this summer. Here’s her sharing the backstory on a walk with Isaac Fitzgerald of Walk It Off.
Taylor Lorenz covers internet culture for NYT, by way of The Atlantic and is currently on book leave to write about the same. Here’s a longform episode on her journey.
Anne Helen Peterson’s Culture Study. She comes to culture writing by way of Buzzfeed by way of academia.
Fadeke Adegbuyi, who broke into writing because of the internet and covers internet culture for the Every bundle on substack.
Terry Nguyen, who writes Vox’s The Goods, also writes Gen Yeet—after-hours thoughts on cultural trends.
What does gen-z want to do in ‘traditional media’?
This is a whole topic to explore in itself but I do want to flag Alex Sujong Laughlin’s Poynter piece from last week: The next generation of journalists is here. And they think we can do better. What stood out to me was the story of a young journalist who turned down two newsroom jobs because of bad pay and lack of diversity and “now works as a producer at a podcast production company doing journalism-adjacent work,” while also considering marketing instead.Who exactly needs the detached, big picture traditional reporting on trends?
If you segment traditional media by generation, then yes, it does make sense for the WSJ to explain younger generations to its readers from a cultural-interest perspective. And if you segment by wealth or profession, then yes, companies want to know how to sell to growing markets. I suppose the same logic applies to why I can get the takes I want from the above list of writers. I just wish we had a broader definition (and therefore standards) for news that isn’t traditional.Why do traditional news-gathering procedures matter if people find and share what they want anyway?
On finding: Back in August, I remember being so frustrated that I couldn’t find any clear information on how to help refugees arriving from Afghanistan from traditional news organizations for days, while one quick follow of an Afghan psychotherapist in training on Instagram, landed me on so many crowdsourced resources and some pretty thoughtful takes on the whole situation within hours.
On sharing: I was fascinated by this new study in Digital Journalism which found that people share fake news not just by accident but because the level of “interesting-if-true” outweighs concerns about accuracy. In other words, they know something may not be true, but if it’s interesting enough, they’ll share it anyway. Which tells us that there’s a lot to be studied about people's perceptions of relevance, as it drives what they read, believe and share.
No answers from me today, but if you’re interested in any of those questions too, leave a comment or write back :)
Jihii
I'm interested in all these questions, particularly because I'm trying to wrap my head around creating a course that'll help students navigate the information landscape when I struggle with that every day myself. (Whether that course will ever happen is an open question, but anyway.)
The answer to the "why do we need news orgs/analysis" question probably comes down to the old idea that, put simply, we need help interpreting and making sense of the world, especially in an era of information overload. But, to go on a bit of a tangent here, I think you're getting at another core issue when you say "I just wish we had a broader definition (and therefore standards) for news that isn’t traditional." Not sure if I'm reading you right here, but I think you're pointing to the conundrum we find ourselves in when, on the one hand, non-traditional news creators offer new ways to produce and consume news (and an implicit or explicit critique of the limitations of traditional news creation) but, on the other hand, the modes of creating and disseminating are disorientingly new and therefore leave us struggling to define what the criteria are for quality and trustworthiness in these new news sources.
Maybe that's another reason we need news organizations (in the broadest conception of the term): because we need to collectively have a coherent conversation on what constitutes good practice and how to hold each other accountable. But this brings us back to your question #7, really: if the news "organization" is now, in a sense, all of us, then is it even possible to have a coherent conversation or create a set of standards? I'm not sure if I'm making sense here--it's kind of an overwhelming set of topics.