Just a short note today to announce the launch of a project I’ve been working on with News Futures for the past year!
For a long time, the structures of journalism (both product and industry) have made me feel uneasy. Increasingly, an incredibly important public service—the provision of high quality information to generate belonging, well-being and agency—isn’t effectively coming out of newsrooms.
But it is coming out of communities.
Often, when in conversation with people who are feeling disillusioned by the media, I find it hard to put in words that I’m actually deeply encouraged by the work happening on the ground in journalism and journalism-adjacent fields these days.
That I’m deeply convinced if we just stop worrying about the monolithic structures that are crumbling above us and instead look directly at the care-filled work happening on the ground in so many communities, the future isn’t as bleak as we think.
Thanks to support from News Futures and an amazing team of collaborators, the brilliant Jennifer Brandel and I spent the last year thinking about how to communicate what all the bad-ass participatory, civic information projects coming out of communities, mutual aid groups, courageous newsrooms, independent researchers, libraries and more are actually made of:
As we looked at examples from journalism and beyond, a metaphor began to emerge.
Every culture has bread. Every culture has soup. Every culture has ways of preserving food for lean times. In the same way, it turns out, when communities need to understand and act in the world, they develop their own recipes for gathering stories, sharing knowledge and making decisions together. Necessity creates practices.
So we wondered: What if we could document these civic media recipes? What if we could break down the components—the ingredients, the techniques, the variations, the “nutritional value”—so more people can understand what civic media is and how to make it themselves?
So we wrote a cookbook!
Download for free below, or email me if you want to be kept posted on print editions once they become available. And if you’re feeling some kind of way about the world, journalist or not, consider this book an invitation to get your hands dirty, use these recipes, and report back!
Jihii