The old news machines are being de-institutionalized: breaking apart, or already broken. What we used to call “the press” and “the media” are at most a side stream. The media over which most news flows today are phones and laptops, not print or broadcasts over the old airwaves.
The new news machines are mostly clusters of people working to re-institutionalize a resource that civilization desperately needs, whether its participants know it or not. How? Take a ride with us.
Here in Bloomington, Indiana, Making News is a local effort in its early stages.* Those efforts are chronicled in a series of essays about how we’re thinking about it and working on it. In that series, you will find a collection of original ideas (most notably from Dave Askins of the B Square Bulletin). These ideas are not, to my knowledge, found anywhere else, including the constant jabber about “saving” journalism. What you’ll find here instead are ideas about advancing journalism in new ways, starting locally, and fanning out globally. The most recent is on top.
- Total News (1 March 2025)
- Lifting the Lid on Government Meetings (23 February 2025)
- Fire and Rain (9 February 2025) #LAfires
- And Now the #HughesFire (22 January 2025) #LAfires
- The Blame Game (19 January 2025) #LAfires
- How Facts Matter (14 January 2025) #LAfires
- What are Stories? (11 January 2025) #LAfires
- The Los Angeles Media Dashboard (10 January 2025) #LAfires
- Los Angeles Fires and Aftermath (9 January 2025) #LAfires
- On Los Angeles Wildfires (8 January 2025) #LAfires
- On the Palisades and Eaton Fires (7 January 2025) #LAfires
- Losing (or Gaining) a Genius (20 December 2024)
- Think Globally, Eat Here (3 October 2024)
- Open Source Journalism (24 September 2024)
- On Journalism and Principles (11 September 2024)
- A Better Way to Do News (16 August 2024)
- The Future, Past, and Present of News (30 June 2024)
- Archives as Commons (21 April 2024)
- The Online Local Chronicle (19 March 2024)
- The New News Business (5 January 2024)
- The News Business (4 January 2024)
- DatePress (9 November 2023)
- Deeper News (20 October 2023)
- Stories vs. Facts (12 October 2023)
- We Need Whole News (15 September 2023)
- We Need Wide News (30 August 2023)
- We Need Deep News (18 August 2023)
Most recent postings pertain to the #LAfires that began on January 7, 2025 and roasted two of Los Angeles’ most distinctive and loved communities: Altadena and Pacific Palisades. Where I am going with this is toward applying ideas born in Bloomington (posts 1 through 16) to a much larger news commons: one that may be able to do far more with those ideas.
For background, here are some relevant works I’ve published here and elsewhere, starting in 2007:
- Giant Zero Journalism (6 March 2007)
- A new business model for news (23 October 2008)
- EmanciPay: a new business model for newspapers (5 February 2009 in ProjectVRM)
- EmanciPay for Newspapers. And everything else that’s free (11 February 2009 in ProjectVRM)
- EmanciPay: A Content Monetization Plan for Newspapers (28 May 2009)
- Prototyping a new business model for everything (13 October 2011)
- The Story Isn’t the Whole Story TEDx Video (September 2018) Here is the script.
- An Immodest Proposal for the Music Industry (8 November 2018 in Linux Journal)
- A citizen-sovereign way to pay for news—or for any creative work (11 February 2019, in ProjectVRM)
- Where Journalism Fails (23 July 2019)
- What becomes of journalism when everybody can write or cast? (24 June 2021)
- An Approach to Paying for Everything That’s Free (28 January 2024)
Lots of other stuff I’ve written about journalism and news can be found at the links that appear earlier in this sentence.
*The original title for this project was News Commons. That’s because we thought a way could be found for the disparate and often competitive participants in local journalism to cohere into something of a whole that was more than a sum of parts—and come to comport with Elinor Ostrom’s rules for governing a commons. That didn’t happen. But hey, what can you do when the institutions we journalists have loved for generations are being demolished? The short answer is make new ones. Welcome aboard.