Breaking old habits

I was ready to break up with journalism in 2020 when I decided to go to divinity school for a chaplaincy degree. My physical, mental, and spiritual burnout was real, but so was an emerging sense of hope because of the hundreds of mutual-aid networks and uprisings that cropped up that year. I realized that, instead of leaving the field altogether, I needed to go harder on breaking up with some bad habits the industry (and this includes the emerging nonprofit wing of the field) had normalized.

Given the uncertain, unprecedented political and economic times, I’m praying 2025 will humble more of us to go through these breakups. We deserve better! And more importantly, so do our communities.

I predict the endings around us will continue to bring us to our knees and that perhaps that is the best vantage point to reimagine everything. As Detroit labor activist Grace Lee Boggs said, “We have to think not only about change in our institutions, but changes in ourselves.” If hospital and prison chaplaincy work taught me anything, it’s that, unfortunately, crisis is a precursor to this kind of change. (Though not always — some folks double down on the familiar.) I have faith that walking away from three particularly bad habits will make space for transformative journalism.

Breaking up sustainability with business

When did sustainability — which Merriam-Webster defines as “of, relating to, or being a method of harvesting or using a resource so that the resource is not depleted or permanently damaged” — become synonymous with the capitalistic business of revenue making for our industry? Sustainability should be determined by community ecology models, not revenue models.

By linking these two, consciously or unconsciously, we’re missing an opportunity to build long-haul, people-powered infrastructure and going down the dangerous, slippery slope of efficiency. As the prophecy goes, “more money, more problems,” and in this case, it’s not just using environmentally catastrophic tools that cut costs or help us raise more money. Treating journalism like a business instead of a public good is a fast track to erasing “public” and replacing it with “commodified.”

A sustainable approach opens up opportunities to collaborate, be it with other outlets sharing back office staff, partnering with libraries to host events or insert another example of building with your community for the sake of care, not consumption. Given the political environment, next year will only seek to divide us further through fear, dismantling this bad behavior now ensures we meet the moment with interdependence not hyper-individualism.

Breaking up impact metrics with growth for growth’s sake

Numerous studies about news consumption all sing the same song — communities want information they can act on. I feel like we’ve known this is a toxic habit for a long time, but the climate, political reckoning of the next year will drive it home. What’s fun about the harmful behavior above is that it flows into the habit of conflating impact metrics with growth for growth’s sake. Counting clicks, website traffic, or any number without humanizing, geographizing, or whatever else indicates you know who your readers are is meaningless unless your actual target audience is advertisers, investors, or philanthropy. Treating who reads you as a number is a way to avoid the true responsibility of the press — to hold power to account and educate the public so they can act.

We got a glimpse of this in North Carolina in the devastating aftermath of Hurricane Helene. Some outlets were keeping body count tolls, while others were figuring out how neighbors could learn who around them had generators. So if the high school civics teacher or the neighborhood grandma doesn’t know about you — what difference does it truly make?

Breaking up with our god complex

Perhaps the most insidious habit all of the above begets is our god complex. In his latest book, The Message, Ta-Nehisi Coates writes: “It is the journalists themselves who are playing god — it is the journalists who decide which sides are legitimate and which are not, which views shall be considered and which pushed out of the frame. And this power is an extension of the power of other curators of the culture — network execs, producers, publishers — whose core job is deciding which stories get told and which do not.”

The power we wield as authors of the first draft of history means we’ve been complicit in building the political climate. Our power doesn’t have to be a tool of the oppressor but if we keep emphasizing numbers and growth then it will be. Are we able, as Coates does so profoundly, to point the finger at ourselves and to acknowledge when we’ve been wrong?

We know that next year will bring ensuing chaos. I believe these breakups will again be on the table, harder truths to swallow. But I predict that if we let these habits go we will, to paraphrase the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, be choosing community over chaos.