Listening to Innovate: A Conversation with Sarah Alvarez

The Outlier founder, now headed to Temple University, talks about information needs and how to meet them.

Welcome to Second Rough Draft, a newsletter about journalism in our time, how it (often its business) is evolving, and the challenges it faces.

Early this month, Sarah Alvarez, founder of Detroit’s Outlier Media and author of the newsletter Understated, was named the new James B. Steele Chair in Journalism Innovation at Temple University’s Klein College of Media and Communication. Sarah is a friend, and I was a Board member at Outlier until last year. She is also, in my view, one of the most original thinkers in our field, and I wanted to hear what’s on her mind at this turning point in her own career. Our conversation, which occurred earlier this month, has been edited for length and clarity.

RT: Sarah, thanks so much for doing this. You spoke in the announcement of your appointment to your new job about weak assumptions behind much of local news today. What did you mean by that?

SA: News is a business that is built on a lot of habit and a lot of assumption, and there really is not room for that kind of sloppy work anymore. There probably never was, but there certainly isn't now, when people are overwhelmed by the amount of information, when the consequences of having bad information are so high, and when the country is so polarized, in part because of the way information travels.

We need to be more careful than ever about how we think about what kind of information people need, how we respond to those needs, and how we think about innovation too.

Also, what is the point of that innovation, and where we should we be working to develop new theories and new models? There is rigor in some of the existing work on that, but it's largely financially motivated, not service motivated.

The perils of agenda-setting

RT: What are some of those bad habits?

SA: One is what you said in one of your previous columns: “authoritativeness no longer effectively carries authority.” I'm with you on that, and yet we have a terrible habit as journalists and as the press of still trying to do agenda-setting when what we should be doing is responding to people's information needs, or to other needs that they articulate to us, sometimes for understanding, not just for straight information.

A lot of time and energy is spent by news organizations trying to convey that they know better than their audience about what matters, about why it matters, in trying to convince people that something matters, rather than listening to people and hearing what they think matters, and then rigorously reporting the context.

Sarah Alvarez photo: Cyndi Elledge

For example, if we think about climate change, I think a lot of news organizations have spent significant time and money trying to convince people that climate change matters and that it's happening. That is really important, because climate change as an issue is important. But that kind of agenda-setting role falls short when it is a substitute for listening to what people do care about, which is safety.

Reporting about changes to climate and more frequent disasters in the context of safety is more likely to be effective in terms of getting people information that they need to meet their goals.

More isn’t always better

RT: That's a great example of a bad habit. What is an example of a bad assumption?

SA: One bad assumption that has not changed since I got into this industry is still that more information is better all the time. Also that people who have more time and money are more deserving of better, more thoughtful, more resource-intensive reporting. Those are two assumptions that have really continued to exacerbate divisions in the country amid a fractured information landscape.

RT: The announcement of your new role also mentioned what you called weak models for journalism. What did that mean?

SA: This is a place where I'm a little bit less sanctimonious, because I really don't know about alternatives, but one thing I wonder about-- and a place where I really want to spend some time researching and thinking and looking at what's happening around the country and the world-- is what formats do we consistently rely on that tend to overwhelm people, or tend to lead to news avoidance or like confirmation bias?

What formats might help people welcome more complex ideas, or digest a complex idea and then feel confident to act on it, not just react emotionally to it? Have you seen [Isaac Saul’s] newsletter Tangle?

RT: Yes.

SA: It's so interesting, and that's not a huge change in format, right? It's a newsletter, a specifically-formatted blog, but it does such a good job of helping a reader through a complex topic in a way that I really haven't seen a lot of news organizations try to do.

On the hierarchy of information needs

RT: A big part of Outlier, it seems to me, has been providing information people need before they can be receptive to news. Would you agree with that characterization of it?

SA: I would, and I think this is actually another big area for exploration.

Outlier was a one of a couple of news organizations that were really thinking about information needs in some kind of a hierarchy. What do you have to do first? What can you do next? If you are in a crisis, you don't have time to read a long article. You have to get the information that you need to deal with that crisis.

That idea really took off, and I think it's been helpful for a lot of news organizations, but we are also confronting the reality that the news ecosystem has only gotten weaker since we wrote about that eight years ago. While we were concentrating on giving people the information that they needed to handle a crisis, there weren't a lot of other news organizations trying to help people, once they got out of that crisis, to assimilate more information, to meet their longer term goals. I think that means we need to rethink what information providers can do to help folks navigate information in civic spaces,

But I also think we have to be able to help people navigate complex ideas and act on information, even when they have information needs in other areas of their life. That's just the way that inequality is shaking out in this country, where some communities are overly burdened with multiple crises and there are things on the horizon that they also need to be thinking about.

Business concerns

RT: What have you learned since that paper eight years ago that surprised you? What surprised you as you went through your adventure since then at Outlier?

SA: I came into news not knowing much about the business. And by much, I mean anything about the business of news, about the economic pressures on news organizations, and more importantly about the kind of economic models and assumptions that drive news organizations. I was really surprised that the collapse of healthier news ecosystems had been so fast and pronounced. It's not that I thought news was a sure bet as a career move, but I didn't understand how weak it was.

I have been surprised how little support there is for people who want some help. I haven't been surprised by how much power reporting can have, but I'm still thrilled by that-- it still really works a lot of the time, which is incredible; there's still a lot of accountability created through our work and the work of newsrooms everywhere. That's wonderful.

The other thing that I'm surprised at is that, again, because of the information ecosystem that we're in, tactics are not enough. Doing things really well, as I think Outlier has-- having a really solid strategy, and meeting that strategy-- still leaves a lot of people uninformed. That is difficult, because we really have to think about how do we interact with other systems to make sure that people can get the information that they need?

RT: One sort of smaller question: Outlier during your time there has done a number of mergers. What do you feel like you learned more generally from those?

SA: So much. It's mostly a good idea, even the merger that didn't work out for us. We merged with MuckRock for a short period of time right before the pandemic, and it didn't work out in the long term, but it saved our ass in the short term. One thing I have learned is that resource sharing is not as hard as people think it is. It makes a lot of sense, especially when resources are scarce, as they are in nonprofit news.

Mergers can also make sense because keeping talented people in work that they're good at, and they like doing, is easier with mergers when we're talking about smaller organizations, and especially local organizations where you have a smaller talent pool.

I think people should continue to do them, being clear-eyed about what the purpose is.

On Outlier, and hard work

RT: Anything else you wish I had asked you?

SA: I do think it's important to say I feel pretty good about the instincts that Outlier was built on. The idea that finding out what people's information needs are is so important and should be the first thing that you do. At the same time, those early information needs assessments were not great, and I'm really happy that we now have the University of Michigan doing them for us with a really big sample, where we can rely on that information.

I don't think that the assumptions that Outlier was built on were weak. I think they were good assumptions, and we tested them a lot, but we still had a lot of work to do in order to prove ourselves and to test those assumptions, and then to deliver the kind quality product that we needed to do. And that took a long time, and does take a long time.

So it's difficult to balance the urgency that I think news organizations need to operate with, and the care that we also need to operate with, if we want to build something better than what came before.

That's the tension that I've always tried to hold, and what I want to keep doing, and that's really hard. So as critical as I am of news organizations and the way that we do this work, I do know that these things are really difficult.

RT: Thanks so much, Sarah.