Irrational optimism and the rebuilding of local journalism

I think there’s an opportunity to create something very substantial here in Manchester: a company that revives local journalism across the country and connects people via storytelling , a means of human communication that goes back much longer than the history of newspapers. As the popularity of American magazine-style journalism shows, people pref... See more

In traditional journalism, there are strong incentives to act maliciously. Journalists are incentivized to optimize for views and clicks. The answer is not to reform the industry. We can change media through radical decentralization. Everyone becomes a journalist. Each person writes about their local issues or areas of expertise

Social media, mainstream news, and an explosion of Substack newsletters often painted pictures of cities quelled and hibernating, in some ways diminished, and of urbanites either turned inward toward self-betterment, or outward, toward their local communities or country homes.