The loss of stories that matter

On what we lose when the purpose of news and stories is profit

On a recent afternoon, I sat in my doctor’s office. They were running late, so late that I was able to read an entire New Yorker article. I pulled up an article that had been in my queue for a couple of weeks. I'd learned about it from its author over breakfast at a writer's residency. Being from Boulder, I'd piqued the interest of Rachel Monroe, one of the faculty members at the residency. She wanted to talk about Outside Magazine, a publisher she'd recently reported on. She was fascinated with the tech guys who are taking over businesses outside of the tech industry. She summarized her story for me: a rich guy in Boulder sold a software company and bought Outside Magazine to revive it; instead, he tanks it, directing money away from journalists to failed initiatives like the “Outerverse,” an attempt to embrace Web3 and NFTs. The results are a series of layoffs that leave a skeleton crew of professionals to write the stories that Outside built its legacy on.

The tale was familiar, not just from the recent stories of arrogant, rich men dismantling government services under the auspices of efficiency, but also because I'd worked in tech throughout the 2010s. During that decade, I watched founders and investors optimize workers into husks of themselves so that they could turn a profit. I wasn't surprised, but yet, as I sat in the waiting room and read Rachel's account of the dismantling of Outside Magazine, hot tears burned my eyes.

Outside is an institution, a journalistic celebration of humanity in all of its wild, ambitious interactions with the natural world. The stories covered over the history of the publisher were beautiful and perilous, and compelling as hell. Yet, its flame after being acquired by fitness tech millionaire Robin Thurston has been extinguished. It's a shell of its former self.

The stories featured in the magazine before Thurston’s tenure focused on remarkable human achievements. These were not driven by today’s commonly celebrated traits like optimization, efficiency, or technology, but by the strength of the human spirit. The book Into Thin Air started as an article Jon Krakauer wrote for the magazine. An article published by Susan Orlean called "Life's Swell" was the inspiration for the film Blue Crush. These stories weren't written to go viral or become books and films. They became books and films because they were great. The best things in life follow an organic journey—they come by surprise. These were interesting stories that became something bigger because the writers had time and space to explore and write them well.

Humans’ insistence on controlling everything is our demise. We're not only destroying the earth with our efforts to manage it, but we are suffocating the human spirit out of ourselves in the service of capital. Those who figure out how to eradicate the messy human elements from business to increase profit are often celebrated. Thurston was recently given the Business School Distinguished Alumni Award by my alma mater, the University of Colorado. This award was given one month before the release of The New Yorker article that revealed his poor leadership.

Turns out, as long as you make money, it doesn't matter what you ruin. Conquering is the objective. The problem is that when our lives are conquered and shaped in service of profit, the majority of people lose.

That's what I'm experiencing in this moment—loss. Congress recently voted to defund NPR and PBS. These two public broadcasting groups are primary sources of stories, information, and connection for millions of people. They also provide jobs to talented journalists. Private owners are not good purveyors of public information. Similar to what is happening at Outside, the acquisition of news groups by private owners has resulted in a severe shortage of local journalists and thousands of news sites that are essentially parked domains for hosted advertisements. We cannot afford to lose public media. In the ever-increasing privatization of news, access to information and commitment to deep human stories are at risk.

Early in my career, I worked for The Denver Post. We shared a building with The Rocky Mountain News. The two papers had different styles. The Rocky was more magazine and tabloid style journalism, and The Post was more traditional broadsheet format. They served different audiences. The Rocky wrote for a more working-class, conservative audience, and The Post wrote for a more elite, business-oriented audience. What this provided was news for everyone, grounded in a commitment to journalistic ethics, editing, and in service to an informed citizenry.

Today, it’s impossible to find information sources that aren't optimized for clicks, shills for consumption, and/or capital generators for investors. I'm grieving for the time when we could consider human stories for the sake of it, and I'm frightened by the fact that most people, especially in rural areas, get their news from platforms like Facebook.

Information has been corrupted by enshittification—a term coined by Cory Doctorow to characterize the declining service and products made by platform monopolies. Most people can’t get news from actual news sources, so they are forced to find it through places like Facebook and Twitter. When I try to find news on social media platforms, I mostly find hyperbolic opinions, not fact-checked, and poorly written. The information shared with me via social media is curated to encourage the worst version of me because that’s what makes money. Our reliance on these sources, in the wake of gutted journalistic outlets, is making us dumber and angrier so that a few people can get very rich. A government that prioritizes the rich is accelerating the effects, and the attack on media as a public service will only speed up our journey to an uninformed public willingly adjudicating our rights to a violent administration.

In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, which prompted the closure of The Rocky Mountain News, I was job searching and attended an information session at a public relations firm about open roles. There were 20 people there, mostly women in their 20s and 30s, and one man. He was middle-aged and an accomplished reporter who had lost his job when The Rocky was closed. With few options for continuing to report and write stories about Denver and the community, he was turning to PR, where he'd have to leverage his decades of storytelling experience in a sales and marketing job. This is what so many other journalists have had to do. Instead of working in the service of the public, unemployed journalists have had to leverage their skills for corporations to sell stuff.

Is this what we want? Everything in service of consumption? To what end? Facts aren't always sellable, the truth isn't always sexy, but it's important.

We must maintain our right to accurate information, covered ethically, by people who know how to report, and who have editors. All media should not be for corporate interests. We have to keep good journalists employed, like those at the Boulder Weekly who were just abruptly laid off by owner Stewart Sallo. One thing to do is to financially support public media, which you can do here and here. Another option is to support independent nonprofit news groups.

A public denied information is a public denied power—and that's when rights are most easily taken. Protect independent news; our freedom depends on it.