I live for outdoor adventure + I work at the intersection of journalism and civic engagement.
See current workAbout
I work at the intersection of local journalism and civic engagement, with a community-service mission, primarily in an amazing county in Southwest Michigan.
I talk about "the information ecosystem" a lot. Most of my work focuses on how people engage — or don't — with the systems that shape their daily lives, and how news can be a source of power.
This site is a place to document my work in public. Which also means plenty of half-baked ideas.
How I got hereONE BIG IDEA
More news is published now than ever before. Supply-side thinking hasn't stopped the decline of the Fourth Estate.
Can we talk about demand for news?The collapse of local news is also the collapse of civic memory. We lose continuity, institutional history, and shared narrative capacity. People are losing the habits and social capital that make public information usable.
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Ongoing lines of thinking that connect my work.
Journalism as a service
When we work for products, our job is inevitably ruled by them.
The real product is'Citizen' as a verb
I worry we've taken for granted what we should be actively maintaining.
We vote every dayWe're a lot like birds
People murmurate more than we realize, and some of our systems have led us astray.
Institutions are flocksWorks in progress
Recent Dispatches
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