Some of the early rumblings of change in the global journalism field came in February, when the International Journalism Festival — a favorite on the circuit as much for its quality panels as for its prime location in Perugia, Italy — announced its cancellation. On March 10, NICAR, the preeminent annual gathering of data and computational journalists, announced that an attendee had tested positive. The next day, March 11, the WHO declared that Covid-19 was a pandemic, and our sense of normalcy turned upside down, forever marking a Before Times and a Groundhog Day present.
We often need metaphors to help us grasp such an unusual world event. So far, it’s become common to call 2020 a black swan event, a term popular in economic circles thanks to the work of options trader Nassim Nicholas Taleb. It’s helpful to read how he defines a black swan:
First, it is an outlier, as it lies outside the realm of regular expectations, because nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility. Second, it carries an extreme impact. Third, in spite of its outlier status, human nature makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact, making it explainable and predictable.
But calling 2020 a black swan takes away from the fact that Covid-19 and the misinformation surrounding it were utterly predictable. Indeed, nearly two years ago, Atlantic writer Ed Yong pointed out that the U.S. — and, as we’ve learned, the world — was not ready for a pandemic. As early as 2017, the Pentagon was aware of the risks. The film Contagion — shot in 2011 and depicting a global pandemic and its effects on common people and institutions alike — feels eerily prescient, but is only predictive because it’s based on solid science about pandemic risk.
This time last year in Nieman Lab, just days before Dr. Li Wenliang began suspecting a novel coronavirus had begun circulating, I warned that the internet is a powerful vector of disease, referencing my co-writing on misinfodemics a year prior with public health scientist Nat Gyenes.
Look around and we see that the devastation we’ve seen this year wasn’t a black swan at all. This year is what policy analyst Michele Wucker called a gray rhino event: “obvious, visible, coming right at you, with large potential impact and highly probable consequences.”
I could stop there, but the moral outrage of 2020 deserves more, even though no amount of words can capture the suffering of this year. I’ve consoled too many friends and family over video chat, unable to hug them or even sit with them in person, to let this be a simple prediction with straightforward ideas and answers.
In the time it will take you to read this article — about 6 minutes, by my count — at least 24 people will have died from COVID-19. They will join some 1.5 million people around the world who have died agonizing deaths, unable to see their loved ones or even say final words.
The skies are red, the Amazon is on fire, the oceans are flooding, 270 million people face famine and 26 million Americans alone are going hungry. We’re still unable to casually spend time with other people, and we walk out the door with masks. An American coup attempt is getting less attention than it deserves, as are the ongoing genocide of the Armenian people, the further isolation of the Rohingya, the erasure of Uighurs, and the forced sterilizations of people in the United States.
All this in the context of a historic market rally, with the Dow Jones soaring past 30,000 as our attention economy makes kings of the already wealthy technological class, while those at the bottom of society are cast down to even lower rungs.
These inequities and atrocities aren’t separate from Covid-19; they’re deeply intertwined with the disease. Consider the words of health journalist Sonia Shah in a cover story for The Nation:
It’s time for a new story, one that more accurately captures the reality of how contagions unfold and why. In this story, pandemics would be cast as both a biological reality and a social phenomenon shaped by human agency. And the coronavirus, if cast as any kind of monster at all, would be a Frankenstein’s monster: a creature of our own making.
We, after all, created the world in which SARS-Cov-2 evolved, one in which our industry has swallowed up so much of the planet that microbes from wild animals easily slip into livestock and humans. We created the society of overcrowded prisons and nursing homes staffed by underpaid employees who must work in multiple facilities to make ends meet; in which employers force their workers to labor on meatpacking lines even if they’re sick; in which asylum seekers are crammed into detention centers; and in which people living in hard-hit cities like Detroit lack access to clean water with which to wash their hands.
2020 is not our swan, not our rhino. It’s our canary.
The phrase “canary in a coal mine” comes from the fact that canaries — which are more susceptible to methane than human beings — were brought to mines as an early warning system. If the canary died, it meant methane was leaking, and that the miners needed to evacuate immediately. The canary was an indicator that something was structurally wrong, a sign of greater danger.
Canaries come in many colors, but I like yellow and orange ones the most. A yellow canary event is like a flashing warning sign for more danger ahead. It is a signal that is itself disturbing, but to an expert is doubly so because of the conditions it reveals. It hurts vulnerable populations and systems first, in a highly visible way. And all the while, it exposes a structural weakness that will cause tremendous harm to everyone if allowed to continue.
COVID-19 is the yellow canary for the societal methane we’ve allowed to fester around us. It is a biological entity with sociological roots and geopolitical effects. And as it harms Black, Indigenous, and people of color and global south communities more than others, as it strikes the elderly and the infirm and the underpaid and refugees and migrants. And as the response becomes politicized, we are reaping the visible consequences of decades of neglect.
Even then, there’s hope, because we can no longer ignore reality. Pandemics are times of societal change and upheaval, a time of forced reflection for those fortunate enough to survive. Take, for example, the Black Lives Matter movement. It has been going strong since at least 2013, when the hashtag was coined by Patrisse Cullors in response to a social media post made by Alicia Garza, who lamented the trial outcome in the Trayvon Martin case.
So why the unprecedented global attention in 2020, seven years later? There was the egregious violence of George Floyd’s death, yes, but it’s not a coincidence that the outrage reached a new level, this year of all years, shortly after shelter-in-place orders loosened around the country.
As Opal Tometti, one of the movement’s co-founders, noted in The New Yorker, the entire country had been sitting in our homes, contemplating death and inequality:
And so my belief and my view of these protests is that they are different because they are marked by a period that has been deeply personal to millions of Americans and residents of the United States, and that has them more tender or sensitive to what is going on.
People who would normally have been at work now have time to go to a protest or a rally, and have time to think about why they have been struggling so much, and they are thinking, This actually isn’t right and I want to make time, and I have the ability to make time now and make my concerns heard. So I think it is markedly differently in terms of the volume of demands we are hearing.
Without our usual distractions and jet-set life, the international journalism community has a unique and rare opportunity to re-evaluate what allowed suffering at this scale to happen in the first place — and why our attention economy is ill-equipped to cast a spotlight on systemic problems until they are undeniably present.
We have a rare opportunity to start making structural changes in our newsrooms, our business models and funding incentives, our ways of operating.
We can start by abandoning the elitism that guides so much of journalism today and put money behind the calls for racial justice, making room to center the most marginalized by hiring journalists of color, journalists from the global south, journalists who are queer, trans, and disabled, and giving them leadership roles.
We can diversify funding streams so we are less dependent on attention economics and advertising as the guiding force behind so much of our storytelling platforms and technologies.
We can trust our audiences to understand complexity, rather than shy away from it, and tell the deeper stories of the interconnected systems that shape our daily lives.
We can reimagine an internet where we scale up human rights and civics, not just data, profit, and infrastructure.
When miners see a dead canary, they know it’s time to evacuate. But if 2020 has taught us anything, it’s that there’s nowhere else to run. There is nowhere on earth unaffected by Covid-19, racial and gender injustice, economic inequality, and climate change. Those of us still alive and healthy must honor those who have passed by facing this reality, articulating the underlying causes, and doing our best to change them. These times demand that we engage with the heartbreak of our current world bravely and compassionately. These times demand that we say that even while the end of the pandemic is in sight, going back to normal is not, because “normal” is what got us here.
It’s so hard to make predictions these days, but one thing I can confidently predict is this: If by this time in 2021, we’re celebrating a return to normal, we will have failed at our jobs.
An Xiao Mina is chief operating officer of Meedan and author of Memes to Movements: How the World’s Most Viral Media Is Changing Social Protest and Power. This essay contains excerpts from a blog post she wrote in July.
Some of the early rumblings of change in the global journalism field came in February, when the International Journalism Festival — a favorite on the circuit as much for its quality panels as for its prime location in Perugia, Italy — announced its cancellation. On March 10, NICAR, the preeminent annual gathering of data and computational journalists, announced that an attendee had tested positive. The next day, March 11, the WHO declared that Covid-19 was a pandemic, and our sense of normalcy turned upside down, forever marking a Before Times and a Groundhog Day present.
We often need metaphors to help us grasp such an unusual world event. So far, it’s become common to call 2020 a black swan event, a term popular in economic circles thanks to the work of options trader Nassim Nicholas Taleb. It’s helpful to read how he defines a black swan:
First, it is an outlier, as it lies outside the realm of regular expectations, because nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility. Second, it carries an extreme impact. Third, in spite of its outlier status, human nature makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact, making it explainable and predictable.
But calling 2020 a black swan takes away from the fact that Covid-19 and the misinformation surrounding it were utterly predictable. Indeed, nearly two years ago, Atlantic writer Ed Yong pointed out that the U.S. — and, as we’ve learned, the world — was not ready for a pandemic. As early as 2017, the Pentagon was aware of the risks. The film Contagion — shot in 2011 and depicting a global pandemic and its effects on common people and institutions alike — feels eerily prescient, but is only predictive because it’s based on solid science about pandemic risk.
This time last year in Nieman Lab, just days before Dr. Li Wenliang began suspecting a novel coronavirus had begun circulating, I warned that the internet is a powerful vector of disease, referencing my co-writing on misinfodemics a year prior with public health scientist Nat Gyenes.
Look around and we see that the devastation we’ve seen this year wasn’t a black swan at all. This year is what policy analyst Michele Wucker called a gray rhino event: “obvious, visible, coming right at you, with large potential impact and highly probable consequences.”
I could stop there, but the moral outrage of 2020 deserves more, even though no amount of words can capture the suffering of this year. I’ve consoled too many friends and family over video chat, unable to hug them or even sit with them in person, to let this be a simple prediction with straightforward ideas and answers.
In the time it will take you to read this article — about 6 minutes, by my count — at least 24 people will have died from COVID-19. They will join some 1.5 million people around the world who have died agonizing deaths, unable to see their loved ones or even say final words.
The skies are red, the Amazon is on fire, the oceans are flooding, 270 million people face famine and 26 million Americans alone are going hungry. We’re still unable to casually spend time with other people, and we walk out the door with masks. An American coup attempt is getting less attention than it deserves, as are the ongoing genocide of the Armenian people, the further isolation of the Rohingya, the erasure of Uighurs, and the forced sterilizations of people in the United States.
All this in the context of a historic market rally, with the Dow Jones soaring past 30,000 as our attention economy makes kings of the already wealthy technological class, while those at the bottom of society are cast down to even lower rungs.
These inequities and atrocities aren’t separate from Covid-19; they’re deeply intertwined with the disease. Consider the words of health journalist Sonia Shah in a cover story for The Nation:
It’s time for a new story, one that more accurately captures the reality of how contagions unfold and why. In this story, pandemics would be cast as both a biological reality and a social phenomenon shaped by human agency. And the coronavirus, if cast as any kind of monster at all, would be a Frankenstein’s monster: a creature of our own making.
We, after all, created the world in which SARS-Cov-2 evolved, one in which our industry has swallowed up so much of the planet that microbes from wild animals easily slip into livestock and humans. We created the society of overcrowded prisons and nursing homes staffed by underpaid employees who must work in multiple facilities to make ends meet; in which employers force their workers to labor on meatpacking lines even if they’re sick; in which asylum seekers are crammed into detention centers; and in which people living in hard-hit cities like Detroit lack access to clean water with which to wash their hands.
2020 is not our swan, not our rhino. It’s our canary.
The phrase “canary in a coal mine” comes from the fact that canaries — which are more susceptible to methane than human beings — were brought to mines as an early warning system. If the canary died, it meant methane was leaking, and that the miners needed to evacuate immediately. The canary was an indicator that something was structurally wrong, a sign of greater danger.
Canaries come in many colors, but I like yellow and orange ones the most. A yellow canary event is like a flashing warning sign for more danger ahead. It is a signal that is itself disturbing, but to an expert is doubly so because of the conditions it reveals. It hurts vulnerable populations and systems first, in a highly visible way. And all the while, it exposes a structural weakness that will cause tremendous harm to everyone if allowed to continue.
COVID-19 is the yellow canary for the societal methane we’ve allowed to fester around us. It is a biological entity with sociological roots and geopolitical effects. And as it harms Black, Indigenous, and people of color and global south communities more than others, as it strikes the elderly and the infirm and the underpaid and refugees and migrants. And as the response becomes politicized, we are reaping the visible consequences of decades of neglect.
Even then, there’s hope, because we can no longer ignore reality. Pandemics are times of societal change and upheaval, a time of forced reflection for those fortunate enough to survive. Take, for example, the Black Lives Matter movement. It has been going strong since at least 2013, when the hashtag was coined by Patrisse Cullors in response to a social media post made by Alicia Garza, who lamented the trial outcome in the Trayvon Martin case.
So why the unprecedented global attention in 2020, seven years later? There was the egregious violence of George Floyd’s death, yes, but it’s not a coincidence that the outrage reached a new level, this year of all years, shortly after shelter-in-place orders loosened around the country.
As Opal Tometti, one of the movement’s co-founders, noted in The New Yorker, the entire country had been sitting in our homes, contemplating death and inequality:
And so my belief and my view of these protests is that they are different because they are marked by a period that has been deeply personal to millions of Americans and residents of the United States, and that has them more tender or sensitive to what is going on.
People who would normally have been at work now have time to go to a protest or a rally, and have time to think about why they have been struggling so much, and they are thinking, This actually isn’t right and I want to make time, and I have the ability to make time now and make my concerns heard. So I think it is markedly differently in terms of the volume of demands we are hearing.
Without our usual distractions and jet-set life, the international journalism community has a unique and rare opportunity to re-evaluate what allowed suffering at this scale to happen in the first place — and why our attention economy is ill-equipped to cast a spotlight on systemic problems until they are undeniably present.
We have a rare opportunity to start making structural changes in our newsrooms, our business models and funding incentives, our ways of operating.
We can start by abandoning the elitism that guides so much of journalism today and put money behind the calls for racial justice, making room to center the most marginalized by hiring journalists of color, journalists from the global south, journalists who are queer, trans, and disabled, and giving them leadership roles.
We can diversify funding streams so we are less dependent on attention economics and advertising as the guiding force behind so much of our storytelling platforms and technologies.
We can trust our audiences to understand complexity, rather than shy away from it, and tell the deeper stories of the interconnected systems that shape our daily lives.
We can reimagine an internet where we scale up human rights and civics, not just data, profit, and infrastructure.
When miners see a dead canary, they know it’s time to evacuate. But if 2020 has taught us anything, it’s that there’s nowhere else to run. There is nowhere on earth unaffected by Covid-19, racial and gender injustice, economic inequality, and climate change. Those of us still alive and healthy must honor those who have passed by facing this reality, articulating the underlying causes, and doing our best to change them. These times demand that we engage with the heartbreak of our current world bravely and compassionately. These times demand that we say that even while the end of the pandemic is in sight, going back to normal is not, because “normal” is what got us here.
It’s so hard to make predictions these days, but one thing I can confidently predict is this: If by this time in 2021, we’re celebrating a return to normal, we will have failed at our jobs.
An Xiao Mina is chief operating officer of Meedan and author of Memes to Movements: How the World’s Most Viral Media Is Changing Social Protest and Power. This essay contains excerpts from a blog post she wrote in July.
Jer Thorp Fewer pixels, more cardboard
Kerri Hoffman Protecting podcasting’s open ecosystem
Jody Brannon People won’t renew
Kawandeep Virdee Goodbye, doomscroll
Rachel Schallom The rise of nonprofit journalism continues
David Skok A pandemic-prompted wave of consolidation
Kevin D. Grant Parachute journalism goes away for good
Natalie Meade Journalism enters rehab
Jennifer Brandel A sneak peak at power mapping, 2073’s top innovation
Errin Haines Let’s normalize women’s leadership
Marie Shanahan Journalism schools stop perpetuating the status quo
Amara Aguilar Journalism schools emphasize listening
Tamar Charney Public radio has a midlife crisis
Eric Nuzum Podcasting dodged a bullet in 2020, but 2021 will be harder
Heidi Tworek A year of news mocktails
Chicas Poderosas More voices mean better information
Danielle C. Belton A decimated media rededicates itself to truth
A.J. Bauer The year of MAGAcal thinking
Tim Carmody Spotify will make big waves in video
Meredith D. Clark The year journalism starts paying reparations
Mandy Jenkins You build trust by helping your readers
Don Day Business first, journalism second
Christoph Mergerson Black Americans will demand more from journalism
Joni Deutsch Local arts and music make journalism more joyous
Laura E. Davis The focus turns to newsroom leaders for lasting change
John Saroff Covid sparks the growth of independent local news sites
Bill Adair The future of fact-checking is all about structured data
Megan McCarthy Readers embrace a low-information diet
Ben Werdmuller The web blooms again
Mark Stenberg The rise of the journalist-influencer
Rachel Glickhouse Journalists will be kinder to each other — and to themselves
Gordon Crovitz Common law will finally apply to the Internet
Julia Angwin Show your (computational) work
Catalina Albeanu Publish less, listen more
Pia Frey Building growth through tastemakers and their communities
Moreno Cruz Osório In Brazil, a push for pluralism
Jim Friedlich A newspaper renaissance reached by stopping the presses
Julia B. Chan and Kim Bui Millennials are ready to run things
Celeste Headlee The rise of radical newsroom transparency
Anthony Nadler Journalism struggles to find a new model of legitimacy
Ariel Zirulnick Local newsrooms question their paywalls
Patrick Butler Covid-19 reporting has prepared us for cross-border collaboration
Matt DeRienzo Citizen truth brigades steer us back toward reality
Brian Moritz The year sports journalism changes for good
Zizi Papacharissi The year we rebuild the infrastructure of truth
Gonzalo del Peon Collaborations expand from newsrooms to the business side
John Ketchum More journalists of color become newsroom founders
Alicia Bell and Simon Galperin Media reparations now
Annie Rudd Newsrooms grow less comfortable with the “view from above”
Marissa Evans Putting community trauma into context
Tonya Mosley True equity means ownership
Jennifer Choi What have we done for you lately?
Doris Truong Indigenous issues get long-overdue mainstream coverage
Mike Ananny Toward better tech journalism
Francesca Tripodi Don’t expect breaking up Google and Facebook to solve our information woes
Nikki Usher Don’t expect an antitrust dividend for the media
Nicholas Jackson Blogging is back, but better
Benjamin Toff Beltway reporting gets normal again, for better and for worse
Shaydanay Urbani and Nancy Watzman Local collaboration is key to slowing misinformation
Francesco Zaffarano The year we ask the audience what it needs
Nisha Chittal The year we stop pivoting
Sarah Marshall The year audiences need extra cheer
Rishad Patel From direct-to-consumer to direct-to-believers
Nabiha Syed Newsrooms quit their toxic relationships
Stefanie Murray and Anthony Advincula Expect to see more translations and non-English content
Alyssa Zeisler Holistic medicine for journalism
Beena Raghavendran Journalism gets fused with art
Rodney Gibbs Zooming beyond talking heads
Hossein Derakhshan Mass personalization of truth
Jeremy Gilbert Human-centered journalism
M. Scott Havens Traditional pay TV will embrace the disruption
Rick Berke Virtual events are here to stay
Brandy Zadrozny Misinformation fatigue sets in
David Chavern Local video finally gets momentum
Talmon Joseph Smith The media rejects deficit hawkery
Sumi Aggarwal News literacy programs aren’t child’s play
Gabe Schneider Another year of empty promises on diversity
Janet Haven and Sam Hinds Is this an AI newsroom?
Cindy Royal J-school grads maintain their optimism and adaptability
Jesse Holcomb Genre erosion in nonprofit journalism
Mariano Blejman It’s time to challenge autocompleted journalism
Taylor Lorenz Journalists will learn influencing isn’t easy
Joshua P. Darr Legislatures will tackle the local news crisis
Michael W. Wagner Fractured democracy, fractured journalism
Nico Gendron Ask your readers to help build your products
Whitney Phillips Facts are an insufficient response to falsehoods
Sue Cross A global consensus around the kind of news we need to save
Masuma Ahuja We’ll remember how interconnected our world is
Tanya Cordrey Declining trust forces publishers to claim (or disclaim) values
John Garrett A surprisingly good year
AX Mina 2020 isn’t a black swan — it’s a yellow canary
Victor Pickard The commercial era for local journalism is over
Pablo Boczkowski Audiences have revolted. Will newsrooms adapt?
John Davidow Reflect and repent
Burt Herman Journalists build post-Facebook digital communities
Chase Davis The year we look beyond The Story
Mark S. Luckie Newsrooms and streaming services get cozy
Jessica Clark News becomes plural
Ray Soto The news gets spatial
Delia Cai Subscriptions start working for the middle
Zainab Khan From understanding to feeling
Jonas Kaiser Toward a wehrhafte journalism
Colleen Shalby The definition of good journalism shifts
Charo Henríquez A new path to leadership
Logan Jaffe History as a reporting tool
J. Siguru Wahutu Journalists still wrongly think the U.S. is different
Ashton Lattimore Remote work helps level the playing field in an insular industry
Nonny de la Pena News reaches the third dimension
Raney Aronson-Rath To get past information divides, we need to understand them first
Ståle Grut Network analysis enters the journalism toolbox
Juleyka Lantigua The download, podcasting’s metric king, gets dethroned
Imaeyen Ibanga Journalism gets unmasked
Anna Nirmala Local news orgs grasp the urgency of community roots
Rasmus Kleis Nielsen Stop pretending publishers are a united front
Parker Molloy The press will risk elevating a Shadow President Trump
María Sánchez Díez Traffic will plummet — and it’ll be ok
Tauhid Chappell and Mike Rispoli Defund the crime beat
Bo Hee Kim Newsrooms create an intentional and collaborative culture
Sara M. Watson Return of the RSS reader
Linda Solomon Wood Canada steps up for journalism
Ariane Bernard Going solo is still only a path for the few
Richard Tofel Less on politics, more on how government works (or doesn’t)
Matt Skibinski Misinformation won’t stop unless we stop it
Marcus Mabry News orgs adapt to a post-Trump world (with Trump still in it)
Jean Friedman-Rudovsky and Cassie Haynes A shift from conversation to action
Andrew Donohue The rise of the democracy beat
Edward Roussel Tech companies get aggressive in local
Sonali Prasad Making disaster journalism that cuts through the noise
Cherian George Enter the lamb warriors
Cory Bergman The year after a thousand earthquakes
Joanne McNeil Newsrooms push back against Ivy League cronyism
Sarah Stonbely Videoconferencing brings more geographic diversity
Ernie Smith Entrepreneurship on rails
C.W. Anderson Journalism changed under Trump — will it keep changing under Biden?
Alfred Hermida and Oscar Westlund The virus ups data journalism’s game
Hadjar Benmiloud Get representative, or die trying
Astead W. Herndon The Trump-sized window of the media caring about race closes again
Samantha Ragland The year of journalists taking initiative
Ryan Kellett The bundle gets bundled
Mike Caulfield 2021’s misinformation will look a lot like 2020’s (and 2019’s, and…)
Ben Collins We need to learn how to talk to (and about) accidental conspiracists
Aaron Foley Diversity gains haven’t shown up in local news
Candis Callison Calling it a crisis isn’t enough (if it ever was)
Steve Henn Has independent podcasting peaked?
Andrew Ramsammy Stop being polite and start getting real
Kristen Muller Engaged journalism scales
Sam Ford We’ll find better ways to archive our work
José Zamora Walking the talk on diversity
Renée Kaplan Falling in love with your subscription
Robert Hernandez Data and shame
Garance Franke-Ruta Rebundling content, rebuilding connections