issue 1: ⭐ introducing media x capital ⭐
Hi,
Thank you for subscribing to my brand new newsletter, media x capital. In this inaugural edition, I’m going to share some background on the project and its goals.
Along with each newsletter, I’ll include a call for responses at the bottom. Just know: I really mean it! I welcome questions, half-formed thoughts, comments, memes…I’d love to hear from you. The most rewarding part of writing about these ideas has been the exchanges I’ve had with others.
I’m so excited to have you here, and I’m grateful for the chance to think alongside you.
k.
🌎 what this is all about
media x capital is a newsletter focused on radically reimagining the media system. I’m especially interested in the relationship between journalism, or media, and the economic system they operate within, capitalism. (Note: I include a caveat on the terms I’m using — e.g. “journalism,” “media,” and others — below.)
🌱- where this came from
This newsletter grows out of nearly ten years of personal experience in the journalism industry, about five of which I spent working at media-focused initiatives: projects that sought to define some version of a problem in the media — from ethics to disinformation — and propose a solution. Over the past decade, projects like these have proliferated. As the journalism industry and market tanked, and anxiety around media and information grew, think tanks, conferences, task forces, nonprofits, and coalitions were born, producing a cottage industry that is preoccupied, much of the time, with “fixing” or “revitalizing” the news.
Over time, I came to think that many of these efforts were missing the point: The majority of projects seeking to “fix” journalism and related information crises were set up to treat symptoms, not causes. The breakdown of the journalism industry is structural, and a core cause, it felt increasingly clear to me, is modern capitalism.
Yet, few of these projects seeking to rehabilitate the “news” or restore “information order” acknowledged the role of the profit motive in the decline of the industry. Fewer still acknowledged the role of the profit motive — or capitalism — in incentivizing the exact problems their organization set out to solve. Disinformation is incredibly lucrative.
I found myself wanting to talk with other journalists, organizers, and scholars about the relationship between capitalism and the structural breakdown of the media system, as well as the relationship between capitalism and the production of journalism, information, and knowledge today.
This led me to publishing a series called “Mediaquake” at the alt-global, cooperatively owned magazine Popula, where I’ve been able to interview many activists, academics, and journalists who are already thinking deeply about these issues.
Now, these ideas have started to shape-shift into a proposal for a book. This spring, the generous support of a writing residency at Mesa Refuge, as well as a residency organized by the Future of Local News at the Blue Mountain Center, made it possible for me to begin writing a proposal in earnest, as well as conducting more intensive research into these topics. I’m starting this newsletter in part as a way to share what I’m finding, thinking, and exploring as I develop this longer project. It’s always been the insights, exchanges, and collaborations generated in conversation with others that has made this work feel worthwhile. I’m hoping this newsletter will be a way to grow the number of exchanges I and we can have.
✉️ - what it will be
What can you expect from this newsletter? There are two sorts of answers to this question.
The first is literal: each newsletter will have three or four sections that look something like this →
💡 on my mind: A short reflection on emerging ideas I’ve been wrestling with in writing or research. This might also be a place where I share a brief book review, or a deep-dive into an article of special interest.
🌲 endnotes: A place for any other relevant links or news that doesn’t quite fit above.
🌀 conversations: I’ve interviewed a lot of people on these topics, and will interview more people as I go. In this section, I’ll share a Q+A with someone great, and explain what stands out to me about their work.
💬 chats: A place to ask / answer / discuss questions to and from you.
The second answer is bigger-picture: This newsletter will be a place to explore some of the questions that sparked “Mediaquake,” and that continue to drive this work. Can the media system survive, let alone produce journalism as a public good, under 21st century capitalism? In what ways do the demands of capitalism throttle journalism, and how can those harms be addressed? How might media work outside of the market?
Embedded in those questions are some even bigger ones: What would a radically changed media system look and feel like? How should a movement interested in creating this media system engage with, and frame, capitalism? What is the role of the left, broadly, in advancing this work; and what would a robust, left platform for media reform or change entail? Bigger still: In a far-off, utopian future, what role would a media system play? What would we even call it?
To start, this newsletter will be semi-regular. I am a person trying to survive in late-stage capitalism, after all. :) I’d love to develop this into a regular newsletter over time, though my ability to do so will depend on a variety of factors. No matter the course it takes, I’m committed to keeping this a free resource.
That said, direct financial support is one way of making ongoing, focused work possible. If you would like to support this newsletter — and by proxy, invest in the development of this research, and these conversations and ideas — you can do so by subscribing here. (There are monthly and annual options.)
🚫 a couple caveats
There are a lot of big terms I’m throwing around in this issue: journalism, news, media, media system, capitalism, profit, profit motive. I want to acknowledge that I’m playing it fast and loose with these terms, and share that I will be digging deeper into definitions in future issues.
Part of the purpose of this exploratory newsletter, the “Mediaquake” series, and the emerging book proposal is to ask questions about the best words to describe the media system of today, as well as the media system of the future. From a movement perspective: if the goal is to create an altogether new media system run by and for the people, is it helpful (or unhelpful) to identify “capitalism” as a villain? In what contexts? Is it more effective to name things like the “profit motive,” “commercialization,” or “privatization” as the core problem? What definitions are in play for each of these terms?
Likewise, what are the best words to describe the way, in a just media system, information would be shared? Are terms like “journalist” or “journalism” useful, or is it time to retire them in favor of new terms, like “civic information” and “civic media practitioner”?
These are the sorts of questions I try to bring to every person I interview, and plan to explore in greater depth as the work evolves.
And finally, my last caveat is: this is very much a work-in-progress. I’m starting this newsletter as a place to ask questions, cull ideas, and brainstorm. While I’ve had the enormous fortune of receiving feedback on many of these ideas from many brilliant people (see credits list at the bottom for a snapshot), this is a no-budget, side-project, think-out-loud-in-the-hopes-it-might-be-useful kind of endeavor. I think it will be messy, imperfect, and, hopefully, fun. I say that to both to give a clear head’s up about what this is and is not, and also to reiterate my invitation to you: please feel welcome to participate in this brainstorm-work-in-progress as much as you’d like!
💡 on my mind & 🌲 endnotes (combined)
Because this issue of the newsletter is already full of the words needed to introduce the project, I’m going to combine these sections and keep them shorter. Skipping ahead to share links & readings that have been populating my mind:
Lately, I've been enjoying reading about (and seeing images of) the new Black Future Newsstand in Harlem, which was dreamt up by a visionary collective of organizers and groups, including The Black Thought Project, Media 2070, and The Maven Collaborative. I’ve been revisiting this op-ed that Bernie Sanders published in the Columbia Journalism Review in 2019 on ‘his plan for journalism.’ I finished Peter Barnes’s “Ours: The Case for Universal Property” (Polity Press, 2021), which has me thinking about what is necessary to create truly democratic, self-perpetuating institutions to take care of ourselves — and how to do that outside the limitations of the current United States government. I’ve been reading about the downfalls of Buzzfeed and Vice, and especially enjoyed this rallying cry by Maria Bustillos for The Nation, and this spicy review of Ben Smith’s new book, “Traffic” (Penguin Press, 2023), by Leah Finnegan for The Baffler. A couple months ago, I had a fun time reading this comedic account of the Penguin Random House-Simon Schuster trial from Christian Lorentzen for Harper’s. I’ve returned, many times, to “The Roadmap for Local News,” an impressive report that describes the emergent civic media system as a “new ecosystem [consisting of] pluralistic networks in which information is fluid, services are shared, and media is made in cooperation with the people it seeks to serve.” It was authored by Elizabeth Green, Darryl Holliday, and Mike Rispoli, with contributions from Andrew Golis, Hala Harik Hayes, Carolyn Lukensmeyer, Kary Perez, Sierra Sangetti-Daniels, and Matt Thompson.
I’ve also been sitting with a host of ideas from Ben Tarnoff’s “Internet for the People” (Verso, 2022), including his argument that in capitalism, the imperative to profit will always rule. Even when you think you’re in control, you’re not! The imperative to profit is. He writes:
A privatized internet will always amount to the rule of the many by the few, and the rule of those few by an imperative that is hard-wired into capitalism: the imperative to accumulate. Mark Zuckerberg is probably the most powerful man online, thanks to a shareholder structure that preserves his control of Facebook. … But even Zuckerberg can’t defy the imperative to accumulate; shareholders would punish him in the form of a falling stock price, and, if it got bad enough, competitors would put him out of business.
Within this framework, freedom starts to feel a lot less like freedom. How can you be free in a system where you will always be ruled by an imperative to profit? It doesn’t matter the level at which you’ve won — whether you are Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk or any other mega-winner of the capitalist casino — there is no opting out of that imperative. If at least one definition of freedom is the freedom to ‘rule ourselves,’ then capitalism makes that an impossibility from the jump. After mulling over this and more, I got to interview Tarnoff for Popula this month; I’ll share more on that in a future issue.
🌀 conversations
A couple months ago, I had the great pleasure — and I really mean that — of interviewing Brandi Collins-Dexter for “Mediaquake.” Brandi is a lawyer, organizer, researcher, and author; she is also someone whose work I’ve followed, and been excited by, for a long time.
In 2022, Brandi published “Black Skinhead: Reflections on Blackness and Our Political Future,” which draws upon personal experience and extensive research to stitch together a nuanced analysis of Black political identity in the United States. She’s currently associate director of research for the Tech and Social Change Project at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center. Prior, Brandi worked for Color of Change, a racial justice organization, where she led the media, cultural, and economic justice departments.
Brandi’s work is so rich that it’s hard to know what to highlight. But one part of our conversation, in particular, has stayed with me. Here, we were discussing the complexities of developing an anti-capitalist critique in a world where operating and identifying as a capitalist can offer a certain type of protection for vulnerable people or communities:
Harloe: On the one hand, capitalism is an exploitative system, inherently harmful, and especially so toward the most vulnerable according to race, class, gender, and other categories. That fact is in tension with the fact that accumulating capital can serve as a protective shield for individuals and communities trying to survive within that harmful system, which also happens to be a white supremacist system.
Your book examines that tension. In a previous conversation with the journalist Carla Murphy, she put it this way: “Ever since the founding of the first Black outlet way back in 1827, news outlets have also been economic engines. They’ve created entrepreneurs within communities that were targeted for economic marginalization. This complicates the [anti-capitalist] critique, as well.”
How do you navigate that tension when you think about media justice?
Collins-Dexter: That’s a good question. I do think that people jump to anti-capitalism and anti-capitalist mechanisms for economic autonomy. For me, I don’t know if it’s high Capricorn energy or high NTP if you’re into Meyers Briggs…all of those things…
Harloe: I love it. [laughter]
Collins-Dexter: But it’s like: we can’t get to a conversation around what it means to exist in a society free of capital until capital is redistributed.
The talking heads of anti-capitalist rhetoric, oftentimes—and I say this across race—are people of a certain class. They tend to be college-educated. We have this whole so-called leftist, anti-capitalist movement built on the back of Patreon subscribers and people in their lofts in Brooklyn doing podcasts, with no understanding of what things mean to the people who are actually living under the weight of capitalism.
It’s like that quote: “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism.”
That doesn’t mean we can’t get to the end of capitalism, but either through antitrust, independent media creation or other mechanisms, we need to redistribute capital before we can even imagine what anti-capitalism means for us at scale.
That’s why the media reparations fight is so important. That’s why the general reparations fight is so important. Because we can’t even have the other conversation if we don’t have these things first.
In Brandi’s formulation, reparations and the systemic redistribution of capital are a precondition of getting beyond capitalism. Not part of the process, or an outcome, but a first step. As organizers and practitioners within the media system, we have our own set of decisions to make about the media system we want to advocate for, and the path we want to take to get there. It is within this context specifically that I see Brandi’s points as important: If one goal is building a media system that is democratically owned and operated and that is not driven by profit — or by capitalist logic — then redistribution and reparations are a first step in getting there.
You can read the full interview with Brandi Collins-Dexter here.
💬 chats (questions & ideas)
That’s it for this week. If you have questions or ideas, send your note to kateharloe@gmail.com.
CREDITS -
Direct References: Brandi Collins-Dexter, whose work you can find more about here.
Edits: Maha Ahmed.
Influences (people and collectives who have influenced the thinking I did for this issue): So many! Special thanks for this week’s issue goes to Victor Pickard, Maria Bustillos, Popula, the Future of Local News network (especially Carla Murphy & Sierra Sangetti-Daniels!), Mesa Refuge, Blue Mountain Center, Yemile Bucay, Jihii Jolly, and the Media Power Collaborative.