Building the Quantum Newsroom

If Semafor's founders can raise $25 million, why can't the Collective Trauma Summit 2022 be the launchpad for the world's first trauma-integrating news media?

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Resonant World #8

On Oct 18., two American entrepreneurs launched a news service called Semafor.

The site bills itself as a “new kind of trusted news source” for an interconnected world.

Given the huge challenges facing the news industry, any start-up looking for serious money needs to offer something fresh. Semafor’s co-founders Ben Smith, a former New York Times media columnist, and Justin Smith, former chief executive officer of Bloomberg Media, have evidently managed to tick that box — having raised $25 million to fund the venture from private investors.

A lot has been written about their plans, but a big part of their pitch rests on a pledge to make news coverage more transparent by breaking articles up into separate sections that clearly distinguish between the basic facts of the story; the reporter’s take; a counter-argument to that view, and other perspectives.

As somebody who’s spent a lot of my professional life working for corporate media, I admire the entrepreneurial spirit needed to build something from the ground up. (I secretly wish I had the gumption to create a new venture myself). The world desperately needs alternative platforms to air paradigm-shifting ideas that the legacy media can’t or won’t grasp.

Unfortunately, Semafor made an early misstep by taking sponsorship money from oil major Chevron for its climate change newsletter — a decision for which it has been deservedly slated. Nevertheless, I see that as a side issue relative to a more fundamental question: What would it mean for a news organisation launching today to integrate our rapidly evolving understanding of collective trauma?

New model

It was no doubt coincidence that Semafor launched less than two weeks after the conclusion of the free-to-watch online Collective Trauma Summit 2022 (the more than 50 speaker interviews are still available to watch as part of a paid package). The interviews with specialists in trauma and the media (several of which I conducted as a co-host) provided a wealth of insight into the kind of questions a trauma-integrating news organisation would need to ask itself from the get-go.

So Semafor’s arrival got me thinking about what I would do if somebody decided to invest $25 million in Resonant World. (I take cheques, cash or contactless).

As a student of Thomas Hübl, the convener of the summit, I would naturally take his body of work as a starting point, mash it up with what I know about newsrooms, and then look for other practitioners to help co-create the kind of media our moment demands.

Towards a trauma-integrating news service

Let’s take Semafor as a reference to try to flesh out what a no-expense-spared version of Resonant World could look like. (And I would love to hear further suggestions, ideas or reflections, in the comments):

Founding principles: Semafor emphasises that the world’s problems are increasingly interconnected. Resonant World would be based on an understanding that any news organisation is inherently engaged in mediating collective trauma — whether it consciously acknowledges this role or not. How the news is reported can recreate trauma — or it can tend towards healing. Coverage would be informed by the knowledge that the media is a participant in collective trauma processes (for good and ill), not merely an observer (see quantum journalism below).

Recruitment: Where Semafor’s initial 60 hires were recruited for their industry bona fides, Resonant World would headhunt editorial staff who are already on a path to understand how individual, ancestral and collective trauma shows up in their own lives and communities — or who are at least eager to learn more.

Radical transparency: Where Semafor aims to gain trust by drawing an explicit line between fact and analysis, Resonant World would take transparency into qualitatively different territory. Journalists would presence factors shaping news coverage that big media organisations pretend don’t exist: The staff’s own biases (in all their many guises); collective psychological projections by the newsroom; knowledge gaps; prejudices, and the systemic constraints imposed by the political economy of the media. Just as individuals do their “shadow work,” so would Resonant World staff be engaged in a continual process of collective shadow work — with discoveries, insights, conflicts and processes shared publicly in some form, where appropriate.

Intentional community: I have no idea if Semafor is planning any corporate retreats or away days, but if it is I’d be surprised if the organisation will be devoting much time to learning the techniques of transparent communication; precise relational attunement, and evoking the mysterious power of collective intelligence that inform Hübl’s Collective Trauma Integration Process for healing in large groups. Naturally, Resonant World would learn from the best traditions of intentional communities to integrate these kinds of relational practices into the daily functioning of the newsroom to establish the kind of coherent fields that support creative breakthroughs, and avoid the fragmentation that unacknowledged collective trauma can cause in any shared endeavour.

Collective healing correspondents: Where Semafor aims to give readers deeper insights into conventional news beats — such as politics, technology or climate — it doesn’t appear to be devoting much firepower to understanding how collective trauma underlies so much of the dysfunction and destruction featured in the news — or the emerging movement seeking to redress it. Resonant World would make these dynamics the starting point for coverage, including by appointing collective healing correspondents around the globe.

Quantum journalism: Semafor’s attempt to restore trust in the media by developing a new article format appears to be rooted firmly in the legacy media’s traditional interpretation of journalistic objectivity. This concept traces its lineage to the Enlightenment — when newly confident scientific disciplines sought to reduce the domain of legitimate knowledge to what could be observed and measured, while banishing subjective experience to the confines of religion. A century ago, quantum physics recognised that this distinction was blurrier than scientists had imagined: Observer and observed form a single system. Quantum journalism would acknowledge that newsrooms must engage in a continual process of self-reflection to question the role their subjectivity plays in shaping events — not merely describing them — even if definitive answers may always prove elusive. This is an uncomfortable prospect for many editors, whose worldview could be compared to that of the classical Newtonian physicists who assumed physical reality behaved independently of the observer. We now know that reality is a lot weirder than that, and it follows that newsrooms must constantly strive to understand the influence they exert in shaping the events they aim to describe. This is particularly consequential with regards to their decisions about whether, and how, they examine the role of collective trauma in driving our global crises.

Wisdom Keepers: Semafor’s masthead contains familiar newsroom roles: Editor-in-chief, executive editor, product lead, and so on. The future Resonant World may well have equivalent positions — but it would also have salaried “wisdom keepers” who would have no clearly defined newsroom task, beyond radiating deep presence — and providing a source of solace, guidance and support for teams and individual staff.

These are just a few ideas to get started — there’s clearly a lot more to say about what a trauma-integrating newsroom would cover, how it would cover it, and what the pitfalls and potentials might be. I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

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Resonant World is NOT brought to you by Chevron.

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