“I certainly knew that I couldn’t stay where I was and I’m feeling my way through this new landscape. But there’s something very exciting about creating something new.” — Anya Kamenetz.
Bookings are now open for the Soulstice Summer Activation on June 19-21 at Pitchcott Farm, a keystone of the Resonant Man international men’s initiative I co-founded with Jacob Kishere. To find out more and grab a ticket click here.
Resonant World #182
As many readers will know, Anya Kamenetz writes The Golden Hour — an essential Substack newsletter for anyone committed to staying engaged in this era of news overload but who wants to read stories filtered through the heart, not just the head.
I love how Anya has been providing a curated weekly news roundup and essays reflecting on how we can respond to the crises we’re facing, which strikes me as a great model that could be tailored to suit many different audiences. (The roundup is on pause until the autumn as Anya works on a podcast series about students with disabilities).
Since Resonant World’s core mission is to help seed a trauma-restoring media culture capable of responding to the times we’re living, I was delighted to have an opportunity to be in dialogue with Anya and hear how she escaped the confines of legacy media to build an independent platform aligned with her values.
“Part of this ability to step back and work independently has been reflecting on the practices of journalism that are designed to produce more anguish and more distress in the name of engagement,” Anya told me. “I certainly knew that I couldn’t stay where I was and I’m feeling my way through this new landscape. But there’s something very exciting about creating something new.”
Anya, a journalist and author who served as a national education reporter at NPR for eight years, has found her move has allowed her to speak more freely and focus on the themes that matter to her most: climate justice, democracy, mental health, social movements, education, technology, media, youth and children. These spheres form a tight Venn Diagram with Resonant World, and its sister publications The Resonant Parenting Project and The Resonant Man, the What Is Collective Healing? podcast, and of course DeSmog, the nonprofit climate news service where I work.
Having myself quit a legacy media organisation in large part due to my frustrations at the company’s attitude to the climate crisis, I felt doubly privileged to have had an opportunity to compare notes with a fellow journalist who’d experienced a similar clash between personal and organisational values. Anya is intimate with both the joys and fears that arise when you step out of the structure that once sustained you to obey your inner directives — and living proof that there’s life outside institutional walls.
Our paths have also converged in our mutual commitment to exploring how the grief, trauma and anxiety triggered by climate breakdown and other symptoms of our planetary crisis are resculpting our inner worlds — both on the individual and collective level.
My sense is that both the Golden Hour and Resonant World have grown from the recognition that the media has as yet barely begun to explore the relationships between the events unfolding in our news feeds and the trauma loops playing out on microcosmic scales in our emotional and relational lives. I suspect that Anya and I share an intuition that — by making these fractal patterns more visible — journalists can illuminate new responses to the metacrisis that may otherwise remain hidden.
Among the topics we explored:
Early inspiration from dissidents and poets driving Anya’s journalism
The limitations we confronted in legacy media platforms
Covering education during the pandemic
Experiences reporting from Ukraine prompt Anya to leave NPR
Awakening to the severity of the climate crisis as journalists
Talking to children about the climate crisis
How Anya’s Substack supports people suffering from news fatigue
Turning a newsletter from a “cottage industry” to a “small business”
Collaborations with Panu Pihkala and Joanna Macy
Anya’s new book Falling In Love With The World Again.
Although we recorded this conversation last spring, our exploration of how we can develop new platforms rooted in an appreciation that what’s happening “out there” is always a reflection of what’s already alive inside of us feels more timely than ever.
This episode aims to:
Explore Anya Kamenetz’s evolution from legacy media to independence
Discuss the dilemmas journalists face when their values clash with their employer
Provide inspiration for forging new media platforms and cultures
Ideas that intrigued me:
Titrating the flood of bad news in a way that can land with audiences
Recognising and naming unspoken values encoded into legacy media structures
More journalists turning their focus to the “invisible landscapes” within
Questions I was left with:
How could I better serve people in these kinds of inquiries via Resonant World?
What short-term project could I embrace to advance the bigger vision?
What new constellations of collaborators could build the trauma-restoring media structures of the future?
Transcript:
Further Resources:
The Golden Hour: climate, children, mental health
Climate Journalism and Trauma (video)
The Electrotech Revolution (Kingsmill Bond’s newsletter)
We Are The Great Turning Podcast
About Anya Kamenetz:
“I am a journalist and author with a solid track record of being prescient about changes in technology, institutions, and society in general. I’m a popular keynote speaker; you can book me with Keppler Speakers.
I’ve been covering tech & climate change, social movements, mental health, education and parenting for almost two decades. I started at 25 with the book Generation Debt about young people’s economic struggles. I’ve published four more books, most recently The Stolen Year: How Covid Changed Children’s Lives, And Where We Go Now. I spent eight years covering education for NPR, where I launched Life Kit: Parenting, a successful podcast series about difficult conversations, and got to co-star with Cookie Monster in a video, which was a career and life highlight.”
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