I always feel a tinge of resentment at the gym during those couple of weeks bookending New Year’s Day. I imagine it’s a feeling shared by devout churchgoers when they see folks they don’t recognize packing the pews on Christmas or Easter. (Pardon the Judeo-Christian centrism of that metaphor, it’s just what came to mind).
Back to the root of the resentment. It’s a sense that their commitment is fleeting, that their presence is more performative than genuine in nature.
Resolutions only matter if you plan on following through — if there’s staying power behind the pledges.
We’ve been publishing for a little less than a year at the Fredericksburg Free Press, and as managing editor, I’m here to assure you that we’re not going away. On the contrary, we have big plans for the coming year.
In that spirit, here are five New Year’s resolutions that will guide the Free Press newsroom in 2025.
We resolve to:
Keep telling your stories, big and small
There’s a real temptation to treat nonprofit journalism like a tech startup, relentlessly mission-focused and efficient. And to be clear, efficiency is essential. The three full-time journalists hired when we launched this past February (myself included) were tasked with covering a region with a population of more than 350,000.
You have to prioritize which stories to tell, which meetings to cover and which people to talk to, all in the interest of your readers. The term “triage” is sometimes thrown around in newsrooms like ours to discuss what or whom is in most dire need of our attention at any given time.
That said, policies don’t make news; people do. Sometimes, that means spending a Friday night watching a middle school football game or listening to ex-felons discuss their path to re-enfranchisement. It might mean spending weeks or even months on a single project.
Additionally, it’s this editor’s view that policymaking is best viewed through a human lens. We attempt to tell these big stories by zooming in on the central actors — our neighbors.
It’s how we relate to the communities we serve.
Keep trying new things — and shedding old habits
When I attended the LION Publishers conference in Chicago this past September, it was a humbling experience. Some of that shellshock came from seeing and hearing from much more established independent outlets who seemed to know what they were doing.
I listened to a panel that included Ryan Sorrell, the founder of the Kansas City Defender. His publication — which focuses on serving that city’s Black community — doesn’t consider itself a news organization but rather a “power building” one.
For the Defender and its staff, advocacy and amplifying certain voices is part of the gig. Didn’t exactly sound like journalism to this longtime legacy (read: newspaper) reporter, but nonprofit news is something different.
Another publication, the Jersey Bee, touted as its crowning achievement from the previous year not an investigation or a series of features, but rather a collaboration with local food banks to make resources (both informational and actual) available to those in their community suffering from food scarcity.
Like I said, these dudes were different.
All of that is not to say that we’re going to stop writing traditional stories and embrace a wholly novel model of journalism. However, it does mean that we’re stepping out of our comfort zones in an effort to better serve the community.
One example you may have noticed is a feature we’re calling “On the Agenda.” It’s an easy-to-digest, well, digest of topics to be discussed or voted on at public meetings throughout the region each week.
By nature, agendas are clunky, inaccessible documents. The goal of our new feature is, frankly, to dumb them down, distilling them into bullet points of what’s most important. It’s the type of straight information synthesis you wouldn’t see in legacy media.
Listen to you and work to earn your trust
At that same conference, I attended a panel where the featured speaker led off with a simple question: what was the first time you were distrusted as a journalist?
An awkward pause followed.
Then, he asked as a follow-up: “Was it by someone with less power than you?” Heads started nodding like metronomes.
I reflected on my own decade-plus career as a sports writer, the spaces in which I would report and why/under what circumstances I would enter them. Often, you go someplace to get a story: to essentially extract something from your sources. Like “Blood Diamond,” only with a notepad.
But put yourself in their shoes. Best-case scenario, they talk to you and maybe nothing changes. Or, more likely, a source could face negative consequences. It’s an asymmetric dynamic by default.
What if we simply listened with no expectations for getting a story? That’s the kind of presence that we want to normalize.
Become known as a publication for everyone
It’s no secret that legacy media hasn’t always served every community equally. When I worked at The Free Lance-Star, I recall being shown a study that Black faces were under-represented in most sections of the newspaper and over-represented in two: sports and crime reports.
Similar disparities, no doubt, can be found when it comes to class or socio-economic status.
So, how to fix it? Representation matters. The goal, ultimately, is for our newsroom to resemble the community it serves, and on that front, I’d say we’re off to a decent start.
As journalists, we also have a choice as to whose voices we center when reporting a story, from the questions we ask to how we ask them. And it’s a choice we take seriously.
‘Do some damage’
I’m borrowing this phrase from a recent Netflix mini-series “Eric.” You’ve gotta watch it. Benedict Cumberbatch is sublime, and there’s this whole gritty 80s noir vibe going on.
Toward the end of the narrative arc, tough-as-marshmallows nightclub owner Gator, played by Wade Allain-Marcus, tells his old friend (and lover) NYPD Det. Ledroit that he has the power to upend the corruption in the department that led to the murder of a 15-year-old boy and subsequent cover-up.
Instead of simply sending his evidence to Homicide, where it may or may not pursued seriously, Gator implores Ledroit to handle things directly, to “do some damage.”
What does this mean for the Free Press? Well, I’ll start with what it doesn’t mean. We have not and will not engage in witch hunts. We won’t drag someone’s name through the mud or report stories in a vindictive or one-sided manner.
However, we’re not going to be timid about which stories we choose to pursue, or which individuals or entities might find them… unflattering.
That trust that we’ve built in our first year as a publication? That power? It’s time to use it. To do some damage.
