Re:filtered #28: Radical acceptance

Welcome to the 28th edition of my monthly newsletter on journalism in a moment of systemic disruption.

I was recently introduced to the work of Marsha Linehan, the American psychologist who developed dialectical behavior therapy in the late 1980s. I am sharing her work here because the journalism space could use some of what she figured out: radical acceptance.

Acceptance, in her usage, is not approval or resignation. It does not say the work does not matter. The work matters.

Acceptance just says: this is what is. It refuses to spend energy fighting the fact that something is the case. It takes the pressure off pretending and lets the work stand on real ground. Only from there can you act.

Acceptance is where useful work becomes possible.

I have been turning this over since the annual Local Journalism Researchers Workshop in DC in early April. In a conversation there I said something that unintentionally landed as a provocation: accountability journalism still has to meet some information demand. If nobody chooses to read/watch/listen to it and re-articulates it to others, not a person, not a machine, not a downstream conversation, all the fine rigor of the reporting does not matter.

Works of journalism don't "deserve" distribution because they are well-crafted. They don't "deserve" attention. There is no captive audience.

This, of course, was read as capitulation to demand-driven economics. Meeting demand, in that reading, was selling out. So, acceptance of what.

Five things this piece works through:

1. Accept that the systems we work in are smaller than our ambitions, and our leverage smaller still.
2. Accept that good intentions in the field have drifted from the work that needs doing, and there is no tactical template to fix this.
3. Accept that journalism is rarely central in a person's life, and that this is fine.
4. Accept that being useful is not the same job as changing minds, and conflating them costs us both.
5. Accept that the rooms where capital and resources get distributed run on assumptions few in the room can afford to challenge, and that the work has to be started outside them and grown there.

Accept that the systems we work in are smaller than our ambitions, and our leverage smaller still.

We all navigate complex, increasingly unequal, and often illiberal systems, including much of the internet today. Much of it is intermediated, fragmented, and optimized against us. None of that is good, and I am not endorsing it. It just is what it is.

Our ability to shape any of this is smaller than we would like. What gets in the way of working in that environment is often not only the environment itself but also what we tell ourselves about it: abstract aspirations, professional hubris, nostalgia for an information order that never quite existed for most non-elite people.

Those illusions let us feel noble while we burn out. Acceptance does not ask us to pretend any of this is fun. It asks us to stop blaming people for the environment we exposed them to ("eat your civic vegetables!") and to use the levers we have with realistic expectations: being useful in the moments people are actually living.

The hardest part is smaller and more personal: What people are open to taking in is rarely on the same scale as our desire to say something that matters to us. Starting from self-expression on a generic idea of "news" makes news deserts look like the natural state of things. Starting from what is useful to someone else makes opportunities visible.

The only test of useful is whether others choose to use your work, carry it, pass it on. Nothing said matters if it does not get resaid. Reporting is the input. Circulation closes the loop. Ignoring that half is not noble integrity, but leaving the work half-done. If we rely on the machines to recirculate, we reduce ourselves to being their tools.

This is the more hopeful reading of acceptance, the one Linehan herself emphasized: you only have to accept the moment you are in. Once you do, the next move opens up.

In our case, the next move is personal, small and often local: pick someone real, be useful to others, see what circulates and what doesn't. That is enough to build on.

Accept that good intentions in the field have drifted from the work that needs doing, and there is no tactical template to fix this.

The same acceptance is owed to the wider field that supports journalism: funders, consultants, conveners, intermediaries.

The people inside these institutions are mostly working hard in pursuit of something they believe in. Where their work falls out of alignment with the work that needs doing, it is rarely cynical. It is the natural drift of a field that has been running for a while without enough validation pressure on its assumptions. The good intentions deserve some grace, though only so much.

Where I have a harder time extending grace is with the consultants selling pipe dreams. The untethered success story is the tell. It is an unverifiable token: the service behind it cannot be checked, only claimed, and the claim rarely matches what any other venture is positioned to deliver. Templates work the same way. What is genuinely portable across contexts is narrow: an intent, a gap being filled, sometimes a tactical move.

A related illusion is harder to spot because it sounds principled. A lot of media ventures use civic or public benefit as blanket cover for not articulating what they actually offer at the service level. The shortcut runs roughly like this: civic and self-actualizing benefits sit at the top of any pyramid of human wants, so a venture promising them does not need to bother with the lower-order, individual-utility rungs. Some versions lean on the "self-actualization" tier of Bain's Elements of Value framework to dress this up.

I am all for designing for those higher tiers because they will always convert far better than the lower ones, and they are less likely to be disrupted by AI. That is exactly why they are worth designing for. They are still individual needs, though. Self-actualizing and civic benefits are still picked or not picked, used or not used, returned to or not, by individuals. The pyramid describes how value compounds across tiers. It does not exempt the top from needing to be desired.

In practice, the higher-tier framing is mostly an excuse to skip the work of clarifying value, and services that skip that work do not function.

Being clear-eyed about value is what lets a media venture eventually emancipate itself from near-total dependence on philanthropic and public funders, and the publicly-funded ones to genuinely serve people the market overlooks.

It is also a basic form of respect for people on the other side of the value exchange. No one is a passive recipient of civic uplift. A service that cannot say what it does for them is not really a service.

This acceptance is the part I find most encouraging. Madison Karas and I argued the longer version of this earlier in April at the local news workshop: funding should be tied to which critical needs a newsroom can demonstrably meet for which specific people, not to the existence of the newsroom itself.

With three generously provided examples (thank you, Elise, James, and Lulu), we wanted to show that one can meaningfully work toward such intentionality within existing systems.

The systems do not have to change first. Specific journalists, creators or entire newsrooms, doing specific work for specific people, can move now. Funders, supporters, fans will follow.

Accept that journalism is rarely central in a person's life, and that this is fine.

Radical acceptance also applies to what journalism actually does in a life. I will say it: few people crave it the way they crave food, rest, or company. It is not the kind of input people actively miss when it is gone.

What it can be, when it is good, is a constant, low-level, orienting presence in lived experience: useful in moments, sometimes pleasurable, sometimes a way to feel less alone with a question.

It is tangential most of the time, part of routines and habits. It can be central in the right moment, on the right question, for the right person. Accepting that range, instead of inflating its role, is what lets a service show up usefully when it actually matters.

The same acceptance applies to what needs come first. People's needs are personal before they are public, and the public ones are usually private needs in another register: wanting to know if your kid's school is closing; wanting to know if the medication you take is on a recall list; wanting to follow what your city council is doing because you live where their decisions land.

None of these arrive as a civic duty. They arrive as personal questions that happen to have public dimensions. A service that meets people where their needs actually start is not less civic for it. I'd argue it is even more civic than abstract ones, because the public version of the need was never separable from the private one in the first place.

Accepting this gets us out of the trap of competing with food, rest, company and entertainment for attention we will not win – no matter how much we cooperate with platform operators.

It again puts us back where we can actually be useful: in the moments people are already living, on the questions they are already asking. That is a smaller claim than journalism culture is used to making. It is also a more honest one, and it holds the potential of traveling further.

Accept that being useful is not the same job as changing minds, and conflating them costs us both.

If needs really are personal first, it forces a choice journalism culture has been opportunistically avoiding: between wanting to be useful to people and wanting to change them in a particular direction.

The two can overlap, but they are not the same job, and treating them as one usually means privileging the second under the cover of the first. Wanting to change someone in a particular direction is a valid stance. It is just a different one from being of service to them. Knowing which one you are doing is the discipline.

There is a related bind, and it is the same logic that hears "meet some information demand" as capitulation. If anyone who does not position their journalism as explicit advocacy for liberal ideals risks being read as an obstacle to liberal progress, we may soon run out of liberals.

Labels do their own kind of damage. They make the question of who is being served, and how, go away. In doing so, they foreclose a real possibility: that service done well, useful to specific people on terms they recognize, may be exactly what allows a liberal society to keep functioning. It may also be what makes a case for that society to the people it has already alienated.

Advocacy for liberalism as default editorial posture has in many places become a legitimation (and fundraising) tactic for elites whom growing parts of the population see as complacent and self-dealing. It is hollowing out the thing it claims to defend. The posture has its place. We just need to be clear-eyed that it is an upselling strategy, not an expansion strategy.

This is worth saying out loud, even at the risk of being misread. (Please read twice if it makes you angry. It is not that bad.)

Of course you can be an advocate for a cause. You just have to be ok with that being a different motivation than being an independent information service in terms of first principles. Cause advocacy turns the recipient into the target of an intervention. None of that makes cause work wrong. It is just a different job.

What I would avoid is advocating for a false consensus on what an information service should be. I see far greater entrepreneurial and social opportunity in being an unapologetic advocate for people with worries and aspirations addressed through information more relevant to them.

A creator (or a newsroom) that commits to specific people develops their own role in people's lives. In such a service, editorial independence is not abstract ivory-tower objectivity. It is an undiluted focus on the truthful provision of useful information so people can navigate their lives better, functionally, psychologically, and socially. The question is not whether to advocate. It is what/who you advocate for, using the tools of the craft of journalism.

If we can accept this, we get to stop performing virtue and start practicing it more.

The work becomes legible to people who do not already share our priors, and the case for a liberal society can begin to rest on serving the alienated rather than lecturing them.

Accept that the rooms where capital and resources get distributed run on assumptions few in the room can afford to challenge, and that the work has to be started outside them and grown there.

Back to the field, now from a different angle. The earlier acceptance was about good intentions drifting. This one is about the money flows that sustain the drift, and what it takes to start or grow something outside them.

It is human to enjoy the conferences as the annual excuse to find kinship in the communal bemoaning of what is happening to media. A lot of what happens at those gatherings is not just performance. It can genuinely create community. The funding conversations, the partnerships, the hiring happen in the hallways and over drinks.

Many of those relationships run on mutual affirmations of wishful thinking that can sometimes feel religious. The funder needs to believe the grantee is producing "impact." The grantee needs to believe the funder is enabling it.

When the aspirations are undefined, or abstract, neither side gains much from naming what is actually happening, because naming it would put the room itself at risk. The premises that justify the funding flows, the convening circuits, the consultancy retainers, are the same premises that often would not survive close inspection. Everyone in the room has a stake in not asking the questions that would unsettle the room.

This is why reform from inside these spaces is so slow, and so often cosmetic. I have learned the hard way that you cannot ask people to dismantle the assumptions their seat at the table depends on. It is structural, not cynical.

A meaningful shift worth trying for is small and gradual: a constant effort to let a little more of what is actually happening into these rooms, one unconventional conversation or invitation at a time.

But that shift only goes so far. Whatever you take from the panels, and whatever you agree to between them, has to eventually work inside your real exchanges, inside your newsroom, your revenue relationships, your partnerships, your subscriber base, your town, your Discord server. Not what we want to be happening. What is.

The mental tool I reach for, to name what is actually being exchanged, is a first principles diagnostic from our service design practice. It is a short sequence of questions that surfaces assumptions, tests evidence, identifies dependencies, and clarifies goals. It is the version of acceptance you can run on the back of a napkin.

Accepting that the rooms cannot fix themselves is what frees you to build outside them, not in opposition or as protest, but just where you actually have a chance of succeeding without building those contradictions and distortions into your service.

A real exchange with a real person you are useful to does not need a panel's blessing. A funding relationship grounded in demonstrable utility does not need the room to validate it first. The work that holds up is the work you can point to, name, and have someone else use. That is a different kind of legitimacy, and it accumulates.

Acceptance, done this way, opens the room for a non-corrupted version of "selfish solidarity." (I picked up this phrase from community organizers in Philadelphia describing how groups with different priorities collaborate on shared goals without pretending their motives are identical, h/t Robin.)

Resource distribution is never going to be perfectly fair or rational. It navigates self-interest, friendship, reputation, institutional loyalty. Accepting that lets us design for it more honestly, instead of pretending the flows are governed by a pure sense of civic mission or by a competition in oratory, hubris, and performative victimhood.

Five acceptances, then, each one small, that together describe a way of working that does not depend on the field reforming itself, the platforms behaving better, or the funders waking up. It depends on you, with one real exchange in front of you, doing the next thing well.

Linehan, again: "Radical acceptance doesn't mean you don't try to change things because you only have to radically accept the moment that you're in."

Acceptance in this sense clears your mind for the next move. That is what I keep arguing for, in this newsletter and elsewhere in my practice.

Editorial independence, used uncompromisingly to help specific people navigate their own worries and aspirations a little better, with better information, is the best job. It's also the most uplifting feeling as a journalist.

While it is not easily attainable, and the rewards are often not on par with those in the performative rooms, it is honest, defensible, and has the most room to grow. It is work that does not need permission from a platform or a funder to begin. It is work AI cannot quietly take over, because the service is built on a relationship.

Dream big, then do the small thing the dream actually requires.

Looking back

A whirlwind month, hence the late newsletter.

In Stockholm, I came across a recently published paper by Ekaterina Kalinina and Stefan Ingvarsson on exiled Russian media. I have to admit I had largely stopped reading reports in this space because the vast majority of them are self-serving platitudes (from disinformation to security) about why more money should go to exiled media, trial balloons for policy-making sound bites. But this one is a thoughtful analysis of the actual challenges these outlets face, including relevance.

The NZZ in Switzerland published an op-ed by friend Gerald Hosp and me on public media reform. While the far-right critique of public media in that country (often carried by that paper) is ignorant and happening in bad faith, I do think there are opportunities to strengthen public media strategy with far greater intentionality on job-to-be-done portfolios.

At Gazzetta, we also published a series of guides and learnings from our experimental work with the Open Technology Fund, this time on content distribution in a highly autocratic context. The country is unnamed in the work but easy enough to guess. It has led to some meaningful tests that I need to write about when I find some more time.

You may have noticed that we reworked our site a little. It is still a work in progress. The newsletter has moved from my private domain to the work one. Field Notes will now be short updates on service design in journalism. re:filtered (this email) will remain a monthly essay.

I sometimes wonder about the utility of all this publishing. The best moment this month was meeting a group of sharp students in DC who had, to my immense surprise, literally read everything we had written, and then there was this post by Khalil Cassimally. Thank you.

Looking ahead

Madison Karas and I will be presenting our work on AI-augmented surveys we ran in Iran and the United States at the Hacks/Hackers 2026 AI x Journalism Summit. After the reception, we are heading to a great Maryland crab institution for Spontaneous & Unorganized Crabs. If you want to join, let us know.

On May 18, we will run another in-person Service Desk workshop in Philadelphia, right ahead of the Lenfest News Philanthropy Summit. It will be the last workshop in the U.S. for a few months, so if you can, join this one! It is free, and you get a free beta version of our draft handbook.

If you can't make it in person, we just reopened more Service Desk slots, our free one-on-one consultations, thanks to the generous support of the Lenfest Institute for Journalism. Madison will run a workshop at the Festival 3i 2026 in Rio.

Expect a late next edition. I'm moving to Europe. In between packing and unpacking, I'm traveling to Baltimore, Philly, Geneva, Vienna, Brussels (big research report release!), Prague, and Vilnius for workshops and meetings. If you're in any of those places, do say hi.

One more thing: I love gather.town as a conference and co-working tool. It's very nerdy but truly not as exhausting as another Zoom call. Imagine the Sims but for work, in a good way - for example, I got to "sit" next to an old colleague I hadn't seen in years. Sounds silly, but genuinely joyful.

When David Kuszmar, our AI research lead, brought up the idea of running an informal virtual conference on AI and information, I was thrilled that he was open to hosting it there.

So 🥁🥁🥁: meet tbd/con, we're hosting virtual conversations on AI, September 23-24, free on gather.town. If you want to join, express interest, submit a pitch, or apply to join the review crew (you'll get to select the sessions)!

I hope it is going to be interdisciplinary, weird and surprising in all the good ways. The future of AI is not only to be determined. It is also to be dreaded, dreamed, and desired. Two days of good conversation among people of various backgrounds, willing to ask and discuss openly without the usual tool or framework selling, sounds like a great uplifting experience.

That's it for April, belatedly. Until next month. Any thoughts or suggestions: reply to this email or message me on Signal (patrickb.01).

Radical acceptance log: One newsletter, late again. Zero illusions abandoned without a fight. A handful of exchanges, a little more real than otherwise. That's the work.