I appreciate your taking the time to write out this idea and the careful thought that went into your post. I liked that it was kind of in the form of a pitch, in keeping with your journalistic theme. I agree that EAs should be thinking more seriously about journalism (in the broadest possible sense) and I think that this is as good a place as any to start. I want to (a) nitpick a few things in your post with an eye to facilitating this broader conversation and (b) point out what I see as an important potential failure mode for an effort like this.
You characterize The Altruist at first as:
a news agency that provides journalistic coverage of EA topics and organisations
This sounds like more or less like a trade publication along the lines of Advertising Age or Publishers Weekly, or perhaps a subject-specific publication oriented more toward the general public, like Popular Science or Nautilus. Generally speaking, I think something like the former is a good idea, though trade publications are generally targeted at those working within an industry. I will describe later on why I am not sure the latter is feasible.
These publications are very different from each other. The Economist (where, full disclosure, I worked for a short time) is a general interest newspaper with a print circulation of ~1 million. The New Yorker is a highbrow weekly magazine known for its longform journalistic content. The Atlantic is an eclectic monthly that leans heavily on its regular output of short-form, nonreported digital content. Current Affairs is a bimonthly political magazine with an explicitly left-wing cultural and political agenda. Works in Progress is small, completely online, wholly dedicated to progress studies, and generally nonreported.
Unherd is evidently constructed in opposition to various trends and themes in mainstream political and cultural discourse, and its goal is to disrupt the homogeneity of that discourse. I really enjoy it, but I worry that it sometimes typifies the failure mode I’m worried about. Broadly, that failure mode is this: by defining itself in opposition to the dominant way of thinking, an outlet can sort potential readers out of being interested.
Consider: if a media outlet mainly publishes content that conflicts with the modal narrative, then the modal reader encountering it will find mostly content that challenges their views. I think it is a pernicious but nonetheless reliable feature of the media landscape that most readers who stumble onto such a publication will typically stumble off immediately to another, more comfortable one. I worry that a lot of EA is challenging enough that this could happen with something like The Altruist.
This may actually be fine- that’s why I harp on the precision of the comparison classes: I think Works in Progress, for instance, is likely to serve the progress studies community very well in the years to come, and an EA version of that would serve well the initial goal you describe of improving resources for outreach. But I don’t think that it would do a particularly good job of mitigating reputational risk or increasing community growth, because it would be a niche publication that might find it difficult to earn the trust of readers who find EA ideas challenging (in my experience, this is most people).
So I think as far as new publications go, we may have to pick between the various goals you have helpfully laid out here. But my aspirations for EA in journalism are a bit higher. Here’s my question: what is an EA topic? It is not really obvious to me that there is such a thing. To most people, it is not intuitive, even when you explain, that there is something that ties together (for instance) worrying about AI risk, donating to anti-malaria charities, supporting human challenge trials, and eating vegan.
This is because EA is a way of approaching questions about how to do good in the world, not a collection of answers to those questions.
So my aspiration for journalism in general is not only that it more enthusiastically tackle those issues which this small and idiosyncratic community of people has determined is important. I also think it would be good if journalism in general moved in a more EA-aligned or EA-aware direction on all questions. I think that, counterfactually, the past two decades of journalism in the developed world would look very different if the criterion for newsworthiness was more utilitarian, and if editorial judgments more robustly modeled truth-seeking behavior. Consequently my (weak, working) hypothesis is that the world would be a better place. I also think such a world would be an easier place to grow the community, to combat bad-faith criticism, and to absorb and respond to good-faith critique.
One way to try to make this happen today would be to run a general-interest publication with an editorial position that is openly EA, much as The Economist’s editorial slant is classically liberal. Such a publication would have to cover everything, not just deworming and the lives of people in the far future. But it would, of course, cover those things too.
To bring things back down to the actual topic of conversation: the considerations you have raised here are the right ones. My core concern is that a publication like this will try to do too many things at once, and the reason I’ve written so much above is to try to articulate some additional considerations that I hope will be useful in narrowing down its purpose.
I agree that a trade publication could potentially be valuable—my main issue would be that attempts at outreach to the existing philanthropic community haven’t been very successful before. Nonetheless, I suspect that if it were able to produce sufficiently high-quality content—including content about topics outside of the traditional EA areas, I suspect I would gain readers and influence.
This is great! I appreciate the detailed response and the friendly but valuable critique. As much as anything, I wanted to start a conversation around how a project like this may work best and these are some really useful points.
I think you’re right that there are competing goals in what I’ve laid out and also that a project reporting from an EA lens on general topics might be more impactful in the long term than one focused on reporting on EA topics.
I appreciate your taking the time to write out this idea and the careful thought that went into your post. I liked that it was kind of in the form of a pitch, in keeping with your journalistic theme. I agree that EAs should be thinking more seriously about journalism (in the broadest possible sense) and I think that this is as good a place as any to start. I want to (a) nitpick a few things in your post with an eye to facilitating this broader conversation and (b) point out what I see as an important potential failure mode for an effort like this.
You characterize The Altruist at first as:
This sounds like more or less like a trade publication along the lines of Advertising Age or Publishers Weekly, or perhaps a subject-specific publication oriented more toward the general public, like Popular Science or Nautilus. Generally speaking, I think something like the former is a good idea, though trade publications are generally targeted at those working within an industry. I will describe later on why I am not sure the latter is feasible.
But you go on to say:
These publications are very different from each other. The Economist (where, full disclosure, I worked for a short time) is a general interest newspaper with a print circulation of ~1 million. The New Yorker is a highbrow weekly magazine known for its longform journalistic content. The Atlantic is an eclectic monthly that leans heavily on its regular output of short-form, nonreported digital content. Current Affairs is a bimonthly political magazine with an explicitly left-wing cultural and political agenda. Works in Progress is small, completely online, wholly dedicated to progress studies, and generally nonreported.
Unherd is evidently constructed in opposition to various trends and themes in mainstream political and cultural discourse, and its goal is to disrupt the homogeneity of that discourse. I really enjoy it, but I worry that it sometimes typifies the failure mode I’m worried about. Broadly, that failure mode is this: by defining itself in opposition to the dominant way of thinking, an outlet can sort potential readers out of being interested.
Consider: if a media outlet mainly publishes content that conflicts with the modal narrative, then the modal reader encountering it will find mostly content that challenges their views. I think it is a pernicious but nonetheless reliable feature of the media landscape that most readers who stumble onto such a publication will typically stumble off immediately to another, more comfortable one. I worry that a lot of EA is challenging enough that this could happen with something like The Altruist.
This may actually be fine- that’s why I harp on the precision of the comparison classes: I think Works in Progress, for instance, is likely to serve the progress studies community very well in the years to come, and an EA version of that would serve well the initial goal you describe of improving resources for outreach. But I don’t think that it would do a particularly good job of mitigating reputational risk or increasing community growth, because it would be a niche publication that might find it difficult to earn the trust of readers who find EA ideas challenging (in my experience, this is most people).
So I think as far as new publications go, we may have to pick between the various goals you have helpfully laid out here. But my aspirations for EA in journalism are a bit higher. Here’s my question: what is an EA topic? It is not really obvious to me that there is such a thing. To most people, it is not intuitive, even when you explain, that there is something that ties together (for instance) worrying about AI risk, donating to anti-malaria charities, supporting human challenge trials, and eating vegan.
This is because EA is a way of approaching questions about how to do good in the world, not a collection of answers to those questions.
So my aspiration for journalism in general is not only that it more enthusiastically tackle those issues which this small and idiosyncratic community of people has determined is important. I also think it would be good if journalism in general moved in a more EA-aligned or EA-aware direction on all questions. I think that, counterfactually, the past two decades of journalism in the developed world would look very different if the criterion for newsworthiness was more utilitarian, and if editorial judgments more robustly modeled truth-seeking behavior. Consequently my (weak, working) hypothesis is that the world would be a better place. I also think such a world would be an easier place to grow the community, to combat bad-faith criticism, and to absorb and respond to good-faith critique.
One way to try to make this happen today would be to run a general-interest publication with an editorial position that is openly EA, much as The Economist’s editorial slant is classically liberal. Such a publication would have to cover everything, not just deworming and the lives of people in the far future. But it would, of course, cover those things too.
To bring things back down to the actual topic of conversation: the considerations you have raised here are the right ones. My core concern is that a publication like this will try to do too many things at once, and the reason I’ve written so much above is to try to articulate some additional considerations that I hope will be useful in narrowing down its purpose.
I agree that a trade publication could potentially be valuable—my main issue would be that attempts at outreach to the existing philanthropic community haven’t been very successful before. Nonetheless, I suspect that if it were able to produce sufficiently high-quality content—including content about topics outside of the traditional EA areas, I suspect I would gain readers and influence.
This is great! I appreciate the detailed response and the friendly but valuable critique. As much as anything, I wanted to start a conversation around how a project like this may work best and these are some really useful points.
I think you’re right that there are competing goals in what I’ve laid out and also that a project reporting from an EA lens on general topics might be more impactful in the long term than one focused on reporting on EA topics.