How is your weekend, Reader?

Mine is slow, with family time with my sister in Singapore. The city-state is a complicated place. I love it for the calmness and convenience. At the same time, I’m worried about its death penalty policy and lack of press freedom.

Singaporean journalist Kirsten Han writes about both topics regularly. It makes her an activist in many people’s eyes, whereas she is applying journalistic methods. In her 2024 essay A Real Journalist?, she speaks about "advocacy journalism". Alliance Magazine interviewed her last week on the And Some Change podcast, which is worth 19 minutes of your time.

I wrote about Singapore in this newsletter two years ago:

Sanne

Working in journalism can be exhausting

Burnout doesn’t always have to do with the amount of work you’re handling. Often it’s the psychological layer that makes it exhausting: the manager who doesn’t just give you a lot of work but also undermines your opinion, or the political context your stories are part of. It can be many things.

It also means that burnout often isn’t an individual issue. Collective well-being, therefore, is one of the modules in The Human Pace course. The launch price is available until 9 October: 197 USD. Design your own well-being practice:

Praxis is messy

When you think about changing journalism, it's important to realize where the profession has its roots. Dutch journalist Frederieke Geerdink wrote a manifesto called All Journalism is Activism (interview in English), and even though I don't agree with everything in her analysis, I find her description of the colonial history of Western journalism useful because it asks you to look beyond the routines you're used to.

Many of the practices that we think are now normal in journalism emerged in a time when the power imbalance in the world was less obvious. Who gets to be an expert? Do we only rely on scientific data or do we also look at lived experiences? What knowledge is credible and, if you position yourself as an observer, who is seen as the object of a story?

A decolonial approach is adding more voices to the existing system but also researching these questions. I still catch myself making wrong assumptions as well, or creating situations that might even reproduce power imbalances.

That's when I know I need to return to praxis. Notice it, question it, and then change it. This is how you learn. And for changing journalism, the same cycle is applicable: you can't strive for perfection if you don't take action.

One step forward, two steps back

Other disciplines and movements are just as well wrestling with similar questions about power, knowledge, conflict, organizational culture, and structural change. Last week, at the Rise Up! Festival, I heard mountaineer Jane Lee share about her Mount Everest Summit with four other Singaporean women.

It took them three months to climb the mountain: walk up to a certain height, adjust, walk down, walk up again. Build a camp, take it down, walk further. Wait for the right weather, adjust the body, et cetera. She wrote a book titled Small Steps to Big Summits, and I realized how similar it is to the way change happens in journalism. With small steps, and sometimes with a few steps back.

If you stay only within your own professional boundaries, it can be difficult to create small changes because you've become used to a certain "normal". Nepal's Prime Minister Balandra Shah mentioned something similar in his speech at the UN General Assembly this week.

Nepal's PM: "We're not blaming anyone"

Shah connected the flood disaster in his country to climate change, climate finance, and the structures of the international system. He argued that justice in this context is about taking responsibility as a global community. He also proposed greater regional collaboration around climate resilience and disaster risk reduction.

As the youngest PM of a "poor country like Nepal" (in his words), he didn't want to play the blame game; instead, he pointed out the structures of inequality:

It seems "normal" in the world to focus on what is going wrong and not pay attention to basic human rights. In journalism, a similar dynamic has led to the creation of solutions journalism. Part of the method is to make sure you're not focusing on hero stories but instead on systemic issues. ​
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The speech by Shah shows that too. Nepali-American journalist Anup Kaphle points it out well for the Kathmandu Post in The Speech Nepal - and the World - Had Been Waiting For. Kaphle ends with a question:

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Keep practicing, keep showing up

It doesn't have to be perfect. You try something, it works out or not, someone points out what you missed, you learn from other disciplines, you change, and try again.

It's similar to how solutions journalism works: you research approaches to problems and write about how they work, to give readers and viewers insights into how to replicate the approach.

Changing journalism is too big a task for one person or one organization. Learning from other disciplines, sharing what works, questioning what doesn't work, and seeing each other's experiments as part of a greater effort. It's messy, but that's not a reason to stop. Keep practicing, keep showing up.

See you next week.

Sanne