Journalists have a lot of high-minded ideals about journalism. We don’t always live up to these ideals, but in Philadelphia, the William Penn Foundation decided to put some money behind the concept that journalism should be a public service. It created the Center for Public Interest Journalism and the Philadelphia Public Interest Information Network (now AxisPhilly). It put millions of dollars directly into public interest journalism, with a three-year runway to figure out what shape such an endeavor could take.
Every mourner encounters a well-intentioned person who says,
“I’m sorry for your loss. At least you’ll always have your memories.”
I would like to give this person the benefit of the doubt that they only mean this as a facile platitude, but in fact, it is one of the cruelest things to say. Memories, when you are lucky enough to have pieced them together somehow, fade. They are ephemeral. They change and shift and sway and disappear. What is meant to be a comfort merely serves as a reminder of the new reality of a lifelong stream of micro-losses.
This year the eight Knight-Mozilla Fellows are roughly half folks who were not previously involved with journalism development and half people who have deepened their engagement with this community via the Fellowship. Last week, we heard from the first group, Fellows who took varied paths to their news organizations. This week we learned what it’s like for people who have worked in newsrooms to experience those spaces as a Knight-Mozilla Fellow.
What do you mean, I get to do whatever I want? Stijn Debrouwere began the week by expressing his awe at the very premise of the Fellowship and the space it allows for exploration.
Last night I saw a documentary about Celebration, Florida. It mentioned how there is some rumor about it being a secret place for swinging couples, which reminded me of an episode of Bob’s Burgers. So, of course I needed to re-watch that episode to see how much it is actually related to that town (it isn’t, really). But before I could do that, I fell down a Wikipedia rabbit hole because I wanted to remember what H. Jon Benjamin looks like.
