Wading into economics, whether I like it or not

I have been using the phrase “demand-side journalism” as a provocation, but also as a diagnostic framing. The danger of borrowing economic language is that actual economists might enter the chat. Or worse: political economists might show up, and then I find myself in a dialectical fight I am woefully equipped for.

They might ask whether the problem I’m describing is really a journalism problem at all, or merely a downstream symptom of broader civic, economic, and institutional decay. I think this train of thought is inevitable if you take my hypothesis seriously. If journalism’s crisis is wholly or even partly a demand crisis, and if this demand is socially produced, then journalism’s crisis cannot be analyzed only inside journalism. We have to ask what kind of economy, civic culture, and institutional order shapes people who believe public information is worth seeking and paying for.

I am a journalist — an accidental one, at that — not an economist. More precisely, I am a local journalism person borrowing a macro-economic concept (demand) to describe something that is not exactly economic (an intrinsic, psychological motivation or need). So, believe me, I’m conscious that I’m out of my lane and likely to bring affront to serious and heady people.

But I’m doing this anyway.

I have spent, and the journalism industry has spent, years talking about the other side of this economic coin, supply: better and more stories, better and more formats, better platforms, better engagement practices, better and more products. My insinuation is that we have not been nearly as disciplined about demand, and we haven’t been asking why people would want civic information in the first place, or what conditions make that desire durable, and what causes it to disappear.

I also think what I’m talking about and how I conceive this “demand” is more akin to the economists’ concept than how my industry peers might interpret it. To my colleagues, demand is likely to be heard as audience, traffic, subscribers, willingness to pay, or market appetite. What I mean is something adjacent but different: the felt need, capacity, and agency that make civic information seem useful, consequential, and worth seeking. People experience demand before they’re ever anyone’s audience.

Reading between the economist’s lines

If demand for civic information is not simply a consumer preference, if it is partly produced by whether people feel agency in public life, then journalism’s crisis starts to touch bigger arguments about citizenship, political economy, class, community, and institutional trust. This line of inquiry has led me into entirely new reading territory.

This is how I found myself chewing on an essay by Ruy Texeira and thinking: he’s not talking about journalism, but he is talking about the world in which journalism lost its demand.

Teixeira’s essay argues that social democracy declined as its postwar economic model faltered, its industrial working-class base shrank, and educated / professional constituencies became dominant in cultural and political institutions; he specifically emphasizes the decline of the industrial working class and the rise of a professional class concentrated in institutions like media, academia, NGOs, and the arts.

So he might hear my argument and, assuming he didn’t zero in on media being part of the problem, say: “Yes, journalism lost demand because the world that once produced civic demand has been dismantled. You are describing a symptom, not a cause.”

My reply, though, is that journalism doesn’t have to sit by and be only a symptom. It’s got its own potential to be part of the solution, I think. Journalism is not irrelevant to the production of civic demand. It is one of the institutions through which people learn whether public life is intelligible or accessible to them.

Economic policy can alter the conditions of citizenship. Journalism helps mediate the experience of citizenship.

Commonplace, the magazine in which Texeira’s essay was published, is a project of American Compass, an economic-policy think-tank. Its stated project is to move conservative economics away from market fundamentalism and toward workers, families, communities, industry, and citizenship; its site describes its work as asking what has gone wrong in America’s economy and how to recover.

American Compass’s founder letter argues against the assumption that institutions or markets will automatically adapt “as if by magic,” insisting that there is “no magic, only people” doing the work of thinking, acting, and persuading. Their “Reclaiming American Citizenship” project argues that citizenship is not merely legal status but a thicker civic condition involving responsibility, belonging, and self-government.

Their critique is that American political economy has treated people too much as consumers and not enough as citizens, and my critique is that journalism made the same mistake.

I think most economists would agree, and I look forward to getting acquainted with some as I embark on this fellowship. I think there’s a lot of common ground to plumb:

Their subject is the economic order. Mine is the civic-information order. Their question is what kind of economy produces citizens. Mine is what kind of journalism helps people experience themselves as citizens.

A worker may need a living wage, a stable family, a functioning neighborhood, and a meaningful role in productive life. But that same person also needs to know when the school board is deciding something consequential, why the county commission matters, where the money is moving, who has authority, what options exist, and whether showing up can change anything.

Maybe some economists have ideas: What would local journalism look like if its job were not merely to inform audiences, but to help produce civic demand?