New Journalism: Reimagining Information Networks From the Ground Up

Patrick Boehler opens by arguing that traditional newsrooms have lost relevance because they built their work around large audiences, platform distribution and performative formats, and that funding priorities have often reinforced those habits. Drawing on his experience in exile and dissident media and on research into informal information flows, he points to examples where people already share news outside institutions: crowdsourced tracking of blocked websites and labor protests in China, VPN sharing communities, and checkpoint and road-safety updates in the West Bank.

He then proposes a framework that breaks journalism into roles such as listening, documenting, commenting, inquiring, sense-making, amplifying and navigating, with enabling as the infrastructure layer beneath them. Distribution is only one of these roles. He argues that trust in these networks comes from personal sharing and repeated interaction rather than algorithmic reach, and that the useful question for technologists is which step of the cycle is struggling, not how to push content further.

In the audience questions, he said he had no ready answer on AI-generated noise or on sustainable funding for community-run services, and suggested that institutions may still matter if they are defined by the utility they provide. His closing message to the security audience was to build tools, share what works and help communities own their information networks.