The Fog of Good Intentions
Why the chaos in the journalism support ecosystem isn’t a problem of “too many cooks,” but a lack of a clear recipe.
Note: This essay reflects my personal observations from working in journalism and nonprofit media. It does not represent the official position of the American Press Institute or any other organization.
I am the son of a college administrator. My dad was a chief administrative officer for 40 years. In other households, kids heard sports or local gossip over dinner. I learned about organizational structure. I learned about the machinery of institutions. I learned that “efficiency” is often just a euphemism for “do the parts talk to each other.”
That is how I see the world. That is how I operate today. I am constantly drawn to structural challenges. I look for the treasure inside the dragon.
That is why I look at our current landscape differently than most.
Today, there is a common refrain in the journalism support world. “There are too many of us.” “We are all doing the same things.” “It feels inefficient.” “It feels like a waste of resources.”
I hear you. I get it.
When you are a newsroom leader just trying to keep the lights on, the field looks like a giant, jumbled mess. You see five orgs all offering product training. You see three others all offering legal support. Where the hell do you turn?
But let’s put that thought aside and look at a different kind of crisis.
What Disaster Relief Teaches Us
Consider the mechanics of a massive relief effort. Look at the response to a natural disaster like Hurricane Katrina. Or look at the current humanitarian operations in Gaza.
In those cases, you don’t see one organization showing up. You see dozens. You see the Red Cross, World Central Kitchen, Doctors Without Borders, and local groups all working together with huge international NGOs. Multiple groups set up food distribution. Multiple groups offer medical care. Multiple groups offer shelter.
If you looked at a map, it would look like clutter. Like duplication.
But in a crisis, duplication is not a bug; it’s a feature. If one org runs out of money or cannot reach a specific neighborhood, someone else will fill the gap. There is no single point of failure when lives are on the line.
Here is the important point. What makes disaster relief work is not the lack of duplication. It is the coordination of duplication.
Organizations are not being told to eliminate their services. Instead they are all asked to connect to a cluster system run by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). Each cluster is grouped by what they do. Health. Shelter. Water. Food security. Each cluster has a “lead agency” that coordinates all actors in that space.
The organizations do not lose their independence. They do not lose their missions. They are not told to merge or narrow their scope. But they all coordinate through regular meetings. They all share information about what they are building. They all route resources strategically.
Think about how Lt. Gen. Russel Honoré came in after Katrina. He did not send everyone a list of phone numbers. He established “unity of command.” He assessed the chaos. He determined the priorities. He directed the traffic. He made the system work by forcing the parts to talk to each other.
I would argue journalism is facing its own mass casualty event. The collapse of business models and the erosion of trust are existential threats. We need a massive response. We need the redundancy.
The problem is not that there are too many of us. The problem is that we are not acting like a disaster response team.
Duplication. Coordination. Disaster Relief. Does anyone else think about it that way?
The Real Problem: Uncoordinated Duplication
I think the “too many JSOs” critique leads to a very specific kind of paralysis.
When a newsroom leader is in trouble, they often do not know where to turn. They may not know if they need a grant, a coach, or a piece of software. They look at the jumble of JSOs and see noise, not a signal.
This confusion has a very real cost.
We spend money and time building tools. We launch programs. We create resources designed to save local news. But those tools sit on the shelf. They are not used as much as they should be. This is not because the tools are bad. It is because the people who need them cannot find them. We are not leveraging all the assets in this system because we are not coordinating around that leverage.
This lack of coordination has a pernicious effect.
When there is no clear dispatcher, JSOs feel pressure to become a “one stop shop” on their own. They see a gap. Maybe it is a lack of good recruitment tools. So they decide to build a solution in house. They do not realize that 2 other JSOs are building almost identical tools.
Now you have 3 organizations all of whom have spent money building basically the same product. That is not resilient redundancy. That is wasteful duplication.
Here is the problem: If you build a tool, no one will find it. No one will use it. That is the fatal flaw of uncoordinated duplication.
We call this the “General Hospital” problem. If every hospital tries to be a Level 1 Trauma Center, we waste billions of dollars duplicating expensive equipment. A healthy system has general hospitals, sure, but it also has specialized clinics. And, most importantly, it has a referral system that knows exactly when to move a patient from one to the other.
Right now we are building the hospitals. But we are not building the referral system. In fact, we have completely forgotten the referral system.
We Know This Works. Other Fields Proved It.
Let me start with my instinct in our field. It is always to build a website. We say, “Let’s create a directory of all the journalism support orgs.” We build a Yellow Pages for saving democracy.
We have tried this. Press Forward just launched the Journalism Support Exchange (JSX) in November. It is a searchable database of >300 JSOs. The logic is simple. “If we list it, they will come.”
I am a huge fan of this effort. The JSX team is responding to the very real criticism that we are not coordinated enough. They are onto the problem.
And they are not alone. RJI launched the News Media Help Desk last month in partnership with Local Media Consortium. It’s a hybrid of a curated learning center and a fractional services program that connects newsrooms to a vetted group of consultants. It’s good work, and a step beyond static directories.
But these are still fundamentally passive tools. They work only if you already know exactly what you need. The Help Desk connects you to resources and experts, but there’s no one to pick up the phone and say “tell me what is going on” and then figure out if you need a grant, or a coach, or a tool, or all three.
If you know you have a leaky pipe, you look for a plumber. But if your house is on fire, you are not browsing the Yellow Pages or consulting a learning center. You are dialing 911.
You are calling a dispatcher.
In a true crisis, you do not need a menu. You need a diagnosis and a direction.
Other fields have solved this exact problem. We can learn from them.
United Way 211 is the closest analog to what journalism needs. A nationwide system where someone in crisis can call a single number and be connected to social services. “Community Resource Specialists,” who are trained social workers, answer calls 24/7. They maintain a database of thousands of local nonprofits. They triage the caller’s needs and refer them to the right org.
The critical part: There are still dozens of food banks in any given region. There are still multiple orgs providing mental health services. The 211 system does not eliminate duplication. It coordinates it. Orgs participate because 211 brings them clients they would not otherwise reach.
StriveTogether runs a similar collective impact model in 70 communities nationwide. Orgs do not give up their missions. They coordinate around shared measurement and mutual reinforcement through a “backbone organization” that convenes partners and tracks shared metrics like high school graduation rates.
Here are the common characteristics:
They do not eliminate duplication. They coordinate it.
They create a dispatch layer. They do not require organizations to give up or change their missions.
They rely on a neutral convener. This entity holds authority and trust.
They work because of effectiveness. Coordination makes everyone better at their job.
What Journalism Has Never Tried
When I started digging into this question, I expected to find examples of coordination attempts. And I did find some—directories, resource hubs, funder coalitions.
But what I did not find was a comprehensive dispatch system.
We have built ways to search for help. We have not built a way to be triaged and routed to help.
We have been so focused on cataloging the organizations and programs that exist that we have never built the active coordination infrastructure—the dispatch layer—that would make all of it work better.
What a Dispatch System Would Look Like
OK, here is the thing I am proposing.
A front door. Someone in a newsroom faces a challenge. They call one number or fill out one form. They do not need to know which JSO does what. They just need to describe their problem.
Trained specialists. People who understand the JSO landscape and can assess needs through conversation, not just keyword matching. This doesn’t necessarily require building a new team from scratch—call center models with subject matter expertise already exist and could be adapted for this work.
Active triage and routing. The specialist asks clarifying questions. They diagnose the real need. They route the newsroom to the appropriate JSO.
A lead agency, not a new org. Following the disaster relief model, a JSO or coalition takes responsibility for intake. We are not creating another 501(c)(3) to manage the managers. We are designating someone to take the conn on routing.
Why JSOs Would Participate
The obvious question: why would a JSO ever volunteer to participate in a system that might route clients away?
Because fragmentation is making all of us less effective.
When newsrooms can’t find the right help, the entire field loses credibility. Funders see the confusion and question whether their investments are working.
A dispatch system does not limit anyone’s work. It makes everyone’s work more visible. It is not about redistributing existing clients. It is about increasing the total number of newsrooms we successfully help.
Look what happened to food banks when they joined the 211 system. They did not lose clients; they gained them. The dispatcher brought them people who would never have found them otherwise.
What Needs to Happen
I am not saying we launch another org. We need the major players and the funders to agree on a “Unity of Command” for intake.
Someone needs to step up and evolve from a passive directory to an active dispatch system. Whether that is an existing funder coalition or JSO consortium with rotating leadership or another model entirely. What matters is less about who does it than that someone steps up to do it.
What matters is that when a newsroom calls for help, someone answers the phone not as a salesman for their own programs but as an architect for that newsroom’s survival.
We need the courage to operate less like a library and more like a triage unit.
The house is on fire. We need to hand people a hose—not ask them to look for one in a catalog.
Let’s Talk About This
I have been chewing on this coordination problem for months. But I know I do not have all the answers.
If you work in a newsroom, have you experienced the confusion I am describing? When you needed help, did you know where to turn? What would make it easier?
If you work at a JSO or are a funder: Does this resonate with what you are seeing? What are the barriers to coordination I am not accounting for?
If you have worked in other fields, what lessons from 211, disaster relief, or collective impact would apply here? What wouldn’t?
Hit reply or leave a comment below. I genuinely want to know if this has legs or whether I am missing something fundamental about why this has not happened yet.
And if you know others in journalism or the nonprofit space who should be in this conversation, please share this piece with them. We need more people thinking structurally about infrastructure, not just programs.
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Hey Yoni! Darryl Holliday here from the JSX team. I could hardly agree more—and would appreciate your take on a plan the JSX team is workshopping alongside others mentioned here. I think it gets right to your point, and is exactly the kind of coordinated effort I see you calling for. I'd love to connect.
Yoni - 2 notes from personal experience.
Note 1: I’m coaching a newsroom that is in start up mode and has - at last count - contracts with 5 JSOs, each one assigned to a different element of the work (tech, strategy, product launch, foundations, major gifts). I think the rollout would’ve been way more effective for each if someone - either a rep at one of the JSOs, or one of teh startup staffers, or your idea of a dispatcher — had convened all of us right at the start so that we could take advantage of the tremendous knowledge base this one newsroom has gathered around it. Hasn’t happened. No one is responsible for “bridging.” It would not be hard to make this happen. I guess I would say that in all the years I’ve worked in the nonprofit space, it’s the genuine exception and not the rule that someone - either a smart funder/program officer, or some staffer that needs a new project or recognizes the loss of efficiency - takes the lead.
Note 2: my wife works for a county mental health department; they’re dealing with incoming queries/calls either from social service or law enforcement, or from potential clients or their families. Intake is crucial to get them pointed to the right starting place for help. Your observation that there is a practice of trained intake specialists is on point, in this field as in disaster relief.