Journalism is asked to explain itself constantly.

Why this story.
Why this framing.
Why now.
Why trust this.

Those questions don’t only come from audiences or critics. They show up inside newsrooms, in editorial meetings, in Slack threads, and in quieter moments when journalists try to make sense of the work they’re doing under real constraints.

They’re also showing up against a changing backdrop. According to the Pew Research Center, fewer Americans are closely following the news than they used to. In 2016, about half of U.S. adults said they followed the news all or most of the time. By 2025, that share had dropped to just over a third. At the same time, Gallup reports that trust in mass media has fallen to a record low, with fewer than three in ten Americans saying they have a great deal or fair amount of confidence in news organizations.

Those numbers don’t just describe audience behavior. They shape the conditions under which journalism gets made.

How Journalism Thinks exists for that kind of sense-making.

This is a space to slow down and think through the choices that shape journalism, without turning those choices into defenses or diagnoses. It’s interested in how journalists explain their work, how boundaries get drawn and redrawn, and how ideas like authority, responsibility, care, and trust actually show up in everyday practice.

The pressures are not evenly distributed. According to Pew’s reporting on young adults and the future of news, younger audiences are less likely to seek out news directly. They are increasingly encountering it through platforms where journalism sits alongside commentary, entertainment, and social content. Pew’s data also show that younger adults now express roughly the same levels of trust in information from news organizations and social media. That reality complicates long-standing assumptions about credibility, expertise, and how the public understands journalistic decisions.

There is no shortage of research about journalism, and no shortage of conversation inside journalism. There are far fewer places where those two worlds meet in ways that feel readable, usable, and respectful of the work itself. This newsletter sits in that gap.

I come to this as a journalism educator and researcher who spends a lot of time listening to journalists talk about their work, especially when they’re asked to justify, teach, or explain it to others. Much of my research focuses on news literacy, not as a curriculum or a corrective, but as a way of naming the thinking journalists already do when they make decisions, draw lines, and talk to audiences about why the work looks the way it does.

This is not a how-to guide, a critique of journalists, or a collection of hot takes about the industry. It isn’t interested in telling journalists how they should think or what they should fix next. This newsletter is interested in thinking with journalists about the choices that already shape the work, and about what those choices make possible or difficult in the world.

What you’ll find here are talking points, reflections, and occasional conversations that take journalism seriously as a form of thinking, not just a set of outputs. Some posts will draw directly on research, helping translate what we academics say into usable practice. Others will stay closer to thinking about the industry. All of them are written with the assumption that readers (journalists, primarily) are busy, thoughtful, and capable of sitting with complexity without being lectured.

There’s no required way to read this, and no promise of constant updates. Think of it less as a feed and more as a place you can return to when you want language for something you’ve been feeling in the work.

If that sounds useful, you’re welcome here.

— PRJ

Thinking, Elsewhere is a short, curated list of experiments, projects, or decisions happening outside this newsletter that make thinking visible in public. These aren’t endorsements or trend roundups. They’re moments where people are trying different ways to explain work, slow down attention, or surface process rather than just outcomes. Sometimes they come from journalism; often they don’t. What matters is the thinking.

Here are three examples of where I see thinking, elsewhere: