This week’s newsletter is sponsored by the Online News Association.

This week, our top story is Lewis Raven Wallace’s latest column making the case for movement journalism. In this installment, he argues that movement media provides political education and clarity in a deeply confusing world — through offering people the tools to make sense of what’s happening and how they might respond.

And another reminder: Our newsletter will be going on a short break throughout September. We’ll still be publishing stories, but we won’t be in your inbox again until October. (Our democracy journalism columnist Beatrice Forman also took a quick break for this week, so resource of the week is going on pause early, too.)

In this issue:

And also: Israeli airstrikes kill five more journalists, Signal Ohio newsrooms are the latest nonprofit newsrooms looking to unionize, efforts to crowdsource attendance at Labor Day protest, and tribal public radio stations wait for handshake deal money.

—James Salanga

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In a new collaboration between The Objective and News Futures, 14 practitioners share their perspectives on building local, participatory, and durable information systems for the next decade.

For years now, friends and I have looked at each other wide-eyed when we talk about the news, confounded and angry: it doesn’t make sense. Why would a local government want to build this massive fake city for police training in the woods, in the middle of a climate crisis, a homelessness crisis, and a crisis of police violence? Who’s pushing for this? None of it makes sense. Why Trump’s rise, why Israel’s unyielding attacks, why organized abandonment, why Elon Musk’s fame, why AI data centers? 

Movement media can’t provide complete answers about the politics and motives of the moment, but can at least attempt to put the pieces together — the root causes, the historical context, and who benefits.

In “This is the Atlanta way: a primer on Cop City,” published in Scalawag in 2023, Micah Herskind — an activist based in Atlanta — offers an explanation of “the city's corporate and state ruling class actors who have demanded that Cop City be built” and a history of land ownership and the politics of development in the city.

Bit by bit, for the reader, the inexplicably bad idea that is “Cop City” begins to make sense, as does the urgency and strategy of the struggle to stop it. This is movement journalism as political education: a way to explain our world beyond simply relaying the bad news to readers.

Political education is the process through which we learn to understand our material conditions, their root causes, and our own role in building the worlds and societies we want. By seeking to understand these underlying systems and structures while analyzing power and who benefits from oppression, we can see the roots of harm and hopefully develop better strategies to unearth it, a process called root cause analysis.

Traditions of popular political education often draw on theater, dialogue and debate, and self-reflection and storytelling to help people work through our relationships to power and oppression and arrive at a new perspective that enables action.

Read more in The Objective.

—Lewis Raven Wallace

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Five Palestinian journalists killed by Israeli airstrikes on Gaza hospital on Aug. 25: The journalists were Hussam al-Masri, a cameraman working for Reuters News Agency; Mohammed Salama, a photojournalist with Al Jazeera; Mariam Abu Daqqa, a journalist working with several media outlets, including the Associated Press; Ahmed Abu Aziz, a freelancer whose work appeared in Quds Feed; and Moaz Abu Taha, who was initially reported as working for NBC, though the network denied the connection. The National Writers Union is currently running a fundraiser for its sister union, the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate.

🏥 Read more in Truthout.

American Journalism Project-backed Signal Ohio newsrooms move to unionize: Fifteen union-eligible workers at Signal Akron, Signal Cleveland, and Signal Statewide — including all 14 of Signal Ohio’s full-time reporters — are seeking union recognition. “We’re looking for a seat at the table to work with leadership to usher in a collaborative next chapter for Signal Ohio – together,” the Signal Ohio News Worker Guild wrote in a petition calling for community support.

📰 Read more in Nieman Lab.

Efforts to crowdsource attendance numbers at Labor Day protests underway: The Xylom is spearheading the effort in the spirit of G. Elliott Morris’s work to do the same for No Kings protests. Morris’s nationwide coordination helped show those as the second-largest nationwide demonstration in U.S. history. The Xylom is asking reporters to contribute their reporting of protests in large and small cities across the country to a database, which it will consolidate and summarize after the protests.

📊 Contribute to The Xylom’s database on Google Sheets.

Tribal radio stations across the U.S. wait on $9 million promised in handshake deal: South Dakota Republican Sen. Mike Rounds negotiated with the White House budget director to move the funding to over 24 tribal stations in rural areas receiving community service grants from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. But Rounds’ office and other federal entities haven’t yet responded to emails asking for clarity about the timeline and amount of grants.

📻 Read the story in the North Dakota Monitor.

Have a story you think we should include in this section of next week’s newsletter? Let us know here or by responding to this email.

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Thanks for reading. We’ll have more for you next week.

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