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Weak assumptions, bad habits: Sarah Alvarez on pushing journalism beyond “sloppy work”

Nieman Lab · Richard Tofel · last updated

Early this month, Sarah Alvarez, founder of Detroit’s Outlier Media and author of the newsletter Understated, was named the new James B. Steele Chair in Journalism Innovation at Temple University’s Klein College of Media and Communication. Sarah is a friend, and I was a board member at Outlier until last year. She is also, in my view, one of the most original thinkers in our field, and I wanted to hear what’s on her mind at this turning point in her own career. Our conversation, which occurred earlier this month, has been edited for length and clarity.

Tofel: One sort of smaller question: Outlier during your time there has done a number of mergers. What do you feel like you learned more generally from those?

Alvarez: So much. It’s mostly a good idea, even the merger that didn’t work out for us. We merged with MuckRock for a short period of time right before the pandemic, and it didn’t work out in the long term, but it saved our ass in the short term. One thing I have learned is that resource sharing is not as hard as people think it is. It makes a lot of sense, especially when resources are scarce, as they are in nonprofit news.

Mergers can also make sense because keeping talented people in work that they’re good at, and they like doing, is easier with mergers when we’re talking about smaller organizations, and especially local organizations where you have a smaller talent pool.

I think people should continue to do them, being clear-eyed about what the purpose is.

On Outlier, and hard work

Tofel: Anything else you wish I had asked you?

Alvarez: I do think it’s important to say I feel pretty good about the instincts that Outlier was built on. The idea that finding out what people’s information needs are is so important and should be the first thing that you do. At the same time, those early information needs assessments were not great, and I’m really happy that we now have the University of Michigan doing them for us with a really big sample, where we can rely on that information.

I don’t think that the assumptions that Outlier was built on were weak. I think they were good assumptions, and we tested them a lot, but we still had a lot of work to do in order to prove ourselves and to test those assumptions, and then to deliver the kind of quality product that we needed to do. And that took a long time, and does take a long time.

So it’s difficult to balance the urgency that I think news organizations need to operate with, and the care that we also need to operate with, if we want to build something better than what came before.

That’s the tension that I’ve always tried to hold, and what I want to keep doing, and that’s really hard. So as critical as I am of news organizations and the way that we do this work, I do know that these things are really difficult.

Richard Tofel was founding general manager (and first employee) of ProPublica, and was its president from 2013 until January 2022. This post originally appeared on Second Rough Draft, his newsletter about journalism — subscribe here.

Broom photo from Adobe Stock. Photo of Sarah Alvarez by Cyndi Elledge.
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