10 Comments

This is excellent. I now get that metajournalism is a thing I've appreciated without knowing its appellation. For example, via your writings and those of Heather Cox Richardson, not to mention my appreciation of Rachel Maddow's approach. Now I have a better grasp of what it is that I value and why when it comes to understanding the news. The five bucks a month to be here couldn't be better spent. Thanks, Seth.

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THIS. Is why we need a Poet, a Professor, an Academic Researcher, an Attorney, and a Post Post-Modern Metamodernist to reconstruct the dialectical deconstructionists' methodology: "Proof of Collusion (Simon & Schuster, 2018), Proof of Conspiracy (Macmillan, 2019), and Proof of Corruption (Macmillan, 2020)—are epic works of print metajournalism that required extraordinary resources to finish, including $75,000 in fact-checking costs, a team of 12 professional fact-checkers, a professionally formatted online index of sources hundreds of pages long, and compositional and editing techniques that are wholly foreign to traditional political nonfiction (for instance, writing at the level of the sentence rather than the paragraph, such that one sentence might be written and then immediately designated to chapter 33, the next chapter 19, and so on; the book is written “from the inside out,” that is, rather than sequentially)". You are a brilliant Renaissance Man and I am so grateful for what I learn from you, and proud to be one of your many followers.

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Clearly I am not educated on journalism, but I find the metajournalism you provide helpful to the extent that it blows my mind I was not aware of the connections you show, that everyone isn’t aware. I thank you for your work.

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Brilliant, exposition on meta journalism. Thank you.

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The news junkie or more politely perhaps, the news hound, curates and aggregates for themselves in passing. How to help them get better at it for their own purposes, and have them output a synthesis, the metamodern tonic for the indigestion caused by the now-ist journalistic system, falling further away each passing day from the ideal public good we hoped it could be?

Or -

How in the heck do we do metajournalism ourselves? !??!!??!!

Where is a syllabus? A curriculum? A how-to? This is a hint. :-)

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I enjoyed this very much. The more I read, the more I began to think "history". As you say in item 4: "One might go even further back into history and note that metajournalists are engaged in modes of research, analysis, synthesis, and the curation of extant work-product that every historian would recognize as the work of historians since time immemorial." Thank you from a Danish historian.

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👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻 Thank you for this! I agree with another commenter that I didn't understand before that I highly value curatorial journalism and why, as well as why I dislike brand journalism. But now I can articulate my thoughts much better after reading this! Over and over I have seen that brand journalism and other big outlets omit context and background and I began to distrust or rather ignore them because they provide so little value. Honestly you provide context and background so well no matter what you're doing, and so this article does an amazing job walking us through metajournalism and so many aspects surrounding it. Cannot wait for the next articles in this series!!

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Thanks for this article. It provides a very foundational understanding/perspective on modern journalism. For me, many of the details of your curatorial journalism have been gleaned from your tweets and mentions in your articles here but remained vague in my mind. This lays out the relationship between some of the streams of conventional journalism and metajournalism clearly as well as pointing out some of the reasons for antagonism from "brand" journalism. I'm looking forward to your future articles on the subject.

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That was really interesting. Thank you.

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beautifully written. well done!

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