Dear Journalists: The war on what you do is escalating.

When the most powerful person in the world declares war on journalism, you can respond in one of two ways. The first adds up to surrender, and I’m sorry to say that some of you appear to have done so, by normalizing what is grossly abnormal and letting your enemies take advantage of the journalism craft’s innate weaknesses.

The other is to find allies, inside and outside the business, and go on the offensive — together.

The glimmerings of that second option may be appearing. Dozens of newspaper editorial boards are plan to use their platforms this week to call out Donald Trump’s escalating war on a free press — to “educate readers to realize that an attack on the First Amendment is unacceptable,” Marjorie Pritchard, a deputy managing editor of The Boston Globe, told the Associated Press late last week.

This is a welcome development. It’s also not nearly enough.

So I’m begging my friends who work in journalism’s non-commentary operations: If you don’t follow up on this collective complaining with real muscle, your organizations will have demonstrated the kind of weakness that Trump and his supporters are convinced — maybe correctly — that rests at the core of the craft.

You — and probably free speech — can’t constantly play defense. You can’t win if you rise to Trump’s bait and start calling him an enemy. And as my friend Jay Rosen said the other day, you need to go way, way beyond Washington Post Editor Marty Baron’s famous but too-facile admonition: “We’re not at war. We’re at work.”

The Post is doing mostly excellent work. It’s not enough.

Instead, I’m begging journalists in general to declare a sweeping mission. You need to fight, not against Trump, but for a free press and freedom of expression, in every possible way you can find. Most of all, you have to do more journalism, with renewed passion, skill, relentlessness, and — this is essential — collective action.

That means breaking with customs, and some traditions — changing the journalism, and some of the ways you practice it, to cope with the onslaught of willful misinformation aimed at undermining public belief in basic reality. You can start by looking at the public’s information needs from the public’s point of view, not just your own.

The collaboration needs to be broad, and deep, across organizations and platforms. It can be immediate — such as an agreement among White House reporters to resist the marginalizing, or banning outright, of journalists who displease the president. If a legitimate reporter is banned from an event, or verbally dismissed in a briefing or press conference, other journalists should either boycott the event or, at the very least, ask and re-ask his or her question until it’s answered. In the briefing room, show some spine, and do it together.

Much more important — and something that should become a standard practice — collaborate on the fundamental journalism itself. One vital element of this should be providing the context that is so often missing. Today’s short-attention-span breaking news coverage amounts to mini-scoops followed by maxi-repetition and, typically, zero explanation of where the latest bit of news fits in the larger picture — the classic focus on trees while missing the forest. As Todd Gitlin put it recently, ignoring context is like “you are reporting a baseball game as if people in uniforms are running around a diamond and chasing a ball for no apparent reason at all.”

T he kind of collaboration I want you to do isn’t entirely absent from journalism. It’s definitely not a new idea. In 1976, after the assassination of Phoenix investigative reporter Don Bolles, dozens of the nation’s top investigative journalists descended on Phoenix to continue his work. Earlier this year, after the murder of Daphne Caruana Galizia in Malta, journalists launched “Forbidden Stories” to help send a don’t-go-there-again message to the malefactors.

Meanwhile, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists is doing astonishing work with a cadre of journalists and organizations around the planet on projects such as the Panama Papers. And in the U.S., ProPublica has partnered widely on focused investigations that have justly won major awards.

Again, terrific but not enough — not even close.

The collaborations we need from you even more in the Trump era should have several organizing principles. You should go deep and wide into topics that are just too big, or too diffuse, for even the best journalism organizations to tackle comprehensively on their own. The topics and issues should be of obvious interest to a large segment of the public — already the subject of some coverage, but mostly one-offs or sporadic bursts of attention that don’t convey their overall importance. You should hire specialists to help you do these collaborations — researchers, data scientists, forensic accountants, lawyers, and more — and invite your audiences to contribute their own knowledge. And there should be a collaborative plan to ensure that the results of these collaborations moves to the public agenda.

What kinds of topics? Here are a few, among many others I could suggest:

Yes, each of these broader topics has been covered. But there’s been little or no effort by journalism to put them front and center on the public agenda where they belong and in full context — showing the forest and the trees. The traditions of “competitive” journalism, combined with the shrinking resources news organizations are able to deploy, have turned so much of our news into a blizzard of quick hits and near-identical clickbait. (Slightly rewritten versions of other people’s stories is a bane of the new world of journalism. So is needless duplication of effort, such as having hundreds of reporters show up for made-for-TV events. News organizations should routinely collaborate on pool coverage — much more than they already do — to free up reporters to do real reporting.)

The kinds of collaborations I’m talking about would be difficult to set up and manage, to put it mildly. Certainly the international consortium proves it can be done brilliantly on certain kinds of stories. Can it be done right on the bigger and broader ones? Why not at least try?

This kind of effort would do best with some outside funding — for startup costs, management, researchers, accountants, lawyers, etc. — in addition to the journalism provided by the news organizations. Hello, foundations and philanthropists (Ford, MacArthur, Knight, Omidyar, et al): This is in your wheelhouse.

Who’d own the output? I’d argue for publishing as much as possible under a Creative Commons license — articles, data, transcripts, documents. Make the results of the journalism be available to everyone. These are issues of essential public interest.

Do this right, and you’ll achieve something we all need right now: an affirmation of why journalism still matters.

The editorial page editors in this week’s loose collaboration will do their best to make that case. I wish them well, and thank them.

But the rest of us in the journalism ecosystem should use their commentaries as the launch pad for a bigger, broader, and game-changing campaign. We have a lot at stake: maybe the republic itself.

https://medium.com/@dangillmor/dear-journalists-the-war-on-what-you-do-is-escalating-eb584529a271