Dear Friends,

I'm a big fan of podcasts as a storyteller myself. It has been a while since I listened to On Being with Krista Tippett. This podcast has been a favorite of mine for a long time. What I love about On Being is that it connects me with people, places, and ideas that are new to me or that offer a nuanced perspective on something familiar.

I scrolled through and landed on the May 2025 episode, "Our Lives with the News”. I hoped would give me some new perspective on why I'm struggling so much with journalism as an allied field to our work. It is a conversation with David Bornstein, who is a journalist and the CEO of Solutions Journalism Network.

According to a 2022 Reuters Institute study, 40% of Americans actively avoid the news. Bornstein suggests that it's the storytelling formula that is at fault. Journalism's storytelling structure engages our amygdala, the part of the brain that is responsible for our fight-or-flight response. We’re hard wired to look out for danger, so it makes sense that we pay attention to stories that arouse fear. It also makes sense 40% of us would rather avoid activating our reptilian brain and, instead, tune out entirely.

What if journalists, like doctors, took a Hippocratic oath to do no harm? Bornstein suggests such an oath may include (read by Krista):

‍“Don’t make people excessively fearful. Don’t make fun of people. Don’t look down on them. Don’t tell people about threats, and then leave them hanging without a sense of what can be done. Don’t flatten people into stereotypes. Make people curious. Feed humility. Help them see that there are things that don’t fit their narratives, both about themselves and about others. Show the humanity, the complexity in others, especially in the other. Be radically helpful, show you care by being helpful. Show people that we have their backs. Don’t overwhelm people with too much information they can’t take in or do anything about; it’s unkind. Listen deeply and respectfully; stop condescending. Don’t make people look foolish. Don’t only come around when you want to show what’s wrong with a place.”

‍These are principles that we can all practice as we curate our own news feeds.

What if journalists shared stories that activated our prefrontal cortex instead: the part of the human brain that likes to solve puzzles, our innate curiosity, and our desire to understand. What if news outlets, Bornstein proposes, “developed a model called a howdunit?” Such stories could ask questions like, “how did this community do this remarkable thing to reduce homelessness?” Or “how did this school actually increase the high school graduation rate when all the other schools with similar resources haven’t been able to figure that one out?”

In other words, what if a primary purpose of storytelling–whether it is oral history or journalism or literary fiction or documentary–was to be radically helpful? What kind of world would that create?

I want to live in a world that is radically helpful and that makes people curious. I hope that Window Seat is contributing in our own small way to creating such a world. We have a busy spring ahead that strives to create opportunities for curiosity and connection. I hope you'll join us!

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Until soon,

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Elaine Vradenburgh

Window Seat Media, Memory Activist

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