Lately here at DCS we have been thinking about the future of media and tech—how they relate to tears in the social fabric and offer fresh possibilities for knitting it back together. 

Our associate Mark Glaser has been working with the Knight Foundation to launch the News @ Knight email newsletter, a biweekly missive that peers behind the curtain of the foundation’s strategy for local journalism philanthropy and offers a roundup of innovations across the field.

“There are a lot of existing media and journalism email newsletters, but we wanted to give a unique viewpoint so people could understand Knight’s strategy in its support for local news,” Glaser said. “And we wanted to have fun doing it. Combining think pieces with short takes is the perfect mix.” In the most recent edition of the newsletter, Knight VP of Journalism Jim Brady and Glaser cover the National Association of Broadcasters conference, the success of the recent NewsMatch campaign, and the increase in older Americans working as local news reporters. 

Over at Immerse, the team released an issue called “AI etc.” It features a collaboration with the Alliance for Media Arts + Culture on a public statement in response to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy’s call for comments about an AI “bill of rights.” Concerns about AI’s role in spreading bias and misinformation are rampant, and this issue explores how media makers and artists are responding.

For my futurist-in-residence gig with with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, I’ve been exploring the relationship between media and health equity across a variety of realms: misinformation, public trust in news, the dangers of pernicious narrative frames, and the unexpected ways in which people acquire medical information. To get a read on what might come next, I’ve read a slew of articles and reports. Just a sampling:  Future Today Institute’s look at tech trends related to journalism and entertainment; Politico’s glumly-titled package “Is the Media Doomed?” and head-scratchers such as “This horse-riding astronaut is a milestone in AI’s journey to make sense of the world,” from the MIT Technology Review. 

Associate Carrie McLaren has also been exploring the intersection between digital games, apps, and health. She’s been researching the rise of fitness video games and the potential of gamification for medical training and diagnosis. Quick! Name that lesion!

See below for more about what we’ve been discovering over the past few months.

What we’ve been reading lately with #DCS_Reads

We’re keeping an eye on debates in art, tech, philanthropy, and more. Follow along each week Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook and use #DCS_Reads to share articles you think we’d enjoy. 

• How local news is championing meteorology.
• Your attention didn’t collapse. It was stolen. 
• Jon Haidt on why social media has dissolved the mortar of our society 
• How Birds Aren’t Real took on the conspiracy theorists

Fun With Futures

This month we’re exploring:

• How the Urgent Optimists community is jointly building scenarios for better futures, while tracking signals of worse ones—like this Disney logo you can see from space.
• The Things We Did Next, a set of interconnected artworks which “transport collaborators, participants + audiences to 2029 when significant impacts on planetary health are a daily reality.”
• The Belonging, Care and Repair report, produced by UK-based consultancy Careful Industries, which offers scenarios based in 2026 using a method which “puts decentred, alternative knowledge in conversation with dominant or ‘official’ future narratives.”
• The Beautiful Trouble deck, which places “key strategies and tactics that have powered centuries of people-powered victories right into the palm of your hand.”

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