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Locus of control, according to Psychology Today, is a construct in personality psychology that “refers to the degree to which an individual feels a sense of agency in regard to his or her life.” There are two types of locus of control. There is internal locus of control, which means you’re more inclined to believe that what you do impacts what happens to you. Then there's external locus of control, which means you’re more likely to believe that actions by forces outside of you have greater control over your life.
Reading the news today, I keep feeling as if it is pulling my locus of control from internal to external, and I don’t like it. I feel my sense of personal agency draining with each headline. That’s difficult to admit as a former journalist. I used to love reading the news. It felt grounding, and what I learned each day felt useful. Granted, back then I had the privilege of writing it.
When I came of age in media, the industry was still in the early days of figuring out the internet and its implications. Circulation was out, page views were in, and “engagement” was the new buzzword. I was a YouTuber making videos back in 2007 -- before some of the youngest social media influencers were even born. I developed a show called “Just the Facts” – a product of FactCheck.org – well before Steve Ballmer’s well-funded effort of the same name. You’ll be hard pressed to find evidence of that now, and that’s probably for the best. It was an exercise in learning how to translate the fact-checking methodology we used into video, and we learned a lot from it. We also had a lot of fun making it.
Today, the digital tools to make the news that once felt new and exciting now feel old, tired, and not fit to purpose. It’s no wonder trust in news is declining.
Back in 2016, I wrote a piece about “fake news” and how the contract between newspaper subscribers and publishers had been broken and needed to be redesigned. In it, I wrote:
“...we’re getting a lot of fiction, because that’s what feels good. We’ll give up a lot to feel good, especially when it doesn’t immediately tap our wallets.”
Going back through that piece (which, like this one, desperately needed an editor), it feels quaint and more than a little naive. When I wrote that piece, I still believed that writing more – feeding more ideas into the machine – would help people better navigate the onslaught of new media and rhetoric that was emerging.
I was wrong. Writing more helped me (and maybe a few robots). It helped me process. Writing is, for my mind, like going to the gym is for the rest of my body. It’s how I strengthen my thinking.
That’s why I am writing again. Granted, I am doing so with far less rigor and institutional support than I did as a journalist. I am also diving into audio and, where I was slightly ahead with video, I am making up the rear of the audio train with a podcast called “Locus of Control”.
I have three goals for this podcast:
- Educate people on how to gather useful, trustworthy information
- Discover and share new ways to use information to improve the state of people’s lives
- Help people build (and rebuild) healthy communities
To achieve these goals, I want to talk to:
- analysts who use financial news to design portfolio strategies
- designers who use art coverage to develop new remixes that surface an entirely new fashion motif
- chefs who use research and reporting about food to get new ideas for meals
- academics who use general news to answer important research questions
- …and just about anyone who uses information to make positive change!
News, research, data – all of it is meant for you to use. The problem is that there’s so much of it, and it’s in so many different formats, it’s hard for us to make the transition from reading, listening, and watching stuff to making it useful. I want to talk about that, because if I am an ex-journalist (emphasis on the “ex”) who finds reading the news painful, overwhelming, and isolating – then I can only imagine how non-practitioners feel, which spells nothing but bad news for all of us going forward if that feeling doesn’t change.
I’m making “Locus of Control” under the banner of my sweet-summer-child of a tiny company, MarginCall.ai. The mission is to invest in diverse creators, build new tools for them, and surface their voices. It is (and will continue to be) somewhat messy from the start, and I am committed to showing as much of the work to put this product together as I can. Let’s see how it goes.
