Mutual aid for the knowledge sector

Gordon Whiting here, Newsjunkie's publisher, with a message of hope for denizens of the knowledge sector.

What is the knowledge sector? Private and public R&D in science, medicine, and high technology, the academies that prepare workers for this work, and the professionals and institutions that document and preserve the culture, policies, and laws that support and benefit from it. In other terms, the zone targeted and deeply damaged by President Trump.

Many of us have spent our lives looking into microscopes, archives, court filings, datasets, manuscripts, classrooms, and computer screens. Now we are lifting our eyes and seeing fires burning frighteningly close to the house. Funding is canceled. Data disappears. Findings are suppressed.

The first responses from the community have been encouraging. Researchers are organizing to preserve endangered data through channels such as the Data Rescue Project and the Internet Archive. States are beginning to fill the funding gap. But the knowledge sector remains organized as separate professions, each with its own mission, priorities, and defensive perimeter.

The threats are not separate. Our responses should not be separate.

No single profession can meet this moment alone. What is needed now is infrastructure: trusted mutual aid across the knowledge sector. Channels for communication. Shared funding. Emergency preservation. Legal defense. Technical support. Data sharing. The capacity for rapid cooperation across disciplines.

Newsjunkie has begun publishing practical guides for rebuilding and preserving knowledge work. Start here, at our Prairie Fire resource page—you'll find a wealth of tips and links to connect with others and keep things moving. At the basic level you can jumpstart an audit of your devices and communication channels with our article on digital hygiene.

For whistleblowers and sources who need to reach journalists safely, there is also SecureDrop, maintained by the Freedom of the Press Foundation. SecureDrop is an open-source system that allows news organizations and watchdog groups to receive documents and messages from people who may face serious risk for coming forward.

The deepest irony in all this is that the disruption comes at the edge of a breakthrough. Despite the forces arrayed against the knowledge sector, we may be entering one of the most fertile periods in human understanding: a convergence of refined scientific method, vast public datasets, hard-won proofs, and large-scale computing power. Don Swanson identified the phenomenon of undiscovered public knowledge—breakthrough insights that emerge from connecting disparate elements already present in the literature, waiting to be seen together. Our task now is to protect the conditions under which those connections can be made.

On point

Catherine Rampell's article Trump Is Making America Stupider: How MAGA is purging scientists and other skilled workers from both the private and public sectors. (The Bulwark)

Today's News for Tomorrow is a series of workshops from the Poynter Institute, IRE, and the Internet Archive on establishing sound data preservation practices for your news or research organization.

The Reynolds Journalism Institute at the Missouri School of Journalism published The State of Digital News Preservation, an important study of digital news preservation practices. Free download here.

Reddit is a lively and useful forum for communities already engaged in the matters of our concern. Here are ten subreddits we found stimulating: r/Journalism · r/Archivists · r/Libraries · r/LibraryScience · r/InformationScience · r/OpenAccess · r/Open_Science · r/Professors · r/legaltech · r/DataHoarder

From the pages of Newsjunkie

• Peter Landau's illuminating interview with Tangle founder Isaac Saul on the challenges of running a non-partisan news org.

• Morgan Kriesel's sobering interview with Marshall Project's Jill Castellano on coping with growing gaps in federal public data.

• We are also pleased to now offer RSS feeds of Newsjunkie articles and blog updates.

Knowledge is power. Thank you for reading Newsjunkie.

—Gordon