Irwin ChenFeatured Project

Wicked Problem Task Force System Map: Crisis of the Free Press

2016 - present

The Wicked Problem Task Force is a think tank led by Heather Chaplin, created through a 2016 grant from the Knight Foundation to explore the problems facing journalism from a 20,000 foot perspective. “Wicked Problem” is a term that originated from public policy circles to describe ill-defined and extremely complex problems that resist traditional problem-solving strategies. This map is the culmination of dozens of workshops with Heather Chaplin, Rajesh Bilimora, Eli Pariser, Kayla Christopherson, myself and other scholars and thinkers, as we tried to surface and document the factors at play in the crisis of the free press (circa 2017, updated later in 2024).# systems thinking
# workshop
# visualization
# presentation design
Mapping the Space

We created our own framework for thinking about the problem. This is a meta-map of the first order forces that are always at play and always have to be considered.



Overview
Our North Star: A resilient free press is the palladium of democracy.

Our boundaries: 
  • Journalism + media specific
  • Location: United States
  • Local + mid-size publications
  • Majority print publications

Our focus areas:
  1. Misinformation on Social Media 
    1. Social Media as an accelerant for misinformation
  2. Extreme Media + the Public -Extremification of Media
  3. Media Literacy + Social (tktk)  
  4. Media Literacy + Business Model
    1. State of Media Literacy
  5. Quality of News + Civic Engagement
  6. Culture of Media (De)Regulation
  7. Local News’ Relationship with Audiences
  8. Opportunities from Media Growth
  9. State of the Local News Business Model
  10. Advertising + Data Mining
  11. Social Media + the Attention Economy
  12. Attention Economy + Manipulation


Workshops


The Full Map (2020)



The Core Story

The free press is a means to an end, not the end itself. The public’s vulnerability to exploitation is what’s at stake. The growth of the Attention Economy makes us more vulnerable to exploitation, and the more vulnerable to exploitation we are, the stronger the Attention Economy grows.




The Neighborhoods

Connected to the core story, we identified some key loops, or neighborhoods, in the map, which highlighted trends we were also seeing in our research.