Every day, for four decades, I have put my right shoe on first, and then my left. Same goes for my socks and pant legs. Over the past week, I tried switching it up. Each morning, I forced my right foot to stay put, as I raised my left. It felt hard and quite unnatural, despite the fact that I’m ambidextrous. I also fell over once. On the day my brain forgot it was doing this experiment, muscle memory took over.

There are several dozen self-help books that lay out a step-by-step process of how I could permanently change this habit, if that were my goal (cues, rewards, repetition, accountability, etc.) The behavioral scientists would warn me, however, that changing this particular practice could take a while. I’m not simply learning a new skill. Rather, I have to both teach my left foot to go first, and I have to unlearn the practice of letting my right lead.

I have no real interest in permanently altering how I put on my pants and shoes. I do, however, have a deep interest in more meaningful behavior change: namely, how we as journalists replace ingrained habits with new ones that allow us to better serve the communities we have long excluded and harmed. To do this — to create more useful news services produced by sustainable workplaces that are anti-racist and anti-toxic — there’s a lot we have to do differently. My prediction for 2024 is that we embrace this behavior change challenge of learning to unlearn.

What will we unlearn? Here are a few places we’ll start:

Let’s unlearn standard interview routines. Every interaction with a source is an opportunity to build trust. Most people in the world have never interacted with a reporter and have very little understanding of how the journalism sausage is made. Take a few extra minutes to go beyond your reporter’s spiel to explain how you put a story together, and what they can expect. This goes so far in engendering trust and building meaningful relationships. Here’s a super-useful tip sheet created by Madison Karas, alongside Resolve’s community engagement team, during Madison’s time as a fellow with us.

Let’s unlearn what’s “newsworthy.” Is it news because it’s alarming, shocking, or damaging? Is it news because we’re reporting out exceptional, hero-esque acts rather than everyday work that builds change slowly? Those of us who have been in the business for awhile — myself included — believe we have the gift of instinctively knowing “a good story.” Yet I am constantly challenged by my Resolve teammates who come from outside the profession to unpack those editorial instincts. Do I consider something a good story idea because it’s about the lives of those who are very different from my own white and privileged experience, and if so, wouldn’t it be better to report on what’s useful for the folks we’re trying to serve? (For a weekly dose of critical framing questioning, I recommend my colleague Aubrey Nagle’s newsletter Revisions.)

Let’s unlearn what a traditional newsroom looks like. At Resolve, we question the structure and makeup of conventional newsrooms and are establishing a model that is built for community responsiveness and impact. We have as many people on our community engagement team as we have reporters. Our staff and board are an expansive representation of the communities we serve. Our work responds to the information needs of those long harmed by traditional media narratives, and we also offer opportunities for folks to participate in the news-making and story-telling process. We prioritize meeting people where they are at with news and information rather than figuring out more ways for people to come to us. We believe that when we unlearn the generations-old conventions for staffing and maintaining the spaces in which the news is created, we lay the foundation for a more meaningful and useful news product.

Let’s unlearn the mandate of shedding our identities when we walk through the newsroom door. The North Star of objectivity was always an illusion: As humans, we are incapable of making decisions divorced from our personal experiences and perspectives. And journalism is nothing if not a never-ending stream of choices: Reporters and editors make choices about which stories to pursue, which people to interview, which quotes to use, which images to publish, which headlines to run, and more ad infinitum. If we don’t unlearn the practice of clinging to a goal which cannot exist, progress will be minimal.

None of this is simple. Unlike what it would take for me to change my dressing routine, this kind of unlearning is virtually impossible to do individually. It takes an infrastructure approach: collective action through teamwork, coaching, ongoing support, and accountability.

There are many of us eager to catalyze professional unlearning. Field-building groups like INN, Lion, Free Press, Gather, and Solutions Journalism Network are invaluable in this space, as are those who’ve been in the practice change business for decades, such as Maynard Institute and American Press Institute. Resolve recently felt called to this service by our mission of developing and advancing journalism rooted in equity, collaboration, and the elevation of community voices and solutions. In 2022, we established Modifier, an in-house professional development practice that supports newsrooms in their practice change. We’ve worked with over 50 newsrooms in their journeys of improving everything from community engagement to operational resilience.

Tomorrow, I’ll go back to saving my unlearning energy on something more important than my lower limb sequencing. In 2024, I and the rest of my team will continue unlearning ourselves, and we will double down on offering unlearning opportunities for others. This year, in combination with allies and colleagues doing aligned work across the country and world, my prediction is that the collective muscle memory of our industry will make some meaningful and necessary changes in 2024.