Two quick subscriber updates.
- From January 2026 onwards the Blind Spot will once again be a fully independent outlet, as my affiliation with Politico will have come to an end. This is good news for readers as I will be able to dedicate myself fully to fulfilling our founding mission. The go slow this past week has been a function of that transition.
- We will be sticking to the cartography journalism principle that we outlined in our September revamp. But content should become more frequent (and bold!). Plus, we are hoping to unveil a daily aggregation post that pools all our best tips, links and sources in one place.
But now some thoughts and reflections on what has been and what is to come, and how we may adapt to better serve readers now that we have more time on our hands.
The challenges we face are clear.
The relentless pace of the news in the AI age means that less increasingly has to be more, which in turn demands firm limits on the scope of our coverage. Yet we still need a way to stay oriented — to maintain a sense of the big picture, and to surface and interrogate our own blind spots. That mechanism is worth rethinking. Not a return to the old model (a weekly, Politico-style round-up of “blind spotty” developments), which proved clunky and suboptimal, but something more dynamic, more playful, and more responsive. Ideally, it should enhance situational awareness while compensating for the fact that I will no longer be embedded in a mainstream editorial structure.
A major downside of not being part of a disciplined and professional editorial structure is that authors can lose touch with broader norms. Whether one agrees with what the mainstream is saying or not, it pays to be tethered to that world to understand how the Overton window is operating in establishment circles. One also picks up a lot of knowledge and awareness by osmosis. But the real value lies less in exposure to consensus views than in the discipline of having to test, defend, and refine one’s own arguments against them. Likewise, one often learns more about what is actually happening in the world by observing what commands colleagues’ attention— and what they are collectively working on — than by dutifully scanning every newspaper each morning.
Replicating that with a team of two is difficult. Dario and I have a weekly conversation about editorial direction, but our ability to triangulate beyond our own instincts is inevitably constrained by time and bandwidth. To guard against tunnel vision I have always depended heavily on the Blind Spot’s Discord community to keep me in check. Their input remains invaluable. But increasingly it feels insufficient on its own. What’s needed I think is something more structured, more disciplined — and potentially something that could evolve into a product in its own right.
That’s why my initial instinct was to open up our editorial discussions to select contributors and to make them fully public facing. Not only would that be useful for me and Dario, I think it could be useful for all sorts of people who would prefer to stress test the morning news flow, rather than just absorb it from third parties.
In that vein, I organized an impromptu X Spaces chat on Friday to solicit initial feedback on the idea. For those interested, below is the AI write-up of what was discussed:
Izabella Kamińska proposed the idea of a “shadow” morning editorial conference as a response to what she sees as deep structural problems in how news agendas are currently formed and filtered. She explained that she feels overwhelmed by the sheer volume of daily news and increasingly frustrated that both mainstream media and independent outlets struggle to provide genuine sense-making. In her view, mainstream editorial conferences are heavily driven by institutional news flows, press diaries, leaks, and competitive pressures, which leads to reactive coverage and a narrowing of focus. Important cross-cutting or obscure stories are often missed because they do not sit neatly within one beat or section, while debate itself is squeezed out by time constraints and hierarchical decision-making. At the same time, she argued that independent media is not immune from failure: while it can challenge orthodoxies, it risks developing its own groupthink, blind spots, and captured audiences in the absence of the daily discipline and challenge that a formal editorial process provides.
Her proposal is therefore to experiment with an open, time-limited, and explicitly exploratory “shadow” editorial meeting that runs alongside, rather than replaces, mainstream processes. The purpose would be to collectively ask what the mainstream is missing, what angles are being overlooked in dominant stories, and how disparate developments fit into a bigger picture. She sees this as a way to check her own biases, counter fragmentation between “mainstream” and Substack-style media, and recreate a space for real debate that she feels has largely disappeared from modern newsrooms. The conference would be grounded in The Blind Spot’s three-pillar mission: identifying genuinely ignored stories, interrogating neglected angles in heavily covered topics, and providing big-picture analysis that breaks through silos. She also suggested that such a forum could eventually guide or inspire follow-up reporting, acting as a kind of collective early-warning system for stories that deserve more attention.
In the discussion, Izabella “IYKYK” (if you know, you know) knowledge gaps as one of the core structural failures of the modern information environment, and as a key reason why a shadow editorial conference might be necessary. She argued that media fragmentation and the internet have created closed epistemic loops in which important knowledge circulates only among small, already-informed groups.
Izabella contrasted this with what she described as the much harder but more important challenge: serving people who “don’t know, but want to know.” She suggested that mainstream media increasingly avoids deep, nuanced explanations because online distribution makes stories travel far beyond their intended audience, raising fears of misinterpretation, backlash, or reputational risk. As a result, coverage is often flattened, simplified, or sanitized, reinforcing the IYKYK dynamic rather than breaking it.
Rabobank’s Michael Every joined the chat and strongly reinforced the need for such a mechanism. Drawing on his own experience of producing daily news digests, he described how difficult and exhausting it is to scan widely enough to spot what really matters, especially when the most important stories are often buried or published by less prominent outlets. He gave a concrete example: proposed U.S. legislation to revive “letters of marque,” effectively legalising private-sector piracy for drug interdiction or tanker seizures. He argued this was a hugely consequential story with implications for defense, energy markets, geopolitics, budgets, and political economy, yet it had been largely ignored because it did not fit cleanly into any single beat and because many journalists simply did not understand it. Michael suggested that this kind of story illustrates exactly why mainstream media misses important developments: coverage is siloed, journalists write for specific audiences, and institutions implicitly tailor “news for parrots” or “news for hamsters,” to borrow his Monty Python analogy. He endorsed Izabella’s idea that a shadow editorial conference should explicitly start by asking what headlines are absent and what is not being seen within the headlines that do exist, as a way to transcend these structural blind spots.
Dario’s contribution focused on the value of people-based intelligence and collaborative filtering in an era of information overload and platform decay. He agreed that individual news scanning has become inefficient, noting how sources such as Telegram channels or online communities quickly degrade once they grow popular, flooding users with noise. He illustrated the benefit of collective sense-making with an example from Spanish politics, where a crucial shift in the balance of power became clear to him not through mainstream coverage but through conversation with someone deeply embedded in that national context. For Dario, this showed how easily even attentive readers can miss decisive details without input from others who see different parts of the picture. He strongly supported the idea of engaging readers and contributors directly, arguing that human interaction is increasingly valuable as AI-generated content proliferates and online discourse becomes more distorted. He also emphasized that conversation and debate work far better in live, human settings than through text alone, which often amplifies conflict and misunderstanding.
Taken together, the discussion framed the shadow morning editorial conference as an attempt to rebuild a lost function of journalism: a shared, contested space for prioritization, interpretation, and challenge. Izabella sees it as a disciplined but open forum that could help counter media fragmentation, reduce blind spots on both the mainstream and independent sides, and re-anchor journalism in debate, context, and collective judgment rather than volume, speed, or algorithmic visibility.
As became clear over the course of the discussion, any move to simply simulate a conventional morning editorial conference would quickly run into issues.
Time pressures mean most daily conferences amount to a rundown of what to expect from reporters that day, diary events and general editorial admin. They are not conifgured to tolerate debate. Discussions about what coverage to prioritize or which stories to chase or focus on are usually relegated to weekly or even monthly news meetings. And that, I think, is part of the problem the media faces. The really good and thoughtful discussions (i.e. those that lead to real journalism) often end up being deprioritized, or overseen by specialist section editors at the team level who might be blinkered about the broader factors in play. That, in turn, encourages siloed thinking, poor sense-making, and, in the worst case scenario, unconscious bias. The overall outcome results in wonderful reporting at the niche level, but an abundance of reporters who don’t understand the broader implications of what they are covering (and thus how they may or may not be being used).
A good example of what I’m talking about comes in recent coverage of the Russian frozen assets story. I had the privilege of witnessing how coverage of this topic evolved among non financial experts. For me, it was brazenly obvious from the get go that brash and jingoistic statements from politicians about immediate asset seizure were hopelessly naive.
I argued early on that outright confiscation was unlikely to be feasible, not for moral or political reasons, but because the market and legal consequences would be prohibitively costly for a system built on the credibility of property rights. This reality, however, took a very long time to sink in in Brussels. Thus, the Brussels “consensus” initially failed to anticipate the level of complexity such a policy would entail.
This misreading was reflected in the coverage. Each new proposal from Eurocrats was largely reported at face value, with only passing or highly contextual references to the counter-arguments. The bias here was structural rather than intentional, however. Brussels reporting is overwhelmingly shaped by political sources, not market or financial ones, which means the “market perspective” is routinely underweighted or sidelined. In practice, the only consistent check on this dynamic tends to come from central banks. In this case, the ECB didn’t buckle on its opposition to the move. But while the ECB’s view was represented in coverage (especially once specialist ECB coverage was initiated) that’s only because it had become a formal part of the conversation.
At the broader level, the ECB’s objections were still frequently waved away — treated as exaggerated, overly cautious, or ultimately negotiable. An unspoken assumption emerged that the central bank would eventually fall into line because it was simply the moral and just thing to do. The outcome? The case against confiscation was never afforded the weight it merited.
Reflecting on how this bias emerged, I’ve concluded it’s because the job of overtly “non partisan” political media is not to question the prevailing logic in Brussels, or to help course correct blind spots. Rather, the job is to report on the current thinking doing the rounds regardless of its merit. The emphasis, in other words, is on chasing how Eurocrats pursue their objectives, regardless of whether the policies are practical or not. (The reality check on the campaign to seize Russian assets famously came this week.)
This, to be clear, is not a moan about any particular outlet. It’s more an observation about how the political reporting “system” works at large, and how it unwittingly captures people — because, to be frank, these processes were alien to me until I found myself in that world.
I daresay there are important lessons for markets and investors in these reflections.
Crucially, I retain a great deal of respect for this kind of non-partisan political reporting. It requires discipline, restraint, and a deeply ingrained professional ethic. It is old-school in the best sense, and in many ways a necessary counterweight to the glut of opinionated, speculative, and heavily editorialized content that now dominates the internet. At its best, it illuminates otherwise opaque deliberations at the highest levels of power and provides a crucial form of public oversight. It offers the public a window into the deal-making room. Moreover, as far as the model is concerned, interpreting the information it collects, contesting it politically, or offering corrective judgments is not its key responsibilty. That responsibility lies with those it serves.
In many respects, the reporting model works best when its coverage resists the urge to persuade or influence those it is reporting on. The reporter’s role instead is relegated to that of a detached observer — less participant than witness — akin to a time traveller from the future whose success depends on remaining unnoticed in the present, careful not to disturb events in ways that might unravel the very timeline they are there to record.
The problem is that while such a set-up is noble at heart, the model is not infallible.
Crucially, it abdicates the fourth estate’s traditional responsibility to challenge and correct system-wide errors of judgment.
Moreover, it places a great deal of faith in the idea that major errors of judgment or false assumptions at the heart of the body politic will reliably be corrected through the very democratic processes it is covering. This assumes that acting as a largely uncritical amplifier of elite discourse — a kind of Wurlitzer for what is being said in the room — has no material effect on those corrective mechanisms, and does not generate unintended politicized feedback loops that ultimately entrench non-democratic dynamics or further detach the establishment from underlying reality.
In practice, however, the belief that this model is resistant to capture or politicization is naïve. What it unintentionally enables is a form of amplification bias: views that dominate elite discourse — however flawed, incomplete, or unrepresentative of broader public sentiment — acquire authority simply through repetition. Dissenting or popular perspectives are crowded out, corrective signals weaken, and over time the narrative hardens into something that feels settled rather than contingent.
George Orwell’s contention, of course, was that journalism was printing what someone else did not want printed, and that everything else was public relations. Non-partisan political reporting, in theory, adheres to this principle because it is so preoccupied with obtaining leaks from motivated sources, elevating opposition and NGO talking points, exposing private political discussions, and getting ahead of the curve on voting intention.
But while such practices truly do hold power to account, they remain reactionary. Most pertinently, they rarely move upstream to test whether the assumptions guiding policy — and counter policy — are sound in the first place.
This is precisely the gap that a functioning fourth estate was meant to fill — and the one that has quietly widened as journalism has become ever more process-driven and access-dependent.
Resisting capture
I am no political theorist, but a growing body of media research suggests this is not an aberration so much as an emergent property of modern information systems. Highly motivated minorities, operating with discipline and persistence, are often better positioned to shape elite debate than diffuse majorities. Journalists, especially those working within process-driven, non-interventionist models, can become inadvertent intermediaries in this dynamic. This means that by faithfully relaying what is being said “in the room,” they can inadvertently mistake saturation for significance, and visibility for representativeness. They may also get too close to sources who have the ways and means (motivation, time and funding) to convince them that all counter perspectives to their own are too kooky and unserious to promote. Indeed, that doing so, may make the reporters themselves appear unserious.
The paradox is that a reporting model which understands itself as neutral, and therefore above politics, can end up reinforcing distortions within it.
Critically, severe bandwidth constraints mean that broad, cross-cutting editorial debates happen infrequently, while specialist section editors exercise disproportionate influence over the balance of coverage in their domains. The lobbying industry understands this vulnerability well and has learned to exploit specialism, shaping narratives by targeting the nodes where scrutiny is most limited.
The result is that foundational assumptions often go untested.
By the time democratic pushback filters through the system, slowly and imperfectly, much of the damage is already done. The irony is that it is often generalists and polymaths, rather than specialists, who spot these failures early — but they lack an institutional role in day-to-day agenda-setting.
This suggests that neutral reporting of this variety may not always be what the system needs at all.
What is missing, I daresay, is not more opinion, but a built-in adversarial function: a standing devil’s advocate in the morning editorial debate whose job is to interrogate assumptions, stress-test consensus against external realities (without stigma!), and surface inconvenient lines of inquiry before they are crowded out. What must become common is wisdom is that neutrality of intent does not guarantee neutrality of effect — and without structured internal dissent that questions core assumptions when evidence suggests such assumptions are worth questioning, even the most conscientious reporting can end up entrenching error rather than correcting it.
To that end I would like to run a daily editorial conference on an open and transparent basis to counter such blind spots, including within my own editorial filter bubble. The aim would be to step back from the noise of the news cycle and systematically review the broader agenda each day, testing it against our founding mission. In practice, that means asking three simple questions:
- What is the mainstream missing today?
- Which angles are being underplayed or overlooked?
- What larger pattern or emerging picture is beginning to take shape?
The goal is not to manufacture contrarianism for its own sake, but to institutionalize a form of daily devil’s advocacy — one that improves sense-making rather than simply accelerates amplification.
I’m not saying this will definitely work. In fact, I suspect it probably won’t. But I’d like to run the experiment next Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday at 10 a.m. U.K. time as a type of audition. For now we will use X to run the experiment, but we may resort to Discord in the long run. I would be delighted if specialists from all sorts of different fields in finance, business and economics “auditioned” to be contributors. Or even generalists. It’s entirely ad-hoc for now. No commitments necessary. Just turn up if you feel like it. See you then, if you’re interested.
