A seasonal despondency in journalism

My friend Dhiya has been writing and publishing one blog post every week for the last 87 weeks in a series she simply calls ‘dilettante’. The eighty-fifth edition focused on an issue I am currently engaged deeply with at work: as a journalist trying to make their team’s work digital-first and as a journalist contending with the consequences of their work via the internet. Excerpt:Pollsters have always known that it is impossible to survey everyone. The entire discipline is built on the idea that a representative sample can tell you something useful about the whole electorate. But what happens when the people willing to answer surveys stop looking like the electorate itself?In 2026, the people most likely to respond to political polls tend to be more politically engaged, more interested in current affairs, and often highly educated. That’s all great to know, but that’s one set of voters. Pollsters know this, so they compensate, they accommodate for "non-response bias." They weigh the…