When Gloria Steinem looked back at the exhilarating early days of launching Ms. magazine, her fondest memory wasn’t a landmark cover or a legislative victory. It was the daily conference room.
“What I miss most are the editorial meetings,” she once said. “In some sense, to me, life is an editorial meeting, but ours were so free and open and full of spark. They included pretty much the whole staff and people who just wandered by and people who were visiting.”
To modern workers drowning in calendar invites and guarded gatekeeping, that sounds like another planet. Today, our meetings, both real and metaphorical, are locked down tight. We demand RSVPs, stick to rigid agendas, and carefully screen who gets in the room. We have organized away the unexpected guest.
Steinem’s insight wasn’t just newsroom nostalgia. It offers a vital blueprint for American life: treating our world like an open editorial meeting, where unexpected ideas and random drop-ins keep us honest and sharp.
At its core, a healthy democracy runs on editorial instincts. We decide which issues to focus on, weigh competing evidence, and admit when an initial idea needs a serious rewrite. But a meeting only works if the door stays unlatched. When rooms are sealed, bad habits turn into gospel, and people end up talking only to themselves
If we want to honor Steinem’s model, we can start by opening up three everyday areas of life.
First, in our offices, tear up the RSVP list. Over the past two decades, workplace communication has become strictly guarded. Major planning sessions are limited to high-ranking titles in the name of efficiency. But companies go stale when the same few people do all the talking.
Smart leaders should leave the door open. Invite junior staffers, interns and colleagues from other floors to listen and pitch. Real breakthroughs rarely come from a preset agenda; they come from someone who hasn’t learned the office taboos yet.
Second, in our towns and schools, pull up more chairs. Public life has become badly over-curated. From campus lecture halls to city council hearings, we show up mostly to cheer on our side and drown out the other. We curate our dinner tables and social feeds to avoid the discomfort of a challenge.
Democratic life needs the drop-in visitor. We should design public debates and town halls where opposing views are welcomed into the core conversation, not just tolerated out in the hallway. A free nation cannot work if we only talk with people whose minds are already made up.
Third, in our own heads, learn to edit with courage. Managing the meeting inside your own mind takes balance. Steinem’s approach means keeping an open-door policy for your thoughts: giving unfamiliar arguments and uncomfortable facts a fair hearing without getting instantly defensive.
At the same time, real editing means knowing what to cut. Just as an editor kills a weak sentence or a rumor, we have to throw out outmoded grudges, tribal assumptions and unexamined habits when the facts don’t back them up.
Steinem’s key word was spark. You need friction to start a fire, and friction requires people bumping into one another from different vantage points and backgrounds. In our rush to insulate our days, our work and our minds from surprise, we have built a culture that runs smoothly but feels increasingly numb.
The First Amendment protects our right to assemble, but the vitality of that right depends entirely on the spirit of the room. If we want a culture and a country that can keep renewing itself, we need to unlock the door, pull up a spare chair and welcome whoever happens to walk in.
Stuart N. Brotman is Digital Media Laureate at The Media Institute and the author of “Free Expression Under Fire: Defending Free Speech and Free Press Across the Political Spectrum.” He can be reached at snbrotman@gmail.com.
Comments
No comments on this item Please log in to comment by clicking here