Last week, we asked the GroundTruth community to help us think about what comes next — and we’ve already heard from some of you.

So far, readers tell us they value stories about local news and community reporting, Charles Sennott’s personal reflections and experiences, and press freedom and democracy most. And when we asked what could make a paid GroundTruth membership valuable, the most popular answers so far are Behind-the-scenes reporting and insights from Charles and other journalists.

But there’s one problem: less than 1% of our readers have responded so far.

We know it’s the end of summer, and the timing may not be perfect. But we’d really love to hear from as many of you as possible. The survey takes less than five minutes — we timed it!

Your answers will help us understand what GroundTruth means to its readers and shape what comes next: what we cover, what journalism we invest in, and what a future membership might look like.

If you have a Substack account, take the survey here:

Substack survey

If not, take it here:

Google Forms Survey

Everyone who completes the survey will be entered into a random drawing to receive a free six-month paid subscription to GroundTruth. We’ll select 10 winners.

If you’ve already responded, thank you. And if you haven’t, we’d love to know what you think.

What we’re reading this week

• USA-Canada: Journalism must not become a bargaining chip in trade negotiations | Staff, Reporters Without Borders

• Pentagon Spokesperson Admits There’s a Secret Blacklist of Journalists | Nick Turse, The Intercept

• A year after Israeli strikes killed journalists at a hospital, no one has been held accountable | Sam Mednick, AP News

• Student Journalists: AI Is Changing Our Work — And Not For the Better | Greg Toppo, The 74

• The Shipping News Stars | Amos Barshad, Columbia Journalism Review

Charlie is taking some time with family this summer, and so over the next two weeks, we’re going to use this space to listen to our readers and learn more about our GroundTruth community. In September, we’ll return to a regular schedule, but in the meantime, your feedback will inform the decisions we will take in the coming weeks about what to cover, what kinds of journalism we invest in, and what future membership benefits might look like. We will share our findings with you all next month.

As a thank-you, everyone who completes the survey will be entered into a random drawing to receive a free six-month paid subscription to GroundTruth. We’ll select 10 winners.

About the survey: The first nine questions are required; the next nine are optional but would help us learn more about you, our audience. Responses are connected to your subscriber account, but we’ll share our findings in aggregate and won’t attribute comments publicly. If you have any questions, feel free to email us at info@groundtruth.org

Thank you for being part of GroundTruth and for helping us shape what comes next.

If you have a Substack account, click the “Start Survey” button below:

Start Survey

If not, click the Google Forms link (Google account not necessary):

Google Forms Survey

What we’re reading this week

• Under new ownership, The Palisadian-Post reunites and serves a community displaced by wildfire | Alyssa Choiniere, Editor and Publisher

• From guidelines to architecture: How newsrooms are rethinking AI governance | Ramaa Sharma, Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism

• Why Knight Foundation is Investing in For-Profit Journalism Richard J. Tofel | Second Rough Draft

• Michigan State University is training journalists for an unpredictable tomorrow | Taayoo Murray, Editor and Publisher

• ICE Shot a Journalist and Threw Him in Detention. He’s Approaching 300 Days Behind Bars With a Festering Wound | Adam Rose, The Intercept

Editor’s note: Charles Sennott is off this week. During his tour across the United States earlier this year, visiting local newsrooms that are pushing against the spread of news deserts, the name of The Banner came up often as an example of a promising approach. This week, our editor Alana Campbell puts the spotlight on The Banner, almost a year after it expanded into the county where she was born.

When the Baltimore Banner announced last year that it was expanding its coverage into Montgomery County, numerous news leaders referred to the county as a “news desert,” crediting this status as a primary reason for the expansion.

I was born and raised in Montgomery County, and it was there that I fell in love with journalism, getting my first reporting chops at Paint Branch High School’s paper, Mainstream. I remember going to the library and looking for local papers only to be surprised that there wasn’t one. I didn’t have the words for it back then, but since I’ve started working at GroundTruth, I’ve become way more acquainted with the concept of news deserts and very quickly realized that the county I grew up in — despite being the most populous county in the state and directly adjacent to the nation’s capital — was indeed a news desert.

A news desert, as defined by researchers at UNC’s Hussman School of Journalism, is “a community, either rural or urban, with limited access to the sort of credible and comprehensive news and information that feeds democracy at the grassroots level.”

The data backs this up. A 2018 study by UNC put the total number of papers in the county at exactly one: The Montgomery County Sentinel. The report mentioned Montgomery County by name to highlight a point: “The 1,449 counties with only one newspaper still publishing range from Arthur County, Nebraska, with 500 residents, to Montgomery County, Maryland, with more than a million people.” All of the other Maryland counties with just one paper have a small fraction of the population, ranging from 1 to 15 percent of Montgomery County’s size. Furthermore, the one paper UNC identified has since folded its print edition; an updated report using their methodology would likely classify the county as a total news desert.

Other studies paint a similarly negative picture.

Northwestern University’s Medill Local News Initiative has published far more recent comprehensive reports with their 2025 State of Local News report, which we’ve discussed in this newsletter previously. On one hand, it identifies Maryland as having the second most newspaper losses over the last two decades of all U.S states, having lost 70.5% of its newspapers. Paradoxically, its 2025 Local News Ecosystem Barometer puts Montgomery County at a zero percent chance of being a news desert, citing eight outlets it doesn’t list by name.

Fortunately, a 2024 study from the Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland adds necessary nuance and paints a clearer picture. The first-ever comprehensive baseline assessment of Maryland’s local news ecosystem, the study found that the great majority of outlets in the state are small — many with just one or two people producing all content. Most of what they publish is breaking news triggered by official announcements. The study concluded that as the Washington Post shifted away from local coverage toward a growing national digital audience, and as Washington TV and radio stations stayed focused on breaking news and broadcast promotion, a void was forming — particularly in Montgomery and neighboring Prince George’s counties.

Montgomery County did have 17 outlets covering it, the study noted, but that number is misleading. Seven of them are blogs, mostly single-person operations, and four of those are run by the same man, sharing most of their content across them. Though hyper-local sites like MoCo360, Montgomery Community Media, and The MoCo Show, provide daily news and information, there isn’t anything resembling a metropolitan newspaper that exclusively covers the county.

This didn’t happen overnight. Just fifteen years ago, there were eight local print newspapers serving Montgomery County. The Montgomery County Journal shut down in 2005. The Washington Post’s local weekly Montgomery Extra section shuttered in 2009. Then, in 2015, came the most significant blow, largely dictated by corporate strategy: the Montgomery Gazette closed all five of its local editions.

Purchased by the Post in the early 90s, the 55-year-old Gazette distributed over 450,000 free copies as recently as 2014. But when Jeff Bezos bought the Post, he shuttered the weeklies to focus financial resources on positioning the Post as a national paper. Twenty-six reporters, editors, and photographers lost their jobs. Montgomery County went from seven Gazette reporters covering countywide and local news to a handful left at the Post, the Sentinel, and Bethesda Magazine. The loss of robust accountability reporting on the county government, schools, and police was catastrophic, and amateur citizen blogs could only fill a fraction of that void.

Then came the fall of The Montgomery Sentinel. Founded in 1855, it ran for 165 years as a print newspaper — one where investigative journalist Bob Woodward got his start. It stopped printing in 2020. Its circulation, which had reached over 200,000 in its 1990s heyday, had dwindled to just 5,000 households for its final print edition. The paper moved online but shifted toward feature coverage, no longer offering the daily reporting on county government, courts, and schools that it once did. With its demise, Montgomery County now had zero local print newspapers.

Adam Pagnucco, who has run The Montgomery Perspective, a blog about local county and state politics, since 2006, watched the whole thing unfold. “The media landscape was very different then,” he wrote in a post last year. “The Post paid a lot more attention to us. The Gazette had a network of community reporters which no outlet can currently match. The [Washington] Examiner had a full-time local reporter. The Sentinel was still active… Compared to the local news ecosphere of that time, today’s environment feels very lonely to me.”

Adjacent to this contracted landscape arrived The Baltimore Banner.

Founded in June 2022 by the Venetoulis Institute for Local Journalism, a nonprofit established by businessman and former politician Stewart W. Bainum Jr., the Banner launched as an all-digital outlet with 42 journalists and plans to grow to over 100. In the years since, it became one of the youngest newsrooms to be awarded a Pulitzer Prize, was a finalist for yet another Pulitzer, and grew into the largest newsroom in Maryland — roughly 145 people on staff, with about 95 journalists. By the end of 2025, it had surpassed 75,000 subscribers despite operating behind a paywall.

On September 15, 2025, amid all of this buzz, the Banner announced it was opening a bureau in Montgomery County — its first major expansion outside the Baltimore area. Expanding into a county of a million people 35 miles southwest of its main reporting hub was a massive leap, and it coincided with a rebrand from The Baltimore Banner to just The Banner.

In an interview with Editor and Publisher earlier this year, Banner editor-in-chief Audrey Cooper acknowledged that, “Montgomery County is much much closer to D.C. and it’s culturally much different than Baltimore. So it poses interesting challenges and opportunities for our coverage.” but added that “Even though it is a stone’s throw from the nation’s capital, Montgomery County is a news desert and it’s also part of our state,” expressing ambitions to be “the primary news source for people in Baltimore and Maryland.”

Cooper also stressed that “saving the great American experiment means saving local news,” and emphasized the role that expansion plays in that: “To have impact in your journalism, you have to have scale.”

Leading the new bureau is Executive Editor Zuri Berry, who heads a team of about ten reporters and editors based in Rockville, the administrative center of the county. I sat down with Berry to take stock of what the bureau had built — and what it still had left to do.

His prior experience in major metro areas gave him a useful lens for understanding how a county this large could still be a news desert: “I was in Boston for a very long time, and you have this world-class city that’s right across the river in Cambridge, but it doesn’t get the same kind of love and attention that it deserves.” The same dynamic plays out here, he said. The numerous urban and rural communities within Montgomery County and Prince George’s County along the 270 and Route 1 corridors “are essentially a dead zone in terms of media coverage,” and Washington D.C. is “the center of gravity.”

The Banner’s staff saw this as an opportunity. The bureau launched with a community poll to get a better understanding of what county residents wanted to see more of and where they should direct their reporting. The reception to the Banner’s arrival was enthusiastic. There was local journalism happening in Montgomery County before they got there, Berry said, but it wasn’t as robust as people felt the community deserved.

In the year since launch, the bureau has published over 1,100 stories. In terms of subscribers, Berry said the bureau sits at around 15,000 between Montgomery and Prince George’s counties. Though he couldn’t disaggregate the two from his dashboard, he estimated roughly 12,000 of those are Montgomery County readers — out of approximately 85,000 total Banner subscribers.

Longer enterprise stories are what he believes will distinguish the Banner from other news sources in the region, and it’s where he sees the Banner having a tangible impact.

The story he keeps coming back to as an example happened in the bureau’s early days. A teen was struck and killed while walking on University Boulevard in Kensington. Every local outlet and TV station covered it, but what the Banner did differently was follow up — knocking on doors, talking to the parents. Because they built that relationship, they learned the family had already complained multiple times about speeding on that block — had even written to a state senator with a letter documenting it. That gave the bureau an accountability story about what local leaders had actually done with those complaints. Speed cameras went up. The speed limit changed. That’s the kind of downstream impact Berry is aiming for.

He also acknowledged something important about the patterns of coverage that preceded the Banner’s arrival: when stories did come to Montgomery County, they tended to cluster around areas adjacent to the capital: downtown Silver Spring, Bethesda, maybe Rockville. “It would be a surprise to see Gaithersburg or Germantown mentioned in the Washington Post or another outlet.” The Banner, he said, is making a deliberate effort to identify and prioritize undercovered areas while still covering the county’s major population centers.

Getting a real sense of where those undercovered communities were — and what people actually wanted from a local news outlet — is part of what drove “listening sessions” the bureau held across the county. These free community events, where people offered their direct feedback, ideas and concerns to journalists, allowed the Banner’s new team to directly engage with residents across the county.

“It’s almost like you have all of this data on a community, and then you go talk to people and either validate it or add context to it,” Berry said. The sessions also provided opportunities to pick up story ideas and sources. A lot of council members, community leaders and activists showed up — people with a vested interest in particular policy issues. “We were able to connect with those people and do better journalism because of it.”

Over the next year, Berry said he’s focused on evolving these sessions. What started as a way to introduce the bureau to the community and to learn from the community for their own journalism is now being redesigned as something more ongoing. “The goal is to evolve them into something more topical and newsy — more of a discussion where people can bring ideas and challenge some of the issues coming up within the county and community.”

When I asked Berry to assess where things stand overall, he was measured but optimistic. “It was definitely a news desert,” he said of the county, but “adding 10 journalists changes a whole bunch of things,” he said. “Does that mean we can get to everything? Absolutely not.... But we’re certainly in a better place. If a story doesn’t get surfaced by us, it will get surfaced by someone else. And if it doesn’t get surfaced by them, it will get surfaced by us.”

The Banner is not yet profitable, but Berry sees a path. “There’s a north star for us as an organization to get to sustainability. We’re not at that point right now, but we can get there. We’re on the front line of that, in Montgomery and Prince George’s.”

As someone who will always view Montgomery County as home, his final statement was particularly resonant: “I’m thankful that we have a bunch of ambitious people who took a chance on this place to try to do something new and different that will help contribute to the success of local news.”

I’m also glad they took a chance. Expansion can be a risk, but the Banner has taken a bet that local news — done at scale with a team of reporters on the ground — is important. In Montgomery County, there are signs that investment is paying off both for the news organization and the communities they serve.

What we’re reading this week

• Nothing Moves The Needle | Craig Unger, American Kompromat

• What 100-plus federal actions reveal about the Trump administration’s campaign against the press | Angela Fu, Poynter

• Striking Out | Riddhi Setty, Columbia Journalism Review

• A record-breaking eight Pulitzer awardees disclosed AI use this year | Andrew Deck, Nieman Journalism Lab

• SPJ Ethics Committee proposes revisions to Code of Ethics | Dan Axelrod, Society of Professional Journalists

Leave a comment

Editor’s note: Charles Sennott is off this week and so he asked our colleague Wilson Liévano to take a look at what has happened to press freedom in Venezuela more than six months after the United States deposed president Nicolás Maduro and a month after a devastating earthquake.

As the smoke cleared around the Miraflores Palace in Caracas and the first images of former Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro in chains and blindfolded inside a U.S. bound plane topped the home page of every news site, many hoped this moment would become a catalyst for the restoration of freedoms lost over the years of repression by the Chávez and Maduro regimes. It didn’t take long to see it was just a mirage.

In the days following the U.S. military operation that captured Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores in the morning of January 3 and installed a transitional government led by Delcy Rodríguez, more than 16 media workers, both local and foreign, were detained by government forces, according to the National Union of Press Workers of Venezuela (SNTP); all of them were released.

Rodríguez has said that Venezuela is living a “new political moment” and that changes are coming, but her government has followed a pattern in matters of freedom of the press that suggests that despite the new management, it’s still business as usual: First, the government announced it would loosen some of the punitive restrictions on what Venezuelans can say or report on, but as soon as journalists tested the limits of the new policies they discovered that they can still end up censored, or worse, in jail.

Although press freedom advocates celebrate that some TV reporters are being permitted back on the air and foreign reporters are being allowed back in the country for the first time in many years, several incidents show that the lines remain blurry. In early June, the journalist Pablo Mujica from La Voz de Valera was detained and interrogated for an Instagram post in which he questioned a shortage of gasoline in his region. He was told that the governor of the state would order his release if he published a story that stated that “The state would guarantee the supply.”

A few days later, intelligence officers detained three photojournalists — one independent, one from the Spanish news agency EFE and one from Reuters — who were covering the transfer of political prisoners. The government agents tried to take their cameras, but received a counter-order, and the journalists were let go.

But perhaps the clearest example happened on live TV. In late January, Venevisión, the channel with the largest audience in the country, broadcasted a brief soundbite of María Corina Machado after a meeting with U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio. This was significant because any mention or image of Machado, a leading opposition voice and Nobel Peace Prize winner, had been banned from private and public media for a decade. But a few hours later, Diosdado Cabello, currently the Minister of the Interior, and one of the most powerful figures in the government, dedicated a segment on his weekly show “Con el Mazo Dando” (loosely translated as “Hammering”) to the soundbite.

Cabello attacked Machado, calling her “desperate” and claiming that she is looking to “manufacture an event that causes an international uproar” to draw attention to herself. “María ‘la Chiflada’ (the nutjob) Machado is running out of options,” said Cabello and pointed at Venevisión for giving her a platform and directed a thinly veiled threat: “Listen up, Venevisión. Without media fanfare, her profile fades away. Without headlines, she simply disappears,” he said.

The free-speech non-profit Espacio Público documented 65 cases and 131 violations of the right to free speech in Venezuela in the first six months of the year, with 33 detentions, a number that is on track to equal or even surpass the previous year toll of 123 cases and 238 violations. The backlash against online organizations has been particularly aggressive. In May, the Instagram account of the investigative site Armando.info was suspended after a wave of complaints of copyright infringement arrived from Venezuela. The site, which operates from exile, had just published an investigation that exposed corruption on the sale of the Bangente financial group. Weeks later, the same strategy was employed against the independent site El Pitazo, and the content creator Miguel Heredia, known as “Kilómetro.” In the case of El Pitazo, Instagram restored the account and acknowledged the organization didn’t violate any laws, but in the other cases the company has not responded to their requests.

Digital censorship extends beyond social media. Even as the government touted that it was restoring access to the social media platform X, more than 200 websites, including 65 news sites, remain inaccessible inside the country, according to SNTP.

Even in areas where there has been some progress, there are setbacks: In February, the National Assembly approved an amnesty law for political prisoners, which allowed several journalists to be released from prison, but it excluded others and left the door open for interpretation by judges. As Human Rights Watch describes in a report: “The law contains limitations that seriously undermine its stated purpose. Although the law claims to cover acts committed since 1999, it limits eligibility to those prosecuted “in the context” of specific events occurring in certain years. It also includes vaguely defined provisions that allow judges to deny amnesty to people who have been prosecuted for acts protected under international human rights law.”

Rory Branker, content director of the independent news site La Patilla, spent more than a year in prison under trumped-up charges of terrorism, treason, hate speech and conspiracy to commit crimes. He was one of the 28 journalists released after Maduro’s capture, but when he approached the courts to formalize the amnesty, the judge in charge denied his petition and his case is now in limbo. “I think the Venezuelan government is not done screwing me,” he told the Committee to Protect Journalists. According to SNTP, eight of the 28 journalists released are still facing charges.

Even if the amnesty law is applied properly, Venezuela still has a myriad of laws created over the years to silence dissent and punish those who criticize the government or who seek to expose its corruption: “Censorship in Venezuela is the result of a process built up in layers over more than twenty years. It began with the 2004 passage of the Law on Social Responsibility in Radio and Television (known as Ley Resorte), which granted the National Telecommunications Commission (Conatel) broad powers to fine, suspend, or shut down media outlets. The forced closure of Radio Caracas Televisión (RCTV) in 2007 was the pivotal moment that established self-censorship as a condition for the survival of private broadcasters. Repressive laws piled up: the Law Against Hatred (2017), the Simón Bolívar Law, the Anti-Blockade Law, and the NGO Law created a legal framework that criminalized dissent,” explained the Espacio Público non-profit in a recent post that examined the blurring of the lines between censorship and self-censorship.

In the middle of this climate of uncertainty, Venezuela faced one of the biggest tragedies in its history, when two consecutive earthquakes hit the north of the country on June 24. The current death toll stands at 6,125 but there is no official data about the number of people missing, which some organizations estimate to be around 30,000 to 50,000 people, and civil and aid organizations have criticized the lack of transparency by the government in their response. Journalists have reported that the military blocked their access to La Guaira, the state most affected by the earthquake, in the hours and days after the tragedy, forcing an already depleted press corps to operate surreptitiously to cover the situation on the ground and leaving them exposed to new repressive measures.

The Trump administration has signaled that Venezuela has to go through stages of “political stability, economic recovery and national reconciliation,” as Secretary Rubio said in a recent interview, before thinking of a return to democracy. But it is unlikely that any of those conditions will be met if basic rights, like press freedom, are not fully reestablished. Since it is also unlikely that the U.S. will demand any progress on these issues, given the administration’s own dismal record on matters of press freedom, Venezuelan journalists will have to continue operating under the fear of censorship and repression, with an added layer of uncertainty on top of it.

What we’re reading this week

• The end of Voice of America deals a blow to coverage of democracy and repression in Latin America | André Duchiade, LatAm Journalism Review

• Costa Rica used to be a beacon of press freedom in Central America. What changed? | Gretel Kahn, Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism

• New York Times’s Malachy Browne on the future of visual investigations in the age of AI | Maurice Oniang’o, Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism

• Is Americans’ declining trust in media driven by political messaging? | Joshua Benton, Nieman Journalism Lab

• Meet the Gen Z journalist who bought his hometown newspaper in Georgia | Ellie Fivas, The Georgia Recorder

Leave a comment

The U.S.-Iran conflict continues to escalate, and it is hard for me not to feel a centrifugal force pulling me toward the Middle East.

For most of the last 40 years, when the region heated up, I packed my bags and got visas that would allow me to head into the latest hot spot. I served as a long-time Middle East correspondent for The Boston Globe for nearly a decade following September 11 and also did a stint for PBS Frontline during the so-called Arab Spring when we thought the uprising against authoritarian regimes in Egypt, Libya, Syria and elsewhere might actually transform the region. Those hopes for real change were dashed long ago.

Those of you who read this Substack know that I have stepped back from the frontlines of the Middle East and the kind of international reporting that I used to do in Ukraine, Afghanistan and elsewhere. These days, I am focused much more intently on local news in America where we are seeing our democracy fray, a story of civilizational decline and a gathering storm of public discontent that I still believe is the biggest story in the world. Most immediately, I am focused on the difficult challenge of serving as a local publisher and trying to make the newspaper in my community sustainable.

Still, it is hard not to feel surrounded by the drumbeat of war banging away on CNN and NPR and in the New York Times. Every day, new headlines indicate a wider regional war is set in motion. New fronts are opening across the Middle East as diplomatic efforts consistently sputter and fail. According to the Associated Press, Iran launched a surprise ballistic missile attack targeting U.S. forces in Jordan. The missiles were reportedly intercepted, but in retaliation the U.S. and Saudi Arabia launched joint strikes against Iranian-backed militias in Iraq.

But as the world plunges into the black hole of the Middle East what seems most striking is that international journalists as well as local media organizations have been effectively thwarted across the region, particularly in Israel and Iran. The two countries are mortal enemies but they are bound together by a determination to constrain a free press and prevent independent reporting from their respective countries.

These constraints placed on journalism are explained away as security concerns and carried out by governments that are consistently refusing to grant unfettered access to cover the conflicts. As a result, their citizenry and the whole world is left flying blind straight into the dark abyss of war. All of us are left without the benefit of ground truth, the belief that we can all best calibrate the complexity of the world around us by basing our observations on the discernible facts gathered by reporters who are there on the ground.

In Iran, which has long been opaque to the outside world and always a uniquely perilous place for Western media organizations, WIRED magazine reports that journalists are relying on satellite links, encrypted apps and smuggled video footage to try to tell the story. The attempt is noble, but so far, they are largely failing to provide any coherent picture as to what is happening inside the country. The stakes are of course incredibly high as any journalist found, for example, with a mobile Starlink would be immediately suspected as a spy for Israel and/or the U.S. and then detained and put in prison.

In Israel, the restrictions are imposed through a tight cordon of security that prevents journalists from operating independently inside Gaza, and therefore a full assessment of the extent of the devastation of Israel’s bombing campaign is difficult to achieve. In a piece titled “Subversion of Reality,” Gerry Shih, an international correspondent for the Washington Post focusing on the Middle East, offers a glimpse of the daily struggle of reporters on the ground, including some of the prominent correspondents in the world such as the BBC’s Jeremy Bowen, NPR’s Daniel Estrin and others.

The Israel Defense Forces are providing tightly controlled tours of Gaza for these journalists which then makes the news organization obliged to submit to censorship rules which Israel says is based on security concerns, but Shih unpacks how these guided tours can end up skewing coverage.

He writes, “While the Israeli military readily facilitates visits to sites that allegedly implicate Hamas—tunnels running under hospitals, the purported weapons workshop Bowen (of the BBC) saw—its ban on journalists’ entering Gaza means that investigations into other subjects, including possible Israeli war crimes, become far more challenging to execute.”

While journalists are frustrated by the lack of news that is actually coming out of these tours, there was often information that would serve as part of a larger story and photographs that emerged were useful in furthering an understanding of what is going on. As Shih explained, the Washington Post has done its level best to make the most of the dog-and-pony shows that the IDF is offering. He cited an old friend and longtime colleague, Heidi Levine, a Post photographer who I worked with for many years who took a memorable image of Gaza City reduced to ruins which landed on the Washington Post homepage.

Shih wrote, “During the mid-2025 hunger crisis, Levine joined the Royal Jordanian Air Force on a humanitarian airdrop. Despite Israeli pressure on Jordanian officials to block aerial photos, she captured a striking shot of Gaza that went viral around the world.”

I worked with Levine in Gaza over the years, and have seen how dedicated she is to telling the story and how many risks she has taken. But in Gaza, it has long been the case that Palestinian reporters and photographers who work with international news agencies are the most consistent avenue for information on what is happening. There are more than 1,000 local Palestinian journalists and stringers affiliated with agencies such as Al Jazeera, Reuters and the Associated Press who fill a void as international reporters are barred by Israel from independently entering and doing their work.

As a result, Palestinian journalists have been in the line of fire as never before, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. As of June 25, 2026, the current total of individuals documented by CPJ as journalists or media workers killed by Israel in Gaza and in Israeli detention centers since October 7, 2023, stands at 209. Recently, Israeli government officials and pro-Israel media watchdogs have scrutinized the CPJ numbers and methodology, and offered photographs of some Palestinians named as journalists who were killed in military fatigues and as combatants connected to Hamas. CPJ follows a strict protocol for verifying who is a journalist and, consistent with this approach, has removed eight names from its database because they were later established to have been Hamas or PIJ combatants. Those corrections to the database would not change the current number of journalists killed in Gaza at 209, according to CPJ.

“It is the deadliest place in the world to be a journalist,” said Jodi Ginsberg, the CEO of CPJ.

In an interview with Al Jazeera in April after a Palestinian journalist who worked for the network, Mohammed Wishah, was killed when an Israeli drone struck the vehicle in which he was driving while on assignment.

“We’ve seen the systematic targeting and killing of journalists … a pattern in which Israel is seeking to control information about what we are seeing out of Gaza,” said Ginsberg, adding that the pattern of killing and the complete impunity with which it is happening “constitutes a war crime.”

In a story earlier this month by Ha’aretz, a correspondent criticized the attempt by pro-Israel press watchdog groups to undercut the distressing findings of CPJ that show an unprecedented level of killing of journalists by Israel. Pointing out inconsistencies and holding CPJ to account is all well and good, and very much the work of media watchdogs. But when relatively small numbers of cases are highlighted as a way to undercut CPJ’s work and suggest that they are inflating numbers, the result, as the headline claims, is actually “an attack on journalism.”

This is crucial, not just because it tries to move the attention away from the fact that dozens of journalists have been killed by state forces, when just one would be one too many, but also because it makes it harder for us to see the complexities of Iran and Gaza and the U.S. role in the region. It serves to push us farther away from the truth, always one of the first casualties of war.

Storymap: Reverberations of the 2026 U.S.-Iran War

Amid the numerous restrictions on reporting across the Middle East, on-the-ground reporting has been made difficult, but several organizations, from global outlets like the Associated Press and The New Yorker to smaller regional magazines like Public Source and 972 Magazine, have produced thorough human-centered reporting that highlights the myriad ways this war has impacted people in Israel, Iran, and everywhere in between. My GroundTruth colleague, Alana Campbell, has mapped these stories here.

Iran

1. Southern Iran Is Being Destroyed | Fateme Karimkhan, New Lines Magazine

2. Iran’s Care for Orphans Has Been Transformed by War | Fateme Karimkhan, New Lines Magazine

3. What the War Has Done to Iranians | Cora Engelbrecht, The New Yorker

4. Afghans in Iran are fleeing bombs, and Iranian crackdowns | Ali M. Latifi & Farzad Rahim, The New Humanitarian

Israel

5. A Collapsing Society: Israel Suffers a National Mental Crisis Due to the War | Tom Levinson, Haaretz

6. Exposed from above, silenced from within: Palestinians in wartime Israel | Samah Watad & Baker Zoubi, 972 Magazine

7. Israel antiwar protests spur intensifying government crackdown | Rachel Fink, The Forward

Gaza

8. Israel’s campaign of erasure: The demolition of eastern Gaza | Riley Sparks & Ghada Abdulfattah, The New Humanitarian

9. How War Has Redefined Marriage in Gaza | Athar Abu Samra, New Lines Magazine

10. ‘The war is between Israel and Iran. Why should people in Gaza pay the price?’ | Ahmed Dremly and Ibtisam Mahdi, 972 Magazine

West Bank

11. With West Bank under total Israeli closure, settlers are seizing the moment | Oren Ziv & Basel Adra, 972 Magazine

Lebanon

12. “Black Wednesday”: Minutes of Israeli Strikes, Days of Searching for the Missing | Dana Hourany, The Public Source

13. Labor Amid Displacement: How Lebanon’s Midwives are Carrying Expecting Mothers Through War | Amelia Hankins & Ghadir Hamadi, The Public Source

14. The real ramifications of Israel’s mass evacuation orders in Lebanon | Ranine Awwad, The New Humanitarian

15. Inside Israeli-occupied southern Lebanon | Santiago Montag, 972 Magazine

The Gulf & Iraq

16. Iran’s Attacks on the Gulf Are Leaving Scars That Won’t Fade | Sinem Cengiz, New Lines Magazine

17. Drivers endure overnight gas lines as a war-driven fuel shortage grips Iraq’s Kurdish region | Stella Martany, AP News

Leave a comment

They are from two different generations, but they are both born of local newsrooms and came of age on the cutting edge of a kind of investigative reporting that is defining this moment in American history.

The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer, whose career was fueled by the Watergate era in 1973, was just starting in her first job at a tiny weekly newspaper in Vermont when Nixon was president but would soon be consumed by scandal and resign in disgrace. Mayer, now 71, would plunge into an illustrious career as an investigative reporter covering national politics and go on to write a searing bestseller in 2016 titled “Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right.”

Nathaniel Horwitz, the CEO and co-founder of the pioneering investigative news organization Hunterbrook, graduated from high school on the Island of Martha’s Vineyard and had his first reporting job in 2014 at the small newsroom of The Martha’s Vineyard Times where I serve as the publisher. Horwitz, now 30, spent eight months as a local reporter and continued on and off as an intern for a few years after that. He wrote about the gender-bending sexual exploits of the venerable horseshoe crab during a full-moon survey of the species which fishermen chop up into bait and which the biotech industry covets as an unusually reliable test for bacteria in injections. Horwitz also managed to talk his way into the White House press pool covering a speech by President Barack Obama on issues ranging from the war in Iraq to racial tensions in Ferguson, Missouri when the president was vacationing on the Island.

I was fortunate to host both Mayer and Horwitz this month at a local literary gathering hosted by The Times titled Islanders Write, where we bring together authors, poets, playwrights and journalists from all genres who share a connection to the Island and a passion for the craft and the business of writing. Mayer is a long-time summer resident who has recently bought a home on Martha’s Vineyard. Horwitz grew up on the Island and is the son of two acclaimed writers and foreign correspondents, Geraldine Brooks and the late Tony Horwitz, and he is today a renowned entrepreneur who has put together a successful hedge fund with a team of investigative reporters who trade on the same information they unearth and thereby create the funding they need to sustain their work.

On a July 14 panel discussion, titled “Writing on the Edge: New Models for Reporting and the Current State of Journalism,” Horwitz and Mayer shared their deep concern about the future of journalism, offered some hope that impactful work is still being done and laid out contrasting views on the business models that will sustain in-depth work.

(Become a paid GroundTruth subscriber at $5/month to get access to the full audio from the panel.)

Subscribe now

Mayer started the panel by setting a bleak stage for First Amendment rights in the Trump era and a culture of fear that seems to be pervasive among the sources she relies on in Washington to reveal the subterranean forces behind political power in America. She argued that the Trump administration had recently “crossed a new line.”

“We’ve never seen in this country people more afraid of talking to reporters. People are so intimidated. Sources are drying up. There’s a sense of fear and kind of malice in the air that is something I’ve never seen in this country. I did cover at some point a few other countries where I’ve seen sort of this kind of atmosphere, but never never before here in this country.”

Mayer pointed to the July 10 subpoenas issued by Trump’s Justice Department demanding New York Times reporters to testify and to provide phone records connected to an investigative story on the extraordinarily high costs of retrofitting a plane that was gifted to Trump by Qatar and converted to an Air Force One jet. A week after the panel, a federal judge forced the Justice Department to drop the subpoenas after sharp questioning by the judge who challenged almost every facet of the government’s approach.

The Justice Department had insisted that it was acting solely in the interest of national security. It filed subpoenas on July 10, just two days after the Times published the first of two stories about concerns that led to the U.S. Secret Service interceding to prevent President Trump from flying home from Turkey on the new Air Force One jet. As NPR reported, “The case highlighted the Trump administration’s ongoing assault on press rights and the free flow of information to the public. It also provided another glimpse of the White House’s eagerness to assert an expansive definition of executive authority, as prosecutors argued the U.S. attorney general has the power to set aside legal protections for journalists when he deems necessary.”

For now, journalism and the right to a free press seem to have at least one federal judge on its side, but it is clear that Trump has set out for a war of attrition against the press, and Mayer believes we should all be very worried. She commented on the extraordinary effort to quash the Times’ reporting and how it fit in with a litany of other lawsuits and legal tactics aimed at punishing journalism and news organizations perceived as less than loyal to Trump.

“It’s going directly at reporters, and it’s basically saying you may have committed a crime for telling the truth to the country. The others were slightly different. I think they’re also tremendously important. Those were shakedowns of major legacy media companies in this country, who, in essence, decided to pay off Trump in order to continue to be able to operate, and of course it raises questions. The word that the lawyers use is chilling. It’s incredibly chilling to news organizations who are seeing that they may wind up having to pay millions and millions of dollars, or face a grand jury investigation,” she said.

Horwitz said that his investigative reporting at Hunterbrook is also about pushing back against the forces of the government and he cited a recent example in their reporting on a series titled “Poisoned USA.” Horwitz said that the administration has in recent years been hollowing out regulatory agencies that have been either destroyed or captured by the industries that they’re meant to impose guardrails around. An example he cited was the EPA, which has been weakened at a time when major industry continues to contaminate natural habitats and poison communities.

“This has already been a substantial source of illness and degradation across the country, but it’s worsened dramatically under an EPA that is controlled by former executives of the industries that it’s meant to put those buffers around,” said Horwitz, adding, “So our Poisoned USA series aims to bring together nationwide datasets on contamination and on the incidence of various diseases, with on-the-ground local news reporting across the country in the communities that are in these hotspots, where there’s an overlap between high contamination rates and high rates of various diseases.”

What is perhaps most pioneering about Horwitz's model is that it takes this time-honored tradition of muckraking and public-interest journalism, and it is building an arm of the business that then uses the information to seek compensation for those hurt by environmental damage caused by corporations and goes further to leverage the information through stock trades to garner profit that can in turn sustain the reporting. It is a controversial and complex model that is not without its critics, but it appears to be an approach that is carefully considered and gaining traction.

Horwitz explained, “It used to be very ad hoc. You might have a couple of journalists at ProPublica who might spend six months talking about a very specific community, a very specific set of people who were harmed. We found a way to financially support doing this much more systematically across the country. And the way that works is that so often the people who are sources for a story like that are also natural plaintiffs in a case against the company that’s responsible, and what’s powerful about that in what I hate to say feels often like a post-shame society is that it gives journalism real teeth because you’re not just exposing wrongdoers who can put their head down and wait for a news cycle to pass, and then not have to worry about this months of investigative reporting. But you’re arming it with the litigation, such that those wrongdoers then have to show up in court, and those people who otherwise would have just had their name and their sort of sympathetic photograph and an investigative report actually have a chance to take on that major corporation.”

He added, “While our legal system has all kinds of flaws, one of the beauties of it is that it enables a regular person to go toe to toe with a corporate giant and sometimes win, and sometimes deter that type of action. And sometimes get restitution. If you’re familiar with the movie Erin Brockovich, we think that that model is a really powerful way, both to fund the reporting as well as to really have people made whole if they’ve been harmed.”

That very important idea, that journalism should be designed to hold power accountable and to advocate for those hurt by abuses of power is really what our craft is all about. Both Mayer and Horwitz embody this idea, and there are lots of reporters working within venerated institutions like the New Yorker and innovative new models like Hunterbrook who are out there finding ways to meet this moment and do the good work of holding power accountable. In the famous words coined by humorist Finley Peter Dunne in 1902 via his fictional bartender alter-ego, “Mr. Dooley,” the job of a news organization should always be to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.”

We can all raise a glass to that!

What we’re reading this week

• The Uses of ‘Treason’ | Jem Bartholomew, Columbia Journalism Review

• Most Americans Lack Local News Coverage on Essential Issues | Dan McCue, The Well News

• A human wrote this – believe me | Marina Adami, Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism

• ‘I Promised People I Would Do Something’ | Grace Benninghoff, Columbia Journalism Review

• How 8 Latin American newsrooms mapped misinformation campaigns targeting environmental defenders | César López Linares, LatAm Journalism Review

Leave a comment

Editor’s Note: Charles Sennott is off this week. He asked our colleague Alana Campbell to share her experience of the World Cup, the biggest sporting event in the world, hosted this summer in the U.S. Campbell highlights how even in these times of racial tensions, war, and despair, communities have found a way to come together and show solidarity, resilience, and joy.

Since the ball started rolling on June 11, the World Cup has pulled immigrant communities across the country, and visitors from around the world, into a shared moment, bringing together families, friends, community members and total strangers.

I’ve had a front-row seat to these connections in one of the most diverse places on Earth: New York City.

I’m not much of a men’s soccer fan (although I played the sport in high school and followed the professional Women’s game religiously in college) but during the group stage, where there were between 2 and 6 games played each day, there was no avoiding it. It was everywhere — flyers advertising watch parties were on every block and walking through the city, I would occasionally hear thunderous applause at seemingly random times of day.

This World Cup is historic by design. It’s the first World Cup co-hosted by three countries — the U.S., Canada, and Mexico — and the first to expand the field from 32 teams to 48. That expansion brought the tournament from 40 matches to a record 104 matches across 16 host cities. Several nations made their World Cup debut, while several other countries returned to the World Cup after decades away. This is also the first time 10 African nations have qualified for the tournament, with 9 of them making it to the knockout rounds.

Tucked behind a church straddling West and Central Harlem, a spot I would pass by nearly every day, a previously overgrown backyard space was transformed into a “World Cup Village” by a local West African man, Bouba Manadja, whose T-shirt doubled as a flyer for the event. Flags from seemingly every country lined the fence, tables and chairs filled the yard, and a single TV anchored the space.

Subscribe now

During the African teams’ matches, the place was lively and packed — full of food, foosball, and when the game wasn’t on, live music. African immigrants were the main patrons of the “village”, but peering in, I saw plenty of community members from every race and creed there.

It was much more subdued by the time I made it there to watch Tuesday’s France vs. Spain semifinal: the crowd was only about 25 people, no one was wearing a team jersey and despite many people there being French speakers, most of them were rooting for Spain, likely due to France’s colonial history in West Africa. Granted the game was at 3:00 p.m., it was 94 degrees with a Heat Advisory issued, and in the middle of the work day in a largely working-class area.

Manadja was friendly and constantly on the move, taking drink orders and making people feel welcome. When I left after the first half to attend another watch party in the Barrio, he thanked me for stopping by.

The next day, for the Argentina versus England game, I came by The World Cup Village closer to the end, right before the 9 minutes of stoppage time in the second half. Wildfire smoke had pushed the air quality to “unhealthy,” and you could smell the smoke in the air. On my walk over, it had started to drizzle. I was certain that the event would be clearing out, if there was anyone there at all. To my surprise, people had stuck around. When the storm picked up steam, the organizers didn’t shut it down, and the people didn’t leave. A few men grabbed the canopy and hauled it over the TV instead, and the rest of the crowd huddled under trees and the remaining canopy to watch the outcome, and they even stayed after to hang out.

Jimmy, a man in a Lionel Messi jersey who celebrated Argentina’s 2 to 1 win louder than anyone else there, put things bluntly: this kind of event — not-for-profit and community-oriented — wasn’t really “American,” he told me, but a product of immigrant communities’ more collective inclinations. I don’t disagree, especially in a cutthroat place like Manhattan. But I’d also say there’s something to the fact that America is still the country where that collectivism so often happens — where a West African immigrant can turn a Catholic Church’s backyard into, for one summer, the whole neighborhood’s backyard.

Subscribe now

What I saw wasn’t unique to my corner of the city — or even to New York. Journalists across the country have been documenting the same phenomenon in their own communities: the World Cup as a rare space where joy, heritage, and political realities coexist. As Argentina and Spain clash on Sunday in the final of what is projected to be the most-watched sporting event in history, let’s take a look back at how communities came together around the beautiful game:

More World Cup Stories

• For the Smallest Country to Ever Play in the World Cup, a Huge Sense of Pride | Asar John, Documented

• One filmmaker’s quest to capture immigrant New York through the World Cup | Ambar Castillo, Epicenter NYC

• Kansas City reflects global push to focus World Cup on workers and immigrants | Mary Sanchez, The Beacon News

• Boston-area soccer bars are winning this World Cup — and hope to keep the streak going | Zeninjor Enwemeka, WBUR News

• What it was like inside Levi’s for the Algeria vs. Jordan World Cup match | Joseph Geha, KQED

• The World Cup is bringing LA’s Norwegians together. You can row with them too | Mariana Dale, LAist

• In New York’s Astoria neighbourhood, Arab nations unite in World Cup joy | Sonia Bhagat, Al Jazeera

• Mexico lost the World Cup — but Mexican Americans won | Gustavo Arellano and Brenda Elizondo, Los Angeles Times

• Barfly on the wall: An inside look at a World Cup match night in a 5 a.m. bar in Kansas City | Thomas White, The Beacon News

• Despite Loss, Ecuadorian New Yorkers Share Pride in Country’s Historic World Cup Run | Rommel H. Ojeda, Documented

• A world of good | Staff, The Martha’s Vineyard Times

Leave a comment

Editor’s note: Charles Sennott is off this week and so he asked our colleague Wilson Liévano to share his analysis of the recent elections in his native Colombia, what the country’s drift to the far right will mean for press freedom, and what role the Trump White House has played in the new president’s victory.

Latin America’s shift to the right took another step last month in Colombia when Abelardo de la Espriella, a right-wing lawyer running on a populist-authoritarian platform who calls himself “the Tiger,” won the presidential election by a slim margin over the government candidate, left-wing senator Iván Cepeda.

De la Espriella’s victory mirrors the ascendance of other right-wing leaders in the region, including Argentina’s Javier Milei, Chile’s José Antonio Kast and El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele. These leaders have in common their closeness to U.S. President Donald Trump, sharing with him their populist discourse, disdain for institutions, and a heavy reliance on social media, which they used to attack their perceived enemies and push misinformation.

Trump had endorsed De la Espriella in a post on Truth Social that left no room for misinterpretation: “The results of this Election are very important to the future of Colombia and its relationship to the United States. Because of his tremendous accomplishments in life, and his political support for me, personally, it is my Honor to give Abelardo my Complete and Total Endorsement.” But De la Espriella takes the comparison with Trump a step further with the disdain he has shown for journalists throughout his life and the extremes he would go to punish those who question him or his dealings. A worrying trend for the small, but mighty independent press of the country.

Months before the election, the Foundation for Press Freedom (FLIP for its initials in Spanish) indicated that De La Espriella had presented 109 lawsuits for libel and slander against journalists between 2008 and 2019, alerting of a pattern of abuse of the legal system to intimidate and silence journalists. The vast majority of these cases were thrown out by the judges, but they forced news organizations and individual journalists to spend time and resources that in many cases they didn’t have, to defend their work.

The stories that landed many of these professionals in court were exposés of the role De la Espriella and his law firm De La Espriella Lawyers Enterprise played in multiple scandals of the last decade, including the “Robe Cartel” where a former chief justice of the Supreme Court was convicted for leading a group that accepted bribes in exchange for favorable outcomes for politicians; the DMG pyramid scheme which left thousands of investors defrauded of millions of dollars; and his relationship with Alex Saab, a Colombian businessman who was at the center of multiple corruption scandals in Venezuela during Nicolas Maduro’s regime, even serving for a time as his minister of production.

Although the facts were on the side of journalists and judges ultimately agreed with them, De la Espriella was successful in his goal: “De la Espriella uses the judicial system not to seek justice or obtain a result in the courts, but to generate fear, force journalists or media to assume very high costs to defend themselves and finally end up self-censoring, thinking twice before publishing,” said Sofia Jaramillo, executive director of FLIP in an interview for the independent site Voragine.

De la Espriella himself admitted that justice wasn’t his main objective: “I have noticed that nothing hurts more that independent journalism in Colombia than their pockets. Pain in their pockets is worse than a toothache,” confessed De la Espriella in an interview seven years ago for the YouTube channel of Carlos Alonso Lucio, a former guerrilla fighter, Congressman and now chief of staff of De la Espriella’s campaign. In the interview, the new president described his approach: “I usually apply the seven plagues of Egypt; I hit them with everything. There are lawyers who only file criminal lawsuits, instead I [file] criminal, tutelas [a special recourse in Colombian law to request action when a citizen feels their fundamental rights have been infringed] and civil action,” adding that “People then have to take money out of their pockets and that is what hurts them. They’re going to think twice next time they want to point fingers again.”

This weaponization of legal procedures is similar to the strategy Trump has employed to persecute critics and perceived enemies like former FBI director James Comey, NY attorney general Letitia James and others. But the similarities don’t end there. During the campaign, De La Espriella attacked any news organization that criticized him by calling them “activists” or “political hacks disguised as journalists.” When the news organization Cambio revealed, days before election day that De la Espriella’s campaign had paid 1.299 million pesos (about $376,300) to a company that didn’t exist for services that weren’t disclosed, the campaign responded with a lawsuit and De la Espriella went on national TV to discredit them: “Many journalists think they are untouchable. Journalists question everything, but no one can question them. Journalists accuse of everything, but no one can tell them anything,” he said during an interview with Noticias Caracol on June 17.

This is particularly dangerous in a country where journalists are killed every year for doing their work, and that ranks 102 out of 180 in the Reporters Without Borders (RSF) free press index. In a recent statement, RSF’s Latin America director Arthur Romeu contextualized the danger of this rhetoric:

“When those who exercise power normalise hostility towards the press, use legal proceedings as a mechanism of pressure or systematically discredit critical journalism, they not only increase the risks for journalists and media outlets: they also weaken society’s right to access free, pluralistic, and independent information. International experience shows that these dynamics must be taken seriously. RSF recalls that the President of the Republic is subject to the highest level of public scrutiny. Investigating his decisions, alliances, contracts, relationships, and exercise of power is an essential function of journalism in any democracy. The new president has the responsibility to demonstrate through his actions that Colombia will become a country where journalists can work without fear, stigmatisation, or without abusive legal pressure. He is also expected to commit to strengthen protections for journalists in a country where two have already been killed since the beginning of the year,”

But perhaps the most concerning attack on Colombian freedom of speech happened in the United States. On June 16, ICE arrested Franklin Humberto Coral-Garrido, a left-leaning online influencer and activist known as Beto Coral. Coral, who lived and worked in Phoenix with a legal work permit, had entered the U.S. with a tourist visa and requested asylum in 2016. Coral had been a vocal supporter of the Petro government, a critic of De la Espriella and the target of a defamation lawsuit in the U.S. against former Colombian president Álvaro Uribe Vélez, where he was forced to issue a retraction for his claims linking Uribe to drug cartels.

Coral, the son of a police captain who was part of the operations that led to the death of Pablo Escobar and was later murdered, was deported shortly after his arrest. On June 19, the New York Times revealed that Secretary of State Marco Rubio issued a memo outlining the rationale for deporting Coral. In the document, Rubio claimed that Coral “has used his presence in the United States to conduct political activity in support of the Petro government.”

Rubio made clear in the memo that Coral’s criticism of De La Espriella was the main reason for his deportation, stating that “Allowing Coral Garrido to remain in the United States undermines U.S. foreign policy interests in Colombia’s democratic processes and signals that foreign nationals may use U.S. platforms to conduct politically motivated disinformation campaigns and litigation targeting foreign democratic actors without consequence.”

In a statement published after his arrest, Coral responded: “I have never been an agent of the aforementioned government, nor have I been an official or contractor. I am a Colombian living in exile; I am an immigrant Colombian who thinks freely.”

Coral’s deportation might be just the beginning. After his victory, the new Colombian president met with Republican Senator Bernie Moreno, who later posted on X: “We talked at length about illegal migration and he immediately agreed that ANY Colombian citizen claiming asylum should return to Colombia and that he would ensure their safety and security. To be clear: America welcomes immigrants who arrive legally, do not file fake asylum claims, are throughly (sic) vetted, learn our language, assimilate, and do not undermine our foreign policy.” The message is clear: if you speak against the Colombian government, you can be deported.

The threats and attacks against the press in Colombia in the last 30 years, which have included assassinations, bombings of newsrooms and harassment of journalists, have forced many reporters to seek refuge in the United States, a place where they thought their freedom of speech would be protected. But De la Espriella’s record of disdain for the press, along with his close relationship with Trump suggest that haven is disappearing.

In his victory speech, De la Espriella said he would hit drug traffickers and “bandits” hard, but within the limits of the law and the constitution. But what will happen when he faces criticism and scrutiny now that he has more power than ever before? If the example of his “friend” Trump serves as a guide, the press freedom organizations in Colombia and globally are right to be deeply concerned.

What we’re reading this week

• New RSF Report: National Security as a Weapon Against Journalism | The RSF editorial teams, Reporters Without Borders

• After earthquakes, Venezuelan press reports through restrictions and scarce resources | César López Linares, LatAm Journalism Review

• Who Counts? | Jem Bartholomew, Columbia Journalism Review

• What an investigation into an AI freelancer reveals about the future of journalism | Xcaret Nuñez, WUWM 89.7 Milwaukee’s NPR

• In historic shift, struggling Kentucky newspaper gets tax approval to become a nonprofit | Jack Brammer, Kentucky Lantern

Leave a comment

History matters, especially when it informs the present.

As we reflect on the 250 years since the birth of America, the historic role that a free press played in that founding narrative should be remembered as it feels more relevant than ever.

In the decade that led up to the signing of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, the free press in the colonies was finding its voice, particularly in the centers of the revolutionary movement that was stirring in cities like Boston and Philadelphia.

These early American news organizations were covering thorny issues that would open the path toward liberty. There was spirited debate that centered around freedom from control of the Crown which effectively oversaw the press in the 13 colonies; freedom from the influence of the King’s taxes on business interests; and freedom to establish a voice that would be by the people and for the people. Primary among these issues was a growing resistance to what was known as The Stamp Act of 1765, which imposed a tariff on paper used for everything but most particularly used by the nascent press in the new country.

The tariff was undercutting the financial sustainability of the press, and the founding fathers knew that the Crown had every intention of weakening the independent voices of newspapers like the Boston News-Letter, the first continuously published newspaper in the country, and the Pennsylvania Gazette, published by Ben Franklin himself and the most widely read paper at the time

Subscribe now

The British Stamp Act, which required all printed paper to have an official stamp from the Crown proving the tax had been paid, severely impacted the free press through the tariff on newspapers, pamphlets, and advertisements. Colonists saw this as a deliberate attempt to cripple the independent press, limit public discourse, and curb mounting dissent. Printers actively protested the financial burden, which many feared could signal a crib death for colonial liberty. And it was not lost on anyone that the tax was being used to support the presence of British troops in cities like Boston which was increasingly restive and weary of taxes imposed through a parliamentary system where they had little say. Heavy criticism produced the rallying cry: “no taxation without representation.”

The resulting protests and boycotts of British goods fueled the broader ideological movement that led to the American Revolution. This resistance ultimately forced Parliament to repeal the Stamp Act on March 18, 1766. Among the owners of the printing presses who had found a sense of confidence in winning their fight against the Stamp Act, there was an emerging market for so-called “pamphlets.” These were essentially long essays bound up as small publications that could easily fit in a pocket and be hidden from the British soldiers, or Red Coats, who were increasing in number in Boston and beyond and seeking to quell a revolutionary spirit in the air.

The most famous author of these pamphlets was Thomas Paine who wrote “Common Sense” in January of 1776. The 47-page pamphlet argued for American independence from Great Britain using clear, persuasive language accessible to common people. It attacked the monarchy and presented a compelling case for a republican government, becoming an instant bestseller and galvanizing public opinion towards revolution.

Okay, that is definitely a truncated history of the American Revolution which requires a wider aperture than I have space to share here, but that was the essence of the time in which the revolution unfolded and our fledgling republic was born on July 4, 1776 with the Declaration of Independence. The document states the purpose and the promise of a revolutionary movement that sought to forge a new, independent nation: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Thomas Paine was essentially an early prototype of what these days we might call “influencers” or “creators” who are increasingly rising up as independent voices. It is worth noting that the era of pamphleteers in the run-up to the revolution had a spirit that was partisan and divided and that would not feel unfamiliar to us today.

Despite the raucous tone, Paine embodied the fact that the founding fathers believed deeply that a free press was the cornerstone of a democracy, and they asserted that the republic could not survive without it. Throughout our history, strong, independent journalists — from Ida B. Wells to Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite to Woodward & Bernstein — have all proven that to be the case. They held us together when the country felt like it might be coming apart, and they reminded us that it needed to come back together.

Subscribe now

Now it comes as no surprise to the readers of this newsletter that the free press in America is in jeopardy as perhaps never before in our history. There are titanic shifts in the business models brought on by technology in the digital age, and we live in a time of great ferment and uncertainty about where journalism is headed.

Local news organizations are suffering and closing their doors in far too many corners of the country. Major news organizations like CBS News have found themselves under the heavy thumb of an autocratic president in the White House. Oligarchs like the billionaire Jeff Bezos, the owner of the Washington Post, are facing critics who feel he has used his vast wealth to shape the legendary watchdog newspaper in a way that will favor his own corporate interests. There is no question these are tough days for an independent press.

So on this 250th birthday of our nation, while a deeply divided country tries to come together around the shared ideals that are articulated on that yellow parchment paper dated July 4, 1776, we should remember this part of our history and that it was journalism that helped shape the ideas that lead to the cry for independence and ultimately led to the Revolutionary War and yielded the constitution that still frames our democratic republic. After the Revolutionary War, when the Constitutional Congress was assembled in Philadelphia, the very First Amendment of that constitution, which was adopted in 1791, enshrined the role of a free press:

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

Let’s not forget that our shared history is alive with ideals and lessons learned that can help us navigate through the difficult era in which we find ourselves. There is much hard work needed for us to live up to the ideals of the revolution that gave birth to America, and there needs to be a concerted effort to remember just how central journalism is in sustaining our democracy.

Happy 250th birthday to America, and wishing a happy 4th of July to all.

Leave a comment

Tomorrow is when I’m 64.

I find myself confronting the age that The Beatles’s song, “When I’m 64,” marked for a whole generation of Boomers as the beginning of the long slow decline toward infirmity — a year of “losing my hair,” a need to “scrimp and save,” and to be “sincerely, wasting away.”

Woohoo! Can’t wait!

The song always annoyed me as a trite interruption in the Beatles’s song book, and now that I’m 64 it actually ticks me off that the reflections of a younger man on the bleak valley of aging is accompanied by an almost vaudevillian set of high notes from a trio of clarinets.

Clarinets! Really?

It didn’t take much research to learn what I had presumed all along: it was written by Paul McCartney. Of course, right? After all, he did create the band Wings which in 1976 put a stake through the heart of the 1960s musical revolution with a single top-of-the-charts hit: “Silly Love Songs.” But what I did not realize was that “When I’m 64” was the first song McCartney ever wrote. And I did not know that he composed it in 1954 when he would have been just 14 years old. So he can be forgiven for writing a song like this as an adolescent especially since he would go on to write masterpieces like “Yesterday” and “Hey Jude.” Still, we all know that John Lennon would have never, ever composed something so damn saccharine as “When I’m 64.” After all, Lennon always seemed more focused on the rage of Aquarius than the age of Aquarius, and it is a safe bet to presume that he would not have stopped as a teenager to ponder the grim bargain of aging and the angst that comes with it.

Subscribe now

It’s hard to imagine, but I learned that The Beatles would play this song in the cellar clubs of Hamburg, Germany in their earliest days as a band before they landed in New York in February 1964 for their first American tour and the country was swept up in Beatlemania. The song would not see the light of day on an album until 1967 when the iconic “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” was released, the year McCartney’s own father, a musician who played the trumpet, actually turned 64. Unsurprisingly, Lennon is said to have detested the song from the minute he heard it, and contributed only the first two lines of this verse about the garden and digging weeds:

“Doing the garden, digging the weeds

Who could ask for more?

Will you still need me, will you still feed me

When I’m 64?”

Cue the clarinets. Ugh!

On June 18, Sir Paul McCartney turned 84 years old, a full 20 years beyond his predictions of infirmity. And, well, the old man actually looks pretty damn good. Sir Paul was seen on his birthday out and about humorously mocking Donald Trump’s dance moves and having a laugh with Jimmy Fallon. And, it looks like he didn’t really lose his hair after all.

So maybe 64 is not all that bad, and definitely not the end of the road. I haven’t lost my hair, at least not all of it. And I’m not “wasting away,” not yet anyway. Every year we are all living a lot longer than our parents’ generation. Globally, average life expectancy has gone from about 50 years in 1962 to 71 years today. And in America, average life expectancy has gone from 69 years in 1962 to 79 years today.

We are going to be around watching the world turn for a lot longer than it seemed back in the early 1960s, and John Lennon was trying to help us frame an existential question amid the often senseless violence unfolding in 1968 through his anthem “Revolution:”

“Don’t you know it’s gonna be alright? Alright. Alright.”

The year I was born in 1962 feels like one of those years on the precipice of history. It is the last full year within the age bracket known as Baby Boomers, a generation born after World War II at the height of the American Century. It was the first year the Beatles landed a recording label. It was the year that John Glenn became the first American to go to space and orbit the earth and the year that President John F. Kennedy would deliver his famous “We Choose To Go To the Moon” speech and set the goal of a lunar landing.

Sifting through some research on my birth year, I also learned that 1962 was the year that Walter Cronkite became the anchor of CBS News and would go on to become the most trusted man in America before he stepped out of the anchor chair in 1981. It pushed me to reflect on the revolution in media I have witnessed in my 64 years on earth. I remember my father enforcing silence in our unruly home when Cronkite came on. The CBS Nightly News was a reverent moment to try to understand a world that felt like it was falling apart with the assassinations of JFK, RFK and MLK and datelines from Vietnam and the deep South during civil rights marches and then the Watergate hearings and the toppling of a president.

Subscribe now

Cronkite’s departure in 1981 coincided with the advent of a new cable television channel known as CNN and the era of 24-hour news, unleashing a new revolution in media and a very different pace to consuming information that bombarded us with live images and “breaking news” but didn’t seem as effective in helping us understand what it all meant. And by 1990, we were turning a corner on yet another new era in media as the first browser was launched on the newly created World Wide Web, opening up a pathway to a universal, linked information system. And we all are quite aware where the internet and its algorithms have taken us. Despite the ubiquity of LinkedIn, we are more fractured than ever. Despite the promises of social media, we are more lonely as a country and a world than we’ve ever been. Now a quarter century after the advent of the internet, we are on the cusp of the next revolution in technology and the next transformation of how we will share information across the world. With artificial intelligence we are entering a new and uncertain void as vast and dark as the space that John Glenn plunged through on his orbit around the earth in that year I was born 64 years ago.

So where are we today? Cronkite would not even recognize the CBS News division that he inherited from Edward R. Murrow, and he would certainly be horrified by the network’s dramatic state of collapse. Space exploration no longer has the romance of Kennedy’s “New Frontier” and is instead seen as the next revenue stream for a brilliant, but deranged inventor who this year became the world’s first trillionaire with Space X shares peaking on June 16. And as for superintelligent AI, we truly don’t know what it has in store for humanity, say, 64 years from now. The only thing we know for sure is that it represents a true revolution, and we are left with John Lennon’s question in the Beatles’ song Revolution still echoing across the generations:

“Don’t you know it’s gonna be alright?”

Leave a comment

Last month, Pope Leo XIV delivered an encyclical entitled “Magnifica Humanitas,” or “Magnificent Humanity: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence.” The document reverberated around the world as the first ever American pope took a stand as a moral philosopher and world leader challenging the primacy of technology and warning us all to “disarm” AI.

And this month, A.G. Sulzberger, the leader of what might be considered the high church of American journalism, The New York Times, delivered his own version of an encyclical that offered a stark warning to us all about the perils of AI platforms for traditional media.

Sulzberger stated, “Their hijacking of the public square is made possible by the original sin that animates their AI products — a brazen theft of intellectual property that has occurred at an unprecedented scale.”

Sulzberger delivered the keynote address at the World News Media Congress in Marseille on June 1st, an annual gathering in the French city that brings together leaders of media and technology, using the phrase “original sin” to characterize AI’s brazen scraping of what they call “data,” but which is known as “journalism” by everybody else.

Bless A.G. Sulzberger for casting this struggle in biblical terms.

It is interesting to see how Sulzberger’s “encyclical” runs parallel to the papal one, as both leaders are talking about safeguarding what is human — for Sulzberger human-centered journalism — in the time of artificial intelligence.

With a nod to the title of Pope Leo’s encyclical and with apologies to my high school Latin teachers, perhaps we might title Sulzberger’s declaration “Magnificus Nuntium,” or “Magnificent Journalism.”

It turns out the word ‘journalism’ was not really a thing back in ancient Rome and so there is not a Latin word for it. But “Nuntium,” which translates roughly as “news,” seems to be the closest I could get to giving Sulzberger’s speech a more pontifical title.

But the most important distinction between these two global thought leaders is in their call to action. While the pope pleads for “disarming” AI, Sulzberger seems to be closer to declaring war to protect the property rights of journalism organizations that are seeing their content stolen in broad daylight by AI platforms.

“Our profession has been too quiet, too passive, and too fragmented in the face of abuses by the companies leading the AI revolution,” Sulzberger said.

He added, “We cannot allow A.I. cheerleaders to dominate the public conversation without interjecting to argue for the importance of ensuring a sustainable future for original journalism. We cannot watch as A.I. companies attempt to permanently dismantle the rights that give us control over the work we create. We cannot sit by as this work is used to build replacement products that undermine our ability to earn the audience and revenue necessary to continue reporting the news.”

In this escalating holy war over who owns the truths that journalism works hard to discern, Sulzberger seeks to clarify the precise meaning behind what he is saying:

“I’m not calling AI — or the tech giants that control this technology — inherently bad or evil. I’m simply warning that AI companies are making choices, choices that violate settled law, threaten the viability of creative work, and appear likely to cause a great deal of unnecessary harm.”

AI companies are reluctant to offer compensation for the journalism they scrape from websites which they reductively call “data”. However, as Sulzberger points out, the AI companies seem to clearly understand the need to pay for other elements that power their platforms.

“Talent, compute, energy and data are all essential to the success of A.I. and, therefore, to the success of the tech giants. The first three are paid for because — of course they are. No tech C.E.O. would dare suggest forcing the most talented engineers to work for free… Nor would they consider stealing chips from a Nvidia factory or illegally tapping a power line. Investors consider the potential financial rewards of A.I. to be so great that they are embracing losses that run into the hundreds of billions of dollars to build data centers and power plants. In contrast, A.I. companies take “data” without consent or compensation.”

And this theft isn’t just happening because publishers are leaving their toys out on the lawn; it’s happening when they are locked up safely in the house. A study found that about 30 percent of AI bot scrapes violate explicit restrictions on accessing and taking websites’ content, including content protected behind paywalls,” Sulzberger states.

The battle ground for this war will be in courthouses. For its part, The New York Times decided to take OpenAI and its partner Microsoft to court “for brazen violations of our intellectual property rights protected by US copyright law both in the training of their models and the ongoing use of our work in their products,” he said.

“But lawsuits are slow and they’re expensive — ours has already stretched two-and-a-half years and cost over 20 million dollars. As AI companies are doubtlessly aware, most news organizations lack the resources to go to court to enforce their rights,” Sulzberger explained.

If you have been reading this newsletter, it comes as no surprise that profound disruption caused by the tech industry has decimated journalism. The U.S. has already lost more than 3,000 newspapers over the last 20 years. But the threat posed by the AI disruption is poised to be far more damaging.

In the old paradigm of web 2.0, there was a value exchange of sorts, one that was weighted against journalism but a business model in which journalism organizations willingly engaged. The digital platforms like Google and Facebook offered publishers a way to reach larger audiences that in exchange brought those organizations ad revenue. Part of the crisis in journalism has to do with the inequity in that value exchange as those two leading platforms, Google and Facebook, took control of about two-thirds of all digital advertising, leaving the traditional media fighting over a small piece of the total advertising pie. So the last great tech development created a formula that did not work well for traditional media.

But in the AI era, the idea of search engines is shifting to the concept of answer engines. In the new model, platforms such as Google are providing users with direct answers, with the consequence that “getting a Google user to click a link, according to industry research, is 10 times harder today than it was a decade ago,” Sulzberger said.

“This dynamic has, of course, led traffic to news websites to plummet,“ he said, citing Comscore research which showed that the largest newspapers they tracked had seen traffic declines of more than 45 percent over the last four years.

So Sulzberger is sounding an alarm, saying, “We cannot afford to be as naive this time.”

And there are practical reasons why journalism stands to lose this battle.

Given that the web 2.0 business model undercut their traditional business models and left them decimated, new organizations are smaller and weaker than two decades ago. But the tech platforms are bigger and stronger than ever — and increasingly willing to use their size and power to influence government policy in their favor.

To stand up against these forces, journalism will have to keep doing what it does best in adding value through accurate, reliable and groundbreaking journalism. And it will have to protect its ownership of the content its reporters work hard to produce. This is true at the New York Times and at leading media companies around the world. It is equally true for smaller newsrooms across the United States and around the world, and journalism organizations will need to find ways to unite and stand up for the work they do and to protect its ownership. The large AI platforms would be wise to see that they have a vested interest in keeping the industry of journalism robust and healthy if they want to continue to use it to train the large language models that drive the enterprise of AI.

“As we prepare, we must remind ourselves: information is valuable. Journalism is valuable,” Sulzberger said.

He offered concrete advice on how publishers can defend their work and build resilience against AI:

• Stand up for your rights. Publishers must actively insist their rights are respected, as “the alternative path of quietly tolerating the systematic theft of your work will eventually end your ability to continue producing it,” Sulzberger said.

• Deal carefully. While Sulzberger said it’s reasonable for news organizations to sign deals with AI companies, he urged publishers to consider if the payment actually represents fair value before agreeing.

• Push your legislators. Collectively, the industry needs to push for strong IP protections, limits to unauthorised bot scraping, and requirements for AI platforms to reveal how they use news publishers’ work.

• Join together. News publishers must work together and with other creative industries, to counteract the AI industry’s massive resources and power.

Both the pontiff and the publisher seem to agree that there is an urgency of this moment for all of us to do more to push AI to remain human centered. They both embrace the idea that AI has brought the world to a crossroads. The publisher offered a way to push back which is critical for journalism in particular, but the pope looked more broadly for safeguards for all of humanity that stands together across the world at this critical crossroads. Pope Leo offered three elemental questions that must be asked: “Where are we going? Toward what goal do we wish to orient ourselves? What direction should we choose as a people and as a human community?”

The pope explains what he means by “disarming” AI and they are words that can guide the world spiritually and in some very practical ways offer a guide to the future of journalism as well:

According to Pope Leo, “To disarm does not mean rejecting technology, but preventing it from dominating humanity. It means freeing technology from monopolistic control and opening it to discussion and debate, therefore making it human-friendly and restoring it to the plurality of human cultures and ways of life.”

What we’re reading this week

• Subversion of Reality | Gerry Shih, Columbia Journalism Review

• AI isn’t just deepfakes. Local newsrooms are using it to better serve you and your neighborhoods | Staff, Epicenter NYC

• Mexico scrapped its transparency agency. Journalists are still investigating corruption | César López Linares, LatAm Journalism Review

• News sites are the new newspapers: People are abandoning them for social media | Nieman Lab Staff, Nieman Journalism Lab

• When a Journalist Took on Corruption, He Used a Tool That Hadn’t Been Used Much in American History: the Unvarnished Truth | Jon Grinspan, Smithsonian Magazine

Leave a comment

It was the last great newspaper war in America.

A fabled time in New York City in the 1980s and 1990s when four major daily newspapers were vying against each other every day for breaking news and fighting for circulation in the trenches of newsstands and kiosks that were on every corner. There was the “Gray Lady,” as The New York Times was known, the feisty, down-market New York Post, and Newsday’s New York edition which was snidely referred to as a “tabloid in a tutu.” And then there was the brawny tabloid Daily News, which had the largest daily print circulation in America at more than 1 million, and it was affectionately referred to as New York’s “Hometown Newspaper.”

I worked during that newspaper war as a street reporter, the equivalent to the infantry, and it was exciting to take the next hill, so to speak, and often disillusioning to see the damage that the battles left behind. But one thing is for sure, it was never boring. I also served briefly as a city editor for the New York Daily News and would occasionally go out to the printing plant in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn. In the fall of 1992, I remember going to check on a special section that I needed to review before the print run. It was late November and the presses were gearing up for a run for the Sunday after Thanksgiving which was always one of the fattest papers of the year stuffed with display advertising at the start of the Christmas shopping season.

That feeling of the rumbling of the Goss presses and the smell of the six-foot-high paper rolls and the floors sticky with ink is something I will never forget. This was the tail end of the golden age of print newspapers and back then the Daily News was still a commanding force in New York. I would move on from the Daily News to the Boston Globe in 1994 and there the presses rumbled right below the newsroom. On Thursdays, when the Sunday edition was in full production, you could feel huge paper rolls landing with a thud on the concrete loading docks on Morrissey Boulevard in Dorchester. The sound was the perfect metaphor for the impact the paper had when it landed every morning.

I feel lucky to have worked in newspapers in this heyday. Those of you who read this newsletter, know that we have been chronicling the shift away from print newspapers and into digital media and the demise of print newspapers which are shutting down at an alarming rate. But we have perhaps not focused on enough is the parallel downward trend for printing presses which seems at a glance to be going the way of steam locomotives. There is no question that the number of printing presses at newspapers is dropping, but there are also some interesting and perhaps surprising signs of life for printing presses and journalism with printed editions of magazines and newspapers, particularly for small local weekly newspapers like the one where I serve as publisher.

At a recent seminar sponsored by the trade magazine Editor & Publisher, industry experts did not sugarcoat the bad news, particularly the unpredictability and volatility that comes with printing in the digital age. The price of newsprint has doubled over the last five years due to pandemic-related supply chain disruptions, mill closures, and high energy costs, with costs ranging from approximately $580 to $670 per metric ton in 2025.

Nearly 100 percent of the newsprint in North America is produced in Canada, but newsprint has been exempted from tariffs of up to 35 percent imposed on Canada by the Trump administration. This has offered some short-term relief to the publishing industry, but it has exacerbated the long-term anxiety over the viability of shipping newsprint. The volatility of the print business and the inevitable momentum toward digital first news has caused several major daily news organizations to cease print publication. Two notable examples are the Minneapolis Star Tribune and the Atlanta Journal Constitution.

The closures and consolidations are playing out across the country right now and this has ignited a scramble for community newspapers to find a printing press that will serve their needs. Many local newspapers are having to travel long distances to get the paper printed adding to further costs to produce the print edition. The last printing press in Maine closed down in April last year, leaving the state without a place for a local newspaper to print. Most of Maine’s community newspapers now drive to New Hampshire or even further to get their paper printed.

But not everything is bad news in the printing world. Angie Stroud, market intelligence manager at Billerud, a major international company producing and marketing high-quality paper and packaging, cited research showing that consumers continue to engage with the printed word and that they see signs that consumers are expressing a desire for the tactile experience of print over digital. Billerud does not produce newsprint and was not trying to sell to newspapers at this event.

Stroud highlighted a data point that warms the heart of a print news publisher: A single print magazine is read, on average, by more than seven people. She added that there is a way for print and digital to work together and that each has unique strengths. As Stroud pointed out in the recent issue of Editor&Publisher, digital channels are more designed for speed and frequency, whereas print on paper is better suited for attention and memorability. Stroud pointed to neuroscientific research, including studies from Temple University, saying, “Print consistently outperforms digital in recall, trust and response rates.”

I think about this issue nearly every day in our small newsroom at The Martha’s Vineyard Times. We, like more and more newspapers, have to travel quite a distance to get our paper printed. For us it is made a bit more complicated by the fact that we are on an Island.

Each week, we work with TCI Press out of Seekonk, MA. Every Wednesday at 3:00 p.m. we ship the PDF files of the 32-page paper we produce for the 3,500 print subscribers, or “members” in our community. Inside the Seekonk printing plant, our PDF files are scanned onto plates, and then an experienced printing team runs the plates through the web of a four-color Rockwell printer.

The pressroom is not quite as loud as the Daily News or the Boston Globe nor does it have the heft of impact, but it has a heartbeat to it that I love. Big rolls of newsprint are moved around with forklifts to be fed into the rumbling weave of the printer. And when it gets humming, it sounds like a freight train. The floors are as sticky with ink as they were at the Daily News plant in Brooklyn. It is all straight out of another century, and, maybe because I have loved working in print newspapers for most of the past 40 years, I am fond of all that noise and the ink-stained floors and smell of those rolls of paper. It smells like, well, news.

When our paper is printed and the copies are bundled together with twine, they are loaded into the back of a produce truck provided by the owner of The Martha’s Vineyard Times who happens to also be the long-time proprietor of Cronig’s Markets which keep the Island supplied with fresh produce in addition to everything else we need. It warms my heart to see the newspapers when they arrive to the loading docks at the back of the grocery store in the produce truck with loose heads of cabbage and broccoli rolling around the top of the shrink-wrapped pallets filled with our newspapers ready for delivery. We like to think the community service of journalism we provide is as much a part of the health of our community as the fresh vegetables with which the print edition arrives.

For publishers like myself that are tempted to walk away from the expense of producing the print product, it is a very important insight. Digital news gathering has far better metrics to assess audience engagement, but print has an intuitive feel that readers want and she warns this emotional reality should not be overlooked. For those considering dropping their print edition, Stroud had this to say: “Based on all the research that I’ve done and the impact that print has on people’s attention … to me, it’s a huge mistake.”

What we’re reading this week

• When the killing of journalists disrupts nothing: a conversation with safety expert Elena Cosentino | Maurice Oniang’o, Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism

• The Centre Daily Times unionizes after backlash to McClatchy’s AI tool | Andrew Deck, Nieman Journalism Lab

• War in Ukraine: How RSF continues to help journalists working under Russian fire | Reporters Without Borders

• The 60 Minutes Crisis Reveals the 3 Questions Every Leader Should Be Asking Right Now | Soren Kaplan, Inc.

• This CEO keeps going viral for thirst-trapping journalists with $200k jobs to be head of content. Yes, he’s trying to prove a point | Nick Lichtenberg, Fortune

Leave a comment

Fifty years ago, “All The President’s Men” opened in theaters across the country.

The blockbuster film chronicles how Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein investigated the Watergate break-in and traced it back to the White House, setting in motion calls for President Richard Nixon’s impeachment and then his resignation in August 1974.

I was 14 years old in that Spring of 1976 and I remember settling into our local movie theater in Natick, MA and watching Robert Redford as Woodward and Dustin Hoffman as Bernstein in a film that would speak so directly to my heart that I knew I was going to be a reporter. I am far from alone in that memory. A whole generation of journalists coming of age in the 1970s were inspired by the work of Woodward and Bernstein, their dogged investigative reporting and the idea that you could have a job in which you get to ‘stick to the man.’ I fell in love with the whole idea of American journalism. I was hooked, and, well, I still am. Hopelessly.

A half century later, it is hard to convey the power of this film to the new generation of reporters who I work with. It’s almost impossible for them to imagine that journalism could yield truths that would change the course of history. Yet, this is exactly the movie that this new generation of journalists should be watching to be inspired, a reminder that getting to the truth is hard work and comes with grave risks, and that it can actually produce profound change if you stay with it and don’t give up.

Subscribe now

The parallels between Nixon and the current administration are unsettling and all of us who work in journalism are left wondering what the hell it is going to take to get American audiences to see that the story of corruption, power, politics and the dangers of an imperial presidency that was at the core of Watergate is just as present today. If you have never seen this film or not seen it in a long time, sit down and stream it.

When you do, you will immediately recognize that the media landscape today is profoundly different. The Washington Post’s fierce reputation for independence was recently diminished by its billionaire owner, and the nobility of Kay Graham and her family that once owned the paper and stood firmly by maverick editors like Ben Bradlee are just framed portraits on the wall, no longer part of the living reality at the paper.

You will also be reminded that audiences these days are fractured and stories like the Watergate break-in quickly pixelate into shards of partisan opinion and ideologies that seem to trump facts. (Pun intended.) Readership is hard to calculate when so few people actually read the stories. I believe these grim but very real trends today make the film more important than ever, and might help us see the film not as a regretful reminiscence but a hopeful reminder of what the power of a free press can look like in a healthy democracy. This film can hopefully stir our collective memory.

The opening scene of “All The President’s Men” is etched into my memory: A close-up of a blank sheet of paper rolled into an old clacking typewriter. The strokes of the keys are decisive and powerful. They sound like the crack of a distant gunshot as if the words themselves are a weapon that can defend us, and protect our democracy. The date that is typed out at the top of the page is “JUNE 1, 1972” and just after the ‘ding’ of the carriage return, it cuts to a helicopter landing on the Capitol Plaza that morning as Nixon arrives to address the House of Representatives and takes the podium at the height of his power.

The next scene is from outside the hotel and we see a flashlight flickering in an office where the burglars are setting out to do their work and the conspiracy is just getting rolling. By pure chance, undercover D.C. police are sent in to check out the report of a break-in and they arrest the men whose names would go down in history for their bizarre role in a plot to protect a paranoid president who wanted to silence his critics and do whatever it took to win an election. Sounds familiar?

Cut to Woodward: a young metro reporter covering courts assigned to the arraignment of these men. One of my favorite angles of this narrative is the fact that Woodward was not a national reporter and that his editor was fighting to keep the Watergate break-in coverage a local story. You have to really love the inside-baseball of a newsroom and the dynamics of power that used to drive them to understand how important that subplot is.

Bernstein is an older, cagier veteran rewrite man also on the local news desk. How they fall into a partnership and start digging on the story drives the momentum of the narrative which is essentially a paper chase to get at who was behind the break-in and why. We all know the history so I won’t unpack it all here, but there is a small moment I love when finally the city editor successfully defends Woodward and Bernstein’s assignments to cover the story. In the beautiful and chaotic symphony of what newsrooms used to look and sound like — the loud clacking of typewriters, the constant din of banter and the mountains of paper that cluttered desks in that lush analogue world of yore — the local news editor Harry Rosenfeld walks briskly by and says, “Woodward, Bernstein: You’re both on the story. Now don’t fuck it up!!”

Subscribe now

Their journey down into the rabbit holes of Washington is guided by Woodward’s deeply placed source in the FBI known to us only as “Deep Throat.” He is played by Hal Holbrook who, with a raspy whisper in a dimly lit parking garage, instructs Woodward on how to direct his reporting: “Just follow the money.” It is certainly the single most memorable line of the movie and one that would also serve any reporters today, a half century later, looking to dig down into the surreal warren of corruption in Washington in the age of Trump. It is worth noting that there are indeed some fine examples of great reporters following the money, most notably David Frenthold for his reporting at the Washington Post and more recently the New York Times on the Trump family and their various conflicts of interest.

The most powerful visual of the film comes at the beginning of their investigative journey toward “following the money.” In the scene, the two reporters enter the Library of Congress looking for White House documents and are blocked by a dismissive clerk, but subsequently they gain access by going down into the basement and finding a lower-level clerk who turns them over.

The scene pulls back into a gorgeous overhead shot filmed on location at the Thomas Jefferson Building of the Library of Congress. It features a dramatic, high-angle camera shot looking down upon them as they sit in the Main Reading Room, surrounded by immense stacks of documents, highlighting the daunting nature of their research. As the shot pulls back, the concentric circles of the Library of Congress take shape, floor by floor, surging to a height of more than 100 feet. It is an iconic piece of cinematography, which was shot using cranes and a pulley system by the legendary, late Gordon Willis, who in his later years lived close by in North Falmouth, MA. To my relatively untrained eye, the scene reflects the Library of Congress as an oculus, an enormous eye looking down from on high. And there in the imperfections of the iris of this eye are the two reporters toiling away and scouring the documents to find answers.

As they close in on the story, they realize they finally have the goods on the big story that connects the White House to the conspiracy. They have worked for a year to get the story, publishing incremental pieces but now they really had it and they were going to print but they go to see Washington Post Editor Ben Bradlee, played by Jason Robards. They are worried about surveillance so they talk in the yard outside his home, and Bradlee tells them to stay focused and keep working.

Bradlee gets slightly pissed off at the two reporters and admonishes them but also supports them by reminding them of how important the work is. For those who see the movie today, especially young reporters, Bradley may as well be speaking directly to the moment we live in:

“Nothing’s riding on this, except, uh, the First Amendment of the Constitution, freedom of the press and maybe the future of the country.”

Leave a comment

The phrase “artificial intelligence” was first coined in 1955, the year Pope Leo XIV was born.

How that phrase has evolved over the last 70 years is essential in understanding this unique moment in world history as the first ever American pope has taken a stand as a moral philosopher and world leader challenging the primacy of technology and warning us all to “disarm” AI.

On Monday, the Pope offered his first encyclical, a form of papal communication that has a long history and serves as guidance to the bishops and the whole of the Catholic Church on challenging moral issues of the time. The encyclical is entitled “Magnifica Humanitas,” or “Magnificent Humanity: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence.”

Although the title might suggest otherwise, the pope is not so much weighing against AI as he is reflecting on the unique power of humanity and encouraging us not to forget what it means to be human.

“So-called artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships and do not know from within what love, work, friendship or responsibility mean,” Leo writes.

The message of his encyclical, which grows out of a decade-long dialogue between the Vatican and global leaders in technology, stands in a marked contrast to the high priests of Silicon Valley, including Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, and their doctrines of faith in the power of technology, the primacy of AI and the bounty of profits it will offer. They arrogantly believe they are saving the world. But, in his 42,000-word tome, the pope humbly expresses his fear they are in danger of destroying it.

This fear was in the air this week at college graduation ceremonies across the country. Many commencement speakers sought to tackle the issue from many different disciplines. Interestingly, students were also collectively voicing a shift in distrust of AI with a smattering of “boos” when the word was mentioned. At Harvard University’s 375th commencement, comedian Ronny Chieng, known for his work at “The Daily Show,” startled a few parents with the level of profanity and anger he directed at AI. The opening line was “Fuck AI,” which he said three times in a row for full effect.

Speaking in a large auditorium on Wednesday at what is known as “Class Day,” Chieng said, “In respect to graduation speakers in colleges around America telling you you need to master AI for the future, I am here to tell you: The mission of your generation is to destroy AI. Kill it! AI is just going to end up making mediocre people dumber.”

His talk was met with applause and some laughter, as he continued, saying, “Untalented people love talking about AI helped them draft speeches and their scripts and their podcasts … What they are missing is this: The creating is the fun part, and I know this platitude is almost worthy of AI. But the reason shortcuts aren’t always good is because the journey isn’t just how we acquire skills, the journey is the point of all this. It is!”

The comedian and the pope are mostly in sync. But the power of the pope’s message is that he is not rejecting innovation or blindly opposing technology. Instead the pope is setting out to raise a voice in defense of humanity and issuing a warning. As a gesture of aligning himself with thoughtful leaders in technology, the pope presented the encyclical in person alongside Christopher Olah, a co-founder of the AI research company Anthropic. Throughout the presentation, the central message by both the pope and the technologist was that AI must be human-centered.

“We are truly experiencing an eclipse of the sense of what it means to be human,” he said earlier this month just before the document was published.

The date the encyclical was published, May 15, carries meaning as it marks the same day on the calendar 155 years ago when his namesake, Pope Leo XIII, released the “Rerum Novarum” (“Of New Things”) encyclical, a moral indictment of the stark economic inequality wrought by the Industrial Revolution, and an unequivocal rejection of the laissez-faire capitalism and rigid ideology of socialism in favor of the process of collective bargaining and a timeless cry for social justice. So, in short, if Leo XIII was indicting robber barons; Leo XIV was making the case against tech moguls. The importance of this document, its timeliness, and its potential to reframe the dialogue around our future and the emergence of AI has everything to do with the unique narrative of this American pope.

He came into the world on September 14, 1955 on the gritty southside of Chicago with the name Robert Francis Prevost. It so happens that that was the same year that a young professor of Mathematics at Dartmouth College coined the phrase “Artificial Intelligence.” The pope loved math and would go onto major it in at college, but most of the pope’s biographers make the case that he was just a normal Catholic kid coming of age at a time when John F. Kennedy would be the first Catholic elected to be the president of the United States.

He earned his college degree in Mathematics and Philosophy at Villanova University in Pennsylvania. The future Pontiff received his theological education at the Catholic Theological Union in Chicago. At the age of 27, he was sent by his superiors to Rome to study Canon Law at the Pontifical University of Saint Thomas Aquinas. In Rome, he was ordained a priest on June 19, 1982. He later went on to serve in Peru for more than a decade before returning to the Chicago archdiocese and then taking on leadership roles in the Vatican where Pope Francis named him the prefect of the dicastery of Bishops. He was made a Cardinal in 2023. After the pope’s death last year, Prevost’s name appeared on the paper ballots used by the college of cardinals and he was elected, becoming the first ever American to lead the global church which is composed of nearly 1.5 billion baptized Catholics.

Harvard professor of history and best-selling author, Jill Lepore, wrote eloquently in last week’s New Yorker, “If those of us Americans who are Catholic are proud of this Pope, many of us are even prouder that the first American pontiff has taken on this vital matter, and at such a crucial moment. In much of American culture—and especially in the business and tech press—challenging the economic power and oligarchic rule of U.S.-based artificial-intelligence companies is an act tantamount to heresy. Pope Leo is not only willing but eager to dissent. Bless him.”

The pope embraces the idea that AI has brought the world to a crossroads. And he argues that as humanity stands at this crossroads, there are three elemental questions that must be asked: “Where are we going? Toward what goal do we wish to orient ourselves? What direction should we choose as a people and as a human community?”

These are the questions of our time. The pope acknowledges that AI promises much that is good for breakthroughs in medicine and mathematics and deeper understanding around complex challenges such as climate change and economic inequity. But it also presents peril. The pope expresses a fear that AI could turbo-charge disinformation by blurring the lines between facts and fabrications and undercutting the human endeavor of critical thinking. He worries that the culture of capitalism and the pursuit of profit around artificial intelligence can easily undermine the search for truth that is necessary for both democratic life and any possibility for a genuine spiritual existence.

Because of the clear and present danger it presents, the pope believes there must be democratic control of artificial intelligence through various forms of regulation, and above all he believes that AI must align itself with the pursuit of truth. Indeed, he writes that the opportunity for that alignment to happen could be an historic breakthrough for humanity. And on that path, he calls, above all else, for “disarming” AI.

He writes, “To disarm does not mean rejecting technology, but preventing it from dominating humanity. It means freeing technology from monopolistic control and opening it to discussion and debate, therefore making it human-friendly and restoring it to the plurality of human cultures and ways of life.”

The instinct to dismiss any claim of moral authority by the Catholic Church is understandable. Its failure as an institution for not protecting children nor prosecuting predators is profound. As a journalist, I have reported extensively on the Church’s failings. I have also interviewed senior clerics on the Church’s inability to employ its moral teachings towards stopping war. It has much to answer for in its unconscionable silence in the face of the rise of antisemitism in Europe that paved a path to the industrial killing of Jews in the Holocaust. But often the Catholic Church’s daily work against poverty in every corner of the world is too easily dismissed. And the ability for the Church’s best leaders to define conscience at a time when the world feels morally untethered is too easy to overlook.

The recent debate surfacing in Washington around “just war” theory and Vice President J.D. Vance stands as proof of the need for us all to be tethered to a mooring that can stand up against the shifting tides of politics amid the wars in Iran, Gaza and Ukraine. Vance took a swipe at the pope for, in his view, failing to understand that the U.S. and Israel’s airstrikes on Iran represented a “just war.” The pope assured Vance, a recent convert to Catholicism, that the Vice President had very little understanding of the idea of a “just war,” the theology and history that lies behind it, and interestingly suggested that AI and its role in modern warfare may in fact require a rethinking of the Church’s teaching on “just war.”

“The ‘just war’ theory which has all too often been used to justify any kind of war, is now outdated,” wrote Leo in his encyclical, adding that “Humanity possesses ​far more effective and capable tools for promoting human life and resolving conflicts, such as dialogue, diplomacy and forgiveness,” he said.

The pope made clear we need moral grounding to steel ourselves for the challenges that AI presents in these active wars as well as the challenges it presents in our daily lives. This pope’s words offer an important and thoughtful road map for us to find our way forward. And, equally important, it offers a call to action. The pope is urging journalists and educators to train people in recognizing the manipulative machinations of AI. He calls on journalists in particular to help us develop greater literacy about media as part of making sure we are discerning users of AI so we can harness its power for good and do not fall prey to its worst flaws. If journalism in its core is about the pursuit of truth, there are so many ways we can align ourselves with its capacity for organizing information. The key, as the pope makes clear, is to be sure that in doing so we never forget the “magnificence of humanity.”

What we’re reading this week

• Inside the news industry’s efforts to join forces to defend its journalism from AI companies | Marina Adami, Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism

• You couldn’t create a more anti-news internet if you tried | Matt Pearce, Nieman Lab

• A Star Is Born | Adam Piore, Columbia Journalism Review

• Press crackdowns in Gulf spike following Iran war, risk becoming permanent | Mohamed Mandour, Committee to Protect Journalists

• How Mongabay built a global model for environmental accountability journalism | Maurice Oniang’o, Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism

Leave a comment

The dramatic decline of news organizations in the United States over the last two decades has coincided with a steady drop in union membership overall across the country, but recently the NewsGuild, which is part of the Communications Workers of America, is reporting a stirring of activity and a rise in membership.

So what does that mean in real terms? In short, it is too early to tell and the trendlines are not clear, but they suggest that the promise and peril that AI represents has motivated more journalists to demand a seat at the table where the future of journalism will be decided. And that’s a good thing.

But while pondering the change that is upon us, it is essential to recognize this is a far more revolutionary moment than the last time the world saw a transformative technology like this, which was Web 2.0. Back then the historic shift was part of what was called “The New Information Order.” The changes were mostly around newsrooms seeking to digitize content and optimize for search engines through Google and setting out to outflank traditional media through new platforms like Facebook. Labor unions were not really a part of that chapter in history even if their members were directly affected by its consequences. Back then it was traditional media companies that were slow to move or resistant to the change and they were marginalized, and as a result their business models were disrupted. The breaking mechanism on inevitable change this time seems to come from the labor movement, and a growing concern that AI presents an existential threat to journalism jobs.

Subscribe now

The NewsGuild-CWA, which now represents over 25,000 workers in 519 workplaces, has experienced a tilt upward in organizing activity and member-driven labor actions in recent years. According to an Axios analysis, since 2020 an average of 23 media unions have formed annually, compared to just 8 per year in the decade prior.

Amid severe industry downsizing, unions are seeking to secure contracts and their ranks are growing through campaigns in both digital and legacy media, including local newsrooms and tech staff, according to the NewsGuild.

Early this spring, members of the Guild at ProPublica, one of the most successful, respected and largest nonprofit newsrooms in America, overwhelmingly voted to authorize a strike. Out of the roughly 150 journalists, copyeditors, videographers and other newsroom workers in the Guild, 92% of members voted to walk off the job and they did so on April 8 in a one-day strike.

ProPublica’s union, which was first recognized in 2023, has been negotiating the first collective bargaining agreement around the boilerplate issues of job security and cost-of-living wage increases, but interestingly it is also zeroing in on an article that would prohibit ProPublica from laying off employees due to AI adoption. If no settlement is reached in the coming months, the union has threatened another walkout.

Other news organizations have also been simmering over how newsroom employees and the unions that represent them will be impacted by the sweeping changes that are coming with AI. According to Neiman Journalism Lab, AI was referenced in 43 contracts negotiated by units of the NewsGuild-CWA.

In three large metro newspapers, The Miami Herald, the Sacramento Bee and the Kansas City Star, unions have filed grievances against parent company McClatchy after senior executives began introducing a “content scaling agent,” or CSA, which is an AI summarization tool powered by Anthropic’s Claude. Management at McClatchy, a respected news organization fighting for sustainability as it operates 30 daily newspapers and dozens of other weekly and digital news organizations across 15 states, wants to place a bet on this AI tool to help find and segment new audiences. Unions representing its journalists are not so thrilled about what it might mean for the quality of what is written under their byline. The union sent a letter to management on May 1. That was followed with a quiet revolt by dozens of unionized reporters at the three papers withholding their bylines on stories and demanding more input on how such decisions are made.

At the New York Times, the Times Guild, representing some 1,500 members from the news organization’s editorial employees, has developed a subcommittee specifically focused on issues surrounding the use of AI in the newsroom. The unit sent a letter in early April to the publisher and senior news executives, stating that the Times’ standards on AI were “woefully inadequate,” citing “serious concerns” after a freelancer was found to have plagiarized an article using AI.

A member of the guild bargaining committee laid out for Axios some of the core issues that the union is seeking in relation to AI, including a mandate for “clearer disclosures around the technology’s use in its journalism.” And further clarity around “the way Times journalists’ name, image and likeness would be protected.”

Senior management at the Times wrote in a note to union members that its latest contract proposal addresses the guild’s main concerns, which in addition to AI include health care, wages, remote work and unionizing The Athletic. Axios, which formed a content partnership with OpenAI, quoted the management letter to the union which “gave assurances that our use of A.I. would be informed by our current best-in-class guidelines and standards while leaving flexibility to iterate as the technology evolves.”

Subscribe now

In addition, the letter stated, “We also added strong language that guarantees that The Times would not create a digital replica of a bargaining member’s image, voice or likeness without their consent — a provision the Guild had told us was very important to its members.”

The union’s contract at the Times lapsed at the end of February and the negotiations are ongoing. Based on the coverage, the tone seems to be respectful, but the issue of AI has become a more significant flashpoint between the management and unions at the Times and other newsrooms as the news organizations seek to experiment with new tools and to seek major partnership deals with AI platforms.

It is too early to tell where all this is headed, but it seems safe to say the issue of how newsrooms will handle the quiet, smoldering labor unrest is not going away. Riddhi Setty, at the Columbia Journalism Review, has been covering the issue as a Delacourt Fellow, which allows recent graduates of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism to bring fresh eyes to media coverage and to immerse themselves in its thorniest issues. Setty wrote on April 30, “Some newsrooms, as large as CBS and as small as Vermont’s VT Digger, have had success in ratifying contracts with AI guardrails in the past month. But for many journalists, the battle is far from over.”

Setty’s piece quotes Hilke Schellmann, an AI expert and journalism professor at New York University, stating, “Now is the time to fight this fight. Because once it becomes standard in a union bargaining agreement across the journalism industry that journalists or employees have no say over AI tools, that quickly becomes a standard.”

Equally concerning is the need for news organizations and the journalists who work at those organizations to fully embrace the potential for transformation that AI promises. This moment is about far more than digitizing content or getting more eyeballs on a website. This is about how content will be verified and whether this new transformation of the model – from search engine to answer engine – can restore trust for news consumers who have so profoundly lost faith in the practice of journalism. If we plunge forward with the right spirit and the right guardrails then the massive investment flowing into AI and the diminished business models of journalism can actually be aligned in an unprecedented way around the pursuit of truth. That, I believe, would be very good news for the craft of journalism.

Leave a comment

Jelani Cobb’s writing on race and culture for the New Yorker stands out as among the finest in contemporary America, but Jelani’s skill as a speaker is in some ways an even more extraordinary gift. The resonance of his words may have something to do with his training as a scholar in history, before he set out on a career in journalism that carried him all the way to serving as Dean at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. His signature is the way he listens and then responds with a deep timbre in his voice, formulating answers as smooth and steady as a Charles Mingus bass line with strokes as powerful and well-timed as a home-run crack off of Barry Bonds’ bat.

For this post, I wanted to bring readers as close as I could to the experience of listening to Jelani, which is why I was planning to run excerpts from our conversation this week at a dinner to benefit the Boston Book Festival and to celebrate his most recent book, Three or More Is a Riot: Notes on How We Got Here: 2012 - 2025. My hope was to give you a chance to read Jelani’s beautifully spoken words and how, as he writes in the introduction, he “pulled together pieces that shed light on the places, events and personalities that are important to understanding how we navigated a besieged decade.”

But as we all know, few plans, even safe ones, survive contact with reality. The recording on a colleague’s iPhone failed and there was no video of the evening since we decided from the start that setting up a tripod and placing microphones would have robbed us all of the proximity of the conversation. So I was not taking notes when Jelani and I perched ourselves on stools in front of the other guests at the home of dear friends amid a group of journalists, authors, entrepreneurs and thought leaders.

After the dinner, when we realized that technology had failed us, we talked about how it seemed appropriate to have to write this one from memory. We would just have to internalize what was simply an extraordinary moment in time to hear a brilliant essayist walk us through his book, which is a collection of narrative journalism, profiles and cultural criticism published in the New Yorker. The book begins with a piece from March 21, 2012, with his coverage of the murder of Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida and how it suggested “the benefit of the doubt in the shooting of a black teenager extends even to unauthorized, untrained, weapon-toting private citizens who pursue unarmed pedestrians.” He ends with an essay published November 7, 2024, titled “2016 and 2024” chronicling Trump’s two election victories, writing, “The prospect that a presidential candidate could be embraced not only by white supremacists but also by one of the two major political parties and almost half the electorate triggered an enduring dread that the progress we had made was fragile and impermanent.”

Subscribe now

As he explains early in the book, the title, “Three or More Is a Riot,” is a reference to the frequent criminal code definition holding that riot is the concerted unlawful action of “three or more” people, serving as a metaphor for the paralyzing incongruity that simple, organized assembly for racial justice is frequently deemed a threat or “riot” by detractors to highlight the criminalization of Black protest and racial justice movements over the past decade.

Beyond Jelani’s erudite writing and the fury of his thinking is a big and warm family man, who I have had the great pleasure to get to know in some quieter moments out of public view with his wife, Danielle, and their daughter and twin boys. Perhaps that is why my favorite passage in this book comes from a dialogue with one of the twins, August. He writes:

“The clouds rolled in from the West. Standing at the window, I could see darkness unfolding across the horizon. Then I noticed the heavy drops of rain that had begun to fall on the Hudson River while the streets below remained dry, their inhabitants largely unaware of the nearby torrent. I called to my sons. They are astute observers of natural phenomenon in the way that five-year-olds often are. I pointed to the raindrops that we could see splashing in the river and the dry streets just a few hundred feet away. Almost as if on cue the downpour began on the streets and then a single drop splashed against the window, followed until they made a steady percussion against the glass. ‘What does this tell you?’ I asked them. August, who is older than his brother, Hollis, by nine minutes, volunteered an answer. ‘Storms don’t stand still,’ he shouted. That’s right, I told him. Storms don’t stand still so it is important to understand what directions they’re headed in.”

“It strikes me that the work included here could be thought of as a particular type of storm-chasing. What began as a few scattered, angry clouds on the distant horizon at the beginning of this collection coalesced into what looked to be a shower a few years in, a passing storm after that and ultimately the maelstrom of volatile white nationalism that defines the moment which this book finds its way to publication … My hope is that it contributes just a little to our ability to recognize patterns that are reasserting themselves – and maybe even helps discern where the storms are heading next.”

This was indeed the question that so many of us had for Jelani on this memorable night in Brookline, Massachusetts, including our hosts, a brilliant lawyer and dear friend, David Feinberg, and his equally brilliant wife, Marina Kalb, a former documentary producer who now serves on the board of the Boston Book Festival. We all wanted to know where the galloping pace of history was going. The truth is Jelani does not offer direct answers to this question in the book. It would have to be said that this is not a hopeful book, but it is helpful in collecting precisely reported and beautifully rendered stories that together serve as complex data points that are forming patterns. If we pay attention, the patterns will prove to us not only, as August observed, “storms move” but as his father shared “it’s important to understand what direction they are headed in.”

Subscribe now

Jelani shared in his talk how the gale force winds of the storm are battering hard-fought protections of civil rights and contributing to the erosion of a free and independent press, especially as it is impacting local news. He made a point of also highlighting many bright spots across the country where new media initiatives were finding a way to replace traditional news organizations.

Specifically, Jelani discussed the fallout from the Supreme Court ruling that has narrowed the scope of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and weakened Section 2, which has long been used to ensure fair congressional redistricting for minority voters. The April 29 decision in Louisiana v. Callais makes it much harder to challenge state voting maps as racially discriminatory by requiring proof of intentional discrimination rather than just discriminatory, and this, Jelani shared, undercuts the chances of the Democratic Party taking back control of the U.S. House of Representatives in the midterm elections.

The power of this book is the warning it provides that we are indeed in a fateful and damaging storm pattern. And it serves as a stark reminder that it will be up to all of us to not only seek shelter and to be sure the windows are battened down, but perhaps more importantly, to do everything we can to ensure that the structure of our democracy is sufficiently strengthened to endure the onslaught.

Leave a comment

About 35 Islanders crowded into the modest and cluttered newsroom of the Martha’s Vineyard Times on the edge of the harbor amid boats undergoing repairs and restoration, a rite of Spring on any island. It was late in the afternoon on May 3, which marked World Press Freedom Day, and you could feel a cold, damp breeze blowing in through rattling window frames.

This quarterly gathering, which we call a “Publisher’s Forum,” grows out of a promise we made to the community when I became publisher just over two years ago, to host outreach and information sessions about what we are working on and what our readers would like to see us working on. They offer essential insights into the community we serve and are important for all of us trying to keep local journalism alive in our respective towns and cities. We often hear about the big themes our audience cares about: the environment, education, housing, immigration and the economic inequity that challenges the island. This time, all those same issues came up. But what made it feel different is that the gathering landed on this date honoring press freedom, and that brought to the forefront some of the global challenges of journalism, and how those challenges play out locally.

At this forum, we chose to look out beyond the harbor at the world to better understand our own community. And I shared an analysis that has shaped much of my work as a local and national reporter and as a foreign correspondent in the Middle East and beyond. My take on this distressing moment we live in is that the crisis in local news has everything to do with the crisis in global democracy. As I have written before, local news is a binding agent that, when done right, can pull communities together around a shared set of facts, around solutions to challenges we face, and around the stories of those who need to be held accountable and those we need to celebrate.

When a community loses its local news source, forming a barren media landscape known as a “news desert,” we know three things happen: voter participation declines, polarization rises, and bond ratings are weakened. The impact on bond ratings, in simple terms, indicates that banks and other institutions of lending do not want to invest in communities where no one is watching the store. So that is why I say the crisis in local news has everything to do with the crisis in our democracy. We are coming undone and pulling apart in no small measure because we are losing the glue that holds us together: trusted, local news.

You’ve probably heard this crisis explained before if you have read my essays in this space, but it is sadly becoming more and more true every day, not only in the United States but also in Ukraine and across Europe, in the Middle East, Africa, Asia, Latin America and so many places where conflict is brewing. So, we thought World Press Freedom Day felt like the right day to make the connection to what this day means for the year-round community of about 20,000 people who live on our island. The population surges in the summer to 100,000, which creates stresses and strains and economic disparities on our island as it does in so many seasonal communities.

With refreshments donated from a diner across the street, I shared our efforts to become “digital first” in our editorial mission at the Times, which has a weekly print edition with 3,500 readers, or “members,” as we call them, as well as daily online coverage that serves about 20,000 subscribers. We are increasing the commitment to digital content, I explained, with a much-needed investment in and redesign of our website, which has been desperately in need of an overhaul in recent years. I used the phrase “deferred maintenance,” which evoked some nods of the head on an Island where the brutal New England weather keeps every homeowner on their toes providing maintenance to houses battered by the salt air and strong wind.

One persistent issue that readers wanted to address is the moderation of the comment section on our website. It is a common criticism of publications – local and national – that comments can quickly descend into polarized and divisive dialogues. We do our best to moderate the comments for our members even as many newspapers have grown so frustrated with the lack of civility that they have just dropped them altogether. We learn by listening to our audience how we can make the dialogue productive, and we are going to keep working on it.

We are definitely not done with this process of reviving our website, and we shared with our readers that we still have quite a way to go to get it right. We also made several important announcements at our forum in the newsroom, including the fact that we are hiring a new director of marketing and digital strategy, a position that we hope will help us to better serve our community and grow our audience.

As publisher of our local newspaper along with the owner, Steve Bernier, we are committed to keeping the business plan within the model of a “for-profit.” I add the quotes because it is “for profit” only in name, not in reality. Our local news organization, like so many others across the country, continues to suffer losses. We have tried to offset those losses by serving our community through a non-profit arm which we call Islanders Write. The name comes from an event that brings Island journalists and authors to talk about their craft, which we have offered free every summer for the last 14 years. The initiative allows us to blend traditional advertising revenue with non-profit fundraising that is mission driven. It is a “hybrid” model which I have been working on for almost two decades now, and which I have written about as an emerging model in struggling local news organizations across the country.

This “hybrid” approach has also allowed us to support a full-time reporter, or “Island Writer,” as we have named them, since last year. She is Sarah Shaw Dawson, who was born and raised on Martha’s Vineyard and focuses on housing issues on an island where the lack of affordable housing is a crisis for our year-round residents who are being priced out by expensive summer homes. It is a problem exacerbated by a short-term rental market that is pushing up the price on year-round rentals and leaving many hardworking people on the Island living in overcrowded conditions all summer, or in many cases just leaving the island to live elsewhere.

We see that exodus of locals as a threat to the character of our community, and that is what motivated us to start this non-profit initiative so we can offer year-round jobs in journalism and hopefully retain local voices to tell the story of their island. We will be adding two more of these reporters in the year ahead thanks to some generous donations.

We also announced an internship in the name of the late Tony Horwitz, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and writer and year-round resident who loved every inch of the Island. The new intern we have named hails from the Brazilian community that is vital and thriving on our island despite the climate of fear created by the aggressive federal immigration policies. We are thrilled to have a young intern who can be part of our effort to serve the Brazilian community and the whole Island by offering a translation service for all of our articles into Brazilian Portuguese. There is a chance here for us to all learn much more about the community, and for the community to learn more about our Brazilian neighbors.

So why am I sharing these very small town updates on the business model of my local newspaper here in a newsletter that tries to serve a community that is national and global? It is because this kind of local innovation and reinvention and outreach is happening in small newsrooms across America, and around the world. For sure, we are fortunate on Martha’s Vineyard to have resources that can help us get the job done, but we believe every community out there has its own landscape of opportunity and terrain of adversity that needs to be explored, and we applaud all of you out there who are navigating it every day.

I am often writing about the crisis in local news and the news deserts and hopefully you have been following our journey to different newsrooms across America and around the world and it can feel like it is all bad news out there. But as I took on the humbling task of trying to figure out how to keep our small paper up and running in my local community, I realized I am part of a family of local publishers who are all working overtime to serve our communities through trusted, local news. And I applaud all of the efforts to keep the lights on. To those publishers and leaders in media out there and all the reporters working with them: Keep the faith. What you are doing is part of a fight for press freedom in America and around the world. It is a global battle fought on local frontlines, and a struggle for truth that is worth fighting for.

What We’re Reading this week

• Trolling, memes and deepfakes: How AI is thickening the fog of war | Gretel Kahn, Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism

• With Malice | Jem Bartholomew, Columbia Journalism Review

• Newsletters, live coverage, a one-time magazine: The World Cup is becoming a testbed for journalism experiments Neel Dhanesha, Nieman Journalism Lab

• In this Duke journalism class, failure was part of the assignment. It led to real AI tools for local news | Bill Adair and Tyler Dukes, Poynter

• The Intercept didn’t just publish a story about ICE — it drove it around JFK | Hanaa’ Tameez, Nieman Journalism Lab

For more than two months, GroundTruth has been on a virtual road trip through the crisis in local news across America. We’ve been from Pittsfield, Massachusetts to Chicago and Montana down to Austin, Texas. But this week I am looking at how this issue is playing in other countries. These two paths — local and global — run parallel to each other and are headed in the same distressing direction that traverses the rising peril for journalists and the steep decline in press freedom.

Sunday marks World Press Freedom Day, and it feels right to recast our gaze abroad and focus on the reality that more than half of the world lives in a country where press freedom is in a “very serious” situation. According to the World Press Freedom Index, that means 4.25 billion people in 42 countries live in places where being a journalist means risking your life or your liberty. As the death toll continues to soar for journalists killed trying to do their job, the persistent fact is that 90 percent of the attacks on journalists take place with impunity. The culprits almost always get away with murder.

That is why World Press Freedom Day is so important. It is a day to remember that everyone, and particularly our leaders, need to recommit to press freedom. It is also a day of reflection among media professionals, an opportunity to celebrate the fundamental principles of our profession; defend the media from attacks on their independence; and pay tribute to journalists who have lost their lives in the line of duty.

It is hard to know where to begin on this global exploration of the decline of press freedom, but it makes sense to head toward places where gathering facts and telling the truth can be a death sentence.

Among the 20 countries with the worst safety scores for journalists, several particularly worrying situations stand out, according to research by the World Press Freedom Index. I realized in writing this that I have touchstones in each of these regions through my 40 years as a journalist. I have seen the hope for press freedom in some of these corners in dramatic and inspiring ways. And in more recent years I’ve witnessed the dispiriting collapse of a free press and the steady erosion of democracy that comes along with it.

Middle East

Simmering conflicts from Lebanon to Yemen have long presented peril for local journalists as well as Western journalists who have been kidnapped, tortured and killed in these countries for decades now. But the war on Gaza has escalated into one of the most dramatic conflicts for the muder of journalists in recorded history. Palestine is now regarded as the single most dangerous place in the world for journalists. With more than 200 reporters, photographers, and media workers killed in Gaza by the Israeli army since October 2023, including at least 44 of whom were slain while doing their job.

According to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) Israel’s killing of journalists marks the deadliest and most deliberate effort to kill and silence journalists that the organization has documented in its 45 years of existence. Palestinian journalists are being threatened, directly targeted, and murdered by Israeli forces, and are arbitrarily detained and tortured in retaliation for their work, CPJ reports.

Israel has systematically destroyed media infrastructure in Gaza, and tightened censorship throughout the West Bank and Israel. International media have been barred from independent reporting in Gaza where a consensus has been building among international experts on humanitarian crises that a genocide is taking place against the Palestinian people. It is important to note that inside Gaza, journalists have also long reported harassment and intimidation by Hamas, the Islamic Resistance Group which has a military force and a political wing that has governed Gaza since 2007.

I began reporting in Gaza in the late 1990s and witnessed the hopeful return of a free press under the Palestinian Authority. Truthfully the PA was never too kind to those who sought to expose corruption, but it was still going through the motions of allowing for a free press. Then I watched the pretensions of support for the role of independent journalism smashed by Hamas as it rose to power. And now too many of us have to watch from afar as Israel targets those Palestinian journalists who seek to cover the war on Gaza and ban all of us from entering and documenting the destruction, the human rights violations and the killing unfolding every day.

Asia

China and Myanmar top the list of Asian countries with the most detained journalists. There are currently 123 journalists wrongfully detained in China, including 10 in Hong Kong. And 59 media professionals are behind bars in the country of Myanmar, where a military coup in 2021 paved the way for the return to a police state. That military junta has extinguished hopes for a democracy where press freedom is respected.

Just 12 years ago, I reported in Myanmar, or Burma with a team of young journalists, 10 locals and 10 Americans, and it was a very different place back then. With support from The Open Hands Initiative, we carried out a reporting fellowship titled “Burma Telling Its Own Story,” during which we sought to build upon the heroic independent journalism that established itself in exile over the years. Now many of those talented, young journalists who worked with us, live in fear and have returned to exile, have been detained or find themselves watching their dreams of working in journalism deferred.

My colleague Gary Knight, the co-founder of VII Photo and co-founder of GroundTruth, worked with me to lead the reporting initiative in Myanmar, recently returned to the region, heading to Chiang Mai, Thailand where Burmese journalists have set up newsrooms in exile or worked as freelancers from there. Gary shared:

“The situation for journalists in Myanmar is terrible, and they are considered ‘enemies of the state’. Burmese journalists living in Chiang Mai told me that approximately 1500 of them are in exile, either internally, or in neighbouring countries. I do not know of a larger diaspora of journalists anywhere. I was told that those that stayed behind in Yangon have largely quit journalism because it’s unsafe, and are doing other things to make a living, like working in real estate. The diaspora suffers not only because it is vulnerable from an immigration perspective, but also from economics because USAID pulled the plug on media that they could work for. The Burmese Press has been eviscerated and they have few places to publish. From a combined publishing, safety and sustainability perspective I can think of few worse places.”

Africa

This is a region where candidly I do not have extensive experience, but I have reported on the perils of truth telling in Nigeria amid violence that is often ignited by misinformation by one side or the other and often fueled from afar by extremists who are both Muslim and Christian. The violent divide we covered featured in a short documentary titled “A Bridge in Kaduna,” which is set in what is known as the “Middle Belt” between herders in the predominantly Muslim North and farmers in the predominantly Christian South. The plight of Nigeria’s Christian communities in Kaduna and elsewhere has been an obsession for American Christian evangelical groups and has received the very recent attention of President Trump’s White House in a way that seems to overlook the great work being done by a free press to expose how outside forces fan the flames of hatred.

There are many other countries in the continent where journalism is at risk, but any thermal mapping of the perils faced by a free press would include a burning red indicator across the Great Lakes region, particularly in the Democratic Republic of Congo. In a recent report by Reporters Without Borders (RSF), “The epicentre of the region’s deteriorating security situation lies in the conflict-ridden eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).”

As the report reveals, the Great Lakes are a region struggling with the geopolitical tensions around natural resources, and journalists in the area are constantly on the move. The new RSF report takes readers inside the day-to-day lives of media professionals who continue to report the news despite grave risks. It states, “Independent reporting in the east of the DRC has become virtually impossible. Reporters are caught between the anvil of the armed group M23 and the hammer of the Armed Forces of the Democratic Republic of Congo (FARDC).”

Too often, this means arrests, attacks, threats, enforced disappearances, executions and the closure, looting and ransacking of newsrooms.

Europe

The war in Ukraine rages on the gates of Europe in a brutal stalemate with sputtering talks about a ceasefire that seem to go nowhere. It is a war of attrition where heroic work is being done by journalists who are risking their lives every day trying to cover it. But long before the war started, Russia began systematically crushing an independent press just as it was starting to emerge following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Russia’s effort to undermine a free press was intended to create news deserts in the border regions where misinformation and disinformation could seep into the barren media landscape, particularly in the Donbas region.

This calculated policy by Russia led up to the first Russian assault on Ukraine with the invasion and occupation of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula in 2014. Seven years later, Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in 2021 as Russian forces attacked Kyiv. Since then journalists have been under attack repeatedly and many have lost their lives covering the conflict.

Over the last five years, I have taken several reporting trips into Ukraine and each time have been drawn to the city of Bucha, the dateline where the world first saw the brutality of the unprovoked Russian assault on Ukraine. I have twice attended what has become known as the Bucha conference, which focuses on the important role of a local media in Ukraine. The conference brings together local media from every corner of the country. There, I learned a fairly hidden history of Russia undercutting the independent media. Today these newsrooms are often shuttered or struggling mightily to survive and stay on the story as Russia seeks to destroy the country’s infrastructure and bulldoze any hopes of a free press under the rubble of relentless drone attacks. But funding for such efforts to establish a free press is just one of the many casualties of Putin’s war in Ukraine.

I have gotten to know the committed and talented and courageous team of reporters at Ukrainska Pravda, a leading, independent digital news organization in Ukraine. I am proud to serve on the advisory board, and to support them any way I can as I’ve gotten to see up front the heroic work they do. I am thinking of the whole team on this day, and praying for their safety and hoping that the country will get back on the road to building their democracy and that Americans will wake up to how important it is that we support a strong, independent press in places like Ukraine.

Latin America

Long a place of great peril for journalists, Mexico today still holds the record for the highest number of missing journalists, with 28 unsolved cases to date. Mexico’s shameful record is often attributed to the drug cartels, but the police and security forces in the country are also culpable, particularly in doing virtually nothing to bring those who murder journalists to justice.

In this vacuum, other journalists have taken upon themselves to find the truth. I’ve been drawn to the work of Katherine Corcoran, former AP Mexico Bureau Chief, who investigated the murder of Regina Martinez, a legendary Mexican journalist who was killed on the verge of exposing high-level government corruption. Corcoran was tired of seeing the killing of journalists going unsolved, or cases fabricated to make it look as if they were killed by drug cartels when in fact the government had done this kind of extrajudicial killing and covered up their crimes almost always by making it look like a drug hit.

Martinez, an investigative reporter out of Veracruz where she worked with a controversial, independent news organization known as Proceso, was just about to break a big story on corruption linking the government to the cartels and she was found bludgeoned to death in her bathroom. Questions began to emerge immediately as Martinez had no connections with cartels and the crime scene was suspicious as the only thing of value that was taken was a television. With the assistance of four reporter proteges who worked with Martinez, Corcoran dug in on the story and together they doggedly pursued several different theories of who was responsible for the killing. But they arrived at the conclusion the killing of Martnez was likely a hit ordered by the Attorney General. In her book “In the Mouth of the Wolf” she convincingly shines a light that breaks through the fog the government often created by blaming the murder of journalists on the cartel.

“It turns out that was a pattern in many of these cases and an attempt to undercut journalism as not trustworthy, and this is why it was important to go back,” Corcoran told me in an interview in January last year.

She added that during her research she was drawing parallels in the way President Trump sought to tarnish journalism and defame journalists as the “enemy of the people.” “This is all the same stuff we heard in Mexico through its history and sometimes they were even using the same language and same narrative. Referring to her home country of the United States, she said, “We are going down that path, and this is where that path leads you. The point is it is not about the press, it is about controlling the population. My book is a cautionary tale, and I hope it is one that might be heard in America.”

The backdrop for the killing of Martinez, she said, was that the threats posed by narcos as well as the government silenced the media in Mexico. There, she said, they do not have news deserts; they have patterns of self-censorship and fear that end with news organizations shutting down. They are called “Zonas de Silencio,” or “zones of silence.”

“Too often with these attacks, the newspapers shut down and self-sensorship is huge. Then people no longer know what is going on in their communities.” This, she said, is what ties together the threads of the crisis in local news around the world and in the United States. We have to be vigilant and we have to be sure that the forces trying to silence the media are called out. If we don’t we are looking at a bleak future.

This Sunday, on the actual day recognizing World Press Freedom, I will be in the small, local newsroom where I serve as publisher and will be hosting a forum for my local community to discuss the importance of local newspapers in a functioning society. It can be a tall order to try to encourage Americans to see these connections between the erosion of press freedom around the world and the ways in which American news deserts and the collapse of local news is producing a different, but pervasive threat to American democracy.

Next week I will post about the forum, the next stop on our journey through the crisis in local news, nationally and globally.

What we’re reading this week

• The journalist pioneering a new approach to journalism training in Ghana | Maurice Oniang’o, The Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism

• Is Kidnapping Back? | Joel Simon, Columbia Journalism Review

• The missing Ukrainian reporter, the Russian prison – and a vital lesson learned about journalism in a dangerous age | Laurent Richard, The Guardian

• Unchecked Abuses: Female journalists face discrimination and harassment in Somalia | Mona Miski, ARIJ

• ​​“Like nailing jell-o to a wall”: Why unions are struggling to protect journalists’ rights in the age of AI | Gretel Kahn, Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism

Leave a comment

It was early in 2022, and I was part of a virtual panel on the crisis in local news hosted by WBUR in Boston along with an extraordinary entrepreneur and force of nature named Crystal Good, who was dialing in from West Virginia. It was on that panel that I heard the term “creator journalist” for the first time.

Good was explaining her role as an independent “publisher,” that is the title she preferred, as the founder of a multimedia organization called “Black by God: The West Virginian” that serves the Black community in a handful of rural counties in Central Appalachia. Given the wattage that comes off of just about everything Crystal Good says and does, I should have paid much more attention to this idea of “creator journalism.” For me, she is the embodiment of that movement.

Now at journalism conferences, from the Online News Association’s gathering last month in Chicago to this month’s International Journalism Festival in Perugia, Italy, the buzz is all about “creator journalism.”

There are seemingly endless panel discussions and keynote speeches by and about “creator journalism,” as the phrase finds itself thrust into the very center of the debate on the future of news and how journalists will build back trust with audiences after years of seeing it erode.

The questions that loom over this idea are mostly around how it will be funded and whether a galaxy of independent, individual approaches serving smaller niche audiences is sustainable as a way to fill information gaps in news across the country, and around the world. Project C and its founder Liz Kelly Nelson offer a critical source of research on the emerging market in America, and surveys of top creator journalists in the U.S. reveal that the movement took shape in 2020 and is in some ways born of the pandemic. But it has grown exponentially, particularly over the last year, and a Muck Rack study last year found that fully one-third of all journalists fit the definition of “creator journalist.” It is now an important force that is essential to understand.

The individuals who make up this sector depend largely on direct audience support through platforms, like Substack and of course YouTube and TikTok, that are making this easier, according to Project C. Other important platforms for monetization are happening on beehiiv, Twitch and Ghost.

Subscribe now

Bringing some order to the ferment of this universe is The Tiny News Collective, a collaborative founded by a team of local news entrepreneurs that supports new and early-stage local news founders. It lists this mission statement on its website: “We make journalism entrepreneurship a more accessible, equitable and inclusive opportunity for people who care about their community.”

Okay, so … while aware of the risk of sounding like a traditional journalist, which I am, and a boomer, which I also am, I have to say that the notion of “creator journalism” has been perplexing to me, and even, well, maybe a bit annoying. Why? Because of its imprecision. After all, independent journalists have been creating new formulas for journalism and sharing them in different ways dating back as far as the pamphlet in the American Revolution. So was Thomas Paine a “creator journalist” when he wrote Common Sense in 1776 in just 45 short pages that helped frame the issues that ignited a revolution?

That journalistic search for an independent path carried right through to the power of freelance journalism in the Vietnam War era, at what might be considered the apex of mainstream journalism. Were independent journalists like Seymour Hersh “creator journalists” when he was out there cobbling together funding to investigate the big stories like the My Lai Massacre that exposed the war in ways that traditional journalism, like the New York Times and CBS News, was too often failing to do? And, of course, the idea of independent journalists creating a space to develop their own voice carried right into more recent decades with blogs that have become journalistic institutions, the Huffington Post serving as the most obvious example. So how do we understand “creator journalism” in the contemporary interpretation of the word?

So let’s go back to that day in January of 2022 when I was in my basement on Zoom as we were still in the loosening grip of COVID and I met Crystal Good. Right away it was very clear she was an early adopter and a social entrepreneur who was out to serve her community of approximately 65,000 Black Appalachians in a handful of rural counties in West Virginia where she came of age.

A sixth generation West Virginian Black writer, poet, entrepreneur and newspaper publisher, Good’s resonance is obvious the moment you meet her and her mission to center a narrative about the existence and influence of Black Appalachians. If you ask Good about the name of her organization, she will tell you, “Well, the news is kind of my ministry. “ But specifically, she will also explain, it is an idiomatic expression that refers to West Virginians who often say they are from “West by God Virginia” to distinguish themselves from those of the Commonwealth of Virginia.

She has journalism deep in her veins. Her father worked his way up from janitor to executive director for news at a local, Fox television station. She says, “That background gave me confidence that I could do this.” And she certainly has done it, starting with early support from the Tiny News Collective, and developing a business model that is built around advertising, sponsored content and a non-profit with a fiscal agent, Black by God is definitely what we would call a “hybrid” model for sustainability.

This newsletter, GroundTruth on Substack, has been writing about the concept since last year when my former colleague, Rahim Jessani, who served as our digital strategy lead before plunging full time into his role as a creator journalist, wrote a guest post that explored the best way to define the term with greater precision. He relied on the words of Project C’s Liz Kelly Nelson in defining the term as an organization that supports and studies creator journalists. Drawing a clear line between “content creators” and “creator journalists,” Nelson explained it this way:

A creator journalist is “an individual who combines elements of journalism with content creation techniques to produce news, stories, or informational content for digital platforms. Unlike traditional journalists who typically work for established news organizations, creator journalists operate independently or as part of alternative media outlets, utilizing platforms like social media, YouTube, podcasts, newsletters, and blogs to disseminate their work.”

Honestly, that definition didn’t help me to discern the importance of the movement much a year ago. But what is clear now is that “creator journalism” has found its place in the ecosystem for news in a significant way. It is gaining traction and there is a mountain of data and market trends that indicate that this is not just a fad, but a genuine industry shift driven by a growing desire for editorial independence fueled by the direct-to-audience capabilities of social platforms such as TikTok, YouTube and Substack and it is supported on these platforms by an audience that prefers individuals over brands.

Subscribe now

That support is significant, but often not enough to guarantee a stable income or replace a traditional paycheck. Muck Rack’s The State Of Creator Journalism study found that 63% of creator journalists make a portion of their income from their solo work. Nearly 40 percent say they make no income from their self-publishing, and more than 60% make some money from their endeavors. Creator journalism is a piece of the puzzle of sustainability, but isn’t the be all and end all that will solve the crisis we find ourselves in.

A way to understand the approach of “creator journalism” is not so much as a trend or a new wave, but a reflection of a deep need for journalists to find a way to restore trust with their audiences. To do that, they are rejecting the trappings of traditional journalism and its formulas, and they are trying new approaches and new platforms to reach audiences and try to win their trust. The Local Media Association got at this last month at their Local News Summit with a broad framing around the idea that “Creator journalism isn’t a format — it’s a trust model.”

So in cobbling together these impressions for this newsletter, and in revisiting the notes from my chance meeting with Crystal Good way back in 2022, which feels now like a different era of journalism, it is worth noting that this writer is indeed what might be called a “creator journalist.” It was in 2006 that I broke away from traditional journalism as the founder of GlobalPost and then continued to create through The GroundTruth Project in launching Report for America. And now in this new iteration of GroundTruth Media Partners, I have proudly broken away even further to try to develop a voice on Substack. So, on reflection, I would have to say I am proud to be in that communion of the saints that have “come marching in” to “creator journalism” from Thomas Paine to Sy Hersh to Ariana Huffington and, yeah, all the way right up to Crystal Good. As the hymn goes, “I want to be in that number.”

Leave a comment

Just days before it was condemned to cease operations, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette was granted a reprieve that restores a much needed hope not just for the city of Pittsburgh but for all of us who care about local journalism.

The publisher of the Pulitzer Prize-winning, non-profit news outlet the Baltimore Banner announced this week that it has agreed to acquire the assets of the Post-Gazette, a nearly 100-year-old print newspaper that traces its roots all the way back to 1786.

I wrote about the fate of the historic Pittsburgh Post-Gazette back in January and described its plans to shut down as an alarming development, one that I argued should be a wake-up call to AI platforms to recognize that the demise of these fact-seeking organizations presents a looming threat to the trustworthiness of their own large language models and the answer engines they fuel.

I wrote that the plight of the Post-Gazette presented an extraordinary opportunity for OpenAI (ChatGPT), Google (Gemini) or Anthropic (Claude) to use the staggering amount of capital they have amassed to invest in acquiring distressed, but vital sources of local truth like the Post-Gazette. In my column, I posed this question about what seemed an imminent closure: “Will it at last spur the aggressive venture capital firms pouring investment into applied AI to recognize that the promise of AI depends on reliable and independent sources of journalism?”

Subscribe now

It turns out that my framing of the question missed a stunning plot twist. As fate would have it, it was not an AI firm awash with capital that came to the rescue, nor was it a voracious hedge fund like Alden Global Capital (fortunately). At the end of the day, it was a mission-driven, non-profit news venture that stepped up and saved the day. Hallelujah!

In this story of salvation, it seems the hero may well be Maryland hotel and nursing home magnate-turned-philanthropist Stewart W. Bainum Jr., who has dedicated himself to bolstering local journalism through the Venetoulis Institute for Local Journalism, which he founded. The institute has pioneered a model that seeks to support strong local journalism while also establishing economic sustainability at a time when so many legacy news organizations are crumbling. The Banner has proven a stunning success story since it launched in 2022, winning the Pulitzer Prize last year and executing on an enviable audience strategy which brought it 79,500 paid subscribers with more than 4 million monthly page views.

The Post-Gazette, which had been suffering losses for at least twenty years, was expected to face a death sentence on May 3, which ironically marks World Press Freedom Day. Instead it has a resurrection scheduled for May 4.

That’s when the sale by its current owner, Ohio-based Block Communications Inc., will become effective, ending nearly a century of family control of the newspaper but serving to ensure the future of Western Pennsylvania’s largest news organization. The Venetoulis Institute announced that the newsroom and a set of local news executives will remain in Pittsburgh. But it has telegraphed that other functions, including technology and overall business operations, will be reconfigured as part of the larger non-profit institute.

The new business model is seen as confirmation of a growing confidence in non-profit approaches to sustaining journalism. But the Venetoulis Institute’s model also tempers its approach by planning to retain a robust advertising team that will be a core part of the revenue that sustains operations. This is sometimes referred to as a ‘hybrid’ approach, and one that has gained considerable traction in recent years among news organizations large and small, including the small, weekly newspaper where I serve as publisher. The idea is to find the right mix of paid subscriptions, advertising and philanthropy to achieve sustainability at a time when local journalism has been in a freefall, as we have chronicled extensively in this newsletter.

In an interview published April 14 in the Post-Gazette, Bainum explained the approach, saying, “The test is not whether you’re for-profit or nonprofit, but whether you’re providing high quality journalism to communities that need it most.”

In the same article, the Post-Gazette quoted Karen Johnese, chair of Block Communications, from a prepared release, which stated, “We are excited to hand our treasured paper over to such a committed and creative organization.

She added, “We trust in their integrity and care for our community.”

Subscribe now

But the end of this story has not been written as many employees and unions that represent them are less trusting, and want to see more assurances about the approximately 100 staff members that make up its newsroom. The Newspaper Guild joined the Teamsters in a rancorous strike at the paper nearly three years ago. A majority of editorial employees resigned from the Guild during the strike and continued to publish online and print editions. The strikers returned to work in November after a federal court ruling ordered the Post-Gazette to fulfill obligations to live up to health care benefits it promised its employees.

The Newspaper Guild released a statement this week, saying an asset sale does not inherently eliminate legal liabilities incurred by the company and that the Post-Gazette “continues to owe its workers several million dollars, and the enforcement of unfair labor practice rulings, including a requirement to bargain in good faith, remains.”

The union said it was “excited for this historic institution to survive and eager to ensure that it operates in a way that respects the people of Pittsburgh and the journalists who strive to serve them.”

Amen to that. But it is clear this salvation story, as hopeful as it is, still has several key chapters that are not yet written.

Leave a comment