If you’re one of the 50 million Americans who happens to live in a ‘news desert’, here’s what that means… It means a certain level of disenfranchisement; you’re not only disconnected from the news, but from your neighbors. And guess what… your tax rates have probably gone up disproportionately too - because “what you don’t know doesn’t hurt you.”

That’s a quote from my guest this week, Eric Steinman, a friend and journalist who lives in the Hudson Valley. Eric’s a freelance writer, and a few years back he helped launch The Hudson Valley Pilot, a local news source for Rhinebeck, a town of about 8,000 people an hour and a half north of New York City. Eric was its editor in chief.

When a local paper vanishes - like the Rhinebeck Gazette did back in 2009 - a town loses its collective memory and its watchdog. As Eric breaks down in our conversation, the quiet fallout of the news desert that emerges has more repercussions than you might imagine. When no one is sitting in the back of the municipal board meetings, local spending goes unchecked simply because there is no one left to ask hard questions.

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Launching The Hudson Valley Pilot was an effort to plug that hole. Going digital was the only viable way to keep the overheads low and stay nimble enough to publish board meeting updates sometimes within an hour. But reaching a small town required surprisingly old-school methods. From planting yard signs stamped with QR codes along local roads to setting up a folding table at the weekly farmer’s market, Eric and his publisher built an audience by being visible and approachable. They deliberately avoided dry, sterile reporting in favor of a distinct, human voice that reflected the character — and occasionally the humor — of the town itself.

Yet the project also laid bare the brutal economics of modern local news. Operating even a lean digital newsroom requires steady capital. Navigating the delicate balance between editorial independence and the relentless grind of fundraising eventually led to the Pilot’s merger with The Daily Catch. But as Eric and I discuss, the breakdown of legacy media doesn’t have to be a total dead end. For journalists entering a tough media market, these underserved communities present a real, untapped opportunity.

By leveraging direct-to-reader platforms, a reporter can step into a news desert, laser-focus on two or three core issues that govern daily life like local development, land use, or town politics, and build a lean, sustainable micro-outlet. It is a model that strips away corporate bloat and returns journalism to its most vital job: holding power to account and offering a community a clear, authentic portrait of itself.

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On this week’s episode of Deadliners, I meet Ryan Kraus, a 22-year-old photographer and visual artist who started publishing a quarterly newspaper, New Paltz Photo Works, while he was still a full-time student at his local community college.

Growing up, Ryan didn’t consume traditional newspapers, but he felt that, for photographers and photography, Instagram was saturated. How could you stand out? He turned to newsprint as a way to bridge generational divides: offering something fresh and curious to younger people, while evoking warm nostalgia for older readers who grew up with newsstands on every corner.

But launching a print publication is one thing; keeping it alive without going broke is another. Too many media startups fail because passionate creators forget to figure out the business model. So Ryan breaks down the practical mathematics for me behind putting New Paltz Photo Works together.

Despite his deep devotion to the physical, tactile ritual of newsprint, he also understands the modern digital game. He doesn’t treat social media as an enemy to print, but as its engine. By actively promoting the newspaper on Instagram — where his posts pull in thousands of views a month — he sources photographers, connects with subscribers across 25 states and five countries, and builds an audience for the physical paper.

I hope you enjoy the conversation.

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I took a few weeks off from the newsletter, but the industry, predictably, didn’t take a beat. While I was away, the cuts kept coming: BuzzFeed shed another 180 staff (about 35% of its total workforce across BuzzFeed, HuffPost, and Tasty) following its restructuring, and the Associated Press offshored another tranche of visual production roles to India. Since April, when Deadliners launched, the tally of journalism job losses has climbed into the thousands. The month we launched the BBC announced plans to slash 2,000 jobs (that’s one in ten staff).

And yet, here you are. Here we are.

So far, we’ve published thirteen dispatches - interviews with editors, academics, war reporters, and founders who are navigating this chaos with stubbornness and ingenuity. If you missed any of them while you were also trying to unplug, here’s what you need to catch up on.

The Front Lines

My conversation with Samer Frangie of Lebanon’s Megaphone remains the standard I measure this project against. After their offices were destroyed in the 2020 Beirut port explosion, Samer’s team refused to let it stop them. They publish in Ammiya, the colloquial Arabic spoken on the street, not the classical language of the political elite. They weaponize memes. And they are the argument for why journalism that emerges from crisis is often sharper than journalism that emerges from comfort.

Then there’s Raghdan Orsud of Sudan’s Beam Reports. Raghdan operates a newsroom from a laptop in Nairobi after fleeing Khartoum. Her team exposed a warlord who boasted on TikTok Live about murdering 2,000 civilians - and found that the platform’s algorithm was actively rewarding him with engagement and monetization until Beam shamed them into taking it down. When USAID funding froze in early 2025, the single largest financial supporter of independent media worldwide vanished overnight, forcing Beam to downsize just as the information war intensified. Of 1,500 journalists working in Sudan before the war, perhaps 70 remain in conflict zones there.

Closer to home, Rob D’Amico of the Big Bend Sentinel in West Texas reminded me why local reporting needs to survive. Rob lives in a $450-a-month adobe in Shafter, a former silver-mining town of 25 people. The Sentinel, which covers the entire Big Bend region, recently shifted to a non-profit model and Rob discusses the importance of shoe-leather reporting.

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The Business of Staying Alive

I chatted to Kira Don, who bets on premium paper and coffee-table production values for her magazine Stranger’s Guide.

I met Jack Wright, who left the UK’s Daily Mirror to launch a magazine in a seaside American town on a shoestring; twenty years later, he’s still printing.

And I caught up with Ben Gish who keeps Kentucky’s Mountain Eagle alive in coal country, where his newspaper “still screams.”

If you need a reason to keep going, consider the meta-study released at DW’s Global Media Forum in June: every dollar invested in independent journalism generates more than $100 in public value through recovered funds, better public services, and reduced corruption. Disinformation, by contrast, costs societies between $350 and $500 billion annually.

In the coming weeks, we’ll have more conversations with the reporters and media folk who are building new platforms, defending old ones, and proving that reporting requires showing up in person, whether that’s in a Beirut bunker, a Sudanese exile’s apartment, or a West Texas bar.

In the meantime, here’s the full archive. Sign up for free if you haven’t already. And if you can afford the $7 a month - the price of a fancy latte in Williamsburg or Hackney - consider helping support this work. The glass is still half full, but it needs topping up.

See you next week,

Alex

I first spoke to Craig Robertson, a researcher at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, for the Deadliners podcast and newsletter back in April, and he gave us a preview of this year’s Digital News Report. Well, that report - the most comprehensive study of news consumption worldwide - is now out, and Craig agreed to come back and talk to me about what he found out. Some headlines:

• For the first time globally social media and video networks have become the single most widely used way of accessing online news.

• The use of AI chatbots for news is growing

• For the first time, a majority of people now watch online news video

• Around a quarter of respondents to the survey get some news from news-focused individual creators or influencers, and almost half get some news from creators of any type.

In our chat, Craig tells me Snapchat is really popular in Norway. Who knew? And Threads is really popular in Taiwan. All these little quirks he learned in preparing this year’s report.

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We talk about attempts by news media outlets to stop AI bots from scraping their content, and how - interestingly - the people most likely to be watching content creators for news are also the people more likely to be using other news brands. “It’s sort of an additive feature to people’s news diets,” Craig says. It’s a way of helping them get a better sense of a story rather than the sole place to get the story.

That’s good news for journalism, I guess. I’ll take what I can get. I hope you enjoy the conversation. Please do share it - and this newsletter. And thanks for listening.

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The current landscape of journalism is undeniably bleak: newsrooms are weathering relentless layoffs, public trust is hitting historic lows, and local community papers are disappearing at an alarming rate. Yet, according to Vicki Whiting, a former third-grade teacher and fashion reporter, the salvation of the news industry might just lie in the hands of seven-year-olds.

Whiting is the founder, editor, and president of KidScoop, an educational and media literacy initiative designed specifically for elementary school students. Speaking to me for the Deadliners podcast, she shared how a simple dilemma in a small Northern California town blossomed into a national movement aimed at revitalizing print media and creating a new generation of critical thinkers.

Tasked with teaching third-graders about their local community in Sonoma, California, Whiting found the standard-issue textbooks didn’t cut it. Looking for a spark to engage her 40 students, she asked a crucial question: “Where can we learn about our community?”

A student answered, “The newspaper.”

Whiting approached the local family-owned weekly, the Sonoma Index-Tribune, proposing a dedicated page that would leverage the local paper as a primary learning tool. The result was immediate: she told me when the papers arrived, students sat up straighter. Suddenly, geography, math, and science felt connected to their actual lives.

Rather than exposing young children to frightening or confusing headlines, the publication uses major global moments to teach foundational concepts. Whiting describes the content as “timely, but not current events.” If a massive tornado hits, KidScoop explains the science of how tornadoes form, giving kids the essential vocabulary to understand the broader world.

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But beneath the colorful artwork and engaging puzzles lies a deeper, more urgent mission: media literacy. In an era dominated by algorithmic echo chambers and viral misinformation, KidScoop introduces concepts of analytical thinking and — crucially — distinguishing between fact and opinion.

“People have this concept that news is factual. Unfortunately, now there are news sources out there that are not factual,” Whiting noted. “That’s why I try to stick with fact and opinion... It might be a news source, but it doesn’t mean it’s factual.”

Meeting the Next Generation

Research from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism indicates young people are deeply curious about the world, often seeking explainers on social platforms like TikTok and Instagram. However, many media executives falsely assume these digital-native audiences will automatically pivot to traditional newspaper subscriptions once they turn 18.

Whiting believes the industry must bridge that gap early by reintroducing physical print into the home and classroom. Pointing to recent research on childhood brain development, print reading, and digital fatigue, she argues that parents and teachers are actively craving a return to tactile media.

For struggling local publishers, she views this as a vital, untapped revenue stream. Through a licensing model, community papers can bring KidScoop into local schools, backed by local underwriting and philanthropic sponsors.

By cultivating that connection early, the media ecosystem isn’t just teaching a child to read — it is securing its own future.

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On the surface, Beirut used to look like a playground of free expression. But as Samer Frangie, Editor-in-Chief of the independent outlet Megaphone, reminds me on this week’s Deadliners podcast, if you looked just an inch beneath the surface of pre-2017 Lebanon, you found a media ecosystem kowtowing to politicians, economic interests, and Gulf money. The on-air debates were fierce, but the boundaries of dissent were carefully staged. If you dug into real financial corruption or systemic human rights violations, you quickly hit a wall — or worse.

Megaphone was born to smash through that wall. What started as a loose collective of media innovators trying to provide context for a generation radicalized by the 2015 “You Stink” protests has mutated into one of the most vital, irreverent media units in the Middle East.

When the popular uprisings exploded in 2019, Samer said he and his team realized they had to dream bigger. They opened their laptops and started recruiting volunteers. But it wasn’t just what they reported; it was how. Megaphone ditched the formal, rigid classical Arabic favored by stuffy network anchors and began publishing in Ammiya, the simplified, colloquial language spoken by everyday Lebanese citizens. Then, they met their audience precisely where they lived: on social media.

And while traditional TV stations broadcast dry ministerial meetings or rehashed speeches from the pulpit of press conferences, Megaphone began covering the systemic exploitation of migrant domestic workers and debunking the dangerous scapegoating of Syrian refugees.

More than anything, they stopped giving corrupt politicians the unearned respect they felt institutional media afforded them. They mocked them with memes, and ran deep investigations alongside biting satire. The political class, expecting these “young delinquents” to burn out, instead found themselves slapped with impactful journalism. And despite the inevitable lawsuits, Megaphone kept swinging, insulated partly by their digital agility and, as Samer noted, the fact that “the benefit of living in an incompetent state is that the repression is also incompetent.”

But the stakes here are devastatingly high. After their offices were destroyed in the catastrophic 2020 Beirut port explosion, and now, as they navigate the terrifying landscape of regional war and ongoing bombardment, Megaphone’s role has shifted from daily reporting to a form of historical preservation. They are archiving a collective memory and documenting a society in flux.

‘The benefit of living in an incompetent state is that the repression is also incompetent.’

For those of us watching the global upheaval of our industry from relative safety, Megaphone is a masterclass in resilience. It reminds us that when institutions fail, the future of journalism doesn’t belong to the media moguls or the state apparatus — it belongs to the people willing to look power in the eye and who refuse to toe the line.

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I first met Tom and Pat Gish back in 2004, about thirty years after the fire that should have ended their newspaper story. I had traveled to Whitesburg, Kentucky, to interview them for a piece that, for reasons only the fickle world of freelance journalism understands, never actually ran. But the Gishes and their beloved Mountain Eagle never left my mind. Years later, I finally got to tell their story in full for Stranger’s Guide.

After a corrupt local cop masterminded an arson attack on their offices in 1974, the Gishes refused to be subdued. Before the fire, underneath the newspaper masthead, it had read: IT SCREAMS! Determined not to miss an issue, Tom and Pat decamped to their living room and put out a paper. And underneath the masthead of that next edition of the Mountain Eagle, it read: IT STILL SCREAMS!

Today, the mantle has passed to their son, Ben — once falsely accused in the very arson that targeted his parents, and who now navigates a version of Appalachia that is struggling with the decline of coal and the rise of digital isolation.

Today, the “barely controlled chaos” and clatter of typewriters he recalls from a youth spent sleeping on cardboard pallets in the mailroom may have been replaced by the quiet hum of desktop publishing, but the stakes in Letcher County haven’t changed.

Like his parents, Ben understands that in a small town, every tough story is written about a neighbor you’ll inevitably run into at the grocery store.

We chatted about the evolution of the Eagle, the weight of being the only check on authority left in the area, and how he intends to carry his parents’ legacy into the future.

From my story for Stranger’s Guide:

. . .

Alex: You’re still operating out of a physical storefront on Main Street. How important is that open door to the paper’s identity in 2026?

Ben: Less than ever, I am sorry to say — and that’s because of e-mail, texting, and other forms of communication. When I was growing up, one of the most important times to be in The Eagle office for business purposes was on Saturday mornings between 9 a.m. and noon. During my high school years, it was my job to get up, walk down School Hill, and open the office. I can say with confidence that I dealt with more office visitors on that one morning each week than we see now in a full week.

During my office-keeping years (1970–1974), Saturday mornings were when most business was conducted in Whitesburg, the county seat of Letcher — just as it had been since the railroad came and the coal mines first opened nearly 60 years earlier. Every Saturday morning, Main Street was packed with men, women, and children. The women would handle the shopping with their children in tow, while the men found places to stand and talk as they waited.

The two-lane road running through both sides of town would be jammed with cars trying to reach Main Street and find a place to park.

Looking back, I stayed quite busy those mornings, mostly accepting subscription payments — usually renewals, with quite a few new ones mixed in.

I loved meeting and talking with customers, especially the elderly. It was from them that I learned a great deal about Letcher County and life in Appalachia in general. Some of the older women would even bring cakes and pies they had baked for the Eagle staff.

These days, most new and renewal subscriptions come through our website. Many still arrive by mail or by telephone.

The same enjoyment I once got from speaking with elderly customers in person, I now get from talking with subscribers on the phone.

We do still get in-person subscriptions, and it’s always nice when that happens. We rarely receive news tips from walk-ins, but when we do, they’re usually good ones. Most visitors now come on Wednesday mornings when the newest edition is off the press and on the newsstands.

You grew up in the mailroom, even sleeping on cardboard pallets. How has ‘press day’ changed from then to today? What does the energy feel like in the office?

Great question. Because of all the changes in technology, most of the energy today comes on Tuesdays just before and after deadline. Those are the moments of frayed nerves and, at times, frustration — sometimes even anger at yourself when you realize you didn’t have enough space or time to do all you wanted.

Regardless, it’s still a great feeling when you hit “send” on that final FTP file of pages to the press in Charleston, West Virginia, where we are now printed.

Finishing the paper each week still feels like completing an important final exam in college and knowing you at least did well enough to pass.

Otherwise, the overall energy level has dropped tremendously, and technology is largely the reason.

We began using desktop publishing in 1990 when we invested in four Macintosh Classic computers. However, we didn’t go fully electronic until around 2006, which is when deadline day energy really changed. Before that, we built pages by hand using layout sheets, waxers, and scissors. All the pages would be laid out on tables, with at least six of us — including my late parents — working side by side.

Once those pages were finished, someone had to drive them to the press in London or Manchester, Kentucky, or Norton, Virginia. While the paper was being printed and labeled for mailing, we would go home to sleep before helping distribute them across the county.

Today, we send pages electronically, and they are printed, mailed, and delivered by a crew in Charleston.

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The Mountain Eagle has seen many advances since its founding in August 1909. Its first press was hand-operated and used no electricity. When my parents took ownership in 1957, the paper used a letterpress and other “hot metal” equipment. I can still remember sitting in my mother’s lap as she typed copy on the Linotype machine.

Around 1962, we switched from hot metal to cold type. My grandfather and father installed our first offset press, which printed tabloid-size pages two at a time. After one side was printed, the pages were stacked and run through again for the other side.

Once printed, my two sisters and I helped fold them and insert them into that week’s edition.

My dad suffered a massive heart attack in his mid-forties, likely from the stress of writing editorials, running the press, shooting negatives, burning plates, and operating the press — all at once. How he managed it, I will never know.

He once told me he wouldn’t even begin thinking about his editorial until the first pages were coming off the press. At some point, he would stop everything, write the editorial on one of the IBM typewriters, and then get things moving again.

That era ended in 1974, when the paper was burned by an arsonist police officer and we purchased our first Compugraphic typesetting equipment.

The legendary “It Still Screams!” tagline was a middle finger to arsonists in the ‘70s. What is the Eagle screaming about most loudly today? What are the big ticket issues for Whitesburg and Eastern Kentucky?

The Eagle’s voice in recent years has focused heavily on life in Appalachia since the coal industry began its decline around 2012 — largely because the world-class coal seams that were opened in 1912 have now been mostly exhausted.

Another major issue is population loss, which began with coal’s decline and then accelerated after the devastating flood of July 2022. That disaster brought destruction and loss of life on a scale never seen here before. Small streams that were dry much of the year rose to second-floor levels in many homes.

One of the biggest current concerns is the cost of electricity. Letcher County and much of Central Appalachia now pay some of the highest rates in the country. It’s a harsh irony — the region that helped fuel the Industrial Revolution and kept energy costs low for much of the nation is now paying some of the highest bills.

Your parents reported a lot on mining in the Appalachians and the repercussions from that. Now that the industry has largely receded, who is the ‘Goliath’ that the Eagle has to keep its eye on today?

One Goliath we continue to watch is unreclaimed strip mining, along with abandoned mining camps filled with deteriorating homes now owned by scattered heirs across the country.

Another is AEP’s Kentucky Power, whose rates can consume as much as three-fourths of an elderly person’s monthly Social Security check. Small businesses struggle to survive under those costs.

We are also deeply concerned about the potential loss of our hospital and the impact of federal policy changes, including Medicaid cuts.

In addition, we closely follow proposed state legislation and what it may mean for the mountains — both good and bad.

In a small town, you may have to write a hard story about a family friend, a classmate, a neighbor. How do you handle that?

I have never — and will never — be able to “handle” that. There is nothing worse than printing something unflattering about someone and then running into them or their family at the post office or grocery store.

I sometimes think about how reporters at larger outlets would handle writing hard stories about people they know personally. I suspect it would be harder than writing about distant public figures.

If anyone says they have no trouble doing it, they are either not being honest or have never had to do it.

The Eagle still survives on cover price, subscriptions, and advertising. Has the Eagle ever considered moving to a 501(c)(3) model, accepting donations and grants, or do you think there is still value in being an independent for-profit business?

I have considered that, but I don’t really know how to go about it. There’s very little guidance available for small independent publications like ours.

Most nonprofit models I see are statewide, foundation-funded operations staffed by former daily newspaper reporters. They often do excellent work — but they aren’t local.

Sadly, I don’t think much value remains in being an independent for-profit business, and that keeps me up at night. I often ask myself how long I want to carry that burden. But then I think about how I would feel if The Mountain Eagle ended up in the wrong hands.

The Eagle has readers scattered across the US. How has the internet changed who your reader actually is?

Whenever I start worrying about losing readers, I remind myself we have a strong online subscriber base.

In many ways, our audience hasn’t changed. It’s still largely former residents who want to stay connected to where they came from, now scattered across the country. We also have a solid number of local readers who now choose the online edition over print.

How do you reach younger residents? Are they subscribers? How do they encounter the Eagle?

Reaching younger residents has always been difficult. Fortunately, we still have a strong circulation, and many readers continue the habit of reading the paper they grew up with.

I try to include content that might appeal to younger readers — for example, a recent front-page feature on a new disc golf course at the base of Pine Mountain. That said, I know I could do better. I need to do a better job of listing local and regional concerts and that sort of thing.

Do you have a pool of young reporters coming up through colleges to count on for staff now and in the future?

No — and that is very concerning. At this point, the main benefit for a young reporter working at a small weekly is gaining experience to move on to a larger publication.

That said, we’ve had many former Eagle reporters go on to strong careers at larger papers, which I’m very proud of. We are considering working with colleges again to bring in interns.

Your dad used to say you never win permanent friends in this business. How many uncomfortable encounters do you have at the local grocery store after a particularly sharp editorial? How do you handle being the editor of a paper in a town where everyone knows where you live?

Aside from what I mentioned earlier, I’ve been fortunate. Part of that comes from growing up with a close group of friends whose families weren’t in politics or coal. Those friendships remain strong today.

I’ve had to report on cases involving extended family members of friends, but I’ve never received criticism from them.

Another factor is watching how my parents handled similar situations. They didn’t let it consume them, and I’ve tried to do the same.

Going through being falsely accused in the arson case also helped me develop a thicker skin.

I also live outside Whitesburg, in a hollow where I’m not in the public eye. At this stage, I’m often surprised when people recognize me. I rarely use my name or photo in the paper.

We hear a lot about how AI is going to take the jobs of journalists. Is the work of a local newspaper journalist and editor in rural Kentucky still too human for a machine to attempt?

AI can be a useful research tool, but I don’t see it replacing the human side of local journalism — especially in a place like this, where understanding people and community context is essential.

If Pat and Tom could read the paper next week, what is the one thing about the modern Mountain Eagle that you think would surprise them the most?

I think they would be pleased that we finally have a printer capable of producing high-quality color on newsprint. They would likely be disappointed by the reduced number of pages — but I believe they would still be proud of what they created.

In many rural counties, the local paper is the only institution doing any accountability journalism at all. Does the editor feel the weight of that? And what do you think happens to a community when its local paper shuts down — as so many have.

I absolutely feel the weight of that responsibility and wish we could do even more.

When a legitimate local paper shuts down, a community begins to decline faster than it otherwise might. I’ve seen it happen.

I’m currently working on a proposal to local businesses, encouraging them to support us through institutional advertising so we can continue doing this work.

Jim Rodenbush spent years training the next generation of journalists at Indiana University, where he served as Director of Student Media and adviser to the Indiana Daily Student — one of the oldest and most respected college newspapers in the country, with roots going back to 1867. His job was to guide student editors, protect the independence of the newsroom, and help young reporters learn what it means to do the work with integrity.

Then, in October 2025, he was fired.

The reason, Jim says: he refused a direct order from university administrators to strip traditional news coverage from a print edition of the paper. What followed was a very public censorship dispute, a lawsuit alleging violations of his First and 14th Amendment rights, and a national conversation about who gets to decide what a student newspaper publishes — the students, or the institution that funds them.

The lawsuit has since been voluntarily dropped and is being refiled in state court. Jim says he intends to see it through.

This fall, he begins a new role as an associate professor of journalism at Western Kentucky University. For this week’s Deadliners podcast we chatted about what happened, what it means for press freedom in America, and what Jim tells students who are wondering whether journalism is still worth fighting for.

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As magazine publishers have shifted heavily toward digital in order to survive, one publication has chosen to remain faithful to paper.

This week I’m chatting to my friend (and former editor) Kira Don, Editor-in-Chief and co-founder of Stranger’s Guide, a magazine about “place” that I (probably inarticulately) describe to people as “somewhere at the intersection of current affairs and travel.” I worked as a senior editor at the magazine for several years. I love it. It’s a beautifully produced publication (it does have a website too) with photo essays, quirky stories, and features that run thousands of words long.

When I launched Deadliners back on April 9, I promised I’d bring you exclusive interviews with the people thinking about the future of journalism: reporters who are refusing to quit, founders starting new platforms, and storytellers finding exciting ways to tell us what’s going on in the world. What Kira is doing is precisely what I was talking about.

Kira has worked as a magazine editor in New York and California, was executive editor of Lapham’s Quarterly, and as a journalist she’s covered politics and culture around the world. She also co-founded the Oakland Book Festival in the city she now calls home.

Since it launched eight years ago, Stranger’s Guide has been nominated for no less than 14 national magazine awards and it’s won four — not bad for a publication that launched on a shoestring at a time when we’re being told that print is all-but dead.

“I love print the way some people love vinyl,” Kira told me. “There’s something about holding an object in your hand, and so in starting this magazine, the most important thing was to make it an object that you would want to keep. It’s not print for print’s sake.”

What makes Stranger’s Guide feel so important right now is that Kira is doing something AI will never be able to do: traveling to a country, sitting down with local writers and photographers over lunch, and uncovering the accidental, beautiful daily realities of life that then make it into print. “We’re journalists in a moment in which journalism has so little respect; when it has so few avenues for being read or acknowledged or noticed,” she said.

We cover a lot of ground — how Kira builds a bespoke editorial board from scratch for every single issue, why she turned Stranger's Guide into a nonprofit, the Iran stories she's most proud of, and her simple advice for anyone crazy enough to start a print magazine in 2026. ("Just do it," she says. And she means it.) Hit play to listen to our conversation above. Or find Deadliners on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

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Sudan is currently experiencing one of the worst humanitarian catastrophes on earth. Two warring military factions are tearing apart a country of 50 million people. More than 9.6 million people have been internally displaced, and another 4.3 million have fled across borders. Yet, the Western media has largely looked away.

In the vacuum left by international indifference, a terrifying proxy information war has taken over — an AI-driven psychological operation designed to manufacture alternative realities.

My guest on this week’s episode of Deadliners is Raghdan Orsud, a communications expert and co-founder of Beam Reports, an independent Sudanese news and fact-checking platform. Launched in 2021 to safeguard Sudan’s democratic transition, Beam has spent the last few years fighting an uphill battle not just against totalitarian forces, but against the apathy of Silicon Valley and the sudden collapse of global media funding.

Rebuilding from a Laptop in Exile

When fighting erupted between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in the spring of 2023, Beam Reports was just finding its footing. They had built a physical studio in Khartoum using local funds and the equipment was still in boxes when the RSF seized their offices. Raghdan and her co-founders fled to Nairobi, Kenya, instructing their reporters to leave everything behind because traveling through military checkpoints with a laptop carrying a journalism logo was a death sentence.

“When the war happened … we found ourselves out of the country with absolutely nothing but personal funds,” Raghdan said. “No funding, no savings, no equipment.”

Today, traditional independent media inside Sudan has largely collapsed. Out of 1,500 active journalists before the war, it’s estimated only about 70 are left working in the country’s conflict zones.

When Algorithms Reward War Crimes

Without a robust local press, regional state-backed media networks have weaponized the information space. More chillingly, warlords and extremists have found a highly profitable home on Western social media platforms.

Beam Reports exposed ‘Abu Lulu,’ an RSF fighter who used TikTok Live to openly boast about murdering over 2,000 civilians in Darfur. Instead of banning him, TikTok’s algorithm actively rewarded his videos with massive engagement.

"The platforms that we live in now, they don't just make it harder for hate speech and incitement to violence to exist—they reward it. He was making money out of that content." 
— Raghdan Orsud

Beam pressured TikTok into taking the content down. Their relentless monitoring eventually forced Meta to bring them on as an official third-party fact-checker for Sudan. But Raghdan is candid about the structural indifference of Big Tech:

“Sudan is not a priority. Any country that does not bring in money is not a priority for big tech companies. I get that part from a corporate perspective. But if you are positioning yourself as a global platform, there’s a responsibility that comes with that.”

Coordinated Disinformation

Through their specialized division, Marsad Beam, Raghdan’s team tracks sophisticated deepfakes and coordinated foreign influence operations. They recently exposed a massive, digital psychological campaign on X (formerly Twitter) promoting a completely fabricated narrative that Islamist extremist groups were attacking Christian citizens in Sudan. When Beam mapped the network behind the narrative, they found it was driven by a coalition of Emirati and Israeli accounts alongside far-right figures in Europe and the United States. The goal, Raghdan said, was to reframe a domestic, territorial military power struggle into a religious holy war to manipulate Western foreign policy.

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The End of USAID Funding

Doing this verification work requires resources. But independent media across the Global South was dealt a devastating blow last year. Historically, the US government was the single largest funder of independent media worldwide, but when the Trump administration froze and effectively dismantled USAID in early 2025, that financial pipeline vanished almost overnight.

For smaller media organizations, the impact was immediate and catastrophic. Raghdan explains that legacy Western grant models actually left media houses uniquely vulnerable to this sudden political shift.

Beam Reports had to downsize and cut a critical project aimed at building a round-the-clock Sudan Fact Check Network. They survived by scrambling to diversify their revenue, but the crisis served as a brutal, global reality check: Independent journalism cannot rely on foreign state charity to survive.

Listen to the podcast to hear our entire conversation, and don’t forget to share this post and subscribe to Deadliners for weekly, deep-dive interviews on how the human craft of journalism survives, adapts, and thrives in an automated world.

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When I asked Rob D’Amico to do an interview with me for Deadliners, I knew I’d have to mention an anecdote he told me a few years back. Rob had posted a short video on Facebook in which he was standing on a chair in his tiny house in Shafter, Texas, a former silver-mining (now ghost) town of about 25 people. On the floor, a few feet away, was a massive rattlesnake, and Rob’s dog, Poncho, was squaring up to it. Rob eventually called a neighbor, who showed up with a mop and a shotgun to settle the matter.

Rob is a veteran reporter who spent years in Austin before heading to the Big Bend — the rugged, remote high desert of West Texas. He’s the creator of the hit podcast Borderlands, and today he edits The Big Bend Sentinel, a 100-year-old newspaper in a town (Marfa) where most people don’t have mailboxes. Every Thursday they walk to the post office to pick up the paper and trade gossip.

Rob’s an old pal. In fact, he was one of the first members of the actual Deadliners Club, an informal meetup group I started for journalists in central Texas far too many years ago. In our conversation we discuss the reality of rural reporting, why the Sentinel recently shifted to a non-profit model to survive, and why AI will never be able to replicate the bar-room intelligence that fuels a local scoop.

Rob’s relocation from Austin to a ghost town of 25 people wasn’t just about a change of scenery. Now living in a $450-a-month adobe house in Shafter, he’s found a way to sustain his craft far from the traditional media hubs. As Rob puts it, “I moved there partially because of economics, but partially because it was gorgeous and I knew I was going to be freelancing and I could do it remotely.”

The reality of rural reporting means pivoting between international crises and local grievances in the same afternoon. While the Sentinel is currently “all wall all the time” due to the expansion of the border fence, Rob still has to keep an eye on the basics. “I had to kind of like put down the wall for a minute and actually do the city council story,” he says, noting that for locals, smart water meters are often as big a deal as national security.

When it comes to the threat of AI, Rob remains a skeptic, arguing that an algorithm can’t replicate the “boots-on-the-ground” nature of a desert beat. For him, the best leads don’t come from a database, but from showing up in person. “AI is not going to go to the local bar, which is where I get the vast majority of my information about what’s going on, just talking to people over a beer.”

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More than four years later, she’s a Livingston Award finalist, has bylines in the Sunday Times, The Telegraph, Foreign Policy and the Daily Beast, and is living in Berlin, about to head back into Ukraine, and still finding the stories that nobody else is telling.

I wanted to talk to Anna because she represents something that I think gets overlooked in conversations about foreign correspondents — the freelancer who packs a bag and just decides to go, figures it out on the ground, and somehow builds a career out of sheer will and an ability to find the human story inside the chaos.

On the economics of starting out

Anna was blunt about the early years in a way that a lot of journalists aren’t. She made almost nothing her first year. She was covering everything out of pocket. This isn’t unusual for young freelancers in conflict zones — but it’s rarely said this plainly.

What changed things, gradually, was building relationships with editors who would cover her costs. But she’s also clear that, in her experience, British media tends to have better frameworks for how to treat freelancers in the field. More resources, better guidelines, a more established culture of working with people on the ground who aren’t on staff.

On selling Ukraine right now

Since the conflict in Iran began, Anna says it’s become nearly impossible to sell Ukraine stories. She arrived in Kyiv in late February specifically to begin working with a TV agency covering the war — and on the day she landed, Iran dominated the news agenda. The agency still hasn’t had a single request from any of its clients about Ukraine.

This matters beyond the economics. Ukraine is still being bombarded. Massive drone and missile attacks are still happening. The human cost is still accumulating. It’s just not on the front page.

On going into the morgue

The story nominated for the Livingston Award is about the repatriation of Ukrainian soldiers’ bodies — the police investigators, the DNA matching, the families waiting years for news. To report it, Anna also spent time in a military morgue outside Kyiv.

She’d been trying to get access for three years. When she finally got in, she was given about an hour. She describes one body in particular — an older man, beard still intact, face badly damaged — that she says she thinks about most days.

What she also describes, and what I think is really important, is the delayed nature of the impact. In the moment, you’re focused on the job; you’re taking notes; you’re watching the forensic process. The weight of it doesn’t hit until later, sometimes weeks later, when you’re somewhere safer and your mind has space to process.

She was living in Kyiv full-time while reporting that story, experiencing drone attacks every week. .

On why she keeps going back

Anna is clear that she’s not the journalist racing to the front line to film explosions. She’s interested in what she thinks is the real story of war: not the ordnance and the hardware, but the human cost. The mother trapped in a frontline town because she has no money; the men sexually assaulted by Russian troops; the families waiting for the body of a soldier who died years ago.

On access — and the Hezbollah funeral

One of the more remarkable parts of our conversation is about her reporting from southern Lebanon in 2024, including attending the funeral of a Hezbollah soldier. As an American journalist, in a Hezbollah-controlled town, at a funeral where the crowd was chanting death to America.

She thinks being a woman helped — less visible, less threatening, easier to overlook. She was wearing a hijab. Nobody heard her speak.

She got in because her translator had local roots and knew who to approach. But she’s also honest that access in places like that requires a certain willingness to be somewhere you’re technically not supposed to be, and to trust that the story is worth the discomfort.

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On the future

Anna wants to go to Sudan. She finds it genuinely upsetting that conflicts in sub-Saharan Africa receive so little coverage.

She’s also optimistic about the future of journalism. She’s not dismissing the pressures — the layoffs, the AI conversation, the editors who chase the news cycle and leave Ukraine behind. But she believes that people will eventually understand that social media and AI can’t replace real reporting from someone actually on the ground.

She might be right. And if she is, it’ll be in no small part because of people like her — who went anyway, figured it out, and kept filing.

Anna Conkling is an independent foreign correspondent based in Berlin. She reports for the Sunday Times, The Telegraph, Foreign Policy, the Daily Beast and Newsphere. She is a finalist for the 2025 Livingston Award. You can follow her work and support her directly via Noosphere.

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Then came a detour to the Daily Express, a magazine launch, and eventually a phone call that changed everything. A contact tipped off a New York publisher about a young British editor with a European sensibility. Jack flew over, met Bob Guccione Jr. — founder of Spin, and son of the Penthouse founder — and found himself editing GEAR magazine in Manhattan.

As Jack explains in today’s Deadliners podcast, after New York burned him out, he quit his job with no savings, no car, no plan, and somehow ended up running a pool bar at one of the oldest seaside hotels in America in Cape May, New Jersey. He was a terrible bartender. But Cape May, with its Victorian gingerbread homes, lighthouse, whaling history, and beautiful beaches, got under his skin in a way Manhattan never had. When Jack found himself eating cereal with ants in it because he couldn’t afford to throw it away, he did the only thing he knew how to do: he launched a magazine.

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Exit Zero started as a 24-page black-and-white newsprint rag. The magazine grew to 144 pages and helped transform Cape May from a quiet Jersey Shore town into something people drove hours to visit. The Garden State Parkway authority eventually put up a sign at the end of the highway that read Exit Zero — a tribute, they said, to what the magazine had done for the place.

Along the way Jack wrote or oversaw stories that got a mayor voted out of office and a city manager fired. He expanded his empire, opening (with zero experience in the food business) a curry restaurant. He expanded into a huge ferry terminal. He lost a lot of money. He got out. But he kept printing.

Now, two decades in, Jack is still publishing, still writing, and still convinced that print isn’t going anywhere — even as advertisers become more Instagram-obsessed. In our conversation, he reflects on what’s been lost since the Fleet Street days, why he thinks the New York Times has got the digital pivot right, and what it actually takes to build something lasting in a world that keeps telling you print is dead.

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We often hear that the golden age of journalism was a time of cigar-chomping editors who alone decided what was fit to print. Kevin Ashton, the visionary tech pioneer who famously gave us the phrase “The Internet of Things”, thinks that’s mostly nonsense. In his brilliant new book The Story of Stories: The Million Year History of a Uniquely Human Art, Kevin argues that the death of the gatekeeper isn’t a tragedy, but an opportunity. While the digital age has invited a flood of “top-of-mind columnist crap”, it has also empowered a new breed of independent originators who are bypassing the aristocrats of the editorial board to reach their audiences directly.

In this wide-ranging Q&A, Kevin, whose first book How To Fly A Horse explored the history of creativity, doesn’t pull his punches. He dismisses objectivity as a biological impossibility and calls out the digital parasites of Big Tech. But amid the critique, there is a bracing optimism. Whether it’s the success of long-form projects like 1619 or the rise of creator-owned platforms like Mehdi Hasan’s Zeteo, Kevin’s message to journalists is clear: People don’t just want facts — they want meaning. And meaning is the one thing a machine can never originate.

Alex Hannaford: You’ve noted that with the advent of the smartphone, when everyone became storytellers, we dispensed with the gatekeepers. In a world where 7 billion people are their own printing press / broadcaster, how important is the role of a trained, professional journalist, and editor as gatekeeper?

Kevin Ashton: Witnessing is important. Investigating is important. Opining not so much. Those first two are expensive and time consuming, so they are less common now, and the third one is cheap, which is why we end up with a lot of top-of-mind columnist crap being passed off as journalism. David Brooks, Ross Douthat, Peggy Noonan, all that thoughtless nonsense. The death of gatekeeping is a good thing, though. Newspapers and broadcasters have a lousy track record when it comes to perpetuating bias and self-censoring inconvenient truths on behalf of their proprietors and governments. Ordinary people taking smartphone videos of, say, police brutality has been pretty good at puncturing that. You still get the New York Times saying “eyewitnesses claim she was shot in the head while doing a three-point turn, and the government says she was actually about to ram twenty officers and commit vehicular mass murder” while shrugging, but the deceit is more obvious now. It’s fascinating that they think they can still get away with it.

Does anyone realize how important a trained journalist and editor is and what they’re missing?

Let’s not get misty and mythical about journalism. For every Martha Gellhorn there were ten thousand Piers Morgans. The interesting thing to me is how contemporary Martha Gellhorns are so independently empowered now. Look at someone like Marisa Kabas. She is able to reach an audience directly, without having to game her way through an editorial board of aristocrats. The rise of small, independent specialist journalists and journals — other examples include Zeteo, 404 Media, Harms Committed — seems like the perfect combination of high professionalism and low friction.

You argue that “less true” stories are often more compelling and travel faster. How can journalists — who are bound by the slow, tedious process of fact-checking — ever hope to compete with the high-speed delivery system of viral storytelling?

You’re never going to outrun a lie. But I am not sure you need to. A well-told story that evokes feeling and seems salient will almost always find an audience. The days of scoops are long gone, because information distribution is so instant now, but exclusives are another thing entirely. Vicky Ward and Julie K. Brown helped bring Jeffrey Epstein to justice, and Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey broke the Harvey Weinstein story, for example.

We are biologically wired to seek confirmation of our tribal biases, so is objective journalism actually a biological impossibility? Are we fighting a losing battle against our own brains?

Yes, objectivity is nonsense. Everyone has a point of view, and it is foolish to pretend otherwise. The mere fact of deciding to write about one thing rather than another is subjective, for example. But, critical thinking is real and achievable, and a big part of that is catching your own biases in the act, and adjusting for them. If you’re an old white man writing about how hard things are for old white men, you might want to stop and examine that, for example.

Will journalism ever be as compelling as a sensationalist conspiracy theory? How do we make the truth go viral?

Conspiracy theories work because they conform to the deep evolutionary structure of storytelling. Hero, villain, high stakes consequences. “Sensationalist” is a good word for them: they deliver sensation, feeling, emotion. You can do that with truth too. It’s harder, because truth is nuanced, but entirely possible. The mistake is to think that something is compelling because it is true, or factual, or grounded in evidence. None of those things make a story more or less engaging.

You are optimistic about a new generation that is progressive and native to the smartphone. How should a 21st-century newsroom adapt its storytelling to reach a generation that gets its news from short-form video and TikTok?

This framing about “a generation that gets its news from short-form video and TikTok” is common but mistaken. The data just doesn’t back it up. Young people encounter news on TikTok, but it is seldom their main news source and they generally do not trust it as much as they trust newspapers. And not all video content is short form: a lot of YouTube videos are thirty minutes or more. The average PewDiePie video is 28 minutes long, and the average penguinz0 video is 60 minutes long, for example. But if you want a good example of a more traditional (i.e. led by older people) newsroom adapting and thriving, look at Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. He’s nearly fifty years old, covers serious topics in great depth, and has won 32 Emmys, among many other awards, and has about five billion views on YouTube, most of them from people under 40.

Is longform storytelling dead?

Not at all. See above, and also, say, the 1619 project, which was a hundred thousand words of print, sold far more than half a million copies, and now costs about $200 to buy on eBay.

Can quality journalism survive as a business model when its competitors (social media platforms) have zero cost of production and no liability for the truth?

Yes, but the model is subscribers not advertisers, and the journalists have to own their platform. Zeteo is a great model. 600,000 subscribers, more than 50,000 paying, and about $4 million of revenue, and not yet two years old.

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What are the human elements of storytelling that AI will never be able to replicate?

Large language models cannot do meaning. They will never be insightful. They work by understanding the frequency of sequences of words, not the meaning of those words. They are just natural language interfaces to big databases.

The Guardian updated its guidelines on the use of AI, saying “However ‘intelligent’ AI may appear, it doesn’t experience the world as we do ... That lived experience is our unique contribution, and an authentic response is what our readers, supporters and staff expect and deserve.” Do you agree?

Yup. The easiest way to understand the limitation of a large language model is to realise that it has no inner life whatsoever. If no one gives it a prompt, it runs no processes. It is exactly as thoughtful as a rock.

Journalists are understandably worried that their jobs are being lost to AI. You’re a self-described optimist. Is there any hope?

The big irony there is that AI does not originate anything. Neither does Google or Facebook or any other platform that aggregates other people’s work. Those systems literally cannot exist without originators. The problem is how to get paid for originating, instead of being exploited by digital parasites. Subscriptions and paywalls are the answer, now well established. Give a little away for free, sell the rest.

If we inherently want to forgo the clickbait and move back to a slower, more deliberate form of journalism, isn’t that just financial suicide in 2026?

I don’t see any evidence of that. Enough people want to be informed, and old tricks like “here’s a list of celebrity scandals, you won’t believe number four” don’t really work any more.

If you were fresh out of journalism school, would you head to a newsroom, or would you be looking to build something entirely new in 2026?

I’d take the best offer, which may or may not be a newsroom. Getting a brand as the first experience on your resume is always a good move, but it is harder to do now. Building something new requires capital and time and therefore privilege. Not everyone has that fresh out of school.

I also wrote about Kevin in 2017 for The Telegraph, and more recently for The Independent.

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We start where all good reporting careers used to begin: at the local level. Olivia cut her teeth at the Waco Tribune-Herald, a paper over a century old, where she covered everything from stabbings to car accidents. She makes a compelling case for why these stories — and the sheer number of them cub reporters cover — are the most important part of a journalist’s education. In her view, it is far better to make your inevitable mistakes at a local paper than on a national platform, yet those local training grounds are disappearing faster than we can replace them.

Our conversation moves into the digital era and what she calls her “40,000 broken eggs” — the massive Twitter following she built and which she used to engage with readers, but which curdled when the platform shifted under Elon Musk.

We chat about the philosophy behind The Barbed Wire (some latest stories include the shuttering of gender and sexuality programs at Texas Tech University and how Texas college students are helping thousands of undocumented classmates.) Running a next-generation media property, Olivia and her team are navigating a hybrid funding model that rejects the traditional paywall. She argues that if the correct information is stuck behind a wall while misinformation remains free, we’re never going to win the ‘how to educate people’ war.

We also dive into the out-of-towner mistakes national reporters make when they parachute into Texas, often ignoring the fact that the state is the birthplace of many of the civil rights movements the rest of the country now takes for granted.

Finally, we address the looming shadow of AI. Olivia explains why investigative reporting — the kind of deep-dive journalism that may require a source to trust you with something off the record — is something a robot will never be able to replicate.

But there’s a flip side: AI could, she tells me, find those stories that have always been hiding in plain sight. For example, she thinks someone should build a tool that scrapes PACER, the federal government’s online database of US court records, and find all the lawsuits the rest of us are missing. The robots, it turns out, might have their uses after all.

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Here’s an excerpt from our conversation:

Alex: You started out at the Waco Tribune-Herald. What did you cover?

Olivia: “Stabbings, shootings, car accidents, inclement weather. I was like the house fire expert. And then I covered a string of dumpster fires that never got solved. Literal ones. I’m so grateful now that I got to make all my mistakes at the local level, because you have to make a certain number of mistakes in this job. And it’s better if you’re not on a national platform when it happens.”

What advice would you give to someone graduating with a journalism degree today?

“The answer has kind of never changed. It’s just that it’s only gotten harder and more competitive. If you want to be a journalist, you have to do journalism. That was the best advice I got — it doesn’t really matter where or how. I had roommates who were like, I’m only ever going to do it in New York. And I was like, good luck. And when I moved to Waco a lot of people in my life said: why would you do that? The real advice now is … you have to make yourself indispensable. Be the first there and the last to leave, and care about getting your stories, and triple-check things even when you don’t have a copy editor, and make it so that no one can imagine the newsroom working without you.”

You built a huge Twitter following and then watched the platform change under Elon Musk. How did that feel?

“I feel like it’s talking about eggs I have in a basket that are all broken. I have 40,000 broken eggs. There is no longer the same water cooler experience. I did a thread the other day on Twitter in reaction to some news, just trying to talk about how sexual misconduct investigations work. And the mentions were not a place I would want to hang out. Bluesky has figured some things out. I like Bluesky a lot. But it’s not like you could have one live event where everybody’s in the same room anymore, which is a real bummer, because that was a lovely experience.”

How did The Barbed Wire come about?

“Texas is just the most news-rich place. We have this huge, diverse, young population who’s not really subscribing to daily newspapers, who are kind of getting their news from TikTok. We could just cover immigration stories, or we could just cover news for the five million Black Texans who don’t have their own news outlet serving their community, or two million queer Texans, or 12 million Latino Texans. We were trying to fill a hole and speak to young, news-avoidant populations. Somebody called us Texas Monthly’s younger, edgier sibling. That’s kind of the vibe I’d like to inhabit.”

What do people outside Texas get wrong about the state?

“The number of people in Texas who voted for Biden was higher than the number of people in New York who voted for Biden. Texas has such a large population — and that population includes almost the most immigrants of any state, almost the most Latinos of any state, almost the most Black people of any state, almost the most queer people of any state, almost the most trans people of any state. The idea that Texas is this hellscape that is unfavorable to various populations is of course true. And also the sheer number of progressives who are fighting the good fight — or just journalists who are trying to inform people — or reasonable moderates, is much higher than people give it credit for. A lot of civil rights movements had to start here because here’s where they needed them the most.”

What can AI never replace in journalism?

“Investigative reporting. It’s really hard to replace someone wanting to tell you a secret off the record.

Every parent of a teenager knows the feeling: watching your child hunched over a phone, thumb flicking upward, wondering, What on earth are they actually learning in there? But, it turns out, they’re actually remarkably engaged with the world.

They may not be engaged via legacy media, so what does being engaged with the world via TikTok and Instagram mean for the future of news and for the journalists who produce it? To help me make sense of this, I spoke to Dr. Craig Robertson, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford.

In Craig’s recent paper, Understanding Young News Audiences at the Time of Rapid Change, he explores the “socialization” of news; the shift from the ritual of the morning paper to the chaotic, creator-led ecosystem of TikTok.

We discuss why the ‘inverted pyramid’ style of news writing that dinosaurs like me were taught in journalism school is a relic bygone era, and why an old guy in a suit behind a desk feels odd and untrustworthy to a new generation that has grown up online and on their phone.

We got into the weeds on a few things that might just be keeping you up at night:

• Why 51% of young people now pay more attention to individual creators than to established news brands.

• How “both-sidesism” on issues like climate and social justice is actively alienating the next generation of readers.

• A look at how young people are using LLMs to simplify and de-code reporting that seems impenetrable.

• Why Craig thinks newsrooms should consider killing their opinion sections entirely to salvage what’s left of their reputation for objective facts (and why he hates newspaper ‘live blogs’)

Like me, Craig is a glass-half-full guy, but his data is a wake-up call for anyone still trying to sell 1960s formats to a 2026 audience.

I started my career in 1997 at a small paper (circulation 20k) in the south of England called the Lymington Times & New Milton Advertiser (two mastheads, mostly the same content, serving two regions.) At the time, it was the last paper in the UK still using hot metal printing. I had a grace-and-favor** apartment above the old 1950s printing press, and on Thursdays (press day) I’d grab a copy from a pile that had just emerged from the oily metal monster that dominated the old warehouse. It was literally hot (sometimes too hot to touch) off the press.

Since then, I’ve spent nearly three decades in this trade, covering arts and culture in London, death row in Texas, the US-Mexico border, politics, and everything in between for the likes of The Guardian, The Times of London, The Independent, GQ, and The Atlantic.

I’ve seen disruption in our industry before. But as I packed up my life in Texas and moved to New York a few years back, our industry feels different. It feels final for some, but also something of a rebirth for others.

Today I’m launching Deadliners, a newsletter dedicated to journalism in the age of AI.

We are living through strange times. On one hand, the institutions are crumbling — 3,000 local papers in the US alone gone in twenty years, legacy giants like the Washington Post and LA Times shedding hundreds of our peers, and news deserts spreading across the map. On the other, we are seeing more and more reporters creating their own content, building their audiences, and owning their archives.

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AI is a paradox. It’s already being used to trawl resumes and delete veteran reporters before an editor ever sees them, or to aggregate our hard-won scoops into hollow summaries. But it can also be a powerful ally, killing the drudgery of manual transcription (when I think of the hours I spent transcribing…) and parsing data at speeds that used to require whole newsrooms of researchers. Amidst this chaos, we’re seeing a rebirth in worker-owned startups and independent Substacks. To me, the path forward is clear: an algorithm can’t witness the world and so our real value lies in “lived experience” — the shoe-leather reporting and the face-to-face interviews that a machine can’t simulate.

Deadliners, then, (named after an informal club for journalists I started many moons ago in Austin, where I used to live) is for those of us who refuse to be replaced. I’ve always been a glass-half-full person. Maybe I’m a dewy eyed optimist, but I reckon our craft is more valuable than ever. That’s what we’re going to talk about here, each week.

To be honest, the reason I haven’t launched a newsletter before is that I’ve always preferred being the one asking the questions rather than the one providing the answers. But while I’ll be steering this ship, Deadliners isn’t just about my perspective — it’s about the collective expertise of a lot of brilliant journalists, media insiders, and academics. I’ll be bringing you exclusive interviews with the people actually thinking about the future of journalism: reporters who are refusing to quit, founders starting new and interesting platforms, and storytellers finding exciting ways to tell us what’s going on in the world. And yes, we’ll even be talking to the people wondering how on earth we’re supposed to make money doing this work we love.

Speaking of money: while a portion of this newsletter will be free, most of Deadliners will be behind a $7 monthly paywall. That’s roughly the price of a single bougie latte in Williamsburg or Hackney, and it’s how I plan to keep this sustainable.

In the coming weeks, I’ll be sharing conversations with the people on the front lines. Some weeks the newsletter will take the form of a Q&A or written piece. Other weeks it’ll be an embedded podcast that you can listen to (or read as a transcript).

I’m a long way from Lymington, and the tools of the trade may have changed, but the goal remains the same: telling the truth about the world we live in. I don’t know about you, but I don’t think I know how to do anything else. So this newsletter is about how we can continue doing it into the future.

* Not AI. Originally published in the Telegraph but behind a paywall. Free (shorter) version on The Week: https://theweek.com/articles/481233/talking-koko-gorilla

** Deadliners, I decided, will be in US English, because that’s where I live and where I think most of its readers will be. But I expect (and hope) to be given shit for it from British subscribers.

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