A headline caught my eye from a small, independent news operation in South Dakota this week. It read, “Subscriber tickets now available for this week’s Sioux Falls mayoral debate.” The news operation is The Dakota Scout, a locally owned, for-profit newsroom covering the state from Sioux Falls. It relies on advertising and a paywall to support its expansive web site, along with its weekly printed version. The newspaper had teamed up with SiouxFallsLive.com, another for-profit newsroom operating a web site and TV channel in Sioux Falls, to hold a mayoral debate last night focused on public safety.

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Both newsrooms livestreamed the event on their respective web sites for voters to take in. But in-person access to the event was another matter. As the headline above notes, subscribers to The Dakota Scout could purchase a ticket for $8 to attend the event. That struck me as odd. Why charge admission to attend an event hosted by journalism organizations that’s aimed at informing the public in the run-up to the election on June 2? The article notes there were some free seats to the event only available to members of law enforcement and their families. That’s also a questionable decision, but more on that in a moment.

The idea of charging admission for an election debate rubs me the wrong way.

I understand there are physical limits to venues and that there must be audience controls in place to manage the space. Most debates handle this by allowing the public to get free tickets to attend, or by handing out blocks of tickets to the candidates or the parties to allow them to invite their own supporters. The latter option can lead to unruly crowds cheering for one candidate or booing another, but so be it. At least they didn’t have to pay to get in.

I’m not sure what I like less about charging admission to an election debate. On the one hand, it just seems petty and cheap. It’s a nickel-and-dime approach to gaining some revenue where no revenue should be expected. If the admission charge was to cover the cost of the venue, find a place that will allow it for free. This event was held at the South Dakota Military Heritage Alliance museum, a venue that appears to offer itself for rent for all sorts of events (you could have seen wrestler Mick Foley’s one man show there last Friday night). Universities, libraries and public buildings often come at no cost—and those places will sometimes cover the associated costs of using the space. If the admission fee was just to put a bit more money in the pockets of the two newsrooms, that’s even worse.

My other complaint is that charging admission to events like this that are important to our democracy is inherently undemocratic.

Eight dollars may not seem like a lot to most people, but there are those who can’t spare it. Do those people not need this information? Do they not matter to these candidates? Sure, the event was livestreamed and available at no charge that way. But that again assumes everyone who wants to watch has the means to see a livestream—again, this is ultimately undemocratic in its assumption.

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I noted above that some seats at the debate were free of charge, reserved for members of law enforcement and their families. I must question the reasoning behind this. While I understand this was a debate focused on public safety, what’s the purpose of packing the audience with cops? I could see this setup working if the law enforcement members in the audience had a role asking questions in the debate. I watched the whole thing—they did not. All the questions came from the two journalist moderators. So it seems these free seats were wasted. While members of law enforcement will certainly be affected by any safety policies a new mayor might wish to enact, none of those law enforcement members has a greater say in who gets elected to champion those policies than any other voter, meaning the cops have no greater right to those seats than any other voter.

Aside from charging for tickets, there was another commercial aspect to this event that gave me pause—the sponsor list.

Four of the event sponsors were typical community-based entities with an interest in seeing the region prosper: Ascend Financial (a wealth management company), Craze Minds Marketing (an advertising and marketing strategy agency), Sioux Falls Insurance-Eric Meyers Group (an insurance agency) and South Dakota Trade (a non-profit focused on building trade with South Dakota companies and industries). These are the types of sponsors I would expect for an event like this and, while I’m not sure how their funds or in-kind donations were applied, there’s no concern about associating them with the two news organizations running the event. In fact, most were probably already advertisers for one or both of the publications.

But there was a sponsor in the mix that really does concern me. Americans for Prosperity (AFP) paid for an open bar reception following the debate. If you’re unfamiliar, AFP is the Koch brothers-founded political advocacy group with opaque funding sources and a history of unethical and deceptive election practices. The group once posted fake eviction notices on homes in Detroit to scare residents into opposing a bridge project. It sent absentee voter applications to Democrats before a Wisconsin recall election of six Republican state senators—applications that had the wrong address on the return envelope and would have effectively prevented any Democrats using them from voting. AFP aired political ads targeting Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Gary Peters in Michigan that contained quantifiably false information about a patient undergoing cancer treatment and what she would pay for that care under the Affordable Care Act. These are not the actions of a group simply supporting a certain partisan point of view. They are actions meant to undermine the operation of our political system. That, to me, is inconsistent with the goals of the mayoral debate—any debate—and should have disqualified AFP as a sponsor. Beyond that, neither news organization should have a cozy relationship with an organization as controversial as this. There could easily arise a situation in which journalists for these newsrooms have to cover a dirty tricks effort backed by AFP in their own communities. That could lead to some awkward relationship questions such as “So why did Americans for Prosperity buy you free drinks at an event you were organizing?” As a journalist, I wouldn’t want to have to answer that question.

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In the end, I salute these newsrooms for making the effort to sponsor a debate for an important city campaign. Please do it again. But next time, invite the public for free, don’t give the cops special seats and be pickier about who gets to be a sponsor.

As the timing of FCC license renewals would have it, I suffered through four license renewals while I was leading the newsroom at KOMU-TV. I say “suffered” because the process of renewing a television station’s license involves a freight car’s worth of paperwork and a lot of time from a lot of people to get it prepared to send to Washington. As news director, my load was among the lightest of the station personnel tasked with the renewal chore—and I still found it onerous. Don’t get me wrong, the federal government absolutely should license television and radio stations. If it didn’t, the airwaves would be a mess of overlapping stations that would be nearly impossible to tune cleanly. Through the 106 years the federal government has been licensing broadcast stations—going back even before the FCC was created—the process has been burdensome and bureaucratic, but never retaliatory. But like so many things in Washington in the past 15 months, that has changed.

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The latest example of burdening journalists and journalism companies with unnecessary work comes as another chapter in Trump’s ongoing war over Jimmy Kimmel’s jokes unfolds. Last week—days before an attacker stormed security at the White House Correspondents Association dinner--Kimmel jokingly referred to Melania Trump as an “expectant widow,” clearly referencing her gold-digger status and her husband’s advancing age and declining medical state. Was the joke mean? Absolutely. Was it funny? That depends on how you feel about the Trumps, of course. Was it encouraging an assassination attempt? Of course not. But that’s how the Trumps spun it following the events of last Saturday night. Beyond Trump’s latest verbal attacks on Kimmel, we found out yesterday the FCC is ordering the local television stations ABC owns to undergo their broadcast license renewal processes early. None was due to renew before 2028, with most not due until 2030 or 2031. Stations normally work for about a year to get their license renewal materials together—as noted above it is a laborious task. But FCC chair Brendan Carr has given the stations just 30 days to file.

What does this move mean?

Well, first off, there is one bright spot. Since this is targeting the local stations owned by ABC, it appears the president now knows that the networks themselves aren’t licensed by the FCC (he has often called for networks to lose their licenses in the past). The other somewhat positive note is that this process probably won’t lead to any station losing its license. The process of removing a broadcast license takes years and will last far beyond the current administration. Even a future Republic administration will probably be reluctant to carry out this petty vendetta for a former president. This ploy will never cost any station involved its license. But what it will cost the stations is time, money and effort. With Carr’s 30-day deadline, each station has to be scrambling right now, trying to pull together the mountain of paperwork it takes to file for renewal.

That’s added work for station employees and an army of expensive lawyers and consultants in Washington who work with stations to make these filings go smoothly. This is a very large millstone around the neck of anyone working at those eight TV stations. And ultimately, that’s the point. This regulatory beat-down won’t change Kimmel’s jokes, won’t punish ABC News reporters like Rachel Scott or Mary Bruce—both of whom Trump has personally attacked—and won’t affect any of the reporting at the local stations. The Trump administration knows this. The purpose of the early renewal call is to irritate, inconvenience and impede the station’s employees, making them feel some pain in exchange for an eight-word joke uttered on late-night TV to so-so laughs.

Having the FCC play games on Trump’s behalf isn’t even the only example of this tactic from the past week.

We learned last Wednesday the FBI had begun an investigation into Elizabeth Williamson, a reporter for the New York Times who had written a piece for that newspaper about FBI director Kash Patel using bureau resources on behalf of his girlfriend, including providing security and transportation. The Times reports FBI agents interviewed Patel’s girlfriend and investigated Williamson’s background and work to consider a federal stalking case for her reporting work. Ultimately, the FBI declined to pursue the case, but the message is clear. If a journalist does a story the administration doesn’t like, those in power will use any tool at their disposal to make life difficult for that journalist—or the company for whom the journalist works. It’s likely in this case Patel himself ordered the investigation, not Trump, but it’s clear the FBI director was just modeling the behavior exhibited by his boss. Trump is regularly using the Justice Department and other agencies to go after political and personal foes. It’s no surprise that he’s made journalists and media companies part of that enemies list.

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As with so many things the Trump administration has wrought on this country, this is likely the new normal.

Even after Trump is gone, we can expect to see future administrations use these same tactics. And I’m not just talking Republican presidents. Democratic presidents have stories written about them they don’t like, too, so there’s no reason Democratic administrations won’t do the same. And we’ll probably see this at lower levels of government as well, with state and local officials taking notes on how this is working for Trump. Journalists and the companies for which they work should be prepared to fight partisan and punitive actions meant, not to stop specific stories, but to make the process of working to report them too burdensome to be worthwhile. I don’t worry that journalists will fear this sort of retaliation. But I am concerned that their employers may decide journalism isn’t worth the cost.

One final thought on the relationship between Trump and journalists.

We were to hear his list of grievances loud and clear at the White House Correspondents Association dinner on Saturday night. Before the dinner, Trump had promised to aggressively call out the press at the event. That didn’t happen, of course, as the event ended early with the attack at security. Trump has called for the dinner to be held again in the next 30 days, but whether that can even happen is questionable. Having been chair of the Radio Television Digital News Foundation and putting together its big Washington dinner, I know the money for the WHCA event is already spent. How to pay for a redo is a big question. But the bigger question is whether journalists should dress up and gather again just to hear Trump berate them? Why give him an audience for such an attack? The clips of those attacks, if he’s given another chance to shout them in our faces, will make the rounds on Fox News, Twitter/X and Truth Social for months.

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Why set up another event to give him the platform to deliver them? The White House Correspondents Association should gracefully bow out of any move to hold this year’s dinner again—and then leave Trump off the invitation list for next year’s dinner and any others while the man who’s working so hard against them is still in office.

Most of us Baby Boomers and Gen Xers were raised to be modest people (later generations, not so much). We were taught to take a compliment and leave it at that. Bragging and pointing out your accomplishments—no matter how small—was seen as terrible behavior. It was something only people who craved the spotlight and needed all the attention would do. We were taught that people will recognize our skills and good work without a need to bring attention to it ourselves.

All these years on now, I’m seeing that what we were taught was wrong.

It’s more often the case than not that the quiet worker who gets things done perfectly soldiers on unnoticed by the boss. Studies tell us that doing good work and waiting for the raises and promotions that should rightfully come doesn’t work. The experts say you must go to the boss, show her what you’ve been accomplishing and ask for what you want. If you speak up for yourself, you’ve got a better chance of being rewarded for your hard work and accomplishments.

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Just as individuals fall victim to the false notion that modesty and hard work are a recipe for success, so, too, have we in journalism assumed the public would recognize the importance of our work and hold us in high esteem, rewarding us with ratings and readership for all we do for the good of society. That last sentence may seem like a naïve view of the world, but it has been the strategy of countless journalism organizations over the years and one of the reasons our profession finds itself in the place it is now.

The problem is we’re not specific in telling our audiences what we do for them.

Sure, we put together promos touting the “most accurate forecast” and how we’re “working for you,” but those claims reach the consumer and instantly fall into the same category as the “new and improved” label we saw on the laundry detergent at Walmart last week. The generic benefits we use to promote ourselves get lost in the sea of marketing promises that washes over audiences every day. Consumers build up a resistance to this sort of approach, assuming whatever someone is selling is basically the same as everything else on the market.

And that might be our biggest problem in journalism. Audiences see news as a ubiquitous commodity just sort of exists everywhere. The source of the reporting doesn’t matter to most people. In fact, they’re often getting it on a different platform than where it was produced, like Facebook or Instagram. Stories—even the most important stories—often exist in the audience’s mind separate from the newsroom that put in all the work to produce them. Sure, we do topical promotion to try to get people to watch a big investigative report or other important piece of work, but that usually goes out to people who are already watching and doesn’t cut through the clutter to tie our good work to something that benefits the audience.

Knowing how hard it is to get people to give us credit for the important reporting we’re doing as a profession, my interest piqued when a video popped up in my Instagram feed from KCUR, the University of Missouri-owned public radio station in Kansas City. In the video, reporter Sam Zeff appears on camera to share a story about a former Joplin, Missouri police officer who has joined the Missouri Highway Patrol, despite his killing a two-year old child during a botched hostage standoff in Kansas in 2022. Here’s the Instagram reel:

As we watch, Zeff carefully lays out the background of the story, essential for the audience to understand its importance. Despite the fact law enforcement experts said the officer made careless mistakes that ended in the child’s death, that same officer has been hired by the top law enforcement department in Missouri—which certainly calls for a follow-up report on how dismal the recruiting prospects must be for the highway patrol. Zeff’s video delivers all the important facts we need to understand the story, including that the officer in question, Keaton Siebenaler, sued and was successful keeping his name secret in the years following the killing. All of those details are important, but there’s a line in this Instagram post that’s much more important. Early in the report, Zeff says this: “We only know his name because KCUR and the Midwest Newsroom went to court fighting to have it unredacted.” Zeff is specifically taking credit for his newsroom fighting to get important information intentionally held secret from the public until KCUR did the work to get it for this story. It’s a thing of beauty here that Zeff and his team have worked that sentence into the story—high in the story, in fact—to let everyone seeing the video know that the only reason the public now has the name of this officer is because a specific news organization went to court to get it made public.

This is the template we should all be following.

Any reporting we do that has resulted from significant effort and enterprise from our newsrooms should have that work cited high in the story to claim credit for it. Likewise, any results we get from our investigative or other reporting work should generate a follow-up story citing the results and crediting our specific efforts to get those results. This technique of building a proof-of-performance promos right inside our stories that show the fruits of our labor connects our efforts to our work no matter where or how audience members consume our stories. If they’re on our own newscasts, claiming credit inside our stories reinforces the value in watching. But if they’re on social media, like how I encountered this story, the practice not only credits our work with the audience so they can’t miss it, but it might generate future traffic to our online platforms or even our on-air newscasts.

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Consultants have been telling us to show our work for years, but that has typically meant working some buzzwords into our copy, like writing “I talked to…” or “I went through records…” These are somewhat generic phrases that use a first-person approach to show the reporter was doing the work. That approach is fine, but isn’t specific enough to really tell people what we do for them. We must spell it all out, listing the individual efforts we put into digging up the facts we’re reporting, and telling people that they only know what we’re telling them because we did the work to find it out for them. We must be sure to name our news organizations when taking credit like this, guaranteeing that if people see our reporting somewhere other than on one of our platforms, we’ll still get credit for our work. Have a sentence ready to drop into your stories that reads something like: “We’re able to report this information to you only because KXXX-TV spent weeks hammering city officials to release these details.”

It would be nice if we lived in a world in which all the people quietly excelling in their chosen fields were recognized and rewarded for the great things they accomplish. Sadly, our world recognizes and rewards those who speak up loudest for themselves. We should join those ranks and be the rare case among them, the ones who really have something worthwhile to shout about.

I like to think of myself as a defender of the First Amendment—both in thought and in deed. I recall first learning about it in elementary school and thinking that, of course we should all have the right to say what we want to say without the government interfering. In journalism school, I learned the specifics of how the First Amendment protects our right to print and broadcast, as well as the collection of court cases over the years that has defined and generally strengthened its protections. Later, as a working journalist, I found myself needing to assert those rights when dealing with public officials and others who would limit what I could put on the air. Finally, as a board member and later chairman of the Radio Television Digital News Association, I had direct responsibility to lead the organization’s championing of the First Amendment at the highest level, including writing and speaking to members of Congress, the White House and the Supreme Court. Through all of that time, I considered it part of my job and responsibility to educate people about the First Amendment, all for the good of the country.

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There’s no doubt we’ve found ourselves in a time now when the First Amendment is in jeopardy more than ever before.

Anti-journalism feelings often target the First Amendment, mistakenly calling it a tool used for bias, rather than the opposite function it actually performs. And those false charges against it resonate with some in the public. A 2019 survey found 78 percent of Americans don’t understand what the First Amendment protects. More concerning, 57 percent think the government should be able to take action against journalists for the content they produce and 36 percent think the government should be able to police the content of the media. We can thank the Trump administrations for perhaps turning some of those anti-journalism thoughts around, as a survey by the Freedom Forum last year found half of respondents see Donald Trump as a threat to freedom of the press and all the other First Amendment rights except freedom of religion, while just a third saw him as a protector of those freedoms. We’ve ended up with what is clearly a partisan divide on press freedoms. Last fall, following the Charlie Kirk killing and the subsequent suspension of Jimmy Kimmel by ABC for making some pretty mild remarks about partisanship after the murder, Republican senator Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming said, “Under normal times, in normal circumstances, I tend to think the First Amendment should always be sort of the ultimate right…I don’t feel that way anymore.” That’s scary.

In a time when we see our First Amendment rights being questioned by the general public and those in power, we should welcome any allies to our cause we can get, right?

Enter the First Amendment auditors. If you’re unfamiliar with that term, this is a group of people—sometimes calling themselves journalists—who purposefully take photos and record video in public places where the law gives them the right to do so. (you can see one of the most popular auditors on YouTube going by the handle Amagansett Press). The movement started out as a somewhat legitimate way to challenge government officials—typically local ones—on their knowledge of what the law requires in terms of access and government openness and compliance. These auditors would typically go into a government office with the cameras rolling, seeing if anyone they encountered knew the law and would allow them to continue.

Of course, the nature of social media monetizing being what it is, this activity has morphed into something that generates a lot more views and a lot more dollars. The typical auditor videos I see now no longer challenge government officials on what they know, but uses regular citizens as their targets. An auditor will set up outside a bank, doctor’s office or pot shop and get pictures and videos of people going in and out—including their faces and licenses plates. All of this is done from a public sidewalk, meaning the auditors are within their rights to capture any images they want as there is no legal expectation of privacy in a public place. But the auditors are hoping the passersby they are recording don’t know that and will start a confrontation. Those confrontations tend to start verbally “I haven’t given you permission to take my picture!” to which the auditor tells the person that, thanks to the First Amendment, no permission is needed for taking pictures in a public place. Most targets don’t believe this is true—including, shockingly, some lawyers—and the argument escalates. In the instances most likely to create a big payday for the auditor, physical violence then ensues. The target will take a swing at the auditor, knock the camera from his hands, or generally assault the person taking the video. That then leads to the police being called. Once they arrive, the target usually finds out the auditors do in fact have the right to film without people’s permission, but that what the target did is assault and that means a trip to jail. In the most lucrative situations, the cops don’t know the law either and challenge the auditor for his ID or start to question him, leading to their own embarrassment when a police supervisor gets involved and sets the officers straight.

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Like many other videos online, there’s a car crash quality to these auditor videos—particularly the ones that get violent—that makes it hard to look away. I have to admit I watch them when they pop up on my feed, not so much to see a target get pepper sprayed by an auditor after an assault, but more to see the look on the targets’ faces when the cops tell them what the auditors were doing was legal. To me, that’s the value of what these auditors do.

But is it educating the public?

When it comes to the targets—particularly the ones who get arrested—I doubt they learn much from the experience. They’re so mad at being put on camera and then proven wrong, they most likely write it all off as dumb cops who don’t know the law. But for everyone else who sees these posts on social media, I think it might actually do some educating. The popularity of these videos and their repetitive nature means those watching them who know nothing about First Amendment rights in general probably at least understand its protections extend to taking pictures and video in public.

Do I love the tactics of these auditors? No.

They often include odd behavior when getting their footage, like covering their face with a mask or refusing to talk when the targets ask the inevitable questions of “Who are you?” and “What is this for?” The auditors often call themselves “journalists” or “citizen journalists” but cannot answer when asked what the topic of the story is on which they are working. They come armed with pepper spray and other defensive weapons, hoping to get to use them. And they will slap or punch those who hit them first, often injuring elderly people. These actions keep me at arm’s length from the auditors. While I do enjoy seeing a particularly smug person being told he definitely can be recorded in public, I get no pleasure seeing a bloodied senior citizen laid out on the ground.

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Ideally, we can seperate ourselves from the auditors and do some peaceful educating of our own when we’re out photographing and recording in public. We often hear someone asking what the video is for—and we should tell them. If passersby ask not to be on camera, we should oblige (unless they are the target of our story), all while explaining why we have the right to record even though we are choosing not to do it. We could also give the public some friendly constitutional law lessons if we use some of our social media posts recorded while out on the scene to explain the law and why it’s legal for us to take video of you or your business from a public sidewalk or why we don’t need to get permission from people we’re recording in a public place. Rather than wielding pepper spray, let’s just pepper in some First Amendment lessons with the social media content we’re already producing. We’ll be helping ourselves by getting the public to understand why we do what we do. Let’s not rely on people chasing questionable social media likes to do that for us.

In the list of days you celebrate each year, Local News Day is probably not a high priority. In fact, you’ve probably never heard of it. I hadn’t until yesterday, when it popped up on something I was reading. More about the day and the good that can come from it in a moment, but first, let’s talk about local news.

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Like many people reading this, I grew up in the suburbs of a good-sized city, St. Louis in my case. The 1960s and 1970s were a time of abundance for local news. In St. Louis we had two major daily newspapers (the still extant St. Louis Post Dispatch and the defunct St. Louis Globe-Democrat), three strong local TV newsrooms (and one small player—any St. Louisans remember Christine Buck at KPLR 11 News?), one of the most powerful all-news radio stations in the country (then CBS-owned KMOX-AM) and a network of local community newspapers covering different parts of the vast county surrounding St. Louis made up of 88 small municipalities. The local TV and radio stations, along with the two big papers did a great job of covering the significant issues affecting the city. But those local community papers made a daily difference in our lives. I remember the Baden News-Press when we lived in north St. Louis County and then the St. Charles Journal, the St. Charles Banner-News, the St. Charles Messenger-Tribune, the St. Peters Star Times and the O’Fallon Times once we moved to St. Charles County. That’s right, there were at least five very local newspapers covering the next county over from St. Louis, a county of about 120 thousand people. These community newspapers covered the goings-on of our local aldermen, important actions by local government and everything happening at our local schools. Proof of that is this clipping from the St. Charles Messenger-Tribune of me (I’m second from left with a lot of hair and a very 1977 shirt) and my brother taking honors in the math contest at a nearby high school:

That photo is evidence of one of the best things about these newspapers—you could clip and save the articles in which you appeared. Thanks to that and other benefits, circulation numbers were high, advertisers craved access to the hyper-local audiences of these paper and it was still special to see your name in the paper for something you had accomplished. The business model for these papers worked 50 years ago. But it didn’t last forever. None of the four community papers I enjoyed as a teenager exists today.

What many use now for hyper-local coverage is a far cry from these community papers.

Online sources pushed out printed papers years ago in most cities. Sites like Patch and Nextdoor want to take the place of those old community newspapers, but fall far short. Patch has a few local journalists scattered across the country, but aggregates most of its content from legacy newspapers and TV stations near its cities. Nextdoor doesn’t employ any journalists and relies solely on aggregating stories from Patch and legacy media. But Nextdoor’s real crime is that its columns are filled with “reports” from Nextdoor users that many may view as news, but are merely observations and rants with no reporting or journalism. I subscribe to the local Nextdoor here in La Quinta—mainly to shake my head at what gets posted—and my feed is typically filled with reposts of stories from the local TV stations, restaurant “reviews” almost entirely focused on restaurants costing too much and racist posts with pictures of brown or black men caught on Ring cameras with the caption “Danger! Seen in the neighborhood!”

On the eve of Local News Day, it would be easy to be pessimistic about the state of the profession. Big legacy media are finding it hard to see a business model that can persist into the future. For-profit community publications have left most cities and suburbs with the Patch and Nextdoor carpetbaggers moving in to try to vacuum up some cash. Those are mighty blows to our profession. But a light at the end of the tunnel keeps me optimistic and should be your focus on Local News Day—nonprofit newsrooms. A search at FindYourNews.org shows 85 nonprofit newsrooms covering California—and the list doesn’t even include several local newsrooms here in the Coachella Valley.

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I get great local news from the Palm Springs Post, the Coachella Valley Independent and the Indio Post. All have professional journalists covering important local stories that often fall under the radar of the local TV stations and the lone for-profit English language newspaper in the area, Gannett’s Desert Sun in Palm Springs. Not community focused, of course, but the other nonprofit news organization on which I rely daily is the Sacramento-based CalMatters.org, one of the best statewide nonprofit newsrooms in the country. I support these essential nonprofit newsrooms with subscriptions and donations, contributing as I am able to keep these newsrooms covering my community in a way we haven’t seen in 50 years.

As Local News Day arrives, I challenge everyone reading this to find a nonprofit newsroom that serves your community.

The Local News Day web site has a newsroom locator page that can be a start (it’s a bit clunky, so it may take some effort to get it to work for you). The aforementioned FindYourNews.org is another place to search. Even a simple Google search will produce some options to check out. Once you have a list of the nonprofit newsrooms serving your area, make an account at each of them, log in and check out the content. If it looks like you’re seeing solid journalism in service of your community, take one more step and buy a paid subscription or make a donation to as many of them as you can afford. Being nonprofit doesn’t mean the stories these newsrooms publish are free to produce. Good reporting costs money and at least some of that money has to come from a nonprofit newsroom’s consumers. Being community supported keeps these journalism organizations free from advertiser or big owner influence, keeping them as close to pure as journalism can be.

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I’ve got a pretty good handle on the nonprofit newsrooms in my area and how I can support them. So while you’re finding some new newsrooms to support on Local News Day, I’ll be checking out a live stream coming out of the founding newsroom of Local News Day, the Montana Free Press. Though the event’s focus is local (or course), you should check it out if for no other reason than to hear from John S. Adams, the founder of Local News Day and one of the most important investigative and political reporters working in journalism today. I’ll also be reading and interacting with the nonprofit newsrooms I already support, hoping this Substack post and my continued interest will help buoy them and move them further toward success for themselves and the communities they serve.

Fifty years ago, the television news profession was revolutionized by two pieces of groundbreaking technology—the RCA TK-76 “minicam” and the dedicated ENG live truck. The TK-76 and its trademark blue body was the first lightweight (sort of—it weighed about 30 pounds), practical electronic newsgathering (ENG) camera that could go into the field and bring back footage on tape to be quickly turned around for air on the local news. Until its advent, journalists used film cameras that produced footage that needed to be processed before it could be aired, adding 90 minutes or more to the news turnaround. I was lucky enough to use a TK-760 (the electronic field production version of the TK-76) in my first job at WESH-TV in Orlando (that’s me with it in the cover picture this week). Mine was quite a historic piece of gear, bearing serial number 000001.

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With a video camera rather than a film camera, we could also connect directly to a transmitter and beam images and sound live for air. The dedicated ENG truck facilitated that process, serving both as the vehicle to travel to the story and the transmission point from which to send back footage and live reports. This equipment was expensive and thus served as a bragging point for the first station in any market to get ENG gear. To show it off, stations went live all the time with stories that were questionable to cover that way.

Now, five decades later, we’ve gone back to going live in many questionable ways. It’s as if the novelty of this technology never faded for us newsroom nerds, even as the digital revolution substantially changed almost everything about the way we gather news. Few stations use ENG trucks (or their satellite cousins) regularly anymore, opting instead for far cheaper live backpacks that carry a squadron of cell phone cards to send video and audio back via a cellular connection. The function of these backpacks is basically identical to the old ENG truck, still a piece of technology by which to send footage back to the station or for a reporter to go live.

In a perfect world, going live would serve just two functions in any newscast.

First—and more valuable—is the ability to cover an ongoing story as it happens. If city hall is on fire downtown at 6 pm, we don’t want the reporter to record footage and drive it back to the station to assemble a report that will be an hour or more old by the time it airs. If the news event is happening at newscast time, we want to have a reporter live to show us the very latest visuals and give us the very latest facts. Viewers at home can get the most up-to-date information that way. The other primary function of live technology is to allow a reporter to send back footage from an event or story that has ended, but doesn’t allow enough time to physically travel back to the TV station to assemble a report. For instance, a city council meeting (imagine city hall hasn’t burned yet) ends at 5:30 pm. The newscast at 6:00 pm would like a report on that meeting, so live technology allows the reporter to stay at the scene, send back video, and put together a script to either read live herself or send back for the anchors. Going live in this case eliminates the travel time and gets the story to air sooner.

Those two functions of our live technology do still happen, but their instances are dwarfed in number by the times when a reporter “fronts” a story live in the field. Fronting consists of sending a reporter to the scene of a story that has already ended hours before or to the scene of a story that will happen at some point in the future, merely to introduce the story from the field. This is done for a number of reasons, including showcasing a big story, giving a reporter more on-air time and—strangely—showing off our live technology. But this flex comes at a cost. In many cases, a reporter who’s been out in the field on a story returns to the station to write and edit it and then goes BACK out to the scene of the story to front a live shot. That’s a huge waste of time that could be spent on more reporting or better crafting of a story.

Many of these “live for the sake of live” reports make us look dumb.

Morning newscasts have expanded to cover many hours before people head off to work. The audience is there in the morning, distracted as they are getting ready for work or school, to put resources in the morning to attract the eyeballs already open at that hour. One common element in morning newscasts everywhere is the live shot previewing something coming ahead that day. I strongly applaud morning newscasts that look to the day ahead rather than rehash the news of the day before, but where can you go live at 4 am that has any real value to a story?

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If your story is about an issue going before the state legislature that day, why stand in the dark outside the capitol building to front it? The reporter wastes travel time getting there she could better use writing multiple versions of the story, doing research or planning for the day. The same criticism holds true for 10/11 pm newscasts that insist reporters be live outside a dark building now locked up tightly since the story that took place there has been over for hours.

The audience doesn’t care about our live technology.

In 1976, an ENG camera and truck were cutting edge technology. One of the things that drew me to a career in TV news when I was in college was how cool the technology was at the time. But we are no longer technology leaders. And the audience that was wowed by sending pictures flying through the air back then now has everyday working knowledge of technologies far beyond whatever we can show them. Going live to be live is a time and money expense that brings very little in return anymore.

So what should we be using our live technology for?

Aside from the two main functions I mentioned before—which remain vital uses of live technology—we should be focusing the ability to “broadcast” video and audio live to the place it could be consumed the most—social media and other online outlets. As newscast audiences continue to dwindle, putting all our best resources toward those fixed periods of time squanders their value to the audience. We don’t have to hope a story will still be going on at 6 pm to show live to the audience. We can put a live stream out on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube and other platforms to let those interested in watching the news at it happens do just that—all throughout the day. And we don’t even have to tie up a truck or backpack to do it. An extra phone in a reporter’s bag will serve the purpose of putting the live stream on social media. We can send that stream out raw or have the reporter give us a play-by-play of what’s happening. If we want it to be more sophisticated than that, we can set up a stream from the station giving social media editors (or anchors in the studio) the chance to fully produce and host the live stream while leaving the reporter to do her own legwork in the field.

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As some of the TV ownership groups experiment with newscasts that are assembled in advance rather than broadcast live, the value of going live—for good reason or bad—will most certainly diminish. That doesn’t mean the audience doesn’t want to see stories as they happen. We just have to be smarter about choosing the right stories and delivering them where the audience can make the most of them. That may actually put some value back into going live just to be live.

When I was running the KOMU-TV newsroom, one of my goals was to be sure the experience students had was as close as possible to what they would get in their first full-time jobs. We aired newscasts 365 days a year, using all the tools found in bigger markets to give students the same experiences they would have working in their future jobs. Our six newscasts a day had gorgeous graphics, sophisticated software and lots of live shots. The one thing we didn’t have in our newscasts—so-called “look lives.”

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If you’re not in the TV news game and don’t know what a “look live” is, I can guarantee you’ve seen them—probably multiple times in the last day or so. The term refers to the practice in which a reporter records a clip in the field in the style of a live shot, relaying information as she would if she were live. These recorded clips are then played in the newscast with the anchors usually pitching to the reporter in the same way they would if she were actually live. In some cases, the reporter even records acknowledgment of getting an anchor pitch, saying something like “Thanks, Jim.”

The philosophy behind the look live is, I suppose, to extend the value—questionable as it is—attached to going live, using the technique for stories that are no longer viable as live reports. For instance, if you have five backpacks for going live, you can make it appear that there are six live shots in a newscast if one of them is a look live. Or it could be considered an easy way for a reporter to leave a capsule summary of her report without assembling an entirely new story. She can literally make it one of her last tasks of the day before wrapping things up. While those could be seen as good reasons to use look lives, they ignore the fatal issue with them. Look lives are lies we tell the audience every time we air them. In fact, I’m just going to call them “look lies.”

A look lie is a lie because it is constructed to appear to the audience that it is live.

The vast majority of stations use the practice mentioned above, having anchors “pitch” to the reporter in the look lie and having the reporter “acknowledge” the anchor(s) who just pitched to her. Many look lies end with the reporter pitching back to the anchors and the anchors thanking her for the report. Using this language to introduce and close look lies means we are lying to audience members about what they are watching. We are implying that the report is live when it is not.

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Now, many of you reading this could be saying, “Yes, but it’s a little white lie. Who are we hurting with it?” We’re hurting ourselves, that’s who. Public trust in media is at an all-time low. Gallup (admittedly an organization with its own trust issues) has been measuring this number for 54 years. Our trust peaked with 72 percent of Americans having a “great deal or fair amount of trust” in 1976 (we can thank journalists bringing down a crooked president two years earlier for that number) and it has plummeted ever since. We’re now at 28 percent giving us a great deal or fair amount of trust, leaving us under water with 36 percent giving us no trust at all. Admittedly, it’s the perception of dishonesty rather than the reality of it that’s driving most of that decline. But why give our supporters a reason to doubt the rest of what we report—or hand our critics another bullet to fire at us? I can’t support journalists lying for any reason—but what a stupid reason for which to be caught lying when the way to avoid it and still get all the benefits is so simple.

I said at the top of this piece that we didn’t do look lies under my watch at KOMU-TV.

That doesn’t mean we didn’t have reporters file recorded reports from the field to air as a complete segment. We just didn’t try to make them look live. Our anchors would clearly say the report was filed or recorded earlier and did not pitch to the reporter as if she could hear them. The reporter did not acknowledge the anchors at the top of the piece as if they could hear her either. And she would use a standard package close at the end, something along the lines of “Jane Reporter, KOMU 8 News, Columbia.” Using this type of report gave us all the benefits of a look lie, but without the lying.

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The value of broadcasting news live, whether it be in a report from the field or the entire newscast itself, has become a point of contention lately—one that I’ll write about soon. But I don’t think there’s ever been a doubt that pretending to be live when we are not is a despicable practice. And it’s so easy to correct. Anyone reading this who’s running a newsroom now can end the practice today. Be honest with the audience when a segment is pre-recorded. I guarantee you the audience will not care. It wants the information your reporter is presenting from the field. Thinking she is live when she is not doesn’t add a thing to the that information. It only subtracts from our reputation when the audience realizes it’s a lie.

You probably saw over the weekend that Federal Communications Commission chair Brendan Carr threatened stations with the loss of their broadcast licenses for running “fake news.” He posted the following, in part, on Twitter/X: “Broadcasters that are running hoaxes and news distortions - also known as the fake news - have a chance now to correct course before their license renewals come up. The law is clear. Broadcasters must operate in the public interest, and they will lose their licenses if they do not.” This post seems to have been prompted by an earlier Donald Trump post complaining about coverage (hilariously, about newspaper reporting) of the war he started with Iran. While Trump probably has no idea how the FCC licensing process works—he thinks the networks are somehow licensed by the FCC—Carr knows. He’s paying lip service to his boss with a threat that has no teeth. But that’s not what I’m writing about today.

I want to explore what “the public interest” means and how well we in the television news profession are serving it.

This has nothing to do with playing political games over legitimate critical reporting on public policy. Instead, I have some thoughts about what “the public interest” really means and how we’re NOT serving it in as meaningful a way as we could. Don’t get me wrong—I don’t think any stations should lose their licenses over the criticisms I’m about to level. But we should be having these discussions every day about the need to double down on our public interest obligation.

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First, it’s worth reviewing from where this idea of serving in the public interest comes. Regulation of the fledgling broadcast industry in the United States started due to the sinking of the Titanic. Read up on that elsewhere if you didn’t already know that (it’s fascinating), but the point is that the Radio Act of 1912 began the practice of issuing radio licenses for broadcast. Spectrum was plentiful then and there was no thought of ever having to deny or revoke a license until the airwaves started to get crowded. With the Radio Act of 1927 and the Communications Act of 1934 (which still governs local television broadcast today), Congress began the practice of renewing licenses to maintain order on the airwaves. Throughout the Communications Act, the phrase “serves the public interest, convenience, and necessity” is repeated over and over again. That is the standard that remains for local broadcast license renewal.

In terms of what “the public interest” means in this context, Congress specifically did not define it at the time—and it has defied a single definition ever since.

Courts have been of little help, often ruling that no set definition of the phrase would serve its purpose. I’ll define it the way I think we should apply it and then use it as a yardstick against which to measure our current practices. First, what “public interest” is not. It is NOT that in which the public is interested, otherwise defined by Merriam-Webster as “a feeling that accompanies or causes special attention to something or someone.” If that were the case, we’d just fill the airwaves with the broadcast versions of clickbait and call it a day. The more apt definition of the word “interest” is perhaps the simplest one, “importance.” Our responsibility is to cover matters of importance that affect our viewers, focusing on consequential things that govern and influence their lives.

We do well on some matters of the public interest, three of which particularly stand out.

First is our coverage of severe weather and its threats. While weather apps on our phones are sufficient to tell us the highs, lows and when it will rain, when weather becomes life threatening, there is still no substitute for a qualified meteorologist on a local TV station tracking the storm and giving specific warnings for those in its path. The benefit of having someone who knows the local area, knows how weather can affect it and has the skill to relay that information calmly and completely is the very definition of operating in the public interest. Investigative reporting is another example of how we are serving the public interest well. Local stations do some of the most impactful investigative reporting anywhere, typically using the medium well to uncover corruption and wrongdoing and get some real results. Finally, local stations have decades of commitment to community service, leading efforts to help local charities, better their communities and use the power of their reach to highlight the needs of their broadcast areas.

But there’s a lot we do that doesn’t serve the public interest as well as we could.

The top of the list has to be the heavy levels of advertising most local newscasts now carry. I understand that this is the business model with which we are burdened, but I can’t count the number of times I’ve been in a hotel watching a local newscast only to get two minutes of news between breaks of four minutes each. As advertising revenue gets harder to capture—particularly in non-election years—stations are loading up their newscasts to try to keep revenue at sustaining levels. I get that. But there must be a better way. At the birth of local news, sponsor logos were often seen mounted on the set or even the anchor’s jacket. They were ever-present and effective—and didn’t take away time from the news hole. A return to that sort of advertising and a look at other sponsorship displays that don’t take away from news time would be a great direction for the business.

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Our morning shows are another place where we’re failing the public interest on many fronts. Weather and traffic in the morning address the public need well, giving viewers valuable information to use in the day ahead. But much of the news content consists of stories that happened the previous day (people already know those stories), national and international news breaking overnight (not part of our local mission and easily available on our phones) or live shots in front of closed buildings to preview the day ahead (wasted resources to go live where nothing is happening). Morning newscasts should be entirely about what’s to come in the day ahead, with detailed stories on what issues are at stake on the day’s news agenda rather than live shots in the dark with few details. To manage this, it will take a change in the assignment process with reporters dedicated to putting together content for morning shows that looks ahead in a detailed way. We know people don’t sit and watch in the morning, being always on the run getting ready for work and school. But we can still deliver short, fact-filled stories to catch them before they leave home.

Beyond the mornings, much of our content during the entire news day is meant to lure people into watching more, rather than informing them on important matters in the public interest.

Two of the biggest offenders on which I often like to focus are crime coverage and sports coverage. Crime coverage has plagued local news at too high a level for the three-plus decades, driven by how easy it is to cover and the illusion that it looks important, even though most of the drug and drug-related violent crime we cover has no impact on our viewers. Likewise, sports coverage—particularly when it falls outside the sports segment—drains away precious resources that could be used for more important stories. Go to any market that has a professional or college team headed for the playoffs. It will be hard to find any content in the newscast that doesn’t have to do with Team X heading to the Super Bowl or the Final Four. Add to those two categories too many entertainment stories or the broadcast version of clickbait stories (“Coming up, find out who President Trump is suing now…”), neither of which serve the local public interest. All of this content is easy to create and air, but takes way from resources that could be aimed toward more essential content.

These criticisms are not to say the FCC should start revoking licenses. We need to police ourselves to do a better job of giving our communities what they need. Some would argue, I’m sure, that crime, sports and entertainment drive viewers to the newscasts. I would argue the rise in this content has driven people away. Smart viewers in the suburbs know a downtown drug arrest has no impact whatsoever on their lives. They see too much of this sort of reporting and realize the newscasts are not worth their time anymore. The same goes for a morning show with too much stale content and too many meaningless live shots. We really do know best what is important to an audience and what content will drive viewers to their TVs. But our natural urge to produce content in the public interest has been drowned out by too much noise from consultants, sales departments, flash-in-the-pan trends and more.

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I’ve always been uncomfortable that broadcasters are the only journalists licensed by the government. We’re seeing the reasons to object to that sort of regulation now as Trump and Carr make threats against broadcasters because those in power are unhappy with legitimate news coverage. But it’s the system under which we must work and the language we must follow. We should be doing more to serve in the public interest—not in fear of Donald Trump and not just because it’s in federal law—but because we still have a common purpose to provide this service that remains free for all to receive.

I wrapped up my nearly three-week trip to Missouri with a visit to the building now housing KMOV-TV, the CBS affiliate in St. Louis. News Director Chris Nagus—a favorite former student of mine—invited me to stop by on my way to the airport. The station moved to the St. Louis suburb of Maryland Heights at the end of 2023, ending decades of broadcasting from a landmark building near the Gateway Arch in downtown. The new home of the station, a former biomedical company building, lies in an office park near a major interstate on the city’s west side. Nagus showed me around the facility and I was impressed. The new location is a palace. Its three stories of state-of-the-art facilities are beautiful to behold and seem comfortable to inhabit. The station has really refitted this old biomedical company building well, adapting it from its old use to efficiently and beautifully serve as a television station.

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Just two miles away in the same suburb you’ll find KTVI/Fox 2. It moved from its own landmark location near the now-demolished St. Louis Arena in 2008. ABC affiliate KDNL (which doesn’t do local news) moved to suburban Richmond Heights in 2022, followed by KMOV’s move in 2023. Just this January, the last of the landmark stations downtown, veneratedNBC affiliate KSDK-TV, moved west from its signature building between Busch Stadium and St. Louis City Hall to, interestingly enough, a new facility on the old St. Louis Arena site, putting it right next to where KTVI’s station used to be.

These changes aren’t unique to my hometown of St. Louis.

Though St. Louis may be the only major market in which all the television stations have moved away from landmark locations in or near downtown, a number of news organizations in other cities have also abandoned their locations in the city center to move to cheaper or more efficient digs further out. For example, KDFW Fox 4 in Dallas is in the process of moving to the Las Colinas suburb. And it’s not just broadcasters. The downtown Los Angeles Times building, an art deco masterpiece designed by the architect of the Hoover Dam, now serves occasionally as a movie set, but otherwise sits vacant since the paper moved to El Segundo near LAX in 2018.

I’m not arguing that these moves weren’t good business decisions for the owners of these media organizations. KMOV’s new location boasts a much more modern set-up than its old riverfront location. The last time I was in that building—probably a dozen years ago—it was pretty worn around the edges. The more than a decade the station spent in that building since my last visit certainly took its toll on the facilities even further. Even moving into a building originally built for something else, as KMOV did, gave managers a chance to gut it and build new facilities with 21^st century newsgathering in mind. Our old mid-20^th century TV station buildings are often more of a hindrance than a help in terms of space for everything a newsroom must do now. Also, if I’m running a newsroom in St. Louis, I’d much rather have crews in a hurry to get to breaking news jump on I-270, a belt highway that circles the city, rather than wending their way out of a congested downtown. Security also comes into play, not only because crime can be more prevalent in the central city, but also because getting to a more anonymous location can mean it’s harder for the crazies to find us. And there are always the issues of parking and employee commutes to consider—both of which get easier in the ‘burbs.

What I’m lamenting is the loss of a symbol.

A landmark building towering about a city’s downtown sends a message to the public that we are important. Just think of your own hometown’s skyline (or if you’re from a small town, the closest big city). That skyline is dotted with not just buildings, but names. Companies put their names and logos on their buildings to shout to the public that they matter. When KSDK and KMOV were still in downtown St. Louis—along with KTVI out by the Arena, their buildings made a statement that they were just as important a part of the city as the big banks, manufacturers and other corporations that populated downtown. The TV buildings brought awe from the people who looked at them. And they were a goal for young journalists, to someday see themselves going downtown to walk in the footsteps of so many journalists who had gone before them into those hallowed halls.

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As traditional journalism becomes less and less important in people’s lives, I can’t help but feel that moving our television stations and newspapers out of the public eye downtown and into the relative obscurity of suburban office parks speaks volumes about our new place in society. I’m excited my colleagues in St. Louis have shiny, modern facilities in which to work, but also a little bit sad that they don’t get to work inside a landmark anymore. I wonder if new employees entering a suburban office park building will get the same charge that wet behind the ears workers once got strolling into a downtown edifice on day one. It must be at least a little bit less of a thrill.

These moves will probably become more common.

The sheer age of a lot of our TV station buildings is catching up with the entire industry. Many TV newsrooms are located in buildings that are 60 or 70 years old—or more. My longtime outpost KOMU’s building just turned 73—but the cows are younger (IYKYK). It doesn’t make sense to refit a mid-20^th century building for our needs today if it costs more than moving into a custom space.

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I hope someone is capturing bits and pieces of these downtown temples of television to save for posterity. TV stations are only so-so when it comes to saving important file video and news footage. They’re even worse at holding on to their own histories. I would love to see a substantial exhibit in each of the new TV station buildings in St. Louis showing photos and artifacts from their old downtown palaces. That won’t replace having giant letters on top of landmark buildings downtown, but it could give new generations of journalists a peek into the glorious time when television stations made up the downtown skyline.

The True/False Film Fest happens this week in Columbia. If you’ve never heard of it, that’s no surprise. It doesn’t draw the celebrities that Sundance does, nor the European glamour of Cannes. But quietly, for the past two decades, it’s grown to be one of the top five documentary film festivals in the entire world. Late each winter, the planet’s best documentary filmmakers descend on this Missouri college town to share their own films, watch each other’s films and advance the documentary discipline.

My history with True/False goes back almost to the very beginning.

When it started in 2004, it was as small as a festival can be—a handful of films shown in a venue that didn’t usually play films. I didn’t hear about True/False until after it was over, but I made sure to attend the next year. And, save one year, I’ve attended it every year since, making this year the 21st time I’ve attended the fest (that cover photo shows all my tickets for the fest in 2016—and yes, those are tickets to the 17 films I ended up seeing during that four-day festival). But I’ve done more than just attend. For half a dozen years, I was a screener for the festival. Screeners are the first eyes that watch films submitted for the fest.

As a screener, I would watch about 50 films each fall, reviewing and ranking them so the programmers would know which good films they should watch and which bad films should never be watched again. I like to describe my role like this: I didn’t decide what films got into the festival—the programmers did that—but I could sure decide what films didn’t get into the festival!

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The festival played a role in my teaching, too. In 2014, when I stepped out of the news director role at KOMU-TV and started the Jonathan B. Murray Center for Documentary Journalism with filmmaker Robert Greene (who was referred to us by True/False co-founder Paul Sturtz), we used the festival as an essential resource. We partnered with the True/False for off-season screenings, used its guests to populate much of our Visiting Artist series to speak to our classes and, as mentioned before, I became a screener. Watching hundreds of documentaries for the festival honed my ability not only to discern what I liked about the good films, but also what wasn’t working in the weaker films. That helped me work with students to figure out the best structure and execution for their films and develop a system to help plan and execute short documentaries.

Immersing myself in documentaries at the festival once again this week has me thinking about what these films offer to us in TV news.

We know documentaries are at peak popularity right now. What we typically think of as documentaries—nonfiction films that explore important subject matter—are always at the top of the streaming charts. Documentary-adjacent content like podcasts are also top of mind for people looking to be informed, engaged and entertained. TV news, on the other hand, has become something to be consumed occasionally, no longer appointment television for most families. Perhaps we could get back some of that excitement by embracing one element that makes documentaries a magnet for audiences—characters about whom we care. The best documentaries introduce us to and have us observe—or even inhabit—the lives of interesting people. We do that in TV news, too, humanizing our stories with people affected by what we’re covering. But we don’t do it often enough or well enough. It’s all too common to see a story that clearly affects a lot of people contain only talking heads from officials.

There’s a sense in many reporters that as long as they come back with some sound, they’re fine. But not all sound bites are created equal and sound from the person who just lost his job due to tariffs is a lot more engaging than sound from an econ professor explaining why it happened. Getting the facts of our stories is generally easy. Finding the right characters with whom the audience can connect takes more work. But if we do it well, it will pay off with viewer interest, just like it does for documentary audiences.

As we seek some better characters for our story, we need to treat them like documentary filmmakers do, as collaborators, not just sound bites.

The typical TV news interview is very extractive. We show up, find someone to interview, stick a camera and mic in that person’s face and start asking questions. As soon as we have what we need, we end the interview and leave. The person we’re interviewing gets very little from the process. We used to be able to at least tell interviewees they’d be on TV that night. No one cares much about that anymore, so it’s not much compensation. Let’s instead have them help us conceive the story, tell us what’s important for them and help us create stories that connect as documentaries do. Most of this work will happen off camera, before we begin the actual interview. That will mean any character we want to feature in a story will already be invested in helping create the report. Now, you may be saying there’s not enough time to do this on today’s newsgathering schedule, but I have an answer for that, too.

Documentary filmmakers have some luxury when it comes to their deadlines.

I don’t know how many times I’ve seen a film at a festival and, during the Q&A session that followed, the filmmaker talks about working on the project for years—even for documentary shorts. That’s an unreasonable timetable for TV news, of course, but there are some habits we have that are keeping us from spending more time on stories. Perhaps the most burdensome is the notion that nearly all stories should be turned in a day. TV newsrooms are still scheduling reporters the same way they did in the 1970s, with shooting, writing and editing stories in just a few hours as the most common approach. While I understand the need to get content out of each reporter on a daily basis, nothing says that each reporter has to do all the work in one day. With more creative scheduling, nearly all of a newsroom’s general assignment reporters could be working on multiple stories all at the same time.

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Each reporter could still turn in a story each day for air, but those could be stories that have been in the reporting pipeline for a week or more. As long as reporters have multiple projects going at the same time (like most people do in their jobs), they can spend more time and connect more with the characters in the stories. I call this “project management-style” reporting, meaning each journalist is responsible for juggling a number of stories (projects) all at the same time. Newsrooms can keep a handful of reporters separate from this system to cover breaking news or stories that demand short turnaround. But slowing down the reporting cycle without reducing the volume of content would ultimately result in better quality reporting across the board, not to mention more audience appeal.

Documentaries do something else TV news has always been bad at—they give us more.

More facts, sure, but also more to care about. Today’s media mix means most people get the little snippets of news they need to keep up right from their phones. We wake up to our phones as alarms, scroll through to see what happened overnight as we get ready and check them all day long to see what news is breaking. Our TV newscasts don’t need to do the work they used to do filling us in on a couple of dozen stories, all 20 seconds at a time. A high story count used to be something to shoot for; now it’s yet another metric of a newscast that won’t break through the clutter. People crave something deeper into which they can sink their teeth. That’s why documentaries continue to grow in popularity, as do long-read magazine pieces. We get tired of information snacks and want a hearty meal from time to time. Newscasts should slow their pace and devote time to longer stories that feature the characters discussed above, giving those characters the time to take us on a journey with them. With this approach, reporters can employ other techniques that take more time to employ, like using the three-act structure to build pieces that appeal to the natural storytelling urge in all of us.

Documentaries often succeed by breaking the rules.

For the sake of this discussion, I’m not talking about breaking journalistic rules. That’s commonplace in many documentaries, as most have a point of view—a bias, if you will—that good TV news does not. I’m talking about breaking the visual rules of how we construct our stories. For instance, documentaries don’t care about jump cuts or, for that matter, editing in short, matched action sequences. That sort of editing is already getting hard to find in most TV newscasts, so we ought to embrace the creativity that comes from not worrying about such a rule. Trust me, I’m not advocating random, sloppy editing. Instead, I want intentionality in an edit that’s not constrained by rules that take us away from what we’re watching. If you’re following a character and you have to move the camera to follow her, that’s fine. I don’t even care if she goes out of focus while you find the shot again. Show me the complete scene of she’s doing and don’t put a random cutaway in to avoid a jump cut. We need to let the story arc we’ve worked out with our characters breathe on its own. The visuals should take a more natural path than they often do in TV news, less constructed and more organic.

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If you’re a TV reporter (or a manager who supervises them), sit down tonight and pick a documentary from one of the streaming services. Watch it all the way through. Then, while it’s fresh in your mind, make some notes on what you liked about its structure, storytelling style, character use and visual approach. Repeat this process a few times over the next couple of weeks. In the end, you’ll have a shopping list of things to test out on some TV news stories. Not everything you like in the documentaries will work in the TV stories. But something will. And that’s the place to start.

I’m back in Columbia for a few weeks, playing host to recruiters from many local TV ownership groups in town to meet with and interview Mizzou journalism students for jobs at their companies. I enjoy these visits immensely, both as a chance to meet students and give them advice for their jobs hunts, but also as a time to talk with colleagues still working in the industry and stay up to date on the latest trends. I’ve had three companies in so far this semester and the two-word phrase I keep hearing over and over again is…”vertical video.”

In the battle to win (or just keep) viewers, vertical video is leading the charge.

It only makes sense that television stations, which have been trying to find the best path to reach people on their mobile devices for decades now, see that people like to consume video vertically. After all, that’s how we hold our phones most of the time. And the apps that are feeding us much of our daily video content each day—Instagram, TikTok, YouTube—are quick to deliver videos vertically to keep us scrolling.

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Those who have been in TV for a long time know this plea for reporters who can deliver content in vertical form is a far cry from our original push when smartphones hit the market. Suddenly, everyone was constantly carrying around broadcast-quality cameras in their pockets, so we wanted them to send in clips they captured that we could use on the news. “See news happen? Snap it, share it, send it!” was the promo that ran on KOMU-TV while I was news director. We were actively recruiting viewers to provide what would come to be called user-generated content, UGC. Aside from sending these clips to us, we asked viewers to do one more thing for us—shoot the video horizontally on their phones. It only made sense. Our broadcast video was in the process of moving from the nearly square 4:3 format to the decidedly horizontal 16:9 aspect ratio. That supported the new HD broadcasts we had begun airing and gave television a more cinematic look, coming close to the standard movie aspect ratio of 1.85:1 (by comparison, TV’s 16:9 translates to 1.78:1 in cinema terms). With our new widescreen newscasts, vertical videos looked just plain ugly on TV, leaving miles of room on either side of the image and shrinking the important content beyond recognition in some cases.

The smartphone’s rise to prominence in the mid-2000s would have more impact on TV news than just viewer videos.

From the mid-2000s on—particularly with the launch of the iPhone in 2007—nearly every pocket, purse and palm carried a device that could shoot and display high-quality video. Users were constantly shooting video and sending it to others—including local TV stations. But they were spending a lot more time watching videos than producing them. It soon became clear that holding the phone in one hand to watch a video in vertical mode was far more comfortable than holding it in two hands to watch in horizontal mode. People started to casually shoot and share their videos vertically, moving away from the horizontal video that they had been doing. Then, in 2017, came TikTok. Vertical videos were the entire purpose of the new platform and young people adopted it so rapidly the rest of the mobile photo and video sharing world took notice. Facebook and Instagram—themselves primarily still image platforms at the time—introduced “Reels” and “Stories” as a way to share video—vertical video—more readily. YouTube, long the supplier of most of the world’s horizontal videos played on mobile devices, set up its own vertical video format with “Shorts” in 2021, flexing its muscles to reach its nearly 3 billion monthly users. These additions to the social media landscape cemented vertical video as the go-to way for younger people to see and share videos. But the more traditional news and entertainment world was still miles behind.

Enter Quibi—the right platform at the wrong time.

I don’t know how many people reading this subscribed to Quibi back in 2020, but I know it wasn’t very many of you. That’s because this video entertainment channel—made specifically to watch vertically on your phone—lasted only about six months and garnered only half a million subscribers over its short life. I was one of those few subscribers and found the concept and execution of the platform to be brilliant. While the main version of the app was designed to deliver vertical videos, if you turned your phone horizontally the aspect ratio would change and what you saw in the video would actually change, too,with no need for letterbox or pillarbox masks. The content was the perfect length (less than ten minutes each) to watch in small bits vertically on the phone, with longer programs cut into multiple parts to watch one at a time or all in a row. Quibi took the staples of entertainment television to create its content—comedies, dramas, sports and yes, news and documentary—though news did not do very well on the platform compared with entertainment programming. Many saw the app as a handy diversion from the stress of the day, so news probably didn’t serve that purpose as well as a reboot of Reno 911! did.

We’ve entered a time when our focus on news coverage must be to do it vertically.

The now instinctual nature of watching short vertical videos on our phones, combined with the move toward increased delivery of news to mobile devices, tells us something about the future of streamed news and entertainment. Fewer and fewer audience members are sitting down on their couches to watch live TV news at 6 pm. Anyone I talk to under 60 seldom does this now. Younger people don’t do it at all. TV news can reach more of these potential viewers by putting out native vertical videos to include in their media mix. By “native,” I means videos entirely conceived, shot and edited vertically for vertical distribution in short segments that would be appropriate for TikTok or Instagram Reels. Interviews, standups and live shots are the first elements of the stories that will fare better in vertical mode. Widescreen shots have never been the best way to capture people, who are, after all, essentially vertical themselves. Beyond capturing people in a more appropriate way, journalists assigned to shooting vertical video and editing vertical stories should have that as the primary focus of their work days, with picking up horizontal video for broadcast a secondary priority.

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I’m calling this vertical-first approach “Vertical News Gathering” or VNG (an homage to the days we moved from film to videotape in the field and had to coin the term Electronic News Gathering or ENG). Just as a digital-first approach to delivering news changed our workflows drastically as we started to publish stories online before they went to air, VNG will change the workflow in our newsrooms to provide an abundant stream of content to users on their phones throughout the day. Facebook and Instagram Reels are probably the best place to deliver this content, with their three-minute time limit plenty long enough to carry short news segments. TikTok can go up to ten minutes, though shorter will be better. It might even be wise to cut longer packages into two or more pieces for people to consume just a bit at a time.

We’re headed for two paths on which to receive our videos.

The way in which we will receive news, information programming and most forms of entertainment will almost certainly move nearly exclusively to vertical video. This content is best suited for watching in shorter stints, consuming while doing other things and generally viewing it as a commodity that can come from many different sources. The word “commodity” is scary for any local newsroom to see, as it means our content is no more valuable to the viewer than someone else’s. But look at the streaming world now—there are “brand names” in the content production space that surpass the commodity stage and become this generation’s version of “Must-See TV.” Local TV newsrooms have the power to reach that level if they embrace the technology and understand the audience. VNG is the first step to domination in that arena

The other path on which we will receive very specific content will remain horizontal or—perhaps the word I should have been using all along—“cinematic.” Cinemas are the places where the widescreen, horizontal picture remains sacred and essential. Content that has the heft and importance of cinema will remain best consumed in that manner. News, sadly, is not in that category for most people, but cinematic nonfiction is. That includes documentaries that feel like you’re watching a movie and information programs that wow the viewer with striking visuals and audio. Our newsrooms may produce some of that sort of content, but it’s not key to our future in the same way content generated by VNG will be.

While we’re used to sitting and watching a horizontal, 16:9 picture on our televisions at home, I can see a day not so far off at which we have two types of TVs (monitors, really) in our homes. Vertical monitors, placed in every room around our houses, will carry entertainment, news and information either streamed from our phones or played on their own apps. These ubiquitous home screens will carry most of what we watch when not looking at our phones. Then, in one or two special places, we’ll find the cinema displays. They’ll be like the widescreen televisions on which we’ll view most home television now—but on steroids. Bigger, louder, more vivid and more cinema-like, they’ll be where we sit to watch the classy, significant and beautiful stuff. It’s probably not that far off to think of truly smart TVs that can change their shape and size to match the content they are streaming, physically morphing into a vertical monitor for that content or into a massively wide cinema screen when displaying films.

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Even as we wait for a technological marvel that will change its shape to suit our viewing modes, we should remember we have one already. That phone in your hand converts from a widescreen cinema viewer to a vertical video viewer with just a twist of your wrist. Now is the time for newsrooms to realize they need to make the same change of perspective in what they’re delivering to their audiences to be sure we still exist when technology—and personal preferences—put an end to our boring, horizontal newscasts.

My semi-retirement duties as a professor emeritus at the Missouri School of Journalism include flying from my California home once or twice a semester back to Columbia to play host to recruiters from the big local television station ownership groups as they come to campus to interview our students. That means I must coordinate appointments for fifty or more students, plotting their multiple available times with the two or three recruiters’ openings for interviews. I generate some spreadsheets to give me all the options and then I must painstakingly try to match everyone so that all the students get a chance to interview and all the recruiters get to see everyone they want to see. I have a system I have honed to perfection over the past few years, but it still takes many hours to set up each visit.

A couple of years ago, an administrative assistant suggested I try using AI to build the schedule. I’ll admit—then and now—that I’m not much of an AI user. Don’t get me wrong—I have no aversion to new technology. I just really don’t have a reason to have AI do what I already know I can do myself. Still, this scheduling task is so burdensome, I figured why not give it a try. After several aborted attempts at writing a prompt telling the AI how to deal with all the data, I thought I finally had it just right. I plugged in all the parameters and, in just a few seconds, got a neat and beautiful schedule all ready to go. The journalist in me wanted to double check everything, so I started comparing the raw data I fed in against what the AI had given me. It didn’t take long to see that large numbers of students were left off the schedule, while others were given repeated appearances with the same recruiters. Part of me understood this was due to some inadequacy in my prompt. But I also could tell that the programmers of the AI built it in such a way that it didn’t really matter how many errors it made, just as long as it turned out something that looked like what I wanted. I quickly went back to my tried-and-true method and did the schedule by hand.

Flash forward to this year as a prepared for my first campus visit of 2026 and figured maybe it was time to try it again.

After all, AI improves all the time and now maybe it will work better without all the errors. I came up with what I felt was a good prompt, loaded in the data and awaited results. Something felt different about the way the AI was responding as it worked, telling me what it was doing each step and promising results in a certain number of seconds. When they finally came—they were worse than what I had tried two years ago. Not only were people left out of the mix, but it just sort of gave up before finishing the entire schedule. My perception was that the AI put in even less effort to do my task than it had when I tried this before, and cared less about doing what I wanted. I know I’m personifying the AI by saying it “cared” about something, but these results had all the trappings of an assignment turned in by a student who just doesn’t care about the work or what grade he gets.

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Simmering in this disappointment, I then stumbled upon what the editor of Cleveland.com (the web site of the Cleveland Plain Dealer) thinks is a good use of AI. The headline caught my eye at first: “Journalism schools are teaching fear of the future,” it read. I beg your pardon, I thought, deciding to read further. But rather than a piece generally lamenting schools being old-fashioned and not teaching up to date skills and practices, it got very specific. The editor, Chris Quinn, is a guy about my age who went to Temple University, a fine journalism school in its own right (if that was his program there). In his editorial, Quinn recounts his frustration with a candidate for a reporting job who dropped out of contention after finding out how the newsroom uses AI. Quinn belittles the person and the journalism professors who had taught this candidate that, to quote Quinn, “AI is bad.” First of all, no professor stands in front of class and says, “AI is bad,” unless also going into great detail about any number of reasons why AI should not be an unfettered tool we use to create our stories. So I’m already rolling my eyes a bit at this oversimplification of what is a very important topic schools are addressing in their classes every semester.

I read on, fearing the worst.

Quinn goes on to explain exactly how his newsroom is using AI. He starts by saying his team is using AI to identify stories in some outlying counties in the newsroom’s coverage area. I’m fine with that. It’s hard to put people on the ground in distant cities and besides, lots of newsroom are successfully using AI to sift through the mountains of data we encounter every day, highlighting items that might be important and worth human attention. OK then, so far, so good. I’m even pleased to read that Quinn is considering expanding to more distant counties using this tool.

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I continue to read, thinking perhaps Quinn is onto something good here—though still not sure why he was picking on journalism schools in his headline. Why would the candidate drop out of contention for a job when AI was just helping find stories? Then I read the next paragraph about how his reporters work:

Because we want reporters gathering information, these jobs are 100 percent reporting. We have an AI rewrite specialist who turns their material into drafts.

Wait, what? AI (and don’t call it a “specialist” to make AI sound like it’s a person) is writing the reporters’ stories for them? Quinn qualifies it by saying humans supervise the final drafts, fact-checking and editing them, but the damage is done. Now I can see why the candidate dropped out. Reporting is not just the act of gathering facts. If it were, we’d just publish the pages right out of reporters’ notebooks and call it a day. Writing is an integral part of the reporting process. Not only is writing necessary to put all the facts we gather into a form audiences can easily digest, but the concept of what form the story will take starts even before we leave the newsroom to report. We build a structure for our writing with the audience in mind, planning lead sentences that will engage the audience to stay for more, including characters about whom the audience will care and weaving it all together in a way that protects and preserves the English language for people who hardly ever consume carefully written or spoken prose anywhere else.

I understand the financial burdens facing journalism these days, but reading this was nothing less than chilling.

Quinn doubles down on his efficiency argument for using AI to write his newsroom’s stories, saying “By removing writing from reporters’ workloads, we’ve effectively freed up an extra workday for them each week.” An extra workday to do what, exactly? Quinn does have the right answer here, saying his journalists are using it to put more time on the street having coffee with sources and doing interviews. At least the AI isn’t doing the interviews—yet. I can’t argue against the notion that reporters with more time on the street is a good thing. But I’m still uneasy about those same reporters not being able to put their own words down on paper to speak directly to the audience about what they’ve seen and heard.

This experiment in Cleveland seems to want things both ways. Quinn argues that the candidate who dropped out of contention for the job was foolish to do so because the job market in journalism is so bad. He cites statistics about layoffs in the newspaper industry and how little chance someone coming right out of school (as this candidate is) would have at getting a job these days. Yet he seems to fail to recognize that many of the job losses he cites are the result of media owners looking to have human workers do less and automation—including AI—do more.

The real shot at journalism education was still to come.

Quinn says the candidate who rejected his AI experiment wasn’t to blame, but that person’s journalism professors are the real culprits. Quinn calls journalism programs decades behind, leaving graduating students with unrealistic expectations they will all be “long-form magazine storytellers, chasing a romanticized version of journalism that largely never existed.” I know we do just the opposite at Mizzou, letting our students know how tough it is to find a job and giving them realistic expectations about the very basic journalism jobs they will be able to get coming out of school. Our students know those dream jobs—magazine storyteller or whatever—will come much later in their careers, if ever at all. Every professor I know at any other journalism school teaches the same thing.

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I’m not planning to use AI to do my schedule for students to meet recruiters at Mizzou anytime soon. But I don’t reject using AI to do the sort of mindless work I was trying to get it to do for me. It can help newsrooms figure out what their reporters will cover and then step back and let the human reporters do the writing. I still fear AI’s sloppiness and lack of concern for accuracy or detail is a dealbreaker for giving it any task deemed to be very important. It will get better, of course, and may actually reach some level of acceptable accuracy at some point. Until then, we can trust it to lift some of the more tedious work from our shoulders, but never to take over what a reporter with a good head on those shoulders can accomplish in an honest day’s work.

I just happened to be in Arizona visiting my mother (she’s 95 and going strong!) when the Nancy Guthrie story broke. I was in Phoenix and saw the local stations jump into action, sending crews to Tucson and making Guthrie’s disappearance the lead story on every newscast. The networks soon followed and it was leading national news on a daily basis.

I awoke this morning to the compelling video released by the FBI of an individual, identity hidden, approaching the Guthrie home. It’s the biggest morsel so far in a story that’s had mouths watering in newsrooms across the country. At a time when the most important news is complicated and divisive, this story comes along to give journalists and viewers something simple over which they can obsess.

The Guthrie story has three things that make it irresistible for TV news: a celebrity, a true crime mystery and—most importantly—a complete lack of need for any effort to cover it.

Let me start with that last part first. Journalists can be a lazy lot. We tend to go back to the same sources over and over. We tend to milk stories with unnecessary follow-ups because we’ve already done most of the work. And we love a story where we just sit around and wait for authorities to tell us what to report. That’s definitely happening in Tucson. Nearly every “break” in the story I have seen has come from an official police or other government source. Sure, some newsrooms are finding retired FBI agents and the like to talk about how the investigation will work, but in terms of hitting the pavement to uncover facts, that’s just not happening. This is a story that allows reporters to sit outside the police station and wait for handouts. Or worse—get the information they report from each other. We’ve seen this lazy reporting many times before, perhaps most notoriously with the Natalee Holloway disappearance in Aruba back in 2005. The world’s reporters descended on the small Caribbean island and literally sat around waiting to be handed facts, reporting mostly just what they were telling each other.

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Don’t get me wrong, there is one very interesting bit of news value in the story. Stranger abductions are incredibly rare in this country. Almost all abductions involve parties who already know each other—drug deals gone bad, parents taking children, etc. But almost never does a stranger come into a home and take someone. Statistics show that about one percent of child abductions are by strangers. The federal government doesn’t keep statistics on adult abductions, but there’s little reason to believe it would much more. That’s the most interesting part of this story.

But the rarity of the type of abduction isn’t what we’re covering.

We’re focused on the fact that this is the mother of a celebrity. What’s more, that celebrity is one of us—a familiar, cheery face on TV news bright and early every morning. If the missing woman had been a run-of-the-mill, 84-year-old Tucson-area resident, the story would have gotten a good deal of coverage locally and in Phoenix, but just a smattering of coverage beyond Arizona. But since she has a famous daughter, the story matters more to news managers across the country and at the network level.

Beyond that, it feeds the seemingly endless hunger for true crime that has gripped this country for the past couple of decades. True crime has always been a staple of TV news, from the nightly reports of local shootings and stabbings to the TV news magazine staples like CBS’ 48 Hours, ABC’s 20/20 and NBC’s Dateline NBC. Those last two once had lives as legitimate investigative reporting news programs, but now devote themselves to chasing decades-old crime stories. America seems to have no end to its appetite for true crime. Throw in a celebrity and you’ve hit a jackpot—the nonstop coverage of the tragic murders of Rob and Michelle Reiner being only the most recent example.

Why should we care if newsrooms want to focus on this story?

The reason is because the Guthrie story using news resources and air time that would better go to other stories. For instance, there’s a story just down the road from Tucson breaking today after authorities shut down the El Paso airport over concerns about passenger safety due to a new anti-drone technology in use by the U.S. Defense Department. The initial airport shutdown was to be for ten days (ten days!), though it has now been lifted. What little I already know about this story tells me it could mean big trouble for the air industry, anything from minor inconveniences to all-out disasters for the flying public. Sure, it’ll get some coverage on the news for a day or so. But reporters will move on from that big story far sooner than they will from the Guthrie story. More money than is necessary will continue to pump into covering the story in Tucson. A source tells me CNN flew Jake Tapper on a private jet from DC to Arizona to cover the Guthrie story (I hope he drops by El Paso while he’s in the neighborhood). That’s a huge waste of money just on the cost of flying private over a comfy business class seat. The person power and dollars spent on this true crime magnet of a story could be staffing and funding more important reporting elsewhere—all of which would mean more to viewers and their lives.

This all boils down to the old question of balancing what viewers versus what they need.

Do viewers want this? Yes, of course they do. It’s been the talk of any gathering of people (driven partly by news coverage, of course) and will continue to gather interest until it comes to an end one way or another. Do viewers need this? No, of course they do not. It has no effect on their lives or how they live them. The key from my perspective is that word “balance.” It is possible to have a little bit of Guthrie news in every newscast without committing a great deal of individual newsroom resources to get it. Local stations will—and should—continue covering this story in a big way. They’re a source for the rest of us to get the latest footage and info for us to share with our audiences. The networks should pull back and use those same resources.

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I can’t place all the blame on news managers deciding to chase this story to the exclusion of other, more important stories. Viewers are to blame, too, choosing the junk food version of news that satisfies their cravings and turning their noses up at the news that’s good for them. Until we can change America’s news consumption diet, the same unhealthy dishes will remain on the menu.

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Authoritarians love to jail journalists, so the arrest of two reporters involved in covering a church protest in Minnesota is something we probably should have expected. Dictators will always want to criminalize reporting. It’s their dream to be able to put journalists behind bars to silence them. We’ve been in “soft launch” mode for this tactic for the last 45 years as Republican administrations have verbally demonized reporters and their reporting to turn the public against us. Now it seems we may be moving to full operational status. But here’s the thing—the changing face of journalism (and some bad decisions on the part of journalists) will make it easier for tyrants to justify putting us in jail.

If this were just a case of the feds grabbing reporters from the street as they recorded an event, it would be easy to cry foul and take the high ground.

But the complicating factor in this instance is the mission of the journalists who were arrested. The better known of the pair is Don Lemon, a former CNN anchor (whom that network eventually fired in part due to ageist and sexist comments on air). In his career’s current iteration, Lemon is what most would consider to be an “advocacy journalist,” part of a movement within our profession that rejects pure objectivity as being impossible to obtain and instead focuses on advocacy as a more effective form of journalism. Its tenets run parallel to most mainstream objective journalism, including the pursuit of truth and accuracy, but the discipline rejects the notion of balanced coverage and the traditional “he said/she said” style of reporting (which advocacy journalists see as amplifying lies and false narratives) in favor of an educated presentation of facts to support solving a problem. Lemon’s YouTube channel is filled with examples of this sort of work. If you ignore the clickbait titles like “Republicans are Running Scared!” and “MAGA’s Second Amendment Hypocrisy Around the Minnesota ICE Crisis!” and actually watch the videos, you’ll see many in-depth discussions of the topics.

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Lemon interviews experts—and plenty of pundits—to get his information, favoring those on the left much of the time, but still filling his videos with verifiable facts buried in all the opinion. Also worth noting is that Lemon is Black and has a higher percentage of Black guests on his videos, perhaps his effort to make up for the lack of Black sources on many traditional news outlets. The other journalist arrested is Georgia Fort. Fort is also Black and makes that identity central to her reporting efforts. She has founded the news site BLCK Press as a means to “connect journalism to Black culture.” And her stories show her advocacy in the topics she chooses to cover, mainly focused on Black and other minority issues in the Twin Cities area. Her approach (and Lemon’s) is not entirely new, but it runs counter to how most journalists working today were trained.

The practice requiring journalists to stand at arm’s length from any ideology or position to maintain their objectivity is largely a 20^th century invention.

One hundred years or so ago, impartial journalism came into vogue as a way to gain professionalism after the yellow journalism era. Most journalists still cling to that practice now despite knowing Fox News basically put an end to objective journalism’s commercial viability 25 years ago. Journalists like Lemon and Fort are, of course, working to make a living and they know they need to do something to attract an audience. Just as partisan broadcasting has made Fox News the most profitable of the cable “news” channels, it seems clear there is potential profit to be made in doing the same on a smaller scale. But I believe there’s more than just a profit motive for each of these journalists. Both Lemon and Fort embrace their Black identities and see themselves as valuable advocates to right the wrongs that group faces at a higher rate than others. Having said that, it’s important to note, for the record, that I am a straight, white, upper middle class, cisgender man with a Ph.D. I am not a member of any disadvantaged group. In fact, the entire system in this country is set up to help me succeed at the expense of everyone who’s not in my group. As a member of my very privileged group, I can be empathetic to the plight of others who are disadvantaged, but I can never experience the impact of the system that exploits them. So it is impossible for me to know the lives Lemon and Fort experience. But I can understand their motives.

To be clear, I am NOT advocating a return to an entirely partisan press.

These arrests have been a thorn in the side of many members of the traditional media in Minnesota. Speaking with one longtime journalist there, it was clear that the actions of Lemon and Fort irritated those members of traditional media who follow the traditional set of rules. I get that—I wouldn’t have covered it the way Lemon and Fort did either—and understand why those journalists covered this story in a traditional manner. Traditional, impartial journalism still serves us very well as a method for covering a great deal of the stories we need to cover. But there is something to be said for the notion of giving certain journalists more freedom to advocate. My time teaching documentary journalism at Mizzou showed me the power of in-depth advocacy journalism in the form of documentaries. Very few documentaries focused on current events approach their subject matter from a position of objectivity. Documentary filmmakers often conceive of and execute their films based on standing for a position or principle. If you look at it by the numbers, perhaps the two most commercially successful documentary filmmakers of the past couple of generations are staunch advocates—Michael Moore on the left and Dinesh D’Souza on the right. While I would stop far short of calling either of them journalists, they have demonstrated commercial success in a medium in which advocacy journalism can survive and thrive.

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For those of you reading this and getting an icky feeling about advocacy journalism, I would argue you’ve been consuming and accepting it for years. I have yet to meet anyone covering the environment who favors more pollution. I have yet to meet anyone on the science beat who favors cutting scientific research. Even in the political sphere, journalists have always advocated for free, verifiable elections, transparency in government and the rights of all citizens to be involved in the process. The work Lemon and Fort are doing are important extensions of what their backgrounds and experiences have made them believe the norms of society should be.

The important word I’ve left out of these musings so far is “independence.”

Can an advocacy journalist remain independent (Guest writer Scott Libin has an excellent take on this in the Dave Busiek on Media Substack today)? The question needs clarification because we must also specify independent of what or whom. Lemon makes a serious mistake in his coverage of the church protest, using the word “we” when seemingly referring to the intended actions of the protest group. It was part of a live feed on YouTube and he may have misspoken, using the royal “we” to speak just of himself. More likely, he truly was referring to himself acting with the group. An impartial journalism would have used the word “they” to reference only the group he was covering.

As for Fort, she hands over her microphone to one of the protestors, leaving the impression that person is speaking into the camera as a member of Fort’s crew. Again, it may just have been a practical way to hear what the protestor was saying over the loud commotion going on at the time. But it may may also have been a sign that Fort associates herself with the protest organization and is not acting independently of it.

That perception of a lack of independence from these two journalists is key for me.

I believe there’s a place in our profession for advocacy journalism IF the journalists employing it stay independent from specific organizations and institutions and focus only on the ideal for which they are advocating. For instance, one can practice advocacy journalism on behalf of the environment without becoming a mouthpiece for organizations like the Sierra Club. To address reporting on the church protest, I believe Fort and Lemon could have covered the event as advocacy journalists focused on the ideals of equal treatment for all and not have cozied up so much to the specific protest group they accompanied into the church.

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I respect Georgia Fort’s and Don Lemon’s passion for the subject matter they are covering. As stated, I cannot fully understand what they live each day and believe they are better suited to cover the plight of the less privileged than I am. My desire is for them and other advocacy journalists to find a position of independence that allows them to passionately seek truth about the issues that matter to them the most. The perception that Lemon and Fort did not do that when entering that church with the protestors has distracted from what should be the real offense we are talking about—the arrest of journalists covering a story. That threat still looms large. In its now commonplace hypocrisy, MAGA will continue to praise the one-sided advocacy of Fox News while condemning legitimate journalists who step even slightly off the line of completely down-the-middle reporting. Those in power who have long harbored the desire to put journalists in jail for doing their job have tasted blood with these arrests—and they’ll likely be back for more soon. Let’s not make it easy for them to pick us off one by one.

That headline above probably makes you think I’m going to write about some of the important and dramatic news events seemingly happening daily in the U.S. right now. But I’m actually going to go back to 40 years ago today—January 28, 1986—when I stood on the front lawn of my TV station in Orlando and watched the beginning of what would be the biggest story I ever personally covered.

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As I relate the events of that cold January day—yes, cold, even in central Florida—I want you to know that I can still see in crisp detail everything I’m about to tell you. The phrase “it’s as if it just happened yesterday” is a bit of an overused cliché, but I can remember every detail of this day 40 years ago better than I can remember any day last week. I had gotten up VERY early that morning. Even though I was my station’s (WESH-TV, the NBC affiliate) newly minted assignment editor, I was doing double duty as a live truck operator for the morning show that day. The reason—a record cold wave sweeping the state putting citrus and other agriculture at risk and causing power outages around the area as thousands of homes turned on their seldom-used electric heat all at the same time.

After putting in a full eight hours running the live truck for the morning show and then running the assignment desk for the entire morning, I was ready to head home.

I stuck around a bit past my quitting time because, even after a very busy news morning, the world’s eyes were focused on central Florida and what was set to happen at 11:38 am. NASA was launching the space shuttle Challenger on its tenth mission, made notable because included in the crew was the first “teacher in space,” Christa McAuliffe. Her addition to the flight was a publicity move by NASA to get people interested in the space shuttle program. After 24 routine missions, the program was no longer front-page news. But the teacher in space gambit had paid off and the entire nation was watching this mission carefully to see this smiling civilian giving her lessons from space.

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Those not familiar with the sheer scope of space launches may find it hard to believe we could watch the launch from Orlando, some 70 miles from Launch Complex 39B where the shuttle would lift off. So, some 20 minutes before noon, I stood inside an edit bay in the newsroom to watch the shuttle engines ignite. It took about 15 seconds for the shuttle to get above the horizon from our vantage point, so I and a colleague (sports reporter at the station and former Mizzou classmate Bill Shafer) leisurely walked outside to watch it rise into the sky to our east.

Less than a minute after we arrived out on the station’s lawn, we saw the solid rocket boosters separate and fly off on their own.

At our distance, we couldn’t see the actual explosion that doomed the shuttle. So, well versed as I was in shuttle operations, I assumed this was what is called a “Return to Launch Site (RTLS)” abort, a move a shuttle in trouble could use to prevent reaching orbit and return safely to land at the Kennedy Space Center. That had never happened before so I knew it would be a big story and that I would not be going home after all. When I got back into the building, I found out what those who had stayed inside to watch the launch on camera already knew—the shuttle had been destroyed with all aboard. It hit me that I had just watched the first in-flight disaster in NASA history with my naked eyes.

The next 12 hours or so were a whirlwind, but not—as is the point of this writing—a blur. I moved back in to take over the assignment desk, first assessing where all our crews were. We had our Space Coast (the nickname for the central Florida coastline cities near the Kennedy Space Center) reporter and another crew at the launch, but most of our crews were out covering the cold wave and its agricultural impact (in-the-know readers may be aware the cold weather—down to 18 degrees Fahrenheit overnight at the launch pad—caused the disaster by allowing hot exhaust gas leaks in the frozen O-rings on the solid rocket boosters). More than a decade before cell phones became everyday tools for reporters, I had to track down my crews by radio, by calling sources with whom they were meeting or hoping they would call in once they heard the shuttle news. I eventually routed everyone to either get local reaction around Orlando or to head the Kennedy Space Center itself—including our helicopter which was in the air at the time of the Challenger explosion returning from carrying a crew to Tampa for a citrus commission meeting (military jets eventually forced our chopper down as NASA closed the airspace for miles around the launch site). I worked getting footage back in house from our crews covering the launch—including exclusive footage of the VIP viewing area with tragic scenes of McAuliffe’s family witnessing the explosion. I was able to locate the other finalists for Teacher in Space, again getting exclusive interviews with them as they returned by bus from the launch site to their hotels in Orlando.

It wasn’t until close the midnight—a full 12 hours after the launch and 20 hours since I first arrived at work that day—that I had a moment to breathe and think about what I had witnessed.

Even then, I don’t think I knew how much this would stick with me. As tired as I was, I can vividly recall thinking about how this could be the end of the space program, a program I had followed since I was a small child in front of the TV watching as Americans first when into space in the early 1960s. Now I was responsible for making some of the TV content people watched about the space program. Had I just watched this effort that had fascinated me for so long end before my eyes?

I went home and got a little bit of sleep, then was right back in the newsroom the next morning at 8 am. My days and weeks following that dark Tuesday in January were filled almost entirely with covering Challenger stories. I still remember—nearly word for word—a call from a viewer asking me what he should do with shuttle debris he had found on the beach near his home. I told him NASA was collecting as much as it could and would actually reassemble the shuttle in a hangar near the launch pad as part of its investigation. I also told him any debris could contain explosive bolts used in escape systems and that he should leave everything where he found it. I still remember the woman who called and told me she had never stood on her lawn and watched seven people die before. She pleaded with me for the station to stop showing the explosion over and over again as part of our coverage. I relayed this message to our news director and he responded by limiting use of the actual explosion only to stories that needed that footage to specifically show what investigators were looking at for the cause. And I still remember the gruesome details we got in the newsroom—but decided not to air—about what divers found when they located the largely intact crew compartment lying on the ocean floor with the bodies of the astronauts inside. What we did report is that evidence there showed the astronauts were alive after the explosion and survived another two minutes as they fell back toward earth and fatal impact with the sea below.

What’s the point of writing about this 40 years after the fact?

Even though most of the big stories we journalists will remember as vividly as I remember the Challenger coverage are tragedies, I still feel lucky to enjoy a profession that gives memories like this. I don’t know how many other jobs deliver such vivid recall after four decades. Maybe it’s because they are tragedies that I find myself grateful for having covered them. I can also quickly recall many days leading our student reporters to tell important human stories during the great flood of 1993 (student work for which KOMU-TV won a professional Small Market Overall Excellence Murrow award the next year). The Challenger coverage, the flood coverage and others that still stick with me made a difference in the lives of people we talked to and the people who watched the stories. What we did mattered and helped people make sense of tragedies that deeply affected them.

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Journalists can never know when the biggest stories they will cover will arrive. It will usually be unexpected and might not even seem that big when they first begin. That Tuesday morning on the lawn in Orlando, I thought I was going back inside to cover a significant space shuttle story—but not the biggest story of which I’d ever be a part. As the country goes through the current tumultuous times that are generating some very dark stories for us to cover, each day could produce the biggest story ever for someone covering it. My journalism career is approaching 50 years—I first started taking news photos and writing stories in high school. I’ve stuck with it a long time. But even those journalists who put a few years into our profession and then move on to something else will have their own biggest stories of their careers. I hope each will generate memories as vivid and precious as the ones I have from 1986. To me, it’s one of the many things that makes this profession so special.

I’ve always wanted to witness an execution. That may be an odd statement—particularly if you know I am a death penalty opponent. I believe no person ever born has the right to take the life of any other person ever born. Period. Still, I’ve always wanted to go see an execution carried out. Perhaps it’s because of my opposition that I wanted to be a witness, to see what the state is doing on my behalf, even if it is against my wishes. Or maybe it’s just my journalistic curiosity.

I certainly had the opportunity to be an official witness to an execution.

I lived and worked as a journalist in a state that performed a lot of them. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, since the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976, Missouri has carried out more executions per capita than every state except Texas and Oklahoma and is one of only five states that have carried out more than 100 executions in that time. Missouri has carried out 101 executions, Florida (where I first worked professionally as a journalist) 106, Virginia 113, Oklahoma 127 and Texas, a whopping 591. Between 1976 and 1989, Missouri carried out its executions at the historic Missouri State Penitentiary in Jefferson City, just 25 miles or so down U.S. 63 from my newsroom at KOMU-TV in Columbia. It would have been easy for me to make that trip then (I started working as a news manager at KOMU in 1986). In 1989, the state moved death row to its Potosi Correctional Center in Washington County, a difficult three-hour drive from Columbia through some remote back roads.

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It’s also a tough drive from the state’s largest media market in St. Louis. In 2005, the state moved the women on death row to the Women’s Eastern Reception, Diagnostic and Correctional Center in Vandalia, leaving the men in Potosi and carrying out the executions of both men and women at the Eastern Reception, Diagnostic and Correctional Center in Bonne Terre ever since. That may seem like a lot of unnecessary location details, but I’ll come back to why they’re important.

I’m writing about the death penalty now because of an interesting court ruling in Tennessee.

Seven news organizations and their owners, including TEGNA, Scripps and the Associated Press brought suit to gain more access to the state’s execution procedures. A judge in Nashville ruled last week state prison officials must grant journalists access to view the entire execution process in Tennessee. The judge ruled journalists have the right to witness the procedure from the time the condemned inmate enters the execution chamber until officials pronounce the inmate dead. Previously, the state only allowed journalists to enter the viewing room after the inmate was already on a gurney with IV lines connected. At some point, the lethal injection was administered out of sight of the journalists—there was no indication to them when that happened—and then a five-minute clock started. When that clock ran out, curtains on the execution chamber were closed and the medical checks on the inmate were done out of view of the journalist witnesses. I applaud the judge’s ruling on this issue, as there are certainly newsworthy issues to cover through the whole process, including botched executions.

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You’ll recall I said I’d get back to all those details on the location of Missouri’s death row and execution chamber. I believe the move to perform the execution away from the state capital (and the many journalists based there) and into the wilderness of southeastern Missouri was a deliberate attempt to move executions out of public sight and out of public mind. In fact, the move coincided with the beginning of a decline in support of the death penalty nationwide. That support peaked around that time with about 80 percent of the public backing capital punishment. The figure now stands at 52 percent among all age groups, with Millennial and Gen Z support hovering around 45 percent. Twenty-seven states allow the death penalty (though Democratic governors in California, Pennsylvania and Oregon have continued holds on executions started by previous governors and Republican Mike DeWine in Ohio postponed three execution scheduled for last year and has said he “does not expect” any more executions before his term ends in January 2027). The U.S. military and the federal government also use capital punishment. With support for death sentences falling, it’s easier for those who support it to carry it out without the public—or journalists—watching.

My take on this has always been that executions should be public.

This is the most significant act governments do on behalf of their citizens, and it should not be done in secret. Much of the world has a history of public executions, mainly when the primary method was hanging. A number of factors in the United States led to making executions private—including new methods like the electric chair and growing research showing the death penalty is not a deterrent to crime. The last public execution in the U.S. took place in 1936 in Kentucky. Lately, renewed calls for public executions have made for strange bedfellows. Capital punishment opponents wanting to show the barbarism of the act support making it easier for people to see the act carried out, while conservative voices like the late Charlie Kirk saw it as way to warn people of the consequences of their actions (again, research shows no real deterrent effect).

Our current coverage of executions consists pretty much of these steps: first, we report on the lead-up to the execution as lawyers ask for stays or reprieves and states and their governors (usually) hold firm and carry out the sentence; next, we use file video or pictures of the death row inmate; and finally, we report what happened during the execution based on the word of state corrections spokespeople—whom we just have to trust are telling the truth. It’s all very routine—seldom the lead story, usually getting minor play in newscasts, in print and online. Only when something goes wrong (remember Oklahoma’s issue with not being able to actually kill an inmate?) does it get some additional coverage. Because of the significance of this act, we should cover this the same way we cover elections or a big football game (I’m not trying to be funny with that comparison—think of the resources we put toward football games).

We should set up cameras, have reporters live on the scene and carry the entire execution process live on the air and on streaming. Viewers should be able to watch their government kill someone on their behalf. Let’s lead into it with solid coverage of the crime(s) of which the inmate was convicted, interview family of the victims and thoroughly explore the case against the inmate. Then we carry the execution live and follow up after the inmate is pronounced dead with an analysis of how well the execution was carried out, talking to prison officials, doctors, etc. Additional cameras outside the prison or in the city where the crimes took place can bring coverage of supporters and protestors making their views known on the execution.

I’ll even take this proposal one step further—out of just taking about media coverage to what citizens’ should expect if they want the government to execute prisoners.

Just as we all get summons to serve on jury duty, states should send out summons to get citizen executioners to do their part in the process. If a jury of the convict’s peers was the panel that ruled in favor of a conviction, then a panel of peers should be responsible for carrying out that final order. Set it up so that there are three switches to start the lethal injection—two dummies and one that actually starts the flow. Have three citizens summoned to be the executioners and let them commit the act. We’ll interview them in our wrap-up, too.

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I know some people reading this think it is an outlandish suggestion, but I must ask why? Don’t we have a duty to cover state or federal action as important as the decision to take a life? We should fight to get full access to death chambers and get everything that happens there broadcast and streamed out to the public. What argument could there be against that?

I was recently reminded of an editorial decision I made some 20 years ago when I was the news director at KOMU-TV in Columbia, Missouri. Most people reading this know the station is a commercial, NBC affiliate, but also the teaching lab for the Missouri School of Journalism. I had two jobs, really—news director running the newsroom like every other person with the same title does, and college professor teaching journalism classes that had newsrooms shifts as their labs.

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A big story at the time was the financial crisis inside the hospital owned and run by the university—it, too, a teaching lab. The institution was losing money fast and campus leadership started making moves to fix it. It’s important to note that KOMU is far from a typical college TV station. We usually shied away from covering trivial things at the university since we were a main news source for all 14 counties in central Missouri and didn’t want to come off as the TV version of a campus newspaper. But this was a big deal with a lot of jobs and the health of the locals at stake, so we were aggressively covering it.

We got word through our sources that the chancellor—the leader of the Columbia campus (some schools call this position “president”)—had fired the hospital CEO. Our reporter asked the chancellor point blank about it (if I recall it was at a news conference) and he said the hospital CEO had not been fired. So the reporter went to the CEO—whom we had to find at home—to get more information. The CEO told our reporter—and this is pretty close to the actual quote—“I’ve been told I’m terminated and not to come to work and I don’t get paid anymore.” So OK, fired.

The reporter wrote up the story and as it turns out, I was the person in the editor’s seat (Tiger Chair—IYKYK) that day to go over the story. The chancellor had clearly lied about not firing the hospital CEO, but the reporter had language something like, “the chancellor gave a different account regarding the fate of the CEO.” So I asked the reporter, “Why didn’t you just write that the chancellor lied?” The reporter wasn’t sure, saying it didn’t sound right or something like that. But it was right and I changed the copy to read something to the effect of: “The University of Missouri chancellor lied today when asked specifically if he had fired the University Hospital CEO.” The story aired multiple times with my language and I was happy about that. We called a liar a liar.

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Word got back to me a couple of days later that the chancellor was furious he was called a liar on the air—even though his office eventually confirmed the CEO had, indeed, been fired (I give some credit to this chancellor that he never came down on me personally for the story. He was ultimately my boss—three levels above me in the org chart—but never called the newsroom or reached out to me to complain. He knew the story was accurate and left it at that). I do think it’s important to know he was upset at the accurate label he had put on him, but more on that in a moment.

The reason this memory from two decades ago came to mind is that Instagram recently fed me a nine year-old clip of Peter Alexander, then NBC News White House correspondent, at a first-term Donald Trump news conference.

Trump had claimed he had the largest electoral college victory (referring to his 304-227 electoral college win in 2016) since Ronald Reagan. Alexander challenged the assertion, noting that Barack Obama had won with a 365-173 electoral vote total. To that, Trump said, “Well, I’m talking about Republicans.” Alexander was ready with the numbers, citing George H.W. Bush’s 426-111 win in 1988. Trump brushed it off, saying “I was just given the information.” Alexander continued to press him, saying “Why should Americans trust you when you accuse the information they receive of being fake when you’re providing information that is not accurate.” Alexander’s choice of words here is important. That long and awkward question would have been better stated as, “Why should Americans trust you when you’re lying.” But the word “lie” never comes up in the exchange.

It’s important to note here that when I talk about lying, I’m talking about statements that are demonstrably false. The 2016 electoral win claim by Trump was demonstrably false—the numbers show it to be a lie. What I’m not talking about are statements like we’re getting today that “the economy is doing great.” While most indicators would show that is probably not true, there’s no single hard number that proves or disproves “doing great.” Trump and other politicians make plenty of statements that are misleading or incomplete, but we can’t call those lies.

This unwillingness to call a lie a lie isn’t limited to Peter Alexander or NBC News.

A Google search of the phrase “Trump lies” shows only partisan publishers like MS Now and The Daily Beast using that exact phrase, along with editorials and commentary in mainstream news operations like the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times. A search of “Biden lies” reveals the mirror image of the Trump search, with partisan publishers like Fox News and the New York Post using the phrase. I did find one interesting exception in the Biden search to the apparent unwritten rule against using the “L” word. CNN published a piece in February 2021 with the headline “Biden lies less than Trump, fact-checkers say. But he’s not perfect.” I admire the use of the word “lies” in the headline, but the piece doesn’t follow through on calling Biden a liar, instead opting for “Like most politicians, Biden exaggerates and embellishes at times…Biden made at least four false statistical claims during a CNN town hall last week on issues including the minimum wage, undocumented immigrants, China’s workforce and the Covid-19 vaccine.” Using “exaggerates and embellishes” and “false statistical claims” rather than “lies” let’s Biden off the hook too easily. And reporters and editors do the same for Trump on a daily basis.

There’s a real cost to avoiding the word “lie” in our reporting.

We’re undoubtedly living in a post-truth world. Politicians have always played it loose with the facts, but two Trump electoral victories have shown there’s no longer any penalty for lying. We can expect the mid-term elections this year and the general election of 2028 to be the most lie-filled campaigns in American history. I’m not sure calling those candidates liars will help stem the flood of mistruths coming out of their mouths. But I think we can have an impact at the local and maybe even the state level. There’s something about being called a liar on air or in print in your local media that’s personal. Remember that Mizzou chancellor from 20 years ago? His being called a liar on local TV hurt. I know it did. I truly believe letting voters know a city council candidate is lying can get that candidate to change tactics—or possibly end a campaign.

We shouldn’t limit calling out liars just to politicians.

We’re seeing unprecedented levels of lying in the private sector, too. When local businesses lie about something they’ve done, we must call them on it. And we need to name names. Saying Company X lied doesn’t have the same impact as naming the media relations person who lied or, better yet, the CEO.

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I charge anyone reading this who’s currently working in journalism to put the words “lie” and “liar” into regular use. Remember, I’m not talking about claims that can be interpreted different ways or be a matter of opinion. But when we see anyone lying about a concrete fact that can be proved, we must act. Call out the lie and back up your reporting with the actual facts that show it to be a lie. Sure, you’ll be attacked as biased and unprofessional, but they’re going to keep calling us that anyway. We might as well hit back with the strongest word we have to call them what they are.

I have vivid memories from when I was 10 or 11 years old of my father packing my brother and me into the car and making the drive to the Space Age structure that is the James S. McDonnell Planetarium in Forest Park near downtown St. Louis. Every Saturday each fall, we’d make that 35- or 40-minute drive to attend astronomy classes. I enjoyed every minute of finding out about the sun, planets and stars, illustrated by the massive star projector in the middle of the auditorium. A series of astronomers led those lessons, each an academic expert who knew the field inside and out. Am I a professional astronomer myself now? No. But those enriching mornings have forever changed my knowledge and appreciation of the cosmos.

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Flash forward to my early years in the news business. A group of advocates, mostly the mothers of young children, had formed a group originally called “MADD - Mothers Against Drunk Drivers” (the group later changed its name to “Mothers Against Drunk Driving”). These advocates aggressively targeted the news media to cover—and challenge—the way society accepted drunk driving. It seems impossible to believe now, but up until this time in the early 1980s, drunk driving was seen as no big deal, something to brag about if you made it home after one—or a lot—too many. But this group of advocates literally changed the national dialog on drunk driving nearly overnight. I still marvel at how, in just a matter of a few years, they were able to get people to go from thinking drunk driving was acceptable to making it such a taboo that friends out for a good time would volunteer to be the designated driver and skip alcohol altogether for the entire evening.

I’m thinking about academics and advocates after seeing the hostage video Tony Dokoupil had to record as he began his stint as the anchor of the CBS Evening News. It’s easy to picture a goon hired by Bari Weiss is standing off-camera with a gun to Dokoupil’s mother’s head as he delivers the message’s deliberately crafted lines. But the metaphorical gun in play is, of course, Dokoupil’s massive salary and the prestige of sitting in Walter Cronkite’s chair—a chair that certainly needs to hold a lot less metaphorical weight than it did when Uncle Walter occupied it.

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In his message, Dokoupil delivers this punch to the gut: “The point is on too many stories the press has missed the story because we’ve taken into account the perspective of advocates and not the average American or we put too much weight in the analysis of academics or elites and not enough on you” (emphasis added by me). I understand, in this post-truth world, the need for the right to target the media and the educated as those who should not be trusted, but this approach has the power to destroy the entire purpose of journalism. Our job as journalists is not to relay what your neighbors think about current events. If that’s what you think news is, sign up for Facebook or Nextdoor. Our job as journalists is to go out and find information, search for facts and do the work regular people don’t have the time or the skill to do themselves. Often, we will find those facts by talking to experts. Real experts have spent their lives and careers learning about specific topics and know far more about those topics than average people do. That knowledge is valuable—and it is typically free from any particular point of view. Science, whether it’s biology or economics or psychology, is based on disproving theories until a theory emerges that cannot be disproven. Scientists don’t come up with an idea and try to bend the facts to support it. They, in fact, do exactly the opposite. And we need what they know to enrich our stories and make them valuable to our audiences.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not against having “real” people in news stories, people affected by what we’re covering.

It’s a staple of journalism education to include what we call “CCCs” or “Compelling Central Characters” in our stories. Their presence allows the audience to connect with someone who’s affected by whatever it is we’re covering and to see what’s at stake. When Dokoupil says CBS News hasn’t focused enough on “you,” meaning the members of the audience, he’s just plain wrong. We’ve focused plenty on the audience, we just don’t use them in place of experts to give us our facts. Imagine if all the stories we did after a hurricane hit the Gulf Coast only included meteorologists. That would be boring, right? But imagine if we got all the facts about storm intensity, direction, cause, etc. from only the people who had experienced its winds. That would leave the audience with a very limited picture of what had happened. What works best is to focus on the real people affected by the disaster and bring the experts to explain what happened and why. That’s the right mix.

In that message excerpt above, Dokoupil also apologized for focusing on the analysis of the “elites.” That’s an interesting term for him to use. Clearly, it was written for him intentionally leaving out the word the CBS brass wants people to fill in on their own, the “liberal elite.” That adjective-noun phrase is the scapegoat on which many everyday people on the right blame everything they don’t like about their lives. But if you really look at the most basic definition of who makes up the elites, it’s this: people who have a great deal of power or influence. Dokoupil’s actually describing the people who now own his network and are destroying the CBS News brand at a rapid pace. Paramount Skydance’s power comes from the astronomical amount of money it puts into politics to get what it wants. The influence in the business that is journalism naturally follows.

Dokoupil’s tenure in the main seat at CBS News is off to a rough start. Aside from the technical problems the show has experienced (part of me wonders whether this might be some sabotage from disgruntled CBS staffers), he hasn’t impressed many with what most journalists would consider softball questions, a lack of follow up and failure to hold those in power accountable during what has been a very busy five days. But it’s early and perhaps he’ll find his feet and work out the kinks.

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Will the CBS Evening News be a beacon of television journalism under its new anchor?

That seems highly unlikely. Will it further erode the Tiffany Network’s claim on the most storied brand in television news? I’m probably betting on that. There’s a weird effort at play in all of this. It would seem, based on that video statement and what has come since, that CBS News Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss wants to draw in viewers on the right of the political spectrum with a news product that’s more palatable than what they’ve seen from CBS for years. That seems like a tall order, given that the people she’s chasing have been told for decades the legacy media are the enemy. I don’t see them suddenly tuning in now just because Tony’s in the chair. What’s more likely is that she’s driven away thinking people in the center and left who no longer trust CBS News to be the hardworking, reputable news organization that once employed Edward R. Murrow, Ed Bradley and Mike Wallace. Those viewers will continue to look for news reported with journalistic standards that would hold up to scrutiny by the aforementioned trio. I’m looking for that, too.

I’ve never been one to do New Year’s resolutions. Sure, I could always lose a few pounds or spend a little less time on my phone. I’m not sure why, but I have never joined in with the mass ritual of making plans for a new me in the new year. Still, I know this works for a lot of people, so why not throw out some suggestions for other people to try in 2026?

The current state of journalism could sure use some self-improvement.

So here’s my free list of resolutions for journalists to adopt in the new year. Feel free to take as many as you like!

1. I’m going to ask more follow-up questions: I’m shocked and amazed at how often I’m watching a news conference or other interview and the reporter asks a question that yields an answer just begging for a juicy follow-up question, only to have the journalist move on to an entirely different topic. As we teach very early in journalism school, a good interview is a conversation in which the reporter listens and adapts to what the source is saying. Purists even say reporters should only bring one question to an interview—with each subsequent question being a follow-up to what was just said. I don’t know if I would go that far, but we all need to listen more and follow up on what is being said.

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2. I’m going to add more context to stories: The audience consumes news less regularly and frequently than it ever has before. The days of a family sitting down to watch the evening news every night or reading the paper every morning are long gone. Yet I see so many stories that assume we have all the context needed to understand why some new element of the story is important—or even what it means. I understand that adding background and context takes time or space in a story, but without it, the story can be meaningless to the audience. Beyond that, good context is the place where we can point out the misstatements and mistruths coming from the people we cover. Social media has been doing a better job of adding context than journalists have, what with the community notes feature on Twitter/X or in the comments section of a post. Journalists need to do a better job of putting each story into perspective and not treating it like a standalone entity.

3. I’m going to cover less crime: Those who have known me for a while know this has been my rallying cry for more than 25 years. I’m completely convinced the small audiences we have for our TV newscasts now are due in part to our driving the audience away with coverage of minor crime that affects no one except the victim and perpetrator. But crime is easy to cover—there’s always a crime scene, a victim and a suspect. And it sort of looks like news, even if it doesn’t really affect anyone. If TV news took the resources it puts into covering minor crime and put that toward solid enterprise reporting, the nature of the medium would change overnight.

4. I’m going to cover less sports: Along the same line of thought, the media spend entirely too much time covering sports. I remember a visit to a TV newsroom in Milwaukee years ago. It was during the NFL season and I sat in for a morning editorial meeting. After listening to about 40 minutes of story pitches entirely about the Packers, the news director turned to me to see if I had anything to pitch. I said—I thought jokingly—“Could you do more Packers coverage?” No one laughed. In fact, they turned to each other and discussed additional football stories. I understand there is a great deal of passion about the local NFL team—especially in January if that team has a shot at the Super Bowl—but that doesn’t mean football coverage has to take up the entire newscast or the entire front page of the newspaper. There are countless sources for the latest NFL, NHL, MLB, NBA, MLS…(need I go on?) stories, but increasingly fewer options for reputable news—especially local news. As our nation’s news deserts grow, what our audiences need is not more sports stories.

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5. I’m going to pitch more original ideas: It’s not just sports that gets us to pitch the same stories over and over again. Being a journalist is difficult work and we all look for some shortcuts to get everything demanded of us done. Doing similar stories or going back to the same sources over and over again can be one way to cut a few corners and reduce our workloads. Too often, it’s easier to do an unnecessary follow-up to an older story than it is to do something new. I’m not arguing against follow-up reports, but sometimes we dwell on what have been high-interest stories because it’s easier than doing something new.

6. I’m going to do more investigative reporting: Doing stories that matter to people, that right wrongs and that empower the audience to live better lives will always be the best use of our reporting resources. Investigative reporting pays off handsomely with the audience—important stories that get results will make the audience sit up and take notice. These stories take more time and effort to do, but they pay off in building the reputation of any news organization that puts in the effort to do them right.

7. I’m going to do longer stories: We’re definitely in an era of shorter attention spans, with most of us grabbing news in tiny bits on our phones throughout the day. With that need met by our devices, why not use our newscasts and publications to deliver longer stories that allow consumers to dig deep in important topics? All the small bits of news we get from our phones have left many of us with the desire for deeper, more fulfilling content—just look at the ever-rising popularity of documentaries. The other benefit to newsrooms is that longer stories take up more time and space in what we air and publish, reducing the need for a higher story count and letting journalists spend more time on each piece to make it better.

8. I’m going to reinvent how I cover the news: I’ve made brief mention here before (and promise to do more soon) on the efforts of Kyle Clark in Denver and Fred Roggin in Palm Springs to reinvent how local TV news operates and how it can work for the audience. These journalists and others are working to break free from a newscast template that has been basically the same for 60+ years. They work for forward-thinking companies that are allowing this experimentation in hopes of sustaining and improving TV news. Even if you don’t work for a particularly progressive-thinking company, find small ways to throw out tired conventions and make what you do indispensable to the audience.

9. I’m going to consider working for a nonprofit newsroom: One way to get to work for a company that’s not focused on the quarterly profit statement is to find one that’s not in journalism for a profit. Nonprofit newsrooms are undoubtedly doing some of the best journalism in America right now. The pay in those newsrooms is probably smaller than what you’ve been making in commercial news, but the payoff for the good of journalism is immeasurably larger. I have hope the nonprofit news ecosystem will continue to grow to fill our news deserts and to compete with the billionaire-owned media companies that are failing their audiences on a daily basis. If that growth happens, those nonprofit newsrooms will need your talent.

10. I won’t quit: We’re living in a time in which it’s very difficult to be a journalist. From a president who calls us the “enemy of the people” to employers demanding more and more from us without providing better compensation or working conditions, it can be easy to think a job outside journalism would greatly improve your quality of life. But remember what drew you to this profession in the first place—the ability to make a difference for your community or your nation, the chance to reach out and meet people who need to get their stories out or the opportunity to tell true, engaging stories every day. Those reasons you chose this job don’t exist in the same way anywhere else. Stick with it another year and see if the previous nine resolutions can help you fall in love with journalism again.

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From my retirement locale in California, I’m not in a position to adopt any of these resolutions myself—though I would if I could. But I’ll keep my fingers crossed I start to see some of these changes in our profession. There’s nothing like a new year to pick up some new habits, right?

By now all of you reading this have seen plenty about the spiked CECOT story at 60 minutes this past Sunday, so I won’t go into all the details here. Suffice it to say that while I was a surprised at the boldness of the move, I wasn’t surprised at all that it happened. When billionaires spend as much as they did to buy a massive TV property just to curry favor with the Trump Administration, they aren’t going to pussyfoot around using that property to their advantage.

I’m sad, of course, to see the most valuable brand in TV news go up in flames the way it did on Sunday.

60 Minutes is, simply put, no longer a legitimate news program and CBS News is no longer a legitimate news organization-thanks to editor-in-chief Bari Weiss and the Paramount Skydance owners. Every single person who works on the 60 Minutes program—including its highly paid correspondents—should have already resigned in protest. As of this writing, I haven’t seen that any of them have done that, which I find disappointing.

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I won’t dwell here on what’s already happened regarding the spiked piece, but will instead share what I think this horrendous incident tells us about what to expect in the future—and how to fight it. It’s clear that Weiss and others with her lack of journalistic integrity are going to pull stories they see as critical of the Trump Administration (and future administrations from which they need favors for their billionaire owners) by citing journalistic “standards” they think the public will accept as legitimate. In the CECOT story case, Weiss said she pulled the piece because it was lacking an on-the-record comment from a Trump administration official. For the average person hearing that, it sounds legit, right? News stories have people on both sides if they’re fair, right? Except if you look at it logically, any administration that wanted to prevent a negative story about it from airing or publishing could simply refuse to comment—and there would never be a negative story about that administration again. Journalists don’t give veto power to the people they are covering. That’s one of the first things we teach in journalism school.

As I publish this on Christmas Eve, this is what the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come is showing us.

The billionaire class will continue to buy media properties with significant news organizations (CNN, you’re next), and the Bari Weiss clones they’ll put in charge are going to continue to run the newsrooms with the appearance of being legitimate and independent. But if any stories threaten the current administration in Washington, they’ll be “pulled for more reporting” and never see the light of day. That would have worked this time except Weiss apparently doesn’t know how her network’s distribution system operates and the story went out on the Canadian airing of 60 Minutes and eventually reached the internet.

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The key to getting real journalism out there is to take matters into our own hands.

If the owners are going to go through the motions of producing stories only to kill them when they threaten the administration, it means those finished stories still exist. The real journalists still working at these news organizations must work like a wartime resistance and leak these stories out. It happened by a lucky Canadian accident this time. But we won’t get that lucky again. We need to build a network inside the networks that can smuggle out the content the bosses kill. Frankly, as long as the story has been thoroughly reported and has all its journalistic elements, we can leak them out even if they’re not completely polished for air or print yet.

There are many ways to get these stories out and online where potentially many more people will see them than if they had aired or published as originally planned. Just look at the numbers for the CECOT story. 60 Minutes averages about eight million viewers a week. Since the CECOT story leaked and ended up on YouTube and other platforms, I would argue it’s reached a much larger audience than it would have airing on CBS. Looking at YouTube alone, Sen. Cory Booker posted the story on his YouTube page and it has already garnered 1.2 million views. Add that to all the other users who have posted it and I’m sure it has far exceeded eight million views by now. This is the sort of rebellion needed as the billionaire class threatens to take away legitimate journalism.

I’m not saying this will be easy.

The billionaires will fight back. Some people will get fired. Copyright claims will kill a lot of the posted videos and articles. But as in any good resistance, the tide will start to turn. Perhaps the public will even start to realize the sort of independent journalism on which they’re missing out, thanks to corporate ownership deleting it one story at a time. That will be good for real independent journalists at nonprofit and locally-owned media outlets. Fighting back will hurt, but it will make us stronger.

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In the Dickens tale, the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come shows Scrooge what may come, but it is not set in stone. Through his actions, Scrooge is able to change his future, but of course, Scrooge was in charge of his own affairs. He manages to turn things around on Christmas Day, leaving us hopeful his future is now brighter than what the ghost showed him. Sadly, we journalists don’t—or soon won’t—control our news organizations. But I find hope this Christmas Eve that we can use technology of which Dickens could never dream to reshape our own futures, getting past the Scrooges that run the business side of our industry to get important reporting that critically looks at those in power into the hands of the public where it belongs.