Substack: Second Rough Draft

Antitrust is an Answer—But Not for Journalism 2/11/21

On the Voting Machine Libel Suits, Hold the Schadenfreude 2/18/21

What’s With All Those Retirements in Journalism? 2/25/21

Journalism Vindicates the Need to Remember, Not a Right to Forget 3/4/21

Why Celebrating the “Power of Print” Can Be a Mistake 3/11/21

How to Cover a Normal Presidency 3/18/21

Is Journalism Inherently Progressive? 3/25/21

Before Communities Need News, They Need Information 4/1/21

Memo to Tribune Rescuers: First Thing You Do, Stop Printing the Papers 4/8/21

SPACs Are Not a Business Model 4/15/21

The Pandemic Mistakes Journalists Need to Be Thinking About Include Our Own 4/22/21

As Evening TV News Shows Resume Their Decline, Some Suggestions From a Text Guy 4/29/21

Four Phrases From Old School PR Worth Abandoning 5/6/21

The Facebook Supreme Court’s Trump Decision: What’s Been Missed 5/13/21

What Do Our News Values Mean Now? 5/20/21

Needed: Local Funding for Local News 5/27/21

A Local News Tree Grows in Britain 6/3/21

Why Are Social Media Policies So Hard for Newsrooms? 6/10/21

The Lab Leak Theory, UFO’s and Known Unknowns 6/17/21

The Reader and Voter Trust Problems Go Both Ways 6/24/21

Don’t Overestimate Government’s Ability to Save the News 7/1/21

Political Reporting and the Phenomenon of Andrew Yang 7/8/21

A Second Justice Joins the War on the Press 7/15/21

If You Work for Murdoch, It’s Time to Do Something 7/22/21

Why the Bourdain Fake Audios are a Problem for Journalism 7/29/21

Thinking About Coverage of China and the Second Cold War 8/5/21

Celebrating the Power of Publishing Partnerships 8/12/21

The Press Also Has Responsibility for the Afghanistan Mess 8/26/21

A Call for More Proportionality in Pandemic Coverage 9/2/21

A Lesson from the Decline of Vice 9/9/21

Four Rules for Nonprofit Journalism Funders 9/17/21

Why News Organizations Should Stop Sponsoring Polls 9/23/21

Is it Time for Journalism to Get Off Facebook? 9/30/21

New York’s Next Mayor and a Failure of Local Reporting 10/7/21

Hedge Funds Are Not the Cause of Newspapers’ Largest Woes 10/28/21

Two Lessons for Today From a Journalism Immortal 11/4/21

Help Wanted: A New Cadre of Business Leaders for News 11/11/21

The Press Has a Gambling Problem 11/18/21

Rules for Covering Omicron Better 12/2/21

Why It’s Still True That BuzzFeed Was Right to Publish the Steele Dossier 12/9/21

A Year in Review, for Worse and Better 12/16/21

Don’t Weep for the Extradition of Julian Assange 1/6/22

Bismarck Was Wrong. We Need Better Coverage of Congress. 1/13/22

The Real Opportunities for a New News 1/20/22

Four Lessons from Two Decades of Newsroom Lawyering 1/27/22

Surrounded by Catastrophe? Maybe Less Than You’ve Heard. 2/3/22

On the Culture Problem at CNN 2/10/22

Journalism Shouldn’t Mean Never Having to Say You’re Sorry 2/17/22

Covering Putin’s War, Our Future and the American Fifth Column 3/3/22

How Nonprofit News Should Think About Earned Income 3/10/22

It’s Important Not to Look Away from the News Deserts Problem 3/17/22

A Call for More Mergers in Nonprofit Journalism 3/24/22

A Journalistic Fail Around a Film About Journalism 4/4/22

Time for Local Newspapers to Go All-Local? 4/14/22

The COVID Death Toll and Our Information Gap 4/28/22

Newsrooms and the National Bad Mood 5/5/12

What to Make of the Retreat of BuzzFeed News 5/12/22

Thinking Through Two Pulitzer Controversies 5/19/22

What If a Recession Is Just Ahead? 5/26/22

Uvalde and Law Enforcement’s Credibility Gap 6/2/22

History and the First Rough Draft of Journalism 6/9/22

Why Watergate Seems Almost Quaint at Fifty 6/16/22

What to Do About Twitter in Newsrooms 6/23/22

Time for Real Coverage of the Supreme Court 6/27/22

How to Report About the Pandemic Now 7/14/22

Opining About Opinion Pages 7/21/22

How Journalists Feel About Journalism Right Now is… Complicated 7/28/22

Books About Investigative Reporting Are Even More Interesting Than They Used to Be 8/1/22

A Halfhearted Eulogy for the Local Journalism Sustainability Act 8/18/22

The Case Against Sunday Newspaper Magazines 8/25/22

How to Think About ‘I’m Saving It for My Book’ 9/8/22

A Local News Guide to Effective Voter Assistance 9/15/22

The Queen, Trust and the Incurious Press 9/22/22

Should Journalists Cover QAnon as Trump’s New Religion? 9/29/22

One Grandpa’s Early Thoughts on Tik Tok and News 10/6/22

Taking Stock of What We’ve Learned About Paywalls 10/13/22

A New (Short) Book on Nonprofit News Management 10/20/22

A Few Words of Warning About Funding Intermediaries and Philanthropy’s Leaky Bucket 11/3/22

More on Intermediaries and Funders (Including from Critics and Fans) 11/8/22

Early Returns on Political Coverage and the First Election for the Democracy Beat 11/17/22

Answers for Smaller Newsrooms After Twitter 12/1/22

What If Your Donor Turns Out to Be a Crook? 12/8/22

A Look Back Before We Move Forward 12/15/22

Five Stories I’d Like to Read in 2023 1/5/23

Thinking About Newsroom Unions 1/12/23

New Paths to the Top of New Newsrooms 1/19/23

Learning From Mackenzie Scott’s Philanthropy To Build Local News 1/26/23

Trump and Russia, China and COVID and the Next Rough Draft of History 2/2/23

LinkedIn and Substack to the Rescue of News? 2/16/23

Opening Our Minds About Whether Biden Will Really Run Again 2/23/23

Confronting Three Hard Questions About Audience 3/2/23

A Smart Way to Subsidize Local Journalism, and a Less Smart One 3/9/23

Why Fox Will Settle the Dominion Case 3/15/23

Don’t Forget About Funding for Journalism Nationally 3/30/23

Making Sense of “Supersizing NewsMatch” 4/6/23

What Can We Learn from the Near Death of the Texas Observer? 4/20/23

Three Ideas About Fixing Our Freedom of Information Laws 4/27/23

Public Radio and Broadcast TV Aren’t (Yet) the Answer to the Local News Problem 5/4/23

How to Better Cover the Crimes of Donald Trump 5/11/23

Of Leaks, Journalism and the Pulitzer Prize 5/18/23

Journalism and the Unmaking of Elon Musk 5/25/23

How a New Experiment Could Usefully Challenge News Judgments 6/8/23

If Cable News is Dying, Here Are Four Reasons Why 6/15/23

Great Newspapers and the Problem of Underspending Billionaires 6/22/23

A Dose of Skepticism on Worker Cooperative Newsrooms 6/29/23

It’s the First Budget Season of the AI Revolution 7/13/23

Lessons From the End of Newspaper Sports Coverage 7/20/23

Newsroom Diversity Will Require Union Flexibility 7/27/23

Is The Press Failing In Its Most Basic Responsibility? 8/17/23

A Dissenting Opinion On Cameras at the Trump Trials 8/24/23

Thinking About AI and the Business of News 8/31/23

Yes, Press Forward, But With Eyes Open 9/12/23

What About Philanthropy for For-Profit News? 9/21/23

You Should Know Who’s Funding Your Local Paper 9/28/23

A Local News Funder Talks Candidly About National and Local Funding 10/5/23

Is Biden Too Old? Could We Try Reporting That Out? 10/26/23

Reading Marty Baron’s Memoir from the Business Side 11/2/23

A Few Words in Celebration of the Failure of Newer Newsrooms 11/9/23

Creators, Influencers, Bloggers– and the Business of News 11/16/23

A Hard Look at News Sustainability 11/30/23

Let’s Stop Trying to Hold Back the Future In News 12/7/23

It’s the Time of Year to Ask for… Money 12/14/23

Parting Thoughts for 2023 12/21/23

Suggestions for the News Agenda in 2024 1/4/24

Taking That James Bennet Article Seriously 1/10/24

A Lesson from the University Mess: Beware the Forces of One Dollar, One Vote 1/18/24

How to Share Bad News With a Newsroom (and How Not to) 1/25/24

What Just Happened at the LA Times? 2/8/24

What Will Work Like Cooking and Games If You Aren’t the New York Times? 2/15/24

A Requiem for the Culture of The Wall Street Journal 2/22/24

Why Biden’s Age Isn’t “Hillary’s Emails” 2/29/24

Why Philanthropy IS a Business Model 3/14/24

What Went Wrong at the Center for Public Integrity? 3/21/24

A Tough Season, But Not a News Apocalypse 3/28/24

What Changes in Who’s Using AP Wires Tell Us About the News Business Now 4/4/24

The Texas Tribune, Example or Exception?: A Candid Talk with Evan Smith About Earned Income 4/11/24

Lessons from Covering the Last Pandemic– and the Next One 4/18/24 (with Harvard Public Health magazine)

Early Thoughts on the New York News Subsidy 4/25/24 (with Vital City)

Modest Proposals for Fixing NPR 5/2/24

Peering Into the Newsroom Generation Gap 5/16/24

Time to Revive a National News Council? 5/23/24

The Amazing Story of the Guardian’s Reader Revenue: A Conversation with Steve Sachs 5/30/24

A Simple Fix for All Those Stories About Polls 6/13/24

How Sources Should Think About Journalism 6/20/24

How I Would– and Wouldn’t– Give Away Millions 6/27/24

What’s Really Needed at the Washington Post 7/11/24

News CEOs and the Question of News Experience 7/18/24

Now to the Questions About Trump’s Age and Health 7/22/24

Celebrating Darren Walker’s Most Important Leadership Move 8/15/24

On Hacked Documents, Journalism and the Motives of Sources 8/22/24

Lessons from the California Journalism Legislative Debacle 8/29/24

Rebooting the Minnesota Star Tribune: A Conversation with Steve Grove 9/5/24

The Business Crisis of the Press is Coming for Local TV News 9/12/24

Help for Local Newsrooms Needs to Meet Them Where They Are 9/19/24

Midterm Grades on Campaign ’24 Reporting 9/26/24

What the New York City Hall Scandals Can Tell Us About the State of Local News 10/10/24

What’s the Matter with the Knight Foundation? 10/17/24

What the Election Means for Journalism 10/24/24

Looking Into Press Forward’s Mass Grant Process 10/31/24

What Now for the Press? 11/7/24 (with Columbia Journalism Review)

Now That That’s Over, How About Covering Public Health? 11/14/24

Reconsidering Philanthropy’s Focus on Local News in Light of Trump II 11/21/24

Thinking About the People Formerly Known as the Press 12/5/24

Newsrooms are Playing Russian Roulette with Libel Insurance 12/12/24

Parting Thoughts for 2024 12/19/24

Suggestions for the News Agenda in 2025 1/9/25

Judging Presidencies, a Second Rough Draft 1/16/25

Listening to Innovate: A Conversation with Sarah Alvarez 1/23/25

How Newsrooms Should Cover Themselves 1/30/25

News Coverage That Meets This Moment 2/6/25

A Plea For Urgency from Newsrooms and Their Allies 2/13/25

Thinking About Collective Action as Threats Mount 2/27/25

The Opinions of Jeff Bezos and the Washington Post 3/6/25

Bringing Digital Democracy to California and Beyond: A Conversation with Neil Chase of CalMatters 3/13/25

How Journalism Should Cover a World with the U.S. No Longer at its Center 3/20/25

Extra! 10 Questions Washington Reporters Need to Ask Right Now 3/25/25

What to Do About the Looming End of U.S. Public Broadcasting 3/27/25

Prize-Winning Lessons on Explaining Government 4/3/25

Managing Newsrooms Through a Trump Recession 4/17/25

Lost Federal Data Means Found Opportunities for Journalism 4/23/25

Amid the War on “DEI,” a Call to Reaffirm Values 5/1/25

How Newsrooms Can Take Creators More Seriously 5/8/25

Four Reasons for Hope in a Time of Fear 5/15/25

Questions for “Multi-Local” News—And the Need for Clear Answers 5/29/25

The Folly of the Trump Tax Bill’s Hit on Foundations 6/5/25

Hard Lessons for Journalism in Covid’s Wake 6/12/25

AI, Search and the Future of News 6/19/25

Some Good News for a Change: Better Libel Insurance Now Available for Smaller Newsrooms 7/1/25

Mayor Mamdani and the News Judgments That Provokes 7/10/25

What to Do Now About Public Broadcasting 7/17/25

Trump, the Press and Defining Deviancy Down 7/24/25

Newsrooms Need to Get Tougher on All That Lying 7/31/25

Four Harder Questions About Nonprofit Boards and CEOs 8/14/25

Where Nonprofit Journalism Funding Stands Now 8/21/25

How to Wrest the News Agenda Back from Trump 9/4/25

The Journalism Lesson I Learned on September 11 9/11/25

CBS News and the First Moves of its Nepo Baby Owner 9/17/25

We Need to Think Differently About How People Get “News” 9/25/25

Freedom of the Press Isn’t Just a Legal Issue 10/9/25

Why Hearst is Buying Newspapers: A Conversation with Steve Swartz 10/16/25

A Timely Reminder to Choose Our Words Carefully 10/23/25

Why Happy Talk Isn’t the Answer for Local News 11/13/25

Tough Questions for Google, and Thoughts on How We Got Here 11/20/25

Public Media Advertising: Fears of the Past, Hope for the Future 12/4/25

Some Modest Concerns of a Loyal New York Times Reader 12/11/25

Parting Thoughts for 2025 12/18/25

Three Stories I’d Like to See in 2026 1/8/26

A Forgotten Machine and its Lessons for AI in Newsrooms Today 1/15/26