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

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