A Plea for Urgency from Newsrooms and Their Allies

Four big things we need to do now.

Welcome to Second Rough Draft, a newsletter about journalism in our time, how it (often its business) is evolving, and the challenges it faces.

This column isn’t really going to be about Donald Trump—I promise; it’s about us in the press—but I do want to start with two observations about him. First, Trump is an avowed opponent of the very idea of a free press in America. His use of the Robespierre/Stalin/Hitler/Mao phrase “enemy of the people” should be enough to confirm that, but there’s also his attacks, both legal and rhetorical, on individual journalists and entire newsrooms that reveal his lies and hypocrisies or uncover his darker secrets. Second, whatever you think of him, Trump is acting with great urgency in his return to the White House. He seems to understand that he has less than the 20 months until the midterm elections to fundamentally transform how this country is governed or he will almost inevitably be stymied in that scheme. So where do those two thoughts leave us?

What this column is about is that the press and its allies seem to me not to be acting with any equivalent sense of urgency. This was powerfully brought home recently when I bumped into a top leader of a major foundation whom I like and respect. I asked if they were going to resume funding journalism. They said that the breadth of the challenges required them to “do a lot of deeper thinking,” and that they might enter the fray next year. At recent industry gatherings, I have encountered less candor, but the same effective result. We continue to congratulate ourselves on our progress, especially when funders are in the room, rather than buckling down to work quickly on transformative ideas and innovative approaches.

Once speed looked like this. We need to go faster.

There are exceptions, of course. And the news of the day continues to be ably covered in many quarters, albeit often with far too much attention to the silliness that ought to be conveyed by the words Greenland, Panama, “Gulf of America,” bulldozing Gaza and pennies.

What do I mean when I say that we badly need a greater sense of urgency? Four ideas come to mind.

A NATO for News?

The press needs to immediately create a network for mutual defense against fundamental threats. So far, thankfully, news organizations have resisted the urge sweeping much of corporate America to debase itself, even to the point of paying bribes personally to members of the First Family, which I think is a fair summary of actions by Amazon and Facebook. (Yesterday’s payment by Twitter feels more like a tip than a bribe at this point. For reasons set out elsewhere, I also don’t see December’s settlement of the libel case against ABC News as fitting into this pattern.)

CBS News has, so far, stifled the reported desire of its controlling shareholder to pay such a bribe, which would leave principled staff there with no choice but to resign. (Note to Shari Redstone: The Supreme Court has said Trump would be immune from criminal charges for accepting a payment intended to influence an antitrust proceeding, but you wouldn’t be for making one, and the statute of limitations is five years, extending well into the next presidential term.)

Threats will continue, and likely proliferate. Not all of them will be lodged against newsrooms that have the resources, and should have the courage, to resist. One of the notions I have heard raised in a number of places, but on which there seems to be little action, is the need to forge a network dedicated to aiding newsrooms, or individual journalists, under attack. Such a network should, in my view, be able to mobilize not only legal resources (which do exist), but also coordinated publicity, fundraising, advocacy and, if necessary, mass protest. Waiting for a particular critical threat to materialize before organizing strikes me as unwise as it would have been, in 1949, to defer creating NATO until Soviet tanks were rolling.

At the same time, not all threats are equal, and most are not existential. We also need a sense of proportion in crafting and operating such a network, just as we do in reporting on such loaded phrases as “constitutional crisis” (see below).

The imperative of hard choices

Funders need to focus their work on critical supports, and trim frills and fat. One thing my foundation friend quoted above was right about is that the needs right now exceed the available funds, even more than usual. What to do about that? First, make hard calls, but make them quickly. In a sense, we are all living in a version of the novel and film Sophie’s Choice, in which a mother must make the horrific decision about which of her two children to save from the Nazis. For today the lesson of that story should be that if she had refused to choose, the Nazis would surely have killed them both.

The difficulty of the choices can be eased somewhat by cutting costs, very much including in the operations of funders themselves, and by discontinuing, as rapidly as practicable, programs that are less effective or just outmoded. This is certainly not the time to be making lots of small grants that serve mostly just to keep antsy stakeholders quiet. It is a time to focus support where it will generate the greatest returns. For operators, this may include accelerating the consolidation of the field, not willy-nilly or out of mutual desperation, but where efficiencies can be found, and where weaker players can find refuge by drafting on the wake of stronger ones.

Two ways to play offense

Work with new players and new tools needs to be greatly accelerated. Two big trends are occurring in and around news which have the potential for us to offer better products and services at lower costs: the rise of the creator economy, which most legacy newsrooms have not yet begun to factor into their operations, whether through collaborations, alliances or actual combinations; and the potential of generative AI, which has not yet yielded the news offerings that I think it can and soon will. Most of what we need to do in 2025 might be described as playing smarter defense. But in these two realms, we have the opportunity to go on offense, and need to do so rapidly.

Report what we know, not just what we are told

We must work much harder to use our hard-won knowledge to help readers see beyond “breaking news.” I wrote last week about what I see as the weakness of the “live blog” mindset for covering the torrent of news. What I meant was that we need to help readers see forests and not just trees, to use the expertise of our beat reporters to look, as they say in hockey, to where the puck is going.

One good example, I think, came with Musk & Co.’s proposed cut to indirect costs at the National Institutes of Health. Those cuts would devastate medical research in this country, But unlike the previous week’s Canadian and Mexican tariffs, which immediately triggered a steep stock market decline until Trump quickly folded and withdrew them, the companies whose stock would be most affected fell only slightly at the start of this week. That is because, as savvy observers noted, the cuts are probably an unsustainable opening bid, with 40-50% more likely than 15% as the final number, and with reductions in required direct costs, perhaps for auditing or even safety, also possibly ahead. Markets also surely factored in the illegal manner in which the changes were promulgated. Had reporting been placed in the hands of knowledgeable specialists in health reimbursement and law rather than novices who churn out breaking copy, most of it centered on politics, we might have given readers a more informed picture.

Beware Chicken Little and The Boy Who Cried Wolf

Relatedly, we need to work harder to avoid catastrophizing when alarm would be sufficient. For instance, over-reaching executive orders and actions being struck down by the courts is decidedly not a “constitutional crisis.” Nor are politicians whining about court orders they don’t like. Both are very much outcomes the Constitution envisions. But presidential defiance of court orders would pose such a crisis.

Franklin Roosevelt wisely said that, “public psychology… cannot, because of human weakness, be attuned for long periods of time to a constant repetition of the highest note on the scale.” If we want readers to understand when the moment of maximum danger has truly arrived, it is a major error to sound that alarm prematurely. Sadly, the day may be coming when we will need the alarm to be heard.