This piece is republished with permission from Land Lines Magazine.

Owning property and leaving it to one’s family has long been considered fundamental to the American dream, a cornerstone of generational wealth. The U.S. has one of the world’s most established private real estate markets, and individuals and investors alike expect that their property rights will be protected.

Yet hundreds of thousands of Americans own property in a state of precariousness and vulnerability that echoes informal settlements elsewhere in the world. The homes they’ve lived in for years, often inherited from parents or ancestors without a will, confer upon them the responsibilities but not the legal protections of homeownership. Such properties can easily be subject to a forced sale with little warning.

Many owners of “heirs property” may not realize just how tenuous their claim to their home or land is, until they’re at risk of losing it.

Heirs property exists all over the country, in both rural and urban settings — though it’s most widespread across the South — and disproportionately impacts Black Americans, who for generations have experienced discrimination and exclusion from the kinds of legal and financial systems that undergird the formalized processes of homeownership.

Indeed, the exploitation of heirs property is seen as a major reason Black Americans suffered more than 11 million acres of involuntary land loss between 1910 and 1997, representing more than $325 billion in lost wealth. Developers from North Carolina to Florida have managed to pry heirs property from Gullah/Geechee descendants of enslaved West Africans, who were among the first African Americans to own substantial land holdings. In places like Hilton Head, South Carolina, such family land has been converted into valuable coastal real estate — in most cases, without the consent of the rightful owners.

In January, the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy convened more than two dozen legal experts, practitioners, and community advocates to discuss challenges associated with heirs property.

“Researchers know the problem very well, and have experience with local communities,” says Xinrui Shi, associate director of comparative law and land policy at the Lincoln Institute. “But we can help them connect the dots on the policy side — we see the connection of heirs property to the property tax, disaster management, economic development, and systemic injustices. So the objective of the conference was to bring these different types of expertise together to see how land policies can help address the challenges at a systems level.”

Fractional ownership and forced sales

Heirs property creates two big vulnerabilities “that often intersect and interact with each other,” says Heather K. Way, director of the Housing Policy Clinic at University of Texas School of Law.

The first is fractional ownership. When multiple family members inherit a property together, each heir gets an “undivided interest” in the property — meaning they own a share of the whole thing, not a specific, divisible portion of it. As generations pass, the number of co-owners can grow exponentially — from, say, four children, to 13 grandchildren, to 42 great-grandchildren. 

That fractionated ownership makes heirs property highly vulnerable to a forced sale, Way says: “Under our partition laws, any outside party can acquire any of the heirs’ interest in the property, and file a partition action.”

A partition action is simply a legal mechanism to sever co-ownership in this type of situation; it’s up to a court to decide whether a property can be physically divided in proportion to everyone’s share. While 10 acres of open land can potentially be split evenly among five heirs, there’s no fair way to divvy up a house.

“For properties in urban areas or smaller lots, that’s going to inevitably lead to a forced sale of the land,” Way says.

What that means is that a distant relative with a small interest in an inherited property can file a partition action to essentially cash out their share of the estate. But it also means a developer can seek out such heirs and purchase their shares, with the intent of filing for partition. In either case, partition can result in a forced sale of the entire property — often at auction, for pennies on the dollar — even if other descendants are actively living there and caring for the property.

Mavis Gragg, North Carolina-based attorney and co-founder of HeirShares, recalls the case of two brothers she worked with, aged 18 and 23. They were living in their grandmother’s home, where they had been raised. But when the grandmother died, the brothers ended up co-owning the house with her widower, who moved away and remarried. He filed a partition action, but the brothers couldn’t afford to buy him out.

Since the house couldn’t be physically, equitably divided, “the partition action actually triggered a possibility of homelessness for the kids,” Gragg says.

“The fact that we have inheritance laws is speaking to the American dream,” she adds. “Owning something, taking care of your family, you have so much more agency when you own real estate. But our laws fall short of actually making it successful across generations.”

Tangled titles

Heirs property usually, though not always, involves a second vulnerability: A clouded or tangled title, meaning there’s no legal paper trail showing who inherited the property.

“Heirs property owners are highly susceptible to loss,” Gragg says. “But the real challenge for most families with inherited property is that they don’t have a clear ownership history.”

Someone who’s living in an inherited family home is, in a sense, experiencing land informality. When an occupant’s name doesn’t match the property’s deed, and they can’t prove ownership, “they face tenure insecurity, lack of access to capital, and barriers to obtaining insurance or other forms of protection,” says Semida Munteanu, associate director of valuation and land markets at the Lincoln Institute.

While they’re still responsible for paying taxes and maintaining the property, it can be difficult for heirs property occupants to access assistance, such as property tax relief programs designed to help low-income homeowners stay in their homes. A homestead exemption, for example, can reduce an owner occupant’s property tax burden by thousands of dollars a year — but only if they can prove ownership.

“Tax relief programs are designed to prevent people from being forced out of their homes due to high property tax bills, but most programs have homeownership requirements for eligibility,” Munteanu says. “When you can’t prove that you’re the owner through traditional means, such as a recorded title deed, then you may not have access to the relief.”

And that, Way says, makes heirs property owners more susceptible to another form of land loss: property tax foreclosure. In studying the prevalence of heirs properties among tax foreclosures in Dallas and Fort Worth, Texas, Way found a striking connection: “In Tarrant and Dallas counties, over half of the property tax foreclosures are heirs properties, which is really stunning.” 

Lost opportunity

Even if a property is not forcibly sold through partition or through tax foreclosure, heirs property owners can lose out on wealth in other ways.

It’s difficult to get a home equity loan or home insurance with a clouded title, for example, or to sell the property at market value. (Most buyers, and their lenders, will insist upon a clear title.) Any meaningful action, like refinancing the mortgage or replacing the roof, requires the written consent of every single heir.

And it’s difficult to access home improvement loans or even most home repair assistance programs when one’s name doesn’t match the deed. That can make it harder to modernize or weatherize a property, or to keep up with necessary maintenance.  

Theoretically, a lender could extend a loan secured by heirs property, says Cassandra Johnson Gaither, research social scientist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service.

“But practically speaking, that’s not likely to happen,” she adds, when there are potentially dozens of heirs all over the country. “Because the creditor would have to get the agreement of all of the co-owners — and in many cases, that is next to impossible to do, even if the lender was willing to.”

“We know that one of the impediments heirs property owners face is being able to maintain their property and to keep it in good condition,” Way says. State and local programs provide billions of dollars in home repair assistance to low-income homeowners, “but in the vast majority of cases, those programs are off-limits to heirs property owners with tangled titles,” Way says. 

Often that’s just the result of policy inertia, she adds, with program rules rooted in the understandable caution of the city lawyers who drafted them. But Way says it’s important to consider the intersection between heirs property and other issues in our communities.

“If you’re barring the ability of heirs property homeowners to access home repair assistance, they’re not going to be able to repair or maintain their homes, and those are the homes that are eventually going to become abandoned and vacant,” Way says. “And that’s going to create all sorts of other costs and impacts for cities in the long run, in terms of tax delinquencies, code enforcement costs, demolition costs,” she adds. “So not only does that result in robbing that family of their greatest asset by not facilitating their ability to repair or maintain their home, it’s going to have all these ripple effects and direct costs to cities and to communities in the form of abandoned and vacant properties.”

Johnson Gaither stresses that many heirs property owners take very good care of their parcels. But the uncertainty of ownership status can often make heirs property owners reluctant to invest time or money in a property — which can increase risks for the broader community, and not just in urban areas.

“Broadly speaking, because of the insecurities around this kind of property ownership, owners — if they even know that they have an ownership interest in the property — are probably less likely to invest in it,” Johnson Gaither says. “If they’re not investing in the property, they’re not, say, managing for wildfire. They’re not clearing the understory if they have forest land.”

The US legal system: A fixer-upper

At the January conference, attendees discussed some of the ongoing efforts to remedy heirs property issues, and what more can be done.

One legislative effort to address some of the worst impacts of partition sales is the Uniform Partition of Heirs Property Act, now adopted by 23 states and introduced in six more. Under the UPHPA, when one heir or co-owner seeks a partition, the remaining co-owners have a right of first refusal — a chance to organize and buy out the lone petitioner.

If a buyout isn’t possible, the court must take into account sentimental value and family legacy, and give real preference to dividing the property rather than selling it. And if a sale is deemed necessary, the property must be appraised for its fair market value and sold on the open market, rather than at auction.

Some states have modified the law further — as in New York, where only heirs, not investors, can start the partition process.

Another policy states can readily adopt is to allow heirs property owners to provide alternative proof of ownership to qualify for property tax relief or other assistance. Texas, for example, now allows heirs to submit an affidavit along with other documents as proof of ownership in their application for a homestead exemption.

When it comes to disaster relief, the Federal Emergency Management Agency since 2021 has allowed heirs property owners to submit a statement of ownership to access individual assistance recovery funds. (After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, up to $165 million in relief funds went unclaimed due to title issues.) But some longer-term relief is administered through block grants from the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which has yet to make such a change — though some states, including Texas and Louisiana, now accept sworn affidavits and other documentation as proof of ownership for these funds. 

States can also make it easier for homeowners to pass on their property — more akin to designating a beneficiary for a 401(k) than drawing up a will, which involves cumbersome, costly processes for both generations. In order for a will to be effective, heirs have to file it through probate court, which can take a lot of time and money, says Francine Miller, senior staff attorney at Vermont Law and Graduate School’s Center for Agriculture and Food Systems.

“But there are tools, and they’re different in every state, to transfer real property without it having to go through a will,” she says.

More than 30 states now permit either a transfer-on-death deed or a lady bird deed (so called because President Johnson reportedly used this method to transfer property to his wife), “where you can literally sign a deed to a person, and it doesn’t take effect until you die, and then it doesn’t have to go through probate,” Miller says. “They have to file that with the land records in order to transfer the title, but that’s a whole lot easier than probate.”

Of trust and trusts

For legal reforms to work as intended, they need to consider input from impacted communities, says Josiah ‘Jazz’ Watts, community engagement director for Vulnerable Communities Initiative and justice strategist for One Hundred Miles.

“You can technically and legally do a lot of things to help people,” he says, “but if you do not understand the dynamics of families, it could all be in vain, and it may not have the positive impact that it needs to have.”

Some Gullah/Geechee residents, for example, pushed back against a loan program in the 2018 Farm Bill that accepted heirs property as collateral, concerned that it could lead to further loss of ancestral lands.

In researching cases where heirs property owners had gone through the title clearing process, Johnson Gaither heard similar sentiments.

“The supposition is that once these titles are cleared, that should enable people to move more into the economic mainstream,” Johnson Gaither says.

While people who had a cleared title were, unsurprisingly, more likely to assume loans, “a good number of them were not interested in getting loans,” she says. “They didn’t want to get into a situation where their property might be taken away from them — that was really stressed.”

Clearing a property’s title can be costly — if it’s even possible to do. Pew Charitable Trusts estimated the average cost of resolving a tangled title in Philadelphia to be $9,200. Legal aid organizations and law school clinics can offer heirs property owners free or discounted services, but their capacity and reach is limited.

“Being able to find strong legal partners, good attorneys that you can trust, in small rural towns— that can be extremely difficult,” Watts says. But in some of the communities he works with along the Georgia coast, “once a year they will have an estate planning clinic,” he says, with partners such as the Georgia Heirs Property Law Center, Georgia Legal Services, or Atlanta Legal Aid.

“Those partnerships are incredible success stories,” he adds. “We have had partnerships with private law firms, through their pro bono departments, and then also with great attorneys like Veronica McClendon, who has done work on Sapelo Island and in other places for families, where she’s helped them to secure their estates and also fight against unfounded claims on their family land.”

Such education and outreach is also crucial to preventing the creation of more heirs property. The Initiative on Land, Housing, and Property Rights at Boston College School of Law, for example, has partnered with the Massachusetts Affordable Housing Alliance to include a session on estate planning as part of the organization’s first-time homebuyer curriculum. 

While creating a will or a transfer-on-death deed is an important baseline step for homeowners, Gragg says entity-centered forms of estate planning, such as living trusts or LLCs, are better suited to ensuring property stays in a family for generations.

“If we’re thinking about multiple generations of real estate ownership, individual wills are not enough,” she says, because they only apply to a single transfer. Even if every family member makes a will — which is rarely the case — that only secures the home for a single generation.

“Think about conservation easements,” she explains. “The reason we make them perpetual is because we want to ensure that certain things happen over time. That requires very specific conditions, it’s a comprehensive strategy.” Instead of relying on a patchwork of individual wills, an entity-centered model lays out a plan for the property itself under a single, broader umbrella.

Forming a trust or family LLC is more expensive than a basic will, but Gragg says these are investments worth making. “The reality is that it can cost thousands of dollars to [set up a trust],” Gragg says. “But I think paying those thousands of dollars is a much better deal than losing hundreds of thousands of dollars in value because you lost ownership due to a partition.”

It can be difficult for families — and, for that matter, legislators — to discuss death and the uncertainty of the future. But heirs property experts say these conversations are essential.

“I always tell families, especially matriarchs and patriarchs,” Watts says, “that today, right now, you have the power to craft what the legacy will be for your family. For your name. For your land.”

The post Understanding heirs property appeared first on The Journalist's Resource.

The amount of debt held by the public is nearly equal to the size of the entire economy.

Why does this matter, and how can journalists make the national debt relevant to audiences who don’t normally follow the news on government borrowing and spending?

To answer those and other questions, we convened a webinar on July 14 with three scholars who study the national debt and fiscal issues. EconoFact, a nonpartisan website from Tufts University that covers economic policy, co-hosted the webinar.

The panelists were Daniel Bergstresser, an associate professor of finance at Brandeis University; Karen Dynan, a professor of the practice in the Department of Economics at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University; and Douglas Elmendorf, a distinguished service professor at Harvard who served as dean of the Kennedy School and previously as director of the Congressional Budget Office.

I moderated the discussion with Michael Klein of Tufts University, founder and executive editor of EconoFact.

The federal debt held by the public stands at nearly $31.5 trillion. Intragovernmental debt, the amount the federal government owes its agencies and trust funds, is about $7.6 trillion, or “money in one pocket that is owed out of another pocket,” as Bergstresser said during the webinar.

It’s the public debt, over $31 trillion, that represents how much the federal government owes to the bond market. Read our explainer on the national debt for more detail about how the federal government borrows money to make up for budget gaps.

And watch the webinar below. But, if you don’t have time, keep reading for three takeaways.

1. Explain that high debt increases the risk of a fiscal crisis, but it’s not the only factor.

The panelists discussed the potential for a fiscal crisis in which interest rates rise and a recession follows.

The higher interest rates are, the higher the cost of borrowing.

Since the federal government finances roughly one quarter of its yearly operations through borrowing, higher interest rates mean it costs more to run the government.

A fiscal crisis centering on higher interest rates would stem from a crisis of confidence among investors who buy U.S. securities, like bonds. Those securities are essentially loans. When investors lose confidence in the government’s ability to pay back its debts, they demand higher interest rates.

“Such a crisis could raise interest rates for anyone trying to borrow money,” Dynan said. “It could trigger disruptions for banks and pension funds, and it could cause a recession and widespread job loss.”

Reporters can help the public better understand the national debt by explaining that high federal debt doesn’t mean a fiscal crisis is imminent — but it does increase the risk.

“Crises do not occur when a single indicator crosses a particular threshold, nor are they typically caused by individual policy errors,” Elmendorf said. “Instead, crises tend to emerge from interactions among high debt, political dysfunction and stresses in financial institutions.”

Crises are also determined by investor expectations, Elmendorf explained.

If investors think fiscal policy will change and their interest returns will be affected, they’ll adjust how much they expect to make in return for lending to the government.

And interest rates on government debt affect the interest rates paid by businesses and everyday Americans, Dynan said. Businesses and households looking for loans, whether to hire workers or to take out a mortgage, pay more when the government pays more.

2. Offer scale and context for the size of the national debt.

The national debt held by the public is nearly equal to the nation’s gross domestic product — meaning public debt is roughly the size of the entire economy. GDP measures the value of all goods and services produced in the U.S.  

Rather than solely reporting the dollar value of the public debt, reporting the debt-to-GDP ratio allows for comparisons across time, which can provide context. Debt-to-GDP spiked from about 80% before COVID and has hovered near 100% since the pandemic.

“Federal debt at 100% of GDP is large relative to our history in the United States,” Berstresser said. “The only precedent for this in the U.S. is the end of World War II.”

The reason debt-to-GDP is a good contextual figure is that it’s a proxy for the tax base that the government could draw from to pay back the debt, Klein explained.

“You don’t want just the absolute number because the economy is much larger than it was in 1946 or 1960 or 1980,” he said. “Just looking at the number by itself doesn’t give you that much information. It’s the number relative to the potential resources available in order to pay the money that’s owed.”

Debt-to-GDP also allows for international comparisons, Bergstresser added.

Reporters can use this ratio to compare the ability of the U.S. government to pay off its debt with the relative debt situation in other countries.

3. Remind audiences that more debt means less ability to spend on other priorities.

When the national debt is relatively high the federal government is less able to respond to societal needs, whether related to climate change, a pandemic, national security or something else.

It’s a concept called fiscal space, which says that a government’s ability to spend — and its ability to borrow to spend — is limited.

“The more debt we’re carrying, the less, as a country, the less ability we have to respond to emerging needs,” Elmendorf said.

High government debt also tends to raise interest rates. As interest rates are pushed up by government borrowing, some households and businesses will forgo taking out loans because they’re too expensive. It’s an economic concept called “crowding out.”

“The cost of all this debt is that it crowds out private investment or other investment in productive capacity,” Bergstresser said. “Anytime somebody talks about a future that involves productivity growth or new technologies that will enable productivity growth, typically those are going to require a great deal of investment.”

The post The national debt: Inform your coverage with these 3 tips from our webinar appeared first on The Journalist's Resource.

Headlines warn of a college mental health crisis.

We hear statistics about high rates of depression and anxiety and the picture seems clear: Gen Z faces unprecedented challenges to their mental health and well-being. The culprits are seemingly easy to identify, from growing up during the pandemic to social media.

But what if that narrative is getting in the way of helping young adults?

As a developmental psychologist with more than 25 years of experience working with young adults, I have seen the “crisis narrative” impede our understanding of what is going on for young people. Even more troubling, this narrative can inadvertently create obstacles to supporting youth who need help.

Suicide is the second leading cause of death among Americans ages 10 to 34. We should never underestimate the struggle that young people are facing or the reality of the data about youth mental health.

Instead, the key is to develop a better understanding of what is a clinical mental health concern and what struggles are typical, expected and developmentally appropriate to this age group.

Here are three shifts journalists can make when covering college mental health.

1. Retire the “kids these days” narrative.

Growing up, coming of age and navigating the disorientation of the college experience has always been hard.

The opportunity to ask the big questions — Who am I? What do I want for my life? How am I going to get there? — has always opened the door to stress and uncertainty.

Nearly 80 years of archival research on college students reveals that this generation of young adults is struggling in ways that are familiar.

As co-director of the Transition to Adulthood Lab at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, I have studied college student experiences dating back to the 1940s. Together, developmental psychologist Nancy Hill and I have documented how the pressure to succeed, uncertainty about the future and the stress of an uncertain job market have shaped the experience of coming of age across generations.

These challenges and their emotional impact are developmental, not generational — meaning 18-to-22-year-olds in previous generations navigated extremely similar emotional terrain while dealing with typical challenges, such as moving away from home and building one’s own adult identity.

The most striking evidence of these intergenerational connections comes from a cohort of students from the Class of 1975 at Harvard and Radcliffe Colleges. When we returned to this cohort and re-interviewed them fifty years after graduation, they assumed their experiences were profoundly different from those of their children and grandchildren.

But, when they listened to their past interviews, they discovered instead how much they had in common with later generations.

When we share quotes from the 1970s interviews with college students today, they marvel at the surprising similarities around achievement pressure, anxiety and depression. While the language and cultural references change, the emotional experiences persist.

This does not mean nothing has changed. Social media, the pandemic and artificial intelligence have reshaped daily life and intensified many emotional experiences of young adulthood, including an increase in perfectionism and risk-aversion. But this is a story of intensity — a heightened emotional experience — rather than something new and unprecedented.

Given the increase in intensity, it is more important than ever that we continue to expand and fund campus mental health services so that students who do need clinical care have access.

For journalists, a “generation in crisis” might feel like a compelling narrative. But a more accurate and nuanced story would look at how common experiences that transcend generations may have intensified for young people today.

By helping audiences understand what is typical and what is not — and resisting the “kids these days” framing — caring adults will be better equipped to identify the signs that someone needs a clinical referral (like when emotional challenges persist, highs and lows are extreme, and daily life is impacted).

2. Identify hidden successes in the data.

Because the crisis narrative is focused on clinically diagnosable conditions, it is worth interrogating what those data truly capture. The numbers can be difficult to parse.

Measurement instruments change over time, new language emerges and diagnostic criteria evolve — as does our clinical understanding of mental health. Similarly, as society talks more openly about mental health, young adults may be more likely to share what they are going through with researchers.

Even more notably, rising diagnosis rates suggest that more students are seeking treatment for conditions that may have gone undiagnosed and untreated in previous generations. Read that way, the data reflect a leap forward in mental health care: Decreased stigma, increased help-seeking, a more robust network of care on college campuses, and a changing public health context in which more students are getting the care that they need.

There are also signs that the diagnosis trend line is shifting. The Healthy Minds Study, an annual survey of more than 84,000 students across 135 colleges and universities, documented three consecutive years of improvement in rates of depression, anxiety and suicidal ideation.

But those numbers are hardly cause for complacency: 37% of students report moderate-to-severe depressive symptoms and 11% report suicidal thoughts, though the decline in both rates is notable. Justin Heinze, a principal investigator of the Healthy Minds Network out of the University of Michigan, has said “sustained reductions tell me this is not a blip.” He laments that these findings are less likely to garner headlines than those supporting the crisis narrative.

Averages conceal disparities, and the encouraging trends do not hold equally across groups: Suicidal ideation among LGBTQ+ students remains substantially higher than among their peers and racial disparities can impede access to care.

And not all indicators are reassuring. Some metrics, including emergency department visits for self-harm and attempted suicide among young adults, have genuinely worsened. Those data also require serious attention. But, even here, the story needs to be more nuanced. A single statistic rarely reveals whether we are seeing more suffering, more disclosure, increased access to more lethal means of self-harm, or more willingness to seek emergency care.

For journalists: Interrogate what the statistics truly measure. Ask: Are more students struggling? Or are students who may have been untreated in the past now accessing the care they need?

The honest answer is almost certainly both — and that is worth parsing.

When the data show a positive trend, that is a worthwhile story as well.

3. Reframe inaccurate language as an opportunity for support.

The newest narrative that has emerged about college student mental health centers on misuse of “social media language” when talking about mental health.

Studies have found that the majority of mental health information on TikTok is misleading or inaccurate and that language has quickly populated youth conversations.

Terms like “panic attack” and “high cortisol” are being substituted in place of “stress” and “overwhelm.”

Similarly, young people are using terms like “PTSD” to talk about singular events and bad days, rather than accurately reflecting the diagnosis of a chronic psychological disorder.

But the key thing to remember is they are using those terms to share something important: They are struggling. This is true independent of the terminology.

Using social media to self-diagnose can create its own issues, including mislabeling what’s happening, avoiding professional support or seeking the wrong treatment. The inaccuracies are real, but the journalistic framing can be both more generous and more accurate: Students are making a bid for support.

But it’s important to clarify what kind of support is truly needed. Otherwise, we risk pathologizing the normal ups and downs of college life that students have faced for generations.

Students who experience typical homesickness or sadness after a romantic relationship ends are being referred to clinical counseling because we conflate the language they are using with clinical terminology. This can exacerbate the issue for young people, causing them to panic when their emotions are labeled as needing intervention. Meanwhile, common issues that do not require therapeutic interventions can tax university mental health systems.

Critically, imprecise language cuts both ways: A student saying “I had a panic attack” may be describing ordinary stress or an emerging clinical condition with the only vocabulary they have.

The right response to a bid for support is not dismissal; it’s asking follow-up questions.

To counter this trend, reporting must move beyond “teens are getting bad advice on TikTok” to a constructive frame for what we can do to help. Three practical tips for reporting on this issue:

• Note that terms may be colloquial and not clinical when directly quoting students.
• Define clinical language and clarify terminology when writing about mental health.
• Share the themes students are talking about broadly rather than adopting clinical terminology when the student does not have a medical diagnosis.

It is also helpful to share free and confidential resources like the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline and The Trevor Project helpline when writing about mental health. A recent poll from the University of Michigan found that information about these supports is still limited, especially among adults over age 50, who are likely to be teaching, raising and otherwise supporting college-age students.

Getting the campus mental health story right isn’t about softening the reality of the struggles young adults are facing, or dismissing the data. Some pressures young people face today are genuinely new.

But resisting the “crisis” frame lets us tell a more complex and accurate story about what we are seeing — and how we can help.

The post Rethinking the campus mental health “crisis”: 3 things journalists should know appeared first on The Journalist's Resource.

This piece was originally published by The Pew Charitable Trusts and is edited here for style.  

Over the early decades of the 21st century, soccer has moved from the margins of the U.S. sports landscape into the mainstream. Major League Soccer has expanded from 10 teams in the 1990s to 30 today, the National Women’s Soccer League launched and now has 16 teams, youth participation has exploded and international matches regularly fill large stadiums.

States and localities have been instrumental in shaping this expansion through stadium deals, land acquisitions, infrastructure investments and community partnerships of varying size and scope.

These efforts have helped grow soccer’s national profile — and they have presented governments with new fiscal risks.

Soccer’s growth is now converging with a run of major events that will keep the sport in the national spotlight. The U.S. is cohosting the 2026 FIFA Men’s World Cup and will host the 2028 Summer Olympics, offering potential economic opportunities but also raising questions about costs for state and local governments amid tightening fiscal conditions.

“We’re really in the middle of a mega decade of soccer,” says Ed Foster-Simeon, president and CEO of the U.S. Soccer Foundation.

The U.S. last hosted the men’s World Cup in 1994. The 2026 tournament offers an opportunity to step back and consider the factors that have shaped the intervening three decades of growth as well as their implications for state and local budgets.

Soccer’s public footprint grows

Before the 1990s, large-scale, soccer-specific public investments were uncommon in the U.S.

That began to change when the men’s World Cup arrived in 1994. Although the country had no top-tier professional leagues and no purpose-built professional soccer stadiums, it did have large public and quasi-public venues that could be adapted for the tournament.

The event went on to set global FIFA attendance records that still stand today, proving that the U.S. did have a substantial audience for soccer — a fact underscored five years later when the 1999 women’s World Cup produced one of the country’s biggest cultural soccer moments.

Two years after the 1994 men’s World Cup, Major League Soccer debuted, but the league’s early growth was fragile. Teams played in borrowed NFL and college football venues, oversized settings that made soccer feel secondary and limited MLS’ control over scheduling and operations, constraining its ability to grow, according to soccer journalist Steven Goff, whose long career was recently honored by the National Soccer Hall of Fame.

“To have a place of your own, to be able to create the environment to mimic the passion that you see in so many other countries,” Goff says, “was so important for the development of the game in this country.”

Then in 1999, the Columbus Crew in Ohio opened the country’s first modern, professional soccer stadium: Columbus Crew Stadium, later renamed Historic Crew Stadium. Although the venue was constructed without public funding, the sold-out games and intimate fan experience helped establish a proof of concept that influenced a broader push by MLS for building soccer-specific venues —often with public support such as direct financing, tax-backed tools, land deals or infrastructure spending.

That assistance not only gave teams permanent homes and improved their revenue potential, they also exposed governments to fiscal risk. In cases when attendance, surrounding development or projected tax revenue have fallen short of expectations, the public — not the teams — have generally been left to cover the gap.

For example, in 2005, Bridgeview, Illinois, used bonds to finance Toyota Park for the Chicago Fire.

When the expected surrounding development and revenue failed to materialize, the village was forced to absorb a large debt burden that it is still paying off today, years after the team left the stadium. That same year, in Harrison, New Jersey, public entities took on debt for land, infrastructure and redevelopment around the then-Red Bull Arena, which contributed to credit pressure for the town after early revenue was lower than anticipated.

These and other projects throughout the country have often been framed as engines of redevelopment, but experts are generally critical of the ability of stadium subsidies to deliver on those expectations.

“The typical argument is job creation, income growth, maybe tax revenue increases,” says Dennis Coates, an economist at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. “There’s very little evidence in any systematic way across any sport, soccer included, that those things are true.”

Coates adds that a key challenge in evaluating these investments is comparing actual spending related to a stadium with what might have happened otherwise, such as alternative public uses of the land, infrastructure or tax revenue committed to the project.

A shift in approach for public support

By the 2010s, the structure of public support for stadium projects had begun to change, precipitated by constrained finances after the Great Recession and growing skepticism toward direct stadium subsidies. Rather than financing stadium construction itself, some cities were opting for less direct investments, such as land purchases, environmental cleanup and tax preferences. Cities also increasingly pursued agreements requiring teams or developers to provide benefits, such as local hiring, youth programs or public access to facilities alongside public commitments.

However, this support can still involve substantial public resources or forgone revenue. As former Kansas City, Missouri, Mayor Mark Funkhouser explains, the question for policymakers was no longer simply whether a stadium is a good investment, and local leaders often weigh basic but consequential questions: “Can I afford this? Can my residents support this? Do my residents want this? What sort of long-term exposure comes with the deal?

For example, in 2014, Washington, D.C., reached a deal with D.C. United for the construction of a new stadium. The city agreed to provide up to $150 million for land acquisition and site preparation, including infrastructure work and environmental cleanup, while the team financed the stadium itself.

The deal also included a community benefits agreement that addressed local hiring, youth employment and programming, and community use of stadium facilities.

D.C. Council Budget Director Jennifer Budoff says city officials viewed the project as a way to quickly broaden the city’s tax base. “Audi Field was built on a former scrap metal yard,” she says. “Putting these sports facilities into these underutilized areas hastens the pace of development.”

Similarly, in Columbus, when the Crew moved into a new stadium in 2021, public support —provided as part of a broader public-private riverfront redevelopment effort and amounting to about $140 million in city, county, and state funds — focused on the surrounding infrastructure and district improvements, such as parking, a riverfront park and a community sports center.

And in 2010, Sporting Kansas City’s stadium, currently called Sporting Park, received $150 million in funding through Kansas STAR bonds, which were to be repaid through sales tax revenue generated within a defined development district surrounding the stadium. State reports show the debt was paid off early.

This trend has not been perfectly linear. Some projects undertaken in 2010s, such as those in D.C. and Kansas City, used public-private models, and some more recent deals have still involved substantial direct public contributions. But over time, public support has generally shifted in form — with fewer stadium construction subsidies and more land, site preparation, surrounding infrastructure and limited tax-backed financing.

Public assets and the soccer pipeline

Stadium deals often draw the most public and media attention, but local governments also shape soccer’s growth through lower-profile fiscal and policy choices involving publicly funded or managed fields, gyms and recreation spaces.

Jon Solomon, research director of the Aspen Institute’s Sports and Society Program, points to Seattle and King County, Washington, which employ permitting and shared-use agreements with youth sports programs, including soccer, to expand access to those public facilities, especially for families and communities with fewer resources. These agreements help maximize public resources, prioritize youth leagues, establish basic coaching or safety standards and preserve lower-cost access.

Such state and local initiatives are generally smaller and less visible than stadium financing decisions.

However, they still involve public assets — land, facilities, staff time and maintenance dollars.

State and local World Cup 2026 investments center on systems

For the men’s 2026 World Cup, U.S. host cities are not building a new generation of soccer-specific stadiums. Matches will be played in existing American football stadiums, which have far more seating capacity than most MLS arenas. With appropriate venues already in place, much of the state and local role has focused not on stadium construction but instead on public systems, including security, transportation, staffing, health and safety, fan movement, and targeted stadium and infrastructure improvements.

In some cities, that has meant fast-tracking projects that were already planned or under consideration: For example, Massachusetts officials have accelerated transportation planning around Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, including commuter rail improvements timed to the tournament.

In Atlanta, tournament preparations have helped push forward work on the BeltLine, a planned 22-mile loop of trails, parks, transit and redevelopment around the city. Atlanta BeltLine Inc. approved a $242 million fiscal year 2026 budget that includes funding aimed at delivering nearly 18 miles of continuous paved trail before the tournament.

In Philadelphia, World Cup planning intersected with a long-term effort to restore FDR Park — a major park near the city’s professional sports complex — that includes the addition of multipurpose athletic fields, playgrounds and other amenities. City officials described the tournament as an opportunity to support planned athletic fields for local soccer and football leagues beyond 2026.

Even places that are not hosting matches are preparing for the tournament’s spillover effects. Rhode Island, for instance, expects to accommodate visitors attending games in Massachusetts, and Ocean State 2026 Executive Director Liz Tanner says the public role has centered on the systems around the tournament — transportation, staffing, health coordination, and what she describes as FIFA’s “safe fan journey” from arrival to match venues to lodging and back home.

Over the past three decades, governments have shaped soccer’s growth — through stadium financing, land use decisions, infrastructure investments and community programming.

But the fiscal impact of these investments has been as varied as the deals that structured them. Some have come in the form of visible public benefits, particularly redevelopment or expanded access to recreation. Others have carried significant costs and produced more limited or uncertain returns.

For state and local leaders — and journalists — the questions are not whether Americans’ interest in soccer will continue to grow in the coming decades, but instead which fiscal commitments to the sport are worth making, whether the projected benefits will materialize and what residents stand to gain or lose.

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This week the Supreme Court upheld Mississippi’s right to count ballots that were cast and postmarked by Election Day but received up to five business days after the election.

Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote for a 5-4 majority of the court. In her majority opinion, Barrett holds that federal election laws do not preempt the Mississippi grace period.

Justice Samuel Alito wrote a dissent joined in whole or part by Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh.

About the case

In 2020, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Mississippi passed emergency legislation allowing the state to accept and count absentee ballots postmarked on or before Election Day and received by the county registrar no more than five business days after the election.

Following the pandemic, Mississippi made this ballot-receipt deadline permanent. Four years later, the Republican National Committee, the Mississippi Republican Party, a Mississippi voter and a county election commissioner sued to challenge the constitutionality of the ballot-receipt deadline. They argued that federal election law preempts the Mississippi law, pointing to Congressional statutes from 1845 and 1872 that establish Election Day as “the Tuesday next after the first Monday in November.”

The Libertarian Party of Mississippi filed a similar lawsuit against the same defendants.

The U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Mississippi consolidated the cases and ruled in favor of the defendants, finding that the Mississippi law did not conflict with federal election law.

The challengers appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. In October 2024, a three-judge panel of the Fifth Circuit agreed with the challengers, holding that the Mississippi law was preempted by federal election law, which requires ballots to be cast by voters and received by election officials on Election Day — not afterward.

In March 2025, the full court of appeals denied Mississippi’s petition for rehearing over the dissent of five judges. The Supreme Court then granted certiorari — meaning the high court agreed to hear the case — with oral arguments occurring in March 2026.

About the ruling

Barrett described the question at issue as a narrow one about ballot-receipt timing, declining to discuss other election processes in Mississippi, such as the use of the U.S. Postal Service or a common carrier to transport ballots, or the general practice of absentee voting.

She cited dictionary definitions, Supreme Court precedent, and Congressional history to find that an “election,” as used in federal Election Day statutes, is marked by the voter’s act of choosing a candidate — not by the receipt of the voter’s ballot. Thus, she found, federal law simply decrees the day votes must be cast, leaving states free to decide when ballots must be received.

The Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act, in requiring states to permit absent military and overseas citizens to vote and establishing a federal system as a backup, reinforces the point that states are in charge of coordinating ballot receipt.

Barrett dismissed the plaintiffs’ argument that requiring ballots to be received by Election Day would promote election integrity. First, she found this to be a policy matter better addressed by legislatures. Second, she found that striking down the Mississippi law would not mitigate plaintiffs’ concerns about party bosses or rideshare drivers handling ballots.

She took seriously plaintiffs’ argument that the Mississippi law could create the appearance of election fraud in circumstances where ballots received after Election Day change the results of an election. But she deferred to Congress to address this issue, should it arise.

Looking ahead to other voting cases

Barrett’s opinion is a demonstration of restrained statutory interpretation, with the decision turning primarily on a limited definition of the word “election” as used in federal law. She declined to give significant airtime to concerns about actual voter fraud or the appearance thereof.

The narrow scope of the decision preserves the court’s ability to come to different conclusions on different state laws in future terms. As Rick Hasen wrote in Slate, the court on Monday also agreed to hear Republican National Committee v. Mi Familia Vota, a case about whether Arizona can reject voter registration applications that do not provide documentary proof of citizenship. The court’s decision in Watson may do little to prevent it from upholding the Arizona law next term.

The post Watson v. RNC: A recap for journalists of this mail-in voting case appeared first on The Journalist's Resource.

This reporting guide was republished with permission from SciLine, where it first appeared.

Updated June 29, 2026, to reflect the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Watson v. Republican National Committee that states may continue to count mail ballots received after Election Day.

Voting by mail will play a key role in the 2026 U.S. midterm elections, and not just because a third of voters now cast their ballots that way. With control of Congress at stake, the Trump administration is pushing to restrict mail-in voting, a process, like most electoral issues, traditionally governed by individual states.

For journalists covering the elections, social scientists’ independent research can help them recognize misinformation, avoid errors in reporting about mail ballots, and identify local story ideas.

Here’s why the stakes are high: The percentage of U.S. voters who cast mail ballots during midterm elections tripled to about 32% from 2002 to 2022, according to the MIT Election Data and Science Lab. During the 2024 general election, 29% of voters used mail ballots.

Even before the COVID-19 pandemic became a catalyst, the number had swelled as more states started letting all voters choose to use mail ballots, which, historically, had been restricted to those who could not get to the polls in person on Election Day because of illness, disabilities, work schedules, and other legally specified reasons.

Several factors could have a significant impact on the outcome of elections this fall:

• President Donald Trump issued an executive order in March instructing the U.S. Postal Service not to deliver mail ballots returned by anyone who does not appear on a pre-approved list of eligible voters for each state, a list that would be controlled by his administration. Additionally, operational changes made recently at the Postal Service will delay postmarking for some mail. Election officials in many states check postmarks to determine whether voters sent mail ballots in on time.
• The U.S. Supreme Court on June 29 issued a decision in Watson v. Republican National Committee, a lawsuit that challenged a Mississippi law that allows mail ballots received after Election Day to be counted. In a 5-4 decision, the court ruled that states can continue to count mail ballots that are postmarked by Election Day but arrive later, a practice permitted in 14 states and D.C.
• If voters make an error at any step of the voting process—from completing their ballot and filling out the ballot envelope to mailing it in or submitting it at a designated location—their ballot could be rejected. Election officials in many states will notify voters if there is an issue with their mail ballot and let them correct it. However, most only contact voters when their ballot has not been signed or the signature does not match the one the election office has on file. In swing states such as Pennsylvania, there have been court battles over which of these ballots should be counted.

Advice for journalists

Reporting on mail ballots can be challenging for journalists, partly because state policies on how and when mail ballots must be requested, completed, submitted, collected, verified, and counted vary considerably. Mail ballots also have been the subject of numerous court challenges since partisan focus on the process of voting ramped up following Trump’s defeat in the 2020 election.

Also, journalists frequently have to fact-check common claims about mail ballots. Many people do not fully understand how mail ballots are processed or how differences in policies can affect ballot counts and rejection rates.

And the terminology can be misleading. Though commonly known as “mail ballots” and “mail-in ballots,” these ballots also can be returned in person, with options varying by state.

“Get very acquainted with the facts around mail-in voting because there is a lot of misinformation,” warns Mindy Romero, a political sociologist who is director of the Center for Inclusive Democracy, a research center at the University of Southern California.

For starters, journalists need to know the three types of mail voting and which ones are available in the state or states that they cover. The National Conference of State Legislatures is a reliable source for this information:

• Excuse-required absentee voting: Thirteen states grant requests for mail ballots based on the voter’s reason for not being able to vote in person. States differ in what they consider a valid “excuse,” but many allow voters with disabilities and those who are out of town to use mail ballots.
• No-excuse absentee voting: In 29 states, any voter can request and submit a mail ballot without providing a reason.
• Universal vote-by-mail: Eight states automatically send mail ballots to all active registered voters prior to elections.

Keep in mind that federal law requires all states to let U.S. citizens who live abroad vote by mail in elections for federal offices. The law also mandates that U.S. citizens who are members of the U.S. uniformed services or the Merchant Marine be allowed to vote by mail.

What the evidence shows

Researchers note that policy differences across states make it difficult to gauge whether and how much mail ballots influence voting nationwide. Individual studies tend to focus on one type of mail voting in a limited geographical area, usually a single state, part of a state, or a small group of states.

Research to date suggests:

• Mail ballot fraud is very rare. “Studies consistently have found negligible evidence of fraud in state elections,” researchers write in the 2023 paper from the MIT Election Data and Science Lab. Researchers at the Brookings Institution, a nonpartisan think tank, examined cases of fraud reported during elections in 2016, 2018, 2020 and 2022 and estimated there were about four cases of fraud for every 10 million mail ballots cast, on average.
• Universal vote-by-mail policies do not appear to benefit one political party over another. When researchers examined election data from 1996 to 2018 in three states with universal vote-by-mail policies—California and Washington, which are traditionally Democratic states, and Utah, traditionally a Republican state—they found that the policy “does not appear to tilt turnout toward the Democratic party, nor does it appear to affect election outcomes meaningfully,” they write in a 2020 paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
• Ballot tracking boosts voter confidence in elections. Voters in Georgia, Colorado and California who used a free online tool to track their mail ballots during the 2022 midterms reported having higher levels of confidence in elections compared with voters who cast mail ballots in those states but did not use the ballot tracking tool, according to a 2024 analysis from researchers at the Center for Inclusive Democracy at the University of Southern California and the Elections & Voting Information Center at Reed College.
• Mail ballot rejection rates vary across states, as do the reasons election officials reject mail ballots. In 2020, rejection rates ranged from less than 0.5% in states such as Arizona and Florida to 6.4% in Arkansas, finds an analysis the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at Harvard Kennedy School released in 2022. More than 40% of ballots that were rejected in Georgia, North Dakota, Tennessee, and Wyoming in 2020 were rejected because they arrived late. Meanwhile, more than 40% of mail ballots that were rejected in Iowa, Nebraska, Maryland and Rhode Island were rejected due to missing signatures.

Avoiding errors in news stories

We consulted three researchers with deep expertise in U.S. elections to create this reporting guide. We also asked them for tips to help journalists avoid some of the most common errors they see in news stories about mail ballots. They shared these three ideas:

1) Remind voters of their options for submitting mail ballots.

Not all ballots delivered to voters by mail are returned by mail. About 40% of the voters who cast mail ballots in 2024 and participated in the 2024 Survey of the Performance of American Elections, a national survey of registered voters conducted after federal elections, said they submitted their mail ballots at designated drop boxes, local election offices, and polling places.

“Reporters will sometimes get that wrong: They will say ‘You have to mail it in,’ but you might not have to mail it,” says Romero, director of the Center for Inclusive Democracy. “Know the different options voters have and include all of those in your stories. Don’t focus on one.”

2) Don’t make broad generalizations about voters who use mail ballots.

“Is there a typical mail voter? The answer is no, that it differs a lot,” says Rachael V. Cobb, an associate professor of political science and legal studies at Suffolk University who serves on Boston’s Election Advisory Committee.

In 2020, MIT scholar Charles Stewart III analyzed the demographics of people who voted by mail during the 2016 presidential election—including race, party identification and family income—in response to growing interest in mail voting amid the COVID-19 pandemic. In a report he wrote to share his results, he points out that the “lack of a major difference between demographic groups is contrary to some claims I have been hearing (and some I believed myself before running the numbers).”

A more recent analysis produced similar findings. However, it notes that Democrats were much more likely than Republicans to cast mail ballots in 2020 and 2022. That difference has since narrowed considerably but still persists, a report the MIT Election Data and Science Lab released last year shows. In 2024, 37%  of Democrats and 24% of Republicans reported voting by mail, compared with 60% of Democrats and 32% of Republicans in 2020.

Prior to 2020, “there was little-to-no partisan difference in voting by mail,” according to the MIT lab.

3) Don’t report or insinuate that ballot rejection rates indicate fraud.

The criteria for rejecting mail ballots varies by state but often include using the wrong envelope, filling it out incorrectly, forgetting to sign the envelope, and submitting the ballot after the state’s deadline.

The most common way election officials verify mail ballots is by comparing the signature on the ballot envelope to the signature they have on file for the voter, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Mismatched signatures is one of the most common reasons mail ballots get rejected.

Cobb notes there are many reasons why signatures may not match that have nothing to do with fraud. People’s handwriting often changes over the course of their lives, she explains. Also, as voters age, their fine motor skills tend to decline. As a result, their signatures may become illegible or inconsistent.

News audiences need to understand that, Cobb adds.

“Most people are genuine and just want their ballot cast,” she says.

Researchers share story ideas

Here are three story ideas that journalists can localize for their communities:

The impact of Watson v. Republican National Committee

Romero recommends journalists ask local election officials how they will prepare for elections this fall if the Supreme Court decides that mail ballots received after Election Day cannot be counted.

“You have a lot of mail voters who are used to being able to pop their ballot in the mail on election night or close to it and they know they didn’t have to worry,” Romero says. “If the Supreme Court changes that, will that message get to voters on time? I think it’s highly unlikely.”

Drop box placement

Cobb says the number and location of ballot drop boxes can influence voting, especially for older adults, adults with disabilities, and those who lack transportation.

She suggests journalists examine the issue in their communities. Scientific studies provide important context, including how state policies governing drop boxes can disproportionately affect voters who are racial and ethnic minorities. In some states, drop boxes are prohibited.

Helping voters make sure their ballots count

Cobb stresses the importance of explaining ballot curing—the process of notifying voters about a ballot problem and allowing them to correct it.

“When you go to vote in person, if you mess up on the ballot, the [vote-counting machine] spits it out and you can get another ballot and fix it,” she says, describing  an in-person voting system that uses paper ballots and optical scanners. “But if you vote by mail and make a mistake, you don’t know. So that fail-safe is not immediate. If there is that option [to correct a ballot], people should know about it.”

Bridgett A. King, an associate professor of American politics at the University of Kentucky, urges journalists to ask advocacy organizations about their efforts to educate the public about the process for receiving, completing, and returning a mail-in ballot.

She also advises asking “how advocacy organizations educate the public on the processes that local election offices use to ensure the integrity of [these] ballots.”

Key resources for journalists

These are some of the organizations that provide reliable information and data on mail ballots and U.S. elections.

MIT Election Data and Science Lab: A research center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Center for Inclusive Democracy: A research center at the University of Southern California.

National Conference of State Legislatures: A bipartisan organization that tracks and reports on various state-level policies and issues.

Ballotpedia: A digital collection of almost 7,000 encyclopedic articles on U.S. politics and elections.

Center for Election Innovation & Research: A nonprofit organization that works with local election officials to build public confidence in elections.

This is a list of the research papers, reports, and experts we consulted for this journalism guide and why we chose them.

Research

Mail voting in the US: Data points to very low fraud and significant benefits to voters
Samara Angel, Jonathan Katz, and Randi Wright. Brookings Institution report, November 2025.

This report from the Brookings Institution, a think tank frequently cited by prominent researchers, features an original and recent analysis of reports of mail ballot fraud.

Voting Outside the Polling Place: Absentee, All-Mail and Other Voting at Home Options
National Conference of State Legislatures report, August 2025.

King recommended this report, parts of which were updated in 2026. It compares and explains state policies on the three types of mail voting.

Vote-by-Mail Ballot Tracking: A Multi-State Analysis of Voter Turnout and Rejection Rates
Mindy Romero, Paul Gronke, Lisa Bryant, Anna Meier, and Michelle M. Shafer. Report from the Center for Inclusive Democracy and the Elections & Voting Information Center, October 2024.

This study, led by Romero, compares the experiences of voters who cast mail ballots and who tracked them using a common ballot tracking tool to those of mail voters who did not track their ballots.

Vote-By-Mail in the United States: Best Practices and New Areas for Research
Paul Gronke, Mindy S. Romero, Enrijeta Shino, and Daniel M. Thompson. MIT Election Data and Science Lab white paper, October 2023.

This paper, which Romero coauthored, offers a detailed look at the research on mail voting and the methodologies different researchers used to conduct their studies.

Ensuring All Votes Count: Reducing Rejected Ballots
Jose Altamirano and Tova Wang. Policy brief from the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation, August 2022.

Romero recommended this research paper, which examines the most common reasons mail ballots are rejected across the 50 states and District of Columbia.

Universal vote-by-mail has no impact on partisan turnout or vote share
Daniel M. Thompson, Jennifer A. Wub, Jesse Yodera, and Andrew B. Hall. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, June 2020.

This paper, published in a leading scientific journal during the COVID-19 pandemic, investigates whether universal vote-by-mail programs favor one political party over another.

Researchers

We asked political sociologist Mindy Romero to help with this reporting guide because she has studied and written extensively about U.S. elections for many years. We also chose her because of her familiarity with voting issues in California, the nation’s largest state and one of the most recent states to implement a universal vote-by-mail program.

We asked Bridgett A. King to help because of her expertise in certain election-related issues, including felony disenfranchisement, citizen voting experiences, and poll worker demographics. We also chose her because she works in Kentucky, a politically conservative state that employs excuse-required absentee voting.

We asked Rachael V. Cobb to help because she studies and teaches election administration, civic engagement, and political participation and is actively involved in improving elections in Massachusetts, which offers no-excuse absentee voting. Cobb is a member of Boston’s Election Advisory Committee and the board of directors of MassVOTE, a nonpartisan, nonprofit voting rights organization.

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A growing share of U.S. audiences turn to social media for their news — a shift that’s been evident for years and shows no sign of slowing down. Newsrooms tend to respond by posting their original product online. In local television newsrooms, this has meant publishing a reporter’s package from the 6 p.m. newscast on the station website.

But that strategy isn’t viable for the future. It overlooks the fact that social media platforms operate as distinct media environments with their own norms, logics and modes of engagement. In these environments, audiences have redefined what counts as news.

Instead of going to news sources, younger audiences want news sources to come to them. These audiences expect the stories they encounter to feel visually alive and socially connected, and they value journalism that reflects their communities in meaningful, contemporary ways.

Beaudet, Okereke and Thalhamer discuss their research with Clark Merrefield of The Journalist’s Resource on June 12, 2026.

Younger audiences aren’t turning away from local TV news

To help newsrooms find a path forward, the Reinventing Local TV News Project at Northeastern University partnered with SmithGeiger Group to conduct online interviews with 1,012 news consumers aged 18 to 34 across the U.S. The study was fielded from June 3 to 8, 2025.

We were pleasantly surprised by the results. While popular opinion may be that young audiences have abandoned news, especially from local television, our survey found otherwise.

An overwhelming percentage —  91% of all 18- to 34-year-olds — are getting news and information from at least one news platform on a weekly basis. News usage is frequent and habitual, with over half of weekly users turning to their primary platforms every day.

Among 18- to 34-year-olds, local news maintains significant visibility: 55% still watch local news programs on TV each week, while 61% actively use local stations’ apps or weather apps. This places local outlets firmly in the middle tier of weekly news sources overall, ahead of Reddit, newsletters and even national news websites and apps.

Instead of turning away from local news, younger people are engaging with it in ways that are distinct from older generations — frequently via social media and on their own schedule.

For station managers, the opportunity is not to win them back to linear programming from TikTok or YouTube. Rather, newsrooms should recognize that this demographic cares about local news and that there is an opportunity to reach them if stations make their reporting part of their audience’s daily, multi-source news routine.

Cultivating connection: What successful journalism looks like on social platforms

The Reinventing Local TV News Project has spent the last decade researching how local newsrooms can reach younger people.

In this latest phase of our research, we embedded innovation fellows to serve as digital content creators in three top newsrooms in New York, Chicago and Boston. They worked in collaboration with an animation fellow who served all three stations. The group produced stories specifically for the television stations’ digital platforms, including social media, websites and streaming apps. From their work, and the responses to that work in our survey, we’ve developed a sense of key factors for successful journalism on social platforms.

One is cultivating connection, especially on social media platforms.

“I want to see more community outreach and help, I want truly local stories, I want to see how individuals are making the place better.”

Younger audiences turn to local news for a sense of place and belonging, but they expect interactivity. For newsrooms, this can mean soliciting audience involvement through comments, polls, or live Q&As. One survey respondent, when explaining why social media is their preferred way to get news, said, “…I like to read comments to see what others think about the news.”

Daily local news consumers report having a deep connection to where they live. Nearly two-thirds — 65% — of younger news consumers report feeling connected to their local communities, with this connection strengthening significantly with age, especially among Black and Hispanic audiences.

One survey respondent, when asked what local news stations could do to improve their digital offerings, said, “I want to see more community outreach and help, I want truly local stories, I want to see how individuals are making the place better.”

For younger audiences, interacting with social media content they consume is a default. For newsrooms, that means every short-form video offers an opportunity to connect with them.

Social media news videos aren’t dead ends. Our survey showed that those stories were the start of a consumer’s experience with a news story or news organization — 94% of viewers say they search for more information after they watch a local news video on social media.

Substantial audience segments also like or share videos — 87% — watch longer versions on station apps or websites — 81% — or even make a point of tuning into the full local newscast on television — 78%.

For younger audiences, this undercuts the stereotype of social media news as fleeting or shallow. Instead, it demonstrates that local news clips can function as entry points that channel audiences toward deeper, cross-platform engagement.

Newsrooms can encourage their audiences to engage further by linking to additional stories, creating follow-up content or prompting viewers to leave comments. This opens a door for newsrooms to cultivate the connection that this audience wants in their social media content.

Local news is no longer solely about proximity

Our research leads us to believe that connection has become an essential factor in how younger audiences define local news. Younger audiences attribute value to local stations both because they are nearby and because they perform functions that extend beyond geography.

They provide urgent and actionable information, sustain a sense of connection to community, and embody trustworthiness and relevance in ways that other information sources often do not.

For this audience, local news is no longer simply defined by geography.

That means “local” needs to be considered a method of producing news, not just a geographic description. A station may be geographically situated within a community and still fail to meet the expectations of what it means to be local if it does not deliver on urgency, connection or trust.

Our data suggest daily local news consumers report stronger community connection than even heavy social media users, and nearly three-quarters of respondents say they trust local news more. Ultimately, credibility at a local level will now have to be earned through a newsroom’s journalism, rather than simply inherited through location.

Learn more in our report published by The Shorenstein Center and our Survival Guide for newsrooms.

The post Redefining local: How young Americans engage with television news across platforms appeared first on The Journalist's Resource.

In their 2025 series “Power Struggle,” Tony Schick and Monica Samayoa of Oregon Public Broadcasting found legislators who had supported green energy initiatives in Oregon and Washington knew little about how to connect wind and solar sources to the existing power grid.

“One of the most shocking things for me, while we were reporting on this, was talking to legislators and finding out they weren’t talking to the most important entity to talk to if they want to connect these renewables on the grid, which is the Bonneville Power Administration,” Samayoa said during a recent webinar with The Journalist’s Resource.

In “Power Struggle,” Samayoa and Schick write that “Bonneville, under a setup that is unique to the Northwest, owns most of the power lines needed to carry green power from the region’s sunny and windy high desert to its major population centers. Bonneville has no state or local representation within its federally appointed bureaucracy and, by statute, operates as a self-funded business.”

The series, produced in partnership with ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network, found Oregon and Washington trailed almost every other state in bringing new renewable energy online. This, despite commitments from Oregon and Washington to go 100% green. The reporting led authorities in Washington to fast track renewable energy projects and Oregon to do the same for solar and wind permits.

I recently spoke with Schick and Samayoa for a behind-the-scenes look at how they reported the series and explained highly technical energy infrastructure concepts to a broad audience. Watch our conversation:

Keep reading for three quick takeaways if you don’t have time to watch the whole hour.

1. Pursue unanswered questions raised during prior reporting.

Schick has been reporting on salmon in the Pacific Northwest for years — from economic inequities related to decimated salmon populations to federal subsidies that failed to increase their numbers to the history of salmon in the region as told through the voices of one Yakama Nation family.   

While covering endangered salmon in the Snake and Columbia Rivers, Schick reported that the administration of then-President Joe Biden was considering removing some hydroelectric dams whose construction had depleted salmon in the rivers decades prior.

“Which led to the question of, how do we replace the power from those dams?” Schick said. “Which led to questions about how we are adding renewable energy and our capabilities of adding renewable energy in the Northwest.”

Those questions then led Schick to discover that droughts in the Northwest had cut output from hydroelectric dams, and there weren’t enough renewable energy sources to make up the deficit. Instead, Oregon and Washington turned to power supplied by coal and gas sources. Carbon emissions from energy were, in fact, increasing in the region, contrary to much of the country, Schick said.

“I was just really interested in why that was the case,” he added.

That’s when Schick turned to Samayoa, who covers energy and climate change, for help understanding regional energy systems.

“Each state, Oregon and Washington, has renewable energy goals to meet by mid-century,” Samayoa said. “And what that means is, by that time, our electric utilities need to deliver carbon-free electricity, meaning no coal, no natural gas, just wind and solar.”

But the states were missing important benchmarks, exacerbated by dwindling federal support for carbon-free electricity. For example, last year the federal government rescinded Oregon’s authority to build offshore wind farms.

2. Compare systems elsewhere to show how other locales provide services.

Most other parts of the country use a central energy operator called a regional transmission organization that covers multiple states over a large area, Schick and Samayoa reported. Texas uses a regional grid operator, spends more than Bonneville on infrastructure upgrades, and spreads those costs across more customers, they found.

“Texas brought more energy online in the past two years than any other power region,” Schick and Samayoa wrote. “That’s helped the oil and gas powerhouse become the country’s biggest producer of wind and solar energy.”

They also looked into the Midcontinent Independent System Operator, a transmission organization that supplies power throughout the Midwest and part of Canada. It has “a very diverse profile in terms of where they’re getting their energy at different times,” Samayoa said.

The comparisons to other energy systems showed there were alternative, effective ways to bring green energy into regional power grids. Bonneville recently rejected joining an energy market based in California “that advocates described as the Northwest’s best bet at accelerating the adoption of renewables,” Schick and Samayoa reported.

Bonneville, a federal entity, told the reporters it was unfair to compare it with regional operators.

“I think there’s something to that, but one of the points of the piece was — the fact that it’s apples and oranges is kind of the point, because so many people are saying that the way that these projects are funded in other regions allows for better maintenance and expansion of the grid,” Schick said during the webinar.

3. Track important facts and the reporting behind them.

Schick and Samayoa created a spreadsheet with key facts and the data supporting those facts. Part of their reporting included filing Freedom of Information Act requests to obtain data on how long energy projects stayed in Bonneville’s review queue, information that other energy entities made public.

When Bonneville pushed back on their reporting, such as the comparisons to regional operators, Schick and Samayoa were ready with their findings. That included independent analysts telling them that Bonneville’s recent infrastructure investments weren’t especially forward looking, but rather long overdue, Schick said.

“When we were vetting the project, we just wanted the actual assertion from the story in [the spreadsheet] and the data that was backing it up,” Schick said.

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The New York Times investigation that led to major legislation compensating wildfire fighters who had worked for years in toxic smoke and developed cancer and other debilitating illnesses began with a reporter’s observation: They weren’t wearing masks.

That led Hannah Dreier down a monthslong reporting journey as she conducted more than 400 interviews, made public records requests to eight government agencies, analyzed thousands of pages of medical and service records and created a database of every national wildfire fighting crew deployment over two decades.

Following the publication of Dreier’s series, “Exposed and Expendable,” Congress passed legislation requiring the government pay $450,000, tax-free, to federal wildland firefighters who become disabled or die from smoke-related cancers. The U.S. Forest Service also began providing masks to firefighters battling large fires.

For her reporting and impact, Dreier was awarded the 2026 Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting from the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, where The Journalist’s Resource is housed.

I recently spoke with Dreier for an hourlong, behind-the-scenes look at how this investigation came together. Watch the full video below and keep reading for five tips pulled from our conversation.

1. Simple questions can lead to big stories.

Back in the Times newsroom following maternity leave, Dreier noticed maskless firefighters on TV news coverage of the 2025 Los Angeles wildfires, despite official health guidance recommending that the public use masks or respirators.

Her question? Why.

“I thought that it might be worth looking into,” she said. “Why that was — why are firefighters out there with no protection? And what might the health risks be?”

Dreier expected a quick answer. Then she learned that Canada, Australia and Greece give wildfire fighters respirator masks with replaceable filters. Firefighters in countries using masks were not suffering from increased heatstroke, one reason the Forest Service gave Dreier for why they didn’t offer masks.

“Getting to that point took a while,” she said of confirming that other countries provide masks. “But once we figured that out, I thought, ‘This has got to be a bigger story.’”

Forest Service researchers had recommended the agency provide masks because of the negative health effects from smoke, she reported. Still, wildfire fighters in the U.S. were continuing to inhale poisons without protection. In fact, Forest Service wildfire fighters were “not allowed to wear masks on the front line, even if they want to,” Dreier wrote.

And the agency, which employs most wildfire fighters in the country, was in a media lockdown. No one there would help her connect with firefighters.

“I couldn’t get any access through the agency,” she said. “I realized I had to basically go out and just start meeting people where they worked.”

That meant going into wildfires herself to interview firefighters. That was possible thanks to a law in California that gives members of the press access to emergency areas.

2. Recast abstractions so they’re familiar to a broader audience.

Many Americans viewed the Los Angeles wildfires through images seen on T.V. news, as Dreier initially did. Those images, though arresting, were far away. For most, the wildfires were an abstraction being fought by anonymous men and women.

The investigation turned out to be a climate change story, Dreier said, with fires becoming more intense and fire season lasting longer as Earth warms.

It was also a workplace safety story, with many wildfire fighters loving the work despite facing immediate and long-term dangers and having limited other employment options.

Those two angles, climate change and workplace safety, gave the story heft and resonance that fleeting images on TV news couldn’t convey.

“The people doing this work are really proud, and it’s incredibly brave, important work,” Dreier said. “They also, to me, seem like people without a lot of options and who were pretty disempowered. These are basically kids who are not going to know what the chemical composition of smoke is unless their employer is telling them. And in this case, they just were not being told anything.”

She added:

“When I started talking to sick firefighters and they started telling me that even though they had severe lung damage, or even though they, you know, maybe had had a cancer diagnosis and were in remission, they were going to go back to the job because they needed the money. That’s when I realized how much this was really sort of a socioeconomic story in addition to everything else.”

3. Meeting sources where they are conveys authenticity.

It wasn’t easy for Dreier to build rapport with firefighters inside the wildfires.

They’d joke that if they talked to the press they’d have to buy the whole crew a beer, she said. She heard it over and over. But Dreier didn’t take the joke to mean the firefighters wouldn’t talk to her — just that they wouldn’t talk in front of their crew. So she’d try to get their phone numbers, then reach them when they were back at their camps.

“That was really helpful because it allowed me to have these more intimate conversations over the phone,” Dreier said. “I think people also respected that we had bothered to go all the way out to an active wildfire and been in this risky situation together.”

4. Intimate narratives enhance data and documents.

One of the first records requests Dreier put in was for national crew deployment data over two decades from the Forest Service. The agency refused. So Dreier went to the Interior Department instead, which had the same data and provided it.

“We needed to know who’s fighting fires,” Dreier said. “We needed to know, how often are they going out there? Just to get the universe of how many wildfire workers are there, and to be able to say that the reliance on contract crews has been skyrocketing.”

That led Dreier to Luis Martinez, an undocumented immigrant and contract firefighter facing cancer without health insurance while raising his 11-year-old son. Dreier was struck by Martinez’ story — by his dedication to the work and to his son, she said.

“You’re basically auditioning characters,” Dreier said of meeting sources. “You’re looking for the people who are going to be able to anchor a whole story. Part of what I’m doing is also keeping a running list of people who I think might be a main character.”

5. When you’re ready to publish, think about how to bring your reporting to the communities your sources are part of.

It’s common for wildfire fighters to take videos of themselves with billowing smoke in the background. The firefighters are usually young men on two-week deployments, Dreier said. The videos they make are one way they pass their downtime. Back at camp, they upload them to social media.

“They’re taking these videos of themselves with all this black smoke behind them, and they’re just taking it for fun,” Dreier said. “For me, I’m like, that is a documentation of an occupational hazard.”

The Times put together features explaining Dreier’s reporting that were made for social media platforms — mostly TikTok and Instagram — where firefighters virtually gather.

“People risked their careers, really, to talk to us and to go on the record,” Dreier said. “I wanted to do everything we could to make sure that this was also going back into that community.”

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This comic is co-published under a Creative Commons license by the Boston Globe Magazine and The Journalist’s Resource, a project of Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, which commissioned the work.

Interested in republishing this piece in print? Get the PDF.

Editor’s note:

In “Before the doctor sees it: Test results in the era of instant access,” Josh Neufeld uses comics journalism to highlight certain provisions in the 21st Century Cures Act. The comic draws on the findings of several academic research articles, along with additional sources — including interviews with researchers Bryan Steitz, an assistant professor in the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Vanderbilt University, and Liz Salmi, the communications and patient initiatives director at OpenNotes.

Steitz and Salmi are characters in the nonfiction comic, which discusses the implications of a rule that lets patients receive their medical test results as soon as they’re ready — often before their physicians have a chance to review them.

This piece adds to the growing field of graphic medicine, which uses comics as a tool to tell true stories about health care experiences, as well as to distill and discuss complex medical topics. 

Neufeld is the creator of several health care related comics, including “Vaccinated at the Ball: A True Story about Trusted Messengers,” which won the 2023 GMIC Award for Excellence in Graphic Medicine, Short Form, from the Graphic Medicine International Collective.

Source list

“Patient online record access in English primary care: Qualitative survey study of general practitioners’ views.” Charlotte Blease et al. Journal of Medical Internet Research, February 2023.

“As a journalist my partner fought for the facts. Yet the truth of his own medical condition was kept from him.” Charlotte Blease. The Guardian, April 2023.

“Leveraging large language models for generating responses to patient messages — a subjective analysis.” Siru Liu et al. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, March 2024.

“Knowing what the doctor knows.” Alvin Powell. Harvard Gazette, November 2022.

“Association of immediate release of test results to patients with implications for clinical workflow.” Bryan D. Steitz et al. JAMA Network Open, October 2021.

“Perspectives of patients about immediate access to test results through an online patient portal.” Bryan D. Steitz et al. JAMA Network Open, March 2023.

“The 21st Century Cures Act requires that patients receive medical results immediately — and new research shows patients prefer it that way.” Bryan D. Steitz and C. T. Lin. The Conversation, July 2023.

“Impact of notification policy on patient-before-clinician review of immediately released test results.” Bryan D. Steitz et al. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, July 2023.

“Repeated access to patient portal while awaiting test results and patient-initiated messaging.” Bryan D. Steitz, Robert W. Turer and Liz Salmi. JAMA Network Open, April 2025.

“HHS announces crackdown on health data blocking.” U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Press release, September 2025.

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The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is an independent bureau that is part of the Federal Reserve System. It was created in 2010 in the wake of the Great Recession to provide federal oversight of consumer financial products and services, in order to prevent another economic crisis.

While the agency has been in turmoil under the second Trump administration, it remains a rich source of data, particularly on consumer complaints, for reporters covering personal finance and consumer issues.

We recently convened a hands-on demo of CFPB data with Erie Meyer, who served as the CFPB’s first chief technologist from 2021 to 2025, and Joel Jacobs, a data reporter for ProPublica who has mined the consumer complaint database for stories.

“Credit reporting complaints — people complaining about potential issues with their credit reports — have been exploding in recent years,” Jacobs said. “They’re really, by far, the most common complaint in the CFPB database.”

A brief recent history of the CFPB

The database is active and available, though most of the agency’s supervisory activities, such as suing companies for illegal activities surfaced through complaints, have halted.

“There is currently a stand-down order and a way to report staffers at the CFPB if they’re caught doing their jobs,” Meyer said. “So the complaint system is working but the internal parts of the CFPB that are supposed to use the complaints are not working — and is one of the reasons why it’s so important that states and other enforcers are using this data.”

This cheat sheet Meyer created will help you find the CFPB data you need.

The CFPB is an executive branch agency, and the president appoints its director, who must be confirmed by the Senate.

Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget, has served as acting CFPB director since February 2025. Prior to President Donald Trump’s second administration, Vought was best known as a primary author of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 document, widely seen as a blueprint for Trump to implement severe cuts to federal government agencies and services.

Last month, the Trump administration announced a plan to reduce headcount at the agency from 1,700 to 500. Ken Sweet of the Associated Press wrote that the CFPB has “largely become inoperable.” Trump previously tried to reduce staff to 200, a move blocked by a federal judge last April.

If you don’t have time to watch the full webinar, keep reading for key takeaways, including insights about the consumer complaint database, spotting trends in the data and more.

And here’s a bonus tip: If you’re hitting resistance from the press office, that doesn’t mean every part of the agency is unhelpful. The staffers in the CFPB Freedom of Information Act office, for example, are dedicated and responsive, Meyer said.

1. CFPB data remains trustworthy and contains rich narratives.

Despite the staffing upheaval at the CFPB, the agency’s consumer complaint data is up and running.

Those complaint records are not like the online rants of someone with an unverified grudge against a business. Companies confirm that the complainant was their customer before complaints are published, Meyer said. The CFPB also gets consent from customers to publish their complaint narratives.

“Cranky people — you would imagine you would have an equal distribution of those types of people in the complaint data — so it is a really interesting view of confirmed customers and what their experiences are with these financial products,” Meyer said.

To search the database, Meyer advises thinking of terms that non-journalists would use.

For example, to identify complaints from people with lower incomes who might be having financial difficulties, search “groceries,” “bread,” “milk” or “formula.”

“You’ll see people who are really struggling just to survive describe what their interactions are with the financial system, because they say, ‘I was trying to buy milk, and all of my cards were turned off, and I couldn’t get a human on the phone to tell me why,’” Meyer said.

2. Journalists can use CFPB data to find stories and hold financial institutions accountable.

If you have coding experience, Jacobs recommends downloading the complaint data in bulk and using languages like Python, R or SQL to explore it. In looking at the data over several years, Jacobs identified two major credit bureaus with a lower share of complaints resolved in favor of customers since the second Trump administration.

But you don’t have to have coding experience to find trends in the data, he said. The CFPB also provides a dashboard of aggregate information with graphics and other visualizations, which are “a great way to do initial explorations,” Jacobs said.

The narrative elements of the complaint data are particularly unique and useful. In reporting a story about Tribal lenders charging triple-digit interest rates, Jacobs used the narratives to identify how those rates were harming customers.

He also noted that financial firms may use different company names for different financial products, or that consumer complaints in other databases might use slightly different spellings for the same company name — but within the CFPB data, the agency attempts to standardize company names.

Standardization of company names “helps a lot as you you’re doing data explorations,” Jacobs said. “This really helped us identify the big players, potential big players, in this in this space.”

3. The CFPB data is great for anecdotes — but lawsuits are better for finding sources.

CFPB data is anonymized. Customer complaint narratives are descriptively rich, but you won’t find sources through them. But bankruptcy cases and lawsuits over unresolved issues are great ways to find contact information for lawyers and, ultimately, their clients.

Take the lead anecdote in Jacobs’ story on credit bureaus dismissing consumer complaints — an accountant in Colorado beset by a lingering $240,000 student loan that wasn’t hers.

“Contacting attorneys is actually how I found her, because she ended up suing the credit bureaus because she couldn’t get her issue fixed,” Jacobs said.

4. State-level enforcement is more important than ever for accountability journalism.

With CFPB enforcement drying up under the current administration, journalists should turn to states as another source of data and to understand local enforcement trends.

These may include municipal consumer protection agencies and state attorney general offices. There are 176 federal and state agencies that handle consumer complaints in the U.S., according to a December 2025 analysis from Meyer. Many of them, especially state attorneys general, still rely on CFPB data to identify illegal activities in their states.

“Twenty-four different state attorneys general have sued the CFPB to have them keep this system operating, because they all rely on our complaint database for their enforcement,” Meyer said.

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As protesters gathered earlier this year in Minneapolis and other U.S. cities in opposition to federal immigration policy, news organizations like 404 Media revealed the tools and tactics that federal officers and agents have been using to monitor citizens and non-citizens.

While a small number of news outlets have done extensive investigations, there remains much reporting left to do on federal surveillance capabilities, according to two experts we recently spoke with — Marianna Poyares, a fellow at the Center on Privacy and Technology at Georgetown Law, and Rachel Levinson-Waldman, director of the Liberty and National Security Program at New York University’s Brennan Center.

This explainer will get reporters up to speed on some of the technologies federal officers and agents have access to that can read license plates, recognize faces and query databases.

There are two main federal agencies that enforce immigration laws: Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection, which are both under the Department of Homeland Security.

One important distinction between those agencies is that, although they often work together, they have different mandates for where they operate. CBP officers and agents generally enforce immigration laws and can conduct warrantless stops, by federal law, within 100 air miles of U.S. land borders and coastlines. They also operate at more than 300 land, air and sea ports.

ICE officers and agents enforce immigration laws within the country. When asking sources questions about ICE and CBP, it’s helpful to know the mandates and authorities of those agencies, and to be precise about the agency you’re talking about.

Keep reading for insights on surveillance technologies, how local and federal agents cooperate and constitutional considerations at play. Plus, five questions based on our interviews with Poyares and Levinson-Waldman that journalists can use to kick off investigations into federal surveillance in their coverage area.

Government data infrastructure has taken decades to develop. AI is now helping power it

License plate readers. Facial recognition apps. Interconnected databases. These tools and systems are the product of decades of government and private investment. They exist because of policy and procurement choices made over decades — choices that journalists can scrutinize.

For example, federal immigration agents have reportedly used facial recognition software called Mobile Fortify to scan the faces of both citizens and non-citizens.

“Mobile Fortify runs on a mobile device and can capture facial images, contactless fingerprints, and photographs of identity documents,” according to a DHS inventory of artificial intelligence technologies its agencies use or are considering using, published in January 2026.

The app has been used more than 100,000 times since it was launched in June 2025, according to court documents cited by Mother Jones. According to the DHS inventory, the government purchased the Mobile Fortify system from NEC, a multinational corporation headquartered in Japan.

After a federal agent captures faces, fingerprints or documents using Mobile Fortify, the app uses AI models owned by CBP to match that information to government records, according to the inventory.

“This administration especially has made clear that it wants very few restrictions on how it uses AI in any number of realms,” Levinson-Waldman says.

The Department of Homeland Security is also working toward a unified database of biometric data, including faces and fingerprints, according to Wired. In December 2025, DHS authorized CBP officers to collect facial biometric data from noncitizens entering or leaving airports, land ports and sea ports.

Systems like Mobile Fortify “are only able to operate in the way that they operate because they rely on a larger data sharing and data analytics infrastructure,” Poyares says. “That has been steadily growing for at least the last 20 years. I think this is a particularly important element that sometimes folks lose sight of.”

Some local law enforcement agencies are sharing license plate scanning data with federal agents, according to research and reporting.

A company called Flock Safety produces many of the cameras that scan license plates on U.S. streets. Local law enforcement agencies often use the information to solve crimes. Flock has contracts with more than 5,000 law enforcement agencies, according to NPR.

404 Media last year documented more than 4,000 instances of local and state police looking up Flock data on behalf of federal law enforcement. Reporters Jason Koebler and Joseph Cox write that, “while Flock does not have a contract with ICE, the agency sources data from Flock’s cameras by making requests to local law enforcement.”

In a January 2026 statement, the company said “ICE does not have direct access to Flock cameras, systems, or data, unless the agencies that control their data expressly and deliberately allow it.”

Researchers from the University of Washington used records requests to identify eight law enforcement agencies from that state that allowed U.S. Border Patrol access to their Flock license plate reader networks during 2025.

“[T]he fact that the searches occurred raises important questions about compliance with Washington’s Keep Washington Working law, which bars law enforcement agencies across the state from dedicating local resources for purposes of civil immigration enforcement,” the researchers write in an October 2025 report on their findings.

How law enforcement and federal immigration agents cooperate

Local law enforcement officers, like police and detectives, enforce criminal law.

Federal agents doing immigration enforcement mostly enforce civil law. Someone without proper documentation to be in the U.S. may face civil penalties, such as removal from the country, but not jail time.

(Despite this, ICE was holding nearly 70,000 people awaiting proceedings or removal in “non-punitive” detention centers in February. Nearly three-quarters did not have a criminal conviction, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse.)

Those caught entering or re-entering the country after deportation can face criminal charges. But removal hearings before a judge are civil proceedings, regardless of any separate criminal charges. Immigrants have a right to a removal hearing and have a right to hire a lawyer, but they don’t have the right to a court-appointed attorney during a removal hearing, according to a Brennan Center explainer.

“A full removal hearing about whether an immigrant is removable and eligible for a form of relief like asylum, for example, can be concluded in as little as two or three hours,” writes Margy O’Herron, a senior fellow at Brennan. “Removal hearings may take place in person at an immigration court, or some or all of the parties may appear remotely via video conference. Removal hearings generally are open to the public and the press.”

States, counties and cities that have policies limiting local law enforcement cooperation with federal immigration authorities are often called sanctuary jurisdictions. Policies vary by jurisdiction.

The Department of Justice, following an April 2025 executive order, published a list of states, cities and counties it considers sanctuary jurisdictions. The Department of Homeland Security last May published a more extensive list of sanctuary jurisdictions. That list has since been taken down, but it’s archived here.

Outside of sanctuary jurisdictions, local-federal cooperation has deepened in recent years across presidential administrations with 287(g) agreements. The program was pared back under President Barack Obama, then revitalized during the terms of President Donald Trump.

The agreements allow state and local law agencies to “perform a function of an immigration officer,” under the Immigration and Nationality Act. That specific authority is executed under what are known as task force agreements. ICE has task force agreements with more than 1,000 agencies ​in 32 ​states ​and ​two territories, according to agency data.

The Fourth Amendment and the data broker loophole

The Fourth Amendment provides the “right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.”

Courts have historically interpreted the Fourth Amendment as allowing for a reasonable expectation of privacy. That expectation does not, however, extend to public spaces.

For example, if you’re walking down a public street, someone else can see which direction you’re headed. Anything an average person could observe in public, so can a law enforcement officer, Levinson-Waldman explains.

Police typically can sit in their vehicles on a public street and stake out your home without a warrant, for example. But police departments are limited by internal rules and resources — there aren’t enough officers to stake out everyone.

“When you have the kind of technology — whether it’s GPS trackers or all of the cell phone location information or other kinds of things that enable very easy, very cheap surveillance — it basically evades all of those structural limitations, and at that point does implicate Fourth Amendment protections,” Levinson-Waldman says. “I think there are good arguments that at least some of these kinds of activities violate the Fourth Amendment, but the case law is very much in development.”

Combined with the general lack of privacy in public there is something called the data broker loophole. While there are federal protections for certain things, like medical and financial data, there are no broad data privacy protections in the U.S.

That means app companies can and do collect huge amounts of data from users, which the federal government then buys from data brokers that compile that information.

“Although we and other organizations have argued that effectively enables a runaround around the Fourth Amendment,” Levinson-Waldman says, “there’s no law prohibiting it, by and large, and the Supreme Court hasn’t yet said that that’s unconstitutional. Those things in combination really enable a lot of this activity.”

Data brokers with reported government contracts include PenLink, Thomson Reuters, and Clearview AI. Journalists and anyone else can use SAM.gov to start hunting down contracts between data brokers and government entities.

“I really think that the media has, right now, a very, very important role to play,” Poyares says.

5 questions journalists can pursue

Which firms are behind surveillance technologies?

Many surveillance technologies are contracted and not created in-house at government agencies. The DHS AI Use Case Inventory Library is a good place to start looking into which companies are making surveillance technologies.

Why is data being gathered?

How long is data being retained — and what information systems at other agencies is data being fed into?

Which specific technologies are being used to identify protesters and observers?

When possible, identify and report on the apps and other technologies that federal agents are using in public during protests and other gatherings.

How do the technologies work in the field?

Does an agent using an app to identify people in public need to be up close to someone, or can these apps be used from points further away, such as across a street?

When drones are used to surveil protesters, what software do they run on and where is information retained?

“Where else was CBP using drones?” Levinson-Waldman asks. “What authority did CBP have in the first place to collect that information? I think there is still probably a lot to look into on the drones front.”

Further reading

Thoughtlessness in the Age of Homeland Security: Race, Surveillance, and Bureaucratic Violence in Immigration Enforcement
Dennis Young. Polity, January 2025.

American Dragnet: Data-Driven Deportation in the 21st Century
Georgetown Law Center on Privacy & Technology. Updated May 2025.

Biometric Tracking and Immigration
Elena Roe. Virginia Tech case study, June 2025.

The Impacts of Restrictive Interior Immigration Enforcement on Undocumented Immigrants’ Decisions: Self-Deportation Out of Fear?
Jihye Park and Rene Rocha. The Sociological Quarterly, September 2025.

Raiding the Genome: How the United States Government Is Abusing Its Immigration Powers to Amass DNA for Future Policing
Georgetown Law Center on Privacy & Technology. September 2025.

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SAM.gov, the federal government’s System for Award Management, tracks billions of dollars in contracts and subcontracts, the companies and organizations that receive them, and entities barred or suspended from doing business with the government.

But the system, which incorporates several retired databases on government procurement, can be daunting to use — even for journalists who have some familiarity with it.

That’s why last week The Journalist’s Resource convened a hands-on demo, which I moderated, with David Zvenyach. He’s a software developer, lawyer and product strategist who has held executive roles in three presidential administrations, including as Executive Director of 18F and Director of the Government Services Administration’s Technology Transformation Services.

Understanding how to access data in SAM.gov is the first step for any public interest journalist who wants to know how federal dollars flow to business interests in the U.S., both locally and nationally.

More than 150 of you attended, and Zvenyach answered many of your questions.

The full video below is well worth the hour. But if you don’t have time, read on for three quick takeaways.

1. Follow the codes

You’ll find several numerical codes when working with data from SAM.gov, but there are two in particular that will help you understand what the government is buying.

North American Industry Classification System codes — NAICS codes — identify the industry that a business selling something to the government is in. It’s a standardized system across federal government purchasing.

Look up individual NAICS codes via the Census Bureau.

Code 334511, for example, includes firms that make search, detection, navigation, guidance, aeronautical and nautical systems and instruments.

The other code type to know is product and service codes. Those are especially useful for understanding what the government is buying, Zvenyach said.

Find individual product and service codes in the product and service code manual, which includes specifics on the types of goods, services, research or development the government bought under that code.

Code 1410, for example, includes “complete drones, initially designed as missiles, but converted to drone use,” according to the manual.

2. Keep an eye out for errors in the data.

While data accessed from SAM.gov contains rich and specific information on government purchasing, there may be errors.

Which begs the question: Can the data really be trusted?

“I’m the sort of person that lives and eats and breathes this data every day,” Zvenyach said. “The short answer is kind of — but kind of not.”

During the webinar he showed a subcontract that was entered into SAM.gov as beginning in 2106. An unlikely start year, being 90 years in the future. The real year was probably intended to be 2016, Zvenyach noted. Errors don’t mean journalists shouldn’t use the data, but journalists — or anyone working with it — need to know that errors are lurking.

“That’s part of this process, is just knowing that the data is imperfect,” Zvenyach said. “It’s manually entered a lot of the time.”

See more examples of errors within SAM.gov on Zvyenyach’s Gov422 blog.

3. Use SAM.gov and USAspending in tandem.

SAM.gov is good for initially identifying contracts, while USAspending is good for digging deeper into those contracts, Zvenyach said. With USAspending, you can see outlays — which is how much the government has actually spent under a contract.

USAspending also allows for searching for contracts by geography and by various codes, including NAICS and product and service codes. You can find how much a company has received in government contracts over time, as well as recent executive compensation figures in certain cases. And there’s information on grant awards that government agencies have given.

“One of the questions that people ask is, how can you kind of get a sense of how much the government is spending, and which agencies, and who’s winning?” Zvenyach said. “USAspending is a really good source for that sort of aggregate information.”

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About 78% of Americans subscribe to broadband internet at home, while 16% only access the internet on their phones, according to polling from Pew Research Center. Americans living in rural areas are especially likely to lack broadband. This piece will help you understand what’s holding back broadband deployment and what states are doing to improve access. It was originally published by The Pew Charitable Trusts and is edited here for style.  

The federal $42 billion Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment program aims to expand high-speed internet access nationwide — and it dominated broadband policy headlines in 2025.

But state legislatures were also active in their efforts to bridge the digital divide.

Combined, states passed over 160 broadband-related bills and resolutions last year. These included regulatory changes, expanding the authority of their broadband offices and addressing internet affordability for low-income customers.

As states prepare to deploy BEAD projects and navigate new uncertainties from federal policymakers — including the potential withholding of some funding from states that have passed certain regulations on artificial intelligence — it will be increasingly important for states to balance administering federal funding while advancing their own priorities.

Following the changes made to the BEAD program in June 2025 — shifting which locations are eligible for funding and the type of networks that can be awarded — state-funded programs may have an increasingly important role to play in complementing federal efforts to ensure that all communities are connected.

Bills passed in 2025 provide early insight as to how state legislatures may consider managing these challenges in 2026 and beyond.

Broadband deployment barriers

In the long preparation process for BEAD, a program authorized as part of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021, state broadband offices identified several barriers that could prevent them from achieving the goals of the program on time and on budget.

Two leading barriers emerged:

• Federal, state, local and private permitting processes for constructing new high-speed internet networks.
• A lack of trained workers.

Given that both challenges can involve federal, state, and local governments, they cannot be fully addressed at the state level. Still, there was progress last year.

Legislatures in Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, and West Virginia updated their rules governing the broadband construction process to set new timelines and fee structures for permit applications.

In Texas and Kentucky, state legislatures approved funding for new broadband workforce training programs. The legislators in Texas put $5 million toward an apprenticeship program to reimburse participating broadband utility engineering and construction companies. In Kentucky, legislators earmarked $6 million for hiring workers to replace utility poles and manage permits, funding originally passed in 2024 and carried forward in 2025.

As states prepare for their BEAD projects, they’re also administering their own state-funded programs, including those aimed at filling gaps in federal policies, and targeting their own deployment priorities. Pew’s analysis of the 2025 state legislative sessions found that 26 states allocated a combined $1.3 billion to a variety of broadband programs, including new or upgraded networks for homes, small businesses, schools, libraries and other government buildings.

Virginia appropriated $50 million in 2025 to the Virginia Telecommunication Initiative, which has awarded broadband grants since 2017. The 2025 allocation commits funding for new deployment projects administered by the initiative, as well as to accelerate deployment of projects funded by the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, which must be completed by the end of 2026. The legislature earmarked $30 million of these funds for additional construction costs, such as permitting fees, for projects that may be at risk of missing the 2026 project deadline.

The Minnesota state legislature also approved $50 million for deployment grants in 2025. Minnesota has operated a state broadband expansion program since 2014 and the state has awarded over $400 million, funding broadband connections to nearly 120,000 homes and businesses.

Unlike the federal programs that states administer, state-level programs can be designed to address specific priorities or needs in a given state or community, such as increasing market competition among internet service providers in certain areas or funding the deployment of networks capable of reaching speeds higher than the minimum federal standards.

For example, under Mississippi’s Broadband Expansion and Accessibility program, the state statute defines communities that have access to service only from satellite providers or mobile wireless networks as “critical need areas” and therefore eligible for project funding.

Some states, including California and Maine, also used their own funding to cover the final costs of connecting homes to existing networks, frequently referred to as “line extensions.”

State broadband office responsibilities

As state broadband offices continue to administer federal and state funding, their functional capacity and authority are key factors in their ability to successfully administer these complex programs.

In 2025, 13 states dedicated new administrative funding for their broadband offices, charging them with new responsibilities such as collecting data from internet providers on subscriptions and service areas, publicly reporting on the progress being made by their programs, and offering enhanced resources to support network construction.

For example, a new law in Colorado requires the state’s broadband office to expand its technical assistance offerings to help internet providers to apply for and manage grants, including resources for the deployment of new wireless services.

Broadband affordability

The bulk of federal funding in recent years has focused on building networks to reach communities without access to high-speed internet service.

However, affordability of service remains a barrier to closing the digital divide — high costs of monthly service can prevent a household from subscribing or staying connected.

These factors, referred to as “adoption rates” and “subscriber churn,” can also determine if providers deliver new or upgraded service in higher-cost communities. In 2025, several state legislatures took steps to address this challenge.

Oregon passed legislation allowing the Oregon Public Utility Commission to increase the support offered to low-income customers through its state Lifeline program. At the federal level, the Lifeline program offers a $9.25 monthly discount on phone and internet bills for eligible low-income households.

Under the Oregon bill, eligible households there can receive an additional broadband discount of up to $24.95 per month, or $49.95 on Tribal lands — and, for the first time, receive a $100 discount when buying a computer.

In February 2026, two other states adopted similar policies: California launched a new home broadband pilot and New Mexico passed its Low-Income Telecommunications Assistance Program.

Based on Pew’s analysis, there are now nine states that increase the discount their residents can receive from the federal Lifeline program on internet services.

Connecticut also instituted new affordability requirements for providers. Passed in June 2025, its legislation requires providers that contract with the state to offer a low-cost plan of $40 per month or less to eligible households. The requirement will take effect on Oct. 1 this year.

In January 2025, a similar law went into effect in New York, which requires providers serving more than 20,000 customers throughout the state to offer service at $15 or $20 per month. Prices are based on minimum speeds and available to low-income and other qualified households.

Looking ahead

Several state legislatures are actively working on broadband issues in 2026.

These include bills introduced in Maryland and Illinois to address affordability; proposals to change the regulatory landscape for providers in West Virginia; and an extension of Missouri’s broadband program, which is set to sunset in 2027.

States are also already weighing bills that could alleviate future challenges for their BEAD projects, including a bill in Kansas adjusting the process for when broadband projects intersect with railroad crossings and a bill in New York on how utility poles are managed.

The post The role of state broadband policy in 2026 appeared first on The Journalist's Resource.

U.S. and Israeli attacks in Iran have reportedly killed more than 1,300 people since the war there began late last month. Missile and drone strikes have destroyed or closed significant energy infrastructure across the Middle East. The effective closing of the Strait of Hormuz — 20% of the world’s oil supply passes through it — has meant rising energy prices for U.S. and other consumers.

“The war in the Middle East is creating the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market,” according to a recent report from the International Energy Agency.

On March 16, as the war entered its third week, The Journalist’s Resource and EconoFact convened a panel to discuss the ongoing economic consequences of the Iran war. I moderated the discussion with:

• Binyamin Applebaum, lead writer on economics and business for the New York Times editorial board.
• Nicholas Bloom, the William D. Eberle Professor of Economics at Stanford University.
• Michael Klein, the William L. Clayton Professor of International Economic Affairs at Tufts University and Executive Editor of EconoFact.
• David G. Victor, distinguished professor of innovation and public policy at the University of California San Diego.

Our wide-ranging conversation touched on economic uncertainty, windfalls for oil producers, how business leaders may be communicating with the administration of President Donald Trump, and even artificial intelligence — insights that local reporters and independent journalists can adapt for their audiences.

Here’s one story idea: Whether business uncertainty spurred by the war is slowing hiring within your coverage area. Watch the video and keep reading for takeaways from our discussion.

The war could increase uncertainty in U.S. hiring

The early days of the COVID pandemic in the U.S. were marked by the Great Resignation — workers leaving their jobs at high rates for a range of reasons, from low pay to a lack of advancement opportunities to feeling disrespected at work.

Now, business uncertainty is fueling the opposite — the Great Hesitation, some are calling it — marked by slow hiring processes and high standards for job candidates. The reason, Bloom explained, is that when businesses are uncertain about the future they’re hesitant to invest the time and money it takes to hire someone, unless they think a candidate is a perfect fit.

Still, the labor data isn’t all doom and gloom, Bloom said. For example, the unemployment rate remains historically low at 4.4%.

But job growth is also low, in part because of immigration crackdowns. And adding more uncertainty to that equation isn’t going to help hiring prospects for those on the job market.

“What will the event in Iran do? I think it’s going to make that worse,” Bloom said.

With energy prices rising due to the war, short-term inflation expectations are also up, as Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell explained during remarks on March 18.

Interest rates tend to follow inflation, Klein said during the webinar. As the cost of borrowing increases, businesses turn reluctant to invest and expand their workforces.

“Financial conditions probably will deteriorate, would be my guess, based on what’s going on right now,” Klein said.

Oil producers are seeing windfalls

With Brent crude trading at triple-digits per barrel and U.S. gas prices nearing an average of $4 per gallon, oil producers have reaped historic market valuations since the start of the Iran war.

“You’ve seen, just in the last few days, reporting on the incredible increase in valuation of essentially all the Western oil companies,” Victor said. “Anyone who’s not too tethered to getting their product out of the Gulf — and that includes Texas. So there’s going to be a huge windfall.”

Other oil producing countries — including those unfriendly to U.S. interests — also stand to benefit from the choking off of oil shipping through the Strait of Hormuz.

“Russia is going to be a big beneficiary of this,” Klein said. “Not only because of the increase in the price of oil but the relaxation of sanctions on Russian oil.”

If business leaders are discontent over the war, they’re communicating it behind the scenes

It might seem that the oil industry would be, if not thrilled about the war, then perhaps content, considering that the price of their product has significantly risen.

But oil companies think long-run, Victor said. They’re concerned with political support for the industry across multiple administrations, along with public backlash.

The same is true of companies across many industries. When companies communicate concerns with this administration in particular, they tend to tread lightly, Applebaum explained.   

“I’ve spent a fair amount of time talking to business leaders about their interactions with the Trump administration, and the overarching theme that you hear repeatedly is that what they learned during the first Trump administration is that there is almost zero value, and indeed significant negative value, in confronting the president or in criticizing him publicly,” Applebaum said.

Instead, he said, when business leaders have issues with administration policies or actions, they tend not to communicate those publicly, but rather behind the scenes through intermediaries.

“That is why you are not seeing corporate executives talking about this in public,” Applebaum said.

The war could slow economic growth from AI

Infrastructure and software behind the artificial intelligence boom are helping spur economic growth in the U.S., according to a recent analysis from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. AI data centers that require huge computing power are a major part of AI-related infrastructure growth.

The energy needs of AI data centers are well documented. An AI data center may consume as much electricity as 100,000 households, according to the International Energy Agency.

“If energy prices go up there’s more political pressure to push back on AI and its energy use, and that could be another big issue for U.S. growth,” Bloom said. “That I could see coming reasonably soon.”

The post 4 takeaways on the economic consequences of the Iran war appeared first on The Journalist's Resource.