Exhausted from a reporting trip in New Mexico for VICE Media, she was pulled into secondary questioning without explanation. The sterile walls of the holding room and the scrutinizing eyes of officials had become all too familiar — a harrowing routine born from the chilling shadow of the “Muslim Ban” during President Donald Trump’s first administration.

“It was pretty frightening because no one knew where I was,” Ahmad recalled of her six-hour ordeal. “You’re not allowed to use your phone in that area.”

Although Ahmad became a U.S. citizen at 16 after immigrating from Pakistan, her story highlights the precarious reality faced by many international and immigrant journalists in the U.S. For them, challenges go far beyond airport detentions: securing work visas, navigating racial discrimination and dealing with immigration policy uncertainties are daily hurdles.

Dealing with unknowns

“There are a lot of unknowns right now for American press freedom,” said Clayton Weimers, executive director of Reporters Without Borders USA, an international non-profit promoting freedom of information since 1985. “Trump has made big pronouncements about targeting journalists, and we are concerned that tightening immigration rules could further impact exiled journalists seeking refugee status.”

Weimers emphasized that the U.S. admits only a limited number of international journalists, and the process for granting emergency visas to those in danger is often slow and burdensome. For those facing immediate threats, navigating these lengthy procedures can be an insurmountable challenge.

According to the U.S. Department of State’s Foreign Press Centers in New York and Washington, D.C., approximately 1,500 correspondents from 92 countries currently work in the U.S. However, this figure excludes the thousands of foreign-born journalists working on other visa types in the highly competitive American news industry. These professionals often face even greater uncertainty due to the precarious nature of temporary visas.

Lorenz Wolffers, a New York City-based attorney who has assisted many immigrant journalists with visa applications, highlighted a troubling precedent: “Toward the end of Trump’s first term, a proposed rule suggested limiting the stay of foreign journalists with I-visas to a maximum of 240 days, as opposed to unlimited time traditionally. This would have required foreign journalists to leave the U.S. every eight months or navigate a complex and costly extension process. Thankfully, this rule was never implemented.”

Reporting Under Scrutiny

Even as a U.S. citizen, Ahmad’s Pakistani origins subjected her to heightened inspections under the Trump administration’s travel restrictions. She recalled that being detained wasn’t an isolated incident — it was a pattern.

Now an editor for The New York Times’ opinion section, Ahmad is committed to working on critical stories drawing from her own upbringing. Her 2021 op-ed, “To Be Young, American, and Muslim After 9/11,” reflected on her experience in the shadow of 9/11 and the “War on Terror.” She interviewed dozens of American Muslims and illuminated the challenges of navigating dual identities amid growing Islamophobia. “Hate crimes against Muslim Americans have yet to drop to what they were before the attacks,” she wrote, linking the lingering impact of 9/11 to ongoing systemic biases.

Despite these challenges, Ahmad continues to champion nuanced storytelling and encourages preparedness for journalists working in high-risk environments. “Even at major outlets like The Times, freelancers working in conflict zones are required to have hostile environment training,” she said. “It’s a liability issue, and it makes you a better candidate for assignments.”

Ahmad also shared practical safety measures she has implemented during her reporting in Pakistan. She established a straightforward check-in system with friends and family during her time there and the system proved effective, as someone outside her immediate area would reach out three to four times a day to confirm her safety. She also emphasized the importance of having a backup plan, which includes sharing contact information with key individuals like drivers, lawyers or trusted nonprofits, to ensure support in case of emergencies.

Work for an Employer Who is Actually Inclusive

Shihao Feng, a real estate reporter at global financial publication PERE Credit, navigated the competitive U.S. job market to secure an O-1 visa — an “extraordinary ability” work visa. After graduating from Columbia Journalism School in 2022, Feng faced the formidable task of finding an employer willing to sponsor her H-1B visa, a temporary visa that allows employers to hire foreign workers in specialty occupations, amidst the highly competitive U.S. job market.

“I remember writing over 20 tailored cover letters upon graduation, but many employers would reject me immediately when they found out I am not a U.S. citizen,” Feng shared.  In 2023, the success rate for the H-1B lottery was just 26% according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, reflecting the growing challenges for skilled foreign workers.

When her H-1B attempts failed, Feng pivoted to the O-1 visa, which required her to demonstrate her “extraordinary ability” as a journalist in the U.S. through substantial documentation. “I collected bylines, secured nine recommendation letters, and spent over $10,000,” she recalled. “It was exhausting and felt like a gamble at every stage.”

While waiting for her O-1 visa to be approved, Feng worked remotely from her company’s Asia office. “It was challenging to juggle time zones and uncertainty, but I was fortunate to have an employer that supported me throughout the process.” She was fortunate to eventually find a company willing to support her H-1B application.

Feng’s experience showcases the importance of working with inclusive employers who value diversity and are willing to navigate complex immigration processes. For journalists in similar situations, Feng advises researching visa options thoroughly, securing a robust portfolio and advocating for yourself during hiring discussions.

“Employers who genuinely support diversity make a world of difference,” she said.

Local Journalism with Global Roots

Drawn to the United States by her passion for storytelling, Maria Palma left her family in Chile, to pursue a master’s degree in journalism at the University of Nevada. After graduating in 2022, she also faced the daunting challenge of finding a sponsor for her H-1B visa.

Growing up in a middle-class Spanish-speaking household, Palma experienced firsthand the challenges of financial and social limitations. “My parents struggled with debt and worked tirelessly to make ends meet,” she said “It taught me to dream big and work even harder to make those dreams a reality.”

For regional outlets, visa sponsorship is rare, but KUNR Public Radio took a chance on Palma. At KUNR, Palma found her calling in reporting for underrepresented communities — a mission shaped by her own immigrant experience. In March 2024, she spearheaded the launch of the station’s first Spanish-language newscast, translating and delivering vital news to Nevada’s Hispanic population. “Reporting in Spanish is more than a job — it’s my way of giving back,” she explained. “It ensures that everyone, regardless of language barriers, has access to the information they need.”

Palma’s newscast has become a lifeline for the community, where she addressed issues from local policy changes to health resources. “I’ve interviewed federal officials, state senators and community leaders, bridging the gap between policymakers and the people they serve,” she shared. “Every story I tell is a reflection of the sacrifices immigrants make and the resilience they show.”

Yet, her path hasn’t been without challenges. “The uncertainty of an H-1B visa is always in the back of my mind,” Palma admitted. “You build a life, make friends, start a career, but there’s always that sour feeling of impermanence.”

Looking ahead, Palma recently took on a new role as a Tahoe reporter for KUNR, broadening her scope while continuing to serve underrepresented communities. She highlights that structural changes are essential to ensure international journalists can thrive. “There’s a lack of dedicated support systems for journalists on visas,” she said. While informal groups on platforms like Facebook offer advice, she believes more accessible and affordable resources, such as pro bono immigration services or professional networks, are crucial.

Palma advocates for more media organizations to open doors for international journalists, emphasizing that journalism demands unique skills, like multilingual abilities and cultural competence. “The demand in hiring internationals shouldn’t just be in STEM,” she said. “Journalism plays a vital role in society, and it’s time for institutions to reflect that by actively supporting global talent.

Explore All Visa Options and Seek Early Guidance

Alejandro Filippa, an immigration attorney and co-founder of Lehach & Filippa LLP, has worked extensively with journalists navigating the visa process. “Many journalists default to the H-1B visa, which has a lower success rate these days, but it’s important to explore all options,” Filippa explained. “The O-1B visa, for individuals with extraordinary ability, is often overlooked but can be a viable path for many media professionals. However, it requires substantial evidence of achievement and strong recommendation letters.”

Filippa also noted a concerning trend: “Under the previous administration, standards for visas like the O-1 became more stringent. What was considered ‘extraordinary’ in 2022 might not be viewed the same way today. This underscores the importance of having tailored legal guidance.”

Filippa says that restrictive visa policies pose a significant threat to press freedom. Such restrictions can hinder the diversity of voices and perspectives in U.S.-based journalism.

“Journalists reporting on critical issues often offer unique insights and firsthand experiences that enrich the media landscape,” he said. “When these reporters encounter obstacles to entering or remaining in the U.S., it not only limits their ability to work freely but also denies audiences access to varied and essential viewpoints. Simplifying and increasing transparency in the visa process could help the U.S. reaffirm its dedication to press freedom and democratic values worldwide.”

Xintian Tina Wang’s work has appeared in TIME, ARTNews, HuffPost, Teen Vogue, VICE, Observer, Inc. Magazine and more. Her documentary “Size 22” won the Best Short Documentary at Boston Short Film Festival. Her photography work is featured in TIME, HuffPost, The Sunday Times, Air Mail and more. She is also the director of events at the Asian American Journalist Association.

And then, something happened. Around 2023, millennials sought out the medium, gave it their kiss of approval, and by the following year, print magazines seem to be rising — both in new and revived incarnations.

Of course, that’s cold comfort to former employees of major publishers such as Hearst and Dotdash Meredith; in January 2025 alone Dotdash laid off 143 people, or a further 4% of its workforce. But if the recent spate of mass market relaunches such as Sports Illustrated, Field & Stream and Life among others, is a guide, some magazines have big hopes for the future of print.

A group of Saveur’s staff celebrate the magazine’s return to print at a launch party in 2024. (Photo by Grace-Ann Leadbeater)

Kat Craddock took over Saveur magazine as CEO and editor-in-chief in 2023, returning the gastronomy favorite to print in 2024. She says she never had a doubt there was still a demand for the print product, albeit with less frequency, publishing twice a year instead of monthly. “There’s no shortage of content out there now,” she says. “Everywhere we look, content, content, content. One of the things a print product can provide is this leisurely and uninterrupted reading experience, and that’s what we’re all craving.”

That nostalgia carries over into a desire for continuity. While Craddock chose a glossier finish for the magazine’s pages this time around, what mattered most was longevity that nods toward history. “We considered some different trim sizes,” she says, “but when I looked up on my bookshelf and saw all our archives, 30 years of Saveur lining up perfectly, I knew it would drive me, and drive the collectors out there, bananas if all of a sudden we were printing a different size.”

It seems Craddock knows her audience well; with 80% of each print run going directly to subscribers and the other 20% to retail partners, she says Saveur is already self-sustaining.

Satirical newspaper The Onion also fired up the old presses in 2024 for monthly — rather than weekly — production, debuting at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, where the company’s headquarters are located. Onion Executive Editor Jordan LaFlure says, “It felt like lightning in a bottle; the timing was right, the event was of a huge national scope, and it was right in our backyard.”

In yet another case of a respected brand rising from the ashes with the help of new ownership, LaFlure says The Onion’s parent company, Global Tetrahedron, is invested in a print-first subscriber-based approach that will dovetail with other ambitions such as live events and a return to book publishing.

But for The Onion, product longevity isn’t nearly as important as LaFlure’s notion that print offers a “funnier experience. A lot of our jokes rely on taking a big news event and underplaying it, big made small. Or conversely, taking a small slice of life moment and pulling it up as though it’s breaking news from on high. Both of those approaches benefit from being placed immediately adjacent to the other. So, it benefits the reader and us to consume it in print.”

Going for the micro

In a not entirely unrelated note, the Recording Industry of America reported that after steadily rising numbers, in 2023, vinyl album sales saw their biggest year since 1990. Ask Bob Guccione Jr., founder of alt-rock stalwart SPIN magazine, which relaunched its print edition in September 2024 after 12 years as a digital publication, and he says the parallels are obvious. “Many publishers don’t like the analogy, but it’s pretty dead on. It’s a product people missed, sort of forgot they missed.” He predicts that much the way vinyl won’t replace streaming music, “magazines won’t replace the internet, but they’re going to have their place alongside it.”

Guccione laments the opportunities publishers missed at the dawn of the internet. He believes the digital age “should have been the greatest thing ever to happen to print.”

It was not. “Print was starved at the executive level with people who were ready to retire, were generally unimaginative and quite often were more financially oriented,” he says. “It was like they just took the articles out of the magazine and dumped them into a CMS. And I always thought, ‘wow, these are two different publications, they can help each other.’” He also believes other factors contributing to print’s decline were the monopolization of the magazine distribution network, and devaluation of the product by lowering subscription prices until they were unsustainable.

As a consultant and contributor to SPIN’s newest ownership, Guccione emphasizes that the secret to print’s renaissance will be recognizing that “you cannot possibly compete with the simultaneousness of digital electronics. You are a magazine of reading, something somebody sits with that offers something different than the instant coffee blast of the internet. Print has to be its own animal with its own economic path and its own distribution channel.”

Many of the new breed of magazine publishers agree, and those betting on a vinyl-style comeback for print see reason to believe. According to the data aggregation site Statista, magazine profits plummeted in 2020, with the industry losing nearly 23% of its ad revenue. Still, growth for print has been slow and steady, and while it’s not exactly in the black, landing at -3.5% [This should read negative 3.5%]  in 2024, that trajectory remains on an upward swing.

Seeing Green

Another parallel between the current crop of print magazines and LPs: the prevalence of pot. Both because of the peculiarities of advertising cannabis from state to state and, of course, an enthusiasm for legal weed, green-minded publishers and editors are leaning hard into print and making sure to differentiate themselves from the High Times model.

While High Times spent 2024 embroiled in legal battles that continue today, Specialty publications such as hiii, The Other and Broccoli leaped into the void with an elevated sensibility and direct appeal to the consumer. Rob Hill, editor-in-chief and cofounder with Pam Patterson of hiii, comes from the traditional magazine world, first at counterculture design powerhouse Ray Gun, and later helping launch international lad-mag FHM. In researching his approach to hiii, Hill noted High Times’ slide from “great journalism”—with prescient interviews including Elon Musk’s father Errol in 1978 and Steve Jobs in 1999—to a grower-focused industry paper.

“That,” he says, “is part of the opening we saw.” The magazine, subtitled, “for people who partake,” is two issues in, covering the Los Angeles area with a mix of high-end lifestyle, culture, décor and yes, marijuana features, ranging from a holiday gift guide (a $295 standing ashtray from Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg’s online venture) to a deep dive into the 170-year history of Zig-Zag rolling papers. hiii has heft and texture, with a matte cover and thick, glossy pages filled with full-color creative photography worthy of defunct fashion-focused magazine Lucky, from which Hill pulled inspiration.

Like many other magazines in the weed space, hiii gets distributed for free in area dispensaries. Hill says it’s available in 175 stores from Santa Ana to Malibu and he hopes to expand the brand to other cities. Clearly, they’re not depending on subscriptions; it’s all about the ads, and this is one space that’s desperate for eyes.

“There’s only two ways to do it in this town,” he says, “our magazine or a billboard. There’s no L.A. Times, no Vanity Fair.” He explains, “traditional media won’t take their ads until it’s federally legal. They’re too scared. They’ll do an article on Woody Harrelson where he’ll talk about his cannabis lounge, but they won’t take his ad because they’re afraid Maserati or whoever else they have in there is going to object.”

One brand that didn’t object is Porsche, which booked ad space in hiii for a full year.

On the opposite coast, there’s The Other magazine, whose fall 2024 premiere issue covers New York City and the Hudson Valley, and which also distributes primarily through dispensaries and other places where readers might linger, such as coffee shops and salons. Its Editor/Chief Strategy Officer Richard “Ranch” Guerra hopes to capture not only the cannabis space but also include regional culture and lifestyle pieces.

Guerra attended Boston University until 2013 and while there, focused on print journalism. He says he was “very fired up about print, flipped through magazines at Barnes & Noble my whole life.” Perhaps that’s also why its presentation mattered so much to him. “We went with matte paper over glossy, an embossed cover in terms of the logo, perfect bound. We did want to make a splash … The key is for it to look and feel like something you would buy.”

The Other still reads like a startup project, with Guerra’s poetry beside a cannabis word search, local farm profiles, and a concert review. But its hyperlocal meet-the-people-where-they-are focus certainly fills advertisers’ needs.

“Unusual Delights”

Broccoli, billed as “a publisher of unusual delights,” was founded by former “slow lifestyle” magazine Kinfolk’s creative director Anja Charbonneau. It debuted in 2017 and ceased publication in 2024 after 20 issues but the imprint has transmuted into multiple one-off and two-off specialty publications featuring the brand’s signature blend of jaw-droppingly gorgeous artwork, interviews, fanciful features and essays, and whatever else might suit the subject. The imprint also expanded into a line of coffee table books and oracle decks (themed picture cards akin to — but much simpler to divine — than tarot).

Working on an irregular schedule, it has published two issues of Mushroom People, which focuses on foraging, foodies, psychedelics and more; four issues of Mildew, about the fine art of thrifting; and one issue of Catnip, about, yes, cats, with another on the way. Madewell says thus far, Catnip has been the company’s strongest performer. All, however, have in common a trend that differentiates most of the new breed of magazine from the old: paper quality.

“In Mushroom People,” Madewell says, “I think we used three or four different paper stocks. In the most recent issue, there’s a whole section on slime molds, and we used a paper stock that’s extremely high gloss, so it looks slimy.” Meanwhile, for Catnip, she says, “if you hold it up to the light, we’ve done a spot gloss treatment on the cover and throughout, so it looks like some sort of ghost cat has walked across.”

Two more conceptual mags are set to debut in 2025: Heartbeat, billed as a magazine covering “music, sound, emotion;” and Sun & Moon, in which half the stories will be about all things solar, and the other half, printed so the reader must flip it upside down to read it, examines the lunar.

Meet Mr. Magazine

Samir Husni, better known as “Mr. Magazine,” has studied the form since he was a child in Lebanon and brought home the first-ever Superman comic book. He’s since acquired a PhD focusing on magazine journalism, started a firm specializing in magazine research, donated his personal collection of roughly 20,000 first issues of magazines printed in the U.S. between 1985 and 2011 to the University of Missouri, and founded the Magazine Innovation Center at the University of Mississippi.

Just as Broccoli saw success with solo themed publications, Husni sees a mass market “bookazine” trend taking over the industry, though in a less favorable light.

Take, for example, Taylor Swift. Husni says, “Whether it’s Taylor Swift Cooks or Taylor Swift Crafts, or whatever she does, if you have Taylor Swift, you can charge $16.99.” And it’s not just the entertainment industry cashing in. “Johns Hopkins and all these others are using their brand to create bookazines. If you see a magazine on food that helps you lose weight you might be suspicious, but if you see the Time magazine label above it, there’s more credibility.”

“It’s ingenious,” he says, “but when it comes to journalism, well, we were always in the business of what sells, but the people creating the content are what we used to call journalists, and I don’t know what else to call this besides marketing.”

A big fan of hiii and 2024 travel magazine entry Ori, Husni notes the sumptuous nature of the newest launches. “We are going to see more magazines as luxury heightened, you can put it on a coffee table and it’s sort of like a prized possession.” Along with luxury comes scarcity; none of last year’s efforts, whether new or revived, are printing monthly, let alone weekly, issues. Even the Saturday Evening Post, he says, only comes out six times a year.

Picture Perfect

One advantage of print is — and long has been — photography. Dan Havlik was editor-in-chief of 2024 startup Wild Eye magazine, which currently exists online in the form of downloadable pdfs, but will feature a 2025 print issue that’s “a compendium of the publication’s best photos. Eventually, the plan is to turn that quarterly digital publication into an actual print one.”

Wild Eye formed after the closure of Outdoor Photographer magazine, where he also served as its editor-in-chief. Havlik hopes to capture some of OP’s 100,000-person subscription base and sees ways to improve on that publication’s operations by reducing the number of issues and, again, eyeing that coffee table.

“[At OP] the paper quality was pretty low; it was a newsstand publication and pretty disposable. The idea is to make Wild Eye kind of a keepsake, have it be something that doesn’t just get cut into recycling after a month.” In January 2025, Havlik returned to the helm of Outdoor Photographer when a new company took over with plans to return to print.

Ori Founding Editor Kade Krichko also learned the trade at mags where outdoor photos mattered as much as print content. He’s an alum of Powder, Outside and Ski Journal, where he saw plenty of room for improvement in the travel field with some innovative twists.

Ori, too, uses heavy paper stock and a “lay-flat perfect bind” that keeps its images from getting lost in the spine’s gutter, but that’s not all that makes it unique.

Krichko’s lofty goals begin with the publication’s name. Its website explains, “In Latin, our name distills to the rise or beginning. In Japanese, ‘ori’ means opportunity. In Hebrew, light. Transcending east to west, north to south.”

The travel journalism industry, he says, “had one way of telling their stories: parachuting in, having an experience, flying out and telling that experience to everybody back home. I felt like we could shift that paradigm by working with people who lived there. It started as an idea and turned into a mission very quickly.”

Krichko figures its pieces use about 85% native storytellers with either a writer or photographer from elsewhere to pair knowledge and a novel view with “a fresh-eyed perspective.” Ori’s subjects range from U.S. County fairs to Papua New Guinea’s women water protectors.

Additionally, Krichko recalls the frustration of hearing an editor say, “We love this story, but we don’t have the travel budget for you; hold on it for next year or report it on your own dime and maybe we’ll pay for it.” Of course, he says, “a journalist will swallow the cost and go into debt to tell a good story.”

To help ease some of this burden and create a sense of community around Ori, Krichko created a grant, which reserves 2% of every subscriber dollar as well as a portion of ad dollars. A few months after each issue, Ori emails a poll asking subscribers to vote for their favorite story and the winner gets a nonbinding grant. The total is currently at $1,000 per recipient, but Krichko hopes it will rise along with the subscriber count).

He also sees the magazine subscription as a sort of credit card offering member benefits, with discounts on parties, affiliated products, and Ori-led international trips (the first, an excursion to Spain’s Basque country is slated for this summer).

Looking to the Future

As enthusiastic as print audiences might be, they consist largely of elder millennials and just plain elders who remember the thrill of receiving magazines in the mail and enjoying uninterrupted, screen-free reading time. For Gens Z and Alpha, no such nostalgia remains. But, Broccoli’s Madewell insists, look beneath the surface, and you’ll see signs of life bubbling up there as well.

“If you go to book fairs there are so many people making ‘zines and using risograph printing,” a style that layers inks in a way that gives the publications a handmade appearance. She says online craft marketplace Etsy is filled with examples of hyperspecific self-published pamphlets and ‘Zine fairs are more popular than ever among aspiring young publishers, with topics ranging from one person’s backyard bug observations to West Michigan’s punk scenes.

Sure, boomers still corner the market, with AARP The Magazine grabbing the most eyes (38.3 million in 2024), but the future may well belong in a smaller, quieter way to those raised on the algorithm and looking for a bespoke reflection of their interests and values.

Alas, there are no hidden treasures or recent gems in this installment, which includes a recent thriller, a Bob Hope non-classic, and a 1980s attempt to update “The Front Page” to the 24-hour news cycle. To see where they ranked on the full list, visit here. 

Opus (2025). Writer-director Mark Anthony Green’s debut feature is an admirably ambitious but ultimately half-baked satire about the relationship between celebrity worship and journalism without saying much about either. The ever-dependable Ayo Edebiri does what she can as young magazine writer Ariel, who is sent to the cult-like compound of reclusive musical genius Alfred Moretti (a painfully miscast John Malkovich). From there, Opus meanders toward its inevitable revelation that Things Are Not As They Seem. There’s a half-hearted epilogue that tries to speak on the inadvertent ways in which the media can lionize dangerous people, but it’s nothing that hasn’t been done better by at least a dozen movies on this list. (MR)

The Critic (2024). Jimmy Erskine (Sir Ian McKellen) is a London theatre critic circa 1934. For four decades, this misanthropic maven has used more pans than the busiest West End restaurant. But when a new publisher (Mark Strong) pushes Jimmy out, the critic pens a little drama of his own to maintain his station … and winds up over his head. The first act is a showcase for McKellen’s inimitable itchy and icy demeanor, whether arguing with his copy editor about draconian terms for big butts or confronting the concerns of a struggling actress (Gemma Arterton) he has previously called both “plump” and “emaciated.” (“Pick one!,” she pleads.) Early on, “The Critic” seems primed to become a relatable, if barbed, story about the desperate heaves from people who feel their time and value are running out. But once Jimmy’s plot kicks in, it takes every predictably tragic route you expect. The solution wouldn’t exactly be a page-one rewrite, but it’s certainly a lesser work from playwright Patrick Marber (“Closer”). One upside: It’s nice to see Strong show some soul outside of his usual turns as a heavy. (NR)

The Return of Doctor X (1939). This ludicrous horror flick is noteworthy for its undead titular villain, played by Humphrey Bogart in ghoulish makeup. In life, Doctor X was infamous for conducting crazy experiments along the lines of “How long can a baby survive without food?” In death, he harvests the blood of the living. It’s up to underappreciated reporter Walter Garrett (Wayne Morris) to get to the bottom of Doctor X’s fiendish schemes. For all of its silly horror (you can tell Bogart is having an awful time in the role), the film is mostly a by-the-numbers gumshoe detective story, as Garrett faces off against skeptical editors, police officers and the legal system itself. It’s perhaps more fun than the original “Doctor X” (also on this list and entirely unrelated to this installment) if only because the whole cast seems to know the material is subpar. It’s hard to beat a script that brings up the starving babies thing multiple times as an indication of mad genius. (ED)

Assassination of a High School President (2008). “Forget it, Funky. It’s high school.” This film translates the classic tropes and hard-boiled language of classic gumshoe crime novellas into a high school setting, with wannabe reporter Bobby Funke (Reece Thompson) investigating the theft of SAT tests from his upscale private school. He has to contend with the local criminal element, the crazed Principal Kirkpatrick (Bruce Willis) and the sudden appearance of Francesca (Mischa Barton), a beautiful girl with a secret. It hits all the notes you’d expect, with the reporter struggling to track down sources, find clues and ultimately solve a mystery using his wits and journalistic acumen. An entertaining enough take on the genre, with an irreverent sense of humor analogous to its contemporary coming-of-age saga, “Superbad.” (ED)

Switching Channels (1988). The weakest iteration of “The Front Page” on this list transposes newspaper reporting with the 24-hour TV news cycle and stars Kathleen Turner in the “His Girl Friday”-esque role of Christy Colleran. She’s a relentless reporter caught between two men — her equally determined ex-husband and news director, Sully (Burt Reynolds), and her fiancé, Blaine (Christopher Reeve), who wants to whisk Christy away to a stress-free life. Of course, Sully reels her in with “one last story” — the impending execution of an empathetic killer. While “The Front Page” and “His Girl Friday” birthed the iconic representation of reporters as frenzied, fast-talking fighters, “Switching Channels” exhausts us with its characters’ breathless, sloppy escapades, which are often jarringly independent of one another. In fact, the film works best when focusing on Turner’s efforts alone. (Perhaps director Ted Kotcheff’s struggle to balance three central characters resulted from off-camera feuding between Reynolds and Turner.) “Switching Channels” has moments of effective screwball tension, but they’re buried beneath a bloated mess of mishaps. (SW) 

Lady Reporter (1989) Cynthia Rothrock was an American martial artist and actress turned Hong Kong filmmaker favorite in the 1980s, and “Lady Reporter” could be considered Rothrock’s “Bridget Jones’s Diary.” Rothrock somewhat resembles Renée Zellweger, and her Cindy also unexpectedly becomes a reporter and must slide down a pole. However, Bridget Jones has not as yet kicked a man so hard his body folds in half. Cindy is actually an undercover FBI agent investigating the flow of counterfeit money from Hong Kong to the United States by way of printing presses at the Asian Post — where Cindy gets a cub reporter job to “get good scoops on scandals and gutter news.” Cindy delivers some accidentally incredible photojournalism before saving a baby from an exploding building, but she more often hits “people until they’re dead” than “deadlines.” While “Lady Reporter” is foremost a showcase for typically outstanding fight choreography from late Hong Kong legend Corey Yuen, Cindy’s real-journalist rivals eventually assist with investigative reporting to unravel this conspiracy. They also take and dish out a fair share of lumps, their shoe leather more eaten than beaten. If only we saw their corruption-exposing headline at the end. Perhaps it’s behind the paywall. (NR)

They Got Me Covered (1943) Robert Kittredge’s (Bob Hope) past may include a Pulitzer Prize, but he’s presently an awards-caliber screwup for Amalgamated News of America. When scooped by every competitor on Germany’s wartime invasion of Russia, Kittredge is sacked. But he sees a shot at redemption in a tip about in-country threats from a group of Axis antagonists. The film is far funnier than 1963’s miserable “Critic’s Choice’ (found very low on this list), and Hope’s best bits lay groundwork for the flaky nervousness at which future funnymen like Chris Farley excelled. The high point is perhaps a sequence when none of the bad guys’ lackeys can decipher the notes Hope’s editorial assistant has dictated about the conspiratorial plot. Pairing Hope with Dorothy Lamour as his stenographer girlfriend, the film essentially achieves what “I Love Trouble” sought to do — even as it hits a mid-movie lull and perhaps plays too dark for Hope’s brand of humor. It’s a bit awkward to hear bad guys boast about bombing cities and poisoning water supplies as Hope struggles to maintain a mannequin pose behind them. (NR)

Birds of Prey (1973) World War II relic Harry Walker (David Janssen) is now an eye-in-the-sky Salt Lake City traffic reporter. When he sees a bank robbery shift into a hostage situation, he gives pursuit in his chopper — an “over-the-hill flyboy who won’t listen to reason” but who becomes the police’s only hope. There is nothing quite like watching vintage fare in which nothing was faked and everything risked. Low-flying chopper chases here would drop Michael Bay and James Cameron’s jaws. There’s a bit where Walker parks his helicopter in the style of Ace Ventura or Elwood Blues inside an airplane hangar, and aerial sequences in Moab, Utah, play like the climax of “Mission: Impossible — Fallout” financed on credit cards and maybe even life insurance policies. Although it grinds to a halt early, “Birds of Prey” also offers surprisingly bleak context about America’s viewpoint on veterans. Overall, the film offers a mix of citizen arrest and citizen journalism, as we hear of Walker’s radio station covering the story and a weatherman colleague offers him a handy report about a storm headed his way. (NR)

Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues (2013). For a movie that includes a musical ode to a shark and John C. Reilly playing the ghost of Stonewall Jackson, director / co-writer Adam McKay’s sequel to his beloved 2004 comedy “Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy” isn’t without a few sharp satirical jabs. In perhaps its most inspired bit, the movie credits Burgundy himself with inventing the 24/7 news cycle when he decides to start inserting baseless speculation during his coverage of a live police chase. Like McKay’s best comedic efforts, “Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues” — with its effective blend of snark and heart (and, naturally, a heaping dose of absurdity) — manages to offer more clever and effective commentary than any of McKay’s more “prestige” turns like “Vice” or “Don’t Look Up.” (MR)

The Great Man (1956). Although now over a half-century old, “The Great Man” takes on new relevance in an era ripe with celebrity scandals and exposés. Co-written, directed by and starring José Ferrer, the film follows radio reporter Joe Harris (Ferrer) as he wrestles between lionizing late radio contemporary Herb Fuller and revealing the warts beneath his public veneer. As Harris puts together a memorial show, Ferrer drums up a great deal of suspense in Harris’s interviews with Fuller’s friends and fans, leaving us wondering where the real truth lies — behind closed doors or across the airwaves. “The Great Man” emerges as a thoughtful, thorny exploration of separating art from the artist. In retrospect, it’s also quite daring in its basis on real-life broadcaster Arthur Godfrey in the wake of his own fall from grace. In the end, “The Great Man” shares the same grit and integrity as its protagonist. (SW)  

The following has been edited for length and clarity.

When did you decide you wanted to be a journalist?

I actually didn’t intend on becoming a journalist. While at Newsweek in the video department, I found myself wishing I could editorialize a little bit more in video editing, especially editing interviews. The interviewer could not be on camera or heard, so that made it hard to challenge people or ask them to clarify. I just wanted a bit more control.

What culture topics did you write about early on?

One of my very first published articles outside of Newsweek was for Vox. It was a personal essay about my cousin who was killed in the 2015 Charleston Church mass shooting and the media response. I’ve always really loved entertainment culture, so another early story I did was for Vulture on the show “The Bold Type.” I wrote about how I was really disappointed in the way the last season was shaped. It was something that I felt very passionately about and is a good example of the first time that I ever had really strong opinions about something and could get paid to write about it.

Why did you decide to write that personal essay about your cousin’s death?

Like a lot of Black journalists, I was really upset and feeling unsettled about the way the news is spread and consumed — and this is coming from someone who got their first job in the push to video phase of journalism. It was kind of traumatic as a journalist and someone who lost a family member in a violent way to constantly be surrounded by a system that I felt was hell bent on sharing the worst moments of families’ lives. I do think it’s important for people to be made aware, and I feel very strongly about the power of journalism, but I also think seeing so much death on a regular basis is not healthy. I also wrote it to caution against using videos of people dying as a retaliatory sort of justice. While I do think it was an important article to write, now looking back I regret that I had to delve into all of that pain for cash.

What do you think the media is missing when it comes to internet culture?

I think internet culture is a misnomer. What we’re really talking about at this point is culture. Things that are said on X will probably directly impact a lot of the policies that you see from the Trump administration in the coming year. The people that you see on TikTok, that your grandparents might disregard, are probably going to be people who are producing blockbusters in the next couple of years. For people who disregard the impact of internet culture, it does them a disservice because it shuts them out of a lot of what’s out there in the world. I also think that if we really care about journalism and finding stories and reporting, we can’t disregard where people are congregating, and right now that’s online.

How do you find stories?

I like to keep a handle on all of the standard communities online. I’m constantly scrolling. My screen time is atrocious. I’m on TikTok, X, Reddit. I’m on Tumblr, still. Often it literally starts with just an Easter egg, like someone will mention something that I can either see is part of a growing trend and I’ll investigate more, or someone will send me a tip and it’ll send me down a rabbit hole. I also love entertainment and books and how those intersect online, so I try to write about those any chance I get.

What’s your favorite story you’ve reported on?

At Rolling Stone, I really love the ability to do deep-dive profiles. I spent a couple of days with food critic Keith Lee which was really interesting because it’s one thing to watch his videos on TikTok, and then it’s another thing to see the entire operation around him. I loved that because I got to do a deep dive into someone who people were disregarding, but his impact is clear.

What’s the most challenging part of your job?

Being interested in a story, but not being able to do it because I know no one is going to click on it. It’s knowing that for every story I’m incredibly interested in, I have to write four stories that I’m not that interested in.

Your work often highlights queer people and people of color. Can you talk about why it’s important to spotlight these communities in your coverage?

While the goal of journalists is to present the facts, I also think it can’t be overstated that presenting who you are and the community you belong to is really important. I’m queer. I’m Black. That is obviously going to inform what I’m interested in. One of the stories that I really fought for was about Nex Benedict, a nonbinary teen who lost their life last year [after a fight at school]. I also wrote a follow up about how queer teens felt about this death. The news tends to report that someone died and then move on, but I think there’s power in talking to people who are directly impacted. A lot of times, adults don’t know how deeply and strongly and vibrantly young communities feel. I think queer people are becoming a larger portion of our society, so why not hear what we all have to say?

How did you find out you made the Forbes 30 Under 30 list?

In an email, on the morning that the list was released. I was very shocked. I told my partner and then I went to work in the office. I remember I had a really busy day with interviews — I had a couple of drafts due — and I think we were close to a magazine close, so I was not thinking about it much. I clearly had not read the email very well. I didn’t realize the list was live and people could see it. I got engaged a few weeks prior, so when people were congratulating me, I thought it was for my engagement. I felt a little silly, but it was very nice.

What advice would you offer to early-career journalists?

Build a social media platform following. Just because you’re good at something doesn’t mean it’s what you have to do. If you find a beat that you’re good at, but don’t enjoy, you can run away. It’s better to do that early than work in a beat for decades and realize you hate it. You don’t have to wait until you graduate to be a journalist and there are plenty of editors who will pay for the opinions or reporting of a teen or young adult. Lastly, write as often as possible and email people that you want to write for and say “I want to write for you. Here’s why.”

Twitter/X: @zoectjones

LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/ct-jones-59b966138

Radio battled numerous headwinds in 2024.

The result in many cases: Owners shrinking or abandoning their news commitments.

After a nearly 60-year run, WCBS’s all-news format in New York was replaced by ESPN sports programming. New York Public Radio chopped its staff by 8% in August, eliminating several news positions in the process. Owner Audacy (formerly Entercom), which merged with CBS radio back in 2017, decided to pull the plug in 2024 and leased the station out, leaving the Big Apple with just one all-newser, 1010 WINS.

Other NPR operations did the same, buffeted by rising costs and membership and underwriting challenges.

Cutback gutted KFI news-talk radio in Los Angeles, where an award-winning news staff of 24 was reduced to seven. All of the station’s reporters and news director Chris Little were dismissed.

Count Little as disappointed but not really surprised. “When a company is facing tremendous debt, you’ve got to understand that you’re facing tremendous danger and that your job may go away. That’s just the way it is,” he said. (Parent company iHeart reported $5.21 billion in total debt in the second quarter of 2024.)

The changes affected more than just radio in the U.S. Across the border, CHML in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada shut down in August after 96 years on the air. Owner Corus Entertainment fired the staff and, two hours later, shut off the station citing “years of financial loss.”

There are still listeners out there. Nearly half (47%) of U.S. adults say they get news from radio “at least sometimes,” according to a 2022 Pew Research Center survey and that figure has remained constant in recent years.

Yet in the same survey, only 7% of U.S. adults say they prefer radio to other platforms for getting news.

Industry observers say the roots of today’s shrunken radio journalism landscape date back to the 1980s, when the FCC began to deregulate the airwaves in favor of a more free-market approach. A 1981 change eliminated the minimum amount of time radio stations were required to spend on news and public affairs programming.

Radio historian and consultant Walter Sabo says “that’s when every big music station eliminated it new department.”

Fast forward to the 1996 Telecommunications Act, which essentially removed caps on station ownership. A wave of consolidation followed, with a small clutch of companies winding up with ownership of hundreds of stations and taking on huge debt. When radio revenue started draining away to other advertising media, layoffs became endemic and more news departments were slashed to the bone or eliminated entirely.

The Big Shrink

WCBS’s ex-morning anchor Wayne Cabot remembers 1989, his first year on the job, when he would walk into the station to see a bustling staff of 30 gathering content, writing and anchoring. That turned into just a handful by the time the station’s nearly 60-year run ended. Cabot, who signed WCBS off for good at midnight Aug. 26, says he witnessed a steady drip-drip of radio news downsizing over the years and adds “now it’s gone from a drip to a steady stream.”

Anchor teams gave way to solo anchors. The reportorial ranks and outside bureaus were slashed. What once was “a wall” of managers just for WCBS has given way to top brass shared among several stations.

His take: “I have to say if WCBS can go away, anybody or any station is vulnerable.”

The now-retired Crys Quimby programmed WCBS for several years in the “aughts,” also helming other news giants such as WBBM in Chicago and KFWB in Los Angeles.

“It’s all money, money, money,” she says, of the cutbacks and closures. She misses the days when smaller talk-formatted and even music stations mounted a news effort.

“It might be small,” she says of those efforts, “but they were doing news that applied directly to their communities and their states.”

Not only did behemoths like WCBS fall silent in 2024. KRLN and KSTY in Canon City, Colorado, ceased operations Dec. 31, shifting the ground under the local informational mix. General Manager Megan Stanley points as death knells for the stations to the pandemic, softening advertising and old-school owners who didn’t embrace positioning the stations in the digital world.

She says the stations’ news director was “on top of getting crucial information out there,” highway crashes, road closures, school lockdowns and the like. Now, she adds that with an older audience not as adept at accessing the digital world for news and a lack of stations coming in clearly in the mountainous area, the community is more poorly served.

Focusing on Local

By contrast, other smaller market “one-man bands” seem to be thriving. Pat Powers has been news director of KQWC in Webster City, Iowa, for a staggering 46 years. He says they’ve done well by super serving their audience, covering breaking news from motor vehicle crashes to power outages as well as keeping tabs on local government meetings and high school and college sports.

Being firmly embedded in the community certainly helps.

“I graduated from Webster City High School 48 years ago, and I’ve had a wonderful relationship with law enforcement, the city council, city government and the county board of supervisors.”

The lesson for radio seems to be, pay more attention to what’s happening in your own backyard.

Radio consultant Fred Jacobs puts it this way: “Being on the ground and having eye contact with the audience is special. It’s something very few media can do.” At the same time, he laments that “more and more stations aren’t doing it because it’s cost-prohibitive.”

Jacobs says research has shown a statistical lift in interest in local news. He attributes at least part of the uptick to the pandemic, when such local concerns as where to find toilet paper, whether a new COVID-19 strain was taking hold and whether a mask was required at a particular restaurant became top of mind concerns.

That resonates with WBBM Chicago Morning Anchor Cisco Cotto — no matter that the Chicago metropolitan area is many orders of magnitude beyond say, a Webster City, Iowa. “We don’t want to say things like ‘we don’t want to do crime in a particular area’ where crime might be a significant problem because to the people who live there, crime is affecting their lives at every moment. We want touch points in every part of Chicago and every part of the suburbs so that people think, ‘Hey, they’re paying attention to what’s going on in my neighborhood.’”

Tom Langmyer well-understands that “back yard”-and Chicago. He was vice president and general manager of WGN, a crosstown news/talk institution from 2005-2013.

“The stations with the most loyal audiences are those that provide a great local experience, and that includes relevant local content. Unfortunately, most don’t see that as an opportunity, nor that there’s any way out of simply becoming a jukebox after they’ve had staff cuts,” he says. He now heads Great Lakes Media Group, a media acquisition and advisory firm.

Adapting to a new media world

Give credit to program and news directors for seizing on an opportunity. A number continue to experiment with ways to stay relevant to their larger operations and their audiences.

At KFI, says Little, their news writing and delivery emphasized “short, sharp and strong.”

“We talk about what people are interested in,” he says simply. “Money, health. And we talk like people talk. We don’t say ‘police pursued the suspect.’ We say ’the cops chased the guy.’”

And they think outside the box on content, he adds. One of his reporters did a story on designer vaginas, with doctors working on getting the private parts tightened, tucked and “prettied up.” Another reporter did a story on “cusswords” and cussing at your boss and he used every cussword you could use but he bleeped them all out.

“That’s the kind of stuff that keeps people listening.”

Radio host Sabo, who says he brought “New Jersey 10.5” and its talk and news format to the air, talks of a reframing of what constitutes news.

He says when listeners wind up with a basement full of water or their car’s check engine light comes on or a student comes home and shows his parents a report card with an F- that becomes their top story. To underscore the idea of relating to the audience and their interests, he mock-imitates a right-wing talk show host: “This is not constitutional.  This is against the Second Amendment,” he thunders.

Switching back to a normal voice, he asserts “I don’t care. I care about the water in my basement. And New Jersey 101.5 does great because they talk about the water in the basement.”

The station lists around a dozen news anchors, reporters and traffic reporters on its site.

At WBBM, Cotto says they’re working on brisk pacing and a higher story count. That plays to increasingly short attention spans.

The material is delivered in a straightforward way. But he adds that in a departure from the traditional all-news model, they’ll break in for some levity, bantering about a funny story or a Bears victory over the Packers. But they keep it brief.

“We don’t want this to turn into talk radio. We want to show them that this is not AI, but these are real human beings delivering the news to you.”

Addressing digital and AI

Heading into 2025, Artificial Intelligence could well be one of several challenges for radio journalism. Last October, a Polish radio operator, backed off what it called an experiment-replacing human journalists with AI-generated “presenters.” OFF Radio Krakow quickly abandoned the trial balloon after widespread pushback from listeners. The future of AI in radio seems murky at the moment, but it’s safe to say many are wary.

But says Ethan Toven-Lindsey, vice president for news at public KQED in San Francisco, “AI can’t go cover a levee breach in California.” The station has an enormous commitment to local and regional happenings with more than 100 journalists — although several took early retirements and buyouts last year.

He says his station is grappling with its place in the digital universe, a challenge shared by radio news operations of all stripes.

“We are growing our distribution and audience,” he says, “Yet we’re still trying to find the same success in building membership digitally as we have building membership in broadcast.”

He says that relates to podcasts, their app, website, Tik Tok videos and social media news.

Monetizing digital is proving tough for commercial operators, says Jacobs. Some podcasts are intricate and expensive, for example.

He says what it comes down to is “Radio stations kind of need to pick and choose their digital avenues. And the smaller markets, unlike the big ones can’t do all of it well so they’re going to pick and choose what avenues they use to distribute what they do.”

WBBM’s Cotto notes layoffs have been a factor in broadcast digital departments as well. He sees revenue growing in the area, but not quickly enough.

The Radio Advertising Bureau reported that digital advertising accounted for 21% of all radio revenue in 2023.

Keeping the talent pipeline flowing

Another challenge radio news faces are the scaling back of news departments in smaller markets. Radio journalists say that’s dismantled the “farm club” that used to exist in radio news and radio in general with younger talent starting out getting their experience in smaller markets, then competing to move up the food chain. A more common pattern nowadays is for large markets to take on young talent and mold them.

As one CNN journalist put it, “We’ve eaten our seed corn.” A longtime radio anchor, the late Larry Maher worked his way up through smaller radio markets in Oklahoma and elsewhere before joining the network.

So did KFI’s Little, who started out with smaller news departments on FM stations (now a pretty well vanished breed). At KFI, he took a chance on younger folks who hadn’t been forged in that pay-your-dues and work-your-way-up career path but who showed promise.

“I hired people in their 20s which is unheard of in Los Angeles,” he says. He believes one advantage that that conferred was a news department more in tune with millennials and Gen Z-ers and their bringing that perspective to their coverage.

As to the future, people like the Poynter Institute’s Kristen Hare sounded grimly realistic but also hopeful.

The same forces that have stressed newspapers and print media are realities for the broadcast industry including radio, Hare says. She believes that despite the competitive and financial headwinds, “powerful work is being done and (there are) some fantastic solutions people are finding to communicate and build audiences.”

One of them is in the philanthropic space. The non-profit Press Forward foundation awarded $20 million to 205 local newsrooms in October. A number of them were radio operations. The aim is to bolster local newsroom operations and close coverage gaps.

And as WCBS left the air, Cabot pointed toward the future as well.

“As we leave the news ecosystem after 57 years of all-news and 100 years of service on New York radio, we implore you to find that next trusted news source. Use it, support it in both word and in deed. It is the most patriotic thing you can do.

“To paraphrase a CBS News legend, ‘Good night and good luck.’”

In a matter of months, The Mercury’s editor-in-chief was fired, the staff went on strike and then quit — and SPJ is among those who helped these journalists launch their own new newspaper to fight back.

Some background: Things went sour when The Mercury’s staff, like many other student and pro newsrooms around the country, opted to report on Pro-Palestinian encampments on school grounds. By the way, it was the editor’s first hours on the job — talk about a slow news day.

Staff said they immediately faced pressure and threats of censorship from the school’s administration in response to its coverage of the rallies and the school’s use of state troopers to curb peaceful protest.

University officials demoted the newspaper’s adviser and removed copies of The Mercury from newsstands. They also fired the paper’s editor-in-chief, Gregorio Olivares Gutierrez, a sophomore studying political science and philosophy who had been with the newspaper for over a year.

“Our campus administrators chose to bring in nearly 100 state troopers and police officers to arrest students and faculty for peacefully protesting,” Gutierrez told me. “As journalists, we obviously chose to cover what was easily the most historic and horrifying day in UTD history. Students and faculty adored our May 20 print publication.”

He added, “I take pride in how my team and I were able to react and cover everything that occurred … But our campus administrators have never shared that sentiment.”

School leadership never fully articulated what they claimed The Mercury got wrong or why they were being punished. They also broke their own policies when completing staff terminations and removals, denying Gutierrez and his peers’ due process.

But instead of backing down, staff at The Mercury fought back — and their strategy was pretty iconic if you ask me.

Instead of getting scared or mad, the entire staff of the UTD Mercury went on strike. Next, they resigned. Soon after, they launched their own paper, The Retrograde (a cheeky nod to their former paper’s name). The Retrograde is this talented staff’s independently-run and independently funded student news publication. Their first print edition was published in January with the help of fundraising campaigns and SPJ Region 3. It also features a back-page ad touting our organization’s ongoing support for a free press.

“Off-campus support has been indispensable,” Gutierrez said. “We would have likely stopped our mischief if we didn’t have support from professional journalists, lawyers and groups like SPJ, FIRE, SPLC and CMA. It is incredibly refreshing to have other people reaffirm the notion that we aren’t hysterical for being upset at the things our university does. I have definitely seen my staff get energized every time I mention that we have a meeting with lawyers or professional journalists because it again shows that we aren’t alone in our struggle.”

So, will The Mercury ever come back?

Gutierrez has his doubts.

“In an ideal world, this would end with our campus administration admitting that they made a huge mistake and then spending some time working with us to make amends. I don’t think that will ever happen,” he said. “Months of national level criticism, student and faculty outcry, and our own advocacy has led to nothing. The Retrograde only exists because we made it in spite of administrative efforts to silence us.”

I’m so proud of and impressed by the students running The Retrograde. But I know they’re just one example of hundreds of incidents in both student and professional newsrooms where censorship threats and dwindling funding threaten our Fourth Estate.

Just earlier this year, Indiana’s lieutenant governor-elect threatened the Indiana Daily Student for its coverage of Donald Trump. They didn’t back down either. Instead, SPJ helped them print T-shirts with the art they ran from the story.

My message to students? Keep going. Or, as the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Daily Tar Heel’s motto goes, “Print news, raise hell.”

I’ll take this opportunity to remind you that SPJ’s Legal Defense Fund, Ethics Hotline and First Amendment Foundation are just some resources we are ready and eager to share.

You can keep up with The Retrograde by visiting retrogradenews.com or following them on social media @retrograde_news.

They demonstrate the eternal importance of local coverage, chronicle society’s evolution over time and highlight international inspirations to enact change.  

They rage against assaults on the right to a free press, strive for broader representation, explore the challenges of investigative journalism in an increasingly digital and disassociated age and showcase the indispensable influence of minority voices in popular culture. 

And many outstanding ones are easily available for streaming. 

Here are 11 from the 2020s well worthy of a watch:

Athlete A (2020) 

ATHLETE A Marisa Kwiatkowski in ATHLETE A. Cr. NETFLIX © 2020

At the pulse-pounding pace of a great crime thriller, “Athlete A” shows how journalists can become the last line of defense when all else fails. The film follows The Indianapolis Star news team that uncovered USA Gymnastics’ long-held policy of protecting predators, including team doctor Larry Nassar, who sexually abused hundreds of young athletes across his long medical career. Former gymnasts like Rachael Denhollander speak poignantly about how the Star’s initial article inspired them to share their own harrowing stories. Co-directors Bonni Cohen and Jon Shenk use these specific stories as springboards to reveal universal truths about the corruption of power, manipulation of youth, mistreatment of women and the cravenly competitive, capitalist motivations that often lie beneath this behavior. But, in the end, “Athlete A” finds hope in the journalists who exposed injustice and empowered others to do the right thing. A key figure in the story: investigative journalist Marisa Kwiatkowski, now with the Knight Foundation and interviewed on page XX of this issue. (SW)
Streaming by subscription on Netflix 

This is Not a Movie: Robert Fisk and the Politics of Truth (2020) 

War quickly disabused British journalist Robert Fisk’s romantic notion of foreign correspondence as depicted by Alfred Hitchcock. But across a six-decade career, Fisk asserted the value of onsite observation to combat both the advent of armchair analysis and the onset of obfuscation amid digital detachment. Director Yung Chang delves into stories Fisk chased in Syria, Northern Ireland, Lebanon and, most controversially, Israel and Palestine, but it principally outlines Fisk’s ideas and idiosyncrasies. Capitalizing on editorial latitude as a late-career columnist, Fisk felt obligated to present war as a “total failure of the human spirit,” to “challenge authority, especially when it leads us into war” and to leave a “direct and emotional record” for future generations so they cannot look back and say no one warned them. (NR) 

Streaming for free on Hoopla and Kanopy, by subscription on Amazon Prime Video or for rental / purchase on Amazon Prime Video 

Storm Lake (2021) 

Art Cullen, editor of The Storm Lake Times, speaks with farmer John Snyder for an annual feature article about the corn crop.

“Storm Lake” follows the Storm Lake Times, one of the last remaining small-town papers, as it emerges from the COVID-19 pandemic. Owners John and Art Cullen have chronicled life and culture in this corner of Iowa for more than 30 years, and it’s something of a wonder they’re still around to this day — delivering local coverage with wit, knowledge and perspective too often in short supply. Co-directors Jerry Risius and Beth Levison’s documentary is a time capsule for this (sadly) fading corner of the profession. “Storm Lake” also reminds viewers how 2020’s events shook the foundations of an industry whose cornerstone was already sagging. It’s an intimate, unvarnished look at the complicated internal workings of a small-town newspaper, including what’s required to finance production, staffing and good reporting. Local news may be on the wane, but it won’t go down without a fight. (ED) 

Streaming for free on Pluto TV or by subscription on PBS Documentaries via Amazon Prime Video 

Whirlybird (2021) 

After a first date seeking a Skid Row serial killer, Bob and Marika Tur wedded and then ceaselessly chased increasingly sensational stories for their independent Los Angeles News Service, sometimes with daughter Katy (now an NBC News personality) in tow. But the Turs’ business — along with their marital strife, emotional tumult and identity crises — achieved liftoff as they acquired a helicopter to “soar among the eagles instead of walking with the turkeys.” Although being first to find O.J. Simpson’s freeway flight gave their work global eyes, the toll was mighty for “war correspondents at home” with a bird’s-eye view of incessant violence, disaster and strife. Director Matt Yoka offers no quarter to the Turs’ spiral into verbal abuse and profound change while questioning their work’s legacy: As one of them says: “Civilization will have to destroy itself before things get better, and no one’s getting the message.” (NR) 

Streaming for free on Kanopy or for rental / purchase on Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV, Fandango at Home, Google Play, Microsoft and YouTube 

Writing with Fire (2021) 

India’s first feature documentary to be nominated for an Academy Award, the powerful “Writing with Fire” revolves around reporters from the country’s only female-run news outlet, Khabar Lahariya. They not only face baseline sexism, but as members of the Dalit caste — the most oppressed in India — they’re vulnerable to even worse horrors. Co-directors Rintu Thomas and Sushmit Ghosh follow these journalists as they risk their safety and stand up to men in power, exposing long-hidden truths that lead to prosecutions and changes in infrastructure. (One of their news stories even prompts a village-wide installation of toilets.) With a fly-on-the-wall intimacy and a you-are-there immediacy, the film immerses us in the tension and urgency surrounding these journalists, especially as they deal with cultural pressure to simply raise their families rather than report to build a better world for them. (SW) 

Streaming for free on Hoopla and Kanopy, or for rental / purchase on Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV, Fandango at Home, Google Play and YouTube 

Endangered (2022) 

Four journalists from around the globe attempt to practice their professions circa 2020 within increasingly dangerous environments. Mexico’s Sashenka Gutierrez is a photojournalist in a nation where nearly 200 journalists have disappeared in the last 20 years. Patricia Campos Mello, a Brazilian journalist, is personally attacked by her country’s then-leader, Jair Bolsonaro. In the United States, Carl Juste photographs the Black Lives Matter protests, while United Kingdom-based journalist Oliver Laughland travels the U.S. during the COVID-19 pandemic trying to understand the Trump phenomenon and anti-mask sentiment. Connecting them is the ever-worsening trend of citizens gathering their news solely through social media feeds rather than professional publications, continually causing the latter to lose funding and slowly disintegrate. In “Endangered,” co-directors Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing ask what the role of a reporter is in today’s society and try desperately to answer that question without giving into total hopelessness. (ED)  

Streaming by subscription on Max, or for rental / purchase on Google Play and YouTube 

Like a Rolling Stone: The Life & Times of Ben Fong-Torres (2022) 

Suzanne Kai and Ben Fong-Torres attend the Tribeca Festival After-Party For Like A Rolling Stone: The Life & Times Of Ben Fong-Torres (Photo by Craig Barritt/Getty Images for 2021 Tribeca Festival)

Ben Fong-Torres was an essential player at Rolling Stone during the magazine’s peak of cultural relevance in the 1970s. His interview skills at the time were unparalleled and influential, creating incisive portraits of legends like Bob Dylan and Paul McCartney while inserting his own worldview in ways that more or less birthed the modern celebrity profiles and long-form interview podcasts we frequently consume today. Fong-Torres was the child of Chinese immigrants, and director Suzanne Joe Kai does not shy away from depicting his triumphs over adversity. His family originally came to America through a loophole during the Chinese Exclusion Act, and he faced plenty of casual discrimination growing up in the United States. “Like a Rolling Stone” excels as both a story of the immigrant experience in America and a historical document of rock journalism. (MR) 

Streaming by subscription on Netflix 

Bad Press (2023) 

The Muscogee (Creek) Nation was among only five of 574 federally recognized Native American tribes with guaranteed press freedom. But in 2018, elected tribal representatives angered by Mvskoke Media’s inquiries into their malfeasance dubiously dissolved that freedom and seized content oversight for stories that Mvskoke reporters called “highly polished, beautiful, shiny turds.” Co-directors Joe Peeler and Rebecca Landsberry-Baker, herself a Muscogee (Creek) Nation member, document Mvskoke’s battle to restore that freedom with immediately, incessantly frustrating momentum. They also cast an affecting gaze on Mvskoke reporters’ own concerns about authentic communication. After all, can a media company cover its own pursuit of a free press without an inherent conflict of interest? Amid a “giant nebula of craziness” that functions as a microcosm for the nationwide chilling of news coverage, “Bad Press” offers a necessary reminder: The press must remain unencumbered by anything but an unassailable code of ethics. (NR)  

Streaming by subscription on the Criterion Channel 

Breaking the News (2024)
Inspired to improve diversity in American news gathering and leadership, Texas journalists Emily Ramshaw and Amanda Zamora founded The 19th* — a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom focused on how politics and policy affect female and non-binary populations. Startup success is tough enough when not facing the precipice of a pandemic, and co-directors Princess A. Hairston, Heather Courtney and Chelsea Hernandez depict both the amusingly lighthearted and existentially worrisome aspects of launching a new, almost fully remote newsroom in early 2020. A chief concern is embodied by The 19th*’s asterisk, a reminder of the Black women omitted from suffrage rights guaranteed by the United States Constitution’s 19th Amendment. It reflects the leadership’s imperfect but earnest attempts to foster a more inclusive workplace, particularly those from trans reporters like Kate Sosin — realizing they must push aside their own patterns of privilege to move The 19th* forward. (NR) 

Streaming by subscription on PBS Documentaries via Amazon Prime Video 

Print it Black (2024) 

Among the victims of the 2022 Robb Elementary School shooting in Uvalde, Texas, was 10-year-old Alexandria “Lexi” Rubio. Her mother, Kim, worked at the Uvalde Leader-News, where Kim’s colleagues were like family. “Print it Black” asserts the necessity of local news to communicate accurate, on-the-ground information in the wake of community tragedy. By combining Kim Rubio’s story with the nitty-gritty of the newspaper’s coverage, director Tomas Navia offers an urgent, emotional reminder of how human stories fall through the cracks without local institutions. “Print it Black” neither leaves the audience with much hope that such papers will maintain long-run solvency nor depicts Kim Rubio’s battles for federal gun control as an easy road. But it reminds audiences to keep fighting the good fight even as the wider world, now accustomed to violent horrors, tries desperately to move on without really learning a thing. (ED) Streaming by subscription on Hulu 

Who in the Hell is Regina Jones? (2024) 

“Who in the Hell is Regina Jones?” is the kind of documentary that restores your faith in a medium largely produced by streaming giants to serve as background noise while you scroll through your phone. Co-directors Billy Miossi and Soraya Sélène follow Regina Jones, a woman who doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page but who played a crucial role in shining a light on key figures in Black art — primarily music — from 1966 to 1982 with the Soul newspaper. This is an empathetic and insightful documentary about one of the 20th century’s most important chroniclers of pop culture, a woman who interviewed titans like Muhammad Ali, James Brown, Rick James and others while raising five children after getting married at 15 years old. The film does a wonderful job balancing Soul’s cultural significance while detailing the deeply human struggles of its creator. (MR) 

Screening at film festivals and awaiting further distribution

Willing to go back a bit further? Here are five from the century’s first two decades that hold up well.  

Control Room (2004) 

Before it grew into a global media conglomerate, Al Jazeera was the Middle East’s CNN. Jehane Noujaim’s documentary becomes a treatise on spin perpetrated by the military and the media, ultimately acknowledging that wartime journalism rests between objectivity and propaganda, and indifference and passion. 

Streaming for free on Kanopy and Plex, or for rental / purchase on multiple platforms.  

Page One: Inside the New York Times (2011) 

With talk of “new” Twitter and now-gutted young Turks like Gawker and Vice, Andrew Rossi’s documentary now feels quaint. But it’s a reminder that legacy news institutions still struggle with ever-evolving digital transitions … and that the late David Carr was a legendary editorial force. 

Streaming for free on Amazon Prime Video, Crackle, DistroTV, Fandango at Home, Hoopla, Plex, Pluto TV, The Roku Channel and Tubi, or for rental / purchase on multiple platforms.  

City of Ghosts (2017) 

Syrian citizen journalists risk their lives to expose ISIS atrocities in Matthew Heineman’s film. It’s rife with unspeakable horror and genuine warmth, and it forces us to consider the dangerous ideologies with which a “fake news” argument aligns while offering no easy answer to fight them.
Streaming for free on Freevee and Hoopla, by subscription on Amazon Prime Video, or for rental / purchase on multiple platforms. 

Obit (2017) 

A genially enjoyable immersion into the mindsets and meditations of New York Times obituary writers. (Yes, it goes into the dictates of pre-written obituaries.) Vanessa Gould’s documentary will also delight those with fond memories of a newspaper morgue’s organized chaos. 

Streaming for free on Hoopla and Kanopy, by subscription on AMC+ and Kino Film, or for rental / purchase on multiple platforms.  

Mike Wallace is Here (2019) 

Avi Belkin remembers the reporter with legendarily merciless interview tactics. Neither mewling hagiography nor mere homage, Belkin investigates the motivations of the mad-dog tendencies Wallace admits he wouldn’t want turned on him … and which have only gotten louder. 

Streaming for free on DistroTV, Fandango at Home, Hoopla, Plex, Pluto TV, The Roku Channel and Tubi, by subscription on Amazon Prime Video, or for rental / purchase on multiple platforms.

Marisa Kwiatkowski’s 20-year journalism career included being part of The Indianapolis Star team that helped uncover the USA Gymnastics abuse scandal which led to team doctor Larry Nasser’s arrest. That reporting also led to the Protecting Young Victims from Sexual Abuse and Safe Sport Authorization Act of 2017. In July, Kwiatkowski stepped into a new role as director of journalism at the Knight Foundation. She spoke with Quill about her start in investigative reporting, her reporting process and her new role. 

The following has been edited for length and clarity.  

What sparked your interest in journalism? 

I never wanted to do anything but journalism. I had my first professional internship when I was 15 and worked for junior high, high school and college papers. It was something that I’ve been passionate about for a long time. 

How did you get into investigative reporting? 

I was often finding in-depth investigative stories on my beats, which is why I was ultimately offered the opportunity to do investigative reporting full-time. I gravitated toward stories about harm being done to children and to vulnerable people whose voices weren’t necessarily being heard. One example is a tip we received about children who had mental health diagnoses as well as developmental disabilities, and whose parents were struggling to find appropriate services for them. The parents were falsely claiming that they had neglected their children in order to get them access to services. I did a big investigation which ultimately prompted the creation of a new state program and changes at the local level for families.  

How did such heavy topics impact you and what advice would you offer to others who report on difficult subjects? 

Early in my career, there were times when I would go out to my car afterward to cry. I remember covering the funeral of a 2-year-old, and calling my husband after because I was just struggling. In some ways, it’s good that we’re human beings in these moments, and it gets easier the more you do this kind of work. I think it’s incredibly important for journalists who cover difficult stories to find healthy outlets. I enjoy exercise and reading romance novels with a guaranteed happily ever after. It also helps to remember it’s not about us, it’s about the people sharing their stories.  

Can you reflect on the work that you did to help uncover the USA Gymnastics abuse scandal. What moments stood out to you on that journey? 

That time of my life is a bit of a blur. [We] were so focused on doing the work and doing the best that we could for the people that we were interviewing and the stories that we were finding. I was also getting my master’s degree. As for moments that stand out, one was going to Georgia and getting nearly 1000 pages of records that were really the foundation for our investigation. I asked for copies of all of the records in the file, and I was given a stack. When I got back to my car, I called a source to confirm I had received everything and quickly figured out I had not — almost half the records I needed were in the judge’s chambers. That’s a good reminder that even when you think you’ve been given something, to make sure you’re getting the right information. Another key moment was when we were all sitting around a table together looking at every word of every sentence of every paragraph to make sure it was right. We wanted it to be bulletproof. When the story came out there was another big moment — the wave of responses from people who had experienced their own challenges within gymnastics. One other moment that will always stick with me was the survivors testifying at Nassar’s sentencing. 

How do you know when you have a story and what’s your process for finding and reporting out these investigations? 

As investigative reporters, we get tips. There’s also following your own curiosity. You read or see something and it sparks an idea. I’ve also sat through incredibly, seemingly boring committee meetings, and there’s a throwaway sentence or moment that ends up being the impetus for an investigation. There is this idea of minimum story/maximum story, where a reporter must figure out what’s the minimum and maximum stories that could come out of a piece of information if it turns out to be true. The reality is there is no minimum story. If it’s not true, there’s no story. While the maximum story is of such public importance that you need to pursue it anyway.  

You’ve been active in many professional organizations throughout your career. Why do you think that’s important? 

Our goal as journalists is to give the public the best information that we can, and many organizations can help support that process. I’ve felt incredibly supported in my career and want to do that for others. I’d encourage other journalists to get involved in organizations that resonate with them because the benefit of building that camaraderie and learning from other people and their experiences is really valuable. It helps when you’re dealing with a challenge, knowing that you’re not alone and that there are people that you can lean on to talk through those dynamics.  

How did the Knight Foundation opportunity come about?  

I felt I had grown as much as I could in the role that I was in. When thinking about opportunities and what I wanted to do next, I really had two criteria: I wanted to do work that would make a difference and work with people that I like. I came across the posting for this job and it was the perfect combination of the two.  

What are your goals within this role? 

I’m trying to help the industry. It really is that simple. I’m also, at the end of the day, trying to help communities get accurate information. 

What are you currently working on? 

My portfolio includes grants relating to investigative work, relating to the First Amendment and legal support for journalists, journalists’ safety and training, as well as international journalism. All the fun stuff.  

What advice would you offer to early career journalists? 

Just to remember at the end of the day we’re serving communities. 

(photo by Mykal McEldowney/IndyStar)

Recently, however, Editor-in-Chief Amy Jones has been forced to rethink that old chestnut. 

“I want you to first demonstrate that you are human,” Jones said. “I want to know that you’re an actual person.” 

It’s a drastic change that was made because of desperate circumstances. Not long ago, “artificial intelligence” was rarely heard outside of “The Terminator” and “ The Matrix” movies and freelance editorial submissions typically consisted of a stack of envelopes perched on the corner of an editor’s desk. 

This painfully analog system imposed a de facto “barrier to entry” on writers and PR people who wanted to get noticed. To approach a publication with an idea, you needed to type up a physical pitch letter, often accompanied by photocopied examples of previous work. Then you had to procure the editor’s address, stamp a self-addressed envelope, stuff everything into a bigger envelope, mail it and then wait (and wait and wait) for a response. This meant that anyone who wanted to submit a story needed to have at least some skin (even if it was only a trip to Kinko’s and the cost of a stamp) in the game. 

Not so now. Sending pitches via email is quick and nearly effortless. Which means editors get more of them. And AI systems like ChatGPT can turn out a cover letter (or 100 cover letters for 100 different markets) in seconds. This is why editors and producers today face an avalanche of AI-produced “story pitches” from both PR firms and writers using the latest technology to cut corners.  

“There’s a rise of side hustle culture online,” Neil Clarke, editor-in-chief of the science fiction magazine Clarkesworld, told National Public Radio when his publication was flooded in late 2023 by so many AI-generated story submissions that it had to stop accepting them until it learned how to weed them out. “And some people have followings that say, ‘Hey, you can make some quick money with ChatGPT, and here’s how, and here’s a list of magazines you could submit to.’ And unfortunately, we’re on one of those lists.” 

Writer’s Digest has been hit particularly hard. Even before the advent of AI, the magazine fielded approximately 2,500 queries each month. But last January that number suddenly ballooned to around 10,000 per month. 

“There would be four or five pitches in a row from the same email address or a slight variation of that address,” Jones said. “All would have the same text, and it would maybe be a short story about some village in another country, or an article outline about some very broad, high school-level writing topic.” 

In short, a useless time suck. 

“There are just so many junk pitches these days,” Jones said. “I can only assume that other publications are having similar problems as us.” 

That’s definitely not an isolated view. The tidal wave of AI-produced story submissions is so new there’s precious little research about it, and no statistics. But editors and researchers have plenty of stories to share. 

“Luckily, AI wasn’t around when I was actively fielding pitches as an editor,” said Zachary Petit, former editor-in-chief of Print magazine and now an independent journalist. “But lately I’ve gotten the creeping suspicion that some of the many emails I receive from PR folks hoping for me to cover their clients have a distinct whiff of ChatGPT to them.” 

A couple of decades ago, when Atlanta magazine Editor-in-Chief Scott Freeman began his journalistic career, he sifted through pitches the same way Benjamin Franklin did at The Pennsylvania Gazette – by ripping open letters, reading the contents and (perhaps more than nine times out of ten) tossing them in the trash. Not so now. 

“I get deluged with email and pitches,” Freeman said. “I got a pitch today for an art exhibit in Mississippi that had nothing whatsoever to do with Atlanta, and I thought, ‘My God, what a waste of my time and their time.’” 

Editors have of course complained about hilariously irrelevant PR pitches for generations (see sidebar for excerpts of some that have recently arrived in Quill’s inbox). What’s different now is their AI-fueled, firehose-like volume. Hard to believe that the artificial intelligence “revolution,” as it applies to journalistic submissions, has only just begun. 

“It’s kind of like the iPhone,” Freeman said. “The first time I held one, it was simply impossible to see all the places it was going to take us. I think AI will change our [journalistic] world in very fundamental ways. Particularly the magazine business, because at some point it will be capable of writing good articles. And there will be media owners who see it as a way to cut expenses and shift to it.” 

At this particular moment, however, writing a convincing story pitch without human assistance seems beyond its grasp. But while AI work typically lacks quality, it has absolutely no problem generating quantity. This means the very idea of sending some sort of response, even to queries that were obviously created by a human, becomes ever more problematic. 

“Do you do the ‘right’ thing and respond to every single submission, or do you save time and your sanity and only cherry-pick the true contenders?” Petit said. “I’ve done it both ways. When I’m on the writer’s side of the equation, it truly breaks me in half to receive no response at all. Not even a form letter. So, when I’m in my editor costume I do my best to respond to as many pitches as possible – so long as they fit the publication and haven’t obviously been shotgunned to 30 other outlets.” 

As Petit illustrates, making the process of creating (generating?) editorial and PR submissions so easy has inevitably decreased the chances of legitimate pitches being accepted — or perhaps even noticed. Recently Freeman had to have a chat with a newly hired editor who earnestly reviewed every submission, wrote personal responses to each, and then cc’d those numberless notes to his inbox. 

“I finally had to tell her, ‘You don’t have time to do that,’” he said. “As for me, I’m almost to the point where, if the header on an email doesn’t grab my attention, I may not read the email at all. Because there’s just so much. I try to peruse as many as I can, but it’s just impossible.” 

His low-tech fix for the AI problem is the same one used by editors for generations — develop a stable of trusted freelancers with clearance to bypass the slush pile. As for unsolicited queries, try to find a few diamonds in the mostly AI-generated landfill that might be worth promoting to The Show.  

“My philosophy as an editor is to depend on the people you trust,” Freeman said. “It’s not easy to crack into that lineup because I’ve developed a pretty wide base of writers, but it’s possible.” 

Still, though it’s easy to dump on AI, the sad truth is that in most cases it isn’t any worse than, say, 90% of the verbiage typed out by actual humans. According to Andrew DeVigal, director of the Agora Journalism Center at the University of Oregon, editors reject AI pitches for the same reasons they’ve always rejected human-produced ones — they’re poorly composed, painfully generic and lack interesting angles. The only real difference between crappy human verbiage and AI dreck is that AI spews out so much more of it. 

“My wife hired a PR firm to help her with an event she directed, and the summary of the event that they submitted to her was straight out of AI,” DeVigal said. “No specificity, no quotes, nothing unique.” 

He always tells his students they won’t be replaced by AI, but rather by someone who knows how to use AI properly. Or, in other words, someone who can use the technology to locate and organize information, but has the skill to give it a thorough rewrite that imparts a “human touch.” 

Though arguably, today’s AIs already write like humans. After all, the system “learns” by examining mountains of already-existing, human-authored online material. The problem is that the majority of this material if we’re being honest, isn’t very good. So, it should come as no surprise when AI takes all of this less-than-stellar source material and turns it into a dull pastiche of meh. 

Jane Friedman, a journalist and book author, who edits The Hot Sheet, a newsletter reporting on the publishing industry, finds that there simply aren’t very many people, let alone robots, with the relevant training, job history or connections to contribute anything useful to her publication. For that reason, writers prone to serving up AI proposals have mostly left her alone. So far. 

“I would actually welcome more submissions, but there are very few people who have enough knowledge of the industry,” Friedman said. “They wouldn’t even know what to pitch to me.” 

The same can’t be said of her personal website, janefriedman.com, which draws a steady stream of generic press releases and AI-generated proposals, along with a smattering of actual pitches from actual humans.  

“Just in my small little corner of the submissions world, I have seen more people turning in stuff that looks AI-generated to me,” she said. “You can see it in the nature of the pitch or even the writing itself. Once you’ve used these AI tools yourself, there are certain stylistic quirks you notice. You see the patterns.” 

She says, for instance, that when offering a list of examples in a story, AI for some reason typically serves up four, while humans only list three. AIs also love to pile on adjectives and adverbs, and if they hit on a particular word, they like you’ll see it again and again throughout their copy.  

“If the writer doesn’t go through and clean that up, it makes it so obvious,” Friedman said. “It makes it really easy to spot a quality submission when it comes through.” 

The problem, of course, is that the programs keep getting better. In such cases, working in a hyper-focused niche might be a refuge. 

“For specialized areas like mine, it’s hard to imagine the AI coming up with an idea that’s actually interesting,” Friedman said. “I think it’s really good at telling us things we already know, but I think it still takes a human to make it compelling or bring some sort of insight to bear.” 

Like her colleagues, Petit and Freeman, she worries that the sheer volume of submissions means less attention gets paid to any particular query, making it even harder for earnest newcomers to break in. She also understands tendency to find, develop and then bunker up with a small, trusted cadre of freelancers who get the lion’s share of assignments. But she’s not a fan of that strategy. 

“I cringe as I’m saying this, because I still believe in my heart of hearts that publishing is one of the last industries where you really can get meaningful consideration for your ideas without knowing someone on the inside,” Friedman said. 

Fortunately, as many publications seemed to have learned recently, there might be a way to staunch AI-generated avalanches of queries. Writer’s Digest, for example, recently put in place a system that, for the moment at least, seems to keep the robots at bay. 

“When we had our editorial brainstorm session last summer to decide our themes for the next year, we spent a lot of time talking about this issue,” Jones said. “How could we find a way to make this manageable again? Because we were tired of spending hours just hitting ‘delete,’ ‘delete,’ ‘delete’ over and over.” 

Turns out much of the issue can be mitigated by throwing up even the most minor of speed bumps in front of the robots. For instance, a while back Writer’s Digest stopped a deluge of spam simply by removing live URLs from their submissions page, forcing submitters to cut and paste the relevant address onto an email. Introducing the need for even a tiny bit of human intervention put a huge dent in the problem. 

This year the magazine tried something similar by having session ideas for Writer’s Digest’s annual conference submitted only via Google Forms. Using Forms once again forced a modicum of human participation in the process, and screened out pretty much all spam and AI submissions. 

“Rather than having people email submissions to a submission box, they are filling out specific questions,” Jones explained. 

Today the magazine uses pretty much the same technique with story submissions. Instead of everybody dumping everything into a central submission box, there are now separate, individual portals geared to the overarching theme of each upcoming issue. Writers not only must conform to Google Form’s template, but also explain how their particular pitch matches up with the chosen theme for the month they’re pitching. This sort of thing is, to put it mildly, not AI’s strong suit. 

“I’m happy to say that now there’s no AI, no spam,” Jones said. “It’s only legitimate pitches.” 

This technique is catching on with other publications. 

“I’m seeing more and more using Submittable or some other submission portal similar to what we are trying to do,” Jones said. “They’re implementing a barrier where a human has to participate.” 

The problem, of course, is that the war against AI isn’t won. Indeed, against an ever-improving opponent whose ability to mimic humans grows ever more sophisticated, “winning” is probably out of the question.  

“Check back in a few months and I can tell you how things are going,” Jones said. “But so far, it seems to be working. The AI bots haven’t figured out a way to fill out a form. We’ll see how it goes.” 

Sorry but we’ll pass  

Excerpts from the Quill pitch pile that we didn’t feel were quite right for our journalist-focused publication. 

• “Scientists at the Limpopo rhino orphanage in South Africa have injected radioactive material into the horns of live rhinos to prevent them from being poached.”
• “To get a pulse on this year’s chilling decor trends, Lawn Love surveyed over 1,000 U.S. adults about their Halloween decorating plans, including budgets, pumpkin-carving habits, and more.”
• “Are you looking for something original to watch? How about a Broadway-style musical about social media influencers living together in an apartment building in Los Angeles?”
• “Following the conclusion of the iconic GRAMMY®-winning artist’s brief trek this summer, he has announced that the U.S. tour raised more than $125,000 for five nonprofit organizations”
• “… a leader in innovative skincare for over 50 years, is thrilled to announce the national debut of the world’s first skin-derived microbiome ampoule…”
• “The platform uses real-time voice AI to offer natural conversations with minimal latency, providing companies with a safe, controlled manner to adopt AI in their sales training processes.”
• “(in Arabic) This course is an intensive introduction to the role of the Board of Directors and the testing and development of effectiveness skills.”

What’s the upside of holding back on reporting?  

An often-cited benefit of these restrictions is that an embargo allows more time for journalists to prepare before news officially breaks. Reporters can pull together background and get reactions from stakeholders while assignment editors can set aside time or space for the story, all of which can allow the news organization to produce a thoroughly reported breaking news story.  

Theoretically, the extra time also cuts down on mistakes, as journalists, spared of an adrenaline rush, can take more care with their story without fear of getting scooped. If everyone plays by the rules, competition is muted and all journalists are equally disadvantaged. Those with the precious currency of speed can spend another day on an unscheduled breaking story. 

Many journalists are indifferent about embargoes and don’t see them as pesky inconveniences that usurp control of the journalistic process.  

Others, however, passionately decry them as uneven agreements that give non-journalists too much influence over the news agenda with little benefit to the public.

Vincent Kiernan, a former science reporter and retired university dean, is among the passionate opponents. 

“Journalists should not allow other people to put collars around them and lead them to one story versus another and to yank on that collar and say, ‘No, you can’t even have that story yet,’” Kiernan said. “That is not a proper role for journalists.” 

Movie reviewers who may have access to films earlier honor release-date embargoes and Broadway critics hold their opinions until the official opening night even if they saw the play in previews. Science journalists, who more likely work at large or national news organizations, report on research findings published in academic journals and encounter frequent, often strict, embargoes. Embargoes also are frequently used by government agencies and public relations firms representing a variety of businesses. And they set the terms of the embargoes, not journalists. 

A typical journalist at a local news outlet is unlikely to have regular run-ins over embargoes, although it sometimes happens. The Chicago Sun-Times usually agrees to embargoes that will give its journalists more time to flesh out complicated stories or mine raw data, said Norman Parish, a deputy managing editor at the newspaper. But the paper doesn’t agree to embargoes on stories it discovers independently, he said. 

“We use embargoes all the time, and most of the time we respect them. In cases that we’re prone to not respect them is when we have the story already or we’re working on it.” 

The Sun-Times occasionally receives consequential news that’s embargoed, such as advance details of the city budget or school statistics, Parish said.  It’s more typical to see embargoes for publicizing the teacher of the year or other non-controversial stories. And while there may be good reasons to not agree to those, it’s not worth spending time debating them, he said. 

Ivan Oransky, a journalist and physician who started the blog “Embargo Watch” in 2010, said embargoes are not inherently bad and that news organizations he now leads sometimes produce work under their restrictions. He agrees there are stories that don’t merit a big investment of time, including time challenging an embargo placed on them. 

“If it’s a good-news story and you’re not going to dig at it, I don’t have a moral problem with that,” said Oransky, executive editor of The Transmitter, a publication focused on neuroscience. “What I do have an ethical, moral, journalistic problem with is handing over wholesale the coverage of a particular industry.” 

Oransky consistently posted to “Embargo Watch” for six years, and he noticed some trends after he stopped posting regularly. When he called out companies for problematic embargoes, the companies discontinued those practices, although today, some of those companies have reverted back to their bad habits, he said. He also has noticed companies setting embargoes with shorter windows of time and increased use of so-called “close-hold” embargoes, which forbid journalists from sharing embargoed information to anyone, including sources they may want to contact for reaction. 

“I think that it’s really important for journalists to realize that when they agree to an embargo, they are sacrificing a bit of their independence,” Oransky said. 

Kiernan, who retired in May as dean of the Metropolitan School of Professional Studies at the Catholic University of America, had trouble seeing embargoes as normal or helpful to journalists or the public. To him, they were incompatible with the practice of journalism. After writing stories and academic papers critical of them, he penned a book, “Embargoed Science,” in 2006. 

“The argument of the book is that embargoes in science journalism act against the public interest,” Kiernan said. “They’re a bad idea, and we shouldn’t have them. That’s the bottom line.” 

Kiernan and others contend that those who set embargoes have far more to gain from them than journalists or the public. It gives them wall-to-wall, concentrated coverage, locking them and their message in a prominent spot among news of the day. Public relations professionals encourage their use, and there’s unlimited guidance across the web on how to use them strategically to increase their effectiveness. 

The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors is well aware of journalists’ complaints: “The ICMJE acknowledges criticisms of embargo systems as being self-serving of journals’ interests and an impediment to rapid dissemination of scientific information, but believes the benefits of the systems outweigh their harms,” the group says on its website.  

The organization says it tries to balance the competing interests of the public, the news media and medical journals.  

“For the media, the embargo creates a ‘level playing field,’ which most reporters and writers appreciate since it minimizes the pressure on them to publish stories before competitors when they have not had time to prepare carefully,” the organization says. “Consistency in the timing of public release of biomedical information is also important in minimizing economic chaos, since some articles contain information that has potential to influence financial markets.” 

When one news organization breaks an embargo, others follow, reasoning that it makes no sense to continue holding a story after it’s available to the public elsewhere. Outlets rarely admit to intentionally breaking an embargo. Someone accidentally pressed the publish button instead of the save button. Or someone thought the release date was Wednesday instead of Thursday. Or someone thought Wednesday was Thursday. Some companies punish outlets that break an embargo, no matter the reason. 

Medical journalist Patricia Anstett says the Journal of the American Medical Association accused her of breaking an embargo in 2002, and she never received another press release from the publication during the remaining 10 years she worked at the Detroit Free Press. Anstett, now a freelance journalist, contends she never broke the embargo but being blacklisted didn’t hamper her career or her work. 

She recalled that Detroit, at the time, was one of several cities participating in a national hormone replacement therapy study, and months before the journal published its research, local doctors were telling her about serious health risks associated with the therapy used in the study that also surfaced in earlier, related studies. After two months of speaking to physicians, women undergoing hormone replacement treatment and other sources, Anstett’s story was ready to go to press. According to Anstett, JAMA’s editor saw a summary of the story on the newspaper’s wire service the day before it would run and told her it violated the embargo and that she couldn’t use any material from the journal. 

“I said, ‘I’m not. I’ve been reporting this for two months, and if you see my story … you can see I talked to all kinds of people who had concerns about the risk of hormone replacement therapy. There’s nothing that came from the study.’” 

The Free Press ran the story as planned, making it the lead story on Page 1. 

JAMA declined to comment on any interaction it had with Anstett: “We cannot speak to what happened more than 20 years ago as editorial and communications leadership have changed,” spokeswoman Jen Zeis said in a statement to Quill. 

“We currently aim to provide reporters on our embargoed access list with the full text of our articles with an embargo period of 48 to 72 hours, a practice we have consistently taken for many years,” she added. “In our experience, reporters appreciate, and have respected, the embargo. We believe media embargoes help our shared goal of reporting complex scientific findings to the public accurately and thoroughly.” 

In August, Bloomberg posted a big story declaring that Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and more than a dozen others had been freed from Russian captivity in a complicated prisoner swap involving 24 people across several countries. Besides breaking a U.S. government embargo, the story was incorrect since Gershkovich still was in Russian custody at the time. The U.S. had notified about 30 news organizations of the pending prisoner swap with the condition that they not release stories until the swap was complete. 

The other journalists were furious over the embargo breach. The government was even more, saying the premature story could have put the deal and numerous people’s lives at risk. 

Bloomberg Editor-in-Chief John Micklethwait told the staff he planned to apologize to each prisoner and already had apologized to Wall Street Journal Editor Emma Tucker, noting that it “was clearly their story to lead the way on.” He said Bloomberg’s handling of the story violated its editorial standards and, following an investigation, “a number of those involved” had been disciplined. 

The Bloomberg fiasco highlights one of two reasons for news organizations to agree to embargoes —minimizing harm, said Lee Wilkins, a former journalist, professor and chair of the Department of Communication at Wayne State University in Detroit. “I’m not talking about minimal harm; I’m talking about great harm, as in loss of life,” she said. The other reason is to allow time for reporters to tell a complete story and verify all details. 

“The good reasons really boil down to truth-telling and harm, and you know what? That’s OK,” Wilkins said. “There don’t have to be a lot because those two are pretty firm. They have an ancient tradition, and they are core principles of journalism.” 

Wilkins praised Anstett for working around JAMA’s embargo and showing that reporters can produce compelling journalism without agreeing to restrictions set by sources. “[Anstett] is just a model of what a good reporter is. She was well-sourced. She was very knowledgeable,” Wilkins said. “The reason JAMA does a lot of those embargoes is so it can capture the attention, which sells more journals, which makes more money for them. Withholding information — good, bad or indifferent — because you want to have a big splashy party at the reveal is not ethically compelling.” 

Kiernan goes further than Wilkins. He believes there is no reason for journalists to ever agree to embargoes. Sports leagues don’t embargo game scores, he said. The U.S. Supreme Court doesn’t embargo court decisions. Yet, journalists manage to get those stories out quickly. Journalists are not all equally talented, Kiernan said, but scores of them regularly show they’re capable of turning around breaking news stories with speed and accuracy. 

No story requiring investment of a journalist’s time is too insignificant to contest an embargo, Kiernan said. He contends a teacher-of-the-year story should be crafted and disseminated when the reporter gets the information. To do otherwise begins a slippery slope, he said. Even stories about the prisoner swap should not have been limited by an embargo, he insisted. The government was wrong to try to corral all stories about the swap so they can be released at the same time. Nor should the government be surprised that such a major story could be contained. If Anstett’s medical story couldn’t withstand an embargo, why would anyone think a complicated prisoner swap coordinated across several nations could withstand one, he asked. 

“Information is power, and that means whoever controls the information has power,” Kiernan said. “And it’s really important to think about what the embargo does in terms of who has power and who does not have power, and are we comfortable with that as a society and as a profession?” 

Rod Hicks is director of ethics and diversity for the Society of Professional Journalists. Follow him on X @rodhicks. 

He wasn’t the first to travel this professional path. During the ’60s and ’70 the now-defunct Post (along with several other English language papers) took in numerous soon-to-be-famous scribes, including gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson. 

“If Paris had been the haven for the Lost Generation of émigré artists, poets and novelists in the first half of the 20th century, then Brazil would become a New Wave destination for storytellers of a different stripe during the second half,” Bloom said. 

After returning from Brazil, his U.S. career included gigs at the Dallas Morning News and the Los Angeles Times, among others, along with appearances in magazines ranging from Esquire to Smithsonian. He’s also the author of seven nonfiction books, including “Tears of Mermaids” (tracing the journey of a single pearl from its retrieval from a clam to its presentation to its eventual owner) and “Inside the Writer’s Mind: Writing Narrative Journalism.” His newest work, “The Brazil Chronicles,” describes the history and the milieu of that country’s expat journalist scene. Why write about such an obscure slice of history? Because it was simply too eventful of a time and too colorful a place to be forgotten. 

“This book is a chronicle of those two years, as well as the history of expat newspapers in Latin America,” said Bloom, who interviewed roughly 150 people from the Herald and other Brazilian publications. “This was my corner of the world.” 

How did you wind up working in Brazil? 

I couldn’t get a job in the United States, because this was the beginning of the precipitous decline in newspapers. In 1978 afternoon papers were just beginning to crater. I wanted to cover the major stories of my generation but I couldn’t get a job. I took my VW Bug and drove from San Francisco to Seattle, camping out along Interstate 5. I interviewed at a lot of different newspapers, and I got a lot of people who said, “When we have an opening, maybe we’ll consider you.” 

I was working as a waiter in a fancy Italian restaurant in the Bay Area, and during a break, I read a Los Angeles Times story about a startup newspaper in Brazil. I wrote them, never thinking I’d hear back, and I got a job offer. I took a crash course at Berkeley in Portuguese and got a one-way ticket to Brazil, never thinking I’d come back. And I got a job working for this crazy expat newspaper. And I realized that expat newspapers in Brazil went all the way back to 1825 and that I was just one of hundreds of journalists who would go anywhere for a job or a story.  

Why was it so hard to find a publisher for this book? 

Anyone who’s interested in Latin America knows that American editors’ eyes glaze over when you talk to them about the region. Maybe not so much about Mexico, but anything farther south, such as Argentina, Chile or Brazil, is really of no interest to American newspaper editors. So when I talked to agents about representing this book, I was told to forget it, because no one’s going to read it. Maybe if I’d worked for the International Herald Tribune in Paris, they’d be interested. But not Brazil. So I went from commercial presses to academic publishers, which presented a different problem, because they are by and large controlled by editorial boards made up of academics who are not that interested in journalism history. Especially newspaper history, which they think is sort of a snooze.  

What kept you going? 

I kept returning to it because it was a hell of a tale that needed to be told. There were sexy angles all the way through the story. Hunter S. Thompson worked for the newspaper a few years before I arrived. I worked with Tad Szulc, who broke the Bay of Pigs story for the New York Times. And Eric Hippeau, the editor of the Brazil Herald, would become the CEO of the Huffington Post. I also worked with people who were ex-cons, fugitives, embezzlers, drug dealers and pornographers. 

So I finally went to the University of Missouri Press because their journalism school is the oldest in America and it’s probably the most well-known with the exception of the Columbia Journalism School. The editor fell in love with the manuscript and it was smooth sailing from there on. It’s really a hybrid book. It’s about me, but I also dish a lot about some pretty big American journalism gatekeepers. I also talk about the fun and fascination of going to this very exotic place and working for this newspaper.  

What was the vibe of the Brazil Herald’s newsroom like?  

It was great. We were on the third floor of a dicey neighborhood in downtown Rio. There was smoking and drinking in the newsroom, and no air conditioning. One thing that wasn’t tolerated, even if the indoor temperature rose to 95 degrees, was griping about how hot it was. We all knew it was stifling, but you just didn’t talk about it. Also, the telephone system didn’t work very well. If you wanted to make a call you had to pick up a phone and wait for a dial tone. And that wait could last anywhere from five minutes to three hours. Our publisher, Bill Williamson, couldn’t wait, so he’d have a secretary sit online. And suddenly she’d scream in Portuguese, “Mr. Bill, you have a dial tone,” and he’d run back to his office. But at that point, there would be no dial tone, so he’d repeat the process again and again.  

How did Hunter S. Thompson find his way to the Brazil Herald? 

He worked at the newspaper in 1962, while I started there in 1979. He actually first tried out his trademark gonzo journalism at the Herald. Thompson left America for the same reason I left – to get a job and to write the great stories. The people who worked with him will tell you something interesting. He wasn’t into drugs. He was into alcohol. And he was really into guns. I write a lot about that in the book. He wasn’t involved with drugs the way he was later when he worked for Rolling Stone and wrote all of his Fear and Loathing sagas. Thompson, as I did, tried to use his Brazil Herald experience to jump the queue to get into mainstream American newspapers. 

Which you say wasn’t the easiest thing to do, given U.S. editors’ prejudice against Latin American stories. 

As a journalist in South America, you’re constantly challenged to tell stories that are going to be on page one. Well, that’s really difficult to do, unless you’re writing about a coup or earthquake. But there aren’t many coups or earthquakes. So you’ve got a country like Brazil, that’s as large as the 48 contiguous U.S. states, and if you’re going to be a correspondent there who’s being paid by an American newspaper, you’ve got to come up with big stories for your value will be considered to be as high as, say, a Middle East or Paris or New York correspondent. But it was a really fertile training ground for me to try to write page-turning, can’t-put-it-down articles that were essentially feature stories. 

What was your biggest success along those lines? 

I’d heard stories about an expatriate community in Brazil that was founded by Confederate soldiers’ families who left the American South in 1866, after the defeat of the Confederacy. I got myself to this Brazilian town fittingly named Americana, and I found third- and fourth-generation American southerners. They were Portuguese speakers and they were born in Brazil, but among themselves, they still spoke an American southern dialect. I sold the story to the Los Angeles Times, which put it on page one. The story was a huge hit in America, but I became persona non grata among the American correspondents in Brazil because in their view I had lionized racists. These were people who used very reprehensible language to talk about Africans in Brazil. What seemed even worse to other Brazilian correspondents was that I had veered from the accepted menu, which was writing about democracy, the Brazilian dictatorship that ruled the country at the time, and American duplicity in censorship. But when my story appeared in the LA Times, all of the other foreign correspondents got notes from their editors saying, “Well, where’s your stunning, gee whiz feature story? 

Why did you decide to go in this direction? 

Those stories were of interest to me. As a newcomer to Brazil and as someone who ultimately became a nonfiction writer, I was much more interested in these other stories that, in maybe a hundred years from now, a thousand years from now, would be more important. They would give an idea of what life was like living in this place called Latin America and what it was like for an American to be there. That’s what I hope “The Brazil Chronicles” can do. It’s sort of this a backward look through a telescope – an attempt at understanding the thrill, the excitement of an ambitious young journalist who decided to buy a one-way plane ticket and for two to three years had the adventure of his life.  

Do you feel sympathy for kids going into journalism these days, who will never know the world where you could write like this? 

I wrote a book called “Tears of Mermaids,” in which I traced one pearl from a diver’s hand to the moment a woman puts on a necklace that incorporates it. But that journalism is dead. That journalism will never exist again. Our attention span has been decimated by our habit of scrolling for hours and hours about meaningless stuff. It’s the new pornography. That’s what Instagram and TikTok are all about. It’s done something to our attention span. But most of my students aren’t going into news and reporting anyway. They’re not going into storytelling. They’re going into communications, and they’ll work for anything from a hardware company to a sports team. Journalism is a capitalistic enterprise. It’s dependent on the people who are going to buy the paper. The more clicks you’re going to get these days, the more advertisers you’re going to get. So you’ve got to get to the point and get to it fast.  

I learned how to write obituaries at a contest-style event hosted at a funeral home and taught by the Miami Herald’s legacy obituary writer, Elinor J. Brecher — I lost. But I felt prepared when my student newspaper needed someone to write an obituary months later. About a year after that, when SPJ Florida went on to host the contest again, I’d end up winning. I still have the decorative urn trophy.

Experiences like that and the connections I made would inspire me to pursue a career in journalism and career-long involvement with SPJ, first taking over the Florida chapter, and later joining the national board. My job history has spanned styles and media, covering community news at the South Florida Sun Sentinel, education at The Florida Times-Union, specializing in social media with South Florida Gay News and contributing to glossy magazines like Teen Vogue, Cosmopolitan and Bon Appétit along the way.

Today, I’m based in South Philadelphia, reporting on national trending news for The Philadelphia Inquirer. It’s my greatest honor to say hello and write this note as your new president of the Society of Professional Journalists — especially serving as a unionized and working journalist in the field.

SPJ has seen its ups and downs in its storied history. In this monumental election year, the organization is re-focused with a new plan for financial stability — thanks to the support of the SPJ Foundation — and new Executive Director Caroline Hendrie at the helm, an accomplished journalist and proven leader with a track record of success.

We also have a new board stacked with new and veteran industry members.

Vice President Chris Vaccaro, a professor and director at Hofstra University, graduates from his role as at-large director and regional coordinator liaison. His leadership and media experience positions him as a reliable voice of reason with additional knowledge in nonprofit boards. He and I will be in lockstep this year, honoring the same rapport I had with my predecessor and friend, SPJ immediate past President Ashanti Blaize-Hopkins.

Sara Catania, SPJ secretary-treasurer and chief program and operating officer at the Solutions Journalism Network, will serve as the finance explainer and liaison to the Society board, working closely with staff to ensure that all budget-related matters are communicated clearly and with the greatest possible transparency. Catania is committed to ensuring SPJ upholds its fiduciary responsibilities, bringing to bear her extensive journalism career combined with her leadership role at SJN, a nonprofit journalism support organization.

Wesley Wright returns in his second year as at-large director. A journalist who took his talents back to his (and my) alma mater of Florida Atlantic University, he serves as the college’s assistant director of student media. Wright has already made his time with SPJ count, cementing new partnerships with other journalism organizations through his work leading the ReNews Project, a program reviving dormant HBCU and HSI student newsrooms across the country. Wright’s work also focuses on sports journalism and freedom of speech issues surrounding college athletes.

Nicole DeCriscio is an award-winning journalist and a founding board member and board president of The Owen News, the first local nonprofit newspaper in Indiana. She became an independent journalist based in Indiana in 2019 after previously working for several daily newspapers throughout South-Central Indiana as a general assignment reporter, copy editor and page designer. DeCriscio has already made history on our board, serving simultaneously as a director and as SPJ’s Region 5 Coordinator as part of her goal to bridge the gap between the national board and the work happening on the ground with SPJ regional chapters.

Patricia Gallagher Newberry, a past SPJ national president (2019-20), joins us on the board. In her day job as an enterprise reporter for the government/business/politics team at The Cincinnati Enquirer, she reads a lot of budgets and crunches numbers. In her long service to SPJ, she’s taken those skills to SPJ’s budget. She supports initiatives to bring in new dollars from foundations and similar funders, and looks forward to continuing to work with the SPJ Finance Committee to see that play out.

Beatrice Forman is a general assignment reporter at The Philadelphia Inquirer, where she specializes in the creator economy. Most recently, she was a contributor for “Taylor Swift,” a book retrospective on the pop star published by Hearst in October. Forman graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 2022, where she established a fellowship program at Penn for BIPOC students with financial hardships that would’ve otherwise prevented them from participating in student media. She brings that excitement to get student journalists involved early on to SPJ. Forman also coordinates U.S. Democracy Day — a democracy-focused journalism collaborative with more than 200 members across the country.

Joseph Hernandez, associate drinks editor for Bon Appétit Magazine, brings his skills in leadership and awards, along with service and features journalism to SPJ. He previously served as vice-chair and regional chair for the James Beard Awards Restaurant and Chefs Committee, where he worked alongside other reporters, editors and restaurant critics to identify and celebrate the industry’s talented leaders and innovators. I know his experience will prove insightful for SPJ.

Finally, Khari Johnson, a tech reporter at CalMatters, rounds out our board. Reporting on artificial intelligence and how it impacts people, their communities and society for nearly a decade, Johnson’s experience will strengthen SPJ’s ability to weigh in on our ever-changing industry and how AI and new technology shapes it.

With this dedicated team by my side, I’m confident we’ll have an impactful year committed to journalism advocacy, ethics, media literacy and diversity. We’re excited for the next year and hope you are too.

Emily Bloch, 2024-25 national SPJ president, is The Philadelphia Inquirer’s national trending news reporter.

CONNECT WITH EMILY:

eblochjourno@gmail.com

Social handles @emdrums

Sorry, we can’t help you with that.

But what we can do, as we have traditionally done in the winter issue of Quill, is offer some material suggestions that journalists would likely like to give or receive.

AUTHOR CLOCK — $199

If you’re a clock-watcher in need of inspiration, how about a clock that actually offers inspiration? Each minute of this unique timepiece brings a new quote — with addition coming regularly since its hooked up to your Wi-Fi. Feeling worldly? You can switch the language from English to French, Spanish or German. Bonus: you can set the font to match your decorating style

MOPHIE POWERSTATION PRIME27 POWER BANK — $50

While we’ve admittedly not tried every brand of power bank, there are some we’ve used that have been … not great. We have, however, been through enough trial and error to tell you we’ve always been pleased with Mophie’s stuff. This one can recharge most phones up to five times, it’s sturdy, it recharges itself fairly quickly and it’s pretty much devoid of bells and whistles — which makes it super simple to use. The device has two USB-A and one USB-C port, and all three can charge devices simultaneously. The USB-C port is also used to recharge the bank. (A note: Anker also makes pretty durable and reliable power banks if you’re looking for something a little slimmer.)

FUTURIZTA ZEUS-X GO ULTRA 6-IN-1 UNIVERSAL CABLE — $44-$49

While we’re on the subject of charging stuff, USB-C connectors — the little plugs that never need flipping over (yes, we all have had that experience with previous USB cables) — will become standard in the EU by the end of this year. That will trickle down to — well, everywhere, eventually. The connections on your older devices, however, will not magically transform when that standardization happens. Here’s a pretty elegant little adapter that solves the problem, with connections for:

• USB to Lightning • USB to USB-C • USB to Micro-USB • USB-C to USB-C • USB-C to Lightning • USB-C to Micro-USB

It comes in two colors, but the “Apex Silver” model currently offers both a “keychain” and half-meter form factor.

PELICAN TRAVELER LAPTOP SLEEVE — $40 and TRAVELER TECH ORGANIZER — $30

You may be familiar with Pelican cases if you’re a photographer, videographer or on-location audio engineer, or you may have seen your pals in the image- and sound-capturing business lugging these things around. Simply put, they’re great gear protectors. Pelican also has a line of soft-sided cases, and they include a weather-resistant laptop sleeve and a nifty case called the Traveler Tech Organizer — think of it as kind of a toiletries kit, but for all your digital accessories. Features include a cord pass-through, an AirTag compartment — and a way less of a disorganized mess in your backpack.

“Paper of Wreckage: An Oral History of the New York Post 1976-2024” — Atria Books, $32.50

An underrated subgenre of non-fiction books is the oral history. In the right hands — and with the right cast-of-character interviews, such quote-compilers make for outstanding page-turners. Here, Susan Mulcahy and Frank DiGiacomo, each past staffers at the New York Post, have relentlessly collected stories that add up to an insightful, funny, thoughtful, sad and relentlessly engaging look at a paper, a city, a profession and its participants.

THINGS IN RINGS — Allplay, $19

Deduction is a big part of journalism and in this game, all but one of the players are trying to deduce the rule that applies to each of the three sections of a Venn diagram formed by three colored rings. Each ring has a rule known only to the Knower (i.e. less than five letters, could help you survive in the wilderness, etc.) and the rest of the players attempt to place words from the cards in their hand into the proper circle or overlapping space. The Knower determines if this is correct — in which case the guesses can take another turn — or incorrect — in which case the card is moved to its proper place and the next player makes an attempt. Eventually, words pile up in the circles and the areas where they overlap. The goal is to deduce the rule for each circle and get rid of your cards, which can prove surprisingly frustratingly fun.

LEDLENSER P5R LED FLASHLIGHT — $72

Yes, your smartphone has a flashlight. The downsides: That built-in feature can drain your battery like crazy, it’s not super bright and it’s probably only got two settings: on and off. If you’ve ever tried navigating during a power outage — or in the wilderness — you know a dedicated flashlight is a huge help. We turned to one of our favorite nerdy pubs, Popular Mechanics, to see their picks for “Best Flashlights of 2024.” We’re recommending the one that weighed the least. (You’re welcome.) Without boring you with talk of lumens, we will tell you this device can give you a spot or flood pattern, has high, low and blink settings, and a rechargeable battery that lasted five hours when tested.

BLUE LIGHT BLOCKING GLASSES — $33-$40

Natural daylight is packed with blue wavelengths — which is great for making humans alert and productive. It’s downright lousy at night, however, since exposure to blue light before bed likely interferes with our circadian rhythms. That’s a problem for any journalist hoping to catch a little shut-eye after wrapping up a rewrite at two o’clock in the morning — most computer screens have a nasty habit of bathing us in the waves that keep us awake. A simple fix: lenses that block that blue light. When it comes to those lenses, Spectra479 delivers a variety of form factors, from clip-ons to fit-overs to standalone shades, all at reasonable prices.

ECO-FRIENDLY COTTON TOTE — Shop SPJ, $26

This two-sided, logo-emblazoned eco-friendly cotton tote bag is perfect for carrying notebooks, recorders and all the essentials for a day in the field. With SPJ’s classic blue logo that shows pride in SPJ, it’s both functional and a statement of dedication to journalism. A practical, stylish gift for any reporter or media enthusiast. You can find this and more on Shop SPJ offering a mix of fun journalism designs like “Journalists Run on Coffee,” the classic SPJ logo and SPJ Code of Ethics.

Local newspaper and magazine subscriptions — Priceless

We will not stop encouraging giving the gift of actual journalism to co-workers, friends and family. It’s the gift that keeps on giving — and helps keep us all working.

To see where these rank in on the master list (now at 210 flicks), visit here. And for a rundown of some of the best journalism documentaries in recent years, check out the winter print issue of Quill.

September 5 (2024). The 1972 massacre of Israeli athletes by Palestinian militants at the Munich Summer Olympics has been frequently documented or dramatized. But rarely has a take focused on the perspective offered by “September 5” — of those who conducted the tone, tempo and tenor of events as reported from ABC Sports’ control room and beamed live via satellite to nearly a billion global viewers. It’s technically sharp, consistently tense, well-acted and offers occasionally compelling thematic elements of how winners shape history and fight having that opportunity seized from their grasp. By collapsing the chronology into only 91 minutes, though, director / co-writer Tim Fehlbaum leaves little room to contemplate the legacy these people wrought in a realm of journalistic immediacy. The film’s final act shifts further into nuances of language, namely in the lexicon of how confirmation and competition can get crossed up, and it also introduces the question of how easily journalistic eagerness can be exploited. It’s always a tricky line to walk between overplaying and underplaying the reason why a movie of the past matters now and Fehlbaum generally avoids issues of historical, or even emotional, reckoning. Anything you feel about having just witnessed some semblance of institutional death at the conclusion of “September 5” is more contingent upon your own ability to connect the dots of history than the film’s forceful presentation. (NR)

Lee (2024). Namechecked in 2024’s “Civil War,” Lee Miller was an American photojournalist whose World War II correspondence for Vogue spanned the Blitz to Buchenwald. After her death in 1977, Miller’s son discovered and promoted her work in an effort to entrench her long-term legacy. Kate Winslet portrays Miller in a film that positions her photographic pivot from fashion cheesecake to fierce combat as a corrective lens for her blind spot to the march of fascism. The finest moments allow Winslet to convey the complex and often conflicting impulses Miller felt in truthfully capturing an image and suitably experiencing catharsis for grief. Paying homage to historical horror is no guarantee that it won’t repeat itself, but sometimes it’s the best defense we have all the same. Unfortunately, the screenplay’s Wikipedia-section approach — and a last-minute structural twist that aims for “Whoa!” but lands on “Whaaaaat?!” — only serves to flatten Miller’s motivation into mediocre melodrama. (NR)

Critic’s Choice (1963). In their last of four films together, Bob Hope and Lucille Ball play Parker Ballantine, a knives-out New York theater critic and his big-dreaming wife, Angie. When she decides to write her own play, Parker reads and rips it, certain it will never see the light of Broadway. But it’s nevertheless financed and prepped for the stage and thus begins an hour-plus of Parker’s tedious ethical quandary about reviewing the show and his quasi-abusive attempts to ankle Angie’s ambition. (At least baby faced Rip Torn’s buffoonish director calls him on it: “It seems to me you’ve got a pretty deep hostility toward the women you marry!”) It takes a lot of work to neuter a natural wonder like Ball, and even conceding Hope’s shtick as Catskill-chuckle territory, “Critic’s Choice” is deeply unfunny. The only thing more dismal than the comedy is the attempt at journalistic drama underpinning it. It’s based on a three-act play written by Ira Levin (yes, “Rosemary’s Baby” Ira Levin), directed by Otto Preminger and inspired by the real-life marriage of New York Herald-Tribune critic Walter Kerr and his playwright wife, Jean. The New York Times said “Critic’s Choice” wasn’t much of a play. It’s even less of a movie. (NR)

The Outlaws is Coming (1965). A gang of Wyoming outlaws decides to take over the Wild West. Their plot? To massacre all the buffalo so as to incite Native Americans to attack the U.S. Cavalry and create a power vacuum. All that stands in their way is an intrepid reporter from Boston named Kenneth Cabot (Adam West) and his three tagalongs — the Three Stooges themselves, Larry, Curly-Joe, and Moe. What starts as a journalistic endeavor becomes an outlandish and surprisingly violent adventure in the West, complete with all the classic mythological figures: Wyatt Earp, Johnny Ringo, Billy the Kid, Annie Oakley and Jesse James. It’s a lot of tomfoolery, as one would expect from the Stooges, crossing into some unfortunate redface at times. The best parts actually emphasize West as Cabot, the idealistic reporter drawn into a new role outside his comfort zone when he’s forced to cosplay as sheriff and embarks on a tense relationship with Oakley. Then again, at one point, Moe gets superglued to a chair… (ED)

Murder is News (1937). Ace reporter Jerry Tracy (John Gallaudet) is investigating the tawdry affairs of the mysterious and fabulously wealthy Edgar Drake (William McIntyre) when his subject invites him for a personal interview. It’s an excellent opportunity for a big scoop — until Tracy arrives at the mansion and discovers Drake dead. He’s been murdered, to be precise, with no known culprit. It’s up to Tracy and his local, legally hamstrung police to determine the whys and hows of the millionaire’s demise. “Murder is News” is a pretty straightforward mystery-thriller, relying heavily on its reporter character for heroics and investigative pluck. Among the plot twists and turns, hidden millions and secret safe houses is a moderately memorable story about the way attention-grabbing headlines can be used to nefarious ends … if the men and women writing them aren’t careful about their sources. (ED)

Eyes of a Stranger (1981). Jane (Lauren Tewes) is a newscaster haunted by the abduction and assault of her young sister, Tracy (Jennifer Jason Leigh, in her film debut). The attack left Tracy traumatized and, as a result, blind, deaf and mute. Although Tracy’s abuser was apprehended, Jane can hardly bear to leave Tracy alone. So, when a new killer starts stalking the hot Miami nights, Jane starts to unravel. “Eyes of a Stranger” is a fairly low-key horror affair (with a finale icky enough to remain memorable), but its tracking of Jane’s instability through the length of her on-air diversions from a teleprompter is a fun way to follow her increasing fragility. It’s also noteworthy that Jane is treated with such derision for doing so in 1981; by today’s standards, her editorializing is positively benign. (ED)

Extreme Justice (1993). Mark L. Lester is best known for directing Arnold Schwarzenegger in “Commando” (and, for fans of ’90s action schlock, the overlooked “Showdown in Little Tokyo”). He’s a squib-and-splatter man all the way. In “Extreme Justice,” Lester’s attempt to channel even a smidge of esteemed director Sidney Lumet just feels lumpen and lunkheaded. Scott Glenn plays Vaughn, the leader of an LAPD special investigation unit that extrajudicially kills rapists, robbers and other scumbags rather than processing them or reading them any rights. He’s joined by Yaphet Kotto (with an unforgettable cowboy drip), classic henchman actor Andrew Divoff (with a dodgy Spanish accent) and Lou Diamond Phillips as new recruit Jeff. Chelsea Field plays Kelly, Jeff’s reporter girlfriend who gets a bit too close to her beau’s cowboy tactics and starts to break a story. “You’re starting to sound an awful lot like a reporter!,” Jeff tells her. “I am a reporter, Jeff!” Kelly shouts back. While it’s not good per se, Kelly’s journalistic pursuit goes beyond the superficial damsel-in-distress plot it would propel in most such films. It forms a substantial part of this one’s second half, which highlights emeritus character actor Stephen Root as an editor and culminates with Vaughn’s direct-address madman scream that “NOBODY READS THE F***IN’ PAPERS ANYMORE!” (NR)

One True Thing (1998). “Ambition is Ellen Gulden’s religion,” it’s said of Renée Zellweger’s character — a “cold and unfeeling” New York journalist running down a senatorial scandal when she’s summoned home to care for her mother (Meryl Streep) after a cancer diagnosis. Throw in a piggish literary professor dad (William Hurt) whose approval she’s always sought but never received, and Ellen is contending with a lot. However, the story Ellen is chasing becomes a focal point in this adaptation of Anna Quindlen’s novel (in which Ellen is instead a psychiatrist). Too bad it is mainly a way to let Zellweger unconvincingly pout somewhere other than in the family home (when she misses a pivotal press conference), to put the film’s thesis about appreciating the little things in the mouth of this skeevy senator, and to let Ellen abdicate her professional responsibilities in time to reconcile with her mom and confront her father with lines like “You have taken sabbaticals for the Great American Novel! Why not Mom?” Toss in a truly bizarre framework involving a criminal conspiracy behind the mother’s eventual decline, and ambition is about the last thing on “One True Thing’s” mind. (NR)

Universal Soldier (1992). Seconds before she goes live, Veronica Roberts (Ally Walker) comes in hot to a Hoover Dam hostage situation — throwing on a blazer and tossing her cigarette aside just in time. “I don’t play by the rules, but I always get you the story,” she tells a superior also onsite … who promptly fires her. When a now-rogue Veronica and her cameraman, Huey, stumble onto the shocking sci-fi specifics of the United States Army’s Universal Soldier program, they are chased. Huey is a good cameraman but a terrible driver, crashing their vehicle within seconds of getting behind the wheel. Good thing they’re rescued by Luc Deveraux (Jean-Claude van Damme), the only empathetic Universal Soldier, who protects them from his rival, Scott (Dolph Lundgren). Walker effectively blends Meg Ryan and Carrie Fisher traits as Roberts, who uses her connections to help Luc learn about his past and locate his family. Junked after poor test screenings, the film’s dour alternate ending showed Roberts struggling to reconcile her professional duties with a human response to Deveraux’s sacrifices. Now, it’s just a slick, proficient action film in which Deveraux is both unfamiliar with the concept of eating and miraculously attuned to the idea that Roberts may be exploiting him for a good story. (NR)

Stranger on the Third Floor (1940). A stellar early noir and arguably the first of its era, establishing the genre standards of darkened city streets, morally gray characters, hard-boiled narration and tortured innocents. Michael Ward (John McGuire) is a reporter whose work lands Joe Briggs (Elisha Cook, Jr.) behind bars. As Ward’s partner, Jane (Margaret Tallichet), wonders if her husband-to-be’s reporting was correct, he slowly succumbs to self-doubt and horror. It’s up to Jane to solve the actual crime, which puts her on the path of the Stranger (Peter Lorre). Aside from its noir pleasures, “Stranger on the Third Floor” serves as a cautionary tale about a journalist’s fundamental responsibility as a truth-teller and the potentially disastrous consequences of making mistakes. (ED)

Andrew Hirschfeld, a New York City-based freelance business journalist and contributor to Al Jazeera English, joined the site in 2011. In August, he covered what he termed X’s “right-wing lurch” and Musk’s attempts to silence journalists who disagree with or challenge his views.

While Hirschfeld hasn’t yet cut the cord, he’s using X less. “It’s hard to accept. I was a legacy verified account, and in a lot of ways that’s almost a marker of success in journalism itself.”

He recalls the early days, “It was a place where you’d go for finding sources in news gathering, engaging with readers who had genuine questions and provided commentary for my work.”

One of the writers who made their exit official — not only announcing his departure but also deleting his account — is David Mindich, professor and former chair of Temple University’s journalism department. He joined Twitter back when his old New York University professor Jay Rosen carved out a spot as the site’s locus for academic discussion of journalistic issues. While Mindich wasn’t a superuser, he liked to promote colleagues doing interesting work, post his own research and “talk a little bit about democracy.”

Once Musk took the helm, however, both Hirschfeld and Mindich were horrified by the sudden proliferation of disinformation and suppression of legitimate news sources. Hirschfeld is also concerned about the new terms of service announced on Nov. 15 that require accountholders to allow their content to be used for training X’s artificial intelligence model, Grok AI.

Add to those drawbacks mentions filled with conspiracy theorists, hate speech aimed at journalists in general (often flung by Musk himself) and women and journalists of color in particular, and Hirschfeld asks, “What value does this have?”

Philadelphia journalist and Broad Street Review Editor-in-Chief Alaina Johns’ answer is clear: very little. “It just oozes desperate, incompetent yuck.”

Bluesky ahead?

Author and editor David Andelman left X after being locked out of his account. He says he learned it was because he “wrote some comments at which Elon took umbrage.” His answer was to launch a Substack, “Andelman Unleashed,” that he says earned him “a powerhouse force I never had at X,” claiming subscribers from 107 countries. He says he never looked back. The site’s built-in Notes feature acts much like a Twitter feed but is populated mostly by writers for writers.

The most heralded development in socials surrounds the burgeoning Bluesky, created by former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, with industries and individuals enthusiastically creating and touting Bluesky’s “Starter Packs” filled with relevant content creators who’ve already migrated to the site. Yet, it’s hard not to recall similar buzz surrounding Mastodon, Post, Threads and other copycats that cropped up every time Musk delivered a new and unpopular edict or spammed users with his own unvetted and untrue posts.

Many journalists, ever hopeful, warily opened Bluesky accounts. Hirschfeld and Mindich are there, as are Christiaan Mader, editor at Louisiana’s The Current Media; Virginia freelance writer Dan Kubiske; and Philadelphia Magazine Arts and Entertainment Editor Victor Fiorillo. None, however, are hooked and instead engage in a sort of protective asset allocation that mines several social sites for their respective strengths. To that end, Johns says, “I believe it’s a fool’s errand to look for a more transparent, ethical social media network. It’s more about tuning in to creators you like, wherever they are, versus being dedicated to one or two networks.”

She’s tempted to open a Bluesky account, but mostly sticks to Instagram citing its natural appeal for arts journalism, writes on Substack and visits its Notes feed, and feels guilty about not using LinkedIn more, saying she likes “the feeling that it is tied to work, not my life.”

These days, Hirschfeld uses X and Facebook to promote his work, Reddit for tips and story ideas and Bluesky for engagement with readers who “are more genuinely interested in what the reporting says and not going to push back for the sake of pushing back.”

Kubiske and Mader occasionally visit Threads and Bluesky. Fiorillo, who, citing the number of tips he still receives on X, kept his account, says now that he sees more journalists he knows heading to Bluesky, he’ll probably start using his mostly dormant account. Maybe.

Mindich likes Facebook for connecting with friends, colleagues, and family members, and recently started dipping a toe into Bluesky’s public conversations. His students, however, seem to be sticking with Instagram and TikTok above all.

If it sounds like these writers are adopting fewer active roles on social media, that’s because they are. Between gearing up for the onslaught of another Trump presidency and the prospect of building new audiences for new accounts, many are exhausted. Johns says she’s on a “strict media diet, including social media” for her mental health, while Mader gave up X for Lent two years ago and hasn’t felt much of a void in its, or any other social site’s, absence.

A few writers plan to remain amidst X’s warring factions on principle, if only from the sidelines. Joanne McLaughlin retired from her career as an editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer and public broadcasting station WHYY in 2022 to become a novelist, but she says, “I’m still on X because freedom of speech means the people I don’t agree with get to talk too. Unpopular views are what the First Amendment is all about. I don’t engage at all, save the occasional book post. But I respect the right of others to say what they want. Just as I reserve the right to log out.”

Still, she also keeps her literary eggs in several baskets, including Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn.

And yes, while she’s still setting up followers, she too recently joined Bluesky.