There are so, so many things that I could talk about in this stream. Media criticism is an endless hole, it seems like. Some of those topics are very serious and need to be discussed, such as Politico and CNN suddenly, maybe being chill with authoritarianism. But I am not going to discuss a serious topic today.

I understand why people don't trust journalists. We (generally) don't ask the right questions. We have no idea how to cover things in a way that's actually helpful. We contribute ludicrous ideas to the national narrative that just make things worse. We argue over semantics.

I've talked here before about how journalists should not be stenographers. I ran across something that's even worse than that.

In a Twitter thread discussing how The New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal employ as many journalists as Gannett, which has more than 200 newspapers, LA Times reporter Jeong Park says that news "can’t be good.” He's right.

Don't be the journalist who massively hypes up a problem and then when said problem starts to get better, you just ignore it. The people who notice this omission get annoyed; the people who don't notice are the same people who put up stickers at gas pumps of Joe Biden pointing to the price and saying, "I did that!"

As someone who works at a small daily regional paper and thoroughly believes in the positive impact of small-town journalism, I will defend our existence to my death. That said, inefficiency among papers owned by the same company is a real problem. I would like to present a solution.

I’m a bit in love with this Twitter account called Fix Media Now because it is savage in its quest to make journalists do their jobs better. For instance, they will frequently “fix” headlines that downplay the GOP’s quest to ruin our democracy.

Is it possible for news to win against propaganda? I hope so. But it ain’t easy. And however news outlets are handling it right now, I can’t fault them for it even if it turns out that they made the wrong call. We’re in new territory here.

I hate when journalists simply put down on paper what someone said and call it a day without any context or fact checking. Turns out, there is an name for that — stenography — and it also seems like there’s a particular journalist who has drawn a lot of ire for doing this regularly.

This entry is less of a media criticism and more heaping a bit of praise on a newspaper that seems to be a lot of what I think all of us in the industry should be doing more of.