Guest Essay

Dean Baquet: Local journalism is the foundation for the future

Lessons from the 2025 Local News Summit

By Dean Baquet

February 21, 2025

This essay is part of a series on the 2025 Lenfest Institute-Aspen Digital Local News Summit, an annual convening of the country’s leading journalists, publishers, funders, news creators, and other industry professionals. It was originally published in Columbia Journalism Review.

This is going to be a historically difficult time for journalism, a challenge in every regard. It will be much harder than the previous Trump era. All independent institutions are under attack, and journalism in particular.

The president persists in calling us enemies of the people. And everyone I talk with in Washington says he is likely to do all the worst things we feared when it comes to the press.

Indeed, if you watch the interviews President Trump and his supporters have given, you will see a greater hostility toward the press. They interrupt interviewers when they don’t like questions.

They brook no debate, and they offer no sign that they regard journalism as an independent profession worthy of questioning them.

I have no doubt that the central tenets we embrace will continue to be challenged. And that the president’s attacks will continue to erode our standing.

Hopefully Sullivan will survive. But much of our future is now dependent on nonprofits that will also have to withstand attacks.

And of course it comes at a time when we are financially weaker, and when we are in the middle of important debates about our role and how we can best carry out our mission. It also comes as some of the biggest players in journalism are controlled by people who feel the need to protect their other, larger businesses by cozying up to those who attack us.

This is also being felt in local journalism. I’ve worked with more than a dozen newsrooms over the past two years and spent time with a dozen more. Most of them have stories of politicians who have begun slow-walking FOIA requests, or who mimic the Trump playbook with constant attacks on our credibility.

When Chris Damien of the Desert Sun, working with the Times, reported on unnecessary deaths at Riverside County jails, the sheriff didn’t bother to dispute the charges. He simply attacked Chris as being too sympathetic to criminals.

When we worked with the Baltimore Banner to expose the city’s failings to deal with the fentanyl crisis, officials there accused us all of being in bed with the pharmaceutical industry.

And Mississippi Today is involved in a life-or-death struggle with a former governor who isn’t challenging facts, just the paper’s right to report them.

The most visible struggles may be national journalism. But maybe the most important, and the most long-lasting, are in local journalism, the place where the next generation of leaders is already emerging.

On that front, there is a lot to be excited about, a lot of new and old publications doing amazing work, much more than we talk about. (I wish we talked about it more.)

Recently I had lunch with Akash Mehta, who helped create New York Focus. This young man who might have struggled to find his place in my generation of young journalists has built a wonderful newsroom, nearing fourteen in strength and growing every year.

We are working with one of his reporters, Sammy Sussman, who has pretty much on his own filed pro se lawsuits and cobbled together bits and pieces of grants to accumulate an unprecedented amount of information about bad police in the state of New York. He is sort of a wonderful mix of Sy Hersh and Steve Jobs.

Could that have happened before this era? I’m not so sure.

Could Akash, and Sammy, and even ProPublica have thrived in the generation where advertising was king and change wasn’t so easily embraced?

But there are issues we need to confront if local journalism is to stay alive and even thrive at a time when it is under attack on numerous fronts.

So: a few observations from having spent much of the past two years with local editors and reporters around the country.

First, the death of competition is one of the least examined changes in the journalism landscape. Having spent my formative years in the cutthroat world of Chicago journalism, I first thought it was a horrible thing that we were no longer fighting to the death to get it first. Our dirty secret is that the motivation to beat the competition has driven more good journalism than the drive to save the Republic. (Forgive me if I missed the chapter in All the President’s Men where Woodward and Bernstein said they wanted to change the world. They just wanted to beat everybody in the story of a generation.)

Now, decades later, I have come around to thinking that cooperation between newsrooms can be a very good thing, an empowering thing, if we can figure out how to manage it. In a world where dozens of small newsrooms can only cover a slice of a story, we need to figure out models for how they can work together, even across states.

We also have to figure out a way to inject more fun and joy into the reports, even if the world sometimes looks like a dreary place to be. It is a lot easier, I suspect, to raise money to look at the inequities of the criminal justice system than to examine food culture or to provide for interesting and funny columnists.

But we still need to offer readers a greater variety of news and service if they are going to stick with us.

Another, related, point. Investigative reporting, even the pursuit of edgy scoops, is in deep trouble. The new entrants are too small to take risks on stories that may or may not land. One reporter I talked to in Chicago looked puzzled when I asked if they chase tips. “We don’t have time,” he said, pointing out that he has to file many stories in a day. Others admit they don’t chase tips unless they are clearly within the mission of the news organization. After all, a newsroom built to cover the criminal justice system may not be equipped to chase a lead about the mayor.

Some of the legacy newsrooms, like the New Orleans Times-Picayune, have managed to sustain investigative teams that do amazing work. But most have not.

It is harder to hop on planes to chase tips. Publishers have to sign off on expensive travel, and many news organizations can’t afford it. And don’t underestimate the impact COVID had on a generation of journalists. Many couldn’t travel and became stuck on their phones and even more dazzled by a world where you can find out quite a bit without leaving the office.

Editors are overwhelmed, and many don’t have the experience to shepherd the trickiest kinds of stories, the kind that will become even more vital in the Trump era.

And too much reporting, frankly, is done by phone and online. We still need to get out and talk with people and challenge our assumptions and see, face to face, the people we are writing about and for.

Many newsrooms just can’t do this kind of work. It is why ProPublica has created its local network and why the Times is working with local newsrooms.

We are also in an era that too often rewards snark and easy opinion. It is cheaper, of course. And it feels great in this particular era.

So I fear that reporting itself—the act of going out with an open mind, not knowing what you will find—is under threat. Reporting is the central act of journalism—whether it be investigative takeouts or sharp off-the-news coverage. Reporting without preconceived notions, unafraid to state a fact. Reporting not designed to affirm what you already believe or think you know.

So if I could ask us to think about one mission in the coming days, and the coming years: How do we restore reporting, the aggressive gathering of fact, to the center of journalism, where I believe it belongs? How do we make sure every state and city has a newsroom that can do that kind of work?

And how do we make the whole thing a lot more interesting, less dutiful, with vivid visual journalism and risk-taking and, yes, scoops?

I can’t help thinking of Mason Bryan, my friend who is an editor at the Prison Journalism Project, who struggles serving an audience of people who all too often have only a fifth-grade education. Rather than do a 3,500-word story about life in prison during a monumental heat wave, Mason and his colleagues sent out a request to prisoners all across the country to answer the question: How do I know when it is sweltering in my prison?

The answers were wonderful and vivid: From James in Wilmington, Delaware: “I know it’s hot in my prison when the floor is weeping.” Another says he knows it’s hot when he is allowed to stay in his boxers all day. Another said he knows it is hot when the guards don’t yell at him for not wearing state-issued pajamas.

That is innovation in storytelling. I didn’t quite realize it until the past couple of years. But you all are doing the most important work there is right now. Local journalism is not only the coverage of local communities. It is the foundation for the future, the place where the future leaders of American journalism are now laboring.

I’m proud to be part of this, honestly.