Guest Essay

Kevin Merida: We don't know our country well enough

Lessons from the 2025 Local News Summit

By Kevin Merida

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.

One of the biggest un-talked-about challenges of our profession is that we don’t know our country well enough. And by that, I mean our fellow human beings. Our understanding of each other is not sophisticated enough.

What is the role of journalism in bridging that knowledge gap?

Historically, we’ve not been that comfortable getting close to our communities, embedding in them, partnering with them. The digital era has created even more distance. More texting convenience and social platform engagement, for sure, and more people walking the streets with their headphones on, not even waving to each other. Our profession has become expert in mining and building databases, making great use of audience metrics and being able to do amazingly creative work without ever leaving a laptop alone. We’ve also normalized email and Zoom interviews—and I’m not mad about it. But I want to normalize doing neighborhood rounds. Drop by Mr. Lucas’s Variety Mart or Gonzales Park or Lily’s Laundromat or Randy’s Donuts. Wherever people gather, eat, drink, shop, play, work out, hang out, and just be, we should be there too.

How often do we, as journalists, talk to people when we don’t want something from them?

I know we feel a fierce urgency around tackling the threats to democracy and the avalanche of misinformation and holding the new administration accountable as it seeks to implement massive changes in policy and government that will affect everyone. I don’t minimize any of it. We need journalism to be vigilant and brave to meet the moment.

But, somehow, we’ve got to get a better handle on the people who live here. Our profession (along with many other interested parties) pored over exit polls and demographic data and sliced and diced the election results, trying to make sense of what happened in November. I was among them. Here’s some of what happened:

· Donald Trump won all seven battleground states; Kamala Harris fared worse than Joe Biden did four years ago in every one of those states.

· Yet Trump’s raw vote margin was smaller than that of any popular-vote winner since 2000.

· In 2020, four in ten voters said COVID was the top issue for them; in 2024, four in ten said the economy was the top issue.

· Approximately three in ten Black men voted for Trump, double what he got from Black men in 2020.

· Roughly half of Latino men voted for Harris, down from six in ten who voted for Biden in 2020.

· Harris did better with college-educated white voters than Biden did in 2020, but Trump gained nine points among voters who never attended college.

· And yet, at the start of his second presidency, Trump’s net approval rating of +7, meaning the difference between the percentage of Americans who approve of him and the percentage who disapprove, was lower than any newly elected president since World War II—with the exception of one man, first-term President Trump.

The polls and data are hard to decipher; they puzzle us. That’s because we don’t know enough about one another. Our real-time exploration is honestly not good enough. Human beings are not static. Those categories we like to analyze—college-educated white women, Black men, English-speaking Latinos ages eighteen to thirty-four—are too big for complex understanding. Human beings don’t fit neatly into these kinds of categories, and besides, they change. Constantly.

Their circumstances change, their mental states, their geographic situations. They have children or not. They have deaths in their families. They have wildly unexpected success, and dramatic, steep falls.

I talked to a friend recently whom I hadn’t seen in a long time. She got divorced, quit a well-paying job, moved from the Northeast to the South (where she used to live and felt more comfortable). The changes in her life may affect how she feels about government, about work, about politics, about every damn thing. This is our reporting challenge. To keep up.

How do we become experts in human beings? How do we nail that coverage?

My contention is that all of the discussion about truth and trust (and Trump) needs grounding in robust local and community-centric reporting. Mastering the enormous challenge of understanding more completely, with greater specificity, our neighbors and neighborhoods, their needs and conditions, is essential for our profession’s survival. And its growth.

Every local news organization won’t be able to run a coffee shop and restaurant, like Max Kabat and the Big Bend Sentinel do in Marfa, Texas. Some are creating community book clubs. My friend Maryam Banikarim cofounded the “Longest Table,” which started in New York City as a pop-up potluck that attracted five hundred people but has now grown to cities and neighborhoods around the country. In LA, my friends at the Boyle Heights Beat, a Latino community-centered news outlet, sponsored a debate around a crucial city council race, and it was packed with local residents.

If our profession is to confront itself, we need to have more courage for disruption. Should we blow up some conventional beats? And for that matter departments and sections? Yes. Get more targeted and focused than education, healthcare, courts, city government, sports, business. Organize ourselves and our work differently. Tell different stories.

And let’s make sure we create enough time for reporters to stop in at Mo’s mechanic shop. Or, for me, Jerry’s Market, two blocks from my house. I love the tuna sandwich there. But what I love most are the conversations. People hanging outside telling stories about their lives, even at night after Jerry’s closes.