What Journalism Do You Trust? A Solicitation.

Let’s build some better media literacy together!

So near the tail end of this week’s Second Sunday Zoom conversation with paying subscribers, we fielded a question that has come up time and time again during our 8.5 years of podcasting: How do we know where to get trustworthy news and information?

As you could tell by my stammery answer, it’s a challenging and ever-changing conundrum, one that is almost certainly better crowd-sourced – especially by our weird crowd – than spit out individually, like some kind of fur-ball.

Post-election season has got the legacy/institutional media reeling, accelerating the long-range decline in audience/influence/heft/trust that we have talked about here often (and which is the subject of a forthcoming Reason feature from me). Some headlines from just this week: “Trump Wins, the Press Loses” (Columbia Journalism Review), “2024’s Other Big Loser? The Mainstream Media. Is There Any Path Forward?” (Will Bunch), “A Doomsday Media Reaction Following Donald Trump’s Presidential Victory” (Poynter), “The Old Media Grapples With its New Limits” (Semafor), “The Media Needs a Reinvention Not Just a Wake-Up Call After Trump’s Surprise Win” (The Wrap), “Media’s Crisis Point: It’s Losing Relevance and Scorned in Trump Era. A Reboot May Be Next” (The Hollywood Reporter), “Journalism's Fight for Survival in a Postliterate Democracy” (Matt Pearce), “The Election Proved the Media Is in Crisis. Here’s What it Needs to Do to Regain its Relevance” (Brian Stelter), and “Trump’s Win Cemented It: New Media Is Leaving the Old Guard Behind” (Wall Street Journal). Or, as Rachel Maddow put it in the lede of her Moynihan-baiting New Yorker post-mortem, “If nothing else, it was an insult to historians.”

Do you want to pause for a little schadenfreude? Up to you. I for one am more interested in building a better media mousetrap, which very much involves some concerted effort on the always-underrated demand side to identify/collate/celebrate anyone and everyone out there doing journalism and news commentary/analysis in a useful, informative, and reliable way.

So, for this one post only, I’m going to (attempt to!) open up commenting privileges to the whole community here, not just paying subscribers, with hopes that you can all answer the question: Who do you trust, for what, and why?

PLEASE do not limit your answers to the over-trod fields of American politics. Every single one of you has some sub-specialty, some micro-interest (labor-market econometrics! Italian pasta grannies! Orange-crate art!) for which you value a trusted analyst or publication or section of a publication or like-minded community or A.I. robot or app. Share this important-to-you knowledge! If it’s a general or broad publication, or even an individual Substacker, get specific about what you value most. And for Aqua Buddha’s sake, let’s not mistake this for an opportunity to yell at one another about politics.

My aim is to repackage the information you provide in the most user-friendly way possible, a la our very important Best Four-Album Run exercise. So the easier you make it for me, the more useful you will make it for you. Surely we can find some treasures in here somewhere!