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Welcome back to Laurels and Darts, now under new management while Bill Grueskin is on sabbatical (ICYMI: more here on his plans). 

I’m Susie Banikarim. Some of you might remember me from this audio series on the downfall of Ozy Media, which I made with Josh Hersh last year for CJR’s podcast The Kicker. I’ve had almost all of the journalism jobs: reporter, producer, director, booker, writer, podcaster, editor, and executive. I lived through the heady days of digital media, saw a one-dollar sale and merger (RIP Newsweek Daily Beast), and witnessed the aftermath of a private equity purchase (RIP Deadspin). I’ve seen how TV news actually works, how blogs get made, how storied startups fall apart (RIP Vice), and how working with the right team at the right time can feel like a small miracle (you know who you are). 

It is easy to be cynical or despairing about the state of journalism, frustrated by bad-faith criticism, overwhelmed by misinformation, and to occasionally wonder whether any of this matters anymore. But at the risk of sounding uncharacteristically earnest, I still believe that what we do can be a little like magic.

Journalism is how people’s stories get told. How power is challenged. How history is recorded, how change is advanced. And there is still so much good work being done. In independent shops and mainstream newsrooms. At local papers and on TV and radio stations across the country. 

I’ll make an effort every week to highlight that “the industry” is not the same thing as the work and that a lot of the best reporting happens far from the loudest conversations about journalism’s collapse. And I’ll throw darts when they are deserved because that’s how this works—and, let’s be honest, this column would be dull if I didn’t. 

I hope we can be in conversation here. Please send your best work, your thoughts, your suggestions, and anything you read that moves and inspires you to laurelsanddarts@cjr.org. 

Now, with the housekeeping out of the way, let’s get started.

On Wednesday, when an agent with Immigration and Customs Enforcement killed a woman during an immigration crackdown in Minneapolis, it was the latest escalation in a series of events that have converged in Minnesota over the past few months. The shooting occurred during a surge in operations that senior officials with the Department of Homeland Security told Julia Ainsley, an NBC reporter, came in response to a viral video by a MAGA influencer named Nick Shirley, alleging fraud in Somali-run daycares that receive federal subsidies.

For more than a decade, Minnesota has been plagued by a social services fraud scandal. There are hundreds of ongoing investigations in the state and, in March, federal prosecutors convicted the leader behind a two-hundred-and-fifty-million-dollar scheme that exploited a pandemic-era program designed to feed hungry children and was so sprawling it involved more than seventy-five defendants. The case has been widely covered by local and national outlets, including the Minnesota Star Tribune—the recipient of my first laurel. In fact, the Star Tribune has reported extensively on fraud in the state for years, publishing hundreds of stories on the problem.

So if you’re as terminally or painfully online as I am (and I hope for your sake you are not), you may have been surprised to see the forty-three-minute video from Shirley, a self-declared independent YouTube journalist, spread by purportedly uncovering a hundred and ten million dollars in fraud perpetrated by Somali immigrants and ignored by political leaders and the “mainstream media.”

How has he managed this remarkable investigative feat? I watched the full video so you don’t have to, and the short answer is he has not. What he has done, over the course of a single day, is interview a man identified only as David, whose qualifications are a mystery, and doorstopped a number of childcare centers, demanding to be allowed in to see kids and shouting at random passersby, “Where are the children at?”

I won’t bore you with the myriad ways the video repeatedly violates the most basic tenets of journalism. Shirley’s so-called “evidence” consists solely of wild assertions and bizarre interactions. He does not appear to consider any noncriminal explanation for why children may not be running around outside in sub-thirty-degree weather or why immigrant childcare centers would be wary of visits from random men—some in masks—in an era of active ICE raids. It’s especially ironic that the video begins with a montage of clips from media sources he claims aren’t covering the story. 

Why, then, has the video proved so popular? I reached out to Eric Wieffering, the managing editor of the Star Tribune, who oversees the fraud beat, to get his thoughts. “Why does this land even among Minnesotans as something that’s new? I’m honestly at a loss. There is so much left out and so many questions that are left hanging by his means and the methods,” he said. “This fraud story, even before the viral video, was dominating all the coverage of the governor’s campaign.” 

Shirley’s impact appears to have less to do with the message than the messenger. He is a Trump-era media star. He was recently given a “Citizen Journalist Award” at Mar-a-Lago. In October, he participated in a roundtable on antifa with President Trump. He once paid Hispanic day laborers twenty bucks to hold signs reading “I Love Biden” in front of the White House. 

His daycare video was quickly boosted on X by a number of conservative influencers; by Elon Musk, who added one of his favorite catchphrases, “You are the media now”; and by Vice President JD Vance, who declared, absurdly, “This dude has done far more useful journalism than any of the winners of the 2024 @pulitzercenter prizes.” (I’ll let you decide if anything I’ve described seems more useful than the work produced by these 2024 Pulitzer winners—or, for that matter, the 2025 winners whom Vance skipped over.)

As my colleague Amos Barshard observed, in his dispatch from the Mar-a-Lago event, “MAGA content creators exist in an influential, symbiotic relationship with the White House,” and that relationship can serve as rocket fuel for their content. Shirley’s video has racked up more than three million views on YouTube. 

The impact of his cozy relationship with the Trump administration has been significant, with wide-ranging implications for Minnesota: federal funding for childcare in the state has been frozen, and two thousand DHS agents were deployed to Minneapolis this week in that surge, which an immigration official called the “largest immigration effort ever.” On Monday, Tim Walz announced that he was no longer seeking reelection in the governor’s race. Less than an hour after that news broke, Shirley posted on X, “I ENDED TIM WALZ.” 

No matter that Shirley’s claims have been widely debunked by local authorities and local reporters. “I know it’s a convenient narrative that a twenty-three-year-old right-wing influencer has exposed something that the mainstream media has ignored, but it’s just not true,” Wieffering told me. “We’re not the only ones who have covered it aggressively and well. KARE 11 has also broken a number of stories, as far back as 2015 and 2016. MPR and other local TV stations have been covering it.” Notably, a week before Shirley released his video, the Star Tribune published an explainer to help readers better understand Minnesota’s troubles with fraud.

Viewers of the viral video weren’t as well served. They wouldn’t have any clearer understanding of fraud in Minnesota, the stakes involved, or which political leaders should be held accountable and why. That was never the point. Shirley’s “report” wasn’t meant to help them understand; it was only ever meant to inflame them.

As for Shirley, he is now pushing an unhinged conspiracy theory that Walz had former Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman assassinated—which President Trump also shared on Truth Social—and is selling merch.

As a bonus laurel, this profile of Hortman from Stephen Rodrick for Rolling Stone is worth your time. When Hortman, her husband, Mark, and their golden retriever, Gilbert, were murdered in their home, on June 14, 2025, she became yet another symbol of political and gun violence in this country. 

“These days, we doomscroll to the next atrocity, our outrage for the anonymous dead anesthetized like an alcoholic who feels nothing after downing a pint of gin,” Rodrick writes. But he takes the time to fill out the story in this beautifully crafted piece about a life that could have been but, more importantly, about the life that was. “It does not matter how Melissa died,” a close friend of Hortman’s says to Rodrick. “All that really matters is how she lived.”

On Wednesday, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette staffers found out that they were losing their jobs in one of the most dystopian ways possible, even by today’s bleak media standards: a prerecorded Zoom video. 

Andrew Goldstein, the president of the Newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh, told my colleague Riddhi Setty that the message came from Jodi Miehls, the president and COO of Block Communications Inc., which owns the Post-Gazette, who had never before interacted with the newsroom. In the video (a portion of which was posted to X, matching the description provided to CJR), Miehls announced that the paper would cease publication on May 3 and asked employees to “consider the legacy of the Post-Gazette,” saying the owners hoped to “exit with grace and dignity.” Miehls assured the team that, though Block Communications planned to immediately issue a press release following the call, the company would “of course give our newsroom the opportunity to publish the story first.” You can read the Post-Gazette’s story here—behind a paywall. 

This latest news comes at an especially tough time for newspapers in Pennsylvania. Last week, Block Communications said it would be shuttering the Pittsburgh City Paper, which has published for thirty-four years, and the Clinton County Record, which published its first edition on December 21, 1871, likewise ceased operations.

In advance of his inauguration, New York magazine dropped a package on Zohran Mamdani profiling his meteoric rise, the challenges he faces as mayor, and his inner circle. The cover featured his team assembled around him, styled like the new Avengers of progressive politics. 

But there was something missing from this picture. According to a New York Times report, a former aide named Catherine Almonte Da Costa was originally included in the photo shoot. But just a day later, she resigned over accusations of anti-Semitism. After she dropped out, New York simply erased her from the image. 

As the Times noted, most news organizations have standards that bar digitally altering photography unless the changes are explicitly disclosed. An explanation for the omission provided by a spokesperson for New York seemed to miss the point entirely: “Since the photograph was meant to introduce readers to Mr. Mamdani’s senior team, it would have been inappropriate to publish a version that included Ms. Da Costa.… The magazine’s editors decided to remove her from the image.”

It may have been inappropriate to publish a version that included Da Costa, but editors did not need to publish the photo at all. A veteran magazine photo editor I spoke to said the standard practice in a situation like this would be to reshoot the picture or do a photo illustration. “I’m shocked they’d make a mistake like this,” they told me. “Photojournalists are usually shy about even retouching photos in most cases.” 

A practice Chris Anderson, the photographer behind the now-infamous pictures accompanying Vanity Fair’s profile of Susie Wiles, addressed when Newsweek asked why he didn’t retouch his photos of the Trump team: “I find it shocking that people would expect that journalistic photos should be retouched.”

Terrence Butler’s college basketball career at Drexel University was unremarkable by most measures. As a rising junior, he had played in only eight games. But when he took his own life—in 2023, at just twenty-one years old—his death devastated his family and deeply affected his coaches, leaving behind the familiar and painful questions that often follow suicide.

As reporter Mike Sielski put it in this deeply reported piece for the Philadelphia Inquirer, Butler’s passing could have been “just another speck of troubling news during troubling times.” Instead, Sielski spent eighteen months with Butler’s family, exploring their grief and examining the life of a young man who seemed to have everything going for him but was locked in a complicated battle with himself. 

The result is a careful, moving meditation on the enduring mystery of suicide and the mental health struggles that student athletes face in an increasingly high-pressure environment. 

Additional reporting by Riddhi Setty. Hat tip to the Sunday Long Read newsletter for the Philly Inquirer item. If you have a suggestion for this column, please send it to laurelsanddarts@cjr.org. We can’t acknowledge all submissions, but we will mention you if we use your idea. For more on Laurels and Darts, please click here. To receive this and other CJR newsletters in your inbox, please click here.

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