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“So long! Farewell!… Adieu, adieu, adieu!”
—The Children von Trapp
It was around ten months, or seventy thousand words, ago that the Columbia Journalism Review launched Laurels and Darts. This was actually something of a relaunch: its predecessor, Darts & Laurels, had been on a ten-year hiatus. I’m now about to take off for several months, to embark on a special project that will keep me away from CJR headquarters. (More on that later.) So, like the Sound of Music brood, I am here to tell you so long and farewell. Out of mercy, I will do so with words and not song.
Setting out on this column, we established a few ground rules. We wouldn’t go crazy over errant headlines or tweets, we’d stick mostly to news coverage (rather than editorials or op-eds), and we’d try to ensure that we’d regularly include stories that hadn’t crossed everyone’s radar. We also encouraged readers to send in nominations; to the many of you who did, thank you.
Doing these columns has left me encouraged, enthralled, amazed, and—more than once—really pissed off. There is a lot of excellent, courageous reporting out there, and then there are some journalists who do not do, shall we say, consistently good work. Here are a few of the highlights and lowlights:
Who doesn’t love a very small news org that does a very big thing? A number of these showed up in Laurels and Darts, but my favorite was the Kerr County Lead, a website that Louis Amestoy founded in 2021 and that was at the epicenter of the tragic Texas floods last summer. Amestoy is editor and publisher, which, as anyone who’s worked at a place like this knows, means you do everything that has to be done. In five days, he (with some AI help) wrote forty-four stories, while shooting photos, posting on Facebook, and dealing with his community’s devastation. A few weeks later, he put out a one-time print edition, providing a physical copy of the many obituaries that followed the rising waters.
Student journalists show the way. The Independent Florida Alligator’s Garrett Shanley examined the former University of Florida president’s dubious expenses, then followed that up with sterling coverage of the state’s surgeon general, who has a largely no-show job in Gainesville. Over in the Hoosier State, staffers at the Indiana Daily Student saw their print edition get whacked by dim-witted administrators, so their rivals at Purdue came to the rescue with their own special edition.
Local TV and radio journalists often do stellar work. A Buffalo crew dug into prison abuse, a trio at a Minneapolis station uncovered Medicaid fraud, public radio stations in Louisiana and Alaska teamed up on a climate change package, a reporter at an Oregon TV station uncovered a nugget in a long interview with President Trump, and Oklahoma’s Spencer Humphrey snagged two separate laurels for his coverage of immigration enforcement and state spending.
Startups are breaking big stories. Ever heard of the Flatwater Free Press? Me neither. It’s an investigative site in Nebraska, and it revealed why the state’s drug-death numbers look so low. (Hint: it’s not because Nebraskans don’t abuse drugs.) Two reporters at NOTUS dug into a seventy-three-page RFK Jr. treatise on healthcare, and found tons of errors and fictitious citations. “I don’t even know what the hell that is,” Trump growled about the site’s name, telling the reporter to “get yourself a real job.” Looks like they already have a real job.
Some solo practitioners know their stuff as well as or better than beat reporters. Want to know what’s up at SCOTUS? You’d better be reading Steven Vladeck. Did a Trump pick for surgeon general look a little dodgy to you? Check out Tony Clark’s coverage. Up for a thirteen-thousand-word exposé on a man unjustly accused of child sexual assault? Then you should read what Radley Balko found after he spent more than two years digging into files and interviewing witnesses. And one of the best pieces of writing I’ve seen all year came from Kyle Kingsbury, a software consultant who described the violent immigration crackdown in Chicago.
And yes, big news organizations do tremendous work. Good luck finding a better lede than Michael Phillips’s beauty in the Wall Street Journal. When Elon Musk and Marco Rubio started making drastic cuts in foreign aid, Nicholas Kristof went to South Sudan and Kenya to chronicle the death toll for the New York Times. The Washington Post’s scoop on the killing of the Caribbean survivors still reverberates weeks later, while Bloomberg’s examination of eighteen thousand emails from Jeffrey Epstein’s account is a model of meticulous reporting and transparency. ProPublica teamed up with Oregon Public Broadcasting to delve into why progressive policies in the Pacific Northwest are stymying green-energy production. NPR found itself in the crosshairs of FCC chair Brendan Carr, and faced cutbacks pushed by the White House, but it didn’t flinch in its coverage of the Trump administration.
I am just a little obsessed with media screwups, and there are always plenty to write about. A lot of the press, including the New York Post and The Telegraph, went nuts when reports emerged that a horde of herpes-infected monkeys had escaped an overturned truck and were rampaging beyond the crash site. Fortunately, the Mississippi Free Press was here to pour cold water on it. They accomplished this by… making more than one phone call.
Journalists are as prone as anyone to bad ideas, not all of which are stories. The Society of Professional Journalists asked college newspapers to publish the most unethical edition they could muster. Yes, that was bad. So is the University of Georgia’s plan to charge students thousands of dollars for a two-week “Introduction to Travel Journalism” trip to Orlando that appears to be about as rigorous as, well, two weeks at Disney World.
You can learn a lot about news organizations’ broad policies by examining specific stories. The Denver Post doesn’t allow government spokespeople to be anonymous, as evidenced in Homeland Security’s futile efforts to get a comment into a story about deportations derailing criminal cases. The Red Bank Green in New Jersey won’t remove accurate stories from its site, even in the face of a bogus criminal complaint. The New York Times said it would stop making endorsements in local elections, then switched gears after Zohran Mamdani gained ground in the New York City mayoral race. (The Times’ opinion editor told me that her earlier statement on the ban was “imprecise.”)
It’s no longer funny to say “I became a journalist because I’m bad at math.” CBS News reported that Trump’s speech to Congress was a huge hit with the public, but that assessment relied on a viewer sample that was 51 percent GOP, 20 percent Democratic. Harry Enten, CNN’s data “whiz kid,” claimed in October that the Democrats’ chances of retaking the House next year “had gone plummeting down!” He was basing that on a prediction market, not an actual voter survey, even as polls show it’s the Republican Party that’s facing tough odds.
Transparency is good; more news orgs ought to try it. The Dallas Morning News failed to cover a big protest, even though it was announced in advance and local TV was all over it. In response, the managing editor publicly acknowledged the oversight and vowed to do better. The Guardian used a quote from a classmate of Charlie Kirk’s alleged killer that indicated he was a leftist, but later removed that viral section from the story. When I called for comment, a Guardian editor explained how this happened.
Before you crow about your scoop, make sure you were first with the scoop. Ken Klippenstein boasted that he’d been “leaked” a State Department memo about student visas. In fact, that story was broken a few days earlier by Marisa Kabas, another independent journalist. I’ve tried many times to get Klippenstein to comment, to no avail.
And finally: We’re competitors, but we’re also all in this together. The country’s most visible journalists are White House reporters who are seen daily, posing questions in the briefing room and doing standups on the lawn. Time and again, the president has insulted or degraded a reporter who asks a legitimate question, and time and again, the rest of the press corps has just moseyed along. Time and again, the president has made outrageous, easily checkable claims, and time and again, the press corps has just traipsed on to its next question. There are a lot of reasons why many Americans don’t trust the news media. Their reluctance to stand up for each other, and for the facts, is one. Perhaps it’s because some of them are timid, or because they don’t want to lose their Oval Office access, or because they don’t want to “become the story.” Whichever is the case, journalists build trust by showing that they will stand up for the truth, and for their fellow truth-tellers. It’s never too late to do that.
Now, as for me: I am headed to Utah, where I’ll be joining the staff of the Salt Lake Tribune for several months. I see the decline of local journalism as being at the heart of a lot of our problems—in the news business and in our democracy. One exception to that trend is the Tribune, which became a nonprofit several years ago and is eliminating its subscription wall while expanding in southern Utah and working with other news organizations statewide. I want to understand what journalists need to do to rebuild local editorial and business models, and the best way to do that is, well, to do it.
And this doesn’t mean that Laurels and Darts is going away! It will return in January with a new columnist: Susie Banikarim, who you might remember from that great audio series on the downfall of Ozy Media, which she produced for CJR last year with Josh Hersh. Susie has worked all over the news industry—from major networks to journalism startups—on articles, documentaries, and podcasts. She has been a media executive in scrappy organizations and a Nieman Fellow at Harvard. She’s deeply knowledgeable about the way journalism works—and just as curious about what is going on across the transformations in news. I’ll be interested to see where she takes the column. Until next time, so long, farewell.
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.
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