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“WE ________ JOURNALISTS MUST STAND TOGETHER.”

That all-caps headline ran on the front page of a newspaper a few days ago. Can you fill in the blank?

[Waiting…]

If you guessed “WHITE HOUSE,” just know that we find your naïveté sweetly (but sadly) endearing. 

If you guessed “PENTAGON,” you are getting much warmer. 

And if you guessed “STUDENT,” come collect your winnings (which consist of our admiration for your brilliance).

This all came about after administrators at Indiana University cracked down on the Indiana Daily Student newspaper. IDS editors had planned to include actual news in the print edition, not just gauzy stuff about homecoming and football. The university thought that real journalistic content should go only online, and halted this and future print editions. Then, David Tolchinsky, dean of the Media School, fired the director of student media who wouldn’t cater to the university’s demands.

To the ramparts marched the journalists at The Exponent, the student paper at Purdue University. They published around three thousand copies of a “solidarity edition,” which they distributed at their rival campus, a couple of hours away. Students deposited the papers, with the “WE STUDENT JOURNALISTS MUST STAND TOGETHER” cover, at around thirty newsstands on the IU campus. The content was almost entirely the work of Purdue students, with headlines like “The Exponent stands with the IDS after director fired, paper censored” and “At Indiana University, the journalism school forgot what journalism is for.” As Exponent editor Olivia Mapes wrote, “Prohibiting the IDS from publishing the news…defeats the entire purpose of a newspaper.” Purdue folks also covered the cost, less than a thousand dollars, Exponent publisher Kyle Charters told me. 

The odd thing is, IU has shown generous support for the student paper, which had been in financial trouble for years. Last year, the university provided a million dollars to cover accumulating debt. Others have chipped in, too. A few months ago, students asked entrepreneur Mark Cuban, a 1981 IU alum, to donate a hundred thousand dollars; he gave a quarter of a million instead.

I emailed Tolchinsky, whose CV shows little journalism experience, to see if he’d comment on whether he agreed with the decision to eliminate news from IDS print editions. I also asked him if he had any broader concerns about the relationship between his school and student journalists. He didn’t respond, and instead, his spokesperson sent me a nonresponsive press release about his new task force, which will address “editorial independence and financial sustainability of student media.” 

Tolchinsky didn’t name its members, but perhaps he could enlist a few student editors—one from his own campus and one from their compatriots at Purdue. Because those journalists, unlike some of their much, much older colleagues, know that we’re all in this together.

Idaho sends a lot of women to prison—more per capita than any state in the country, and fifty times as many as it did in 1980, when the state had half the population it does now. While behind bars, those women are under the control of guards—mostly men—who sometimes show a shocking propensity for sexual harassment and assault, and who are rarely disciplined for doing so. 

Wilson Criscione and Whitney Bryen at Investigate West dug deeply into this, finding that assaults are underreported by the state and that women who allege mistreatment may wind up in “the hole”—that is, small cells where they are held up to twenty-three hours a day. 

Meanwhile, a guard who is reasonably accused of sexual misconduct may be allowed to submit a “resignation in lieu of discipline.” In such a case, the underlying allegations are kept private, “leaving victims without justice and future employers in the dark. Officers, meanwhile, avoid facing rape allegations.” Sometimes, Criscione and Bryen found, women file complaints but are never interviewed. Or, when they do submit to questioning, the investigation may go nowhere: One woman “provided locations, a timeline, witness names and other details about her abuse and the abuse of others. None of the men [she] accused were ever contacted, let alone questioned, by the detectives, records show. Neither were the witnesses she named.”

Last Saturday, people opposed to Trump’s policies turned out for “No Kings Day”—a few thousand demonstrations that each included anywhere from dozens to more than a hundred thousand protesters. All told, it appears that more than five million people turned out, or what data analyst G. Elliott Morris called “likely the biggest single-day protest event since 1970”—the Earth Day march during the Nixon administration.

It was such a big story that the Washington Post gave it five columns atop Sunday’s print edition. It was such a big story that the Los Angeles Times gave it identical treatment Sunday, under the headline “‘No Kings’ Protests Draw Huge Crowds.” And it was such a big story that the New York Times placed a couple of small photos below the fold, teasing to a story back on Page 23. (You can see all three front pages here.)

Now, I know print isn’t what it used to be. (Though in the NYT’s case, print still drives almost a third of its total ad revenue and more than a quarter of its subscription revenue.) Far more people are likely to access your journalism online. (Though screenshots of the Times homepage from Saturday and Sunday show a similar approach to the print edition’s.) But front pages, especially Sunday front pages, still matter, both for those who subscribe to print and as a fixed statement of a newsroom’s priorities and values. 

I also know that a big story can get crowded out by bigger stories. But the top of the NYT’s Sunday front page included such soporific headlines as “Little Urgency from Trump on Shutdown” and “Democrats’ Ads Make Old Pitch: Stopping Trump.” 

The Times has taken some flak about its choices, so I reached out for comment. Spokesperson Nicole Taylor gave me a detailed response, an edited version of which I’ll quote here, and you can decide which position makes more sense.

“I…would respectfully disagree with the suggestion that including a story ‘below the fold’ in our print edition negates this being a significant story in the eyes of The Times. We deployed more than 20 reporters and a dozen photographers to cover the ‘No Kings’ protests on Saturday, and had comprehensive live coverage throughout the day as well as articles, photography, and video pieces.… 

“While we did have our two front-page photos on the protests, using print alone to measure a story’s significance, impact, or reach is a partial and outdated assessment. Altogether, this was comprehensive on-the-ground coverage, in line with how we would approach documenting other comparable events.

“On Sundays, we tend to showcase reporting that readers can only find at The Times, in this case, the results of a monthslong investigation into how members of a murderous regime have escaped justice. Two other articles on the Sunday front addressed major themes that came up in the protests, namely President Trump’s approach to the shutdown/governing and whether the Democratic Party can regain power in Washington. Devoting two photos on the Sunday front page and deep nationwide reporting on most of an inside page is significant print coverage. We covered the ‘No Kings’ protest in June on the front page; we covered the July protests as well.”

Almost a decade ago, Harry Enten was lauded (by no less than CJR) as a “whiz kid” for his data skills, amid praise that he represented “the new generation” of political journalists. But something went awry after he made the move from the once wonderful FiveThirtyEight website to CNN, where he serves as the network’s chief data analyst. He became weirdly prone to hype, as if some TV coach advised him to mimic a hungry meerkat chasing a juicy caterpillar. 

This has been going on for a while. In April, for example, we wondered why he gushed that President Trump “ain’t no lame duck. If anything he’s a soaring eagle!” Enten’s evidence was that Trump had signed more executive orders (many of them meaningless) than his predecessors.

Enten took another un-data-like turn earlier this month when he stated that Democrats’ chances of retaking the House of Representatives in 2026 had “gone plummeting down.” His key piece of evidence for this came from “Kalshi Prediction Market Odds,” which show a twenty-point drop for Democrats since April. GOP chances are now, Enten exclaimed, “up like a rocket, up like gold!” 

Do not ask Kalshi for crosstabs or margins of error, though, because the company is not a polling firm. It’s a prediction market, where traders can bet on everything from the Rotten Tomatoes score for the new Springsteen biopic to how many cars Tesla delivered this quarter. Enten didn’t bother explaining that to CNN viewers, instead claiming that “what looked like a pretty clear Democratic win in the House has become much closer to a toss-up.”  

There are reasons, like aggressive GOP redistricting and the Supreme Court’s reconsideration of the Voting Rights Act, why Democrats could have a bad election cycle. There are also reasons, like stubborn inflation and Trump’s anemic polling numbers, why Democrats might retake one or both houses of Congress. There is no reason, outside of an eagerness to promote a line that you can’t fully back up, to use a prediction market as the fulcrum for your cable-news segment.

This just in, from the Department of Very Obvious Takes: “People will take buses and trains only if they feel safe while riding them.”

That’s the subhed of a recent piece in The Atlantic. Okay, we don’t give darts for trotting out tired story ideas. 

But we do give darts for cherry-picking statistics. The column points to the murder, in August, of a young woman on a Charlotte train, and then goes on to state that “safety is a big part of why so few people use Charlotte’s light rail. In polling from last year, only 37 percent of respondents agreed that Charlotte public transit was safe from crime.” 

If you click through to that study, though, you learn that when residents were asked why they have never used the transit system, only 1 percent said it was because “I do not feel safe from crime while waiting or riding.” As for those who had stopped using the transit system, just 6 percent said it was because they didn’t feel safe while riding—and that included concerns about driver ability, which presumably is unrelated to crime.

The Atlantic story also stated that “about 40 percent of Americans describe public transit as unsafe.” Once again, if you click through to that survey, you’ll find that the people who say it’s dangerous are largely those who never take it, or who live in rural areas. Among those who do use public transit daily, 87 percent say it is very or somewhat safe. 

It’s perfectly legitimate to note that public transit ought to, and can, be safer. It’s even better to show your readers that this is a complex issue that can’t be reduced to a simple thesis, especially when many of the statistics don’t neatly align with your point of view.

Correction: An earlier version of this column misstated the Indiana-Purdue direction. 

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