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Congrats on your busy day in the newsroom. You covered two meetings, put the finishing touches on a feature, and helped a colleague build out his source list. Phew—that was a day’s work!

Here’s what Louis Amestoy, editor and publisher of the Kerr County Lead, did recently. On Tuesday, he pushed out eight bylined stories. On Monday, he wrote five. On Sunday, nine. Friday and Saturday? Eleven stories each day.

Amestoy is covering the horrific flood that swept through Texas’s Hill Country last week, regularly updating the death toll, examining the supply of clean water, and reporting on a tragic scene at an RV park. The stories and photos are mostly his, with some help from his girlfriend, his ex-wife, and his daughter. He also regularly updates a widely viewed Facebook page with news and videos from briefings and other events.

Amestoy is the go-to person at the Lead, a site he launched in 2021 after around thirty years in the news business. He doesn’t have the resources to hire a lot of staff to serve a county with around fifty-three thousand residents.

He pulled off this week’s juggling act with a combination of hard labor and modern tools, he told me in an interview squeezed between multiple assignments. Lately, he has spent up to eighteen hours a day covering the news, as he also uses artificial intelligence to help turn transcripts and data into stories. And while AI speeds the process, it doesn’t replace the skills he honed as an editor and reporter elsewhere.

So, for example, when he was assembling a story to show the flood’s toll, “I got death logs from the police department, uploaded the PDF, and asked AI, ‘Can you build a timeline?’ I had to double-check because there were some deaths that weren’t from the flood, so we had to weed those out.”

When you’re churning out this much copy, especially without an editing desk, mistakes can slip through. When I first emailed him an interview request for Laurels and Darts, he responded, “We did f— one up. Maybe I could have both a laurel and a dart.” He was referring to a story he had published about two girls being rescued from a tree shortly after the floodwaters hit. It was based on “self-described witnesses” and on-the-ground social media accounts. But it was false, as he acknowledged in a top-of-page mea maxima culpa: “Like everyone, we wanted this story to be true, but it’s a classic tale of misinformation that consumes all of us during a natural disaster.”

Sorry, Amestoy, but mistakes happen, you were candid with your readers, and you’re still getting this dart-free laurel.

In the sports world, there’s a term for journalists who cover local teams with giddy enthusiasm: “homers.” For such reporters and announcers, every close call at the plate or on the field should have gone their way.

And in sports, that makes a certain amount of sense. When Boston fans are watching the local broadcast of a Red Sox or Patriots game, they often want the reassurance that comes from an observer who supports their team as much as they do.

The problem crops up when reporters cover politics like it’s a game, where the winners and losers are the people making policy rather than the citizens whose lives will be improved or diminished. Sometimes those “homer” journalists are rooting for a particular candidate or official, but more often, they’re just glorifying the win/lose narrative without considering the consequences. 

And that brings us to this cringey video from Politico, which could have been titled “Ipecac for the Soul.” It’s only sixty-three seconds long, but you may feel that several lifetimes have passed before it ends. 

Capitol Bureau chief Rachael Bade uses the clip to gush about Trump’s week, from the budget bill to the Iran strike: “Trump is at the top of his game right now!” she exclaims. Among the president’s accomplishments, she says, is forcing a recalcitrant senator—North Carolina’s Thom Tillis—to drop his reelection bid: “Well, let’s just say he’s headed for an early retirement,” Bade snarks.

And what does the video tell us about the effectiveness of the attack on Iran, or the impact of the bill on our national debt, or on those who rely on the government for nutritional and medical assistance? You’ll have to consult Politico’s more thoughtful coverage elsewhere.

If a refinery in your county had discharged arsenic, cadmium, chromium, and other toxic metals into public waterways, you’d want to know about it right away, yes? 

Unfortunately, this started in an area between New Orleans and Baton Rouge last August, and it’s now coming to light thanks to an investigation by Wesley Muller at the Louisiana Illuminator. 

Atalco (short for Atlantic Alumina) has racked up nearly two dozen violation notices from state environmental regulators. “With a caustic level higher than drain cleaner,” Muller reported, “Atalco’s waste slurry eroded through levees in multiple locations at multiple lakes, forming canyons as deep as 10 feet that allowed the toxic waste to escape.” Some samples showed arsenic concentrations up to 9,000 percent higher than federal and state standards allow. 

The pollution continued even after the company was made aware of the breaches. Given that, you’d also likely want to know what Atalco has to say about it. But the company declined the Illuminator’s interview requests.

It’s hard to remember a story that has caused as much journalistic navel-gazing as the New York Times piece on Zohran Mamdani, the mayoral candidate, who, as a teen, marked himself as “Asian” and “Black or African American” on a Columbia College application form (since, well, he was born in Africa and he is an American).

There are plenty of insightful takes on this story, including a Guardian column by Margaret Sullivan (who used to serve as the Times’ public editor), Liam Scott’s analysis for CJR, and pieces by Don Moynihan and Mike Masnick. So I don’t want to retread their ground. But I do want to highlight an early blunder, one that did much to undermine whatever value this story might have had.

The Times provided half-baked anonymity to the source who passed them Mamdani’s application, which had been stolen in a massive hack of Columbia University’s database. An early version stated only that the leak came via “an intermediary who goes by the name Crémieux on Substack and X and who is an academic and an opponent of affirmative action. The Times agreed to withhold his real name.”

You, gentle reader, might wonder why this source needed to be anonymized. Was “Crémieux” afraid he’d lose his “academic” job? Did he fear retribution from Mamdani supporters? The Times doesn’t want to tell us.

Then they make it worse. In a stealth edit—that is, one that readers would have no way of learning about without seeing both versions side by side—the Times rewrote the section to say that their source “provided the data under condition of anonymity, although his identity has been made public elsewhere. He is an academic who opposes affirmative action and writes often about IQ and race.”

Turns out “Crémieux” was already well known: last March, Guardian reporter Jason Wilson reported that he is Jordan Lasker, a longtime eugenics supporter who traffics in bizarre theories about race and intelligence. 

So, in other words, the Times grants anonymity to a source, never gives a reason why this was necessary, and even provides his alias, which might lead curious readers to find his real identity. It’s as if Wikipedia existed in 1973, and Woodward and Bernstein quoted “Deep Throat” while also providing breadcrumbs so diligent readers could identify him as Mark Felt.

Shortly after the story ran, Patrick Healy, assistant managing editor for standards and trust, pushed out a ten-tweet thread justifying it. If you can make it past the vainglorious blather in the first few posts, you’ll come to the one part where he acknowledges they might have screwed up: “We heard from readers who wanted more detail about this initial source. That’s fair feedback. We printed his online alias so readers could learn more about the person.” Healy is sending us on a scavenger hunt, but for the truth.

Editors should have set a higher standard even before publication, especially given how eager this source was to get the information into the Times. Or the Times could simply adopt the Washington Post’s guidelines: “Reporters should press to have sources go on the record.… Persistently pushing sources to identify themselves actually works—not always, of course, but more often than many reporters initially expect. If a particular source refuses to allow us to identify him or her, the reporter should consider seeking the information elsewhere.”

Because we were off last week, we’ll summarize a few other hits and misses:

• Laurel to a six-reporter team at the New York Times for its investigation into how Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele has been cutting deals with MS-13 gang members, with the acquiescence of the Trump administration.  

• Laurels to Julia Frankel and Sam Mednick, who deployed geolocating tools and audio forensic experts to produce this Associated Press report about US contractors using live ammunition and stun grenades to deter starving Palestinians seeking food at so-called humanitarian aid sites. In one video, bursts of gunfire erupt as a contractor says, “I think you hit one.” That is followed by a shout: “Hell, yeah, boy!” (The foundation that is running the aid program has denied elements of the AP’s report.)
  
• Finally, we bestow “Bunker Buster” darts—that is, “the heaviest legal darts in the world”—to Bob Iger and Shari Redstone, top executives of Disney (owner of ABC News) and Paramount (owner of CBS), respectively. Both companies faced baseless suits from President Trump, and both caved at the same price: $16 million. In striking these deals, they solved a problem for themselves, but created much deeper ones for smaller, less resourced companies whose leaders have intact vertebrae. So while Disney and Paramount give in, Gannett and the nonprofit First Amendment organization FIRE continue to fight Trump’s ridiculous suit over a Des Moines Register poll that gave him the jitters a few days before the 2024 election. That’s very commendable, and their position would be even stronger if Iger and Redstone hadn’t established a market price for settling misbegotten litigation.

Correction: An earlier version of this article gave an incorrect first name for Jordan Lasker. The piece has been updated accordingly.

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