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To start, I want to acknowledge the cuts this week at the Washington Post. We’ve all become somewhat inured to layoffs in media because they happen so often, but watching Jeff Bezos gut such a historic organization is devastating. As my colleagues Amos Barshad and Siddhartha Mahanta wrote the morning the news broke, the cuts impact the entire newsroom—including Nilo Tabrizy, to whom we gave a laurel just last week. CJR continues to chronicle this and other unprecedented challenges to journalism—so, thanks for reading and supporting our work. And now, on to the column.
If Minneapolis is the battleground for Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown, Georgia is poised to become the battleground for his administration’s efforts to undermine the legitimacy of elections. No newsroom has pursued the story more extensively than The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “For us here in Atlanta, in Fulton County and in Georgia, 2020 has not gone away,” Shannon McCaffrey, the managing editor of politics at AJC told me. “We’ve been covering this story since then.”
So several days after the Federal Bureau of Investigation entered an election center, seizing roughly seven hundred boxes of Georgia voting records, McCaffrey’s team obtained exclusive body cam footage of the raid showing that local police and federal agents appeared confused about the search. “We’ve had reporters who have been covering these issues and this beat and these sources for such a long time now,” she told me. “Those are the kinds of the kinds of sources that don’t develop overnight. They’re not going to trust you parachuting in for a story like this.”
The raid, coupled with Trump’s comments this week suggesting that Republicans should nationalize voting (a proposal that is pretty clearly unconstitutional), raises serious concerns about the security of the midterm elections. It also underscores that election interference is shaping up to be one of the most consequential stories of Trump’s second presidency. To McCaffery, the stakes for AJC readers are especially high. “We are covering this differently than the nationals are, and there’s a reason for that,” she told me. “Our audience, they’re the ones whose ballots were taken the other day, and they don’t know where those ballots are. Our primary audience is going to vote in a state where elections might change because of this.”
Of course, even as a moment like this underscores the value of local journalism, it arrives amid ongoing financial pressure on community news outlets. The AJC ceased publication of its daily print edition at the end of 2025 and this week announced layoffs affecting about twenty-five newsroom positions. Even so, Andrew Morse, the paper’s president and publisher, assured me that the cuts won’t impact election interference coverage. “We’ve invested and we’ll continue to invest in the areas where we can produce really distinctive world-class journalism and our coverage of the Fulton County story is a great example,” he said. “We will marshal resources and continue to invest wherever we need to on the story.”
Improbably, President Trump reached a new low in his dealings with the White House press corps this week, lashing out at CNN’s Kaitlan Collins for asking a question on behalf of Jeffrey Epstein’s victims.
Kaitlan Collins: What would you say to the survivors who feel they haven’t gotten justice?
Donald Trump: You are so bad, you know? You are the worst reporter. No wonder. CNN has no ratings because of people like you. You know, she’s a young woman. I don’t think I’ve ever seen you smile. I’ve known you for ten years. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a smile on your face—
Collins: I’m asking you about survivors of Jeffrey Epstein, Mr. President…
Trump: You know why? You know why you’re not smiling? Because you know you’re not telling the truth. And you’re a—you’re a very dishonest organization. And they should be ashamed of you.
Collins: These are survivors of a sexual abuser.
That his primary concern in an exchange about sexual assault survivors was whether the woman asking the question smiles enough managed to shock me, even though it really should not have. This was hardly the first time Trump personally attacked a journalist for asking about the Epstein files. In November, he pointed at a Bloomberg correspondent and said, “Quiet. Quiet, piggy.” Trump has a well documented history of targeting female reporters with his harshest and most vitriolic attacks.
Writing this column in December, Bill Grueskin admonished White House reporters for not showing more “solidarity—with one another, and with the public—by pushing forward with the newsworthy questions that they have every right to ask.” It’s a point that bears repeating in light of this latest tirade.
Collins is a professional and seasoned journalist, capable of defending herself. But when the rest of the press corps fails to follow up on a consequential question—one that clearly so rattled the president that he resorted to ad hominem attacks—it’s a disservice to us all.
Axios closed out its Axios 2028 newsletter on Sunday with one of the oddest items I’ve seen in a while. Alex Thompson fed Josh Shapiro’s new memoir into ChatGPT and asked it to generate a New Yorker–style review. Here’s a bit of the result: “Shapiro is at his most characteristic when he writes in triads and clipped imperatives—language built for breath and cadence, the kind you can imagine being underlined on a note card. ‘Listen, feel, do’ he instructs at one point, compressing a whole governing philosophy into three blunt verbs.”
I assume this is meant to be clever, but the whole thing reads as lazy and uninspired. It’s hard to imagine who this is for or why anyone would want it. Are there New Yorker readers looking for AI-generated approximations of its voice? And if there is a demand for this, isn’t the point of ChatGPT that people can do this for themselves?
The only explanation for this “experiment” I can think of is that it’s a subtle plug for Axios’s partnership with OpenAI, which, according to an announcement this week, is expanding. The deal is a content-sharing agreement that allows OpenAI’s ChatGPT to draw on Axios’s local reporting in exchange for funding. Axios has said that the technology won’t be used to report stories. Reviews, apparently, are another matter.
Like most journalists, I love print. I read almost everything online now, but it’s just not the same as getting a newspaper or magazine and poring over its pages for hours. So when 404 Media announced in December it was printing a zine, I was into it.
If you’re not familiar with 404 Media, you should be. It’s an independent online reporter-owned tech outlet focused on “impactful, groundbreaking accountability journalism on the companies and powers that are pushing us to a more inhumane world.” The site frequently breaks stories on surveillance, privacy, and hacking.
The zine, which is out this week, is about the surveillance tactics used by Immigration and Customs Enforcement—and the ways people are resisting the technology. It includes exclusive reporting, and is just plain cool.
Each copy was printed, assembled, and cut down to size by hand. 404 initially ordered only a thousand copies but demand was so great, the team ended up putting out thirty-five hundred. The zine is now sold out but you can still find it for download here in English and Spanish.
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