Accurate, concise, and contextual news coverage.
I’ve spent fifteen years watching local newsrooms shrink across this country. What started as budget cuts and buyouts has become something far more damaging: entire communities left with no one watching the store. We call them news deserts—counties and towns where not a single reporter shows up to the school board meeting, the city council …
Continue reading “Why Local News Deserts Lead to Higher Corruption and Lower Voter Turnout”
The Rule That Got Everyone Talking Last April, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services did something that doesn’t happen often in healthcare policy: it drew fire from nearly every direction at once. The agency finalized a mandate requiring nursing homes to staff at minimum 3.48 hours of nurse care per resident daily, with at …
The Buyout Nobody Wanted to Talk About By mid-February, the Office of Personnel Management had quietly tallied the damage. Approximately 75,000 federal workers had accepted the so-called “deferred resignation” buyout offer before the deadline passed. That’s not a typo. Seventy-five thousand people. Gone or leaving soon. The press releases from Washington called it streamlining. Efficiency. …
Continue reading “75,000 Federal Workers Left. Your City Is About to Feel It.”
The Numbers Tell a Story, If You Know Where to Look I got a call last Tuesday from a city planner in Des Moines. She didn’t want to be named. She was calling because her grant coordinator position—federally funded, federally staffed—suddenly didn’t exist anymore. Not eliminated by her city council. Eliminated by the Department of …
The Trust Collapse Nobody Argues About Last Tuesday I sat in a city council meeting where two residents cited the exact same news story to prove opposite points. One said it proved the mayor was corrupt. The other said it proved the media was corrupt for reporting it that way. Neither had actually read the …
Continue reading “Why Your News Diet Broke—and What Might Fix It”
