As the Biden administration is drawing to a close, its top officials are holding final press conferences and giving journalists one last chance to “hold power to account.” But questions aren’t being prioritized — security removed two journalists who critiqued U.S. policy on Gaza at Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s presser yesterday.

In this issue:

And also: Grants for L.A.-area newsrooms reporting on the wildfires, artificial intelligence expands its role in journalism, a movement journalist on trial for coverage of a Palestine solidarity protest, and layoffs at Vox and the Chicago Reader. Plus, our resource of the week is a newsletter-exclusive, twice-monthly column about journalism in support of democracy.

Behind the new column is Beatrice Forman. Here’s more about what she does, in her own words: “I’m a Philadelphia-based journalist who gets paid the medium bucks to help news organizations think about what their work tells audiences about democracy.

Yes — really. I coordinate U.S. Democracy Day, a nationwide journalism collaborative helmed by the Center for Cooperative Media. Since 2022, it’s brought together over 150 news organizations annually, The Objective included, to produce at least one piece of work about how democracy manifests in their neck of the woods on the International Day of Democracy, September 15.

To me, the true point of pro-democracy journalism is to help people feel informed enough to participate in civics confidently and to make decisions in their best interest without regret.”

Beatrice’s column will be in the “Resource of the Week” section, and she’ll share tips about uplifting democracy across your journalism, including Q&As with news leaders about their projects.

(P.S. We’re still working on getting stickers and posters out to new supporters, as they’ll be shipping from Los Angeles — thanks for your patience!)

—James Salanga

On the eve of a three-phase ceasefire agreement that could bring some hope to Palestinians living under Israeli apartheid, press conferences are the time to “hold power to account.”

But yesterday, that’s not what happened: Two reporters were removed from Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s final press briefing after asking questions about the United States’ financial and diplomatic support of Israel during the Biden administration. Worse, the removal — not Blinken’s policy — was the focal point of coverage, and none of the journalists’ colleagues in the briefing room intervened.

The U.S. has vetoed a ceasefire resolution in the UN Security Council six times. The Israeli military has killed over 46,000 Palestinians since Palestinian militants with Hamas launched a surprise attack in October 2023, and human rights organizations have pointed to Israel’s military using starvation as a weapon of war, bombing hospitals and displacing Palestinians as conditions exacerbating the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.

But questions about U.S. complicity weren’t centered or prioritized yesterday. if you look up news coverage of Blinken’s final press conference, many headlines don’t identify the two removed reporters as journalists: Instead, they’re protesters and “hecklers” who berated Blinken.

The rhetoric and frame in this reporting focuses on the element of disruption instead of substantively centering the journalists’ critiques. It’s another example of what’s known as the protest paradigm, a pattern of mainstream news reporting that focuses on negative impacts of protesters rather than the changes they’re pushing for.

Sam Husseini, a Jordanian-Palestinian writer, pointed out the U.S. consistently blocked International Court of Justice orders for Israel to call off its military actions while Blinken was giving remarks and was told to “respect the process.”

“Everybody from the ICJ to Amnesty [International] is saying that Israel is doing genocide and extermination, and you’re telling me to respect the process?” he responded.

Max Blumenthal, editor of independent media outlet The Greyscale, asked, “Why did you keep the bombs flowing [after the May 2024 Rafah airstrike] when we had a deal in May? … How does it feel for your legacy to be genocide?”

Nearly a year ago, the ICJ ruled it was “plausible” Israel committed acts violating the Genocide Convention.

And reporters’ unwillingness to intervene when both their peers were removed from security highlights the power dynamics at work within these government press conferences: They should just be grateful to be within the room, and access hinges on officials’ assessment of whether questions and conduct are “respectable.” A focus on respectability has trickled into news coverage, as studied in earlier accounts of media coverage of Black Lives Matter.

“You pontificate about a free press,” Husseini said before being removed.

Journalists are constantly discussing ways to stand in solidarity with their fellow reporters. Even when they may disagree with their peers’ approach, it would’ve sent a stronger message about press freedom for those in the briefing room to support the pursuit of answers and truth on U.S. involvement and complicity in Palestinian deaths — especially in what has been the most deadly event for journalists in human history.

—James Salanga

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Reporters should cover migrants as people, not as partisan props. During the Biden administration, reporters’ assumptions about immigrants impeded nuanced coverage about migrant and border policy. Read more.

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Grants for local newsrooms reporting on California wildfires: Independent newsrooms reporting on the California wildfires can apply for up to $10,000 through fast-track grants from the Institute for Nonprofit News (INN), with support from Google News Initiative (GNI). They must be based in Los Angeles or Ventura Counties (the counties where Gov. Gavin Newsom has declared a state of emergency) and be nonprofit organizations or independent publishers with budgets under $5 million.

🚒 Read the story in the Institute of Nonprofit News.

Another big week for generative A.I. in the news: OpenAI made its first foray into directly funding newsrooms — namely, four Axios Local newsrooms. Neither company divulged the amount of funding. Amid journalists’ petition calling for Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos to change course, Post leaders unveiled a slide deck aspirationally describing the newsroom as an “A.I.-fueled platform.” And a new report analyzed sports news sites producing frankenstein stories — a mix of A.I. generated content and plagiarized sports reporting.

⚙️ Read the stories in Nieman Lab, the New York Times (via archive.ph), and WIRED.

Movement journalist put on trial for coverage of Palestine solidarity protest: Portland-based Alissa Azar is one of at least 48 journalists arrested in the U.S. in 2024 and, in relation to a separate case, she is one of only four reporters to have been sentenced to jail since the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker began documenting repression of journalists in 2017. Reporter Jen Byers writes that her case “reveals a landmark legal condemnation against social media journalists and press freedom in the U.S.”

📹 Read the story in Prism.

Layoffs at news outlets national and local continue: Under the auspices of restructuring, Vox Media executes its third round of layoffs in the past two months. At least ten employees are impacted, primarily at the director level. Less than a week before, the company had laid off 12 employees from Vox.com. Meanwhile, the Reader Institute for Chicago Journalism is laying off six Chicago Reader employees in hopes of averting organizational closure.

🛑 Read the stories in The Wrap and the Chicago Reader.

This week’s resource is … a new column about pro-democracy journalism, written by Beatrice Forman, the project coordinator behind U.S. Democracy Day.

Hey! I’ll be taking over this section of The Front Page every other week to share how you can transform your journalism across all beats to uplift democracy. At U.S. Democracy Day, much of my time is spent finding journalists the financial and skill-based resources to do reporting grounded in some fundamental questions: How is democracy supposed to function for your audience? For whom does it function well? And for whom can it function better?

But a concerningly large amount of my days are also spent telling journalists a half-truth: Earnestly doing journalism that supports democracy can be easy, something they can try before they buy. Admittedly, it’s what some folks need to hear amid constant layoffs, threats from private equity vultures, and burnout.

It’s also not the whole picture. Yes, pro-democracy journalism is often simpler than our industry’s focus on intensive blue-chip investigations makes it out to be. But it’s also fundamentally transformative. Transformations take time and effort.

So today’s tip: Stop waiting for Donald Trump.

Beyond standard event coverage — the former president is getting inaugurated on Monday with a lineup of performers lost on their way to CMA Fest —  a lot of newsrooms are treating Trump’s inauguration as the official signal to start preparing for what will likely be an onslaught of drastic democracy-shaking policy. Unfortunately, that’s the wrong way of looking at things.

Trump hasn’t been mum about his intentions. He intends to launch mass deportations “at light speed” as soon as he takes his second oath of office, already setting off ‘self-deportations’ as immigrants weigh the pro-cons of sticking around while he works out the logistical kinks of his immigration plan. He has vowed to sign executive orders to cut funding to schools “pushing critical race theory” and pardons for hundreds of convicted Jan. 6 rioters within his first moments in office.

An adage I keep hearing, and one I have also told myself, is “We don’t know how bad things are going to get until they start happening.” Though a nice salve for fear-mongering, that sentiment can translate into a plan-pocalypse, or when editors spend so much time developing contingency coverage plans for different scenarios that they forget people need information to make decisions now.

Waiting to see what happens sets reporters up for failure when it comes to building trust with communities in crisis. It also undermines journalism’s public service ethos. Now is the time to begin building relationships with communities who stand to lose the most. Especially because it will better help them make informed choices about how to handle life under this administration.

It’s worth spending the next weeks listening to your communities about what issues they care about most and the issues that stand to have the most impact (because as we’ve seen, those are not always the same). This will look different for every newsroom. But starting now means when shit hits the fan, you know how to deploy your resources to cover what matters on the terms your audience needs.

—Beatrice Forman, Democracy Journalism Columnist

Ask me your pro-democracy reporting questions!

For more style guides, journalism job boards, and tip sheets, check out The Objective’s resource list.

Thanks for reading. We appreciate you being here, and we’ll have more for you next week.

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