There’s a certain comfort to formulaic constructions — the lede goes up top, followed by the nut graph, and so on. But these are not comfortable times. In that respect, there’s no need for me to open with the latest assault on the First Amendment, to outline the many ways in which journalism is under attack for this newsletter’s readers. You already get it.
Yet as I write this, a news alert just appeared on my screen saying the Defense Department has fired the editor, publisher, and Middle East reporter of Stars and Stripes, a government-funded news agency that had been independently reporting on the war in Iran. This latest rhetorical shot isn’t just part of a war on a fundamental U.S. right; it’s an attack on the truth itself. Despite many attempts at obfuscation, we live in a reality where approval ratings are in decline and costs are climbing, so “no news is good news” for the powers that be. That translates to them firing who they can and silencing (through any means necessary) who they can’t.
But journalists aren’t a quiet lot. Each week in Depth Perception, we interview the industry’s biggest names about their best and latest longform work. Along the way, we also ask them some of our recurring “Leading Questions” to see how they answer the same inquiries differently. This past year (Depth Perception kicked off three Augusts ago), the answers varied but also found common ground. There was one theme in particular we kept coming across: hope.
Despite the tumult within journalism, the practitioners at the top of their craft seem to agree that while the stakes are high for the industry, the ceiling is even higher. Sure, outlets are cutting their budgets or shuttering, algorithms are changing, and AI has begun producing its own articles (poorly!), but there’s more news than ever for journalists to report.
“I find it hard to imagine human curiosity going away,” Superbloom author Nicholas Carr told me in a Depth Perception interview last month. “If we can sustain human curiosity, then there’s still hope.”
Here’s hoping that he’s right. —John Patrick Pullen
How did you get into journalism?
Jelani Cobb: There’s probably a through line with people who are journalists to curiosity, or a less charitable version of that would be nosiness. A love of finding out things — your job being to get smarter. If you’re out working every day, you should come back with information that you didn’t have before and be able to share that with the public.
I tell my students this all the time: “We can talk about these weighty, ethical things and this responsibility to democracy until the sun goes down, but fundamentally, we all do this because it’s fun.” We like doing it — putting together a story and fact checking it. There’s a particular kind of masochistic joy that comes out of that.
What is the best career advice that you’ve ever received?
Seamus Hughes: In a dwindling journalism world, you’ve got to be really good at at least one thing so that the guys in the corner office can’t get rid of you. They would be lost if they didn’t have a FOIA person or lost if they didn’t have a court reporter. They have to figure out the money for that.
Julia Angwin: When I joined The Wall Street Journal, there was this woman who was my mentor, Rebecca Blumenstein. She’s the head of NBC News. And I was like, “Rebecca, what do I need to know?” And I’m waiting for some really profound things. She’s like, “It’s all about beverage management.” And I was like, “Beverage management?” She was like, “Yeah. You have got to caffeinate right up to the right amount, but you can’t get too much or you can’t work. And then you’ve got to drink your alcohol with your sources, but you can’t have too much because you’ll forget what they told you.” And I was like, “Oh my god, she’s so right.”
Anthony Breznican: There was a gentleman named Bob Thomas who’d been covering Hollywood for the Associated Press since … the 1940s and he’d have interviews with Betty Grable, Abbott and Costello, Humphrey Bogart. I loved reading his old work. Sometimes I go to the newspaper archive and search up articles that Bob wrote.
He’s gone now, but he was a pretty old man by the time I met him. And he would go to the AFI Lifetime Achievement Awards. He always did an interview with the person who got that [award] and one year it was Harrison Ford. And I was like, “What’s it like talking to him?”
And Bob said: “He’s smarter than you think, but he speaks slowly and that’s because he’s thinking … He speaks in short sentences and when he goes quiet you have to remember to be quiet too because if you fill that void, he’ll stop and you’ll just move on to the next thing. So a good thing to do —” and then he would just nod his head and not say anything. He said, “If you have to say ‘go on’ or ‘tell me more,’ then say that, but don’t talk too much.”
He’s right. You can get nervous when somebody is being thoughtful and you fill the void and they stop down that line of expression. You have got to learn to be quiet and let the silence fill itself.
What stories of yours are you proudest of?
Ryan Broderick: It was very exciting for me this year to set up a Signal account for federal workers to text us about what it was like during the DOGE takeover and to be able to publish that. We were getting emails from different departments, and being able to verify and report that out — we’d never done that kind of scoop-based journalism before.
And then during the Charlie Kirk assassination news cycle, we moved to a daily publishing schedule. Garbage Day has, at most, published three times a week. It’s supposed to be a step back, a digest, a magazine kind of product. We were able to go daily during the Charlie Kirk assassination news cycle because I had hired the people this year to help me scale the business. We were basically running a small newsroom and keeping up with larger publishers and having our stuff cited around the country. It was a really fucked-up cycle, but for me, it felt pretty amazing.
Elliot Williams: There’s an anecdote toward the end of [his book Five Bullets: The Story of Bernie Goetz] of him going on “The Opie and Anthony Show,” this pretty vile shock jock show that got canceled for being so vulgar. And having unearthed that — yes, certainly it’s out there, people know it’s there — but I had not seen it reported or written about anywhere. And it’s a remarkable insight into, one, the future of Bernhard Goetz, who this guy became, and two, almost a meditation on notoriety. This is what happens when someone cannot shake his notorious past. It’s a really fascinating story, and I retell it toward the end of the book.
Five years ago this week, Long Lead released its first-ever production: “Long Shadow: 9/11’s Lingering Questions,” and within days, the limited series podcast climbed to #1 on Apple Podcast’s history chart. Next week, we will be updating the Signal Award-winning season with a new episode commemorating the 25th anniversary of 9/11. Looking back on the past quarter century, this powerful, special episode asks “What is the legacy of 9/11?” The answer: We’re living through it right now.
Hosted by Pulitzer-finalist author, journalist, and historian, Garrett Graff, “Long Shadow” is among the most critically acclaimed journalism franchises of the decade. Through a series of riveting, complex narratives, the show makes sense of what people know — and what they thought they knew — about the most pivotal moments in U.S. history. Across four seasons, the Peabody Award-finalist podcast has cast new light on events including Waco, Columbine, Y2K, 9/11, COVID-19, January 6, and beyond.
A winner of five Signal Awards, an Edward R. Murrow Award, and an RFK Human Rights Journalism Award, “Long Shadow” was named a “Best Podcast of 2024” by The Atlantic and Audible as well as “Best Podcast of 2025” by Rolling Stone. Catch up on all four seasons today, wherever you get your podcasts.
What’s one app/tool/service you cannot do your work without?
Jasper Craven: Buy LinkedIn Premium and use it as a tool for source development. This doesn’t apply to every beat, I suppose, but for most reporters out there, LinkedIn can be a really vital reporting tool — [for] both finding people and searching for people who work or have worked in specific industries, government agencies, corporations, or nonprofits.
When I get a juicy tip that feels promising, my first stop will be LinkedIn. I will try to gut-check the tip and corroborate it by connecting to relevant people in an industry or at the relevant company. It’s really great for building out a network of sources.
What’s the biggest threat to journalism right now?
Chuck Todd: The fact that we don’t control our distribution. Our distribution is in the hands of four or five tech companies. I look at the story of The Daily Caller, who built an entire business based on understanding the Facebook algorithm. Then one day, Mark Zuckerberg gets up and says, “No, we’re going to change it.”
The ability to essentially starve an organization from potential readers because you can manipulate an algorithm — that’s dangerous. If you criticize tech, good luck seeing your tweet getting seen by the normal number of people. It’s no different than if you promote Taiwan on TikTok.
What makes you think journalism is doomed?
Nicholas Carr: Writing to the algorithm is going to erode the ability of journalism to really do its job, because you’re not even really writing for the audience. You’re writing for a machine that is between you and the audience. This narrows the range of what’s covered. It forces journalists to fit their work to a kind of inhuman editor that is very powerful.
The mechanization of the editorial function, the content selection function, is very dangerous. At the same time, given the power that these algorithms have come to hold in getting between journalists or creators and the audience, it’s very hard to see how you escape the dynamic that we’re in currently.
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What makes you feel hopeful for the future of journalism?
Dave Jorgenson: When the Charlie Kirk killing, shooting, happened, I wrote in my newsletter about how there’s a lot of talk around young men and how unwell they are, which I think there’s a lot of evidence for. But I wrote in the newsletter, “I know a lot of you based off the stats that I get from YouTube and otherwise are young men. And my experience with the comment section is that you’re all very thoughtful people, at least the ones that comment. And that is something that I want to hear from you. Tell me how you’re doing.”
And I got hundreds of emails from people — from young men — and some of them were not doing well and they were very honest about it. And other ones were saying, “I’m not well, but I’m working on it or I’m seeing a therapist.” But there were a lot of different, more thoughtful comments and replies than I expected, even knowing the audience. And so that gave me hope, even as I felt sad for these people who are growing up in a world that was just very overwhelming and overstimulating. So the hope I get mostly is in the audience. And that’s really nice.
Nicholas Thompson: Well, I do think that AI is. In my book, I used AI all the time. [It] never wrote a sentence, because I think that’s unethical and wrong and bad practice and it’s a crappy writer. But using it to brainstorm and edit — it’s crazy. I’d write a section on my father and I can take all my father’s diaries, upload them into Notebook LM or, with not-so-personal stuff, upload them into Claude or ChatGPT, and then ask, “Hey, here’s 50,000 words of material. I’ve synthesized it into 600 words. Is there anything in my 600 words that misrepresents what’s in these 50,000 words? [Are] there any quotes that I’ve used [that have] better versions? Is there anything that contradicts it?” It’s incredible. It’s like having an infinitely capable research assistant who isn’t as good as a New Yorker editor or an Atlantic editor, but who can give you an answer, not in 15 hours, but in 15 seconds.
If I had a really hard question — I profile five different people in the book and I had this really hard choice because I’d written six, seven, eight profiles — should I have five? Should I have six? Should I have four? Should I cut one of them? Which one should I cut? For that, I’m gonna rely on my Random House editor. You need someone who’s human.
Nicholas Carr: People. The good thing is that people are still curious if you give them an opportunity. I find it hard to imagine human curiosity going away. If we can sustain human curiosity, then there’s still hope.
Margaret Sullivan: When I see all these people protesting out in the streets, when I see people organizing, when I see writers who clearly care a lot, and when I see people doing important cultural work, like in the arts, that all makes me feel like all is not lost.
Laura Jedeed: Independent media, honestly. I think that’s the future. The legacy media is crumbling. The money is not there. It’s getting worse all the time. There are people who are really good that are still in it, but I think we’re seeing the rise of stuff like Substack. It’s not ideal — we have a thing where everyone’s paying $5 to a lot of people, and that’s not ideal. But I think it’s going to evolve over time into something that’s actually sustainable. I hope so.
Jelani Cobb: If we were to strip away the dark storm clouds, what would become obvious to us is the fact that journalism is more dynamic now than it has been in 50 years. We’re trying all kinds of things that, if we weren’t talking about the collapse of the business model and AI and lack of trust and all the other kinds of things that dominate the landscape, we would be talking about just how amazing the innovations in the field are.
People are coming up with new business models. We were previously lazy in a way that had been bred by success. But now we have different types of distribution, different structures, we have just a huge number of nonprofit news organizations that are coming online, and people are actively trying to figure out what’s the most sustainable format for us. When a lot of smart people are all dedicated to trying to solve one question, we tend to make a lot of progress.
If someone is graduating from college in 2026 and wants to be a journalist, what do you tell them?
Margaret Sullivan: Try to have very diverse skills. Be able to do a lot of different things. Don’t just think, “Oh, I’m a radio person” or “I’m a this or that.” You have to be able to pivot. Get whatever paid work you can. Don’t be fussy. Go get an internship. Be willing to travel and work the contacts. Nothing matters more in any workplace than relationships.
Enjoy more great journalism from Long Lead:
“Title Waves,” by Kim Cross. One generation after another, women have battled for gender equity in education. But when the political tide turned against Title IX, a high school girls water polo team fought back — and kept the landmark law afloat.
“Long Shadow,” by Garrett M. Graff. This RFK Human Rights and Edward R. Murrow Award-winning podcast series examines what people know — and what they thought they knew — about the most pivotal moments in U.S. history.
“Border Line War,” by Thomas Dworzak and Christian Caryl. From Norway to Kazakhstan, Russia’s neighbors hold a tenuous line with the world’s largest country. Scenes from along this new Iron Curtain show what it’s like living next to the ghost of an empire that insists it has no boundaries.
“Double Meaning,” by Sarah Rogers and Kate Bennis. Each year, thousands of strangers pilgrimage to a small town in the middle of America where they celebrate being the same, but different. In a moment ruled by division, what do twins know that the rest of us don’t?
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