Truth, morality and independence in journalism under the second Trump regime

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This year has been full of firsts, and today marked another one: My first college speaking engagement. I was fortunate enough to be invited to speak in front of students and faculty at Grinnell College in Iowa—also my first time in Iowa!—about the business of independent journalism. This event gave me the opportunity to reflect a bit on how I got here, the current state of media under the Trump regime and consolidated billionaire control. I thought it might interest some of you—especially if you just found The Handbasket this year.

Here are my full remarks:

I was nervous coming into this event because I’ve never done anything like this before. But as I was struggling with what to say, I reminded myself that the whole reason I’m here is because I decided to do something I’d never done before, which was to publish journalism entirely on my own. Despite that fact, I reported one of the biggest news scoops of the second Trump administration hours before any major outlet had it, and have, however improbably, become a trusted voice in media. More on that soon.

I’ve had to get used to barreling head first into situations that are new and uncomfortable. This, of course, has always been the nature of journalism. The job is talking to strangers and familiarizing yourself quickly with new ideas and acknowledging what you do and do not know. But this has become a particularly tricky time for journalists, because not only are we dealing with the typical challenges of this work, but we’re also forced to think about so many externalities. It’s not enough to have a good story. It’s not enough to report the shit out of it. Journalists now have to wonder, will my outlet even exist tomorrow? If not, will a billionaire bail us out? Is it possible to speak truth to power under billionaire leadership? If I post this story on social media in a way that angers a conservative outlet, will I lose my job? Will I be sued, even if it’s the truth? Will the truth be crushed by the boot of fascism?

I tried to think about what you as college students could use from me right now. Hope can be a tricky word. It can betray a lack of grounding in reality or unwillingness to see the world as it is. I don’t know if hope is something I can give you right now. But in lieu of hope, I’d like to offer some encouragement and stress how important you are to maintaining a country that recognizes a free press.

But first, a bit about me.

I attended journalism school at George Washington University and graduated in 2009. To give you a sense of the journalism education environment I came up in, all of my professors were former print newspaper reporters who hated my writing style and wanted me to fit their mold. None of them had ever worked for a website. We had one class called “digital media” where we learned to edit videos using rudimentary equipment. I know this makes it sound like I took a covered wagon to school. It’s hard to believe this was less than 20 years ago, and yet the skills I learned then might as well have been from a different century. 

My senior seminar faculty advisor made us join Twitter as part of the course. This was spring 2009, and it wasn’t even clear at that point if Twitter had any news aspirations. I’d first heard about Twitter the previous fall when I was an intern at the NBC News Investigative unit in Washington and a cameraman who used the handle @newmediajim showed the other interns and me this new platform that encouraged blurting out literally whatever was on your mind. It didn’t click for me right away, but I also saw how fast the industry was shifting and how news outlets were struggling to make money on digital journalism, and it felt hard to predict what would be the next big thing.

Soon after graduating journalism school I had an interview with the Executive Editor of The New Yorker to be her assistant. I remember being so excited and so nervous. This was one of the most storied American media outlets and in my mind, the potential for growth there was exponential. But it was clear that online media was the future, which created a bit of a problem for old stalwarts like the New Yorker. Still, I figured a place with their budget and institutional knowledge would have figured it out. 

That’s why I was taken aback when the Executive Editor asked me, “How do you think we can monetize our website?” I really wanted to say “how the fuck should I know?” and also “why are you asking me?” In retrospect it should’ve been a glaring red flag that the adults in charge had no idea what they were doing and that it would be up to me and my peers to figure it out. But that’s something I wouldn’t realize until much later on, after years of expecting someone else to fix it. Until I realized I was the adult. 

I started The Handbasket in 2022 basically as a placeholder. I was a freelance reporter at the time, and not a very successful one. Every time I pitched a story to an editor it felt like even if we’d worked together in the past and the story performed really well, I was starting from square one. Online outlets were laying off staff writers all the time, freelance budgets were laughably small, and in order to win a freelance assignment you had to really prove it was REALLY worth their while. And even if you were able to clear that impossibly high bar, the pay typically sucked. It was demoralizing and exhausting.

At the time, a growing number of writers had launched newsletters on Substack, and some were even making money at it. I didn’t have the audacity—or in retrospect, confidence—to think I could sustain a publication on my own. And in fairness to my previous self, it’s not like there was much recent precedent for it. The last full-time media job I’d had was at a site owned by a Spanish-language cable news network, and the publication where I was on staff before that was owned by one wealthy man who was the son of another wealthy man. Almost quaint in retrospect. 

So the idea that a middling freelancer, with a decent but not great Twitter following could successfully spin up her own shop seemed pretty ridiculous. I was fine publishing The Handbasket whenever I had something to write that I either thought wouldn’t interest an editor or was more personal. For the first six months, I didn’t even offer a paid subscription. It wasn’t until I started getting some traction the following January that I realized I probably shouldn’t be working for free.

A lesson it took me much too long to learn is that you don’t have to wait for anyone to give you the opportunity to be a writer or reporter. You simply start writing and reporting. In many ways that’s never been easier, and it’s basically what I did. I started a newsletter and just started writing, knowing it was possible my work would never go far beyond my family and friends. I think there’s this old idea that you need to be ASSIGNED a story, or given permission to pursue something, when in reality all you need is to be a nosy bitch with a smartphone. You’d be amazed at how open people are to talking if you simply ask.

Here’s an example from my experience: In August 2023 I was scrolling on Bluesky when I randomly saw a link to a local publication called the Kansas Reflector reporting that a small-town newspaper called The Marion County Record had been raided by local cops. I read the Reflector story, reached out to its author with a few questions, and then emailed Eric Meyer, the owner of the Marion County Record, asking to speak with him. 

The next morning we got on the phone. He explained what had happened during the raid, how they seized all the reporters’ electronics, and even raided his own home while his 98-year-old mother watched in horror. He also revealed that the newspaper had been actively investigating the local police chief for allegations of sexual misconduct at his former job. I had this moment where I was like, wait–did I just get a major scoop? My background was not in breaking news and I wasn’t sure what to do with the information I’d just received. If I pitched it to another publication, I’d have to wait for confirmation and risked having someone else report it first. Then I remembered I had my own newsletter. I only had a few hundred subscribers at that point, plus a couple thousand followers on Bluesky, but the story felt big enough to transcend my relatively small platform. 

Earlier that year I had jumped on the George Santos beat without anyone asking me to, drawing on my knowledge as a Long Island native to explain how the hell this happened. That’s when I decided to start offering a paid subscription option. For those who don’t recall, Santos was an unknown Republican congressional candidate who shocked the country when he won his race in 2022. But because of diligent journalism, we quickly learned Santos was a fraud, and repeated coverage from me and others led to him being expelled by Congress and later tried and convicted for his crimes. Though the Kansas newspaper story was completely different, I had already proven my ability to own a story without permission, and so I decided to publish my interview with Eric Meyer on The Handbasket. 

It was quickly an online hit, and my instinct that it was a big fucking deal was right. No American newspaper had been attacked in that way before. Press freedom organizations issued statements condemning this clear violation of the First Amendment, and journalists around the country and around the world expressed solidarity with the reporters in Marion. The idea that a media outlet would be so overtly punished for what they covered was not something we’d seen in this country. Looking back, it was one of many warning shots that a period of great repression was coming.

And I think deep down I knew that. After all, I founded my site in June 2022 when Trump was no longer president, COVID was still very much raging but miracle vaccines had made it so we could more safely step back out into public life, and at least on the surface, things were heading in the right direction. Yet still I named it The Handbasket because despite the relative peace, I knew we were headed for hell. Two weeks later, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. 

When Donald Trump was elected President of the United States for the second time, I found myself at a crossroads. Knowing what I did from his first term about how mentally difficult it is to cover his presidency, I wasn’t sure if I had the wherewithall to do it again. I also wasn’t sure what I’d be able to contribute. Despite the handful scoops I’d published, I didn’t actually know how to do that on a daily basis. But without making a conscious decision to do it, I did it anyway. 

On January 28th of this year, I reported that the White House’s Office of Management and Budget had sent out a memo to leadership at all federal agencies letting them know they planned to freeze all grants and loans across the entire government. The first week or so since Trump was inaugurated had already been hell for journalists, with a flurry of executive orders of dubious legality making it hard to separate bluster from real threats. But the memo felt like we’d reached a new level. And it made it clear that the wheels of Project 2025—the Republican blueprint for conservative government takeover—were in motion. 

In the memo, the agency’s acting director wrote: “The use of Federal resources to advance Marxist equity, transgenderism, and green new deal social engineering policies is a waste of taxpayer dollars that does not improve the day-to-day lives of those we serve.” It was not practical but ideological. It was not sensible, but punitive. 

I posted a copy of the memo I’d received from a confidential source on Bluesky, the Twitter-like social media platform, making sure I’d concealed my source’s identity. Even still, I was still terrified for their safety. I nervously waited for someone else to confirm the story, even thought I was certain it was 100% accurate. For so long, news was only treated as “real” when it came from a handful of particular institutions, and who was going to take just my word for it? About three hours later, The Washington Post confirmed.

I imagine that was the first time most people had ever seen my name. They probably wondered how the hell I got this scoop and why they should trust me. I imagined them asking “Her?” Little did they know I was asking myself “Me?”

That scoop opened the floodgates, and for the next couple of months I was inundated by tips from federal workers whose jobs were under attack by the Trump White House and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, which became known as the cringey DOGE. A vast majority of tips were sent via Signal, the encrypted messaging platform that most journalists use for secure communications. The only option was to learn on my feet—learn how to be a breaking news reporter, learn how to earn the trust of strangers, learn how to publish highly sensitive news entirely on my own. So many people were reaching out on the worst day of their lives, and soon I was also an amateur therapist. I was so honored that people felt safe sharing their stories with me and so guilty that I couldn’t devote time to share every single one of them. Even if a story didn’t seem as major in the overall scheme of things, it was major to them and I made sure they knew that. 

But on it’s face, it was a ridiculous situation. Employees of the federal government felt so threatened that they were turning to a random journalist in Brooklyn with no national profile and a website she published herself. Yet when I finally had a moment to breathe and take a step back, I realized how much it said about the state of our media institutions. The years of distrust in the media sowed by Trump and other conservatives combined with the crumbling of trusted news brands that had been through a million reorganizations and corporate mergers made regular people feel like they had to try something else. And for a lot of them, the something else was me.

Once major outlets like The Post, the New York Times, Reuters, the Associated Press and others started taking my reporting, often times without attribution, I figured I must be doing something right. But I also made sure to stand up for myself, sending pointed emails to editors demanding attributions, and sometimes just bitching about it on social media. Hey, I didn’t claim to handle everything with grace. The more vocal I was about demanding respect for my work, the more respected my work became. It’s funny how that works. 

And I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the huge role social media has played in my career, for better or worse. Those early days on Twitter helped get me used to sharing opinions in a public space and often times having to defend them. And it’s because of Twitter that I got my first few jobs in journalism by going back and forth with editors, making them familiar with me, and eventually asking for work. It’s also what allowed me to promote my work and eventually start my own business. It’s no exaggeration to say that without Bluesky, The Handbasket would not exist in its current form. I was able to cultivate a supportive community there and use my account to publish even more news when I didn’t have time to write an entire post. It’s a main artery of what I do, and many of the people who pay for a subscription understand that it’s part of the product I’m providing.

Social media of course has it’s pitfalls, and some extremely dark ones. It got me used to random people coming out of nowhere and saying some of the meanest shit you’ve ever heard. 

That’s a reality of our current media environment: Journalists are now so accessible that people take advantage of that access. And when you’re independent, the access is typically even greater. It’s so important to be available and approachable, but not everyone is looking to approach you in a positive way. I’m not here to normalize that type of behavior or say it’s a price you must be willing to pay if you want to be a journalist, but it’s an unfortunate byproduct of having a platform. Subscribers to my site and people who follow me online will send everything from snide comments to outright threats. 

But the other side of the coin is the kind notes you receive. The acknowledgement of how important journalism always has been and remains. The ability of words to make people feel seen. That’s why keeps me going. 

I believe one of the things that makes people connect to my work goes back to how I started it in the first place: Combining the political and personal in the same space. For so long conventional news wisdom has been that there are two sides to every story, and that striving for some undefinable level of objectivity is a virtue. But what we’re seeing is that not every story has two sides. Or if it does, both sides aren’t necessarily equally weighted. 

All journalists come to this work with a set of biases whether we admit it or not. Where you grew up, your racial and religious background, where you went to college (or if you didn’t go to college) all create a unique point of view that will influence the way you approach covering the world around you. And that is an asset. No one will ever be able to do exactly what you do because there is only one of you.

So as I tried to find my footing in an ever-changing industry, I figured that instead of trying to sanitize my work, I’d attempt a paradigm shift. (Which is really just a fancy way of saying I was going to do what I wanted and hoped it would work out.) I’d make it crystal clear in my writing where I was coming from so that there would be no ambiguity. It was a risk, to be sure. But for so much of my career I tried to fit someone else’s idea of what journalism is supposed to look like, and I was done.

I realized that once I had decided to go down this road of critically covering the government, there was no turning back. I had put myself in the crosshairs of a vindictive government who didn’t need much pretense to detain you. I’ve had discussions with my family about the very real possibility of being arrested for my work, and have come to realize that’s a risk I’m willing to take. Though in some ways I’m more vulnerable than others—as a woman, as a Jewish person—but privilege is relative. I understand that I have a lot more than most, and if I’m not using it to protect the most vulnerable then what is the point?

In the last two years we’ve seen how corporate news outlets have whitewashed events at home and abroad. It’s taken two years for many in the media to refer to what’s happening in Gaza as a genocide. The Handbasket first used the term in March 2024. In the past month or so, the Trump administration has blown up boats in international waters, killing more than a dozen people. Despite the obvious lawlessness, I’ve seen outlets lean on language like “experts say there is no known legal basis for these actions.” I went with: “There is no readily available legal justification for striking these boats, leading to the appropriate conclusion that it is illegal.”

The art of speaking plainly is one that has by and large been lost, but the growth of independent journalism is showing it can be restored. There is a clear appetite for fact-based truth tellers who call it like they see it. There is a clear appetite for people who want to know that what you’re telling them is based on what you know, and not run through a filter of corporate interests. It’s amazing the clarity that comes with only answering to your readers. 

To say we’re living through a time of great upheaval seems like a failure of words. But each day we wake to news that would have been incomprehensible before January. Armed and masked ICE agents are violently abducting our family and friends and neighbors from our streets. The military is being deployed to cities in our own country despite no one in those cities wanting them there. The White House is trying to classify anyone who expresses anti-fascist sentiments as a terrorist. College campuses have been turned into ideological battle grounds where students are used as pawns in a game that has nothing to do with them. Being a journalist right now has never felt more scary, while never feeling more essential.

So how have I been able to weather this storm? It’s important to say that some days I don’t. Some day I wake up and scroll and scroll and scroll and fall into a pit of despair. But on my best days I’m able to muster the strength and clarity to tell important stories while abiding by immovable morals and standards. And I believe it’s my unwillingness to waiver that has allowed me to reach this point. Because once you demonstrate you have malleable ethics, there is no turning back. 

I’ve seen peers ascend to great wealth and power by their willingness to be someone else’s mouthpiece. To stand for the principles of the monied few instead of the people—or even instead of their own. To sublimate their morals to meet a bottom line. Perhaps they can live with themselves, but I know I could not. 

There has been a years-long effort to make us believe that journalism doesn’t matter. That the truth has become so subjective that attempting to share it is a waste of our time. There are days when I feel that weight bearing down on me. When the power of the malignant right wing media ecosystem feels too powerful, and my stories seem like pebbles in a mudslide. Weirdly enough, the only thing that gets me through those feelings is working harder. I’m loath to call it an act of resistance, but when I’m furiously tapping my laptop and the words are flowing out like a song, the thought sometimes enters my mind that there are people who wish I would stop.

What I hope you’ll take away from this is that even though journalism continues to morph in ways that are challenging and far from an ideal, there is always, always, always a way in.