The space to breathe

This January, I wrote a hypothetical story about how to keep newsrooms safe from raids the day before federal agents raided Washington Post engagement reporter Hannah Natanson’s home. More than one industry person called me prescient, but I wasn’t. It was completely obvious this was going to happen.

The environment for newsrooms during the second Trump administration is unprecedented: an increase in secret subpoenas, raids on journalists and newsrooms, ratcheted-up surveillance, new restrictions, and an overwhelming message that we should fall in line or face the consequences. In January, not every newsroom leader had accepted that the norms of American democracy were being so thoroughly undermined. Wouldn’t our Constitutional protections — and the principles we tell ourselves are American norms — hold up?

I didn’t think so. For some Americans, those things had never been true; many newsroom leaders were simply too privileged to see it clearly, and therefore had a harder time believing it could happen. The gap between what America says it is and what it does was only going to become more obvious; I was firm in my intuition that the situation was going to be bad and get much worse. I didn’t make it up: my position was based on accounts from people inside government, stated intentions from administration politicians, and analysis from experts I trusted. It was also informed by the stories I grew up with, which in turn shaped how I see the world.

Some of my father’s first memories are of the Ambarawa 6 concentration camp in Indonesia, run by Japanese forces to imprison around four thousand women and children. Torture and malnutrition were an ordinary part of life. My Oma gathered and cooked snails to provide extra protein for her children; my aunt escaped through the sewers to gather extra food. When they were finally liberated, they were on the brink of death.

He later became an activist in Berkeley, protesting the Vietnam War and fighting for affirmative action. He experienced the betrayal of COINTELPRO and police overreach first hand. Years after Indonesia regained its independence after the war, the US underwrote the killing of left-wing activists there; simultaneously, it actively oppressed activists at home.

I grew up with those stories. And I grew up hearing my Oma wailing as she suffered through nightmares every single night. As the Project 2025 plans began to play out, my limbic system was working overtime. If the things that were happening were not exactly the same as the stories I was raised on, they certainly rhymed.

A lot of people feel this perception gap more than I do. I’ve usually worked in the C-suite, and although I have an immigrant background, I present as a straight, white man. Individual contributors in the newsroom are much more likely to be women and/or people of color than upper managers. They have been sounding the alarm, but haven’t always been listened to. Not only does that leave the newsroom unprepared, it leaves the people who are on the ground actively doing the work burned out. Many reporters, particularly people of color, wind up leaving the industry, even though we arguably need their voices the most.

I was not a reporter, although I was proud to work with people who were telling such important stories about our new reality. My role was to lead product engineering, IT, and security; the technology behind our publishing platforms, the systems that enabled the journalism to be done every day, and the digital policies that kept our newsroom safe. The day-to-day rhythm of those things is never boring in a good year.

It was not a good year.

One of the purposes of the relentless dystopia of the second Trump administration is to “flood the zone”: provide an ongoing distraction that prevents real analysis of substantive policies, and keep the media in a reactive mode rather than one where they can take a step back and strategize. Even if you’re not reporting on each new development, you’re reading and internalizing it; the environment of non-stop cruelty has a real cognitive effect.

As someone who worked in a newsroom, I couldn’t look away: there was no respite. That was particularly true when right-wing activists doxxed me in the aftermath of ProPublica’s identification of the CBP agents who killed Alex Pretti. ProPublica’s reporting is consistently high quality, thoroughly fact checked, and visceral.

An industry that has not had the foresight to be prepared, and is then hit in the face by an unstoppable firehose, can only be in reactive mode. But journalism can’t afford to be. As an industry, it’s been in decline for years: first through a failure to adapt to the web, then through loss of its incumbent business models, and finally because the administration and its allies are actively trying to harm it.

These problems are urgent. We need trustworthy information and context to make good democratic decisions. We need sustained sunlight to fight political corruption and abuse. Even if we don’t care about the journalism industry itself, we should care about having a high-functioning democratic society.

But if everybody is burned out from everything that’s happening outside their workplaces and from the disconnect with the people they work for, nobody is mentally present enough to do the work to fix it.

Research consistently finds that stressors people cannot control significantly reduce creativity. Uncontrollable stress impairs the prefrontal cortex, the brain’s seat of flexible, reflective thought, and pushes cognition into a reactive mode. Unfortunately, that describes newsrooms in 2026 exactly. Flooding the zone doesn’t just work on institutions; it works on all of our brains. And in this era, the less power we have, the more uncontrollable stress we experience.

I previously wrote about looking for a “yes, and” space, and how I found it in my JSK Fellowship. To that, I would add: to innovate, you need to be able to breathe and play. More than anything, you need to give yourself the time and space to let your brain unclench. You need a space to breathe.

Those spaces are disproportionately available to the privileged. If you come from privilege, you have more ability to take time out, reflect, be healthy, and look at the bigger picture. But at the same time, people who don’t come from privilege — who are more likely to have more diverse backgrounds, cut across race, class, gender, and geography — have more value to add. In news, people trust journalism less when they aren’t represented in the newsrooms that serve them, because they’re less likely to be covered accurately and fairly.

Consider Kensington, one of the most complex neighborhoods in Philadelphia, which the New York Times called “the Walmart of Heroin”. Kensington Voice sprang up to accurately cover it, giving a more representative voice to that community. Of the two newsrooms, Kensington Voice could see the challenges its communities faced with much greater fidelity. But at the end of September, it announced it no longer has the funding to publish new stories. Finding that breathing space to do something different is hard.

The people who can see America most clearly, and therefore have the best chance to solve its problems, are the people who have the least time and space to think.

The JSK fellowships provide one way for a broader set of insightful people to find space to think. (My imposter syndrome still looms very large.) But we also need to think about how to create these spaces inside newsrooms.

We can’t turn the firehose off: news is news, and everything is happening all of the time. But we can intentionally design our cultures to provide more room for breathing and innovation. We can build cultures that give everyone not just a voice but equity and say in the decisions a newsroom makes. The creativity-killer is uncontrollable stress; the more control and ownership everyone in a newsroom has, the more cognitive freedom they have to innovate.

It’s also about time. We need to make space in our organizations to step away from the firehose, experiment, and build prototypes. We need “yes, and” spaces, but we also just need the permission to spend some time doing something else, get feedback, and iterate, without the pressures that put us in a reactive mode. Those protected spaces can’t just be for upper managers and people with official strategy responsibilities; to be effective, they should be available to everyone, coupled with real design guidance and training.

Ideally, we would build this inside the newsrooms we already have; if we need to build new ones to give people the space they need to better serve their communities, so be it.

I came here thinking I’d focus on platforms. I think the bigger problem is culture. It’s a harder problem, but it all starts from there.