It’s been one hell of a wild first year
The launch of this Substack a year ago coincided with the inauguration of a president who has shocked us by doing exactly what he said he would: becoming a dictator “on day one.”
Has there ever been a year this wild in American history?
Think about all that has happened over the last 12 months to our country, our democracy, our world, our free press, the international institutions we built after World War II and, well, to truth itself.
When I stepped down as CEO of The GroundTruth Project and created GroundTruth Media Partners and then launched this Substack, I never imagined just how furious the battle for truth would become. Every week it seems we have one jaw-dropping unprecedented attack after another on our institutions and particularly on the free press. Consider just these three assaults waged by President Donald Trump’s White House:
The FBI raided the Alexandria, Virginia home of a Washington Post reporter who saw her computer and her phone taken and her source exposed and charged apparently in connection with her reporting on defense information the government declared as classified.
The successful litigation against big networks like CBS and ABC for tens of millions of dollars and the more petulant grievances he has taken to court like the lawsuits still winding through the courts against AP for refusing to follow his edict that the Gulf of Mexico would now be called the Gulf of America.
The dismantling of USAID as part of an effort that has sought to mute independent voices of truth that once echoed around the world through Radio Free Europe, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and most recently Stars and Stripes, a federally funded but independent news organization that has earned respect for its coverage of the American military.
Over the last year, we have produced more than 50 weekly posts on this Substack. As we shared in our founding mission statement, these posts are intended as dispatches from the frontlines in the war on truth.
Some of these dispatches are reports from literal battlefields in Gaza and Ukraine, others come from the frontlines of innovation where there is both peril and extraordinary opportunity as AI is not just transforming journalism but ushering forward a revolution in how we receive information.
We have also covered local issues around the decline of independent local news organizations in America in cities like Pittsburgh, which is in danger of losing its last daily newspaper; to the aggressive ICE raids across the country particularly in Martha’s Vineyard where I serve as publisher of our local newspaper and where we have watched what is unfolding in Minneapolis with horror and wondered if the same brutal fate will come our way and target our large and vibrant Brazilian immigrant community.
Every week, it feels hard to know where to begin in documenting the Trump administration’s unprecedented threat to press freedom. We have had amazing interviews with thought leaders who are helping us better understand this pivotal moment in history, including Nobel Laureate Maria Ressa, the head of the Committee to Protect Journalists, Jodie Ginsberg, to courageous veteran foreign correspondents like former NPR reporter Deb Amos.
We launched GroundTruth Media Partners with a new mission and a new business model to continue innovating in independent journalism. The journey of GroundTruth has circled back to its origins, growing out of the for-profit news organization GlobalPost, which I co-founded almost 20 years ago. The last two decades as an entrepreneur in new media are part of a 40-year journey in journalism that always finds its way back to a simple idea that reporting on the ground is what matters most.
Meanwhile, the two programs launched by GroundTruth, Report for America and Report for the World, have gone full speed ahead on their own journey and focused more on their individual brands—and I couldn’t be more proud as the co-founder. Over the seven years since it launched, the team has helped produce more than 100,000 local news stories across the country, and in 2025 it placed 181 reporters in 152 host newsrooms.
In a full-circle moment on Jan. 12, they announced both programs would be joined under a new name: Report Local. Rather than being an initiative of The GroundTruth Project, Report Local now serves as the home for Report for America and Report for the World, and is being built to bring these proven, powerful programs to more communities nationwide and around the world.
“This transition reflects who we are today: A global, community-rooted organization focused on strengthening local journalism ecosystems,” as written on their brand-new website, which will be further rolled out in 2026. GroundTruth Media Partners will also maintain an archive of all the special reports and editorial partnerships that The GroundTruth Project has done through the years.
As Report Local put it in a statement,
“The name reflects the organization’s sharpened mission to strengthen community-rooted journalism in the United States and around the world at a moment when reliable local information is essential to civic life.”
As the movement we set in motion continues this incubation of local news, our work at GroundTruth is now more important than ever. That is why I am grateful for this year of transition into Substack. This move has allowed us to build a coalition of subscribers who care deeply about independent, community-based journalism—a community that helps us celebrate the work of local journalists, report on the staggering decline of local news outlets, and also explore the bright spots within this crisis. I’m thrilled to be joined by such a vibrant community of readers here on Substack who care deeply about truth, dialogue, and the power of journalism.
But we still have miles to go to build the newer entity of GroundTruth Media Partners, which has three main areas of focus:
The GroundTruth newsletter on Substack
Thought leadership from a network of well-established journalists
An incubator that will help support innovative new ideas, particularly around the revolutionary promise of AI, where forces of change are already well underway.
Within each of these areas, there is an element of “GroundTruth”—the idea of being on the ground, in the field, close to the story—that I want to do more of as we head into our second year on Substack.
I want to hear the stories of workers in the industrial town of Youngstown, Ohio, and revisit how the impacts of underemployment have changed since we last covered it five years ago.
I want to host public forums that bring together thought leaders and local reporters in a space where we can listen, learn, and reflect on how to rebuild trust in journalism.
I want to stand alongside Ukrainian journalists in cities like Kyiv and Bucha as they continue to report under relentless Russian aggression while also losing vital resources as USAID gets gutted.
I want to go to places where newsrooms have recently closed—like Pittsburgh—to see how the community is living through it and how local newsrooms are stepping up to fill in the voids.
I want to explore how AI is impacting local journalism, and, more importantly, how AI needs local journalism.
But I need your help to sustain all of this work. This kind of reporting takes time, resources, and a deep commitment to the truth. I need your help to fund aspects such as travel, pay for guest columnists, and to build an editorial brand that can sustain the kind of quality of podcasts, special reports, photo essays and documentaries we have produced over the last decade.
To help us stay in the fight for the truth, I’d like to invite you to consider becoming a member of GroundTruth on Substack. For just $5 a month—or $50 for the whole year—you can help us continue producing independent, community-based journalism. If you’re not able to contribute right now, that’s okay. Our newsletter will remain free and without a paywall, because we truly believe these times require all of us to do what we can to bridge the divides. If you believe in this mission, I hope you’ll consider becoming a paid subscriber. Again, please do not feel obligated to contribute, as all of my columns will still be available for free.
But if you truly care about this work and want to see more of it, I encourage you to join our community. After all, at the rate things are going, the year ahead promises to be as wild as our first year. Thanks for staying with us on the journey.