Trump’s roller coaster ride for the American economy needs context
A reflection on a decade of twists and turns in technology and the economy and where it is taking local journalism.
BOSTON - Amid the free fall of confidence in the American economy under the increasingly erratic and seemingly incoherent Trump administration policies, particularly the policy on tariffs, it is crucial to step back and find some perspective on where this is all headed.
Just think about where America and the world was ten years ago in April of 2015. Think about where you were in your own life ten years ago and what was your confidence in the future under the administration of President Obama versus the current Trump administration? Wall Street made it very clear how it was feeling with a staggering, four-day-straight plunge in the market until Wednesday when Trump reversed course and announced an immediate 90-day tariff pause.
Personally, I am thinking quite a bit these days about this decade-long timeline. April 21 marked ten years to the day that we publicly launched The GroundTruth Project as a non-profit global and local journalism organization. Our founding mission statement was dedicated to supporting the next generation of journalists to serve under-covered communities around the world and across America. Back then, the crisis in journalism was just taking on a head of steam, and now it is accelerating at a distressing pace, one that feels like it is going straight off the rails in the current instability of the American economy.
There is a narrative here about how best to address this crisis and about how pioneering business models are evolving to sustain journalism. It is a story that is unfolding along the ragged edge of economic conditions and new platforms and technologies. The impact of social media platforms, in particular on how we receive and perceive sets of facts, has left many of us, who care about an old-fashioned idea known as “the truth,” scrambling to roll up our sleeves and do whatever we can to try and save a craft – journalism – that lies at the cornerstone of democracy.
If you want to understand the current moment you need to ponder how a global crisis in journalism, particularly the five-alarm-fire in local journalism, has contributed to the wider crisis in democracy here in the U.S. and around the world. Documenting this drama writ large is the dedicated purpose of this newsletter.
So before we get to all that much-needed perspective and how we might understand the impact that the current economic meltdown is having on journalism, let’s try to establish some context for this ten year time frame: In April 2015, under the Obama administration, the U.S. economy showed steady recovery from the Great Recession with improving employment and wages but lingering fiscal concerns, while April 2025, under Trump, reflects challenges such as tariff-related economic distortions and rising debt levels despite low unemployment.
In March 2015, inflation was close to zero, well below historical averages, reflecting the efforts of the Fed to support the recovery. Consumer Sentiment, an index used to gauge Americans’ confidence in the economy, was over 90 points.
Compare that to March 2025, which showed inflation dropping to 2.4 from 2.8 in February. Normally, that would have been a reason to celebrate, but economists pointed out that the numbers didn’t include the impact of tariffs or the stock market swings. We’ll see how the prices reacted to Trump’s policy in May, when the April numbers are released, but the Consumer Sentiment Index, published today, already gives us a clue: The index dropped 11 percent in the last month, to 50.8, its lowest reading since June 2022 and the second lowest since the 70’s.
“This decline was, like the last month’s, pervasive and unanimous across age, income, education, geographic region and political affiliation,” said Joanne Hsu, Director of the Surveys of Consumers at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan, which gathers and publishes the Consumer Sentiment Index data, in a press release.
“Sentiment has now lost more than 30% since December 2024 amid growing worries about trade war developments that have oscillated over the course of the year,” she added.
So what is the impact on journalism over these ten years?
The recent economic turmoil has significantly impacted journalism, exacerbating existing challenges and introducing new ones. In the last ten years, audiences have fragmented even more, with young people in particular looking at influencers in social media for news, rather than traditional sources. Applied AI has appeared on the scene to change the way we produce and absorb information, but also introduced new dangers and tools that allow bad actors to deceive and confuse audiences, making the line between truth and fabrication harder to distinguish than ever before.
As these transformations occurred, local newspapers continued to disappear at an alarming rate. In their 2022 report, the State of Local News Project calculated that the U.S. would have lost one-third of its print newspapers by the end of 2025. In last year’s report, they announced that the country had already crossed that mark. Although new digital organizations are being created and some publications moved from print to digital, the news deserts across America continue to grow, particularly in rural areas.
This drop has been accompanied by a decline of trust in the media. There is a crisis in the soul of American journalism that should prompt self reflection for all of us who need to understand how media, increasingly concentrated in coastal elite cities, is failing to document a growing disillusionment across America, particularly in rural areas, where the messaging of the far right has taken hold.
And ten years of anti-press rhetoric by Trump and his supporters has definitely taken a toll, bringing the percentage of Americans who say they trust the media to an historic low of 31 percent in Gallup’s annual poll. In 2015, the number was at 40 percent. But perhaps more concerning is the data from the Pew Center that shows that in 2016 only half of adults in the U.S. said they followed the news all or most of the time. By 2022, the last time Pew conducted the survey, the number had dropped to 30 percent. It wouldn’t be a surprise if that number has not continued its steady decline in the last three years.
Despite these challenges for the news business, there are opportunities for innovation through creative collaborations and technological adaptation and there are new startups coming forward every month, particularly in local news. That said, rebuilding trust between communities and local news organizations and ensuring financial sustainability remain critical for the survival of the business of journalism in this volatile landscape.
It did not always feel this bleak.
Back on April 10, 2015, it was a big and optimistic day for us when we packed Yawkey Auditorium at GBH in Boston, the public media hub that is a national leader in creating and distributing content for PBS and NPR, to officially launch The GroundTruth Project.
This idea of creating a non-profit initiative started for me at GlobalPost, which was actually a “for-profit model.” I put air quotes around that phrase because in truth GlobalPost was hemorrhaging financially with no promise in sight of figuring out a sustainable business model. The insight was inspired by Calvin Sims, who was then heading up journalism giving at the Ford Foundation, when he invited GlobalPost to apply for a grant under what we called the GroundTruth initiative. Sims, who now serves with me on The GroundTruth Project board of directors, has long described that as the first ever gift by the foundation to a “for-profit.” That is where we broke new ground and began to develop what has become known as a “hybrid model” mixing nonprofit and for-profit approaches. The Ford Foundation grant set us on the path to building what would become The GroundTruth Project as a pure non-profit organization under the 501c3 classification by the IRS for tax-deductible charities.
We took that idea and we ran with it, creating a culture of innovation and iteration that spurred a movement that supported more than 1,000 emerging journalists through fellowships and through our service programs Report for America (which I co-founded with Steve Waldman in 2018) and Report for the World (which I co-founded with Kevin Grant in 2021). We raised an estimated $100 million in funding to support journalists in the field, and we helped local news organizations raise tens of millions of dollars in their own communities to match our national funding, producing award-winning and impactful journalism at every step of the way.
So my own journey has come full circle back to the for-profit structure of an LLC in establishing the GroundTruth Media Partners. I genuinely believe that while the non-profit business models are crucial to sustaining journalism, particularly local journalism, there is simultaneously a very exciting revolution unfolding around new technology and the ways in which AI will augment and transform how communities, locally and globally, will unpack knowledge and search for the truth.
This new innovation will not necessarily be called journalism. It will be about empowering communities to find their own paths to explore data and analyze what is happening in their community. For example, a resident of a small town can in many places simply use an AI application to study their town’s annual budget and look for trends in spending and perhaps even look for misspending. In doing so, they will fulfill the role of accountability that was once seen as the pure purview of journalism. I am excited about these changes, and I want to be part of that change and there are startups that are embracing this change in communities across America with support from the American Journalism Project’s Local News Incubator. There is a great deal of excitement around what the future holds, and it is drawing in capital investments and new businesses that will transform the future of journalism, and that is why I have established this new entity, GroundTruth Media Partners, as an LLC, or for-profit enterprise.
It has been said that “the truth will never go out of business,” and that is why despite all of the negative indicators around what is happening in media we will find a way forward to evolve and innovate and ultimately get back to celebrating the craft of journalism and restoring its place at the cornerstone of democracy.
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