Why You Should — And Shouldn’t — Trust Me

In answer to a question I was recently asked...

Yours Truly

I don’t have a journalism degree. Aside from fixing the printers inside the Akron Beacon Journal, I’ve never worked in a newsroom. I don’t have press credentials or a network of sources or an editor checking my work.

I did work on the school paper in the late 1900s. But I’m pretty sure that doesn’t count.

What I do have is years of research experience working in law firms and publication houses — places where getting it wrong has consequences. Where you verify, then verify again, and you don’t move until the sourcing is airtight. And then you verify one more time. That’s not a habit I developed for RotWR. I brought it with me.

I’m also a guy from the United States who has lived in Paris long enough to notice something. The news looks different from here. Not slightly different. Fundamentally different.

When Trump won, my phone started filling up with the same question from friends back home: what is the world saying about this? I’d answer, they’d go quiet for a second, and then: why aren’t we hearing that?

That second question I couldn’t quite answer.

Then the war in Iran started. The messages became a flood.

Fifteen thousand people found this in three weeks without me asking them to. I’m still not entirely sure what that means. But I think it means the question my friends were asking — why aren’t we hearing that? — isn’t just their question.

That’s why I do this. My credentials are right there in the work.

This is me answering that second question.

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