Then, in October 2025, he was fired.

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The reason, Jim says: he refused a direct order from university administrators to strip traditional news coverage from a print edition of the paper. What followed was a very public censorship dispute, a lawsuit alleging violations of his First and 14th Amendment rights, and a national conversation about who gets to decide what a student newspaper publishes — the students, or the institution that funds them.

The lawsuit has since been voluntarily dropped and is being refiled in state court. Jim says he intends to see it through.

This fall, he begins a new role as an associate professor of journalism at Western Kentucky University. For this week’s Deadliners podcast we chatted about what happened, what it means for press freedom in America, and what Jim tells students who are wondering whether journalism is still worth fighting for.

This week I’m chatting to my friend (and former editor) Kira Don, Editor-in-Chief and co-founder of Stranger’s Guide, a magazine about “place” that I (probably inarticulately) describe to people as “somewhere at the intersection of current affairs and travel.” I worked as a senior editor at the magazine for several years. I love it. It’s a beautifully produced publication (it does have a website too) with photo essays, quirky stories, and features that run thousands of words long.

When I launched Deadliners back on April 9, I promised I’d bring you exclusive interviews with the people thinking about the future of journalism: reporters who are refusing to quit, founders starting new platforms, and storytellers finding exciting ways to tell us what’s going on in the world. What Kira is doing is precisely what I was talking about.

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Kira has worked as a magazine editor in New York and California, was executive editor of Lapham’s Quarterly, and as a journalist she’s covered politics and culture around the world. She also co-founded the Oakland Book Festival in the city she now calls home.

Since it launched eight years ago, Stranger’s Guide has been nominated for no less than 14 national magazine awards and it’s won four — not bad for a publication that launched on a shoestring at a time when we’re being told that print is all-but dead.

“I love print the way some people love vinyl,” Kira told me. “There’s something about holding an object in your hand, and so in starting this magazine, the most important thing was to make it an object that you would want to keep. It’s not print for print’s sake.”

What makes Stranger’s Guide feel so important right now is that Kira is doing something AI will never be able to do: traveling to a country, sitting down with local writers and photographers over lunch, and uncovering the accidental, beautiful daily realities of life that then make it into print. “We’re journalists in a moment in which journalism has so little respect; when it has so few avenues for being read or acknowledged or noticed,” she said.

We cover a lot of ground — how Kira builds a bespoke editorial board from scratch for every single issue, why she turned Stranger's Guide into a nonprofit, the Iran stories she's most proud of, and her simple advice for anyone crazy enough to start a print magazine in 2026. ("Just do it," she says. And she means it.) Hit play to listen to our conversation above. Or find Deadliners on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

In the vacuum left by international indifference, a terrifying proxy information war has taken over — an AI-driven psychological operation designed to manufacture alternative realities.

My guest on this week’s episode of Deadliners is Raghdan Orsud, a communications expert and co-founder of Beam Reports, an independent Sudanese news and fact-checking platform. Launched in 2021 to safeguard Sudan’s democratic transition, Beam has spent the last few years fighting an uphill battle not just against totalitarian forces, but against the apathy of Silicon Valley and the sudden collapse of global media funding.

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Rebuilding from a Laptop in Exile

When fighting erupted between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in the spring of 2023, Beam Reports was just finding its footing. They had built a physical studio in Khartoum using local funds and the equipment was still in boxes when the RSF seized their offices. Raghdan and her co-founders fled to Nairobi, Kenya, instructing their reporters to leave everything behind because traveling through military checkpoints with a laptop carrying a journalism logo was a death sentence.

“When the war happened … we found ourselves out of the country with absolutely nothing but personal funds,” Raghdan said. “No funding, no savings, no equipment.”

Today, traditional independent media inside Sudan has largely collapsed. Out of 1,500 active journalists before the war, it’s estimated only about 70 are left working in the country’s conflict zones.

When Algorithms Reward War Crimes

Without a robust local press, regional state-backed media networks have weaponized the information space. More chillingly, warlords and extremists have found a highly profitable home on Western social media platforms.

Beam Reports exposed ‘Abu Lulu,’ an RSF fighter who used TikTok Live to openly boast about murdering over 2,000 civilians in Darfur. Instead of banning him, TikTok’s algorithm actively rewarded his videos with massive engagement.

"The platforms that we live in now, they don't just make it harder for hate speech and incitement to violence to exist—they reward it. He was making money out of that content." — Raghdan Orsud

Beam pressured TikTok into taking the content down. Their relentless monitoring eventually forced Meta to bring them on as an official third-party fact-checker for Sudan. But Raghdan is candid about the structural indifference of Big Tech:

“Sudan is not a priority. Any country that does not bring in money is not a priority for big tech companies. I get that part from a corporate perspective. But if you are positioning yourself as a global platform, there’s a responsibility that comes with that.”

Coordinated Disinformation

Through their specialized division, Marsad Beam, Raghdan’s team tracks sophisticated deepfakes and coordinated foreign influence operations. They recently exposed a massive, digital psychological campaign on X (formerly Twitter) promoting a completely fabricated narrative that Islamist extremist groups were attacking Christian citizens in Sudan. When Beam mapped the network behind the narrative, they found it was driven by a coalition of Emirati and Israeli accounts alongside far-right figures in Europe and the United States. The goal, Raghdan said, was to reframe a domestic, territorial military power struggle into a religious holy war to manipulate Western foreign policy.

The End of USAID Funding

Doing this verification work requires resources. But independent media across the Global South was dealt a devastating blow last year. Historically, the US government was the single largest funder of independent media worldwide, but when the Trump administration froze and effectively dismantled USAID in early 2025, that financial pipeline vanished almost overnight.

For smaller media organizations, the impact was immediate and catastrophic. Raghdan explains that legacy Western grant models actually left media houses uniquely vulnerable to this sudden political shift.

Beam Reports had to downsize and cut a critical project aimed at building a round-the-clock Sudan Fact Check Network. They survived by scrambling to diversify their revenue, but the crisis served as a brutal, global reality check: Independent journalism cannot rely on foreign state charity to survive.

Listen to the podcast to hear our entire conversation, and don’t forget to share this post and subscribe to Deadliners for weekly, deep-dive interviews on how the human craft of journalism survives, adapts, and thrives in an automated world.

More than four years later, she’s a Livingston Award finalist, has bylines in the Sunday Times, The Telegraph, Foreign Policy and the Daily Beast, and is living in Berlin, about to head back into Ukraine, and still finding the stories that nobody else is telling.

I wanted to talk to Anna because she represents something that I think gets overlooked in conversations about foreign correspondents — the freelancer who packs a bag and just decides to go, figures it out on the ground, and somehow builds a career out of sheer will and an ability to find the human story inside the chaos.

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On the economics of starting out

Anna was blunt about the early years in a way that a lot of journalists aren’t. She made almost nothing her first year. She was covering everything out of pocket. This isn’t unusual for young freelancers in conflict zones — but it’s rarely said this plainly.

What changed things, gradually, was building relationships with editors who would cover her costs. But she’s also clear that, in her experience, British media tends to have better frameworks for how to treat freelancers in the field. More resources, better guidelines, a more established culture of working with people on the ground who aren’t on staff.

On selling Ukraine right now

Since the conflict in Iran began, Anna says it’s become nearly impossible to sell Ukraine stories. She arrived in Kyiv in late February specifically to begin working with a TV agency covering the war — and on the day she landed, Iran dominated the news agenda. The agency still hasn’t had a single request from any of its clients about Ukraine.

This matters beyond the economics. Ukraine is still being bombarded. Massive drone and missile attacks are still happening. The human cost is still accumulating. It’s just not on the front page.

On going into the morgue

The story nominated for the Livingston Award is about the repatriation of Ukrainian soldiers’ bodies — the police investigators, the DNA matching, the families waiting years for news. To report it, Anna also spent time in a military morgue outside Kyiv.

She’d been trying to get access for three years. When she finally got in, she was given about an hour. She describes one body in particular — an older man, beard still intact, face badly damaged — that she says she thinks about most days.

What she also describes, and what I think is really important, is the delayed nature of the impact. In the moment, you’re focused on the job; you’re taking notes; you’re watching the forensic process. The weight of it doesn’t hit until later, sometimes weeks later, when you’re somewhere safer and your mind has space to process.

She was living in Kyiv full-time while reporting that story, experiencing drone attacks every week. .

On why she keeps going back

Anna is clear that she’s not the journalist racing to the front line to film explosions. She’s interested in what she thinks is the real story of war: not the ordnance and the hardware, but the human cost. The mother trapped in a frontline town because she has no money; the men sexually assaulted by Russian troops; the families waiting for the body of a soldier who died years ago.

On access — and the Hezbollah funeral

One of the more remarkable parts of our conversation is about her reporting from southern Lebanon in 2024, including attending the funeral of a Hezbollah soldier. As an American journalist, in a Hezbollah-controlled town, at a funeral where the crowd was chanting death to America.

She thinks being a woman helped — less visible, less threatening, easier to overlook. She was wearing a hijab. Nobody heard her speak.

She got in because her translator had local roots and knew who to approach. But she’s also honest that access in places like that requires a certain willingness to be somewhere you’re technically not supposed to be, and to trust that the story is worth the discomfort.

On the future

Anna wants to go to Sudan. She finds it genuinely upsetting that conflicts in sub-Saharan Africa receive so little coverage.

She’s also optimistic about the future of journalism. She’s not dismissing the pressures — the layoffs, the AI conversation, the editors who chase the news cycle and leave Ukraine behind. But she believes that people will eventually understand that social media and AI can’t replace real reporting from someone actually on the ground.

She might be right. And if she is, it’ll be in no small part because of people like her — who went anyway, figured it out, and kept filing.

Anna Conkling is an independent foreign correspondent based in Berlin. She reports for the Sunday Times, The Telegraph, Foreign Policy, the Daily Beast and Newsphere. She is a finalist for the 2025 Livingston Award. You can follow her work and support her directly via Noosphere.

Then came a detour to the Daily Express, a magazine launch, and eventually a phone call that changed everything. A contact tipped off a New York publisher about a young British editor with a European sensibility. Jack flew over, met Bob Guccione Jr. — founder of Spin, and son of the Penthouse founder — and found himself editing GEAR magazine in Manhattan.

As Jack explains in today’s Deadliners podcast, after New York burned him out, he quit his job with no savings, no car, no plan, and somehow ended up running a pool bar at one of the oldest seaside hotels in America in Cape May, New Jersey. He was a terrible bartender. But Cape May, with its Victorian gingerbread homes, lighthouse, whaling history, and beautiful beaches, got under his skin in a way Manhattan never had. When Jack found himself eating cereal with ants in it because he couldn’t afford to throw it away, he did the only thing he knew how to do: he launched a magazine.

Exit Zero started as a 24-page black-and-white newsprint rag. The magazine grew to 144 pages and helped transform Cape May from a quiet Jersey Shore town into something people drove hours to visit. The Garden State Parkway authority eventually put up a sign at the end of the highway that read Exit Zero — a tribute, they said, to what the magazine had done for the place.

Along the way Jack wrote or oversaw stories that got a mayor voted out of office and a city manager fired. He expanded his empire, opening (with zero experience in the food business) a curry restaurant. He expanded into a huge ferry terminal. He lost a lot of money. He got out. But he kept printing.

Now, two decades in, Jack is still publishing, still writing, and still convinced that print isn’t going anywhere — even as advertisers become more Instagram-obsessed. In our conversation, he reflects on what’s been lost since the Fleet Street days, why he thinks the New York Times has got the digital pivot right, and what it actually takes to build something lasting in a world that keeps telling you print is dead.

We start where all good reporting careers used to begin: at the local level. Olivia cut her teeth at the Waco Tribune-Herald, a paper over a century old, where she covered everything from stabbings to car accidents. She makes a compelling case for why these stories — and the sheer number of them cub reporters cover — are the most important part of a journalist’s education. In her view, it is far better to make your inevitable mistakes at a local paper than on a national platform, yet those local training grounds are disappearing faster than we can replace them.

Our conversation moves into the digital era and what she calls her “40,000 broken eggs” — the massive Twitter following she built and which she used to engage with readers, but which curdled when the platform shifted under Elon Musk.

We chat about the philosophy behind The Barbed Wire (some latest stories include the shuttering of gender and sexuality programs at Texas Tech University and how Texas college students are helping thousands of undocumented classmates.) Running a next-generation media property, Olivia and her team are navigating a hybrid funding model that rejects the traditional paywall. She argues that if the correct information is stuck behind a wall while misinformation remains free, we’re never going to win the ‘how to educate people’ war.

We also dive into the out-of-towner mistakes national reporters make when they parachute into Texas, often ignoring the fact that the state is the birthplace of many of the civil rights movements the rest of the country now takes for granted.

Finally, we address the looming shadow of AI. Olivia explains why investigative reporting — the kind of deep-dive journalism that may require a source to trust you with something off the record — is something a robot will never be able to replicate.

But there’s a flip side: AI could, she tells me, find those stories that have always been hiding in plain sight. For example, she thinks someone should build a tool that scrapes PACER, the federal government’s online database of US court records, and find all the lawsuits the rest of us are missing. The robots, it turns out, might have their uses after all.

Here’s an excerpt from our conversation:

Alex: You started out at the Waco Tribune-Herald. What did you cover?

Olivia: “Stabbings, shootings, car accidents, inclement weather. I was like the house fire expert. And then I covered a string of dumpster fires that never got solved. Literal ones. I’m so grateful now that I got to make all my mistakes at the local level, because you have to make a certain number of mistakes in this job. And it’s better if you’re not on a national platform when it happens.”

What advice would you give to someone graduating with a journalism degree today?

“The answer has kind of never changed. It’s just that it’s only gotten harder and more competitive. If you want to be a journalist, you have to do journalism. That was the best advice I got — it doesn’t really matter where or how. I had roommates who were like, I’m only ever going to do it in New York. And I was like, good luck. And when I moved to Waco a lot of people in my life said: why would you do that? The real advice now is … you have to make yourself indispensable. Be the first there and the last to leave, and care about getting your stories, and triple-check things even when you don’t have a copy editor, and make it so that no one can imagine the newsroom working without you.”

You built a huge Twitter following and then watched the platform change under Elon Musk. How did that feel?

“I feel like it’s talking about eggs I have in a basket that are all broken. I have 40,000 broken eggs. There is no longer the same water cooler experience. I did a thread the other day on Twitter in reaction to some news, just trying to talk about how sexual misconduct investigations work. And the mentions were not a place I would want to hang out. Bluesky has figured some things out. I like Bluesky a lot. But it’s not like you could have one live event where everybody’s in the same room anymore, which is a real bummer, because that was a lovely experience.”

How did The Barbed Wire come about?

“Texas is just the most news-rich place. We have this huge, diverse, young population who’s not really subscribing to daily newspapers, who are kind of getting their news from TikTok. We could just cover immigration stories, or we could just cover news for the five million Black Texans who don’t have their own news outlet serving their community, or two million queer Texans, or 12 million Latino Texans. We were trying to fill a hole and speak to young, news-avoidant populations. Somebody called us Texas Monthly’s younger, edgier sibling. That’s kind of the vibe I’d like to inhabit.”

What do people outside Texas get wrong about the state?

“The number of people in Texas who voted for Biden was higher than the number of people in New York who voted for Biden. Texas has such a large population — and that population includes almost the most immigrants of any state, almost the most Latinos of any state, almost the most Black people of any state, almost the most queer people of any state, almost the most trans people of any state. The idea that Texas is this hellscape that is unfavorable to various populations is of course true. And also the sheer number of progressives who are fighting the good fight — or just journalists who are trying to inform people — or reasonable moderates, is much higher than people give it credit for. A lot of civil rights movements had to start here because here’s where they needed them the most.”

What can AI never replace in journalism?

“Investigative reporting. It’s really hard to replace someone wanting to tell you a secret off the record.

Every parent of a teenager knows the feeling: watching your child hunched over a phone, thumb flicking upward, wondering, What on earth are they actually learning in there? But, it turns out, they’re actually remarkably engaged with the world.

They're not engaged via legacy media, though, so what does being engaged with the world via TikTok and Instagram mean for the future of news and for the journalists who produce it? To help me make sense of this, I spoke to Dr. Craig Robertson, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford.

In Craig’s recent paper, Understanding Young News Audiences at the Time of Rapid Change, he explores the “socialization” of news; the shift from the ritual of the morning paper to the chaotic, creator-led ecosystem of TikTok.

We discuss why the ‘inverted pyramid’ style of news writing that dinosaurs like me were taught in journalism school is a relic bygone era, and why an old guy in a suit behind a desk feels odd and untrustworthy to a new generation that has grown up online and on their phone.

We got into the weeds on a few things that might just be keeping you up at night:

* Why 51% of young people now pay more attention to individual creators than to established news brands.

* How “both-sidesism” on issues like climate and social justice is actively alienating the next generation of readers.

* A look at how young people are using LLMs to simplify and de-code reporting that seems impenetrable.

* Why Craig thinks newsrooms should consider killing their opinion sections entirely to salvage what’s left of their reputation for objective facts (and why he hates newspaper ‘live blogs’)

Like me, Craig is a glass-half-full guy, but his data is a wake-up call for anyone still trying to sell 1960s formats to a 2026 audience.

[Photo is of 1944 CBC newsroom, Montreal. Conrad Poirier / Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec and Wikimedia Canada]