“We have collective power”: Advice for journalists on covering the next Trump presidency

It’s a daunting job for journalists, especially those who are marginalized, to capture some small swath of this landscape in the face of a president who has historically been vehemently hostile toward the press — with a pattern of targeting female reporters.

To be clear, things are distinct from the start of Trump’s first presidency eight years ago.

The second Trump administration comes amid an ever-rising tide of authoritarianism, borne out by surveillance and police violence at Palestine solidarity protests, the rise of Cop Cities across the country, and growing mask bans. The specter of Project 2025 looms over Trump’s second term, threatening the dismantling of what little social safety net exists. The future president has already promised to begin deporting people as soon as he assumes office; anti-trans legislation is at an all-time high; climate change continues to progress rapidly; COVID continues to disable people en masse while public health institutions look the other way. 

Still, journalists The Objective spoke to — who have worked under the previous Trump administration — are urging the importance of community over defeatism, investing in coverage that fosters imagination around different systems of power, and developing skills around digital and physical safety.

“This is going to be tough,” Cayden Mak, publisher of Convergence Magazine, said. “I don’t think that pretending anything different is going to help anybody.” 

Amid fear and anxiety, Mak said it’s also crucial to remember that media workers have agency. 

“We can all make choices, and the choices that we make are very important. It’s always been important,” he said. “Now is the time to get organized and think about what structures are going to serve us and keep us afloat.”

Journalism isn’t a zero-sum game 

Jaisal Noor, a Baltimore-based journalist and media trainer working with newsrooms across the country, urged collaboration across independent media organizations, especially for younger journalists and journalists of color who may be the only ones in their newsroom.

“We have so much collective power, and that’s where our power really lies,” he said. “We’re building on the work of so many other people.”

Jen Byers has been a reporter for over a decade — including at Al Jazeera during the last Trump administration. Byers said it’s crucial now, more than ever, for journalists to work with each other. 

“Knowledge is power,” they said. “When you’re in a situation where you feel disempowered, you can learn more. If you can connect with more people, you can grow your network, you can grow the way you think about the world, you can reflect on history, and that can help you feel stronger in these moments.”

Journalists can strategize about what’s next by organizing together, says Mak. He helped co-found the Movement Media Alliance, 17 publishers committed to creating movement journalism together instead of competing. 

“[Organizing is] also about, ‘How are we part of a broader community and how do we look out for each other?’” he said. 

Emily Nonko, who founded the nonprofit collective Empowerment Avenue, said journalists should invest more time in working with and getting to know incarcerated journalists. 

They have “challenged the crime-and-punishment myths that politicians rely so heavily on … built sourcing and community networks under highly oppressive conditions … built readerships who increasingly question our dependence on our criminal-punishment system … [and] they’ve disrupted a mostly white, privileged media landscape,” she said. 

Proactively imagine and critique different forms of power 

Electoral politics has often been framed by mainstream media as the primary way in which people can change the world around them. 

While Jersey Bee executive editor Simon Galperin acknowledges it as one of the marquee forms that civic action occurs in the U.S., he says news organizations would do well to be more inquisitive in their coverage of existing systems of power. 

“I think journalism has an America-first problem, where they [journalists] perceive the institutions of the state, all the way down to the local level …  as infallible, as somehow on high ground with moral standing,” he said. “They don’t question the electoral college and their day-to-day coverage. They don’t question the anti-democratic nature of the Senate or the Supreme Court.”

Instead, he said, it’s worth “proactively imagining different forms of power.”

Nonko with Empowerment Avenue echoed this. She says she’d like to see “less fear around reporting on oppressive power structures which have sophisticated press machines.” 

And the news media can also move beyond collapsing specific stories that just impact one population, Nonko said. For example, incarcerated journalists reporting on topics like censorship and women’s rights are not just “prison stories,” but stories that impact the entire country. 

Galperin says that can also look like acknowledging the agency that residents have in knowing what solutions work best for their respective communities, especially locally. 

“For me … it’s not enough to observe and report,” he said. “What are the resources we are providing? How is your journalism bridging gaps for people to help them get to the next place? How is your journalism a service instead of just a recap of political football?”

Researchers behind a Reuters Institute study published last year spoke with Black and rural audiences in the U.S. to better understand attitudes around news media. They heard that “grievances around deficient or harmful coverage often co-existed with perceptions of the news media as enmeshed with broader power structures that actively marginalised people like them.”  

That echoes concerns going back even further. The 1968 Kerner Commission report, which chronicled the reasons for widespread Black protest around the country, found “gross flaws in presenting news” of the 1967 protests. The report’s authors say the press “repeatedly, if unconsciously, reflects the biases, the paternalism, the indifference of white America.”

Decades later, the cracks in the so-called racial reckoning in news media from 2020 are emerging as the alarm is sounded on the lack of trust in mainstream news. 

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Related: After 2020, Black-led newsrooms ask: Where is the support?

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So movement journalist Jen Byers says it’s crucial now that journalists examine the history of journalism at large and how that affects their reporting. 

“We can, as a field, really look at all of the ways that we fail people — look at the long history of racial bias in the news, the long history of anti-Indigenous bias in the news, the long history of warmongering in the news, the long history of platforming hate in the news under the guise of neutrality,” Byers said. 

Skill up with others 

Along with reporting on movements for over a decade, Byers has also worked to build the Aegis Safety Alliance. The collective is run by people of marginalized genders who provide holistic, trauma-informed, identity-centered safety training for journalists, documentarians, and media-makers.

As someone who reported for Al Jazeera during the first Trump administration and has been at countless protests with the possibility of violence, they recommend journalists also brush up on safety training for covering events where people may be hostile towards the press.

“If I’m going to a place where I know that they beat up the press, I’m more likely to try to blend in like a regular civilian and have my smartphone instead of my long lens,” Byers said. Otherwise,  they’ll typically also bring an individual first aid kit, a respirator, a bulletproof vest, cameras to help document the event from a safe distance, and a helmet in those cases.

Beyond physical safety, Mak suggests media workers also build solidarity and community security by learning from non-media worker organizing efforts. 

“We don’t all need to be doing the same thing,” he said. “But the thing that we choose to do, any one of us or any group of us, needs to be considered: How do you respond to this? What are the things that matter to us? What are the non-negotiables?”

Trainer and reporter Noor said education around the history of rights — from the freedom of press to workers’ rights and environmental protections — in the U.S. is similarly important as those rights face heightened risks. 

“Understanding struggle and that nothing was given to us, all those things were fought for … those are the kinds of frameworks and stories that are going to be more important than ever,” he said.

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Related: White supremacy isn’t new, and newsrooms shouldn’t cover it like it is

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Mak said journalism doesn’t have to look the same as it did during the first Trump administration, where reporters “breathlessly” covered each new thing that unfolded. 

“It is the case that these authoritarians need to not be able to do what they’re doing with impunity, and the first step of that is making sure there is an archive, there is a record for the public to know what they’re up to,” Mak said. “I also think it [this archiving] can be very disheartening.” 

Trump also succeeded this election cycle in part by telling the story of the way he thinks the world should be, Mak added. But that also offers media workers a different role to play. 

“We can provide comfort and clarity to people in many moments to come when there’s going to be a lot of chaos, of pain,” he said. “There’s work that we can do as media workers to offer an alternative positive vision of how the world could work and what could be.” 

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Here are some resources these journalists recommended:

On organizing and community:

• The National Writers Union’s Freelance Solidarity Project and the International Workers of the World’s Freelance Journalists Union can provide a starting point for collective organizing for freelance journalists.
• Noor cites the Journalists of Color Slack as a place for other journalists of color to get to know others in the industry. 
• The Press in Prison guidebook offers a guide to inside-outside co-reporting and more resources for working with incarcerated journalists. 

On framing and history: 

• Nonko with Empowerment Avenue recommended journalists listen to movement journalist and organizer Lewis Raven Wallace’s podcast, The View from Somewhere, to help break down the idea of the “neutral journalist.” (Disclosure: Wallace is part of The Objective’s advisory board.) 
• Noor suggests looking at the Solutions Journalism Network story tracker for similar examples of stories covering communities’ power in determining solutions for themselves. 

On training: 

• Byers’ Aegis Safety Alliance offers holistic, trauma-informed, identity-centered safety training for journalists, documentarians, and media-makers.
• The International Women’s Media Foundation dedicates much of its resources toward journalist and newsroom safety for women and nonbinary journalists. 
• The Committee to Protect Journalists has assembled a list of resources for pre-assignment safety preparation.

For digital safety concerns, the Freedom of the Press Foundation offers digital security trainings for journalists and tracks press freedom incidents in the U.S.

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This story was edited by Gabe Schneider. Copy edits by Marlee Baldridge.

James Salanga is the co-director of The Objective and the podcast producer for The Sick Times.