Who's behind the news?
Who's behind the news?
Spotlighting our best articles and what's coming next
Hello Newsjunkies,
Peter Landau here, managing editor, with a look at some of the notable articles we’ve recently published and a preview of what’s to come.
As you are aware, there is an emerging digital resistance to the attacks from the Trump administration. Newsjunkie is your common ground for finding organizations committed to saving research, archival data, and free speech, and keeping up with developments.
Publisher Gordon Whiting is writing a book he describes as an inquiry into the nature of news and information. He will be serializing it on Newsjunkie, building on his ongoing “Newspapers and Civilization” column. Here’s a taste of what he has already published:
An American in Manila
[Note: Below is an excerpt from my piece about the long-running U.S. newspaper Stars and Stripes. Recently it suffered an attack on its editorial independence when the Pentagon, which funds it, made changes to "refocus its content away from woke distractions,” according to Public Affairs officer Sean Parnell. There was an outcry from the community, whose readership consists of consists of service members and their families, but so far the changes have stuck. On May 21, 2026, Senate Democrats mounted an effort to pass a bill restoring the paper's independence.—Gordon Whiting]
The moist heat of Luzon was bearable in the still of morning. Starting school at sunrise meant I got home in the early afternoon and had the rest of the sweltering day to relax. Hopping off the bus in front of our home at 34 Cambridge Circle, I rushed through the door, tossed my book bag onto a chair, and reached for the Stars and Stripes. Flopping onto the sofa, I would quickly turn to the ball scores, then devour the comics. Finally, I would skim the bold headlines shouting about the war. There was a lot going on in 1968.
I learned the habit of news reading by following the Stars and Stripes. This full-featured print journal became my pipeline to the greater world of culture, commerce, and conflict.
I followed the Dodgers: Don Drysdale pitched six consecutive shutouts that year. The weekly top ten songs occupied a little box next to Dear Abby’s personal advice columns—Wichita Lineman and Everyday People come to mind among endless 60s classics. I got caught up in the daily doings of the comics page: Maggie and Jiggs in Bringing Up Father, Oop and Ooola in Alley Oop, Blondie, Charlie Brown, Mandrake the Magician, The Katzenjammer Kids—all of them, even Mary Worth. I ventured into the business pages, studying the companies in the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Why? Curiosity, and maybe to prepare my eleven-year-old brain for a future of grand possibilities.
Cofounders Gordon Whiting and Andrew Blaisdell wrote President loses a battle in his war on libraries, a detailed autopsy of the Trump administration’s recent legal setback over library funding.
I spoke with Joe Sacco, the comics journalist famous for his books on the Palestinian struggle. He recently published The Once and Future Riot, a Rashomon-like account of the Hindu-Muslim riot in Uttar Pradesh in 2013. He’s also publishing Requiem in Gaza with journalist Chris Hedges this fall.
Staff reporter and Prairie Fire editor Morgan Kriesel spoke with Ari Lamstein, a data scientist who has created open-source software tools that are a boon for data journalists and researchers.
Morgan Kriesel has an interview with Rachel Santarsiero, the director of the National Security Archive’s Climate Change Transparency Project. The National Security Archive was founded in 1985 by journalists and scholars to check rising government secrecy. They are currently working on a chronology of disappearing data, which Newsjunkie will help compile. (Read Gordon Whiting’s first part of a two-part interview with Tom Blanton, director of the National Security Archive.)
The third installment of our ongoing poetry column, Journo Verse, where journalism and poetry meet, features Stephen Crane’s posthumously published poem “A newspaper is a collection of half-injustices.” Crane—author of The Red Badge of Courage and a war correspondent for the New York Journal, the New York World, and Blackwood's Magazine—turns a critical eye on the industry.
Be sure to stop by the Guide to Public Archives to explore entries on museums, government publication repositories, presidential libraries and much more. Our archive of the week for Memorial Day is the University of Victoria Digital Archives World War I Photographs.
That’s it for now. I’ve got to get back to work and crack the whip on those deadline-ignoring journalists. But please drop by and visit Newsjunkie—it’s a good place to get data and dirt on the many changes happening to our world.
Carry on, Newsjunkies,
Peter
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