The reasons I’m at The Dispatch

When I left sales and marketing for journalism more than 20 years ago, I had this idea that I might do it better than the professionals. 

Reporting the news—that takes skill, and over time I learned to love delivering scoops (more on that in a moment.) But news and information presented without proper context is incredibly vague at best and wildly misleading at worst. It was a big problem with the reporting that dominated local and national political coverage, and one that I thought I might be able to contribute to solving. And that was then. Today, in a digitized news machine driven by social media algorithms, the lack-of-context problem is worse than ever. 

But after years in that system, I have finally landed somewhere that encourages me to do what I can to address this nagging problem afflicting political news coverage: That place is The Dispatch. 

When Jonah and Steve founded The Dispatch a few years ago, I watched with interest as they sought to establish a media outlet dedicated not only to fact-based reporting and center-right political commentary, but an organization committed to providing context for all of that content, so that readers understood what to make of it, and if they so choose, what to do with it. When people ask me how I compare The Dispatch to other places I’ve worked, or other places I could work, this is my favorite thing to tell them. Which gets me to the other reason I’m here.