The year journalists abandon the press conference

2026 will be the year when journalists finally realize that being in the room is not where news happens.

Sure, à la Hamilton the musical, lots of back-room deals happen in quiet, private spaces of power — but journalists generally aren’t in those rooms. Instead, journalists go to press conferences and public meetings — and for more than a century, this has been the bread and butter way for beat journalists to report out a story.

But what if journalists actually don’t have to be “there”?

At first glance, the state of journalism and democracy in America looks pretty dour. The Trump administration’s old flex is back: denying journalists press credentials. At the local level, we’re deeply worried about communities that no longer have reporters at school board and city council meetings, and what that might mean for public accountability.

Journalists’ ability to depend on these reliable reporting routines has become increasingly precarious, thanks to the sorry state of our political culture and the news industry’s bottom line — but these news-gathering shortcuts have also become increasingly useless to journalists.

Let’s face it: As the recent controversies around Pentagon press credentials have revealed, good journalism — in fact, some of the best journalism — does not depend upon being spoon-fed officially sanctioned facts by comms staff, or stenographically covering school board meetings that have become staging grounds for political extremists to launch their careers (as I wrote about in my most recent book, Amplifying Extremism).

Journalists have adapted all sorts of newsroom practices to account for new technological, economic, and political realities. Ironically, some of the oldest conventions of what it looks like to do journalism have remained remarkably stable — journalists can justify their authoritative role as purveyors of public knowledge because they are in places where most of us cannot go.

But we’re thinking about place wrong: Beat journalism needs to de-locate itself from a dependency on the old, reliable places where news could be expected to happen.

It feels heretical for me to say this as someone who has spent much of the last 10 years arguing for the importance of place in journalism. But I’m not abandoning this claim, I’m just doubling down on the need for reinvention — new places rather than old ones.

At best, press conferences and public meetings produce perfunctory quotes for a story. At worst, politicians and other powerful (or aspirationally powerful) people can redirect press attention away from the task at hand to some flashy and ridiculous new controversy. (This isn’t just a presidential tactic — cue Elon Musk or Deion Sanders.)

What might journalists do instead? At the local level, artificial intelligence becomes the first best shortcut for journalists. Most public events are recorded in some way, or they can be now, and at scale, the raw fodder for the perfunctory story filler.

And until now, it’s been heresy for journalists to actually make good on their threat to ignore press conferences or refuse to directly quote powerful people, especially in national politics — and especially if that newsmaker is in the White House.

The reason the Pentagon’s press corps has been so effective at registering their complaints is that they have stuck together, and more importantly, national defense journalists develop their expertise in spite of the official line, not because of it.

These journalists are also producing some of the best national defense journalism in recent memory without being in the room (or the world’s second-largest office space) where it happens.

What seems like a moment of defeat and retrenchment for the free press is actually a golden opportunity for journalists to finally be free to challenge conventional norms about how to report and gather news.