Simon is a news nerd who started her career at a public radio station in Vermont, worked at The New York Times and, most recently, the Covid Tracking Project. OpenNews interviewed her for their Source blog as she leaves the industry and her insight is a perfect critique of one of the problems of the news business right now.

I don’t say this lightly, because craving the feeling of demonstrating I’d done the reading is precisely what led to my burnout, but I’ve seen far too many people in this industry encourage the pretense that a journalist’s job is simply to find “the experts” and report out “the facts.” Instead, I did my best work when I knew the source material well enough to fully engage with it and well enough to grapple with difficult questions about how best to approach what I learned.

One hope I have for the industry—especially for local news—is that newsroom management might provide reporters with the time it takes to build this kind of expertise.

The truth of a thing, not just the fact of it, is possibly the greatest challenge the news faces.