Here is what you need to know about me before I tell you what I think about AI: I studied IT and informatics in high school. I spent two and a half years in college studying computer science and electrical engineering. And then, mid-degree and mid-trajectory, I walked away from it.

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“A little bit of light dispels a lot of darkness.”

—Chabad.org

Somewhere along Federal Highway, between the nail salons and the bodegas, between the casinos and the synagogues, between the Publix with its Russian-language aisle and the park where men play chess on Saturday mornings, there are large, bright apartment buildings in which the old world has never quite ended. It turns out it never needed to.

Here, in Hallandale Beach and Hollywood, Florida, people are coexisting between a living room and a shared hallway, between a balcony sale and a folding table in a parking garage. The Soviet kollektivnost, the communal obligation, did not vanish when they crossed the ocean. It shape-shifted. It put on a price tag. And somewhere in the process of becoming American, it also became something almost ancient: a version of Jewish communal life that their grandparents, in the shtetlekh of Ukraine and Belarus, would have recognized immediately.

What they built here, in these Florida corridors, is not a relic. It is a living thing. It is, in fact, the future.

The Architecture of Belonging

To understand this community, one must understand what it escaped and what it carried. The kommunalka, the Soviet communal apartment, was not a choice. Families were assigned rooms in shared flats by state decree; strangers cooked on shared burners, bathed in shared tubs, raised children in rooms no larger than a generous closet. Privacy was a bourgeois concept. Everything belonged to the collective whether you liked the collective or not.

But underneath that imposed collectivism, something older persisted: the Jewish understanding that a person is not complete in isolation. The Hebrew concept of kehilla, community, is not a sentiment but a structure. It is the minyan, the ten people required for prayer, that makes certain acts of worship possible at all. It is the hevra kadisha, the burial society, organized not around grief but around obligation. It is tzedakah, often translated as charity, though it more precisely means justice, which frames giving not as generosity but as duty. These were not ideas the Soviet state could stamp out. They went underground. They survived in kitchens. They arrived in Florida intact.

The people who came to South Florida in the 1990s and 2000s, from Odessa, from Minsk, from Leningrad-becoming-St. Petersburg, from Kharkov and Dnipro and Kyiv, carried that architecture in their bodies. They knew how to share a wall. They knew how to negotiate a kitchen. They knew that survival was collective even when ideology was not. What they did not know, not at first, was capitalism. So they invented their own version: warm, chaotic, slightly irregular, deeply effective. And deeply, recognizably, Jewish.

The Economy of the Corridor

In Hallandale Beach, the buildings are not assigned. You choose your building, your floor, your proximity to the pool. But the old gravitational pull reasserts itself: the Odessans cluster by building, the Muscovites by block, the Georgians by synagogue. Within a year of moving in, a floor becomes a village. Within two years, the village has an economy.

These corridors are decorated with transaction: plastic folding tables bearing Tupperware containers of pickled herring, amber jars of homemade compote, hand-labeled bags of dried mushrooms from a cousin who still summers in the Catskills. A hand-written sign in Russian and English, taped to a cinder block wall, advertises alterations. Another announces reflexology. The hallway is a market. The stairwell smells of dill.

At the center of one such building stands Sofiya Berkman. Grey-streaked hair pulled back, earrings the size of small chandeliers, a voice that carries clean through two closed doors. Sofiya speaks of her life with a pragmatism that sounds almost like philosophy. She recounts her forty years: the music conservatory in Kharkov, the immigration in 1997, the years cleaning houses in Aventura before she discovered what she actually had to sell.

What she had was time, skill, and neighbors. She began by altering clothes for the women on her floor. Then a neighbor’s daughter asked if she could teach her daughter piano. Then someone else needed help writing a letter to the Social Security office, and Sofiya’s son, who had studied English at night school until he dreamed in it, became the building’s unofficial translator. Now the ground floor storage room is a sewing studio. The hallway outside apartment 7B is a weekly market. The pool deck on Sunday mornings resembles a trade fair, if the trade fair also involved three competing opinions on the correct way to make forshmak.

This is free-market communal living: the spatial logic of the kommunalka married to the entrepreneurial hunger of the immigrant and the ethical spine of Jewish tradition. Shared walls become shared opportunity. The hallway is no longer merely a passage from one private space to another. It is infrastructure, held together not by decree but by something much stronger.

The Hair Salon on the Second Floor

If the hallway is the market, the hair salon is the confessional.

On the second floor of one building, in what was originally a one-bedroom apartment, Roza has been cutting and coloring hair for fifteen years. There is no sign outside. There has never needed to be. Her waiting area holds four chairs, a low table stacked with Russian-language magazines, and a framed photograph of Tel Aviv at sunset that a client brought her from a trip and that she accepted with the understanding that it was also a payment for something owed.

Women come to Roza for their hair. They stay for everything else. The salon is where news actually travels in this community: not the news of screens and feeds, but the news that matters. Who is sick. Who needs help. Whose daughter just got engaged. Whose son is struggling. Who arrived last week from Odessa with two children and no winter coat, even though winter in Florida is barely winter at all, and still someone will bring a coat by Tuesday.

Roza does not repeat what she hears. This is understood. The salon operates on the same unspoken code as the confessional, the therapist’s office, the kitchen table at two in the morning: what is said here is held here. But the help that results from what is said here moves freely through the building, through the block, through the network of women who have known each other for twenty years and whose loyalty to one another was forged in the particular heat of people who arrived somewhere foreign and decided, together, to make it home.

There is a younger woman, Natasha, who comes every six weeks without fail. She is in her thirties, arrived from Kyiv in 2022, and speaks of her life with the careful precision of someone still deciding which parts are safe to say out loud. But in Roza’s chair, with the warm water and the familiar smell of the dye and the sound of Russian filling the room like something she had not realized she was missing, she talks. About her mother still in Kyiv. About the adjustment. About the particular loneliness of safety, which is a thing no one outside this room would quite understand.

Roza listens. She does not offer solutions. She offers the bowl of hard candies on the counter and the knowledge that next time, in six weeks, the chair will be there.

This too is infrastructure.

What the Shabbat Table Teaches

On Friday evenings, the buildings change. The smell of Matzo ball chicken soup moves from floor to floor like a tide. Doors that were closed all week open. Neighbors who passed each other with nods in the laundry room sit together at tables set with actual tablecloths, actual candlesticks, the good dishes brought from the old country wrapped in newspaper and carried by hand across the Atlantic.

Not everyone here is observant in the same way, or at all. The community spans the full spectrum, from those who keep strictly kosher to those for whom “Jewish” is more a cultural inheritance than a religious practice. But the Shabbat table has a way of gathering even the secular. It is not about theology. It is about the weekly insistence that there exists a time belonging to no one’s schedule, a table that belongs to everyone, a meal that cannot be rushed.

The blessing over the candles, said by the women of the house, is one of the few moments in Jewish ritual where the prayer is traditionally performed with eyes closed and hands covering the face, drawing the light inward before sharing it outward. The women of these buildings know this gesture. They learned it from their mothers and grandmothers in apartments where the state officially disapproved of religion, where the Shabbat candles were lit quietly, the curtains drawn, the Hebrew spoken low. That it survived is not a small thing. That it now fills a Florida corridor with golden light is, by any measure, a miracle.

The men make Kiddush over wine. The children, some of them already more fluent in English than Russian, repeat the blessing with the mixture of reverence and impatience that is the universal language of children at religious tables. The food is abundant. Abundance, in this tradition, is not ostentation. It is a theological statement: we were slaves, we were hungry, we were afraid. And now look. Now look at this table.

Memory as Inheritance

One afternoon, Sofiya was in a Publix on Hallandale Beach Boulevard when she had a feeling like she was being followed. She turned around. No one was there. She stood near the entrance for a while, just to be sure, and found herself thinking of a particular kitchen in Kharkov, the one on Ulitsa Mironosytska, where four families had shared a single four-burner stove and somehow managed not to kill each other for eleven years.

She went home and took out her photographs. Haunted by former neighbors, she traveled back through images that were yellow-tinged, slightly overexposed, full of faces that did not know they were being documented for the future.

Memory in this community is not nostalgia. It is operational. It is also, in the Jewish tradition, a form of obligation. The Hebrew word zachor, remember, appears in the Torah more than any other command. Remember that you were a stranger. Remember what was done to you. Remember who helped you. This is not sentimentality; it is ethics made structural. The women of these buildings remember which neighbor helped during an illness, who brought food after a surgery, who quietly covered a month’s electric bill and asked nothing about it later. This memory is the ledger of the community. It runs parallel to, and often supersedes, the official economy.

Sofiya came to the United States in 1997. She wore a dark blazer she’d had made in Kharkov, and she carried a jar of her mother’s cherry preserves and a photograph of the Black Sea. The America she encountered was louder than she’d expected and lonelier in ways the loudness could not mask. “In Kharkov,” she says, “even the strangers were not strangers. Here I had to build that from the beginning.”

She built it. They all built it. And the building, the literal building with its ten floors and sixty-four units and one elevator that is always slightly questionable, is the evidence.

The New Arrivals and the Chain of Transmission

Since 2022, new neighbors have come. Ukrainians, displaced by war, arriving with the exhaustion of people who left not for a better life but simply for a living one. The older residents, those who made the same journey thirty years earlier, recognized something in their faces. Not sameness, but kinship. The memory of emergency.

The building mobilized before any organization did. Sofiya’s son began translating for the new families within days of their arrival. Lena and Arkady on the third floor, who had themselves come from Dnipro in 2003 with almost nothing and built a small empire of pelmeni and infused spirits, began delivering food to the new units without being asked. The women on the fifth floor created a clothing exchange in the laundry room. No committee was formed. No one was asked to lead. It simply happened, the way things happen in communities that have internalized, over generations, the idea that a stranger’s need is a community’s responsibility.

This is what the Jewish Russian tradition carries at its center: not a single experience but a method. A way of organizing around obligation rather than convenience, around the long view rather than the immediate transaction. The gemilut hasadim, acts of loving-kindness, are understood in Jewish law as superior even to tzedakah, because they can be given to both the living and the dead, to both the rich and the poor, and they require not money but presence. The women of these buildings are masters of presence.

The older ones teach the younger ones: how to navigate the Florida DMV, how to negotiate with a landlord, how to find a doctor who speaks Russian and won’t dismiss your symptoms. How to make borscht from what’s in the refrigerator. How to light the Shabbat candles even in a strange apartment, even when you are not sure you believe in anything, because the light itself is not nothing.

Lena and Arkady: A Love Story in Two Kitchens

The most vivid enterprise in the building belongs to Lena and Arkady on the third floor, who arrived from Dnipro in 2003 with a container of furniture and a combined three hundred dollars. Arkady found work in construction. Lena found that she could make pelmeni faster than anyone she’d ever met, and that her neighbors, missing the particular texture of homemade dough, would pay for this.

She began selling pelmeni by the bag on Fridays. Then came the borscht, sold by the quart. Then Arkady, who had a gift for flavored vodka apparently passed down through genetics, began producing small batches of infused spirits for building events, horseradish, black currant, dill, that are not technically for sale but are always exchanged for something of equivalent value.

Their kitchen is a factory. Their living room doubles as cold storage on delivery days. Their balcony, which faces east and catches the morning light, is where Lena drinks her tea and does the informal accounting she keeps in a green notebook that no one else is allowed to touch.

They have not moved in twenty years. “Why would we?” Lena says. “Everything we need is here.” She means the building. She means her customers, her neighbors, her supply chain of women who grow herbs in gardens in Miramar. She means the infrastructure of trust that took twenty years to build and cannot be relocated.

But she also means something else, something she says with a small smile and a gesture toward the building’s bulletin board, where her Friday pelmeni notice shares space with an announcement for Shabbat services at the Chabad two blocks away, a flyer for a Russian-language Purim celebration, a reminder about the annual building Hanukkah party that has grown, over fifteen years, from a single folding table in the lobby to a catered event that requires a permit and ends with someone inevitably singing Bulbes, the old Yiddish song about potatoes, which everyone pretends not to know and then everyone knows all the words to.

“We came here with nothing,” Lena says. “But we came here together. That is not nothing.”

A Corridor Full of Light

Sofiya still stares at the nesting dolls she brought from Kharkov. Pressing them together is still, she says, a little like falling. But she means it as a good thing now: the way each smaller self is held inside the larger one, the way the outermost figure contains all the others. She applies her lipstick carefully before walking out of her apartment, because the hallway is public space and public space requires a presentation of self.

At the end of the long, bright corridor, past the community bulletin board with its layered advertisements, manicure, Hebrew tutoring, a used treadmill, someone’s mother’s pirozhki fresh Thursdays, a Torah study class on Sunday mornings for those who never learned and those who once knew and want to find it again, is the elevator. It opens onto a lobby that smells of coffee and something someone is already cooking for tomorrow.

She picks up the building’s house phone, still there, still working, a relic that no one has removed because someone’s grandmother still uses it, and dials an upstairs neighbor. “Mashenka?” she says. In Russian, the suffix carries everything: affection, history, the specific warmth of people who have survived something together and are, against all probability, still here. Still building. Still feeding each other. Still lighting candles on Friday night and breaking bread and arguing about politics and selling each other pelmeni and teaching each other’s children and sitting together, at last, in the particular peace of people who have found their place in the world and know, now, that they made it themselves.

Her apartment’s second bedroom, nine square meters, high ceiling, three windows facing east, is her studio. It holds a sewing machine, bolts of fabric, a dress form wearing someone else’s wedding alterations. It is a waiting space, but it is not empty. It is full of what comes next.

Outside, the Florida sun does what it always does: it flattens and illuminates everything equally. But inside these buildings, in these corridors, in these rooms that were never meant to be workshops or restaurants or studios or sanctuaries, there is a light that comes from somewhere harder to name. It is the light of people who did not wait for the world to provide a structure and so built one themselves, out of dough and thread and memory and the very human, very Jewish, very Russian, entirely irreducible refusal to live alone.

The kommunalka did not follow them here. They carried it. And then, slowly, joyfully, stubbornly, they made it into something the old world never quite managed to be: a community chosen freely, sustained by love, and open to whoever arrives next.

I. The Numbers Spinning

There is a particular kind of conversation that starts with nothing and ends with everything.

I was at a Shell gas station, watching the numbers spin on the pump like a slot machine I never agreed to play, when the guy at the next island looked over and just said it, the way strangers only do when the price is bad enough to break the social contract of silence.

“Man. You believe this?”

I shook my head. I didn’t need to say anything. The numbers were saying it for both of us.

He was maybe fifty, work boots, a truck with a magnetic decal for some kind of contracting company on the door. The kind of guy who drives forty, fifty miles a day just to do his job. For him this wasn’t an annoyance. It was a monthly budget crisis, arriving in four-minute increments every few days.

“Government doesn’t care,” he said. “They’re all making money off this somehow. Every single one of them. And the war? It’s all a distraction.”

And here’s the thing. I didn’t argue with him. Not because I agreed with every implication, but because underneath the frustration there was something true and worth sitting with. There is a pattern. There is a recurring structure to how power operates when it stops being accountable to the people it claims to serve.

I’d been thinking about it for a while. Reading about it. Turning it over. And standing there watching $34 become $35 become $39.99, today $4.19… something clicked into focus.

* * *

II. The Same Movie in Different Costumes

I’d been down a rabbit hole for weeks, the kind you fall into when current events stop making sense and you go looking for a longer frame. Iran. Venezuela. Cuba. Russia. Not because I have some academic obsession with failing states, but because I kept noticing the same movie playing in different costumes.

Every one of these places started with a genuine grievance. Real suffering. Real corruption that needed overthrowing. The Shah really was brutal. Batista really was a gangster propped up by American casino money. The Venezuelan oligarchy really did ignore the poor for generations. The revolutions drew their energy from something true.

But then, and this is the part that kept snagging my attention, the people who took power made a choice. Actually, they made it over and over again, every day, for decades. And the choice was always the same: us first.

Chávez stood in front of millions of poor Venezuelans and wept for them on television, genuinely, I think, at first, while the machinery of his government was systematically looting the national oil company of hundreds of billions of dollars. His daughter ended up one of the wealthiest people in the country. The generals got their cut through narco-trafficking routes. The true believers got the speeches. The insiders got the money.

The Iranian Revolutionary Guards, the IRGC, control somewhere around a third of the entire Iranian economy. A third. A revolutionary military organization founded to protect an Islamic utopia now runs construction companies, telecommunications firms, import monopolies. The ideology still flies from every flagpole. The theology still broadcasts from every state channel. But underneath it, the structure is just extraction. The mullahs and the generals have built a private economy on top of the public one, and the public one, the one ordinary Iranians live in, has a currency that has lost more than ninety percent of its value in a decade.

Cuba is almost poignant in its smallness. There’s not that much to steal in a poor Caribbean island. But the structure is identical. A revolutionary family and its allies maintaining power and privilege while the population endures blackouts lasting twenty hours, food lines, and a brain drain so severe that over half a million people left in just the past few years.

Russia just runs the whole program at the scale of a continent. The oligarchs who emerged from the Soviet collapse didn’t come from nowhere. They were the people already closest to state power, who understood that the moment the old system cracked, the assets had to be grabbed fast. Putin didn’t dismantle that system. He organized it. He runs it.

* * *

III. The R-Word

While I was standing at that pump, Europeans were doing the same thing. Except worse. In Germany, in the Netherlands, in France and Italy, the prices went even higher. We were complaining about crossing four dollars a gallon. They were looking at the equivalent of eight, nine, ten dollars depending on the week and the country.

And then their governments, these modern, sophisticated, democratic, Western European governments, started telling people to ration.

Drive less. Turn the thermostat down. Take shorter showers. The German government was asking people to not heat certain rooms in their houses. Public buildings dimmed their lights. Monuments went dark. Emmanuel Macron stood up in France and announced, with a straight face, that the era of abundance was over and everyone needed to adjust their consumption.

There it is. There’s that word.

Ration.

It is a word with a history. And the history is not warm and comfortable. It lives in the same conceptual neighborhood as allocation, quota, collective obligation, state-directed consumption. When a government tells you how much of a resource you’re permitted to use, that is, in a technical, structural sense, a form of command economy behavior.

But here is where it gets complicated. And this is the part that separates a genuine political insight from a bumper sticker.

Europe’s rationing didn’t come from ideology. It came from dependency.

For decades, and this is a genuine strategic failure of almost comic proportions, Western Europe, led by Germany, made a deliberate choice to deepen its dependence on Russian natural gas. Gerhard Schröder, the former German Chancellor who negotiated and championed Nord Stream, went directly from that job onto the board of Gazprom, the Russian state energy company. He was, in a very literal sense, a Western democratic leader who enriched himself through the exact same mechanism we were talking about. Ideology as decoration, personal benefit as the real engine.

Then Putin invaded Ukraine. And suddenly Germany found itself in the position of a household that had let one supplier control every pipe coming into the house, and that supplier had just lost their mind.

The rationing wasn’t communism. It was the hangover from a catastrophically bad dependency decision, made over decades, enabled by corruption and short-term thinking at the highest levels of European governance.

But the word lands with such force in the American ear, and increasingly the European ear, because there is a deep and accurate cultural memory that rationing is what they do. The Soviets rationed. Cuba rations to this day. The libreta, the ration booklet, is a foundational institution of Cuban daily life. Cubans line up with their state-issued booklet to collect their monthly allocation of rice, beans, sugar, cooking oil. It is the physical manifestation of a system that has decided the state knows better than the market how much you need and what you deserve.

Every one of the countries we’ve been discussing did the same thing. Name the suffering. Celebrate the coping. Never address the cause.

* * *

IV. The Charcoal Cadillac

Cuba, the island that froze itself in 1959, that kept its American cars running through sixty years of embargo through sheer mechanical ingenuity and desperation, that became internationally famous for its rolling museum of chrome-finned Chevrolets and Buicks maintained with coat hangers and prayers, Cuba is now converting those cars to run on charcoal.

Not gasoline. Not even the adulterated, low-grade Soviet fuel they were getting in the eighties. Charcoal. Wood. Burned in a gasifier bolted onto the engine, producing a combustible gas that can, technically, barely, at reduced power, at walking pace, move a vehicle down a road.

It is a technology from the 1930s. It was used in Europe during World War II when supply lines were cut and people had no other option. It was a wartime desperation measure in countries under literal military blockade and bombing campaigns.

Cuba is doing it in peacetime. Because the system has failed so completely that there is no other option.

Think about what had to go wrong, in sequence, for this to be the answer.

First, the Cuban economy had to fail to develop any domestic energy production of significance, despite sitting in a region with oil deposits, despite sixty years to figure it out, despite billions in Soviet and then Venezuelan subsidies that could have been invested in infrastructure. That’s the first layer: the ideological distortion of investment, where political reliability matters more than technical competence.

Then the foreign subsidy pipeline had to run dry. The Soviets collapsed. The Venezuelans, looted by their own revolutionary elite until the infrastructure that produced the oil that funded the subsidies that kept Cuba’s lights on simply stopped functioning. Cuba had built its entire survival strategy around other people’s revolutions staying solvent. When they didn’t, there was nothing underneath.

Then the state had to be too ideologically rigid, too economically incompetent, too paranoid about market mechanisms to allow the private sector to fill any of the gaps. Because a functioning private fuel distribution network would mean Cubans making money independently of the state. And Cubans making money independently of the state means Cubans with leverage. With options. With the material basis for dissent. The regime would rather have everyone on charcoal than have anyone financially independent.

There is a Cuban phrase that gets at this. Resolver, to resolve, to figure it out, to make something from nothing. The charcoal gasifier is, in a narrow technical sense, impressive. Three generations of mechanical knowledge applied to an impossible problem. But resolver is also the regime’s most useful ideological achievement. It turned the failure of the state to provide into a virtue of the population to endure. It reframed scarcity as resilience. It made suffering into identity.

The charcoal car is resolver made visible. It is a sixty-year-old American automobile, a technology frozen in amber by a revolution that promised the future, now burning wood to move at fifteen miles an hour through streets where the buildings are crumbling and the lights go out for twenty hours a day.

Meanwhile, the elite have fuel allocations. They have access to the hard currency economy that exists in parallel to the one everybody else lives in.

The ration is for the people. The abundance is for the party.

The charcoal is for you. The gasoline is for them.

* * *

V. Of Oil and Dostoevsky

There is a particular kind of educated despair that comes from reading too much and watching too little change.

You know the type. Maybe you are the type. The person who has read Dostoevsky, really read him, not just Crime and Punishment in a sophomore lit class but the full descent, the Brothers Karamazov, the Idiot, the Possessed, and come away understanding something profound and terrible about human nature. About how people contain within themselves the full architecture of their own destruction.

About how Raskolnikov doesn’t kill the pawnbroker because he’s evil but because he has constructed an ideology so internally coherent, so sealed against outside light, that murder becomes logical inside it. About how the Grand Inquisitor doesn’t threaten Christ out of malice but out of a genuine, deeply felt conviction that people cannot handle freedom. That they will trade it, gratefully, for bread. Every time. Given the choice between the terrifying openness of liberty and the warm imprisonment of certainty and provision, the crowd will choose the prison and call it paradise.

Dostoevsky saw all of this in the nineteenth century. Saw it with the precision of a surgeon and the anguish of a believer. Wrote it down in prose so alive it still has a pulse.

And it changed nothing.

That’s the thing nobody tells you when you’re young and serious and filling your head with the great books. The diagnosis is not the cure. Understanding a disease with magnificent clarity does not make the patient well.

The man at the gas pump wasn’t quoting Dostoevsky. He hadn’t read about the IRGC’s stranglehold on the Iranian economy or the bolibburguesía of Venezuela or the charcoal cars of Havana. He had none of the theoretical scaffolding.

And he was still right.

Not right in every specific implication, but right in the way that a body is right when it registers pain before the mind has named the injury. Something is wrong. Power is not accountable. The people who make decisions are insulated from their consequences. The system tends to protect itself at the expense of the people inside it.

He felt it at a gas pump in South Florida. Dostoevsky felt it in a Siberian prison camp after a Tsar had him arrested for reading socialist literature at a meeting. They are separated by a hundred and seventy years, an ocean, and every conceivable difference of context and education and vocabulary.

They are pointing at the same thing.

* * *

VI. Zan. Zendegi. Azadi.

I think about the women.

Specifically I think about a girl, she could be seventeen, she could be twenty-two, who grew up inside the Islamic Republic. Who never knew anything else. Who was taught from childhood that the hijab was not oppression but protection. That the West was not freedom but corruption. That the Supreme Leader was not a politician but a conduit for divine guidance.

And who one day, maybe gradually, maybe suddenly, the way Hemingway said you go bankrupt, slowly and then all at once, stopped believing any of it.

Not because someone handed her a pamphlet. Not because she read Montesquieu. But because she could see. Because the electricity went out again. Because her brother couldn’t find work despite his engineering degree. Because she watched a woman get beaten by the morality police for a strand of hair and felt something in her chest that no amount of state theology could reframe as acceptable. Because she had a phone and the phone had a signal and the signal had the world on it and the world did not look like what she had been told.

Mahsa Amini was twenty-two years old. She was visiting Tehran from a Kurdish city in the northwest. She was arrested by the Guidance Patrol, the morality police, for allegedly wearing her hijab improperly. She died in their custody in September 2022.

And something that had been accumulating for decades, layer by layer, exactly like the ruin we’ve been describing, came to the surface all at once.

Zan. Zendegi. Azadi.

Woman. Life. Freedom.

Three words. No manifesto. No ideology. No vanguard party with a theorized program for the restructuring of society. Just three words that said: we are human, we are alive, we will not ask your permission to be free.

They were met with live ammunition.

* * *

VII. What Dostoevsky Cannot Do

This is where Dostoevsky becomes both indispensable and insufficient.

Indispensable because he understood, better than almost any writer who has ever lived, that the human soul is not a political problem. That you cannot fix what is broken in the relationship between power and conscience by rearranging the institutions. That the Grand Inquisitor is not a historical character but a permanent temptation, available in every century, speaking the same language: give me your freedom and I will give you bread and certainty and the comfort of not having to choose.

Insufficient because understanding this, really understanding it, holding it in your mind with full clarity, does not automatically produce the will to act. Knowledge without urgency is just melancholy. And there is a particular bourgeois melancholy that dresses itself in literary seriousness, that reads Dostoevsky and Camus and Solzhenitsyn and comes away feeling that it has discharged some moral obligation through the act of understanding. That the tragedy is noted, the insight is achieved, and now perhaps a glass of wine.

The girls in Tehran were not melancholy. They were burning.

Alyosha Karamazov is not smarter than his brother Ivan. Ivan has the better arguments. Ivan’s rebellion is philosophically airtight, logically devastating. But Alyosha has something Ivan doesn’t. He has the capacity to act on what he knows. To take the knowledge and let it move him toward someone else rather than curling around it like a wound.

That’s the gap. That’s the gap between reading all the Dostoevsky in the world and actually waking up.

Information is not activation. Understanding is not courage. The diagnosis is not the cure.

* * *

VIII. The Choice

The man at the gas pump was awake in the way that pain wakes you. Nerve-level, gut-level, this-is-wrong-level awake. That kind of waking matters. It is the beginning of something. But pain without direction is just suffering. And suffering without solidarity is just isolation. And isolation is exactly what every system we’ve been talking about depends on to survive.

They depend on you being awake enough to be miserable but not awake enough to connect. Awake enough to distrust your neighbor but not awake enough to recognize the man three rungs up who designed the distrust. Awake enough to be angry at the price of gas but not awake enough to trace the line from that pump to Schröder’s Gazprom board seat to Putin’s war to the rationing notices in Berlin to the charcoal cars of Havana.

The system does not fear your anger. It has been managing anger for centuries. What it fears, what every closed system, every entrenched elite, every Grand Inquisitor in every century has feared, is the moment when enough people get awake in the same direction at the same time.

Zan. Zendegi. Azadi.

Three words. No theory required.

* * *

Coda: Before the Gasifier

The charcoal is real. The ration booklet is real. The girl who died for a strand of hair is real. The contractor at the pump doing math that comes out wrong is real. The oligarch on the board of the foreign state energy company is real. The revolutionary guard running the import monopoly is real. The fifty-year-old Buick running on burning wood is real.

And this is real too.

On December 28, 2025, shopkeepers in Tehran’s Grand Bazaar shuttered their shops and walked into the street. The rial had lost half its value in a year. Food prices were up seventy percent. The protests spread to more than two hundred cities. Students at Shahid Beheshti University put out a statement. Not a manifesto. Not a program. Just this: this criminal system has taken our future hostage for 47 years. It won’t be changed with reform or with false promises.

The regime’s response was to deploy security forces onto rooftops, positioning snipers above mosques and police stations, firing at protesters and frequently targeting heads and torsos. On January 8 and 9 alone, the death toll rose into the thousands. Khamenei went into a bunker. From hiding, he called the dead rioters and terrorists. On January 8, the regime cut all internet access to conceal what was happening.

Iran’s president proposed a budget that increased security spending by nearly 150 percent while offering wage increases amounting to only about two-fifths of the rate of inflation. More guns. Less bread. The math of every regime we have discussed, expressed in a single line item.

Women’s bodies were returned to their families with missing organs, the wounds of torture hidden before burial. The internet was off. The world was not supposed to see.

And yet here it is. Recorded. Known.

Leonard Pitts Jr., interviewed in News Without a Newsroom, put it plainly: history is not designed to make you feel good or bad, or comfortable. It’s the record of our truth. Period.

Not our aspirations. Not our preferred version. Our truth. The bodies at the Kahrizak morgue are the truth. The charcoal car is the truth. The ration booklet is the truth. The budget line for bullets, a hundred and fifty percent larger than the line for wages, is the truth. Khamenei in his bunker calling the dead terrorists is the truth. The fifty-year-old Buick is the truth. The gasifier bolted to the engine of a revolution that promised the future is the truth.

And Dostoevsky is true too, more true in some ways than any of it, because he mapped the interior of the thing. The human thing. The part that decides.

But he cannot decide for you.

Nobody can.

You can read every word he wrote. You can understand the Grand Inquisitor’s argument so well you could deliver it yourself. You can trace every layer of every ruin, Iran, Russia, Cuba, Venezuela, the gas stations of Europe, the charcoal of Havana, and hold it all in your mind simultaneously, this whole long pattern of what happens when power stops being accountable and starts being permanent.

And then you have to do something with it.

Or you don’t.

And that choice, that one, quiet, daily, renewable choice, is the only thing that has ever made any difference.

The largest uprising in Iran since the revolution itself happened three months ago. It is still happening in the bones of everyone who survived it and in the silence of everyone who didn’t. The regime is still in place. The gasifier is still running. The ration booklet is still the deal.

Wake up.

Not to the right ideology. Not to the correct theoretical framework. Not to the perfectly articulated program.

Just, wake up.

Before the gasifier is the only option left.

Before the ration booklet is just how things are.

Before the budget line for bullets is a hundred and fifty percent larger than the line for wages and nobody finds that remarkable anymore.

Before the revolution is forty-seven years old and the only thing left of the promise is a Supreme Leader hiding underground, calling the dead terrorists, and a teenager’s body returned to her family with pieces missing.

This is the record of our truth.

Wake up while there is still something to wake up for.

———

———

I want you to picture something.

It’s 1940. London is burning. A man sits in front of a microphone in a bombed-out city and tells America the truth about what’s happening across the Atlantic, in real time, while his government would rather everyone just looked away. His name is Edward R. Murrow. His network is CBS. And what he builds in that moment, a direct line between a journalist and a citizen, no filter, no spin, no corporate interference, becomes the gold standard for everything American journalism is supposed to be.

Yesterday, that line got cut.

CBS News announced Friday that CBS News Radio is shutting down after nearly 100 years of broadcasting. Every single job on the radio team is being eliminated. Around 700 affiliated stations across the country will go dark. CBS News

And the people who made this decision? They issued a memo. Tidy. Bloodless. Done.

Let’s Call This What It Is

Bari Weiss and Tom Cibrowski told staff it was about “challenging economic realities” and a shift in programming strategies. Deadline

Sure. And Nero just really liked music.

Weiss arrived at CBS after Paramount Skydance bought her publication The Free Press for a reported $150 million. Variety She walked into one of the most storied newsrooms in American history with a mandate to blow it up and rebuild it for the algorithm age. And now, a few months in, the longest-running newscast in the country is gone.

CBS had already been quietly bleeding out, cutting its Weekend Roundup and World News Roundup Late Edition late last year just to try to stay alive. It wasn’t enough. NPR

This isn’t a pivot. It isn’t a rebrand. It’s a demolition.

What They Actually Destroyed

I need you to understand the scale of what just disappeared.

CBS News Radio dates back to September 27, 1927. It was the foundation that the entire CBS empire was built on, the second national radio network ever to hit the airwaves. Radio World Before the CBS Evening News. Before 60 Minutes. Before any of it. There was a microphone, a signal, and a commitment to telling people what was happening in the world.

Murrow’s first words ever heard on air came through CBS News Radio, broadcasting Germany’s invasion of Austria in 1938. NPR Millions of Americans heard the war coming before their government admitted it was real. That’s what this institution was built on. Not clicks. Not engagement metrics. Not monthly active users. The truth, delivered without apology.

The “World News Roundup” is the longest-running newscast in American history. CBS News Was. I keep correcting myself.

The People Who Know Are Devastated

Dan Rather is 94 years old. He has seen everything. His response to this news was seven words: “It’s another piece of America that is gone.” NPR

Seven words from a man who has never been short of them. That silence says everything.

Michael Harrison, who has spent his career studying the radio industry, put it this way: “This is another part of the landscape that has fallen off into the sea.” NPR

Fallen off into the sea. I’ve been sitting with that image since I read it. Not an explosion. Not a fight. Just erosion. Just the slow, quiet collapse of something that took a century to build, because the people holding the deed decided it wasn’t profitable enough to keep standing.

SAG-AFTRA said they were appalled. The Writers Guild called it inept leadership and said the people responsible should not be allowed anywhere near CNN or any other major news outlet. Radio World

They’re right. And they’re also, I suspect, screaming into a void.

Here’s the Part Where I Get Personal

I started this newsletter because I looked at what was happening to journalism and through the lens of “News Without a Newsroom,” I felt the need to tell this story.

Not sad. Necessary.

Because the death of places like CBS News Radio doesn’t just mean fewer journalists with jobs. It means fewer people whose entire purpose is to find out what’s actually happening and tell you, without fear, without a billionaire owner’s agenda shaping every sentence, without an algorithm deciding whether the truth is engaging enough to surface.

The big institutions are gone or going. The ones that remain are being bought, hollowed out, and rebranded as content platforms. And in that vacuum, two things are growing. Propaganda from people with money and an agenda. And independent voices from people with nothing to sell but the truth.

That’s the war. That’s the actual war. Not Republicans versus Democrats. Not mainstream versus alternative. It’s people who want you informed versus people who profit from you being confused.

I know which side I’m on.

Seven hundred stations are now scrambling to find a replacement for CBS News Radio. CBS News Most of them will fill that slot with something cheaper, louder, and less true. That’s how this goes. The vacuum doesn’t stay empty. It fills with whatever is cheapest to produce.

Unless people like you decide to fund something different.

Good Night, and Good Luck

Murrow used that sign-off as a kind of promise. That he would show up. That he would tell the truth. That the work mattered even when it was hard, especially when it was hard.

On May 22nd, CBS News Radio will say it one last time and go quiet.

Ninety-nine years. Gone in a memo.

I’m not going quiet. This newsletter isn’t going quiet. And if you’re reading this, I don’t think you are either.

The last independent voices aren’t the ones with the biggest studios or the richest owners. They’re the ones still showing up every day, without a corporate strategy behind them, because they believe you deserve to know what’s happening.

That’s all this is. That’s all I’m asking you to be part of.

Subscribe. Share this. Tell someone. Because the people who just killed CBS News Radio are counting on you not to.

Prove them wrong.

PS: If this made you angry, good. Share it. And if you’re not subscribed yet, now is the time. Independent journalism doesn’t survive without readers who show up for it.

There’s a sign at the entrance to Portsmouth that reads 1623, and I stood in front of it in the cold the way you stand in front of a sentence that feels important before you’ve quite figured out why.

Four hundred years. Longer than the country itself. People built something here before there was even a word for what they were building, or anyone agreed on the rules, before the whole experiment had a name. I find this, like most genuinely old things, both humbling and a little whimsical. We arrive with our lanyards and our conference agendas and our algorithm‑induced anxieties, and the town has simply been here, patient as a librarian, waiting for us to settle down and relearn what a free market or country means, the way our ancestors once had to.

Inside, away from the harbor wind, there’s a kind of warmth that reminds me of my hometown in winter, where the cold is so reliable that people stopped complaining about it sometime in the previous century and instead perfected the art of hospitality. Portsmouth seems to have made the same pact.

During the NENPA Convention, I was reminded Marty Baron said something that Rufus Friday from the Center for Integrity in News Reporting echoed: “We’re not at war, we’re at work,” a modest line delivered against the backdrop of an actual war in Iran, which gave it the kind of weight most keynotes spend their entire runtime chasing. It asks journalism to resist its own mythology, to put down the cape, to understand itself as labor rather than crusade. And yet there’s something almost radical in that modesty. If the work is ordinary, it can be sustained. If it’s a heroic act, it burns itself out.

Everyone in the room was living some version of the pressure he named. AI rewriting the back office. Platforms that reward the loud and punish the careful. Baron’s line didn’t solve any of that. But it reminded us what we were actually there to do, which, in my experience, is half of what a good keynote is meant to accomplish.

Next Gen News: A New Definition of News

I want to tell you about the students from the University of New Hampshire, because they were the most perceptive audience for News Without a Newsroom. They became a lens through which the entire encounter made sense. Much to my surprise, and against your own cynicism, unexpectedly, the most inspiring reminder that the next chapter of journalism isn’t a decline story but a renewal story.

They move through digital space the way people who grew up near water move through water: instinctively, without marveling at it, without explaining it to you. They just know where the current goes. Meanwhile, the rest of us are still occasionally surprised that our phones now shoot in 4K like tiny film studios and how to use them properly.

Here’s what I didn’t expect: they want the newspaper. Not as a nostalgic object or a heritage artifact, but as something that means something. They described wanting their reporting to feel the way a newspaper felt to their grandmother on a Sunday morning reading it with her coffee, something with weight, that says: here is what happened, here is why it matters, here is someone who went and looked.

And the data, polite enough to surprise us now and then, backs them up. Jeremy Gilbert, Northwestern’s Knight Chair in Digital Media Strategy, found that younger readers consume more news than older ones—not less. The obituary for the engaged young reader was premature. What they want, and what research increasingly confirms, isn’t the disappearance of journalism but the disappearance of a particular kind of journalism—the kind that delivers facts with the emotional temperature of a parking receipt.

The gap tells a story. Young audiences may scroll past news everywhere, but when they choose a primary source, they’re choosing video. What resonates now is a reporter who is present in the story. Not performing objectivity from behind a one‑way mirror, but visible, accountable, human. Someone who was in the room and can tell you what it felt like. Some call it first‑person accountability journalism. Some call it personalized reporting. I would call it simply: writing that trusts the reader enough to have a point of view.

The students already understand this. They’re not waiting for permission. And that shift is reshaping the entire ecosystem.

The convention was full of people who understand it too. The structures are shifting, have been shifting, will continue to shift. The work continues anyway. The next generation is already here. And the stories that are hardest to tell are, almost by definition, the ones that most need telling.

We are, in our own way, still catching up. And yet, I left the two-day convention with something rare in this line of work: genuine hope.

To the NENPA organizers: thank you.
Thank you for the invitation, for the conversations, for the warmth inside those history-filled walls. It was a privilege to be in a room full of people who still believe in the work, and who keep showing up to do it.

Last night’s FLiFF reception felt like a small, defiant bloom in a season where the world feels increasingly brittle. The warmth of the room, the standing ovation, the way the audience engaged after the film. A reminder that stories still matter, and that the people inside them matter even more.

And today, March 1st, the first day of Women’s History Month, I find myself thinking about the women who carry that consciousness on their backs. The women in my documentary. The women who stand behind the cameras. The women who report from front lines. The women who fight in wars. To women who hold communities together when the world is falling apart. The women who plant flowers in the ruins.

Because these women don’t just report the truth or defend it; they hold their truth, even when the world tries to turn it against them.

And I go back to Martin Fletcher’s line from the interview: truth has become a weapon of war—a phrase so overused it risks cliché, and yet so devastatingly accurate that it refuses to loosen its grip on me. Maybe that’s why I was drawn to journalism in the first place. Not by the glamour of the byline or the mythology of the newsroom, but by the war correspondents who stepped into the world’s darkest corners with nothing but a camera, a notebook, and a stubborn belief that bearing witness still matters. They taught me that witnessing is a form of courage. That telling the truth is sometimes the only thing standing between memory and oblivion. That someone has to look directly at the thing the rest of the world would rather not see.

There is a moment at every film festival Q & A, somewhere between the applause and the rolling of credits, when the microphone drifts toward the audience, a familiar question rises. It is not the one about craft or budget or how many days we had to shoot. It is not even the perennial “What inspired you to make this film,” which is really just a polite request for a creation myth.

The question that keeps returning, almost shyly, almost as if it were embarrassed by its own sincerity, is this one:

“Why did you care?”

Sometimes it becomes “Why do you care,” as if caring were a temporary condition, something like a fever. Sometimes it becomes “Why should anyone care,” which is the version that reveals the deeper anxiety. Beneath the question is the suspicion that caring has become an unusual act, a deviation from the norm.

I have come to recognize the tone. It is not cynical, it is not hostile; it is weary. It is the voice of a culture that has learned to measure everything except meaning. A culture fluent in metrics ROIs and dashboards, in the cold grammar of optimization. A culture that has grown suspicious of interior life, as if purpose were an outdated technology.

Umberto Eco would remind us that idealism is not naïveté. It is a form of intellectual courage. He would also say that every question carries the sediment of older questions. That when someone asks why you cared, they are also asking why they no longer do. They are asking what was lost, and when. It is also the willingness to believe that meaning can still be made, even in a fractured world. It is the belief that the future is not merely something that happens to us, but something we participate in shaping.

And perhaps this is the quiet truth beneath our moment. The sense that the revolutionary purpose of work, the animating idealism that once shaped entire generations, is no longer the compass it used to be. Purpose is now something we map, not something we follow. Yet as the world continues to change at an increasingly rapid rate, it becomes more important than ever for both companies and individuals to return to their why and let it guide their decisions in a complex and distracting world.

We are facing challenges that feel unprecedented, and at the same time we are starved for leaders who can inspire rather than manage. Over the past few decades there has been a steady loss of idealism. Unlike John F. Kennedy or Ronald Reagan, our leaders no longer speak of world peace or peace on earth as their driving motivation. Hearing those words now almost feels quaint, as if idealism were a relic from a museum of lost virtues. Yet it is idealism, the ability to start with why, that moves us to invent, explore, and advance the world forward. It is what allows us to feel inspiration and fulfillment along the way.

And this is where journalism returns to the center of the conversation. Because journalism, at its best, is one of the last remaining public expressions of idealism. It is the belief that truth is worth pursuing, that memory is worth preserving, that communities deserve to know themselves. It is a form of collective care, a way of saying: this matters enough to witness.

When people ask why I cared enough to make a film about journalism, I could give them the practical reasons. The closures. The layoffs. The hollowed out newsrooms. The communities left without witnesses. The slow collapse of the civic immune system. But the deeper reason is that journalism embodies the very idealism we have been losing. It is a reminder that purpose is not ornamental. It is structural. It is the architecture that holds a society together.

And in that sense, I am proud and humbled by the impact this work has had in the world, and more importantly in people’s lives. Because every time someone reconnects with their why, every time someone remembers that caring is not a weakness but a form of strength, the world becomes a little less fragmented, a little more capable of hope.

So here is the blessing I keep returning to, the one I want to offer to anyone growing up in this strange, beautiful, fractured moment.

May you grow up in a world that starts with why.
May you grow up in a world where journalism is not an afterthought but a shared responsibility.
May you grow up in a world where idealism is not something to outgrow, but something to cultivate.
May you grow up in a world where caring is not something you have to justify, but something you practice without apology.

The future will belong to the people who remember their why, and who insist on building from it.

The other day I overheard a local man, a veteran, say something that people in America repeat with the same confidence they use when announcing the weather is terrible. He said, “If you don’t like this country, you should just leave,” then said it again, and again, as if repetition might make the idea more profound or as if the country were a restaurant with a strict no‑complaints policy. There was no anger in his voice, only the serene belief that dissatisfaction is a personal defect rather than a civic responsibility.

As an immigrant, I always find this line a little funny, if not sad. Immigrants do not leave easily. We leave entire histories behind, languages and rituals and families, the smell of bakeries and narrow streets, even the way the light falls on the pavement at 4 p.m. in winter. We leave because we believe something can be built, not because we expect perfection, so when someone says “just leave,” it feels like being told to abandon a house because the window is cracked. Most immigrants would rather fix the window because we know what it costs to walk away.

That comment reminded me of Michael Levine’s Broken Windows, Broken Business, a book built on the idea that small signs of neglect are never just small. They are early warnings that reveal what a place is willing to tolerate, and once you start tolerating the small things, the big things follow. The man’s comment felt like the national version of that logic: if something is broken, don’t fix it, don’t ask questions, don’t get involved, just leave. It is the civic equivalent of shrugging at a cracked window and assuming the building will hold.

Most people think this way without realizing it. They treat their country the way they treat a disappointing sandwich: if it’s not perfect, toss it and try somewhere else. The instinct is exit, not repair, because it is easier to abandon a thing than to fix the tiny details that make it work, and this, more than any dramatic failure, is how mediocrity spreads.

Small things are never small; they are the first signals of what a culture is willing to accept. A smudge on the counter, a shrug in the voice, a missed follow‑up: these tiny lapses communicate indifference long before anyone says a word. Neglect multiplies, a lapse becomes a habit, a habit becomes a norm, and norms become culture. Everything erodes gradually and then suddenly, like a roof that collapses only after years of pretending the leak was charming.

People love to talk about culture as if it is a mission statement or a framed poster in the lobby, but in reality culture is whatever people see tolerated. Excellence spreads, but so does mediocrity, and mediocrity is the more contagious of the two because it asks less of everyone. A well‑run business is never a mystery; somewhere inside it is a manager or owner who is maniacally obsessed with the details, not in a glamorous TED‑Talk way but in the way a person checks the stove three times before leaving the house. The temperature of the room, the placement of the chairs, the tone of the greeting, the cleanliness of the bathroom, the way the team speaks to one another when no one is watching; these things are not decorative, they are structural.

Attention to detail is strategy because details create trust, cleanliness signals credibility, and prevention is cheaper than repair. These are not slogans, they are the physics of how organizations either rise or decay. And in a Yelp world, where customers communicate with their feet long before they communicate with their words, the quiet loss of loyalty is the most dangerous kind. People do not always complain; they simply stop coming back, disappearing like socks in a dryer until you are left wondering where everyone went.

Michael Levine reminds us that reputation is fragile, that there is no shortcut through the firewall, that you should under‑promise and over‑deliver and act hungry like it is day one every day. These ideas sound like corporate clichés until you watch what happens when they are ignored. The decline is never theatrical – it is always quiet, a little dust here, a little indifference there, a sense that no one is really paying attention.

People love to talk about hiring as if it is the master key to excellence, but the real differentiator is far more uncomfortable: it is not who you hire, it is who you do not fire. Mediocrity survives because it is tolerated; excellence survives because it is protected. Standards must be explicit, good enough is not enough, and assiduous politeness is not optional but the baseline of a functioning culture. When standards are clear, people rise to meet them. When standards are vague, people fall to the level of what they can get away with.

Which brings me back to the man who repeated, three times, that if you do not like the country you should leave. It is a tidy solution, but it is also the logic of someone who has given up on the idea that small things matter. It is easier to leave than to fix, easier to abandon than to improve, easier to pretend that the details are trivial than to admit that they are the only things that ever change anything.

Immigrants know this. We come from places where the small things were ignored for too long, where the cracks in the windows became cracks in the institutions, and where the cracks eventually became escape routes. We know how quickly a society can slide when people stop tending to the details, how fragile institutions are, how easily trust evaporates, how fast a window becomes a wall becomes a border becomes a wound. Many of us have watched friends, colleagues, and entire professions come under enormous pressure from authoritarian regimes, forced to work in exile because the small things were dismissed until they became unmanageable. We know what it looks like when people stop fixing what is broken.

As a result of that, we also know that meritocracy is not a system but a daily practice, a discipline of refusing to let the small things slide, a willingness to do the extra work no one sees, a belief that excellence is not elitist but responsible. Mediocrity demands nothing, which is why it wins so easily when no one is paying attention. The difference between the two is not philosophical: it is behavioral, cumulative, contagious, and it always begins with the smallest things, the ones that are never actually small.

And if you want to see what happens when a society stops tending to the small things, you only have to look at what hedge funds have done to local newspapers: they treat journalism the way a slumlord treats a building, ignoring the cracked windows until the whole structure is collapsing.

Dale Anglin, one of the voices at the heart of this film and now the director of Press Forward, reminisces: “I try to remember what my grandmother thought was news […] reading the church bulletin.”

It’s a line that has stayed with me. Before journalism became an industry, it was a community habit. A shared ritual. A way of keeping watch over one another.

Which makes our next screening location feel almost predestined.

News Without a Newsroom is returning to Fort Lauderdale as an official selection of the Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival (FLIFF) and we’ll be gathering inside Savor Cinema, a place that has lived more civic lives than most buildings ever get to.

Once a church, Savor Cinema began as the First Methodist Church of Fort Lauderdale, a sanctuary built for collective attention. Over the decades it became a counseling center, a narcotics storage site for the courthouse, a stage theater under Vinnette Carroll, and finally a film house; a place where people still come together to sit in the dark and care about the same story at the same time.

There’s something sacred about that. A church turned cinema is a reminder that communal watching is not entertainment: it’s a civic act. It’s how we practice paying attention. It’s how we remember that conscience has guardians, and journalism is one of them.

If you’ve been following the project, this is the moment to join us, to watch the film in a room built for gathering, and to stay for the conversation afterward.

See you at Savor Cinema.

🎟️ Tickets: https://fliff.com/events/newswithoutanewsroom/

On this day in 1965, Malcolm X was shot while preparing to speak to people who had gathered for something essential: the right to know themselves without distortion. Long before the bullets, he had already named the danger. If you are not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the oppressed and loving the oppressor. He was speaking of the machinery that shapes perception, the quiet architecture of power that decides who is visible and who is erased.

The civil rights movement understood this with a clarity born from generations of survival. Black newspapers carried the truths others buried. Local reporters stepped into danger because silence was a luxury their communities could not afford. And when broadcast journalism arrived, it forced the nation to look. The country watched children facing police dogs, elders beaten on bridges, students dragged from lunch counters. The movement marched, but it also documented. It insisted on a record. It insisted on a future in which no one could say, We did not know.

News Without a Newsroom stands inside that same lineage of struggle and vigilance. It shows what happens when the storytellers disappear and the civic record thins. It shows how quickly misinformation fills the vacuum, how easily power reorganizes itself when no one is watching, how entire towns can be spoken for by voices that have never walked their streets. And it reminds us that the civil rights movement did not triumph on moral force alone: it triumphed because journalists, print and broadcast alike, made the nation confront what it preferred to ignore. When those journalists vanish, the possibility of that kind of reckoning vanishes with them. This is not merely loss. It is a form of dispossession, the removal of a community’s ability to name its own reality.

A newspaper, at its best, is not just a chronicle. It is a safeguard against erasure. It is a collective memory. It is a refusal to let the powerful narrate the world unchallenged. Malcolm X knew the cost of losing that. The communities in this film know it too. They are fighting not only for stories, but for the right to exist in public truth.

Tomorrow, Sunday February 22, News Without a Newsroom will screen at Cinema Paradiso in Hollywood at 12:30 p.m. And next Sunday, February 28, it will screen again at Savor Cinema in Fort Lauderdale at 1:00 p.m.

If you come, you will see how our veteran journalist teach in different ways, that truth-telling is not simply an act of resistance. It is a form of care. It is a form of survival.

Tickets and details are here: https://fliff.com/events/newswithoutanewsroom/#buynow

Two decades later, the symptoms he described have not only persisted. They have grown legs, learned to sprint, and now run laps around us. The internet accelerated the fragmentation; social media liquefied it. And now, in the early years of the AI era, we are confronting a new kind of disconnection. It is not just social or institutional. It is existential. We are losing not only the places where we gather, but the places where we agree on what is real.

Into this landscape walks News Without a Newsroom, a documentary that feels less like a film and more like a dispatch from the front lines of civic erosion.

The Collapse of the Local Story

The film begins where Putnam’s thesis ends. When a newsroom disappears, it is not simply a business failure. It is the loss of a public square, a memory bank, a referee, a witness, a place where the daily life of a community is translated into a shared narrative. It is the civic equivalent of losing your sense of smell. You can still breathe, but the world becomes harder to interpret.

Reporters in the film describe what it feels like to work without a newsroom. The absence of a physical place becomes an absence of mentorship, of camaraderie, of civic mission. A newsroom is not just desks and scanners and police radios. It is a ritual. It is the daily gathering of people whose job is to look outward together.

Without that ritual, the work becomes atomized. Journalists become freelancers of their own communities. And communities become freelancers of their own truths.

The Geography of Distance

This unraveling is not only institutional. It is architectural. It is cultural. It is geographic.

In much of Europe, and especially in the East, daily life is built around proximity. You walk to the market, to the post office, to the neighbor who still remembers your grandmother’s maiden name. Encounters are not scheduled. They happen because the world is arranged to make them unavoidable. And when someone asks how you are, it is not a polite formality. It is an invitation to tell the truth. People expect an answer that contains your life.

The physical closeness of places creates a social closeness of people. Streets and courtyards and stairwells become the architecture of community. You learn to read the weather of other people’s days simply by passing them on the way to buy bread.

In the United States, the geography tells a different story. Distances are wide. Errands require cars. Neighborhoods are designed to be passed through rather than inhabited. Even the question “How are you?” becomes a ritual of efficiency, a signal that the conversation should stay light and move quickly. The form is the same, but the meaning has changed.

The physical distance between places becomes a symbolic boundary between lives. It is not that Americans are less warm or less capable of connection. It is that the structure of daily life makes intimacy optional, and anything optional becomes rare.

This matters in a post‑internet and now post‑AI society. When the digital world pulls us further into our private orbits, the absence of physical proximity removes the last natural counterweight. In places where people still walk, still linger, still ask questions that expect real answers, the social fabric has more chances to repair itself. In places where movement is solitary and conversation is transactional; the fabric frays faster.

News Without a Newsroom captures this tension without naming it. The loss of a newsroom is not only the loss of a civic institution. It is the loss of a place where people are forced into proximity, where stories are shared because bodies share space. In a society built on distance, those places matter even more.

The Post‑Internet Condition: Connection Without Connectedness

The internet promised to solve the very problem Putnam identified. It offered infinite connection, infinite information, infinite access. But connection is not the same as connectedness. Information is not the same as meaning. Access is not the same as accountability.

In a world where everyone can publish, the question is no longer “How do we get information?” but “Whose information do we trust?” The collapse of local news created a vacuum, and the internet, efficient and uncurated and unaccountable, rushed to fill it.

The result is a society that is hyperconnected and underinformed, saturated with content but starved for context.

The Post‑AI Condition: Knowledge Without Witness

And now, AI adds a new layer to the crisis. We are entering an era where information can be generated faster than it can be verified, where the line between documentation and fabrication becomes porous, where the very idea of a public record is destabilized.

Putnam warned that social capital was eroding. Today, epistemic capital is eroding too.

The Harvard Business Review devoted an entire special issue to the question of how to thrive in a Gen AI world. The essays share a common refrain: the organizations that will endure are the ones that double down on human judgment, human relationships, and human meaning. AI can accelerate work, but it cannot replace the social structures that give work its purpose. It can generate content, but it cannot generate trust. It can scale information, but it cannot scale belonging.

Which is another way of saying: AI can do many things, but it cannot stand in the rain outside a firehouse waiting for a source. It cannot look someone in the eye and ask a question that matters. It cannot rebuild trust because trust is not a dataset. It is a relationship.

Rebuilding the Civic Commons

If Bowling Alone diagnosed the collapse of community, News Without a Newsroom documents the collapse of the storytellers who once held that community together. And yet, both works point toward the same conclusion. The revival of American civic life will not come from nostalgia or from technology or from institutional rescue alone. It will come from rebuilding the places, physical and social and narrative, where people encounter one another as citizens rather than as consumers, avatars or Pokémon characters.

Local journalism is not a luxury. It is civic infrastructure. It is how a community remembers itself. It is how democracy maintains its muscle tone.

In a disconnected society, the act of reconnecting is not sentimental. It is structural.

Toward a New Kind of Togetherness

We are living in a moment when the old forms of connection have frayed and the new ones have not yet earned our trust. But the documentary suggests that the path forward is not to abandon the idea of shared truth. It is to rebuild the institutions that make shared truth possible.

If Bowling Alone was the obituary for twentieth‑century civic life, News Without a Newsroom is the blueprint for its twenty‑first‑century reconstruction.

Not a return to what was, but a recommitment to what is necessary. A recognition that the past is not a blueprint, only a reminder that people once built things together and can do so again. And above all: not newsrooms as buildings, but newsrooms as communities, places where the act of witnessing becomes the act of belonging.

Not the quick tap of a like or the fleeting glow of a notification, but the slow accumulation of trust that comes from showing up, from being known, from being accountable to a place and the people in it. Connectedness is what happens when proximity becomes relationship, when attention becomes care, when strangers become neighbors.

Not the endless scroll of content, but the shared understanding that helps a community decide what matters and what it must do next.

These distinctions are small on the page but enormous in practice. They are the difference between a society that drifts and a society that chooses itself again. They are the difference between living among one another and living with one another.

They are the difference between a country built for distance and a community learning, slowly and stubbornly, to take the long way home.

But documentaries have never belonged to that category. They resist it. They make the category look small.

A documentary sits in the narrow, electric space between journalism and the cinematic arts — a place where the public record meets the human imagination. It is not simply something to watch. It is something that asks you to witness.

The journalistic spine is always there: the reporting, the verification, the ethical responsibility to get the story right. But the cinematic dimension is equally essential. A documentary uses composition, pacing, silence, metaphor, and emotional architecture to make truth legible — not just as information, but as experience. It’s the difference between reading a police report and standing in the room where the story happened.

Calling that “content” is like calling a courthouse a building. Technically true, but spiritually wrong.

And here’s the part that still astonishes me: if the Pulitzer Prizes can offer grants for high‑impact documentary projects — explicitly recognizing the form as journalism of the highest civic consequence — I fail to see why certain organizations (which shall not be named) remain so obstinate, so incurious, so unable to grasp what is plainly in front of them. If the most respected institution in American journalism can understand that documentaries are part of the public record, why is it so difficult for others to see the same thing.

This blindness shows up in the strangest places. I’ve watched juries for journalism awards tie themselves into knots trying to decide whether a documentary “counts” as journalism — as if the reporting, the sourcing, the verification, the months (or years) of fieldwork somehow evaporate the moment a camera enters the room. Often the loudest objections come from someone who last practiced journalism twenty years ago, who still once-upon-a-time didn’t consider digital video storytelling, and who — in a moment that would be funny if it weren’t so revealing — has never heard of PEN America. And this isn’t happening in some underfunded corner of the field; this is coming from a high‑end university where students pay Harvard‑level tuition for a “state‑of‑the‑art” journalism education. These are the people tasked with defining the boundaries of the field. These are the people deciding what “qualifies.”

And meanwhile, the ground is shifting under their feet. As newsrooms shrink, as local reporting evaporates, as written journalism becomes harder to sustain financially, documentary and other audiovisual forms are increasingly carrying the weight that newspapers once did. They are becoming the place where complex stories still receive time, resources, and public attention. Not because filmmakers set out to replace journalism, but because the infrastructure around them has eroded. In a landscape where fewer reporters are given the time to dig, the camera has become one of the last tools still capable of holding power to account. It’s not hard to imagine a near future in which documentary — and its adjacent forms — become some of the only state‑of‑the‑art journalistic practices still standing.

The misconception matters because it shapes how we treat the people who make these films. If documentaries are just content, then filmmakers are just content creators — interchangeable, disposable, optimized for volume. But if documentaries are civic works, then filmmakers are something closer to public historians, cultural translators, and, at times, the last witnesses in the room.

A documentary is a civic instrument. It restores context in a culture that keeps losing it. It slows the pace of attention long enough for meaning to reappear. It gives shape to the stories that hold a community together — or expose the fractures that threaten to pull it apart.

And maybe that’s why the word content feels so insufficient. Content asks nothing of you. A documentary asks everything: your time, your attention, your willingness to be changed.

In an era where the feed wants everything to be frictionless, documentaries insist on friction. They insist on consequence. They insist that reality, however uncomfortable, is still worth looking at directly.

That’s not content. That’s culture. That’s citizenship. That’s art.

And it’s not just filmmakers who see the institutional blind spots. In News Without a Newsroom, Taryn Southern captures the absurdity of how quickly “impossible” becomes “inevitable.” As she recalls, “At one point in time, watching video online was considered impossible.” She tells the story of losing the University of Miami’s entrepreneurship competition because she pitched a digital‑video platform and the judges insisted no one would ever stream video on the internet.

It’s a perfect illustration of the pattern: the frontier is always dismissed by the people most invested in the past. The technologies that reshape the field — digital video, AI, VR, neurotech — arrive wrapped in skepticism, fear, and institutional resistance. Yet they’re also where the opportunity lives. Southern’s point is that the people willing to experiment, to stay open‑minded, to learn the tools as they emerge, become the ones who define the next era rather than defend the last one.

If All the President’s Men were made now, the story would unfold in a very different country. The Washington of 1972—messy, muscular, and still tethered to the idea of a shared civic reality—has given way to something that feels unmoored. The old machinery of accountability, for all its flaws, at least existed. Today, much of it has been dismantled quietly, piece by piece, until the absence feels almost normal. Or at least as normal as anything feels in a nation where the weather, the politics, and the Wi‑Fi all seem to be having synchronized nervous breakdowns.

The Watergate investigation depended on a constellation of forces now in short supply: editors who backed their reporters, publishers who tolerated discomfort, and a public that believed facts were not a personal insult. Woodward and Bernstein had time, institutional memory, and a city full of people who understood that truth, however inconvenient, was a public good. They also had expense accounts, which in 2026 feel as fantastical as dirigibles or a functioning subway escalator.

Set that story today and the first question is painfully simple: who would be there to notice anything at all?

Across the country, local newsrooms have been hollowed out or shuttered entirely. The city hall beat, once a rite of passage, barely exists. School board meetings pass without a single journalist in the room. The watchdogs haven’t lost their instincts; they’ve lost their salaries. Many now drive rideshare, which is honest work but not ideal for uncovering a constitutional crisis unless the suspect happens to get in the back seat.

In this version of the film, Deep Throat doesn’t whisper in a parking garage. He sends a message that disappears into a reporter’s inbox, or he posts something online that vanishes beneath the churn of the algorithm. More likely, he says nothing, convinced no one is left to listen, or is too afraid to try. Or he starts a podcast, which is its own kind of surrender.

Meanwhile, the presidency remains meticulously documented: archived, indexed, preserved. But the public record at the local level, where most of civic life actually unfolds, is evaporating. Presidents get libraries. Communities get whatever survives on social media before it scrolls out of view, usually between a dog video and an ad for a mattress promising to fix your life, your posture, and possibly your destiny.

The crisis now is quieter than Watergate, but no less consequential. It lives in the unobserved corners of public life, in the decisions that pass without scrutiny, in the stories that disappear before anyone knows they existed. Power doesn’t need to hide when no one is watching. It barely needs to dim the lights.

And into this landscape comes the Berlinale’s recent guidance—that the festival would prefer films to be “less political.” A request delivered with the gentle tone of a cultural ministry from a vanished empire, the kind that once insisted art should be uplifting, patriotic, and preferably involve a tractor. Fatigue is understandable; the world has been relentless. But the timing is uncanny. The note arrived just before news spread that Dana Eden, producer and co‑creator of Tehran, had been found dead in her Athens hotel room while working on the show’s fourth season, with Greek police treating the case as a likely suicide based on early evidence.

And then came Arundhati Roy, withdrawing from the Berlinale entirely after jury president Wim Wenders suggested filmmakers should “stay out of politics,” a remark she called “shocking,” “jaw‑dropping,” and “unconscionable” before pulling out of her scheduled appearance. It was a gesture that felt both principled and faintly absurd—absurd because the idea of apolitical art, in a moment like this, has all the plausibility of a Soviet pamphlet insisting that everything is fine, comrade, please enjoy the harvest musical.

To ask for less politics in film is, in some sense, to ask for less engagement with the world as it is. It reflects a desire for comfort, for a curated reality in which the hardest stories are kept at a distance. But the world does not oblige. It insists on its own complexity, its own demands, its own tragedies—including the kind that claim the lives of filmmakers who never had the luxury of neutrality.

Presidents’ Day is meant to honor leadership at the highest level. But perhaps the more urgent question is what happens when the systems that once held leaders accountable—newsrooms, filmmakers, local chroniclers—are told, implicitly or explicitly, to soften their gaze. To be quieter. To look away. To make something “uplifting,” ideally with a talking puppet and absolutely no mention of geopolitics.

Watergate was not a miracle. It was the product of a culture that believed the public deserved to know. If we want that culture to survive, nostalgia won’t be enough. We will need to rebuild the institutions that make accountability possible: on the page, on the screen, and in the communities where the story begins.

If All the President’s Men were set today, it would not be a thriller. It would be a reminder that lights may dim, but the story doesn’t leave the room. The truth never does. And perhaps, in the spirit of tender irony, it would also be a newsroom black-coffee-comedy—because sometimes the only sane response to the absurdity of our civic life is to laugh, briefly, before getting back to the work of paying attention.

That ground is shifting fast. The collapse of local news is no longer an abstraction; it is a lived condition. Entire communities now exist in what we call “news deserts,” places where the public record evaporates and civic memory thins. As Sarabeth Berman of the American Journalism Project has warned, we have lost more than 60% of local journalists and editors — casualties of a revenue model that simply collapsed.

Yet the Forum was not a lament. It was a reckoning. And a call.

Artificial intelligence hovered over every conversation — not as a threat, but as a tool whose meaning depends entirely on our will. Edward R. Murrow’s old warning echoed through the room: technology is only as good as the purpose we assign to it. AI can accelerate reporting, expand access, and strengthen verification. It can also deepen echo chambers and enable what scholars now call “digital gerrymandering,” where information is carved and targeted with surgical precision, fragmenting the public square.

The question is not whether AI will shape journalism. It already has. The question is whether we will shape it back.

Alberto Ibargüen once compared the future of news to John Cage’s music — expansive, experimental, unbound by old forms. That spirit was alive last night. The consensus was clear: the future of journalism will not be saved by nostalgia. It will be rebuilt through experimentation, especially in local, not‑for‑profit models that center mission over scale. These organizations are fragile, yes — but they are also trusted, rooted, and capable of rebuilding civic life from the ground up.

And then came the reminders of why this work matters.

Julie K. Brown, in conversation with Marty Baron, revisited the Epstein investigation — a case that nearly slipped into silence. When told her wouldn’t find anything, she answered with the line that has now become legend: “When you tell me you’re not going to find anything, I will make sure to find something.” It was a masterclass in the stubbornness democracy requires.

Georgia Fort’s reflection on the Minneapolis arrest added another chilling layer: you cannot be neutral about the dismantling of our democracy. Neutrality in the face of erosion is not objectivity, it is abdication. Her words landed heavily because they matched the mood of the moment. We are living through a time when public space is increasingly gated off under the banner of “national security,” when the press is treated less like a civic institution and more like an adversary. At the Pentagon, and other places, journalists are now seen as a greater threat than foreign states. The growing barricades around public space in the way everything is now gated off under the banner of “national security,” show us what happens when fear replaces transparency.

Everything we heard at the Forum — the warnings, the resolve, the insistence on truth — is the very lived reality inside News Without a Newsroom, a landscape the film has been mapping long before last night’s conversations gave it new urgency.

The Forum’s conversations aligned so closely with the film’s message that the renewed curiosity from organizations and foundations felt like a natural convergence — a sign that they, too, are wrestling with the same questions the documentary raises: how do we rebuild trust, rebuild infrastructure, rebuild the public record. We are proud to feature voices like Alberto Ibargüen’s, representing Knight, and Martin Baron’s, alongside so many others who have shaped the moral spine of American journalism.

The documentary shows how democracy becomes brittle when no one is documenting its daily life. News Without a Newsroom is not just a documentary about journalism. It is a documentary about civic engagement — about what happens when the lights go out in the places where truth is supposed to live.

The conversations at Knight amplified the message, making one thing unmistakable: rebuilding local news is not a technical challenge. It is a civic one. It requires imagination, yes — but also vigilance, stubbornness, and a refusal to accept that decline is inevitable.

AI will evolve. Business models will shift. But the core purpose of journalism remains unchanged: to uncover what is unknown, to verify what is claimed, and to tell the stories that hold a community together.

Democracy is not protected by laws alone. It is protected by people who stand up for the rule of law — citizens, journalists, and institutions willing to bring their own shoe -leather work ahead.

It was refreshing to be surrounded by good journalists again. To reconnect with old friends, to make new ones, to feel that spark of shared purpose. If you’re not making new friends at the Forum, you’re doing it wrong. Because community is not a side effect of this work; it is the work. It’s how we stay sharp, stay honest, stay human.

Because a country without shared facts cannot govern itself. Because our laws
only matter if we stand up for them. Because the First Amendment is only as
strong as the people who insist on using it.

The work ahead is hard.
But it is ours. And it begins now.

There’s a particular hush that settles over the United States in the hours before the Super Bowl. It isn’t silence so much as a collective pause. You feel it in airports and grocery stores, in the way strangers wearing the same jersey nod at each other as if they’re sharing a small secret. It’s the kind of moment that suggests a country getting ready for something it no longer has a clear name for, a ritual disguised as a game.

If you pay attention—the kind of attention you use when you’re trying to read the emotional weather of a place—the Super Bowl becomes more than a sporting event. It turns into a moment of cultural gravity. People who disagree about almost everything else still manage to gather around the same screen. A stadium becomes a kind of civic commons. The field becomes a stage where, for a few hours, the country remembers how to lean forward together.

Maybe I notice this more because of where I’m from. I grew up in Transylvania, not the tourist‑brochure version but the real one, with mountains that brood and villages where history sits so close to the surface you can feel it under your feet. In Kronstadt/Brașov, you learn early that landscapes have moods and that people absorb them. Rituals there are small, local, and organically felt. In that world, transcendence wasn’t abstract. It was physical and immediate, woven into daily life. You didn’t go searching for meaning; it arrived on its own terms.

Strangely, that’s what the Super Bowl feels like to me now. A big‑culture version of a small‑culture instinct: people gathering because gathering still matters.

Even the halftime debates—Bad Bunny or Kid Rock, reggaeton or rock and roll—feel less like divisions and more like proof that a country this large can hold multitudes without falling apart. Two different Americas, yes, but orbiting the same moment, the same ritual, the same shared attention.

And the game itself, at least metaphorically, often feels like a defensive struggle. Not in the literal sense of blitzes and sacks, but in the emotional sense. Two sides trying to move forward carefully and thoughtfully, without giving too much away. A kind of national choreography of caution. Every yard earned. Every opening meaningful. It mirrors the way American life feels right now, with everyone trying to advance while still protecting something fragile.

This brings me to the work I’ve been doing on News Without a Newsroom. Traveling through towns where the local paper has vanished and the last reporter left years ago, I kept seeing the same thing: people who still care deeply about their communities but no longer have a shared place to see themselves reflected. The civic glue has thinned. The common story has frayed.

And then I would come back to the Super Bowl, this enormous and shimmering spectacle, and feel something almost grounding. For all its noise and excess, it still manages to do something local journalism once did effortlessly: give people a moment of shared reality. A place to look together.

In small cultures, transcendence is intimate. In big cultures, it has to be scaled. But the hunger underneath is the same: the desire to feel part of something larger than yourself.

Which is why the hush before kickoff feels so meaningful. It isn’t really about football. It’s about recognition, the quiet acknowledgment that, despite everything, we still know how to gather.

And as the stadium lights dim and the country exhales back into its scattered, glowing rooms, my camera will turn toward the quieter places—the town halls, the empty newsrooms, the people still trying to stitch a common story out of all this noise. That is where the next chapter of this documentary begins, and where, if we’re lucky, the fragile miracle of a shared “we” might flicker back to life.

I had come from a post‑communist country where the sky hung low and the future felt rationed. New York rose in glass and steel. Skyscrapers like open declarations. They promised that a life could be built floor by floor if you had the will to climb.

Then the world shifted. The pandemic emptied the streets. Sirens replaced traffic. People stayed inside and counted the days. In that silence, the city felt fragile. The systems we trusted showed their seams. Information became a lifeline, and it frayed fast.

When the protests began, the streets filled again. Black Lives Matter signs in the air. Voices carrying through masks. It was a second kind of emergency — one born of history, not disease. The two crises ran side by side. One asked us to stay apart. The other demanded we stand together. Both exposed how much we rely on clear, honest reporting to understand what is happening around us.

But the newsrooms were thinning. Meetings went uncovered. Decisions passed quietly. Rumors traveled faster than facts. People tried to fill the gaps — volunteers with phones, neighbors with newsletters, anyone who believed a community should know itself. Their work mattered. It was also fragile. A patch on a sinking hull.

While making News Without a Newsroom, I saw how quickly a place can lose its memory. How power grows in the dark. How silence is not empty but occupied. Information is not a luxury. It is structure. And when it fails, it fails the way birds do when they strike the mirrored windows of skyscrapers at dawn — drawn to a reflection they mistake for open sky, hitting hard, then falling out of sight while the building still looks perfect from the street. MLK warned against the comfort of delay. He said the time to act is now. He was right. We cannot wait for the market to fix this. We cannot wait for someone else to care more than we do. The cost of waiting is already here.

The work ahead is not grand. It is steady. It is the kind of work that keeps a city standing: record the meeting, ask the question, publish the truth, hold the line. Floor by floor. Word by word. Action by action — the only way anything holds.

The skyline still shines. But the interior needs repair. And the repair must begin now.

As filmmakers, we’re no longer just making films. We’re holding up a light in a world that forgets faster than it learns.Journalists hold the collective consciousness of a community. When a crisis hits, attention narrows, illusions fall away, and our values come into view with a clarity we rarely allow ourselves in ordinary times.

In a world where news is constantly evolving and the truth is often obscured, the role of journalism as the collective guardian keeper of our consciousness has never been more crucial. The decline of local journalism continues to threaten the fabric of our society, “News Without a Newsroom” serves as a wake-up call for communities to recognize the importance of supporting and preserving local news outlets. And as Martin Luther King Jr. famously stated, “We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now.”

The risk is not only in the crisis itself, but in the habits it leaves behind. When people grow used to gaps in information, when self‑censorship becomes the path of least resistance, a community begins to accept what it once challenged. Because once a community stops challenging what matters, the drift is almost invisible at first. Standards soften. Expectations lower. The space where public life once lived begins to thin. What was once a shared reality becomes a collection of private guesses. That is how a society forgets itself—not in a single moment, but in the slow erosion of attention, the quiet surrender to whatever fills the silence. The only antidote is to look directly, to insist on seeing, to keep the record alive.

About News Without a Newsroom

News Without a Newsroom is a documentary examining the collapse of local journalism and the civic consequences that follow. Through on‑the‑ground reporting and intimate stories, the film explores how communities navigate information gaps and what is lost when oversight

The Post’s New Buyouts: A Familiar Tragedy

The Washington Post’s latest wave of layoffs has reopened the same wounds—another attempt to “right size,” “streamline,” or “future proof” a legacy institution that once defined American journalism. Veteran reporters, editors, and staffers are again being ushered out with severance instead of ceremony. The silence I encountered that morning has become institutional.

The tragedy isn’t just the shrinking headcount. It’s the evaporation of institutional memory. The quiet disappearance of the people who carried the Post through Watergate, wars, elections, and reckonings. The newsroom that once held power accountable now finds its own people afraid to speak above a whisper.

And hovering over it all is the same question that haunted my documentary:
What happens when the people who tell the world’s stories can no longer tell their own?

Marty Baron’s Warning, Now in Real Time

Marty Baron’s ‘Collision of Power’ feels eerily prescient in this moment. His book chronicled the uneasy triangle between Bezos, publisher Fred Ryan, and the newsroom itself: a collision of money, mission, and modernity. Baron described a newsroom caught between the gravitational pull of billionaire ownership and the ethical weight of journalism’s public duty.

What he captured on the page is now playing out in the hallways he once walked.
The tensions he warned about—between editorial independence and corporate ambition, between journalistic rigor and technological disruption—have only intensified. The latest exodus feels like the next chapter of the same story: a newsroom squeezed between the demands of a digital marketplace and the expectations of an owner whose vision for journalism is shaped as much by algorithms as by accountability.

Baron wrote about power colliding. Today, we’re watching the debris fall.

The Documentary That Became a Mirror

When I began filming News Without a Newsroom, it felt like a provocation—a question posed to an industry that still believed in its own permanence. But today, the film feels less like a question and more like a mirror. What was once a documentary about a possible future has become a document of the present.

Its themes have only grown sharper: newsrooms shrinking, journalists silenced by fear, the rise of AI‑driven decision‑making, the disconnect between billionaire owners and the reporters who carry the mission. What I captured outside the Washington Post that morning now plays out across the industry.

News without resources. News without protection. News without a home.

The film’s title, once metaphorical, has become literal.

And in many ways, News Without a Newsroom now reads like the cinematic companion to Collision of Power: one told from inside the executive suites, the other from the sidewalk outside the building, camera in hand, watching the institution lose its compass in real time.

A Vision for What Comes After the Drift

News Without a Newsroom was born from the belief that journalism is no longer confined to buildings, presses, or corporate hierarchies. It lives in the hands of those who refuse to stop asking questions, even when the doors close, even when the newsroom shrinks, even when the journalists inside are too afraid to speak.

But the documentary was also a warning: When a newsroom loses its compass, the public loses its North Star.

The Post’s brutal cuts are not just a business decision. They are a cultural alarm. A reminder that institutions can erode quietly, one resignation at a time. A signal that the future of journalism may depend less on legacy giants and more on the outsiders, independents, and documentarians standing on the sidewalk with a camera, trying to capture the truth before it disappears.

The tragedy is slow. The warning is clear. The vision, if we choose to see it, is that something new can still rise from the dust.

Democracy and journalism don’t die in the darkness. They wither in the quiet, procedural “no” that stops progress not out of principle, but out of habit. They fade when institutions become so tangled that they discourage participation, silence their own storytellers, and lose sight of the public they were built to serve.

That’s the danger when a newsroom loses its compass — and why News Without a Newsroom feels more urgent than ever.