Why I Started The Center Square: A Return to Real Journalism
I’m Chris Krug, and you probably have no idea who I am.
I’ve lived three decades watching American journalism transform into something I barely recognize. I started my career in the analog era, when newsrooms were filled with reporters who saw their job as holding government accountable to the people who fund it. You could still smoke in the newsroom, and pretty much everywhere else.
By 34, I had left the Denver Post, where I served as the Night Editor, to run the newsroom of a suburban Chicago daily because I believed local news truly mattered and that the internet could revolutionize how we connect with readers – speaking with them, not at them.
What I didn’t anticipate was how that same technology would eventually be used to manipulate rather than inform.
Let me give you a recent example that crystallizes what’s gone wrong.
When Hurricane Helene devastated Western North Carolina, FEMA ran out of disaster relief money for American families. Many of them lost everything. At the same time, FEMA was spending millions housing migrants in luxury hotels in New York City. These are both verifiable facts, documented in government records and spending reports. As well, they were confirmed by a spokesperson from the Biden administration, a spokesperson from FEMA, and then-Secretary of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas. When The Center Square reported both sides of this story as factual news, legacy media outlets called our coverage “biased” because politicians began using the comparison after our story published.
Every worthwhile news organization has (and should have) an agenda. But let’s be clear, an agenda is a list of items for discussion. A worthwhile and sincere agenda is open. It seeks to find truth in a specific area of the news – whatever area it may be the organization is choosing to cover. An effective news agenda creates a conversation with an audience that would benefit from the reporting the organization seeks to bring forward. As a process, the core of the news agenda should be curious, skeptical, and consistent in its pursuit of truth. And those in the process should be challenging each other throughout the planning, reporting, editing, publishing (or airing) – and then afterward with an honest consideration for the resonance of the work.
An agenda is not an orchestrated attempt to create, maintain, and perpetuate a narrative as long as possible. Some news agendas ultimately destroy credibility to an extent that it requires the writing of a perplexing book such as “Original Sin,” by CNN’s Jake Tapper and Axios’ Alex Thompson.
And as much as I hate (strong word, but applicable here) the current vernacular of news “narrative,” I suspect that I will have to use it more often to contribute thoughts to the current state of news. Sadly, so much of what the American news consumer reads is reported from within a consistent construct of what clearly is an agenda. The patterns and one-sidedness are unmistakable in combination.
I’ll share some of the things that we are doing at The Center Square to be a force for good in the news. The Center Square is the culmination of 30-plus years as a reporter, editor, and publisher in news media. It was created for this moment, and that is why it’s thriving. Not every idea I come up with is a good one. The Center Square is a good idea because it is staffed with great people who aspire to do great journalism.
I took over a dormant, financially upside-down foundation in 2017, parted ways with the entirety of its staff, and then completely rebuilt it to focus on one goal: providing Americans with straight news about their government without the spin.
Within two years, we launched The Center Square newswire – the first state-focused competitor to The Associated Press (AP) in generations. The AP is such a great competitor to challenge, because it has been around for nearly 180 years, treats its member partners poorly, gouges them for every penny they can, and then force feeds it some of the most openly progressive news produced in the world today.
The Center Square’s name itself reflects what we’re trying to build. There was once a time in America when people from all walks of life gathered in their local town square to share information and discuss what mattered to their community. That common meeting ground – where facts were facts regardless of your politics – is what we’re working to restore.
The response has been extraordinary. Today, The Center Square provides about 300 stories each week to more than 1,000 media outlets. We average over 1 million republications annually and reach 141 million Americans daily – a majority of the adult population. This isn’t because we’re pushing an agenda. It’s because there’s massive hunger for government accountability journalism that simply reports what happened and pays very close attention to the use of the tax dollars that Americans send their government to manage.
We produce zero of our own opinion content. There is far too much of that clogging up the news marketplace. Every story from The Center Square asks one question: What do taxpayers need to know about how their government operates and spends their money?
This approach – looking at government through the taxpayer’s lens – used to be standard practice in American journalism. For some news publishers, talking about the size, scope, or cost of government is decried as biased toward conservative interests. That, of course, is ridiculous. Whether you are being asked to pay an extra 5 cents for a plastic bag or being taxed an extra 56 cents on every gallon of gas you pump, everyone has the right to know where those pennies are headed and whether they are accomplishing anything other than making them poorer every day.
Over the next few weeks, I’ll share what I’ve learned about how we got here and, more importantly, how we can fix it. I’ll explain how the industry shifted from those stoic, accountability-focused newsrooms I first joined to the politically driven operations that dominate today’s landscape.
But I'll also show you something encouraging: that local news can thrive without government subsidies or controlling patrons when it focuses relentlessly on what citizens need to know.
The Center Square proves there’s still a market for journalism that treats readers as intelligent people capable of forming their own conclusions when given the facts.
This conversation starts here. Thanks for joining it. Let’s catch up again soon.
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