Immersion: What Media Gets Wrong by Not Going Deep

In January 2025, just after the Inauguration of President Donald Trump, Switchyard organized a gathering of journalists from across the country to discuss how we would go about covering the new administration. We gathered together the biographers of Michelle Obama and Mitch McConnell, authors of books about the Koch Brothers and The Family, about Amazon and Google and Facebook, about the rise of white supremacy and the cash value of racism. We featured writers and editors for the New York Times, the LA Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Mother Jones, for StoryCorps, This American Life, and Reveal. We also had musicians, filmmakers, novelists, essayists, and poets. 

As we had hoped, the gathering was a source of solace, a call to action and a chance to recommit ourselves to our values and best practices and a rekindling of our belief in the power of storytelling, in all its forms. In these unprecedented and difficult times, we are once again reporting on a president who characterizes journalists as enemies of the state and jokes about killing us. And he empowers and emboldens state and local level officials to indulge their most authoritarian impulses. Here, in the heart of Tulsa, on the grounds of the Tulsa Race Massacre and the end of the Trail of Tears, we have state officials who have sought to block the teaching of that history while requiring schools to buy Bibles branded with the new president’s name.

The solemn question each of our panels addressed: What are we going to do now?

In this live episode, we hear from Ted Conover, Quraysh Ali Lansana, Christopher Leonard, and Elliott Woods with responses from Theodore Ross and Esther Honig.

Ted Conover the award-winning author of Cheap Land Colorado: Off-Gridders at America’s Edge, Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing, Rolling Nowhere: Riding the Rails with America’s Hoboes, Coyotes: A Journey Across Borders with America’s Mexican Migrants, and several other works. He has also written for The New Yorker, New York Times Magazine, and Harper’s. He is a professor at NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute.

Quraysh Ali Lansana is author of over twenty books in poetry, nonfiction, and children’s literature. He is a Visiting Associate Professor of English/Creative Writing at the University of Tulsa and an alumnus of the Tulsa Artist Fellowship. Lansana is Executive Producer of KOSU’s Focus: Black Oklahoma, a monthly radio program, which has received a duPont-Columbia Award, a NAACP Image Award, and a Peabody Award nomination. 

Christopher Leonard is a business reporter and author whose work has appeared in The New York Times, Fortune, and Time magazine. He is the New York Times-bestselling author of The Lords of Easy Money, The Meat Racket, and Kochland, which won the J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award. He is the founder and director of the Watchdog Writers Group at the University of Missouri, a nonprofit investigative reporting center. 

Elliott Woods is the host of Third Squad, an Edward R. Murrow Award-winning podcast about the Afghanistan War. He has covered America's post-9/11 wars, veterans' issues, politics, humanitarian crises, right-wing extremism, and the environment for numerous publications, including Texas Monthly, The New Republic, Outside Magazine, and Wired. His work has received an Overseas Press Club Award, a National Magazine Award, and a Chairman's Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Theodore Ross is the editor-in-chief of the Food & Environment Reporting Network. He is an editor, writer, and television and audio producer with more than twenty years of experience at national publications, websites, and productions. He was an executive editor of The New Republic, and an editor at Harper’s and Men’s Journal. His writing has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, The New Republic, The Atlantic, VICE, and Businessweek.

Esther Honig’s work focuses on the intersection of agriculture and immigration. Her work has been published by The Nation, Snap Judgment, Latino USA, NPR, and Mother Jones. She is a recipient of the UC Berkeley 11th Hour Food and Farming Fellowship and her work has been recognized by the Edward R. Murrow Awards and the Society for Professional Journalists. She is  a producer for StoryCorps where she helps everyday people tell their own profound and illuminating stories.