A veteran insider urges journalists to address public anger at inequality and entrenched elites — including the press.
By Alexander Russo
Dick Tofel may not have the name recognition of some of the other folks out there commenting on the state of journalism.
But he’s got something few others have: experience helping found, grow, and lead ProPublica, the nonprofit behemoth founded in 2008.
Three years since leaving, Tofel is the principal of a journalism consulting business and the author of Second Rough Draft, a popular Substack.
In the following interview, Tofel urges education journalists to track Trump’s actions and results rather than focusing on his promises and announcements.
He dismisses many early post-election reactions as attempts to “wriggle off the hook” from covering the big meaning of the election, which is widespread frustration with inequality and elites (including the press).
“We in the press are part of the problem,” says Tofel.
“We in the press are part of the problem.”
This interview was edited and condensed for clarity.
Russo: How well have newsrooms been responding to the Trump win so far, in education or on any other beat?
Tofel: I don’t think there’s going to be as much impact on elementary and secondary education as Trump has implied. One of the themes that I’m trying to impress people with is, as John Mitchell suggested, ‘Watch what they do, not what they say.’ I think it’s important to track the promises versus the action. I don’t think Trump’s serious about closing the Education Department, for instance. I think that was just nonsense, and now we’re going to move on, and he’ll never mention it again.
Russo: Education reporters have spent an inordinate amount of time writing about the potential abolishment of the Department of Education. I feel like journalists waste a lot of their time on this kind of campaign promises coverage.
Tofel: I actually hope that people will focus on campaign promises now that the campaign is over. And the question is, on the education front for instance, whether Trump just nominates someone to be the secretary and moves right along and implicitly acknowledges that the whole thing was a joke. I think for anyone who voted for him for that reason, the joke’s on them and somebody ought eventually to tell them.
The Washington Post spent a lot of time and effort in the last Trump administration counting up the lies. I don’t think there’s any point doing that anymore, because everybody knows that. His supporters and his detractors all know it, and he’s going to keep lying. What would be interesting now, I think, would be a much more serious effort to track what he’s doing versus what he promised. And I think using his promises about education as a frame for the coverage of federal efforts on education would be a very useful thing.
“I don’t think Trump’s serious about closing the Education Department.”
Russo: What about the speculative coverage, reporting on what might happen if and when he does something?
Tofel: Until they start to move in that direction, I feel like that’s a lot of wasted motion. I would be much more interested, if I were a reader, to find out that—and here I am making up future specifics — Trump has nominated six people to jobs at the Education Department that require confirmation. They’ve sent 32 other people over there. They’re clearly not doing anything moving toward abolishing the Department. We read Trump’s one big education speech. Here’s 14 things he’s already not done.
Russo: What should ed reporters or anyone else be doing around the campaign promise of mass deportation?
Tofel: They shouldn’t assume that a loud deportation is a mass deportation. My personal hunch is that there will be a few very loud, performative deportations, and the numbers will not be significant from a national or historical perspective. And it will be really important for the press not to play into a misimpression about that. My guess is that Trump will pass a version of the border bill that Harris endorsed. So that’s not a big surprise, it would have very likely happened no matter who won. And then he will noisily stage a few raids, and then he will declare the problem over. And there will not have been, by any reasonable definition, a mass deportation. He may say 50,000 people is mass but you know, by historical standards, it is not. So it would important to say here’s what Obama did by way of deportations. That’s the yardstick. How does Trump compare to that? Of course, if they actually do deport millions of people, that would be a very big deal and should be reported as such.
Deportation numbers “will not be significant from a national or historical perspective.”
Russo: Have you seen newsrooms adjust to the realities that so many people actually voted for Trump — including a lot of parents and a lot of immigrants and working-class people?
Tofel: Not really. But it’s a little early. I do feel like there’s been too much of an effort to wiggle out of the bigger meanings of the election by focusing on smaller ones. I think all the stuff about tactics has been mostly silly, and I think the stuff on the macro economy has been mostly distracting. The economy was clearly a significant piece of it, but we knew that.
I think people are trying to wriggle off the hook from covering the big meaning of the election, which is that people are really frustrated and pissed off about widening inequality and entrenched elites. And I think one of the reasons that they’re trying to wiggle out of it is because we in the press are part of the problem.
Widening inequality is reflected in the newsroom. We’ve been very proud of ourselves for diversity, and we have lots of kinds of diversity. In many places, we’ve got gay and straight and Black and white and Latino and Asian American people, but if they all went to Ivy League schools we aren’t diverse. That, to me, is a big problem.
Russo: Is there anyone else who’s writing as squarely on inequality as you would like?
Tofel: Alec MacGillis of ProPublica writes about a whole range of things, some of which are related to education. He’s the person probably covering this, which I think is the biggest story in the country, more squarely than almost anyone else. The New York Times’ David Leonhardt thinks a lot about this. The Times’ Eli Saslow, in his own way, writes about it a lot.
“I think people are trying to wriggle off the hook from covering the big meaning of the election.”
Russo: What’s it like with your newsletter Second Rough Draft trying to get people to think about and change journalism from the outside?
Tofel: You know, I don’t really feel like I’m much of an outsider at this point. I’m just a less encumbered insider. I wouldn’t pretend to be an outsider. The difference is that I’ve had my last full-time job. I’m not dependent on foundation funding anymore. I’m 68 years old, or about to be, and so I’m somewhat more liberated in what I can say — which are often things many people don’t say aloud (or at least in public) but do think. I don’t really think it’s an outside perspective so much as it’s a little bit of a liberated insider’s perspective.
Russo: Is it satisfying? Do you feel like you’re making a difference being able to say things that people think but don’t say?
Tofel: I think it helps a little. I don’t think it’s changed the world, but it helps a little. Sometimes the newsletter seems to resonate with people. Just judging by the size of the audience and the open rates and the growth trajectory, it’s in a very small world, but in a very small world, it seems to get some notice.
Russo: What are some of the most important things that you’ve been able to say in this role?
Tofel: Two that are significant, I think, are criticizing institutional philanthropy when I think that’s warranted, and questioning what I see as an imbalance in favor of funding journalism intermediaries rather than newsrooms directly.
Russo: What’s your thinking about the role of foundations in journalism?
Tofel: Institutional foundations aren’t really where American philanthropy is. They’re not the leading edge, certainly not the risk capital they often say they are. And they’re not the preponderant amount of money in American philanthropy. So I think people focused on the foundations are probably mostly focused on the wrong thing. You know, the real big trends in philanthropy in the country are major donors and small donors. People who focus on the foundations as emblematic of philanthropy have largely missed the picture. They haven’t been the center of gravity of American philanthropy for years.
“I think people focused on the foundations are probably mostly focused on the wrong thing.”
At every one of the successful nonprofit newsrooms, major donors who are making their own decisions are more important to them than the institutional foundations.
I say it all the time: Foundations ought not be your principal fundraising target, because they don’t stick with anything for very long, they change strategies, and they’re not where the money is in the aggregate. Is there anybody who gives more than Knight or MacArthur? There may not be. But ProPublica and the Texas Tribune and the Marshall Project and CalMatters and I think almost everybody you could name in nonprofits who has gotten a lot of money and been relatively successful, it’s because of major donors.
Yes, there’s foundation funding, and it’s not trivial, but it’s the major donors that are the distinguishing factor.
Previously from The Grade
How ProPublica’s Alec MacGillis dominates the education beat.
Schools are ‘hugely dynamic places,’ says Eli Saslow
Zimmerman: I was wrong about the school culture wars
Complacency and inertia (MacGillis interview)
‘We could have been a lot louder,’ says NPR’s Anya Kamenetz
‘I don’t think I did enough,’ says former PBS correspondent John Merrow.
