Recent searches
Search options
I saw someone expressing very understandable frustration this morning about not seeing any headlines about a Trump admin EO (executive order) that was posted late last night, and I think this is maybe a good way to explain in real time how an EO becomes A News here.
I’m not going to get into the substance of the EO! (It’s bad, of course.) I’ll just walk through its movement through the media ecosystem.
Please be gentle with each other in replies, things are rough.
Beforehand: I’m not a working journalist, but I’ve done various kinds of journalism, worked with newsrooms, and—maybe most relevantly—been a person reporters email and text late at night and early in the morning to ask for analysis and explanations.
What I learned doing those things changed my understanding of how news works on, like, a mechanical level. Maybe this will be useful to others.
Here is the EO, published the night of Feb 19: https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/02/ensuring-lawful-governance-and-implementing-the-presidents-department-of-government-efficiency-regulatory-initiative/
If you're a reporter/reporting team in a newsroom working this story, you need to find people with the right expertise to explain and contextualize it and break down the likely effects.
Those people are not inside the newsroom, they're in your phone contacts or someone else's phone contacts or on the internet.
So you start making calls and talking to people who have what seems to your newsroom like relevant expertise.
Or…
Or you go fast and shallow, aggregate a couple of people posting their hot takes on Twitter/X, add some context at the top, and run with that—which is much faster than having actual conversations.
That's what Politico did here, in the first writeup of this EO I've personally come across:
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/02/20/trump-order-review-federal-regulations-00205143
(They aggregate two X posts, both from right-wing sources, and kinda imply they're covering both sides of the story. This is…v Politico.)
Or another fast thing…
Another fast response is what the NYT does here, which is to throw the EO onto their big tracker (ty to the Times reporter who posted a gift link) to get it onto the board, and link directly to the EO itself:
@kissane
Kudos to the NYT (something I’m not saying a lot these days!) for that “so-called” qualifier
@inthehands @kissane Over-under on when that headline gets stealth-edited?
@obviousdwest @kissane
Heh…yeah. But I gave up betting on the NYT years ago. Just savoring the small win here.
@inthehands @kissane I glory in the fact that *someone* employed there had the guts to publish this headline. It’s pretty surprising, tbh. I wonder if they’ll leave it alone if enough lefts wingers $lick on it?