Libraries have long been associated with books, quiet reading rooms, and rows of computers. But as remote work has changed where Americans spend their working hours, public libraries across the country are expanding their role as community workspaces.

From rural communities in Maine to the growing city of Mesa, Arizona, public libraries are adapting their spaces to accommodate people who need somewhere to join a meeting, collaborate with colleagues, study, launch their small business or simply get out of the house with their laptop.

Research from Australia suggests that this shift is not limited to communities in the United States. In a 2026 study published in the Journal of the Australian Library and Information Association, researchers surveyed 97 public library branches in New South Wales and Queensland to examine how libraries are accommodating remote workers. They found that 80% of responding libraries reported an increase in work-related use since 2022. 

Maine invests in libraries as remote work infrastructure 

Launched on August 3, 2023, the Maine State Library’s “Remote Work Through Libraries” Initiative went beyond providing financial support. It was designed to strengthen individual communities by helping libraries develop spaces and services tailored to local needs.

According to Marijke Visser, Director of Library Development at the Maine State Library, funding came through the state’s Department of Economic and Community Development, using money from the federal American Rescue Plan Act. The department sought ways to support remote workers, the economy and communities.

“The libraries are kind of a statewide infrastructure,” Visser said. “They really spread out across the state pretty well, and they’re even in more remote areas.” Maine has 256 public libraries, and she noted that most serve populations of less than 5,000 people.

The initiative funded 40 libraries to develop or enhance spaces for remote work, with each location adapting its approach to local circumstances. Some renovated existing areas, while others purchased technology, installed privacy features or created spaces for meetings and video calls.

As of July, participating libraries reported 48,175 workers using new or newly enhanced coworking spaces and 16,726 new remote worker library patrons. The figures were collected through quarterly reporting requirements, tracking overall users and new or non-repeat users. Although privacy principles limit the personal information Maine libraries can collect from patrons, the state compiles usage counts, broad surveys and community demographic data to understand its audiences.

“We definitely expanded the definition of what remote work is,” Visser said.

That broader understanding recognizes that a library workspace can serve more than just employees working independently at a laptop. Parents may work while their children use family-friendly spaces, and entrepreneurs and small business owners may need somewhere to manage their operations. The Australian research has similarly identified freelancers, entrepreneurs and small-business owners among those who use libraries as workplaces, whether working alone or alongside others.

According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, 36% of employed people usually work from home. In the United States, The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that 22.6% of employed people worked remotely. These numbers show the relevance of work arrangements and the potential for libraries.

In this sense, libraries are becoming flexible community infrastructure rather than alternatives to conventional offices. The benefits are shown in Maine’s coastal towns, where seasonal populations can change dramatically.

“The coastal libraries in particular have a big influx of population in the summer,” Visser said. “Some of the smaller towns, they double, triple in size.” 

For seasonal visitors who work remotely, libraries can provide something they may not have at a vacation property: access to dependable internet access, workspace and equipment for professional meetings. In rural communities, they can also help bridge gaps in household broadband access.

Connectivity remains central to this role. Visser said roughly two-thirds of Maine’s libraries are part of the Maine School and Library Network, which provides high-speed internet access, email, web hosting and broadband connectivity to approximately 950 schools and libraries across the state.

“At home, we’re such a rural state. It’s still kind of iffy whether you’re gonna have a good enough broadband to do a virtual meeting, or whether you can afford it,” she said. 

Libraries responded with outdoor Wi-Fi access, loanable laptops, and mobile hotspots, charging stations and improved video conference equipment.

However, reliable connectivity alone does not meet every remote worker’s needs. Video calls and confidential conversations require privacy and noise control, which can be difficult to provide in traditional library spaces.

Maine libraries found ways to address these concerns despite physical limitations. Visser said that some libraries operate in historic buildings, including structures listed on the National Register of Historic Places, where renovations may be restricted. Others may not have the infrastructure needed to install new wiring. To work around those limitations, some libraries purchased privacy pods and furniture with built-in charging stations.

Community input also shaped how the funding was spent. Rather than deciding independently what remote workers needed, participating libraries consulted residents before making purchases.

“The libraries looked and asked for input from the communities, but before they were spending the money to say, ‘what would you want if you had a remote workspace?’” Visser said.

Taking a community-centered approach distinguishes public libraries from traditional coworking businesses. Their goal isn’t to provide desks and office equipment, but to integrate remote work into their broader public service mission while responding to the practical needs of their community.

Mesa Gateway Public Library takes a flexible approach

Thousands of miles west, the Mesa Gateway Public Library illustrates another way public libraries can serve remote workers and the wider community.

In August 2026, the library received the 2026 International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions/James Bennett Public Library of the Year Award for its design, innovation and community impact. 

The 28,000-square-foot library was designed around flexibility. As of December 2025, patrons had made more than 5,400 study-room reservations, accounting for over 9,000 hours of reserved study-room time, or roughly 136 reservations per week. 

The library doesn’t track how many reservations are specifically for remote work, as patrons aren’t required to disclose their reasons for using the rooms. Jones noted that the spaces also serve students, tutors, families and other community members.

“I think a lot of people’s work now is collaborative,” Jones said. “When they’re looking for space outside their home, it’s often to meet with somebody else to work on something.”

To accommodate these needs, Gateway has individual study rooms, group rooms and a larger room that can hold up to six people. Flexible seating areas, free Wi-Fi, tables with integrated power and rooms equipped with screens provide additional options for meetings, presentations and video conferences.

This approach aligns with the Australian research suggesting that libraries do not need to operate as dedicated coworking facilities to support workers. Instead, adaptable spaces can serve different purposes and users throughout the day.

Gateway’s ThinkSpot and maker space provide another example of flexibility. When the space is not being used for 3D printing, its tables and chairs can be used for additional work or study space.

“It’s not always the maker space,” Jones explained during a tour of the facility. “It’s also tables and chairs and seats” for the people who need them. 

The facility also includes a community room that can accommodate larger groups and a range of activities. These spaces prove how people use libraries to work, learn and gather together.

“More and more people want to use the library as a place to be in and not just a space to come and get a book and leave,” Jones said.

Libraries as a free workplace and “third place”

One of the main advantages of libraries as workplaces is that they are free and accessible to the public. Unlike traditional coworking spaces, which have a U.S. national median cost of $259 per month for memberships or $35 for day passes, libraries allow people to work without paying for a desk. They also provide an alternative to coffee shops, where customers are generally expected to make a purchase, and homes that may lack reliable internet or a suitable working environment.

For one remote worker who responded to an anonymous survey in Maine, this accessibility made a significant difference: “Quiet public spaces to remote work are so helpful for me. Private co-working spaces can be quite expensive and very noisy. I am so grateful to the Camden Public Library.”

Beyond affordability, libraries offer a change of environment for people who might spend their working days at home. Jones describes the library as one option on a remote workers “menu” of places to work, noting its flexibility by saying, “I think that’s another thing that makes the library attractive. You can come and go.”

This flexibility connects to the concept of a “third place”, a location outside the home and traditional workplace where people can spend time working and interacting with others. Libraries can provide a shared public setting for remote workers without requiring them to participate in a formal coworking community. Their value is not only providing a place to work, but also offering a place to be part of the wider community.

However, this role comes with challenges. Unlike coworking spaces, which can prioritize the needs of professional development, public libraries must accommodate all of their visitors. The Australian study found that some libraries reported concerns about remote workers occupying limited spaces for extended periods, increased noise and conflicts with other library activities. 

These tensions highlight the difficulty of balancing different needs within a shared public space. Libraries must support remote workers while providing access for students, families, readers and other community members. Their success as third spaces depends not on becoming dedicated offices, but being inclusive to serve the wider public.

A new role for public libraries

The changing role of public libraries shows how people think about work and community space.

Maine and Mesa demonstrate different responses to that need. Maine takes a funding approach, providing statewide support that allows individual libraries to identify local needs and invest in technology and workplace resources. Mesa takes a flexible approach through its space design and adaptability, creating environments that accommodate multiple user groups.

Neither approach attempts to turn the public library into a corporate office. Instead, both recognized the opportunity that the modern library can serve everyone. Australian research suggests that this shift is occurring beyond the United States, but both Maine and Mesa demonstrate the future of library-based remote work will ultimately depend on the communities around them.

The office may no longer have one fixed location. It can be wherever people have the space, technology and connectivity to get their work done, and for many, that place may be their local library.

The post From Maine to Arizona, public libraries are rethinking the workplace appeared first on The Reynolds Center.

The Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing hosted a webinar on September 15, “Private Equity, Public Health: Finding the Balance,” to help journalists understand the growth of private equity and other financial actors in healthcare. 

The panel featured Joseph Bruch, assistant professor in the Division of Health Policy and Economics at Weill Cornell Medicine, and Jane M. Zhu, associate professor of medicine at Oregon Health and Science University. Reed Abelson, a reporter for The New York Times who covers the business of healthcare, moderated the discussion.

Financialization in healthcare

Understanding private equity in healthcare requires looking beyond the initial acquisition and examining how financial relationships change after a deal is completed. For journalists, that means tracing not only who owns a healthcare organization, but also how money moves through the organization. Bruch emphasized that following those financial relationships can help reporters understand who ultimately benefits from private equity involvement. 

Bruch encourages journalists to investigate what happens to the money within a healthcare organization after a firm becomes involved. This includes dividend recapitalizations, the resale of healthcare real estate, or the subsequent sales of the acquired company.

The spread of private equity firms throughout the U.S. healthcare system has put more emphasis on tracing what happens to healthcare dollars and assets after acquisitions. Rather than stopping at who purchased a healthcare organization, Bruch encourages journalists to follow the financial activity that occurs afterward. 

“Where is the money from the healthcare center going? How is this over time? What does it mean that these financial firms will have more and more of the financial assets of our health system? And who really is profiting?” said Joseph Bruch, assistant professor in the Division of Health Policy and Economics at Weill Cornell Medicine.

One starting point for journalists is Medicare data on provider practice and specialty, available through the Research Data Assistance Center. The data can help reporters identify whether an individual Medicare provider is connected to a particular practice by linking providers through their National Provider Identifier and Tax Identification Number. This can be useful when investigating whether physicians who may appear to be independent are actually a part of the same practice and identifying the organizations connected to them.

The Agency for Healthcare Research Quality Compendium of U.S. Health Systems can then help journalists move from individual providers and practices to the larger healthcare systems they belong to. The compendium identifies health systems and connects hospitals, physician groups, nursing homes and other healthcare organizations to those systems. It can help reporters determine whether a healthcare organization involved in a private equity transaction is part of a larger system, rather than treating it as an isolated organization.

Commercial databases such as IQVIA OneKey can provide another layer of information by helping journalists trace corporate parents, affiliations and organizational relationships. These databases contain information on healthcare providers and organizations, including relationships between organizations and their corporate parents. For journalists, that can be useful when ownership is spread across multiple subsidiaries or when the company that appears in a transaction is not the ultimate corporate parent.

Journalists can use the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ Provider Enrollment, cChain, and Ownership System, or PECOS, to investigate ownership information reported to Medicare. PECOS contains provider enrollment information, including ownership, managing employees, billing arrangements and related organizations. Used alongside other sources, it can help journalists compare the ownership that healthcare organizations report to federal regulators with the corporate relationships they find elsewhere.

Tracing ownership is only the beginning. Bruch explained that journalists should also investigate the underlying financial flows rather than assuming what the acquisition means for patients or providers. Even when an acquisition doesn’t immediately result in higher prices or charges for patients, it often results in changes to the business model. A hospital, for instance, may have opportunities to generate revenue through facility fees, while other financial arrangements can involve outsourcing functions such as revenue cycle management, or RCM, to private equity-owned companies. Other mechanisms can relate to the type of treatment patients receive, some of which may generate more revenue than others. Bruch explained that one of the biggest challenges is the lack of data and studies that would give journalists more to cover across different healthcare settings.

Acquisitions in private equity versus non-private equity 

Changes can also come on the cost side of the equation. Staffing is one of the first “cost-cutting measures that hospitals sometimes take,” Zhu said, after private equity acquisitions bring interest payments, lease payments, and cash reserves into consideration.

In her presentation, she shared a study that used hospital cost-report data as a proxy for staffing levels to compare the average change associated with private equity acquisitions with non-private equity acquisitions in the emergency department and intensive care units.

The authors found a 12% to 17% reduction in total hospital employees and a 16% to 18% reduction in salary expenditures in emergency departments and intensive care units after private equity buys a hospital, compared with other hospitals. In contrast, non-private equity acquisitions showed an increase in both the number of hospital employees and salary expenditures.

In another study examining whether price effects may be related to consolidation in healthcare within anesthesia practices, economists found the initial acquisition had little effect on prices, but subsequent acquisitions increased prices immediately by 18%.

Abelson later questioned the caution of overgeneralizing within healthcare reporting, meaning private equity’s impact in hospitals compared to physician practices. 

Zhu responded that the data is unbalanced when comparing hospitals and nursing homes with physician practices. Referring to a study of hospitals and nursing homes, she explained that outcomes are easier to measure for quality of care because of the greater availability of data. She later mentioned research on physician practices and the challenge of identifying a direct outcome because of the wide range of practices. For journalists, this means we can’t use one study and overgeneralize that information in our reporting. 

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The Examination and The New York Times won the Gold Award in the Global/National category for “The Poisonous Lead Trade,” and POPLab and Connectas took Gold in the Regional/Local category for “The Profitability of Fear.” Barron’s reporter Nick Devor received the Outstanding Young Journalist Award for his coverage of the gambling industry. The Reynolds Center for Business Journalism at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, which administers the awards, will spotlight the top winners at an event Nov. 9 in downtown Phoenix.

“This year’s winners underscore the incredible role in-depth investigative business journalism can play in keeping the public informed about the issues that affect their well-being and way of life,” said James B. Steele, half of the Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative duo Barlett & Steele for whom the awards are named. “Using the latest as well as time-honored reporting tools, these journalists shine a light on abuses committed by powerful interests.” 

This is the fifth year that the Barlett and Steele Awards have recognized publications across two distinct categories, Global/National and Regional/Local, in order to honor more of the incredible investigative work being done across the United States. Each category features a Gold, Silver, and Bronze award. These awards come with cash prizes of $3,000, $2,000, and $1,000, respectively. The Outstanding Young Journalist Award features a cash prize of $3,000. The Barlett and Steele Awards are named for the illustrious investigative business journalist team of Donald L. Barlett & James B. Steele.

The Gold Award in the Global/National category was won by a team of reporters from The Examination and The New York Times for an impactful investigation into an American company that supplied some of the world’s most recognizable carmakers with lead from shoddy factories in Nigeria that was poisoning workers and residents. The Poisonous Lead Trade prompted swift reaction from the Nigerian government and attracted widespread attention across the country, while also pressuring American car companies to improve oversight of their supply chain.

The Silver Award in the same category went to an investigation by Reuters reporters that looked into Donald Trump’s crypto wealth and explored the cost to everyday people who believed the president’s promise of a new kind of finance. The Bronze award goes to “Cancer Calculus,” a yearlong investigation by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, which revealed a devastating portrait of a health care system that has created global inequity in accessing necessary cancer medications, and the lengths one pharmaceutical company went to ensure prices and revenue remained high.

The Gold Award in the Regional/Local category goes to The Profitability of Fear by a team of reporters from POPLab and Connectas, which covered how insecurity became a big business in Mexico and how the same company that has yet to fulfill promises of safer communities is also expanding its presence in the United States. The investigation revealed patterns of opaque contracting, unverifiable results, and a structure that is bound to invite corruption.

The Silver Award in this category goes to the San Francisco Chronicle for its investigation “Failed to Death,” which exposed how the country’s largest behavioral health companies exploited a state regulatory loophole, allowing the companies to reap massive profits while patients suffered the consequences. The Bronze Award goes to SMUGGLED, a collaboration between The Marshall Project-Cleveland, the Columbus Dispatch, and the Cincinnati Enquirer that investigated the constant flow of illicit drugs into Ohio prisons that has doubled the discipline for incarcerated people, despite millions of tax dollars spent on security upgrades.

The Outstanding Young Journalist Award goes to Nick Devor of Barron’s for a series of coverage on the gambling industry that ranged from the 1-800 addiction helpline to regulating prediction markets and focused on the industry’s massive impact across society and the potential harm to Americans’ wallets and mental health. 

“Twenty years after these awards were created to honor the best in investigative business journalism, the change-making work submitted for consideration continues to demonstrate the centrality of business in people’s lives,” said Dr. Jeffrey Timmermans, director of The Reynolds Center for Business Journalism. “It’s incredibly encouraging to see such great reporting in such a variety of publications, as well as the collaborative nature of the top entries.”

About the winners

Gold – Global/National Category

In a story that influenced the Nigerian Senate to declare a national emergency, The Examination and New York Times reported on the dire conditions workers and nearby residents of the local lead recycling industry were experiencing. “The Poisonous Lead Trade” reported that 70% of volunteers working or near lead processing factories, which supplied materials to American carmakers, had dangerous levels of lead poisoning and soil testing revealed conatmination near schools, markets and homes. 

The judges noted that what made this piece stand out was the significant effort the publications made to ensure that the people most affected by the story were also able to read it. This meant partnering with local news outlets to share findings so they could report their own stories under their own bylines, in their own language, to reach residents and policymakers that could act. This was a true testament to the power of a collaborative press and the impact that is possible when good investigative reporting meets compassion that centers the human in every story.

Silver – Global/National Category

A team of reporters at Reuters pulled back the curtain on Donald Trump’s crypto business ventures that highlighted the president’s conflicts of interests and the playbook that allowed the Trump family to invest little-to-nothing and walk away with billions. Using Trump’s disclosure reports, crypto trade information, and property and financial records released by the courts, the reporters calculated the family made $2.3 billion, while retail buyers and investors lost vast sums of money.

In the first half of 2025, the president’s family raked in more than $800 million in sales from crypto assets, much of which came from foreign sources. Despite the claims of separation between the presidency and his family’s businesses, the reporters showcase that the relationship remains blurred and is a story worth documenting.

As the judges noted, the stories included “intricate details, demonstrated very strong reporting chops, and illuminated the unprecedented conflict of interest between Trump’s family crypto ventures and his public role as overseer of U.S. crypto policy.”

Bronze – Global/National Category

“Cancer Calculus” began with a tip from a Russian pharmaceutical representative who alleged corruption in global drug pricing that prompted a large collaboration between the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) and 47 media partners in 37 countries. Through hundreds of interviews, with doctors, patients, experts, regulators, and individuals impacted by cancer around the globe, the reporters were able to demonstrate how the cancer drug Keytruda was just one blaring example of a broken global system meant to deliver care. 

The investigation found that the company Merck, which owns Keytruda, had exploited the global patent system to prevent cheaper alternatives from coming to the marketplace while the company raked in $31.7 billion in revenue from the drug in 2025 alone. In the United States the medication can cost a staggering $208,000 a year prompting patients to seek the drug outside the country where it is considerably cheaper. The reporters found multiple cases where this dynamic had created the opportunity for counterfeiters to cash in on the demand at the expense of cancer patients.

As the judges noted, “these stunning reports could easily be titled ‘Profits over Patients’ as it showcases a health care system that has created global inequities in access to pricey cancer drugs, as drug counterfeiters take advantage.”

Gold – Regional/Local Category

“The Profitability of Fear,” an investigation by POPLab and CONNECTAS, examined how the Mexican government consistently responded to rising violence with an increase in surveillance technology. Despite billions in public funds spent on cameras, drones, and other monitoring systems, violence continued to increase in many states and the technology often failed when relied on to solve crimes.

The reporters pored over more than 700,000 internal fiscal records and revealed a pattern of opaque contracting that was ripe for corruption. Additionally, they found that the surveillance systems were occasionally being used for purposes outside of crime prevention, including identifying and monitoring people participating in protests. After the investigation was published, the Mexican president announced audits of surveillance contracts receiving federal funding.

The judges believe that “the scope, importance, and impact of this investigation, accomplished in the most challenging of environments, make it the clear winner this year.”

Silver – Regional/Local Category

The San Francisco Chronicle investigation, “Failed to Death,” began with a tip from a former patient who said he was locked inside a psychiatric hospital. Cynthia Dizikes and Joaquin Palomino found that between 2019 and 2024, 18 people had died after receiving care at California for-profit psychiatric hospitals and 12 of those deaths occurred at Signature Healthcare Services facilities. Patients and families reported assaults, lack of supervision, and wrongful discharges, while state inspectors found understaffing and other safety failures. 

The reporters examined public records, financial data, internal communications, confidential documents, and thousands of pages of sworn testimony. They found that Signature’s hospitals had reported paying more than $200 million to companies controlled by or connected to its CEO since 2011. The investigation also found that the CEO had sold six hospital properties for $380 million in 2017 and leased them back at higher rates, potentially diverting money from staffing and patient care. Following the investigation, California adopted the nation’s first minimum nurse-to-patient ratios for psychiatric hospitals and imposed $1.8 million in fines connected to the impact of the Chronicle’s reporting.

The judges noted that this was a rigorous investigation into a national problem and “a prime example of giving voice to the voiceless by meticulously exposing a mental health care system that delivers hundreds of millions of dollars in profits while patients suffer.”

Bronze – Regional/Local Category

A drug-soaked paper known as K-2, the most common drug in Ohio prisons, was at the center of a year-long investigation by The Marshall Project – Cleveland, Columbus Dispatch, and Cincinnati Enquirer. Through hundreds of records, hours of prison footage, and interviews with those inside and outside state prisons, the reporters found that despite increased security measures, drugs were still finding their way inside prison walls. They found that too often staff smuggled in the drug and got off with no charges, while other smugglers continued to find new methods to funnel drugs inside, including using drones to drop them over prison walls, as no one was truly being held accountable.

Because of this reporting, state lawmakers are considering stronger drug smuggling penalties, and a county prosecutor dropped criminal charges for an incarcerated whistleblower in a drug smuggling case. According to the judges, this investigation was “an eye-opening deep dive into a topic that’s received little attention elsewhere.”

Outstanding Young Journalist

Barron’s reporter, Nick Devor, delivered a landmark story on a New Jersey court decision to remove the national 1-800-Gambler helpline’s national sponsor and return millions in donations. Devor was the only reporter in the room when the decision was made and his reporting uncovered how the helpline sat at the front of a debate on national vs. local caller support and why advocates expressed relief when the helpline lost its national sponsor. He also revealed that the regulatory body in charge of overseeing the fast-growing prediction market industry had been dwindled down to a single enforcement attorney, meaning there was no better time for corrupt actors to make their plays.

Devor’s coverage of the gambling industry has repeatedly produced exclusive reporting that not only breaks important news, but holds the powerful accountable. This is why the judges believed Devor was a perfect example of what the Barlett and Steele Awards stand for and is why he was chosen as this year’s Outstanding Young Journalist. The judges look forward to seeing what Devor reports next.

—

The Reynolds Center will spotlight the recipients of the top prizes at an event on Nov. 9 at 5 p.m. Arizona time in the First Amendment Forum at the Cronkite School in Downtown Phoenix. Tune in to The Reynolds Center event page for updates on the live event.

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But a new digital frontier is putting those retention efforts at risk.

Sony Group Corp. announced in July it will end physical disc production for its Playstation gaming console by 2028, meaning game software will be available only by downloading it from company servers. Future consoles will no longer have a disc drive.

Microsoft Corp. followed up Sony’s press release with its own announcement of a disc-to-digital feature, which would give owners of discs a digital license of the game as well – a move more focused on embracing the physical media. Testing for the feature is underway.

Companies’ turn toward fully digital production isn’t surprising news. Physical game spending fell 11% in 2025 compared to 2024, according to industry analyst Mat Piscatella from Circana. But the temporary lifespan of games, a product of constant updates and server maintenance, makes it difficult to retain the original copy, or even preserve the game itself.

Digital archivists and academics are concerned about how the changing landscape will affect video game preservation for archives and broadly for the consumer. Still, some remain optimistic of community involvement and ongoing conversations with industry members.

A 2023 study by the Video Game History Foundation and the Software Preservation Network found that only 13% of all video games are commercially available, only three percentage points higher than salvaged pre-WW2 audio recordings. 

In history, the video game industry has never made more than 20% of video games available for purchase.

“For the first time, something that’s in the hands of a significant part of the global population could disappear in an instant if one person somewhere makes the decision,” said Torsten Reimer, the dean of the University of Chicago Library.

Video games give academics a snapshot of a cultural era, and are part of a long line “the most ancient forms of human expression,” said Laine Nooney, a professor at NYU. They also said games often remain at the front of innovation in digital platforms, such as microtransactions.

“Games always did it first,” Nooney said. “Understanding that history, I think, is an important part of understanding our history of transformations in the economy, in labor, and technology, and leisure time, and domestic life, right? Games are connected to everything.”

But issues with video game preservation didn’t just start because disc production is ending at Playstation, Nooney said.

“There were many things that you did not own the right to do with that material, even when you had a physical disc,” Nooney said. “The risks economically to Sony, I think, are fairly limited, and the preservation problem continues in a way that is, I think, not that different from the circumstances we were already in.”

The problem mainly lies in how newer games transitioned into full online dependency. They now run on servers and get multiple updates or patch notes, meaning the disc a consumer gets may not be playable until extra content is downloaded.

Groups like Stop Killing Games are particularly focused on the online-dependent format, garnering over a million signatures to keep servers alive after the end of support.

At the University of Arizona, the Learning Games Initiative Research Archive stores video games, consoles and cultural items like magazines. Ken McAllister and Judd Ruggill started the archive to preserve not just the software, but the cultural impact the game left behind. So far, they’ve acquired thousands of games and more than a hundred consoles.

But they aren’t in the market of hoarding games so they can collect dust.

“It is our own sort of gonzo nature,” Ruggill said. “A part of our archival philosophy is preservation through use.”

On the other side of the country, the University of Chicago Library Games Collection follows the same philosophy, collecting games for students and scholars to engage with. 

Kent Lambert, Associate Director of the MADD Arts Labs, said their focus is on usage as well, but they’ve also talked with developers and industry experts on ways to preserve media. 

“Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft – they are doing work to preserve their own games, but the terms are very limiting, both for consumers and certainly for institutions like our own,” Lambert said. “How can we, as an institution, engage, collaborate in that work? Are there pathways for us to do that?”

But Lambert also said the work for companies to preserve their games, which is something he spoke with an archivist at Sony about, is a “gargantuan effort.” He said his institution is trying to find ways to help in that effort.

Methods to preserve

There are some methods of preservation Lambert said they use to add games to their catalog, such as the Steam PC Café feature to mass share game licenses. They also reach out to developers for access to their software.

Another solution libraries and academics point to is emulation. Game emulators mimic original video games to recreate an experience while not using original files or code. 

Eric Kaltman, a professor of media and technology studies and history at the University of Alberta, said fans are leading the effort.

“The hobbyist community creating essentially commercial-grade emulators that can support the interpretation of this old data is absolutely essential to my research and a lot of the work that I know people are doing,” he said.

Fan communities have even revived old components of games through its original code, rather than complete replication. Project Sunrise is an initiative to revive unplayable content from Destiny 2, an MMO shooter, that’s been “sunsetted,” or removed from the game to save space for newer content.

“I got very nostalgic about playing back in the day when I was in school, and all of those old maps that I loved very much were all gone.” said Stanislaus Jusek, the creator of the project. 

Since he started the initiative, Bungie announced this September it is planning to revive vaulted content in future updates amid community backlash.

The U.S. Copyright Office did review whether or not to exempt academics so they can offer remote play for unplayable games, like those that lose server management. But this push failed in 2024 when the office sided with the industry, as opponents argued the move could “present a serious risk to an important market,” according to the final decision.

Potential litigation pushes academics like Lambert away from modifying software and more toward other avenues of preservation. 

Lambert said there are worries that tampering with the software could violate copyright laws, but he wants to look at ways to backup software through fair use.

“It’s not something I take lightly,” Lambert said. “But I hope that we can start to very thoughtfully find ways.”

Kaltman said there are many games that will disappear and are nearly impossible to retain.

“The most popular games that exist are, in some sense, unpreserveable, because they constantly update, they are constantly changing, and so the best way we found to actually figure out what’s happening is to go back to how you would have done historical research in the past,” Kaltman said.

One of these alternatives for historians is capturing moments of gameplay, or finding footage on video platforms like YouTube.

“If the content disappears, there’s still a general record of it, not unlike a newspaper writing about an event,” Ruggill said.

Research into digital preservation and software retention is still in its infancy, Kaltman said, but it has the potential to solve problems with digital archives beyond video games.

“Our research into game preservation has significant ability to transfer across all sorts of other disciplinary boundaries,” Kaltman said. “The age where most people would have their documents not mediated through software has been over for a while.”

The Learning Games Initiative is taking a different approach to video game preservation by storing cultural items as well, from foreign cover boxes to collectibles like posters and magazines. 

Despite many video games getting lost to history, Ruggill said the impact they leave behind and remnants of play are equally worth archiving.

He remembered a moment in the archive where a woman, accompanied by her partner who perused the library, appeared bored until she stumbled upon a gaming badge, a collectible patch that retro gamers could obtain by sending their high score to a developer. 

He said he saw her melt, as she recalled her father getting one of these patches and sewing it on her jacket so she could talk about it at school.

He said these moments are what reminded him the importance of preserving not just the game, but the culture surrounding it.

“That, in a way, is a much more precious and important preservation of the game than the actual game itself,” he said.

The post Video games are getting harder, sometimes impossible, to preserve, academics say appeared first on The Reynolds Center.

Ticket resale market

When you’re looking to get a ticket to see your favorite artists in concert, there are two avenues you can take: the official site or resale online. This creates two markets: the primary or official sale of tickets by the organizers, and the secondary market, which involves reselling by individuals, bots, or other third-party brokers.

In the United States, there is currently no federal law that prevents scalping. However, there is a growing push at the state level to address scalpers, most commonly when it comes to concert ticket prices.

Some states have made it illegal by requiring anyone selling or reselling tickets to hold a specific license, and Massachusetts State Senator Dylan Fernandes has proposed a bill titled “An Act to make Noah Kahan tickets affordable for the rest of us,” which would prevent tickets from being sold at higher than 110% of their original price.

Most recently, Washington DC now has one of the strictest anti-scalping laws in the country, with the RESALE Act banning bot scalpers, speculative tickets (when a ticket is listed for resale by a broker who does not actually possess a ticket yet), and instating a price cap of 10% on resale tickets. 

While this kind of legislation has been backed by dozens of musicians, bands, and fans, there is some debate as to whether price caps are the most effective way to curb scalping and protect fans. A report by the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that “the caps generally are not effective because they are difficult to enforce,” and that they “could send resale activity underground, where there are fewer protections.” Other research corroborates the idea of price caps backfiring onto consumers, such as this 2025 study comparing ticket fraud rates in capped markets in Australia and Ireland with the U.K., which found that ticket fraud rates were higher in the capped markets. 

There are other potential methods of curbing scalping, as seen most recently in the U.S. with the World Cup. FIFA introduced a new system of dynamic pricing, using an electronic system adjusting costs in real time to fans’ demand. While potentially effective at limiting overpriced resales, the dynamic pricing sparked huge backlash from fans, who saw ticket prices become unaffordable and “[transformed] the world’s most important soccer tournament into a two-tier, gentrified commodity.”

Collectible resale market

The gentrification of hobbies is not unique to event tickets. In nerdier spaces of gaming and collecting, scalping has been a known issue, taking the fun out of many beloved activities.

An article titled “The Hobbies Scalpers Are Ruining” published last year by GameRant puts the idea more eloquently than fan pages and Reddit discourse, saying, “More and more, people are being priced out of their pastimes by jerks looking to shake down dedicated fans. The idea of simply being able to pay fair market value is quickly becoming a notion of the past as we are being bludgeoned by our own FOMO by ruthless scalpers.”

While trading cards have the biggest reputation for dealing with scalpers – including anything from baseball cards to Pokémon and Magic: The Gathering – there is much less regulation to deal with the issue beyond event tickets. This leaves businesses and fans to deal with the slowly-poisoned well themselves.

The Pokémon Company has undertaken an especially unique experiment to combat this issue, as in late July, it announced that it was introducing a mandatory facial recognition system at some of its locations in Japan, to better enforce its purchase limits that prevent scalpers from buying too much stock.

While fans acknowledge that scalping is “detrimental” to the trading card game, the response to this policy has been predominantly negative, with much of the criticism being around the overreach to people’s privacy. The policy states that the “face image data” will be properly managed and deleted “after a certain period of time,” a vagueness that has not addressed many concerns.

Outside of company-wide announcements, even local game stores find themselves caught in the crossfire between fans and scalpers. Mike Laza is one such small businessman who has been accused of scalping Pokémon cards, despite owning a game store, Funkatronic Rex, in North Phoenix and having a license to sell the cards.

“I’m not doing anything wrong, but it’s just indicative of how collecting changed post-pandemic,” Laza said in reference to the accusations. 

“Before people collected out of joy,” but now, he says, many people only see the monetary value in these hobbies. “It fooled non-nerds or people who aren’t appreciating or playing the games into thinking this is just a market to suck the value and investment from.”

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To help guide journalists in tackling a book project, the Society for Advancing Business Writing and Editing (SABEW) held a webinar on July 28. The panel brought together journalists who successfully made the leap to authorhood, including Megan Greenwell, Patrick McGee, Kate Conger and Ryan Mac, all of whom are finalists in SABEW’s 2025 Best in Business Book Awards. Caleb Silver, editor-in-chief and senior vice president of Investopedia and chief business editor at People Inc., moderated the discussion.

Making the leap

“This is one of the hardest things you can do as a business journalist,” said Silver. “There’s the writing of the book… then there’s everything that happens after.”

Though it can be intimidating, Greenwell added that “journalists writing books actually have a huge advantage,” as their knowledge of both their specific beat and the media world will really come in handy in getting their book out there after it’s written. She noted that even with a publisher’s experienced marketing team, authors still need to do a lot of work to market the book.

Greenwell made the jump from journalist to first-time author in 2022 and felt that her experience as a well-established narrative journalist helped her credibility when pitching a narrative book. She also waited until she had the right book in mind to write: “I was very aware of the burden of the first book, you know? You want it to be really good and you want it to sell well, because the second one can be very hard to even get a contract for if the first one doesn’t sell well. I really did take my time, and I ended up being very grateful for that.”

Despite waiting for the right idea, Greenwell noted that she had an agent for years before she made the pitch, but journalists can also develop their ideas well before finding an agent. What’s most important is finding one you work well with when the time comes to make your pitch. Mac emphasized that “your agent should be your biggest advocate, whether that’s for money or for promotion.”

McGee added that an agent will know what makes a good pitch and can take care of a lot of stuff behind the scenes for the author, like pitching to publishers and setting up interviews. Although he wasn’t familiar with the publishing process before his first book, he had a great meeting after connecting with an agent through another author and was asked to submit a pitch. He felt his agent “was very clever in the process” because, rather than ask for a full 70-page pitch right away, the agent asked him for bits and pieces of the pitch over the course of four months, which felt much more manageable. “It just gave me such confidence…I thought that was ridiculously helpful.”

Timing is key

Authors should plan on a 6- to 12-month waiting period between submitting the final manuscript and publication, which can cause some worries when working on a time-sensitive subject.

“One thing you can’t plan for, so therefore you can’t really give much advice on, is getting the timing right,” said McGee. He shared that in the eight to nine months from when he submitted his manuscript for Apple in China: The Capture of the World’s Greatest Company to when it was finally published, Trump won the election and took office again. That ironically made the book’s content even more timely since Apple was directly impacted by the incoming series of tariffs.

Conger and Mac, who co-wrote Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter, noted that choosing how to end the book was quite difficult for them. “There was a lot of stuff that we wished we could have included, but we couldn’t,” Mac said, reflecting that the book can be viewed as capturing “a moment in time.” In the time after the duo submitted their manuscript, Musk had endorsed Trump and the election took place.

Greenwell agreed with that sentiment. Though she wrote her book, Bad Company: Private Equity and the Death of the American Dream, by following how private equity has impacted individuals in the housing, healthcare, local media, and retail industries, the conversation has since largely shifted to private equity in youth sports. “As a reader, [that] is something I really love about books. They are published in a certain moment and they don’t have to be all-encompassing,” said Greenwell, adding that such books are still valuable to read even years later.

Still, there is a way for authors to add additional insights even after a book is published. McGee mentioned that he was able to write an epilogue for the paperback edition of his book, and Conger and Mac are considering doing the same for theirs. The panelists shared that doing so can be a great way for authors to address new developments that have taken place since the publication of the book and reflect on the material.

Building trust 

McGee found the major difference between writing a book and “day-to-day journalism” for him to be the length of time you have to retain a reader’s attention. His solution was to build trust with the reader throughout the narrative.

Greenwell agreed on the importance of trust overall, especially whenever you are working with sources you will be writing about. When writing about high-profile individuals, Conger added that it’s important to be careful and thoughtful to protect your sources while also doing your best to avoid any legal issues that could arise if someone is unhappy about the book’s contents. 

Journalists may also find it beneficial to partner with another journalist for a book project, such as Conger and Mac did. The two developed a strong working relationship at the New York Times, and when the Twitter takeover happened, their roles in the book project developed easily since Conger was a Twitter beat reporter and Mac had covered Elon Musk in depth. “At this point, I feel like we are left-brain, right-brain,” Mac said of their partnership. For others looking to do something similar, he emphasized the importance of good communication and proper outlining. Agreeing on what you want the book to accomplish and playing off of each other’s strengths can help make the process much smoother.

Additional tips along the way

Greenwell emphasized the importance of budgeting if you’re planning to work on a book full-time, recommending that others secure an advance before starting a book project. Mac and Conger stayed on as full-time reporters while writing their book, but took advantage of “book leave,” during which they weren’t paid their usual salary but still kept their employer-sponsored health insurance, which can alleviate some of the financial burden while providing more time to write.

The panelists agreed that you don’t need fancy programs to get started writing your book – Conger and Mac wrote mostly in Google Docs together before transitioning to Adobe Acrobat for line edits. Aside from writing, McGee has found ChatGPT and Claude helpful for deep research. All of the panelists are avid readers, with McGee adding that he found it helpful to read other nonfiction works to understand their structure and what captures his interest as a reader, then try to emulate that in his own writing.

Greenwell commented that crafting a successful book isn’t just about good ideas, but also trends in the publishing world. She noted that the nonfiction market hasn’t been quite as strong recently, and “the standards for what kinds of books publishers consider commercial are higher than ever in a way that I think is resulting in the rejection of some really great books.” Still, she is confident that opportunities will remain. “The book market is incredibly cyclical,” she added, so nonfiction will rise in popularity again in the future. For the present moment, her advice to others is to “make sure a book idea is as big as possible, in terms of potential readership” and marketability.

You can view a full recording of the webinar on SABEW’s YouTube page and check out the organization’s website for future panel discussions.

The post Always wanted to write a book? SABEW panel shows journalists how appeared first on The Reynolds Center.

So on July 9, the Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing (SABEW) convened a panel in partnership with the National Institute for Healthcare Management Foundation to address what journalists need to understand about healthcare affordability and what changes or innovations – including artificial intelligence – are driving healthcare costs.

Panelist Larry Levitt is the Executive Vice President for Health Policy at the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF). Marty Steffens, the SABEW Chair for Business and Financial Journalism at the University of Missouri, moderated.

Background

Levitt first spent some time contextualizing the environment of healthcare affordability, saying KFF’s latest polls have revealed 64% of voters are worried about being able to afford healthcare, and 41% of adults have some kind of debt for medical or dental bills, totaling over $200 billion in healthcare debt.

“Medical debt certainly has financial consequences. I mean, it causes people to cut back on other household needs. It can hurt people’s credit reports. But it also leads to poorer access to care,” he said. “In many ways, I think that medical debt is kind of the canary in the coal mine of our healthcare.”

Levitt also explained some of the biggest challenges people currently face with healthcare affordability, including the future impacts of H.R. 1, or the omnibus spending bill passed by Congress in July 2025, which is projected to cut Medicaid by $911 billion over the next decade. The complexity of navigating health insurance, from obtaining insurance to begin with to dealing with prior authorization – where some treatments or medications need to be approved by health insurance before receiving care – also places a burden on patients who may forgo necessary care to avoid financial strain.

“A small percentage of people use the vast majority of healthcare, and it’s for chronic and serious illnesses,” he said. “We don’t emphasize prevention and primary care nearly to the extent they do in other countries. That’s part of the reason we spend almost double on healthcare per person compared to other high-income countries.”

Where journalists should be looking

One of the biggest reasons Levitt thinks journalists struggle to cover healthcare affordability is the idea of timeliness, as these challenges have been around for decades. Levitt and Steffens discussed how, even in the 1970s, then-President Nixon called healthcare costs unsustainable.

“Healthcare is kind of the slowly boiling frog,” he said. “Healthcare costs have risen dramatically over time, much faster than inflation, much faster than workers’ wages, faster than we can afford, but it’s like a steady drip…If something’s been a crisis for decades, it’s hard to make it a current story.”

In addition, healthcare is such a vast and varied system that it’s difficult to narrow down into a neat story.

“Gas prices, you can go to the corner, you can see the gas prices posted, there is nothing like that in healthcare,” Levitt said. “Healthcare is multiple different kinds of services, multiple different industries. There is no single price, there’s not really transparent prices yet, it varies from patient to patient based on the services they’re getting, so there’s not always that one number that allows you to write about it clearly.”

Despite the complexity, Levitt said there are still interesting avenues for journalists to take, especially considering overlap with politics, labor, and technology.

“The government plays such a big role in healthcare,” he said. “Much of healthcare spending is now made by the government. So even what may appear to be a healthcare business story is still a politics story, because you can’t take the politics and policy out of healthcare.”

Artificial intelligence

But how has such a long-standing ecosystem been adapting to the rise of artificial intelligence? While the use of AI in the industry is on the rise, Levitt said it’s still too soon to know exactly what impact it will have.

“I think we’re going to soon be into issues around what type of care can AI provide. There’s a pilot going on in Utah now where AI can renew a prescription. I think we’ll very quickly be into a debate about whether an AI app can actually write a prescription,” he said.

Levitt provided an example of how artificial intelligence might be improving the patient experience by allowing doctors to be more present and attentive in an appointment and allow technology to handle the administrative side. However, he added that the same AI that enables this connection can backfire.

“I think it’s very likely that AI is increasing costs right now, not decreasing,” Levitt said. “Those systems are very effective at upcoding or revenue cycle management, basically increasing costs.”

Upcoding refers to a kind of medical billing fraud that inflates the severity of a patient’s diagnosis or treatment, letting billing departments get greater reimbursements than the actual care provided. This leads to higher healthcare costs for patients through higher insurance premiums, further impacting later access to affordable care.

Insurers are also now using AI to root out inappropriate claims and identify care that may not be needed, and providers and patients are now using it to write appeal letters when their claims are denied, turning the prior authorization process into “bots talking to bots.”

KFF surveys are also seeing a growing use of AI by patients, which Levitt said is partially driven by worries about healthcare affordability, though it’s unclear yet how that trend will impact medical costs.

While many aspects are still unclear, Levitt said this unpredictability is a good aspect for journalists to explore: “I think it’s a huge story in drug development, being able to identify potential new candidates for drugs. Healthcare is, I think, one of the biggest areas where AI is being applied but still very early on, I think, as is true in many other sectors.”

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So on June 23, the Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing (SABEW) convened a panel of experienced independent journalists to give out practical advice.

The panelists included Mallika Mitra, a business and financial freelance journalist, Chris Morris, a contributing writer at Fast Company, Inc., Moneywise and AARP, and Chris Taylor, a personal finance journalist. Ellen Sheng, the founder and principal of Sheng Media LLC, moderated.

The practical tips

The panelists focused on strategies for building bridges in the industry, especially by maintaining a positive reputation and connecting with editors.

When pitching to publications, the three panelists agreed that it’s best to tailor a pitch to a specific editor or organization. Mitra advised pitching yourself to organizations with a specific niche over a narrow idea, as the editors will have an idea in mind of what they want.

“I’ll just pitch them like myself and be like, ‘Hey, you know, these are the places I write for. If you’re looking for more freelance reporters I would love to chat,’” she said.

Taylor recommends getting comfortable with at least one social platform to have a strong online presence, saying it’s helpful for publications if you broadcast your work. He shares both professional and personal developments online, including a recent post about his son’s graduation, saying that the engagement gets people to feel invested in his personal life.

He also stressed the importance of not pitching the same story to multiple editors at the same time, calling it “a recipe for trouble.”

“If you get multiple people saying yes and then you have to choose between those publications, you’ve just burned a bridge. And I think in this business, you know, it’s not that big a community,” he said. “Everybody knows everybody. You don’t want to burn any bridges. You need every bridge you can get.”

Mitra also advised frequently and periodically reaching out to new editors and publications to get on their radar. Over time working in the field, she says she learned to think and plan long-term with her assignments, to ensure she always had stable work.

“Think: ‘Okay, I have a lot of work right now but who knows three months from now,’ and sometimes it can take three months, six months, a year [or] two for that first email to actually turn into an assignment,” Mitra said. 

Morris, who has several regular freelance gigs, sees his role as putting his clients first rather than overt marketing, but echoes the idea that building relationships and fostering a good reputation is key.

“This is a small business. People move around all the time. Maybe someone that has worked with you will move to a different publication and then will reach out to you and say, ‘Hey, can you write some for me here?’ And then you’re exposed to other people and it grows from there,” Morris said. “I think the most important thing that you can have as a freelancer is a good contact list and a good reputation.”

The business side of freelancing 

Aside from active career-building tips, the panelists also had advice for how to handle the administrative side of being self-employed. They covered how to deal with taxes, retirement savings, and what tools they use to keep track of everything.

All three recommended freelancers set up a business banking account and figure out taxes as soon as possible. Mitra says early on she hired an accountant to help plan, and she makes a point of setting aside enough money for quarterly estimated taxes, a sentiment Taylor echoed saying he’s “pretty religious about getting that done.” 

In the United States, people who are self-employed are required by the IRS to file estimated taxes to pay Social Security, Medicare, and income taxes, as they do not have an employer automatically withholding those figures on their behalf.

“Freelancers typically do not have a ton of money coming in and it’s easy to kind of let that slide to the end of the year and then all of a sudden you have a huge bill that you just don’t have enough to cover and then you’re in real trouble,” he said. “So I would say do whatever you have to do to get those estimated taxes in every quarter.”

They also discussed invoices and how to ensure you get paid, with Morris recommending that whenever you start working with a publication, you should ask their billing department what time period you can expect to be paid in, and be persistent.

“There was one publication I wrote for, [and] it took me over a year to get paid just because they were dragging their feet,” Morris said. Sometimes, he added, some employers don’t pay up at all, but there’s often a sense in advance that something is going wrong.

Final tips

Fundamentally, the panelists said it’s crucial to meet deadlines and have clean copy, as that’s the first thing editors look for when hiring freelancers.

“Freelancers need to realize that editors have thousands of people to choose from right now. There have been so many layoffs of outstanding journalists in this business, so there’s a lot of talent out there that you’re competing against,” Taylor said. “There’s no room for error. You need to do the work, you need to do it well, and you need to do it on time.”

More broadly, the panelists all agreed that perseverance, flexibility, and foresight are necessary to make it in the industry.

“Determination is something that you’ve really got to have in spades,” Morris said. “You’ve got to be able to sort of push forward when your instinct might be, ‘Oh, the hell with this.’ You got to have patience for the exact same reason.”

The post Contacts, clean copy & determination: Freelancers discuss the keys to success appeared first on The Reynolds Center.

The vast majority of survey respondents (69.4%) stated their current position was as a reporter, correspondent, or freelancer, with 26.8% of respondents stating they are in editorial or managerial positions. The remaining respondents reported holding other roles, such as researcher, producer, or academic fellow. The median salary for all respondents this year was $92,500, with editors, supervisors, and managers reporting a combined median salary of $109,375. Very few respondents (2.1%) reported a decrease in salary in the last year, with the overwhelming majority (68.9%) reporting a salary increase. The remaining respondents stated their salary stayed the same (26%) or were too new to journalism (3%) to have had a change in their salary.

“The strong hiring and salary increases show that journalists with business expertise remain in high demand – and they continue to enjoy a healthy salary premium over other journalists,” said Dr. Jeffrey Timmermans, director of the Reynolds Center.

That demand isn’t accidental, according to Robert Barba, Board President of the Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing (SABEW) and politics editor at WNYC/Gothamist. 

“Journalists on the business beat play such a vital role in helping readers understand the world around them,” Barba said. “The public relies on business coverage to inform how they navigate their financial lives. I’m heartened to know that my colleagues are being compensated for the work they do.”

Print and digital media outlets are still overwhelmingly where business journalists have found work, with 93.2% of survey respondents reporting from these outlets. The remaining business journalists have found positions in radio, podcast, TV, or wire service outlets. While just over half of respondents (53.7%) reported that their newsroom is currently hiring journalists, the data show that hiring rates vary widely across publications. Journalists at global/national publications were most likely to have newsrooms that are actively hiring (75.4%), while journalists at the American City Business Journals (20%) were the least likely to work at a publication that was actively hiring.

The mix of respondents at print and digital media outlets is similar to the results from the 2025 survey, with a considerable proportion of journalists working for a trade publication (14.5%). The largest share of all respondents, 31.9%, reported working for a regional/local publication. Another quarter (26%) reported working at a global/national publication, with another 17% stationed at one of the American City Business Journals.

A total of 235 journalists from across 34 states (including the District of Columbia) responded to this year’s survey. The most common states included New York, Washington, California, Texas, and Florida. The age and career experience of respondents were very similar to those of the respondents from 2025, with an average age of 40.5 and 11.7 years of experience as a business journalist. 

A career for young and diverse journalists

Young journalists under 30 continue to be a sizable portion of survey respondents in the annual survey, with just over a quarter of this year’s respondents (26.4%) in that age group. Of those journalists, 64.5% reported receiving a salary increase in the last year, and overall, the group reported a median salary of $69,333.

Similar to the data collected in 2025, young business journalists in this year’s survey were more likely to be from diverse backgrounds, with 40.3% of journalists under 30 identifying their own race as something other than white. That percentage decreases to 26.5% in the 40-49 age group and reduces even more to 3.7% for journalists 60 and over. Additionally, 67.7% of journalists under 30 identified as female, compared to 49.7% of journalists 30 and over, and 11.1% of those 60 and over.

There are ample opportunities in business journalism for young journalists to explore their passions and learn new skills. For example, the young journalists in the survey reported a range of different beats that included more traditional business beats such as real estate, development, personal finance, and banking, as well as some less traditional beats such as sports, gambling and prediction markets, technology, retirement and aging, and city government. Young journalists also reported working for every type of publication in the survey and were pretty evenly distributed across the different regions of the United States. While most of the young respondents stated their current position as reporters, 11.5% of those respondents are already working in editor and supervisor roles, demonstrating a strong career path for young journalists.

“Amid the many pressures facing the industry today, it’s worth celebrating the fact that many talented young people are pursuing successful careers as business journalists, and they’re helping to make the industry as a whole more diverse – not just in terms of background but in the new types of beats they are pioneering,” said Timmermans.

Journalists on the move

This is the first year the Reynolds Center included a survey question on the length of respondents’ current position in addition to their experience level. While survey respondents reported an average of 16.7 years of experience as a journalist, over a quarter (27.2%) of the respondents noted they have been in their current position for a year or less. This data showcases that many journalists have been on the move in the last year.

According to the data, the American City Business Journals had the highest concentration of journalists in newer positions, with 47.5% of those journalists reporting a year or less in their current roles. In contrast, trade publications had the smallest percentage of newcomers (6.9%), with the bulk of these journalists (67.6%) reporting 2-5 years in their current position and no trade journalists reporting more than ten years in their role. Regional/local publications had the highest concentration of journalists who have been in their current roles for more than ten years (17.4%), demonstrating the long careers these types of publications can offer many journalists. 

Differences by publication type

For journalists seeking a stable position with a higher salary, it is not surprising that landing a reporting position at a global/national publication would yield the best results. In the survey, reporters at these publications had the highest median salary of any publication type ($116,875) with an average of 5.6 years in their current role. However, these reporters were also, on average, the oldest and most experienced of the groups. Their average age was 41.6 compared to 37.7 overall, and they had an average of 16.4 years of experience compared to the overall average of 13.8 years. 

For younger and less experienced journalists, trade publications may be a wise alternative to consider, as the median salary of those reporters was $91,667, with an average age of 35.6 and 11 years of experience as a journalist. On average, reporters at trade publications have been in their role for 3.3 years, with 76% reporting a salary increase in the last year.

The lowest salary for reporters by publication type was at the American City Business Journals, where respondents reported a median salary of $66,667. This lower salary can likely be explained by the higher percentage of reporters who are new to their roles (45.5% reported being in their role for a year or less), and the fact that this publication type had the youngest average age of all the publications at 31.4. In comparison, reporters at regional/local publications reported a slightly higher median salary of $71,071, but were on average 38 years old with 14.6 years of experience. The average time in their current role was 5.5 years, with 57.9% reporting a salary increase in the last year.

About the salary survey

The Reynolds Center reached out to business journalists throughout the country from small and large publications, including the American City Business Journals. The Center also collaborated with SABEW to invite their 2500+ members to participate between April 27 and May 18, 2026. Although this survey is by invitation only, business journalists are welcome to sign up to receive information about participating in future surveys.

This is the fifth consecutive year the Center has conducted this salary survey after reviving it in 2022. You can view past data results, compare between years, and read more about the survey process on The Reynolds Center website at businessjournalism.org/salary-survey.

The Reynolds Center for Business Journalism was established in 2003 in order to broaden the understanding of business journalism among journalism students, give journalists tools to improve their business coverage while promoting industry best practices, and help freelancers navigate working with a variety of publications. The Reynolds Center is housed inside the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University.

For more information about the Reynolds Center’s salary survey, contact: reynoldscenter@gmail.com.

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Did your source sign an NDA after they told their spouse? 

A panel on building trust with reluctant sources was full of gold. 2026 Pulitzer winner Hannah Natanson talked about establishing rapport by demonstrating she’s just another human, breaking mid-phone call to admit her dog had just peed on the floor. The Washington Post reporter had her home raided by F.B.I. agents in January in one of those alarming threats to press freedom. I like to imagine the two events connecting in some way. 

After the session, I spoke with panelist Khadeeja Safdar about working with sources who have signed non-disclosure agreements. Safdar, who has broken several stories about Jeffrey Epstein’s abuses with The Wall Street Journal, talked about thinking through everyone who might know the relevant information, and who they may have told. Did your source tell their spouse about what happened before they signed the NDA? 

Where will the money come from in journalism’s shift to vertical video? 

In October, I wrote a story for the Reynolds Center about the slew of magazines, newspapers and radio shows hiring social video producers to bring their reporting to TikTok and Instagram. No fewer than three panels at the SABEW conference took on the topic to some degree, but it remains unclear whether the pivot can really pay off while direct revenue streams remain meager and website referrals are just a trickle. 

I asked about this at the end of one panel moderated by Erin Reynolds of The Philadelphia Inquirer. Reynolds said her paper is preparing to take a step some traditional outlets have been wary of: having video journalists present advertisements in their videos. A video on local real estate could incorporate a message for renters’ insurance, for instance. 

Short-form video is undeniably where the audience is, and brand partnerships are certainly one of the few proven ways to turn those eyeballs into dollar signs. How it affects audiences’ perceptions of journalists’ independence is another matter, but I tip my hat to the Inquirer for trying this — I’ll be watching eagerly to see where it goes. 

FOIA for their LLM logs

Are public employees’ AI chat transcripts public records? It depends on the jurisdiction, WIRED editor Tim Marchman said in a panel on FOIA strategies, but where you can get them, they can reveal a great deal. Happy FOIAing. 

Newspaper man Charles Forelle heads to an embattled CBS News

Not everyone in the room enjoyed Semafor Editor Ben Smith’s sparring line of questioning in a lunchtime interview with CBS News Managing Editor Charles Forelle. I did. 

CBS News has been frequently in the headlines as well as breaking them since the billionaire scion and Trump ally David Ellison bought the network in September. The acquisition and installation of a new editorial team — which includes Forelle and The Free Press founder Bari Weiss —  has been read by some as “part of a deal … to make coverage more favorable to the Trump administration,” as Smith framed it in his first question for Forelle. 

Forelle denied the claim. Yet answers to the vexing question of how to restore the network to anything close to the levels of public trust and audience scale it enjoyed in the days of Walter Cronkite were less declarative. Before joining CBS in October, Forelle covered business at The Wall Street Journal for 23 years, and acknowledged that “I am six months into my television life and don’t have all the answers.”

Smith pressed for them nonetheless, asking for a “diagnosis” of why the network’s viewing figures have been trending so steeply downwards since Weiss’s accession last fall. Forelle looked to a “bright spot”: “Around the big news events, we are seeing more viewers come to us,” he told Smith. “We had killer ratings on the White House Correspondents’ Dinner shooting.” 

An audible wince rippled through a room full of correspondents at that choice of words. A transcript of the interview can be read here. 

Energized

Much of my recent work has been on global energy markets — both for the Reynolds Center and in my work in Japan for Cronkite’s Borderlands project. It was great to hear from four of America’s leading journalists on this beat in a panel on data centers. The subject is riven with complex technical terminology and endless data points, and requires imagining what energy even is — when it cannot be simply seen or touched. With that in mind, it was great to hear The New York Times’ Ivan Penn stress the importance of good old-fashioned shoe-leather reporting. Get to know the receptionists as well as the CEOs of utility companies, Penn said. Keep your feet on the ground, and your reporting in the real world. Sage advice.

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