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On June 14, a journalist named Mario Guevara stepped out into the street—Chamblee Tucker Road in Doraville, Georgia, north of Atlanta. Guevara, who is forty-eight, wore a red polo, jeans, and sporty sunglasses, black-rimmed with lenses tinted greenish-blue. He also had on a black helmet and press vest, indicating himself plainly as a reporter. In 2024, Guevara had started MG News, a digital outlet, and before that he’d worked for Mundo Hispánico, a local Spanish-language newspaper. Since 2004, when he arrived in the United States, he had been covering immigration for Spanish speakers in the Atlanta metropolitan area. He’d left El Salvador because he had received death threats for his journalism.

That day in June, hundreds of people were gathered for a “No Kings” rally against President Donald Trump. Above them was a bright blue sky dappled with puffy clouds. Guevara was on the ground, livestreaming. Police officers were also there, in riot gear, body cameras on. “Keep an eye on the guy in the red shirt,” one said to his colleagues. “If he gets to the road, lock his ass up.”

You’ve likely heard what happened next. Police approached Guevara from one side, holding shields. He backed away; his feet touched pavement. The other men leaped forward. “Officer, officer, I’m a member of the media, officer,” Guevara said. He was charged with obstructing law enforcement, assembling unlawfully, and being a pedestrian walking on a road. DeKalb County decided not to pursue the charges, but he was taken into the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. (The Gwinnett County Sheriff’s Office also booked him for traffic-related violations; those charges were dropped, too.) At the time of his arrest, he had been legally authorized to work in the US and had a path to obtaining a green card. “If I am deported, I will leave with my head held high, because I am convinced it will be for doing my work as a journalist and not for committing crimes,” hewrote from jail. “That said, I will leave with a broken heart and my dignity tarnished.” He remained in ICE detention for more than a hundred days, during which time he celebrated his birthday. Then he was deported.

Guevara’s case is a singular and devastating blow to this country’s commitment to freedom of the press. There’s also something almost allegorical about the step-by-step of his arrest: a member of the news media, just doing his job, being pursued from multiple angles, pressured to retreat. Most journalists can relate to the feeling of forces closing in. Some, like Guevara, fear law enforcement. Others are preoccupied by the collapse of journalism’s financial models; private equity’s disruption to local news; layoffs; unnerving trends in defamation law; lack of access to what should be public events or documents; direct attacks on press freedom by heads of state; an increasing willingness of media’s corporate owners to appease the powerful and interfere with coverage; the wild spread of mis- and disinformation; the displacement of vetted reporting by influencers whose claim to (or interest in) ethical guardrails varies; the aversion of legacy newsrooms to ideas that might upend treasured (however archaic) conceits; plummeting trust in journalistic institutions; the rising prominence of artificial intelligence; persistent lack of representation when it comes to people of color, queer and trans people, disabled people, poor people; despair, notably among journalists from Gaza; low pay; low morale; gambling’s takeover of sports media; or that sometimes, gunshots will strike a news van.

If you have been reading the Columbia Journalism Review for a while, you know that I could go on. I have been working here since the summer of 2018, when I was hired as the managing editor. Mostly, I help colleagues and freelancers bring their coverage into existence. Occasionally, I write. Before coming to CJR, my background was in magazines, where I developed a sense of journalism as a group project, one in which everyone involved plays an essential role. I think there is, in the face of everything, dignity in that—and that anyone engaged in this line of work is connected to CJR as part of this much larger whole. The mission of CJR, “to be the intellectual leader in the rapidly changing world of journalism” and “the most respected voice on press criticism,” one that “shapes the ideas that make media leaders and journalists smarter about their work,” rests on an assumption of shared stakes. No one of us may have all the answers when it comes to solving the problems of the press, but we’d all do well to do what journalists do: try to figure out what, exactly, the story is.

The story of journalism that we’re living through at the moment is complicated. Its plotlines and characters are often messy, noisy, and wearying. Much is blamed on the dearth of objectivity. I’m not sure that’s the problem, or some new problematic source. “I have yet to see a piece of writing, political or non-political, that doesn’t have a slant,” as E.B. White put it in 1956. “All writing slants the way a writer leans, and no man is born perpendicular, although many men are born upright. The beauty of the American free press is that the slants and the twists and the distortions come from so many directions, and the special interests are so numerous, the reader must sift and sort and check and countercheck in order to find out what the score is.” Revisiting that recently, I wondered if White had presaged the very-online news consumption mode that many of us—especially my non-journalist friends—embrace. The reality now is one in which the distortions are so pervasive that every individual, not just reporters, is passing media (typed, filmed, posted, whatever) through an individual sieve. Including what ChatGPT spits out, in deluges of robo-speak bullet points.

My friend John Bennet—an editor at The New Yorker for more than forty years and a professor at the Columbia Journalism School for twentysomething years, who died in 2022—had lots ofaphorisms for reporting and writing. Some of us who worked for him refer to those sayings often. One of my favorites is: “The bias of journalism is coherence.” It’s tempting to define this era of journalism as the Trump years and to address the specific harm he has caused the press—including, notably, the fact that ICE deported Guevara under his direction. But Trump doesn’t get all the blame or the credit; our story is not his to own. We could focus on the global crisis that has emerged as misinformation collides with authoritarianism. Or other turmoil related to tech—the collapse of news publishing’s advertising market, for instance. But these, or any single idea, can’t neatly fit everything on its plate. And it’s not like there’s only doom and gloom: as ever, journalists are imaginative, resourceful, and driven to do their work some way, somehow.

That leaves CJR to follow these leads and try to make connections visible where we can. To write an ambitious reported feature about how media executives at a major network have been interfering with political coverage. To check on how a national news story is impacting a local newsroom. To experiment with the capacity of AI to summarize news or detect fakery. To look where news consumers fall in the gap between fact-based journalism and partisanship, or propaganda. To solicit ideas from a variety of smart people, from inside and outside the news industry, about how to defend press freedom in a place that lacks it. It’s a big job. You might not know this, but we’re a small group: It’s just a couple of editors, one staff writer, and three fellows whom we hire for an academic term out of the journalism school. We have a few dedicated freelancers who write articles, edit copy, make art, produce our podcast audio and social media (that’s one person doing both jobs), and provide technical support. We also work with occasional contributors. Everything we do, it’s a team effort. My hope is that, if you’re reading this, you willsupport us by becoming a member.

This summer, Mario Guevara’s daughter Katherine spoke about his work at a press conference at the Georgia State Capitol. “He chased stories that mattered, stories that told the truth about immigration, injustice, about people who usually go ignored,” she said. Lately, his son Oscar, a photographer who works part-time shooting sports stories for the Gwinnett Daily Post—had been helping keep MG News afloat. And yet, as he said in a court document, he could not fill the reporting gap that his dad left behind. “My father is a very caring and brave person,” Oscar Guevara said. “He says as a journalist you can never be scared.”

Maybe so, but when scariness and vulnerability do arise, they’re best not faced alone. So if it feels like being part of the journalism world has you walking on an edge, there just may be something for you in CJR on which to hold steady. Or maybe you’re just looking for a good thing to read. Either way, welcome. As for Guevara, he is now back in El Salvador—and back to reporting.

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**Betsy Morais is the acting editor of CJR. **