Since the year began, there has been no shortage of news.
There was the driver who barrelled through a New Orleans crowd, killing 10 on New Year’s Day. Then there were the LA wildfires, plane crashes and the spread of bird flu. Not to mention President Donald Trump’s return to office and the flurry of changes that came it: the termination of more than 200,000 federal employees, a freeze on foreign aid, a new Elon Musk-helmed office trying to access taxpayer data, a proposal for the U.S. to take over war-torn Gaza, a fiery exchange with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, executive orders banning trans people from sectors of public life, and on and on. When there’s an onslaught of news, how do journalists know where to put their energy and sanity?
This is something NBC News Digital Senior Executive Editor Tom Namako thinks about every morning when he wakes up at 5 a.m. and starts combing through the news that happened while he was asleep.
“There are days when I am very emphatic and passionate about, ‘We need to be on these three stories — let’s put resources around them,’” he said. “And we have an excellent team of editors, and the advantage sometimes of being in this news environment is everyone’s timeline is a little different, so they’re seeing things I have missed.”
Below, Namako spoke with NBCU Academy about what makes a good news pitch, how to tie government action to those affected, and when to explore the larger patterns of why things are happening and where they are headed. Our conversation has been lightly edited and condensed.
What must a pitch have for you to consider it? What would make you or one of your editors say, “Yes, go out and report this”?
Our coverage for NBC News Digital is in three major buckets: Is it urgent, is it exclusive, or is it distinct? And that’s how I encourage editors and reporters to think. “Urgent” meaning it could be breaking news, but it can also be something that’s going to happen very soon that we should plan for. “Exclusive” is revelatory reporting. Revelatory information is one of the hallmarks of good journalism. And then “distinct” can mean a variety of things — something that’s much deeper, more enterprising, fun or interesting, or just a darn good story, something that makes us stand out and stand apart.
We’re looking for ideas that are robust, deep, thoughtful. They have great detail that help tell the story.
We’re in a moment where there’s no shortage of news to cover. What do you say to journalists who may feel overwhelmed about what to pitch?
I would look for patterns. This is applicable to the Trump administration, but it’s applicable to other storylines as well. Think to yourself: How often has somebody said this thing? How often have we seen this happen in the past? And then ask yourself, why is this happening?
In the case of DOGE slashing federal agencies, it’s also important that we’re not just capturing what’s happening inside the agencies, but also what the effects are on the ground. We had a great story from a freelance journalist about how the USAID freeze was impacting land mine removal in Cambodia. That, to me, was a good example of something happening in Washington that has reverberations around the world.
Let’s break down the coverage of a massive news event like the dismantling of USAID. Like you said, there’s the news of the cuts itself, and then there’s the impact. What are the stories that need to be covered on day one versus day two versus day five?
Day one is, let’s make sure we have somebody who’s capturing all these developments and figuring out which reporters have sources inside USAID. We have found that people are coming to NBCNews.com in breaking news moments because they want to make sense of a world where information can flow so quickly and be incorrect on social media. So, on day one, it’s trying to get an understanding of what is happening in the moment.
Day two is when you really start to think about, “OK, what has happened, and what are the effects of that going to be?” And hopefully, from our sources and our inside reporting, we can have an idea of “OK, these programs are being cut or might be cut. What do those programs do? What would the impact be if that went away?” And then get in touch with people who manage those programs and the beneficiaries of those programs.
Right, when news moves on to the next big story, when do you go back and follow up on older stories where the impacts could still be happening?
This is a perennial question for us. Because the news moves so fast now, and we as journalists move so fast, and society’s interest level moves so fast that big, major things happen and then everyone collectively moves on. Social media moves on. The media moves on.
We make a concerted effort, usually via the national desk and our enterprise desk, to make sure we’re going back in a month or so, or even a couple weeks, to the folks we spoke to in the moment and ask, “What do I need to know?” That’s where a lot of accountability reporting comes in, where we learn where the failures were and who needs to be held responsible for those failures.
How do you balance what readers need to know versus what they want to know?
Your job as a journalist is to understand your audience but also to inform them. It’s such a huge balance. One of the things about digital journalism I really love is that we have immediate feedback from our audience about what they are interested in. Do we write to what our metrics are showing us, like, does that dictate what we do day in and day out? No, and it shouldn’t. But do we need to take the signals that our audience is giving us? Do we need to interpret what they’re saying to us and let that guide us about what they are trying to learn more about and are interested in? Yes, that is important.
It’s a constant balance. For example, when the Trump administration came in and enacted a lot of executive orders and policies and priorities immediately, we followed that very closely. We probably shifted away from nonpolitics coverage for a few weeks, but then we remembered our readers are coming to us for more than just news of what is happening out of Washington, and we need to make sure that we capture that.” We average about 85 million unique visitors a month, and they need to be served with the topics they want to read, like pop culture, tech and business. It’s a good reminder that we’re a broad-interest news organization. We have to meet that goal.
In these moments when the news is nonstop, what is your North Star? What should journalists remind themselves is their primary job or the goal of this work?
People are entrusting us with their time and attention, and we have to take our audience very seriously. I try to remind myself and the newsroom of that all the time. Expanding that audience and diversifying that audience should always be a North Star.
Another North Star is that the point of journalism is to make sure that we are revealing things that are in the public good and are of the public interest. We have to be able to inform people about what is going on in the world around them, so that they can make good decisions about their lives.
