Last night I attended a symposium at NYU Skirball Center about the future of journalism and its role in a polarized world.

I went because my close friend Tina Brown was talking and this is a topic I care about passionately. Traditional journalism, let’s face it, is in crisis. Deep-dives are expensive and newsrooms are shrinking and cutting budgets.

As I listened, I felt so grateful to all of you for supporting my work here. And so grateful for the Substack platform and for the direct dialogue I am able to have with all of you. I don’t just learn from my sources. I learn from you, especially when you write me. I learn from the people who tell me they hate what I write. That’s OK. I’m eager to learn and to discuss. The one thing worse for democracy than a heated, over-the-top conversation is no conversation at all. Thus, the danger of living in a country as polarized as this one is that the Right and the Left don’t talk to each other. One looks down on the other and vice versa. Each thinks they are in possession of true facts and the other team is deluded.

I’ve felt the division keenly recently because I’ve been spending a great teal of time far from New York in the Pacific North West reporting for the book I’m writing with James Patterson about the awful murders in Moscow, Idaho.

Moscow is a mostly liberal town, but Idaho, as you know, is deeply Republican. Many of the people I’ve interviewed bring their guns into the room with them.

Read on at Vicky Ward Investigates