Q&A: Chris Krug

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Q&A: Chris Krug
Chris Krug has been in the news business for more than 25 years. | LinkedIn

Chris Krug is the president of the Franklin News Foundation and the publisher of its watchdog news outlet, the Center Square, which was founded in 2019. He has more than 25 years of experience in the news business and was previously vice president of the Chicago Sun Times.

Q: Why do Americans have a low opinion of the media?

A: Americans have problems with national media.They have problems with the networks and with cable TV news. They have problems with the major print outlets that they feel are one-sided or untrustworthy. But they have the greatest level of trust for their local news outlets. I think that’s because they’re close enough to the news that they can double-check it by asking someone.

There’s also a different level of accountability in local news. One of the things that I think makes our organization unique is the vast majority of the people who work for us came up through local news, and the value of that is that these journalists had to live and walk among the people for whom they reported the news. They stood in line with them at the grocery store, their kids played baseball with other people in that community, there was a personal connection and an accountability that frankly just does not exist at the national level.

Q: A lot of journalism students dream of going straight into national media outlets in big cities like Los Angeles, New York, and Washington, D.C. What’s the case for starting at a state or local news outlet?

A: It’s to learn to do journalism the right way and to do it in an environment where you can fail, but not fail and never recover. One thing I really appreciate about Hillsdale is that journalism is a minor, not a major. I don’t have a journalism degree; I learned to be a journalist. For me, journalism was about trying and learning and failing, and I got to do that in Meadville, Pennsylvania, at a 19,000-circulation daily newspaper. Don’t get me wrong — in coming up through the industry, there were absolutely people I knew who came out of more traditional journalism schools and were elevated to the top rung of the ladder in their early 20s. But I don’t know if that necessarily benefited them, because they didn’t have time to grow. Journalism is one of those races run step by step; it’s a marathon and not a sprint. My path has been really fulfilling and satisfying because I’ve learned in real time how critically important it is to be thorough, factual, honest, and to perform with integrity and serve a readership by giving them access to things that they otherwise couldn’t access on their own.

Q: How has the quality of journalism declined?

I think there are very few people who are writing original news at this point. That is, in my view, the biggest loss of all. A story gets written and enters into the news ecosphere. This person grabs it, maybe adds something to it, maybe just rewrites it, maybe doesn’t do anything with it. This next person takes it and forms an opinion on it. As a consequence, we have people making policy decisions as a consequence to public outcry over a story that maybe wasn’t right in the first place.

Q: What’s the reason for this?

A: I think it comes back to the economics of the industry that you just don’t have that many people to do the work. Then it becomes a matter of what kind of work your media company chooses to do: are you creating news or are you recreating news? These companies are out there simply putting their spin on whatever it is that was originally reported, either willingly or unwittingly distorting the news.

Q: What are the most valuable skills you look for in a journalist?

A: There are two parts to being a good reporter. You have to have a high level of curiosity and  you have to have the courage to ask challenging questions. That first part is the most important part. We can teach people how to write, how to put words together, how to arrange thoughts. You can’t teach somebody to be curious. If you come equipped with some level of curiosity and the willingness to ask challenging questions that ultimately coax the truth from people with power and authority, you can be highly effective as a reporter, whether you can write or not.

Q: What is the mission of the Center Square?

A: We cover statehouse and statewide news with an economic perspective that resonates with taxpayers and small business owners, entrepreneurs, innovators — people who want to create, free from government overreach. We take pride in the fact that we’re writing the stories that people are talking about or the stories that people should be talking about. It’s that interest in what’s going on with government, how government spends money, what government is doing with the money we send to it — the economics of it. We want our journalism to be highly-accessible short stories that are impactful and get to the heart of how tax dollars are being spent.