John Adams

And then I said, let me tell you how we do our job, why we do our job, why this information is important, why the Montana Constitution has a right to know.

And I kind of explained just sort of like the whole process and how the role that journalism plays in representing the public, in holding their government officials accountable.

And it didn't take long for them to make those connections and see that this was a more complex story than the soundbites might have you believe.

And that takes work, right?

Every journalist doesn't have time to go out there and have individual conversations about every single story.

But we do through the technology and the platforms that we have access to now, like what we're doing right here, we can show our work to a broader base of people.

We can talk more about not just what we do, but how we do it, why it's important.

And it doesn't all have to be negativity and it doesn't all have to be accountability.

Some of it is, you know,

We provide a public service that isn't always just, you know, getting people in trouble or, you know, quote unquote, holding public officials accountable.

A lot of what we do is just informing people.

A hundred percent.

And I mean, we do that, you know, at Montana Free Press.

That became really obvious to us in the pandemic, right?

Like there were just a handful, there were three of us.

And, you know, the beautiful thing is we have such incredibly powerful tools.

Some of the technologies and some of the platforms and some of the things that, you know, we could point to that said, you know, these are part of the problem.

And, you know, one of the things that we did that I, that was, you know, it didn't seem all that novel at the time, but I think in Montana in that moment, it was a degree of, of, of a novel approach to journalism was, you know, we, there were three of us publishing in the newsroom at the time we had just hired a business person, you know, our first business person.

So we were a team of four, I believe when the pandemic hit and we had the shutdown and, um,

I had a weekly podcast at the time called The Montana Lowdown, which is now the name of our weekly newsletter.