John Adams

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.

And I went from a weekly podcast to a daily podcast.

And it went from being sort of like a big, you know, something along akin to what you and I are doing now to something a little bit more like, hey, here are the 10 things you need to know today or the three things that you need to know today.

Yeah.

You know, one of the, I remember one of the episodes was talking to the heads of, you know, shelters that house domestic violence victims, you know, and like that suddenly in Montana in March, when the temperatures are in the teens or below is a real serious problem.