Commentary - November 4, 2026 - by Rachel Dahl

- Click for Full Interview

There is something wonderfully ironic about watching two veteran newsmen discuss the future of journalism on television while the rest of us are trying to figure out how to keep newspapers alive.

Sam Shad recently welcomed Glenn Cook, executive editor of the Las Vegas Review-Journal, to Nevada Newsmakers for a conversation that wandered through presidential politics, the First Amendment, Harry Reid, Colorado River water negotiations, artificial intelligence and the changing habits of news consumers.

Pretty much everything except how to get somebody to renew a newspaper subscription.

Which, for those of us in the business, remains a fairly pressing question.

Cook oversees one of Nevada's most influential newsrooms. The Review-Journal has the institutional resources, reporting depth and audience reach that most newspapers in America can only dream about.

And yet, listening to him, I was struck by how many of the challenges facing his organization are precisely the same ones confronting the little newspapers scattered across Nevada's enormous geography.

The scale is different. The fundamental problem isn't.

How do we get people reliable information in a world increasingly flooded with information that isn't reliable at all?

Cook was particularly interesting when Shad asked about artificial intelligence.

The Review-Journal, he explained, is already using AI to help journalists process enormous documents, summarize previously reported material and produce certain routine information pieces. The newsroom requires disclosure when AI is used to create stories and insists on human verification.

That's a sensible approach.

I've come to think of artificial intelligence as something like the arrival of the calculator. It doesn't eliminate the need to understand mathematics. It simply changes how much time we spend doing arithmetic.

Of course, a calculator doesn't occasionally invent a Supreme Court decision or attribute a quotation to someone who never said it, but AI sometimes will.

Which brings us to Cook's most important observation.

The Review-Journal has the staff to verify the information its reporters produce. Most newspapers, he acknowledged, don't have that luxury.

He's right.

Across rural America, newspapers are operating with fewer reporters, smaller advertising bases, rising production costs and communities that still expect someone to show up at the school board meeting. Rightly so.

Our school board meetings are important. So is the county commission, the water district, the planning commission and the seemingly inconsequential public hearing where somebody proposes a change that will affect a community for the next 50 years.

These are not necessarily stories that attract millions of clicks, but they are the stories that determine how people live.

And here's where I think the future of journalism gets interesting.

Large newsrooms have advantages in staffing, technology and institutional reach. Small newsrooms have something else: proximity.

The reporter covering a rural county may see the county commissioners at the grocery store, know the rancher whose water rights are being challenged and understand why a proposed industrial development that looks perfectly reasonable on a map might fundamentally change the character of a community.

That familiarity is an advantage, provided the journalist remembers that knowing the people involved is not the same as knowing the facts.

Proximity can also create blind spots. Sometimes it's harder to ask an uncomfortable question when you're going to see the person you're questioning at church on Sunday.

Good journalism requires both access and independence.

Cook also offered an observation about presidential power that deserves attention well beyond the newsroom. Every incoming administration, he suggested, tries to exercise more authority than the one before it.

Regardless of party.

That's a real good reminder that the First Amendment isn't supposed to protect only the journalists whose reporting we happen to like, but it protects the ones who annoy us, too.

Perhaps especially those.

And that brings me back to newspapers. The Review-Journal and the smallest weekly in rural Nevada have more in common than their circulation numbers might suggest.

Both have to earn the public's trust. Both have to distinguish reporting from rumor. Both have to find ways to pay for the expensive, sometimes tedious work of establishing what actually happened.

And both operate in an environment where everybody with a smartphone can publish something, but not everybody publishing something is practicing journalism.

We can compete for readers, advertising, stories and territory. Competition, properly understood, makes us better.

But we ought to recognize that the real competition isn't necessarily the newspaper down the road. It's the growing belief that facts are optional, that verification is unnecessary and that journalism is simply another word for somebody's opinion.

Nevada needs the Review-Journal. It also needs the little papers in places where the nearest metropolitan newsroom may be hundreds of miles away.

And it needs journalists willing to do the difficult work of asking questions, checking answers and publishing what they find, whether the people involved appreciate it or not.

The future of journalism won't be decided solely by the size of the newsroom, the sophistication of its technology or the number of people clicking on its stories.

It will be decided by whether communities still believe the work is worth having and whether those of us doing it can continue to earn that belief, and the subscriptions and the ads that support it.

One verified fact at a time.

- Click for Full Interview