For those brave enough to follow the news these days, the experience can be overwhelming. What’s real and what’s fake? What is the truth? How is technology changing the equation? Kurt Andersen, Charlotte Howard, and Joel Simon discuss the state of the news industry and provide practical guidance on how people who want to be informed and engaged can stay up to speed.

Joel Simon is founding director of the Journalism Protection Initiative at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY and the former executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists. He is author of four books and writes on media issues for the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and Columbia Journalism Review.

Kurt Andersen is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Evil Geniuses and Fantasyland, as well as the bestselling novels You Can’t Spell America Without Me, True Believers, Heyday, and Turn of the Century. With Steven Soderbergh he co-created the streaming series Command Z (2023), and has previously written for TV, film and the stage. He co-founded Spy magazine, co-created and hosted the Peabody Award-winning public radio show and podcast Studio 360, and hosted and co-produced the podcast Nixon at War (2021). He’s also a journalist – regular contributor to the New York Times and The Atlantic, formerly a New Yorker columnist, Time critic and columnist, and New York Editor in Chief.

Charlotte Howard is The Economist’s executive editor, New York bureau chief and co-host of the Checks and Balance podcast. Prior to this, she served as The Economist’s US business editor. In other beats she has covered the energy sector and climate policy, consumer goods and retail, the global health-care industry and politics and policy in America’s Midwest. She joined The Economist in 2004 and is a graduate of Yale University.

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