Jennifer Wagner Chartier: Trust but localize: On-the-ground reporting is king

My husband is a Notre Dame fan who hails from South Bend, so we decided on a whim that it would be fun to drive down to New Orleans for the Sugar Bowl. We found some inexpensive tickets, planned our route and headed out on New Year’s Eve.

While we were sleeping a few hours away in Mississippi, tragedy struck in the Big Easy.

We woke to a slew of push notifications alerting us that a vehicle had struck New Year’s revelers in the wee hours of the morning on Bourbon Street.

In the days that followed, we would learn this was a carefully planned terrorist attack by an American-born perpetrator who visited New Orleans several times in the months before he struck. The death toll from his horrific acts would climb to at least 14, with dozens more injured.

But we didn’t know any of that then, and information was just starting to trickle in from various sources as we drove the last leg of our journey.

It was still mid-morning when we arrived, and our hotel was a few blocks from the French Quarter, so we walked down to the media staging area. It was striking how different things looked and felt in person than what we had seen on cable news hours earlier in the day.

The city itself was just waking up to the gruesome reality of the attack. People were trying to access cars they’d parked the night before that were now behind police barricades. The atmosphere was somber and uncertain, but just a few blocks away, Café du Monde continued to churn out beignets and coffee.

If you were watching national news all day, you mostly saw the same looped video of Bourbon Street immediately following the attack. The streets in that pre-dawn footage were empty, lit only by blue and red lights from dozens of emergency vehicles. Those visuals stayed on screen alongside a parade of national experts on terrorism, radicalization, law enforcement and public safety. Fear permeated the coverage.

In contrast, local news reporters interviewed local elected officials, residents and passersby who were in town to celebrate the new year or attend the Sugar Bowl. They reported live from multiple sites across the city, sometimes pushing through their own raw emotions to tell the incredibly sad stories of the victims and what had happened to their city in the early hours of 2025. It felt personal because it was.

I lift this up because most people see only the 30,000-foot view of breaking news that rises to the level of national coverage. And fewer and fewer of them trust what they see there.

Pew Research polling released last October found a nearly 20-point drop over the past eight years—from 76% to 59%—among U.S. adults when it comes to trusting information from national news organizations. Trust in local news organizations fell far less, from 82% to 74%.

Access to media is easier than ever living in an era where almost every American has a smartphone that can open doors to countless, often-free sources.

Ronald Reagan said, “Trust but verify.” I wish more people would “trust but localize” their news sources, making a both/and choice in times of crisis so they can augment high-level coverage with the richness and texture that comes from on-the-ground reporting.•

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Chartier is a lifelong Indianapolis resident and owner of Mass Ave Public Relations. Send comments to ibjedit@ibj.com.

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