In this episode of Julie Gammack’s Potluck, we welcome Geneva Overholser—former Washington Post ombudsman and former editor of The Des Moines Register—for a wide-ranging, urgent conversation about what’s happening to American journalism, and what might come next.

Overholser opens with a blunt assessment of the recent upheaval at The Washington Post: it’s “a two-part story”—the brutal economics battering legacy newsrooms, and the additional distortions that come with billionaire ownership. She argues that what’s been lost isn’t just staffing, but whole sections that once helped define a great metropolitan paper—sports, books, and the breadth that made a newsroom feel like a civic institution. She also describes how changes in editorial direction have narrowed the range of ideas on the opinion side, and why that matters for public life.

A central thread of the conversation is the disappearance of the ombudsman/public editor—a role Overholser says was essential for bringing readers’ voices into the newsroom with real independence, not just as customer-service feedback. Responding to questions from Iowa Writers’ Collaborative members, she explains what the ombudsman function offered that editors often can’t: a credible internal critic who can press hard questions in public, week after week.

The discussion turns to where readers and writers are going now: Substack and independent platforms. Overholser sees genuine upside—smart people gaining independence and a place to publish—but warns that the new ecosystem can further “fractionalize” the country’s shared news diet. Collaboration, she suggests, is one antidote: independent voices working together so citizens aren’t left with only narrow “niches” and no shared body of facts.

Overholser also sketches the range of ownership and funding models she’s watching with hope: philanthropic owners who treat newspapers as civic treasures, conversions to nonprofit status, partnerships with public media, and even forms of public support used in other democracies—paired with strong guardrails. Still, she returns repeatedly to the unresolved core problem: the country hasn’t yet cracked a sustainable way to fund robust reporting, and in the end it may depend on whether the public learns to value accurate information enough to pay for it.

The hour closes with something like a charge: a reminder that journalism is still a public service, still “interesting as hell,” and needed more than ever—especially in communities sliding into news deserts. Overholser leaves listeners both clear-eyed about the damage and surprisingly hopeful about the experiments underway—and about the possibility of rebuilding a shared civic conversation, one collaborative effort at a time.

Read Geneva’s Substack column.

Julie Gamack and Guests

Ordinarily, I don’t announce our Monday podcast guest until the day of the show, because some time events cause a last minute change in the lineup. Last week I listed guests, including Geneva in advance, and readers indicated they like to know beforehand who our guests will be. On Monday, February 23. Rita Hart, chair of the Iowa Democratic Party, will join us, and on March 2, Scott Anderson talks about his new book, King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution: A Story of Hubris, Delusion and Catastrophic Miscalculation.

The Monday podcast is recorded live at noon central time, and subscribers are welcome to join the conversation.

Thank you, paid subscribers to any member of the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative. You are invited to a couple of terrific evening musical events by our songwriters, to be held in Storm Lake, Iowa on April 23 & 24.

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