Guest Essay

Amanda Zamora: For journalists, this moment will not be defined by what we choose to record, but by what we choose to do

For people navigating immediate risk, history is not something to be preserved for later interpretation. It’s something they are moving through in real time.

By Amanda Zamora

February 4, 2026

This essay is part of a series on the 2025 Lenfest Institute-Aspen Digital Local News Summit, an annual convening of the country’s leading journalists, publishers, funders, news creators, and other industry professionals.

On The Daily last month, a reporter described talking to Minnesotans turning out to observe, to protest, to help their neighbors. People very much like Alex Pretti, who every day are weighing both the risks of their actions — and the consequences of not acting. One of the questions that came up, I can’t stop thinking about: Am I going to need to start hiding people in a spare room in my house?

Let that sink in. 

This wasn’t a metaphorical question. It was a logistical one. The kind of question people ask when they sense that the systems meant to protect them may no longer function — when the threats against them are real, and the information they rely on suddenly feels incomplete, delayed, or unreliable.

And while we’re gathering here in San Antonio — a city that has lived with immigration enforcement as a constant reality — the sense of dire uncertainty spreading in places like Minnesota obviously matters. Because fear doesn’t travel evenly. It shows up first as confusion. As rumor. As people scanning their phones, trying to decide what’s real and what’s not, what’s safe, and how much risk they’re willing to take in response.

The same fear that is traveling in Minnesota is traveling in Texas, too.  

Last month, I was bundled up in Austin with my husband and our three dogs, waiting out the storm and following the horrific news of Alex Pretti’s killing. As temperatures dropped that Saturday, rumors began circulating online that ICE operations were headed to Austin next — that federal agents had rented rooms at a downtown Hyatt for the next two weeks.

One of the most widely circulated posts — one with about 19,000 likes, and the first to land in my Instagram feed — came from a local immigration attorney, a role many immigrants are trained to trust. They warned of the expected increase in ICE presence and told their followers that the information was “legit and confirmed.”

But it wasn’t confirmed.

A while later, the mayor addressed the rumors, saying ICE had assured city officials that it wasn’t targeting warming centers or cold-weather shelters. His post received about 200 likes.

The Austin American-Statesman also looked into the claim — though you wouldn’t know how unless you were a paying subscriber. Its Instagram post (which got 400 likes) was sparse, pointing people to a paywalled article that barely mentioned the rumors (and offered no confirmation).

This is what fear and information failure looks like in Austin.

When people are afraid — for themselves, for their neighbors, for their families — they don’t look for perfect information. They look for actionable information. They look for speed, clarity, and sources that feel close enough to the problem to understand the risk they’re facing.

And when institutions — like city governments and legacy media — step into moments like this, they often do so too late, too quietly, or behind barriers that make critical information harder to find, not easier.

So people turn elsewhere. To group chats and WhatsApp. To organizers and neighbors already embedded in their lives.

Yes, this is an information failure. But it is not a failure of the public.

It’s a sign that information itself has become vital infrastructure — the difference between someone getting the resources they need to survive, or exposing themselves to harm.

Long before mainstream newsrooms began prioritizing engagement and trust, Black, brown, and immigrant communities were building parallel information systems — not to document events at a distance, but to help people survive them. These systems weren’t built out of ideology. They were built out of necessity.

And that brings me to the question I want us to sit with today:
What would it look like for journalism to see itself not just as a witness to this moment, but as part of a collective effort to meet people’s real information needs when their rights, safety, and lives are on the line?

This question sits in tension with how journalists have been trained to understand our calling.

After ICE shot and killed Renée Good — and it’s worth remembering that Good and Pretti are not the only two to be killed by ICE; the many immigrants who’ve died in ICE custody haven’t gotten nearly the same framing or attention —  a Poynter headline asserted that this moment will be defined by what we choose to record. That local press and the public have a duty to document every arrest, every interaction with federal agents, every act of enforcement. That without that record, we lose the ability to hold power to account. 

This is true. This work matters. Recording what happens — preserving evidence, telling the story — is essential to accountability, and we should keep doing it. In fact, we — the public — are already doing it. 

But the rumor about ICE in Austin also exposes the limits of that framework when it stands alone.

Because for people navigating immediate risk, history is not something to be preserved for later interpretation. It’s something they are moving through in real time. And when journalism positions itself primarily as an observer — arriving after the fact, speaking mostly to officials, publishing behind paywalls, draining urgency or hedging reality in its language — it leaves a vacuum.

That vacuum is too often filled with rumors and partial truths — not because people don’t value journalism, but because journalism isn’t meeting people where they are.

When journalists observe and record someone detained by ICE, they might ask (as the Poynter article does): What is his name? A fundamental and important question. But the person who sees information as an act of mutual aid is asking different questions: Who is posting his bail? Who is feeding his dog? Who is explaining to his family what comes next?

These are not competing values. They are different definitions of responsibility.

And this is where the work of mutual-aid organizers offers a crucial lens for viewing this particular moment.

I spoke last month with researcher Alesandra Baca-Vázquez about her time embedded in Austin’s mutual-aid ecosystem. What she and her colleagues found was not informal or ad-hoc help, but highly organized information work carried out under enormous pressure. Much like the rapid response organizing unfolding in Minneapolis. 

The Austin mutual aid groups she studied were meeting requests for help in real time. Maintaining resource lists that changed daily. Vetting for scammers that target those seeking aid. Curating information to reach people routinely excluded from official channels.

And critically, they were doing all of this while making hard decisions about safety — knowing that the openness required to help people also exposes the most vulnerable to surveillance or harm. Accessibility and protection were in constant tension.

What struck me most in my conversation with Alesandra, was how much this labor mirrors what we say journalism is for — verification, accuracy, clarity, public service — and how rarely news organizations ask these groups what they need. 

When journalists do show up, it’s often to document — to tell a story about mutual aid — rather than to ask how newsrooms, how we might employ our skills, our reach, or verification capacity — to actually strengthen the information infrastructure already at work.

Alesandra put it plainly:

“Trust takes time — and I know that y’all don’t have a lot of time. But I think there’s some relationship building that needs to happen. And that would take a bigger shift in how journalism is practiced.”

That paradox — we don’t have time, but we can’t afford not to build trust — is the moment we’re all in.

Because without relationships, accuracy suffers, and information needs go unmet. And when journalism remains at the level of documentation alone, it doesn’t stay neutral — it shifts the burden of survival onto people with the least protection.

So when I, and others, talk about journalism as mutual aid of information, I’m not talking about abandoning independence or blurring ethical lines. I’m talking about decentering ourselves — recognizing that journalism is one node in a much larger information ecosystem, and that our power comes from how we participate in it.

For many, this is not theoretical.

I’m thinking about the tremendous work of outlets like Sahan Journal who are already doing this work — building trust through proximity, listening before publishing, and treating information as something people need to use, not just consume.

They remind us that journalism doesn’t lose its power when it collaborates. It gains it.

I want to come back to that Poynter line — that this moment will be defined by what we choose to record. Because while that framing is well-intentioned, it lets us off too easily.

History will not judge us by the volume of stories we document. It will judge us by whether people were able to access and act on information to stay safe, to make decisions, to protect their families, and to survive this period of extraordinary instability.

We will be defined not just by what we recorded — but by what we did with information when it mattered most.

So my challenge to all is this: What would it look like to fund and lead journalism that is brave enough to de-center itself — that understands its role not just as a witness to history, but as a participant in a collective effort to ensure people are informed, protected and seen?

Because this moment will not be defined by what we chose to record.

It will be defined by what we chose to do.