By Emily Soto

If the local news outlets in Long Island had the support it needed, would George Santos be in office today? White House Reporter Aamer Madhani said, maybe not.

“But that’s crazy, right? Like, somebody got that far,” Madhani said. “And just basically, because he didn’t go through the typical vetting that the news media would put their candidates through…They just didn’t have the ability to cover it.”

As a White House reporter for the Associated Press, Madhani is now witnessing the fallout of Santos’ election, but he isn’t blaming the local journalists of Long Island for not learning of his obscure history earlier. In fact, Madhani is saying that with more resources in the local newsroom, the congressman’s campaign might have been exposed before he was elected to office.

Chicago’s news landscape is adapting to this need for increased local coverage. Outlets like South Side Weekly and Block Club Chicago have emerged to fill in these gaps. This isn’t new though. Madhani, a Chicago native, remembered growing up with a variety of publications to choose from.

“When I was a teenager, the Chicago Reader was an incredible place to figure out like, what to go listen to, or what was interesting and movies that was a little bit less stuffy than, like, reading about in the in the Tribune,” Madhani said. “I felt like [that] was a really great conduit for me, and all those types of places are gone now.”

So, all these years later, as he lives in Virginia, just outside of Washington D.C., Madhani finds himself looking for that same coverage ─ but this time, with no luck.

“I’m a White House reporter now, but I care about how my local government is working, like, I have a child, how the school system is working, I care about the public transportation system I use, I care about the culture of this place…I want to know about the place I live, and I find it much harder than it should be,” Madhani said.

But to be a local journalist today, requires some pretty substantial sacrifices, according to Madhani. When he started at the Tribune nearly 25 years ago, journalists could spend their whole career in one place. Today, not so much.

“I heard these stories, more often than not, of like, reporters well into their career that were very established, doing side hustles just to make ends meet,” Madhani said. “I feel for that generation of reporters that are basically just 10, 12 years younger than I am, and how much it’s changed in that sense and how, perhaps, unless you’re willing to make some pretty substantial sacrifices, that being a local journalist is going to be a lot harder.”

So as journalists who recognize the need for local coverage, is there anything we can do to help these publications?

Madhani left Chicago 3 years ago for his current job. Yet to this day, he still pays for a subscription to Block Club Chicago.

“There’s zero reason for me now to need to know, like, what’s going on in Lakeview,” he said. “But [my wife and I] feel this need to like, at least support it because we as journalists, we understand the value of it, but it’s going away.”

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