Who wants to travel with Trump?: Usually traveling with the president — any president — is something journalists fight to do. Not any more. Wary of a White House that flouts safety precautions in the coronavirus epidemic, news organizations are backing away from traveling with President Trump, as three journalists got sick. So far, NYT, WSJ and the WaPo are among the major newsrooms that have stopped traveling with the president and his entourage. It’s gotten so bad, it’s hard to scrounge up outlets to go with him. 

Local news & tracking disease: Local newsrooms have been going through many different stages of skepticism from their readers during the outbreak of COVID-19. This has resulted in the decline of newspapers in cities across the U.S., affecting the essential surveillance role of journalists.But Lauren Harris, explains how the closing of newsrooms can affect the detection of future disease outbreaks as many disease-monitoring resources around the world rely on the data of local journalists. This story also contains databases on the current outbreak and also provides a list of media outlets hiring due to the decline.

Local newsletter for communities: Simon Galperin writes how an aggregation newsletter in a “news desert” can pull news from multiple sources to help a community. The newsletter harvests news from other news sources, which helps residents stay informed. It’s a far cry from locally-sourced news, but does represent maybe a half-step forward.