Get your cub reporters serious mentorship. For free.

By Emily Sachar

A reporter, relatively new to the health beat in Lafayette, La., a town of 121,000 people in the Deep South, needs guidance on an enterprise health feature. Her boss is overworked but ambitious, eager to see the woman stretch her wings and to establish his paper as one capable of meaningful enterprise work in a town best known for fine Cajun and Creole cuisine. The project sits undeveloped and unrealized.

Some 1,500 miles to the northeast, retired and yearning for that old journalistic joy, sits the solution: a man of 74 who was once one of the nation’s top health reporters, an award-winner who spent his career in the newsroom of The Wall Street Journal.

Through a mixture of creativity, organization, determination, and spunk, the reporter has now been matched to the veteran journalist. Her first health beat project, “Shipped Away,” on the dearth of accessible local mental health services for teens in Lafayette, was published May 8.

This unlikely scenario, a septuagenarian mentor guiding a rising reporter separated by hundreds of miles, is now playing out in other communities around the nation, brought to the news world by a nascent matchmaker: Pro News Coaches. 

PNC is composed of a cadre of former Wall Street Journal editors and reporters working pro bono to help newsrooms – be they small and undercapitalized or large and financially secure – realize challenging hard news, features, and enterprise pieces they might not otherwise have had the wherewithal to produce.

“It makes my day that this is happening,” said PNC’s co-founder, journalist James Carberry, in an interview with his colleague, Kate Ortega, who spent a quarter-century at the Journal, including about 10 years in senior operational roles. “I think of myself when I started at the Journal, in the paper’s Los Angeles bureau in the early '70s. I learned so much from my mentor about the craft of storytelling. Now, I want to help kids learn as I did, from WSJ veterans, and get excited about careers in journalism.”

Added Michael Waldholz, the Louisiana PNC coach best known for his coverage of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s, “To be still relevant, using my skills and all I’ve learned about nurturing young journalists, as well as sharing lessons from my many mistakes, is the kind of fulfillment I need to stay engaged and to enjoy what's left at the highest level possible.”

PNC launched in the summer of 2022 when Carberry, who worked as a Journal reporter between 1970 and 1980, and Norman Pearlstine, former executive editor of the paper, scratched out ideas for a volunteer advisory corps.

Other WSJ veterans, among them workplace reporter, book author, and editor Joann Lublin, the 2018 Gerald Loeb Lifetime Achievement Award winner, soon joined PNC, as did Janet Guyon, a longtime journalist-now-lawyer who has worked on establishing the group’s non-profit status, and Pauline Yoshihashi, owner of a Los Angeles-based strategic communications firm. 

Former PNC team members, who helped with its startup, include veteran journalist Roy Harris, longtime tax reporter Tom Herman, and Jeff Rowe, who worked in the Journal’s Los Angeles bureau.

Two years later, some 15 PNC-coached projects are either underway, completed, or ready to take flight around the country, and Carberry expects 12 new projects to be added in 2025. 

In Peekskill, N.Y., an hour north of New York City, WSJ alum John Helyar, co-author of Barbarians at the Gate:The Fall of RJR Nabisco, recently started advising a junior staffer with the Peekskill Herald. 

A few miles north (at the hyperlocal paper I edit, The Daily Catch), Journal veteran Andy Sobel is helping a recent Marist College graduate chase down reasons for the eight-month delay getting an Amtrak station restoration project off the ground. 

Jonathan Friedland, who helmed a Spanish-language newspaper chain in Texas and who was a WSJ bureau chief in Los Angeles and in Latin America, has helped Gina Keating, editor of the Olney Enterprise in North Texas, develop an ongoing story about a local business that is using Venezuelan asylum seekers to fill jobs —- especially understanding the intricacies and realities of such arrangements.

"Jonathan has been a huge source of support for me just to bounce stories off and to trade ideas about developing in-depth stories with limited resources,” Keating said. 

And in Salem, Oregon, alum John Emshwiller has teamed up with Joe Siess of the all-digital Salem Reporter, guiding Siess as he investigates the failure of a local ambulance service to provide adequate service and explores why the local government is waiting more than a year to take over the service. Emshwiller is providing key help in pursuing documents needed for this enterprise project.

The PNC portfolio also includes general advisory work. Suzanne McGee, formerly a markets reporter for the Journal who has had a deep and varied freelance career, last year ran a workshop for The Keene Sentinel in New Hampshire. Among the topics covered were identifying basic tools of reporting and writing, developing sources and enterprise reporting, and time management.

PNC also includes in its portfolio the work of Journal veteran Bruce Koon, who is now the program coordinator and writing coach for the Contra Costa (California) Youth Journalism program. 

PNC now has a board of directors. Ortega and John Simons, who has held senior positions at the Journal and other major news organizations and is now a partner with Brunswick Group, a critical issues advisory firm, recently joined Lublin, Yoshihashi and Carberry on the board. 

PNC makes decisions about who to help on a case-by-case basis, says Ortega. “We're eager to help newsrooms committed to providing strong news coverage for their local communities for the long term,” she said.

Perhaps the most successful project to date has its heart in Louisiana. Journalist Alena Maschke is a 2017 Columbia J-School graduate who came to the Current after a year reporting on the recovery from hurricanes Laura and Delta in southwest Louisiana. Editor Christiaan Mader helped raise local foundation support to fund a two-year health reporting effort and assigned Maschke to the beat.

Questions immediately surfaced. What specific health stories should she chase? Mader says he didn’t feel he had the expertise or time to guide her. Through an introduction by WSJ alum Ken Wells, he connected with Carberry and agreed to be a guinea pig for PNC’s ambitions… and his own. The project started slowly until Waldholz took matters into his own hands: calling for weekly meetings with Maschke and Mader, and researching an array of sources, clips and court cases he could turn over to the Current team.

“I realized it was my job to keep them jazzed, to map out a way forward, and show the project was doable,” Waldholz said. “My initiative helped, given their inexperience and heavy workload.” 

Within several months, owing in part to Waldholz’s own developing interests in mental health issues, the new team settled on a project about the disarray in Lafayette providing geographically proximate support services to teens in crisis. Waldholz pressed for drafts as the work continued, even as Maschke hewed to daily news responsibilities. Once launched in earnest, the project took four months, start to finish.

Alena, 32, reflected with gratitude on the outcome.

"Learning a new beat, especially one as complex as health care, is challenging and it's easy to feel overwhelmed,” said Alena, who has been a reporter for 7 years. The choice of stories, the barriers to accessing records, the challenge of navigating privacy concerns from sources and authorities all weighed on her. “Talking through challenges, figuring out which barriers we could overcome and which we had to circumvent, even discussing the right tone to take in a certain interview — Michael's input helped us move the story along and make sure it lived up to its full potential."

Mader said he, too, was thrilled with the outcome.

“Working with Michael has been really valuable both for me as an editor and for Alena as a reporter,” said Mader, the founding editor in 2018 of The Current Media and a 2006 Emory University graduate. “For me, I get to see how an editor of his caliber works, not just in terms of procedure but his bedside manner. Meanwhile, [Alena] has remarked to me a few times that she's getting an education out of Michael that wasn't available to her in J-school.”

The support, Mader said, also helped him amplify the reach of his newsroom. “I'm a little ahead of my skis as a newsroom leader, so it's been a crash course in editorial management,” he told Local News Blues. “It's really helpful to have someone pace, interrogate, and polish enterprise stories. The work is much better, and I've gotten better as an editor, too.” 

Waldholz and The Current are looking to expand his role into a contributing enterprise editor working with three reporters. “This is very exciting for me,” said Waldholz. “To be relevant and helpful is a great feeling.”

PNC is preparing to file with the IRS to be recognized as a 501(c)3 non-profit corporation. Meantime, it is able to solicit tax deductible donations through its fiscal sponsor, Local Media Foundation. 

It hopes to raise $40,000 this year, which will be used as travel stipends for editors, website design, memberships in journalism organizations, and for various insurances the group wants to hold. To date, $4,883 has been donated. 

PNC’s directors are promoting the project on the WSJ alumni private Facebook page, which has 1,200 members, on LinkedIn, and on PNC’s home page.

Newsrooms interested in collaborating with a PNC coach can visit this website, which includes a contact form at the bottom of the homepage. 

Emily Sachar, an award-winning journalist several times over, is the Founder, Editor-in-Chief, and CEO of The Daily Catch, a nonprofit, nonpartisan online newspaper serving the Hudson Valley towns of Red Hook and Rhinebeck, New York. She is also a member of the Local News Blues editorial board. Read more at the Local News Blues contributors page.