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The day of the last conversation for this article marked five days until an odd-year Election Day, thirty days of the soon-to-be longest federal government shutdown in American history, 1,344 days of the Russo-Ukrainian war—and found six Commonwealth alumni/ae with a lot on their minds.

In Government Center, a mile’s walk from his old high school, Matt Costas ’14, Chief of Staff to City Councilor Liz Breadon, kept tabs on grassroots efforts to feed residents in the face of impending cuts to food benefits. At the Massachusetts State House, Senator Will Brownsberger ’74 worked to pass limits on the eviction of federal workers affected by the shutdown. Across the Charles River, Kevin Ballen ’16—current Harvard Law student, former White House staffer—was already anticipating the 2026 midterms. (“Elections are long,” he notes.) In New York, Camille Simoneau ’10 joined a State Department delegation at the United Nations General Assembly; in Michigan, State Senator Erika (Swanson) Geiss ’89 moderated a session of complex procedural discussions as president pro tempore. And overseas, longtime diplomat Peter Galbraith ’69 delivered a speech in Croatia, where he was once ambassador, while observing signs of weakness in American institutions that alarmed him.

It was a turbulent denouement to a year variously described by these six in government and politics as “uncertain,” “a roller coaster,” and “a constant inferno.” But in their careers and study, they had to continue to address what Peter calls the “first question about any proposed policy or law”: “Will it work? If it won’t work, you don’t need to consider whether it is the right thing to do.”

If you’ve been pondering that question around something you care about, you’re at the same starting point as the alumni/ae you’ll meet here: several never thought they’d enter their roles until they ran up against a problem they wanted to tackle. They all attest that one critical step in finding any solution is listening deeply to others’ experiences. Start now by hearing theirs.

Between debates over bias in mainstream media outlets, the prevalence of inaccurate information online, and the increasing number of bots on social media, Americans’ trust in the information they consume has waned, accelerating a downward trend that has been observed since the 1990s. A Pew Research survey from late 2016 found that one-third of Americans said they often saw false information about politics online, and twenty-three percent said they had, whether knowingly or unknowingly, shared false information online themselves.

Nearly a decade later, we’re no closer to putting a cap on the spread of fake news. While by nature difficult to measure, misinformation (inaccurate information from a mistaken source) and disinformation (inaccurate information deliberately shared with the intent to manipulate) seem increasingly unavoidable, especially on social media. Reporting in October 2025, Gallup found that twenty-eight percent of Americans express trust in mass media, down from forty percent just five years earlier, in 2020.

But who is “the media,” and what has this era of misinformation meant for them? For Commonwealth alumni/ae working in newsrooms, there’s a clear imperative to face the evolving realities of our times head-on—and to carry on delivering good journalism to a public that needs and deserves it.