This isn’t as much as a prediction for 2026 as it is my hope: that the media will not be so entranced by President Trump’s compulsion to dominate every news cycle and instead focus limited resources on stories that matter, stories that hold the powerful accountable, and stories that help people make the best decisions about their lives.

In our determination to keep up with Trump, many news organizations, including my own, have out of necessity focused on the pandemonium in government and society. That has at times unfortunately meant we have had less time to devote to other kinds of deep investigative projects. That is understandable; we all have only so much bandwidth. But I hope next year we can all catch our breath and find a better balance.

This is one of the most tumultuous eras in Washington in our lifetimes. In 50 years, 100 years, how will history judge how we covered this president? Were we so occupied with his daily distractions and Truth Social posts that we failed to sufficiently report on the real-world reverberations of his time in office? Were there other important stories that have nothing to do with Trump that were left untold?

To state the obvious, this is a trying time for journalism: Friends in the business are advising students not to pursue journalism as a career because jobs are vanishing. With withering insults from the White House, many media moguls caving to the president as they put profit and power ahead of serving the public, and layoffs commonplace, what’s the appeal?

But our work is more urgent than ever. We have to find ways to produce quality journalism and sustain the work.

It’s not all bleak. Every day, I see examples of extraordinary journalistic work and reasons for hope for the industry more broadly.

At Stat, I’ve been encouraged to see that the stories that drive the most interest are often the hard, complicated projects and investigations that no one else has taken on. One of our most widely read stories this year — and the one that garnered more new subscribers than any other — was an in-depth look at Moderna, the company that helped save the world with the COVID-19 vaccine, and the implications for future breakthroughs in drug development. (It was a business story, by the way, but one that was also tied up in the politics of the Trump administration, which canceled $766 million in contracts with the company to prepare shots for a potential bird flu pandemic.)

I hope we all can keep our focus next year, on stories that matter, and not be as captive to the news cycles and fleeting and forgettable distractions from the president.