You don't have a capacity problem. You have a mission problem.
Your team isn’t overwhelmed. They’re lost.
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The Secretary of Defense went on television and complained about media coverage of the war with Iran. Too negative. Not patriotic enough. The Biden administration got a pass on Afghanistan that this administration isn’t getting. It’s easy to dismiss this as a partisan grievance. But there’s something real underneath it, even if he’s diagnosing the wrong problem.
Most newsrooms can’t cover military conflict the way it deserves to be covered anymore. They don’t have Pentagon reporters. National security correspondents are rare outside a handful of national outlets. The beat that was well-staffed and competitive during the Iraq and Afghanistan years has quietly atrophied over the past decade. What’s left in most markets is wire copy, reactive breaking news, and the occasional rewrite of whatever the Associated Press moved that morning.
So the Secretary’s complaint is legitimate. Just not the way he meant it.
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From 2001 through 2012, a Pentagon reporter wasn’t a luxury; if you were a paper that took itself seriously, it was a requirement. Even regional outlets near bases like Bragg or Hood kept people on the beat to track deployments and the quiet, grinding human cost of those wars. Then the news cycle shifted. Afghanistan wound down. Iraq faded. The reporters retired or moved on. Nobody replaced them. By the time the next conflict came around, the institutional capacity to cover it was gone.
This is where the Secretary’s grievance hits a deeper, more useful truth. When staff tells a newsroom leader they’re overwhelmed, the leader usually reaches for a scheduling tool or a job posting. They think it’s a math problem. But overwhelmed is rarely about the clock. It’s actually code for: I don’t know what the priority is, so everything feels like a priority.
That’s not a capacity problem. That’s a mission problem. And the distinction matters more than most leaders realize.
A newsroom that hires ten more reporters without clarity about what those reporters should prioritize doesn’t become more capable. It becomes more confused. More people chasing an undefined mission just means the confusion scales up faster. You’re pouring water into a bucket with no bottom. Hiring more people just increases the flow. It doesn’t fix the hole.
The venture philanthropy model that has shaped so much of nonprofit journalism funding has made this worse. Funders ask what you need to grow. The answer from newsrooms is almost always the same: more people, more programs, more ambition. Growth becomes the metric. So newsrooms grow. They add beats they haven’t fully thought through. They launch initiatives because the grant was available, not because the mission demanded it.
Instead, staff gets spread thin across a dozen different initiatives that don’t talk to each other. They aren’t drowning because the pile of work is too high; they’re drowning because they can’t see the point of the pile. When your team says they’ve hit capacity, they aren’t begging for an extra hour in the day. They’re begging for a reason to say no to the wrong things. They’re telling you the organization has lost its coherence.
Are you seeing this in your own organization? Is your team telling you they’re overwhelmed? What does that actually mean where you work? Leave a comment or hit reply. I read everything.
This is where right-sized journalism matters as something more than a slogan. The idea, which I’ve written about before, is simple: the goal isn’t to build the biggest newsroom you can fund. It’s to build the most focused one you can sustain. A newsroom that is smaller but ruthlessly clear about what it covers and why will outperform a larger one chasing everything. The smaller one makes faster decisions. Staff knows what they’re optimizing for. The mission is obvious enough that people can use it as a filter. The larger one spends its energy negotiating priorities and justifying why any given piece of work actually fits.
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This isn’t just a newsroom failure. It’s an ecosystem failure. The journalism support organizations built to help newsrooms succeed have fallen into the same trap. The JSOs that actually work know exactly what they do. They’ve said no to things. They’ve let go of programs that didn’t fit, even when the funding was there. The ones struggling are often the ones that grew because they could, not because growth served anyone’s actual needs. More staff, more programs, more mission creep, and then a genuine confusion about why nothing feels like it’s working. The newsroom capacity problem and the JSO capacity problem are the same problem wearing different clothes.
Organizations move forward by getting clearer, not by getting bigger. That requires a harder conversation than posting job listings. It means asking what we should stop doing. It means admitting that some of the growth was a mistake. It means being honest with funders about what the mission actually is, rather than shaping the mission around what funders want to fund.
Back to the Secretary’s complaint. He wants better military coverage. On that narrow point, he’s not wrong. But the answer isn’t for newsrooms to hire more reporters and point them at the Pentagon. It’s for newsrooms to decide, honestly, whether covering the military actually belongs at the center of what they do. If it does, resource it properly. Staff it meaningfully. Own it. If it doesn’t, stop pretending and let the wire do the work. The space between those two honest answers, the half-hearted coverage that nobody owns but everyone feels responsible for, is where capacity actually collapses.
The word capacity has become organizational shorthand for a problem nobody wants to name directly. Leaders hear time. Staff means mission. Until those two land in the same place, no amount of hiring fixes anything.
Correction notice: This piece references a press conference held by the United States Secretary of Defense regarding media coverage of current military operations. If any details are reported inaccurately here, please reply directly and I will issue a correction promptly.