August 19, 2018

Mitt Romney Covers Breaking News!

The Senate candidate took a break from the campaign trail to take some photos.

June 26, 2018 - Orem, UT, USA - Mitt Romney and Ann Romney celebrate onstage after Mitt was declared the winner of the 2018 Utah Republican Senate Primary on June 26, 2018, in Orem, Utah. Brian Cahn/TNS via ZUMA Wire

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Mitt Romney has been busy shaking hands and knocking on doors for the past six months, while he runs to replace Orrin Hatch as the new senator from Utah. But he apparently took a few minutes off the campaign trail Friday night to take some video and still photos of an unfolding disaster in his Holladay, Utah, neighborhood:

Romney is famous as a very wealthy guy who still pumps his own gas, shovels his own walk, and takes a hands-on approach to home improvements. So perhaps it’s no surprise that he was on the scene to capture footage of a garage and camper going up in flames at a house just a 10-minute walk from his own.

At least 20 firefighters responded to the blaze; no one was injured. Romney’s photos suggest, though, that he recognized the news value of the neighborhood disaster. His campaign sent the video and photos to the local Sinclair News Broadcast station in Salt Lake City, KJZZ, which published them without fanfare—just a modest photo credit reading “Courtesy Mitt Romney.” 

KJZZ confirmed that the photographer was indeed the former GOP presidential nominee and now Senate candidate Mitt Romney. 

 

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In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

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