2026 Local Journalists Workshop

MODY: Thank you so much, and good morning. It’s a pleasure to be here. My name is Seema Mody. I’m a global markets correspondent and anchor at CNBC Business News. I also happen to be a member here at CFR.
And a pleasure to be joined by Jonathan Hillman, senior fellow for geoeconomics at the Council on Foreign Relations, who just wrote a pivotal piece, which we will get into shortly. And here we have Benn Steil, senior fellow and director of international economics, Council on Foreign Relations, who is the expert on all things global economy. And joining us virtually is Heidi Crebo-Rediker, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, who focuses on critical minerals, among other topics.
Today’s conversation is centered around “U.S. Economic Security,” so I thought, Jon, it would be of utmost importance to start with your pivotal task force and research that you put together on where the U.S. stands right now on the global stage, and perhaps we can focus on what it tells us about the race between the U.S. and China right now.
HILLMAN: Sure, so happy to provide a little bit of an overview. This report, which...

STARR: It’s great to be here. I want to preface my remarks by saying as a recovering journalist who’s still freelances, I want to thank everyone in this room, because I know everyone has made sacrifices to stay in this profession. It’s getting harder to do this work now more than ever, precisely at the time when we need you more than ever. So, thank you, and thank you for being here with us today.
We’re going to be talking about immigration, which is an issue I’ve covered on and off for twenty years. And we have a fantastic panel for you. You have their bios, so I’m not going to, you know—(laughs)—recite everything on this page.
But, you know, just to introduce people briefly, Dara Lind is at the American Immigration Council. Fantastic immigration reporter. If you guys have not caught up on her work, I highly advise you to do so. She cut her teeth at Vox, was at ProPublica, and now writes a regular column, right, for undocumented, which is available. And she does a fantastic job of really boiling down a lot of policy issues that can be difficult, I think, to untangle.
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ROBBINS: So, welcome to our final panel, and our topic is “Foreign Policy Implications of the Midterm Elections.”
And I want to thank Irina Faskianos and her National staff—(applause)—for organizing a wonderful day of discussions and for organizing our excellent monthly Local Journalists Webinars. And if you aren’t participating in them, you should be participating in them because they are an extension of this without the wine, and we have to work on that. (Laughter.)
So, you all have our panel members’ bios, so just a quick summary. And I just want you to know that I know everybody here and I like everybody on this panel, so this is a particular delight for me.
So, Jocelyn Kiley is the managing director of U.S. politics and policy research at Pew Research Center, where she leads a team that regularly surveys the American public on political and policy issues and conducts in-depth studies of Americans’ political values, beliefs, and electoral choices, and has been a principal investigator for the center’s ongoing work on political polarization for more than a decade. And if you’re not using Pew polls, you should be using Pew polls. I teach polling, and I...

WEISBERG: This is like my fantasy, a room full of only journalists at the Council on Foreign Relations. (Laughter.) I really am excited to be here and see all of you. I grew up on local journalism in Chicago, and as a local journalist in Chicago. That was the beginning of my career. Juju and I are going to talk a little bit about our journeys and how we got where we are.
But I just wanted to start by welcoming everybody, and by welcoming Juju, a journalist I’ve admired and seen at the Council for many years—many years now. And in a way, there’s no one better to sort of talk to you about this intersection of international news, foreign policy, and how you make it relevant for an audience. And I wanted to start, maybe, Juju, just by asking you to give us a little capsule of your career.
CHANG: Sure. I think that I’ve done just about every job there is at ABC News on the editorial side. And I think it’s really served me well in the chair that I sit in right now, which is the co-anchor of ABC News, Nightline. But I...