St. Louis-based editor who quit rather than cave to Trump has no regrets

When I told my colleagues that Alan Greenblatt was a St. Louisan, they were really surprised. “Alan Greenblatt?? Lives here??” 

There aren’t too many journalists with national profiles working from, or in, St. Louis. But as editor of Governing, Alan earned a reputation for doing serious journalism about an area long neglected by the Washington, D.C. press corps: state and local government.  ”Newspapers will pay attention to their own state, their own city, but as a group, they’re not covered very much at all,” he told me. Governing didn’t just do it, but did it smartly. It showed how government worked—and by “worked,” I mean not the nuts and bolts, that proverbial sausage getting made, but how it could solve problems, how it could help people.

“You know most states, most cities, most counties, end up having pretty much the same problems,” he recalls. “And our bread and butter was saying, Here’s a place that addressed this. Here’s a city that brought down its homeless population. Here’s a city that has managed to get more people back on public transit after the pandemic. Et cetera.” 

Greenblatt clearly loved that job, and believed in its mission. But last month, he quit. He told the story soon after in an essay for Politico, with a headline that pulled no punches: “My Bosses Were Afraid of Crossing Trump. So, I Quit.”

In conversation for The 314 Podcast, Greenblatt tells me that his boss, the chief content officer for E.Republic, had made clear she didn’t have the stomach for a fight: “She bluntly stated in a meeting that we shouldn’t write negative articles that could draw the attention of the Trump White House and have them shut us down.”

It didn’t take long for the issue to come to a head: Soon after the assassination of right-wing provocateur Charlie Kirk, Trump’s chair of the Federal Communications Commission had targeted comedian Jimmy Kimmel, leading to his suspension from ABC. Greenblatt had never felt Governing’s mission was to cover the federal government, but felt called to defend the First Amendment, something that, as a journalist, had never felt remotely controversial. His boss disagreed. 

“She told me she did not think running the piece was a good idea; after all, she noted, it violated the stated company policy against setting off alarm bells within the Trump White House,” Greenblatt wrote in his Politico essay. “The piece went unpublished, and the words ‘I quit’ came flying out of my mouth.” They didn’t back down even then, so neither did he.

Greenblatt is now staring down unemployment. He had moved to St. Louis in 2010 (his wife, Megan Robb, had been hired as an art therapy professor at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville). He had worked remotely for both NPR (when he served as its digital editor) and then Governing. Now 60, he knows it won’t necessarily be easy to land another full-time journalism job. Even publications that want Midwest correspondents often want them living in Chicago, not St. Louis.

But he believes he still has something to contribute—perhaps especially because he’s living in a place like St. Louis. “As somebody covering states, it was always a pet peeve that when I would pitch stories to national publications, they’d say, Well, who cares about what’s happening in Ohio or Missouri or Alabama or California? Even as they’re covering every incremental lack of movement in Congress,” he tells me. “There is definitely a blind spot.”

Thanks to his wife’s job and the fact that their son is nearly done with college, Greenblatt knows he’ll be OK financially even if he can’t land a job in his profession. But he’s still trying, because he’s not ready to give up yet. And while he knows his act of defiance could make him look like a troublemaker, he hopes there’s still a publication in America that sees a certain kind of troublemaking as a positive. 

“ I definitely quit this job knowing it could end my career in journalism,” he says. But he has no regrets. Of his decision to quit the magazine he loved rather than kowtow in fear, he says, “To me, there was no choice.” 

Hear the full interview with Greenblatt on The 314 Podcast.