The Assignment Desk Has Migrated

A woman reached out to Steve Staeger on TikTok about a $340 speeding ticket that didn’t add up.

Six months later, two Colorado towns had voided $2.3 million in photo radar fines, a police chief had resigned — for reasons the town says were unrelated — and the state had a new law banning the ticket-trap tactics that started it all.

The tip didn’t come through the station’s tip line. It didn’t come through the assignment desk. It came through a social media interaction. That’s where the audience is now. Steve is one of the few local TV journalists who followed them there.

Since the first issue of this newsletter, I’ve told you: trust has moved from logos to people. A few weeks ago, I showed you how the Houston Chronicle is earning that trust by working with external creators. This week, I want to show you the other path. Here’s what happened when a legacy newsroom grew its own creator from the inside.

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Let’s be clear about who we’re talking about. It matters.

Steve Staeger is the consumer investigator at 9NEWS in Denver, where he created the “Steve On Your Side” franchise in 2023. He has nearly 20 regional Emmys, including four Best Reporter wins, and a Murrow. He’s been doing this for almost 20 years. This is a fully credentialed, mid-career broadcast journalist who looked at where his audience went and rebuilt his distribution to follow them.

He’d been big on Twitter for years, with close to 50,000 followers. He built that audience live-tweeting the Blagojevich corruption trial from a courthouse overflow room. When Twitter fell apart, he looked at what he was doing on other platforms. It was the same thing most reporters still do: posting links.

“I’d post a link to a digital article that did nothing,” he told me. Then he started posting videos instead. “When you put face to camera and explain what you’re working on, the engagement with the audience increases exponentially.”

He studied creators. Not just news creators, but anyone whose style he liked. He approached it the same way he once studied Boyd Huppert and Chris Vanderveen to learn how to build a package. His Facebook page grew from 5,000 to about 26,000 followers. TikTok went from 1,000 to more than 20,000.

And the recognition changed. People still stop him in public — but now, he says, it’s almost 70-30 “I love your content” over “I saw your story on the newscast.”

Think about that ratio for a second. Same journalist. Same journalism. The trust just moved somewhere new.

So: the $340 ticket.

A woman interacted with him on TikTok about a photo radar ticket in a small town that didn’t add up. Steve started digging. He found the town’s Google reviews full of people complaining about the same camera. He texted one of them. Instead of calling him back, she posted his cell phone number in the community’s Facebook group.

He was home on the couch with a sick one-and-a-half-year-old, and the phone would not stop ringing.

Most reporters would call that a bad day. But that’s the story. The audience didn’t just give Steve a tip. They shared him. That’s not just an audience relationship. That’s a source network. You can’t buy that. You earn it, one face-to-camera video at a time.

The investigation ran for six months. The competition caught wind early and rushed a story. Steve watched them turn out what he calls “the most base-level awful story that you’ve ever seen.” It was a simple piece built around the police chief saying the camera was great. Steve’s version asked a different question: why was a town with a $40 cap on photo radar fines mailing out $340 tickets?

When it aired on TV, it reached a Denver audience. When he posted the TikTok version, face-to-camera, walking through what he found and how, it garnered 220,000 views. “Think about the number of people who saw it there compared to the number of people who saw it on television,” he said. “It’s just exponentially different.”

Here’s what I want every journalist reading this to notice. What powered this story between the tip and the payoff was showing the work.

With each development, Steve kept the audience updated on TikTok and Instagram. Some updates were just for social. They were too small for a TV rundown, but exactly what people following the story wanted. When the town called a special meeting at 4:30 for a 6 p.m. start, hoping nobody would notice, Steve and his producer jumped in the car. He shot a video from the passenger seat: we just found out about this meeting; we’re on our way. That video and the follow-up each got 20,000 to 30,000 views. Nothing aired on TV that night.

When the city stonewalled his records requests, saying “we don’t have existing records” for a camera the police chief said was writing 1,000 tickets a day, he posted screenshots of every dodge, told with his dry humor: “What’s a guy got to do to get some records?”

The audience’s verdict, over and over in his comments: “Now THIS is journalism.”

Says Steve: “It’s nothing different than what I’ve been doing before. It’s just telling it in a different way that might feel kind of uncomfortable to people… I think people care about the process more than we give them credit for. And I think that’s how we rebuild people’s trust in what we do.

Here’s what kills me. This all happened in a rural community that had mostly written off mainstream media. At that special meeting, only one citizen showed up. Steve saw him as someone who “would not trust the media.” They talked in the lobby during the executive session. The man wasn’t hostile. He was curious. How does this work? What do your editors have to see before you can report something?

“There are so many people out there who don’t understand what it is we do every day. And we are so bad at communicating what it is we do every day that a lot more people would trust journalists if they could see what we do.”

By the end, $1.1 million in fines were voided in Kersey. Another $1.2 million in Hudson. Steve called it “the most recent case where we got $1.2 million back for people.” There’s a new Colorado law requiring warning periods for new speed cameras and banning tickets for barely-over speeds. It all started with TikTok.

The tips haven’t stopped. They’ve moved upstream.

“Back in the olden days, we would stare at a big board in the editorial meeting — what’s trending today? What are people talking about?” Steve said. “Now people are bringing me into those conversations before it’s trending.”

Recently, five different people tagged him in a Facebook thread about surprise hospital “facility fees.” That’s a $400 charge just for seeing a doctor at a hospital-owned clinic. There may or may not be a story there. That’s not the point. The point is the community now brings its problems to a person they trust, before any newsroom’s listening tools would ever find it.

Would those five people have tagged @9NEWS? Maybe. Would anyone have seen it? Steve’s honest answer: probably not. “If they’re bringing me into the conversation, I actually look at it.”

That’s the trust shift in one sentence. The logo has an inbox. The person has a relationship.

If you’re a reporter, Steve’s advice is blunt. This is more work than you’re ready for, and it’s worth it. Treat your social versions with as much care as your broadcast story. “If not more, because honestly, this is the thing that’s going to connect you with the audience.” Give people the story natively, face-to-camera. And stop teasing. “All you’re doing is giving the viewer a homework assignment to figure out how to watch your story. They’re probably not going to do the homework.”

If you run a newsroom, notice what 9NEWS got right. Mostly, they got out of the way. The followers are on Steve’s handles, not the station’s. The station is building on his trust in communities that would never turn on a 9NEWS newscast. A man in a town that distrusts “the media” now thinks that guy from 9NEWS helped us out. That’s bridge-building no brand campaign can do. Steve’s warning to the industry applies here too: “We need to get good at this so that no one’s stealing our work and we are the face of our own work.”

If you’re leading a company outside of news, the takeaway here is the same as before, just flipped around. Trust isn’t about your logo — it’s about your people. The folks who are willing to show their work out in the open are the ones who will create real relationships and pipelines that your brand’s social accounts can’t touch.

The latest Reuters data says that, for the first time, more people worldwide now get news from social and video platforms than from linear TV. You can see that as the end of something. Steve saw it as an assignment.

Who’s the Steve in your organization? Who is the person your audience would follow off the channel? What are you doing to back them rather than slow them down?

Hit reply and tell me. I read every one.

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