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Set out to do as little as humanly possible over the long holiday weekend. Mission accomplished.Took gold in the Ass Meets Couch Invitational. Earned my sedentary black belt.Every morning, I…

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ALTON – An effort to change Alton’s residency requirements for certain city employees is once again on hold. At the Committee of the Whole meeting on May 26, 2026, Alderman Michael Velloff moved to lay over a resolution to amend a section of the Alton City Code regarding residency requirements for non-union city employees. His motion was seconded by Alderman Chris Bohn. This comes just over two weeks after aldermen postponed a previous version of the resolution to 2029 before

The Ian Mackey era in the Missouri House is coming to an end. And on the latest episode of the Politically Speaking podcast, the Clayton Democrat reflected on his eight years of service in the Missouri House. Mackey and STLPR's Jason Rosenbaum discussed education policy, a possible merger between St. Louis and St. Louis County, and why he does not like the initiative petition process.

Bursting out of Detroit, and the same studio where Greta Van Fleet got its start, Mac Saturn is music-first quintet that fuses the best of its members’ disparate influences into […]

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Homicide detectives were responding, police said.

In honor of Miles Davis’s 100th birthday, trumpeter Terell Stafford and saxophonist Tim Warfield lead a special concert series that pays tribute to Miles’s groundbreaking legacy—through melody, innovation, and spirit.

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The latest decision in journalist Catherine Herridge’s legal fight over confidential sources highlights how fragile the reporter-source privilege remains in the absence of a federal shield law. Not only did the court refuse to reconsider the order forcing Herridge to identify her confidential sources, but it also asked the public to accept its decision without immediate access to the court records we need to fully understand it.

On May 22, the appeals court declined to revisit its prior ruling requiring Herridge to name her confidential sources for her 2017 reporting about an FBI investigation into scientist Yanping Chen. Chen, who had founded an online college that received government funding, sued the FBI and other government agencies, claiming that federal officials damaged her career by leaking to the press. She then subpoenaed Herridge, arguing it was necessary to identify the source of those leaks.

Because there’s no federal shield law, Herridge tried to rely on the First Amendment and common law protections that many courts have recognized for reporters. But both the trial court and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit rejected those arguments.

That outcome, and the court’s latest refusal to reconsider it, should concern every journalist who depends on confidential sources. The reporter’s privilege exists because source confidentiality serves the public interest. Whistleblowers and others often come forward only because they believe journalists can protect them.

In Herridge’s case, however, the courts treated the public interest as secondary or even irrelevant. They focused narrowly on whether Herridge’s testimony was essential to Chen’s claim and whether Chen had exhausted other avenues to obtain the information she sought.

That approach turns the reporter’s privilege into a weak procedural obstacle, rather than the meaningful safeguard for newsgathering it’s supposed to be. The D.C. Circuit has previously said that it should be the rare, exceptional case where a reporter is compelled to reveal her sources. But the decision in the Herridge case means that other journalists may be more likely to be forced to do so in the future.

The secrecy surrounding certain documents in Herridge’s legal fight makes matters even worse.

The right of access to court proceedings is supposed to be contemporaneous

Herridge argued that she shouldn’t be forced to reveal her sources because any harm Chen suffered wasn’t caused by the alleged leaks, but rather by a later, independent decision by the Department of Defense to terminate the participation of the college Chen founded in a government tuition reimbursement program “on national security grounds.” But key records related to the department’s decision were sealed in the trial court and remain sealed, even though they directly relate to the justification for forcing Herridge to reveal her sources.

As a result, the public can’t fully evaluate whether the courts properly weighed the factors before ordering Herridge to comply with the subpoena. Parts of the oral argument in Herridge’s appeal were even held behind closed doors because of the sealed materials. That’s hard to square with the principle that court proceedings should happen in public view.

And that’s especially true of court proceedings that reshape constitutional rights, like this one. Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) and Herridge separately asked the appeals court to unseal the documents and hearing transcript. But in its May 22 ruling, the court declined to do so, sending the issue back to the district court instead. It didn’t explain why it wouldn’t act itself, even though its own rules allow it to unseal district court records “when the interests of justice require.”

This delay matters. The right of access to court proceedings is supposed to be contemporaneous, so the public can understand and assess in real time whether judges are doing their job properly. Courts shouldn’t be making groundbreaking decisions on the reporter’s privilege by relying on partially sealed arguments and secret court records, even if they’re later unsealed.

Herridge may now seek Supreme Court review. But the Supreme Court only accepts a small fraction of the cases it’s asked to hear each term, and there’s no guarantee that it would improve the reporter’s privilege even if it takes her case.

It’s understandable if Herridge decides that petitioning the Supreme Court is necessary to protect her sources and her professional ethics. But the best solution in the longer term for other journalists would come from Congress. Lawmakers should pass a shield law like the PRESS Act to provide clear, strong protection against compelled disclosure of journalists’ sources. Without a federal shield law on the books, confidential newsgathering may continue to be eroded, one subpoena at a time.

Dust off your flip phones and cue the dial-up tone. Hidden Gem is turning back the clock with its newest immersive pop-up experience, Y2K, Baby!, a high-gloss, low-rise, fully nostalgic […]

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Members of Congress toured the Ste. Genevieve County Detention Center on Thursday, raising concerns about housing immigration detainees in a county jail they said was not designed for that purpose.

Senior residents at Council Towers, an apartment building in St. Louis, have been without running water inside their homes for more than a week. The water outage began on a Tuesday after multiple pipes burst, which flooded the building's mechanical room.

I’ve spoken to enough teachers and professors to know that LLM tools are absolutely a challenge for many of them in the classroom. Many struggle with making sure they’re actually teaching students how to learn, worrying that the tools are doing the work for them, and skipping over the actual learning. Many are (understandably) resorting […]

ST. LOUIS COUNTY - St. Louis County Police Department Bureau of Crimes Against Persons detectives are investigating a shooting in the 400 block of Midlothian Road that resulted in critical injuries to a 6-year-old male. At 2:25 a.m. on Tuesday, May 26, 2026, St. Louis County police officers from the North County Precinct responded to a call for service for a shooting in the 400 block of Midlothian Road. Officers located a child suffering from an apparent gunshot injury. The child wa

In a new video for Amazon Live and Amazon Music, Paul McCartney sits down with another famous Paul, Paul Mescal, who's playing him in the upcoming quartet of Beatles films from…

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ST. LOUIS COUNTY - St. Louis County Police are asking for the public’s help in identifying the person or people responsible for anti-Islamic graffiti discovered Saturday morning, May 23, 2026, on multiple properties in South St. Louis County, including near the Turkish American Society of Missouri. Officers from the St. Louis County Police South County Precinct responded at about 8:47 a.m. Saturday, May 23, to a call for service in the 3600 block of Bayless Avenue, where graffiti

St. Louis city leaders and residents are publicly weighing how to spend hundreds of millions of dollars in Rams settlement funds, marking the first formal hearing in a process that has been years in the making.