Isaac Arnsdorf on Building Trust One Story at a Time

May. 13, 2026

Isaac Arnsdorf, a 2007 Free Spirit Scholar, spoke with Freedom Forum in December 2025. Learn more about Freedom Forum’s Al Neuharth Free Spirit and Journalism Conference.

This profile is part of a series that spotlights Free Spirit alumni, exploring their achievements and how the conference helped shape their journeys.

Isaac Arnsdorf says he’s taken journalism seriously since he first became interested in it as a high school student.

Today, Arnsdorf is an author and part of a Pulitzer Prize-winning team at The Washington Post. He approaches political reporting from two angles: breaking news and long-form investigations.

In his day-to-day reporting, Arnsdorf says he works to bring people the basic facts about what happened. With his books, he aims to help people understand the significance of what happened.

Through his work, he’s discovered that accuracy, neutrality and fairness are keys to earning trust from both readers and sources.

That lesson came early. While working on the student newspaper at Yale University, he says he learned to take all stories seriously, including those that seem minor. That opportunity itself, he says, was possible only thanks to a “transformational” experience he had as a high school student: being selected for Freedom Forum’s Al Neuharth Free Spirit and Journalism Conference.

What's the Al Neuharth Free Spirit and Journalism Conference?

Now celebrating its 25th anniversary, the Al Neuharth Free Spirit and Journalism Conference is an engaging, in-depth, five-day summer program for 51 high school juniors (one from each state and the District of Columbia) who “Dream. Dare. Do.”

Participants get insider access to Washington, D.C., newsrooms, connect with other high school juniors from across the U.S. who share their passion for journalism, meet some of the nation’s top journalists and multimedia storytellers, and explore our capital city.

During the Washington, D.C., summer program, he got to see where political stories happened, sparking the beginning of a career in political reporting.

That career landed him at the Post in 2022, where he’s now part of the team that won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for breaking news reporting. The Pulitzer committee recognized the Post for “urgent and illuminating coverage” of the July 13, 2024, assassination attempt on then-presidential candidate Donald Trump, highlighting the team’s “detailed story-telling and sharp analysis that coupled traditional police reporting with audio and visual forensics.”

Arnsdorf says of the award-winning coverage that having the journalistic training to focus on concrete details while on the ground in an urgent situation was one key to the story’s success.

Even with breaking stories, he says he “always would rather be right than first.” When balancing speed with accuracy, waiting a beat instead of speculating can be critical. After all, “Trust from the public is all we have to trade on,” Arnsdorf says.

“Trust from the public is all we have to trade on.”

— Isaac Arnsdorf

While his day-to-day reporting focuses on headline news, Arnsdorf says other stories unfold over a longer timeline. He has examined political stories with a longer lens through his two books: “Finish What We Started” and “2024: How Trump Retook the White House and the Democrats Lost America.”

While Arnsdorf notes the importance of getting close to key sources, he also points out shifting practices in access to newsmakers and spaces where news occurs. Arnsdorf says he and other journalists must keep adapting to ensure there’s a “neutral, dispassionate observer” in the room.

But even as those practices evolve, for Arnsdorf, the keys to producing trusted reporting remain “being extra careful … to find out what the people in power don't necessarily want you to know and telling you everything that we can about how we found out, and why it's important … and then leaving it up to the public to decide what to do with that.”

Karen Hansen is a staff writer at Freedom Forum. She can be reached at [email protected].

For any questions on the Al Neuharth Free Spirit and Journalism Conference, please email us at [email protected].