What The Minuteman Is and Why I Write It

Storylines Beneath the Headlines

You already know something is wrong.

You watch the news and you get fragments. A policy gets reversed. A trade deal falls apart. A number spikes on a chart and the anchors spend forty-five seconds on it before cutting to the next thing. You’re left with the feeling that something important just happened but no real understanding of what it was, why it happened, or what it means for your life.

That feeling is not confusion. It’s the natural result of a news environment that assumes you already have the background. Most coverage drops you into the middle of a story that started years ago and expects you to keep up. If you don’t have the context, it’s on you to go find it. And most people don’t have the time.

That’s the gap The Minuteman exists to fill.

I write long-form narrative journalism that takes the issues people are already hearing about and traces them back to the systems, the money, and the decisions that caused them. Every article starts with something you already feel and works backward to the forces behind it. The economy feels broken, so I traced what detached it from the people it’s supposed to serve. A woman checks her phone and sees a missed call from a blocked number, so I traced how a surveillance apparatus got built to make that moment possible. Your electric bill went up, so I traced the thirty-year policy story behind the number on the page.

What you walk away with is not just information. It’s the story that holds it together. Cause and effect, from the decision to the consequence to the person standing in the middle of it. After you read it, you can explain what happened and why it matters to someone who hasn’t been following along. That’s the promise: I help you understand complex news well enough to explain it clearly to others.

The reason it’s built on storytelling

Human beings don’t absorb bullet points. We absorb stories. We need to see who made which decision, what it caused, who it landed on, and what happened next before something as abstract as policy or economics becomes something we can hold in our heads and carry into a conversation.

That’s why every article is structured as a narrative. Not opinion, not a news summary, not a topic dump with headers. A story with an arc, a beginning that hooks you into caring, a middle that builds the evidence through cause and effect, and an ending that pulls back to reveal that the article was always about something bigger than you realized when you started reading.

I use the tools of fiction (scene, character, contradiction, momentum) because those tools work. They work in novels and plays and they work when the subject is tax policy or surveillance technology or why your gas bill doubled. A story gives the information a place to live. It makes the complexity navigable. And it makes the understanding stick, because you didn’t just read a fact, you followed the chain of events that produced it.

If I use a technical term, I explain it in context so it earns its place. If I present evidence, I show where it came from. I don’t fabricate characters or scenarios. The people in my articles are real. The data is sourced. The conclusions follow the evidence, and if the evidence contradicts what I expected to find, I follow the evidence.

The person I keep in mind when I write

Honestly, me. Most days.

I’m a journalist and a storyteller. I know how to find the answer and frame it so it makes sense. But I also open the news and think, “What the hell is happening?” The volume is relentless. Everything feels connected to everything else in ways nobody explains. You read three articles about the same event and walk away with three different impressions and no real understanding of any of them. The “horrors” pile up. (Oh, the horrors). The complexity piles up. And somewhere in the middle of it there’s a quiet voice that says, “I should understand this better than I do.”

I know that voice because I hear it too. The difference is I have the training and the time to sit down, do the research, and trace the story from the surface to the root. Most people don’t. Not because they’re not smart enough or don’t care enough, but because they have careers and lives and a finite number of hours, and the news is not designed to reward the people who want to go deeper. It’s designed to keep you scrolling.

So what do we do about it? Get informed. That’s the whole idea. I do the reading. I follow the cause and effect. I write it so you can walk away with the full picture instead of fragments. Not overwhelmed, not passively consuming, not wondering if your understanding holds up. Clear. Grounded. Able to explain what’s actually happening to someone who asks, without second-guessing yourself. Not because I told you what to think, but because you followed the story and arrived there on your own.

If that sounds like something you need, this is built for you. But you’re not the only one reading. I hear from people across the political spectrum who found something here that the rest of the news wasn’t giving them. The work is for anyone willing to sit with a story long enough to understand it, regardless of where they land when they’re done.

A writer, not an expert

My name: Chris Connors Jr. I came to political journalism from storytelling. I have a master’s from Syracuse university’s Newhouse School of Public Communications, and before I started covering national politics I spent five years building a hyperlocal newsroom into a daily operation with over 20,000 readers. I’m also a playwright whose work has been staged in all 50 states and over 40 countries. The throughline across all of it is the same: find the story people are living inside but can’t quite name, and make it visible.

I am not an expert in economics, constitutional law, or foreign policy. I don’t have a degree in any of the topics I cover (I’m a journalist, we’re comfortable with arogance…that’s only a little bit a joke). What I do is pick a subject that matters, spend a concentrated stretch researching it, pull from the best sources I can find, and write it so that someone without the time or access can still understand what’s happening and why it touches their life.

I also don’t call this site nonpartisan, because I’m not sure nonpartisan journalism exists and I don’t think people want it. When a writer strips their perspective from the work, what you get isn’t objectivity. It’s writing with no voice and no spine. I have opinions (gasp). They come from research, from evidence, from weighing what I find against what I believe. When the evidence contradicts me, I change my mind. When I don’t know something, I say so. What I will do is show my work, present the full context, and let you see how I got where I landed. If the evidence doesn’t make my case, then the person who needs to change their stance is me.

What this isn’t

The news space is louder than it’s ever been. Most of what fills it falls into familiar categories: breaking coverage that moves too fast to explain anything, hot takes that perform outrage for engagement, ideological arguments that already know what they think before the research starts, and increasingly, AI-generated summaries that can repackage information but can’t find the connection between two things that nobody’s put in the same room yet (ugh…A.I).

I don’t do any of those things. Every article starts with an angle — (OMG em-dash!) International Women’s Day traced back to the anti-war movement and reexamined through a current conflict; over-financialization explained through the lived contradiction of watching GDP rise while your buying power shrinks. That angle, the unexpected connection that reframes what you thought you understood, is the spine of every piece. It comes from doing the reading, sitting with it, and caring about making the full picture visible.

Where I stand

I lead with empathy, not anger. I don’t punch down. People in power deserve scrutiny. Private citizens do not. I don’t write from inside experiences that aren’t mine, but I will write about the systems that affect people whose lives differ from my own. I don’t take money for coverage. I don’t sacrifice accuracy for a good story.

Kindness matters to me. But kindness doesn’t mean silence when something needs to be said. When the evidence points in one direction and we argue about it anyway, I follow the evidence. When reasonable people can land in different places, I say that too.

I’m not on a pedestal looking down at a crowd. I’m in the crowd. (And the crowd is confused AF).

Where to start

If you’re new, here are a few pieces that show what the work looks like in practice:

How a Surveillance State Gets Built: Palantir, ICE, and Your Private Data — Starts in the life of a person who doesn’t know she’s being watched, then traces the technology and policy that made it possible. You walk away understanding how data collection becomes enforcement.

Who Decides How AI Goes to War — Starts with two AI companies making opposite decisions about the Pentagon in the same week, then traces the real question nobody was asking: who actually has the authority to decide how AI goes to war? You walk away realizing the answer is no one you elected.

Why We Fight. The Middle East Conflict, Explained — Takes a seemingly overwhelming, centuries in the making geopolitical conflict and distills the confusion down to one question: who stays in power because of this? You walk away with a deeper understanding of the conflict, myths about violence spurred by religious fervor squashed, and a nuanced perspective of U.S. military intervention in the region.

Did Trump Save You Money in His First Year? — Takes the claim at face value and follows the numbers. You walk away able to evaluate the economic argument for yourself with evidence instead of talking points.

Why Electricity and Gas Prices Are Rising — The thing on your bill explained through thirty years of policy decisions. You walk away knowing why the number changed and what’s driving it.

Every article follows the same principle: start with what you feel, trace it to what caused it, and leave you with something you can carry into a conversation.

Why subscribe

All content is free for every subscriber. If you find the work valuable and want to support independent journalism (this kids gotta eat) that puts education over engagement, consider becoming a paid subscriber to my Substack. Either way, welcome.

About us

Morristown Minute: About My Local Roots

About Morristown Minute

I also founded Morristown Minute, a hyperlocal news outlet based in Morristown, New Jersey. It launched in September 2021, it’s run by local residents and community members, and it now reaches over 20,000 readers daily.

Morristown Minute covers town council meetings, development proposals, school board decisions, infrastructure, and the stories that shape daily life in Morris County. It exists for the same reason The Minuteman does: because informed citizens make better decisions, whether they’re voting for president or showing up to a zoning hearing on a Tuesday night.

The two platforms work hand in hand. The Minuteman covers the national picture. Morristown Minute covers the local one. Same principle, different scale.

Have a topic you’d like explained? Send me your suggestion. I’d like to hear it.