Truth in the News

Ren LaForme, BA ’10, always wanted to appreciate the bigger picture. Thanks to UB, he has found a profession that gives him that opportunity every day.

“I’m a fan of the unvarnished truth,” says LaForme, a journalist in St. Petersburg, Florida, who grew up in Gasport, N.Y., a small town in Niagara County. Truth is, he says, UB was a big place at first. “I'm a first-generation college student, and I felt a lot of pressure to succeed.”

A psychology major, LaForme added journalism certificate classes during his junior year, learning ethics and investigative reporting from several Buffalo News veterans. The classes “set me off on a new trajectory,” he says. “I remember leaving each class extremely inspired, yet full of knowledge that informs what I would be up against as a journalist.”

LaForme began writing for The Spectrum, the daily student newspaper, interviewing campus visitors like Ralph Nader and former U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan. He also covered campus issues and major news stories, like the 2009 crash of Flight 3407 in Clarence, N.Y., and the death of a student in the Ellicott complex.

In addition to managing The Spectrum, he also became editor in chief of Generation, the student magazine he helped to reboot.

Covering the flight crash, a national story that deeply affected the Buffalo region, was a flashpoint for LaForme, a self-described “Buffalo guy.” A crew from ABC World News Tonight arrived and asked for help finding freelancers. LaForme and several other Spectrum writers joined the coverage team. Although he didn’t visit the crash site, he recalls a fellow reporter commenting that “you could smell the burning on their clothes.”

After graduating, he moved to south Florida with his then girlfriend, Keeley Sheehan BA ’10, CERT ’10, whom he’d met at The Spectrum. They married, and Keeley attended graduate school at the University of South Florida for journalism while Ren worked a few jobs, including brief stints in marketing that showed him “how little I enjoyed marketing.” He eventually studied journalism at USF, too, becoming editor of the campus paper and dipping his toes into the state’s political news cycle.

In 2013, LaForme landed jobs as an online learning instructor and then digital tools reporter at The Poynter Institute for Media Studies, a nonprofit news advocacy organization that owns the Tampa Bay Times. “We teach journalism to journalists in support of democracy,” he explains, listing the institute’s growing stable of projects, including PolitiFact and the International Fact-Checking Network, a global consortium of verified fact-checkers for news outlets.

Now managing editor of Poynter.org, LaForme sees technology as a useful tool but not a silver bullet for the struggling newspaper industry, which he says is drowning in a “trust and misinformation problem.”

“Journalists work really hard to put factual information out there, but through social media and other means, there is as much if not more information that counters that work,” LaForme says.

While LaForme can’t predict the future of journalism, he remains optimistic. “I would put my money on smaller, local mission-driven organizations over chain-owned, profit-driven organizations any day,” he says.

Time will tell, but for now, he works to keep the truth on his side, and the big picture in view.