Earlier this month, The New York Times published a remarkable story about the Sinaloa Cartel and its sprawling fentanyl operation. It’s the kind of arduous reporting that takes time to develop, and in this case, it required journalists immersing themselves in a criminal enterprise, getting face-to-face with the worst of the worst.

Tanner Greer, a conservative essayist, lauded The Times for the story in a tweet and said that there are

no investigative reporting pieces like this being published in conservative alternative media. It’s not easy to win the trust of a cartel drug runner, have him show you how he hides bags of fentanyl in his car, much less take you with him dodging military check points.

Greer is right. Not just about the unique difficulties of journalism like that, but also about the fact that you simply do not see this kind of thing coming out of right-wing media. That’s not to say that there isn’t any journalism on the right. It’s just that, even now, nothing quite rises to the level of what you will find in The Times.

Yes, conservatives can quibble with what outlets like The Times get wrong—and they do get plenty of things wrong. But the fact remains that the outlets we so easily dismiss as “fake news” for these sins do, indeed, still produce world-class reporting, and there is no equivalent on the right.

Marlo Slayback, executive director of the Collegiate Network for the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, agrees. She has made it a point to try to address this disparity from her perch at the conservative nonprofit.

In an email, Slayback wrote that young conservatives who pursue journalism

often enter the field because they want to ‘fight back’ against what they see as media bias, and I get that because I was one of those students. While that instinct is understandable, the danger is that it leads them to conflate journalism with activism and that can get in the way of not only impartiality, but also the types of stories being pursued.

I asked her why this is happening, and about her efforts to fix it.

Why doesn’t the right do the kind of journalism and writing that you find in The New Yorker or The Atlantic?

I think this fundamentally boils down to a patronage problem. I know plenty of talented writers who would happily spend a year collecting interviews, following leads, building sources and bringing hidden stories to life, but who would never receive the support they need to accomplish that from a right-leaning publication. I think Michael Anton captures the problem well in a piece he wrote called “The Tom Wolfe Model.” Conservative donors tend to favor immediate political results, and that high time preference behavior pairs really poorly with the demands of thorough, thoughtful, and artful writing. Conservative media projects often begin not as independent artistic or intellectual ventures but as donor-backed initiatives with explicitly political objectives, so I always find it ironic when the right accuses the left of making everything political. I think the right falls into this habit too, at least when we’re talking about journalism and the literary arts. Large conservative donors typically want a return on investment in terms of policy influence or cultural signaling, not necessarily in cultivating patient, slow-growing prestige brands that could sustain a stable of writers who need time to deliver work that’s competitive with the stuff that prestige papers are publishing. So I think conservative publications often lack the freedom to invest in experimental formats and styles or long-form cultural criticism that doesn’t obviously “pay off” politically.

What are some of the problems right right-wing media and the incentive structures that make it tick?

A lot of people who are interested in journalism and who would self-identify as conservative are drawn to it initially because they’re politically involved or activists, and there’s a place for that in the newspaper, but it’s the Opinions page. An Opinions page shouldn’t make up the bulk of any paper’s output or resources. Joseph Mitchell, a journalism legend who spent decades at The New Yorker, attributes his prolific career to a piece of advice his first editor gave him, which was “to be a good reporter, walk.” This takes time and money because that kind of reporting means travel and many hours.

A lot of conservative publications expect writers to churn out several pieces a day, often by drawing from newswire services. Some ask for several opinion pieces per week. When I was working full-time as a reporter in my early-mid 20s, I self-funded a lot of writing projects, drawing from my meager journalism salary to do it because I thought it was worth it, but there was nowhere I could go that could subsidize the costs related to investigative journalism. I bought plane tickets to Europe when I needed to attend an event or meet up with a person I wanted to interview on their home turf, which adds invaluable texture to a story. The importance of showing up is something I learned from a very liberal journalism program in college, actually, and in retrospect I’m grateful for that experience because it taught me that journalism and nonfiction writing are a trade and an art.

Something that creative writing programs (where you’ll often encounter journalism specializations) do very well are workshops. Sending in your work to an instructor for edits and review but also having your peers review and workshop your writing was critical for the development of my writing voice and style. I don’t think the right does much of this because journalism isn’t really viewed as an art, outside of a handful of very niche magazines out there, and even then, many of those that do it well are explicitly religious (The Lamp is a good example). My very liberal journalism instructor in college was also the advisor for the campus daily paper, and I remember him really impressing on us journalism etiquette (things like, if you’re reporting a story and there’s food being served, you don’t help yourself to any of it while on the job). He took the vocation very seriously, so I took it very seriously.

He also always pushed us to go to the scene and tell a story. The best pieces I ever wrote were written by sitting in someone’s house with him for hours and talking with him, while also letting the atmosphere and all of the little things this person curated his home with fill in the gaps and add the odds and ends that animate a great piece of writing. You also need to develop a disposition, your journalism persona, that becomes comfortable with being a little intrusive. This takes time, and then once you have the raw material, it’s like whittling wood.

How are you working to address this through ISI?

What I’m trying to do with the journalism program I lead at the Collegiate Network is get conservative students who are interested in journalism to think less of themselves as playing defense against the left and think more of themselves as being truthtellers who are obsessed with excellence in craft and technique, not just content.

I think if you’re unable or unwilling to invest in the craft of journalism, you lock yourself into a narrower audience and undermine the work you’re doing. This year, our students are learning how to use a DSLR camera to take original photos for their stories. A complaint I’ve long had is, why do so few of these conservative publications have a full-time seasoned photojournalist? I remember speaking to a former colleague who was a photojournalist who left right-wing media to work as a freelancer with some mainstream local publications because she felt like she was treated as disposable. Every mainstream publication has numerous photojournalists who work for them, and sometimes the photo has more of an impact than the accompanying story.

We’re also spending significant time teaching our students journalism ethics, doing feature and investigative reporting writing workshops, basically J-School without the hefty price tag. My hope is that these students think of journalism as a vocation, with tools and skills they master so that the stories they tell are elevated into cultural memory by being too good to ignore. And that’s what will ultimately matter beyond today’s news cycle.