My management tricks (which came from being managed) included calling for a 90 minute meeting if I needed 45 minutes, and bring snacks.
Oh and when someone finishes an all day job in half a day, let them goof off for the rest of the day.
But then I believed that whole happy workers are maximally productive workers thing that, well, every serious management study reports.
As we quickly learned during the George W Bush era, no news media agency can be trusted. To counter this, check reporting of the same incident from multiple news agencies and find the consistent facts. Everything else is suspect.
In a hurry, see if Reuters or AP has covered it, but verify when you have the time.
Done this way AJ is perfectly viable as a source for news, in that the bias can be filtered out.
FOX and OANN are known to lie or misrepresent facts entirely, but that gets filtered through cross-checking.
Trust, but verify.