Nieman Journalism Lab
Last May, as India conducted the largest democratic election in history, I spoke to reporters and fact-checkers in the country about the challenges they faced identifying political deepfakes. Many of them spoke to shortcomings in existing AI detection tools, and the biases baked into them. Most commercial detection tools, and even models developed by academic...
Newsrooms in Colorado that once employed hundreds could now “fit around a large dinner table,” Larry Ryckman, publisher and co-founder of The Colorado Sun, told me in December. Leaders at newsrooms like the Sun, seeing the rapid collapse of local news around them, are thinking about how they can do more to compensate for what’s...
Houston, with a population of more than 2.3 million people, is the largest city in Texas — and the Houston Landing had funding to match. The nonprofit news startup raised $20 million well before it began publishing, from the American Journalism Project and the Knight Foundation along with local philanthropies the Houston Endowment, Kinder Foundation,...
Last week, Nieman Lab reported that Gannett, the country’s largest newspaper chain, had removed references to “diversity” from its corporate site and would stop publishing diversity information for its newsrooms. This week, it’s the parent company of Reuters that is erasing “diversity” references and “clarifying some of [its] talent practices and language,” according to an...
It was about five years ago that I first started noticing the name Eunji Kim on some interesting research. Best dissertation, best paper, best article — she seemed to be winning them all. In her (still relatively brief) career, she’s written about everything from the impact of Trump’s most repeated lies on public opinion, how...
America’s largest newspaper chain, Gannett, will no longer publish demographic and diversity data about its workforce, and has revamped its corporate site to remove mentions of diversity. The announcement was made in a company town hall meeting on Wednesday afternoon. A spokesperson told me the company is “adapting to the evolving regulatory environment,” and, in...
Perhaps it’s surprising, perhaps not, but one thing has become clear about Donald Trump’s bizarre war with the Associated Press: The White House cares about it. It’s not just a symbolic gesture, red meat to throw MAGA’s way — it’s a conscious attempt to rewrite the rules of how the presidency interacts with the press....
Last month, Patch announced it was publishing AI-generated newsletters in 30,000 communities across the U.S. These newsletters scrape from local news sites, social media groups, and official town websites, then use large language models (LLMs) to select the most relevant headlines and draft story summaries. The final product is a daily or twice-weekly email round...
If you’re working out your newsroom’s AI budget for the rest of the year, maybe scrap the chatbot idea. According to a new Poynter/University of Minnesota study about how the American public feels about generative AI in journalism, 49% of respondents said they aren’t at all interested in using chatbots to find information from news...
Eight years ago, a friend and I drove from Buffalo to Los Angeles in a 14-year-old Audi station wagon we nicknamed Gerhardt. It was an imperfect car: The brakes didn’t work until the day before we left and the check engine light stayed on until we hit the Grand Canyon, at which point one of...
Last week, G/O Media sold Quartz to a Canadian software company called Redbrick, firing the entire editorial staff along the way. It was the final death knell for Quartz, which had been cofounded by Zach Seward — now the editorial director of AI initiatives at The New York Times (and once a Nieman Lab assistant...
Who actually wants impartial news? Your first thought might be: everybody! After all, if news is meant to be a reflection of reality, wouldn’t you want the least biased version of that reality — the one that matches up most with the world around you? Even an outlet as partisan as Fox News understands the...
Crime news has been a fixture of journalism for centuries. The true crime genre, from documentaries to podcasts to YouTube channels to TikTok explainers, has boomed over the last decade. And news publishers are looking to standalone subscription products to boost reader revenue. USA Today is combining the two trends with Witness, a curated collection...
Some of the gnarliest debates in my student newsroom were over granting anonymity and takedown requests. As staff writers and editors, we were taught to consider our duty to our readers when granting anonymity — and weigh that seriously against the risks a given source may face if named. Takedown requests, meanwhile, required a vote...
When the U.S. Agency for International Development was gutted, student journalists at The Arkansas Traveler realized the impact wasn’t limited to foreign countries — it hit close to home in Northwest Arkansas. USAID typically purchases about $2 billion worth of American crops to send overseas, and Arkansas, the largest rice-producing state, supplies roughly 40% of that grain....
When Donald Trump signed an executive order to gut the government-run agency overseeing Voice of America (VOA), among the first in line to celebrate were Russian and Chinese state officials. “Today is a celebration for my colleagues at RT, Sputnik, and other outlets, because Trump unexpectedly announced that he’s closing down Radio Liberty and Voice...
There’s a lot out there to leak. The second Trump administration, historically unfriendly to the press, has thrown Washington into chaos. Tens of thousands of federal employees have been placed on leave or fired as billionaire Elon Musk’s DOGE tries to gut the government. And taxpayer-funded data is being destroyed. Amid the confusion, news organizations...
Billionaire Mark Cuban backing a startup is not, on its own, a big story. He’s done it hundreds of times. But I was interested in this particular investment highlighted by Sarah Perez in TechCrunch: (You can download Skylight for iOS and Android now. It…looks like an underpopulated TikTok clone — but one I could log...
A decade ago, journalist András Pethő co-founded the nonprofit investigative site Direkt36. He’d just resigned from Origo, one of Hungary’s leading news sites, over political pressure on the newsroom. Origo went on to become “a mouthpiece of Hungary’s authoritarian government” and “the website that shows how a free press can die.” Direkt36, meanwhile, has cemented...
What would happen if Congress defunded NPR and PBS — something Republicans have renewed their push for following a House hearing last week? First things first: “The funding bill passed by Congress and signed into law by Trump earlier this month included $535 million for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the entity that disburses funds...
On the morning of February 27, USAID workers who had been fired or placed on administrative leave during the Trump administration’s sudden dismantling of the agency went back to their offices at the Reagan Building and International Trade Center in Washington, D.C., for the last time. They’d been assigned 15-minute windows to clean out their...
Austin, Texas — The first time Donald Trump attacked White House reporter Ashley Parker by name on social media was in 2019. It was worrying and unsettling but Parker quickly focused on a silver lining. “There was this wonderful moment where I got to hear from everyone in my life,” Parker told a crowd at...
As LinkedIn post ledes go, Spotlight PA CEO and editor Christopher Baxter’s on a post last week was intriguing: “I recently had lunch with a staunch, pro-Trump Republican and highly successful business leader, and his views on local news changed my own.” In the post, Baxter, the founding editor of the six-year-old nonprofit local newsroom...
Robert W. McChesney, the lion of anti-corporate media scholarship, is dead at the age of 72. He was, for decades, probably the most prominent academic critic of American media from the left, focused on all the ways our idealized vision of a “free press” was actually hampered by the power of big business, the wealthy,...
It’s hard not to root for the National Trust for Local News. Heralded as a savior of local newspapers, the nonprofit has presented itself as the ideal foil to the hedge fund-owned chains that slash local newsroom jobs and chase profit over meaningful journalism. The Trust has grown at a remarkable clip since its founding...
Journalism’s biggest scoops usually require months — years! — of shoe-leather reporting. Developing sources. Building trust. Coaxing out documents. Analyzing data. Assembling tiny fragments of information — perhaps insignificant on their own — into a damning portrait of malfeasance, graft, or abandonment of duty. But sometimes, you just get dropped into the wrong group text....
In 1964, Philip Converse published what would become one of the most cited papers in all of political science, “The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics.”1 It was a result of a movement at the University of Michigan, where Converse taught, to do large-scale data analyses of the ideology of the American public —...
The digital media company Ziff Davis — owner of CNET, Mashable, Lifehacker, and PC Mag as well as a number of shopping and B2B sites — has acquired The Skimm. The Skimm will join Ziff Davis’s health and wellness division Everyday Health Group as part of the deal. The Skimm will operate as a standalone...
After a decade at the helm, Charlie Sennott is leaving the GroundTruth Project, the nonprofit journalism organization he founded in 2014 that also launched Report for America and Report for the World. Sennott, a 2006 Nieman Fellow, will take the GroundTruth Project name and newsletter to launch GroundTruth Media Partners LLC, a for-profit organization with...
Jake Fischer was at a friend’s birthday party when a push notification lit up his phone just after midnight on February 2. His first thought: “That can’t be real.” The incoming tweet from ESPN’s senior NBA insider Shams Charania revealed that the Dallas Mavericks had unexpectedly traded their young superstar Luka Dončić to the Los...
When ABC shut down FiveThirtyEight early this month, the site’s publicly available polling databases — like a presidential approval rating tracker — shut down, too. Many news outlets, including The New York Times and FiveThirtyEight founder Nate Silver’s Silver Bulletin, had relied on the data for election coverage, and people worried about its disappearance. “Collecting and maintaining...
The federal government does a lot of things. It lifts millions of seniors out of poverty! It forecasts avalanches! It invades foreign countries based on dubious intelligence! It determines what time it is! And when it’s got a spare moment, it protects the Constitution — or at least one copy of it. If you set...
The “Trump bump” isn’t just for news publishers in the United States. Last fall, four European news publishers sweetened their subscription deals by offering complimentary access to The New York Times, with the idea that their readers might want more expansive U.S. election coverage. Premium subscribers to news outlets like El País (Spain), Politiken (Denmark),...
On Friday, United States president Donald Trump signed an executive order to gut the United States Agency for Global Media, the parent organization of U.S. news agency Voice of America. More than 1,000 VOA employees were put on indefinite paid leave on Saturday, according to NPR. VOA and its affiliates had reached 420 million people...
Last fall residents of Mandan, North Dakota woke up to an unfamiliar newspaper at their doorsteps. The broadsheet Central ND News, printed on newsprint, had columns, standard-sized articles, and headlines. But there was an odd theme to its stories. Many referenced events that had happened nearly a decade earlier, when protestors had swarmed the rural...
On March 7, education reporter Hannah Dellinger published a story on the experiences of Michigan LGBTQ+ students since Donald Trump took office. Dellinger spoke to several students who have seen a rise in hate speech at school after the president signed a series of anti-trans executive orders. The lead voice in the story was Sebastian...
NICAR — the National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting1 — is one of my favorite annual journalism conferences, even if I haven’t been in a few years. That’s because it’s uniquely easy to benefit from even without attending. As the nation’s news nerds descend on a city (this year Minneapolis), they come bearing PDFs and slide...
When Ruth Marcus resigned from her position as an associate editor and longtime political columnist at the Washington Post on March 10, she said it was because Post publisher Will Lewis had killed one of her columns. Specifically, she’d written a column criticizing Post owner Jeff Bezos’ vision for an opinion page that advocated for...
Let’s start at the end. The acknowledgements of Murder the Truth, a startling and deeply researched new book by New York Times journalist and editor David Enrich, thanks the Times’ “unflappable” in-house lawyer. The business investigations unit overseen by Enrich has repeatedly been targeted by threats that are part of a larger campaign to weaponize...
If you care about public media and have read any news mentioning the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in 2025, chances are it’s been something scary / depressing / grim about how the president wants to defund it (not a new threat, but one that feels more real than it did a few years ago). That’s...
Wendy Monterrosa and her colleagues founded news site Voz Pública in El Salvador in 2020. A year into Nayib Bukele’s presidency, marked by frequent attacks on journalists, Voz Pública built a small newsroom focused on fact-checking and investigative journalism. But everything crashed down in early February when Donald Trump put on hold any funding from the United States Agency for...
Over the past year, AI chatbots have been widely criticized for how poorly they cite news publishers, and how little traffic they drive to the publishers they do cite properly. ChatGPT has often been at the center of this conversation. Last summer, I reported that ChatGPT frequently hallucinated fake URLs to news sites, even to...
Joe Rogan is, if nothing else, prolific. He’s published 2,286 episodes in the 15-ish years he’s been making his podcast, at an average of a little over two and a half hours each. New episodes drop three or four times a week, which means getting the full Joe Rogan Experience would take about 240 days...
Politico Pro is a high-priced item ($12,000 or more annually!) that is targeted at a demanding audience of lobbyists, agency staffers, corporate execs, industry think-tankers, and oligarchs either real or aspiring. It attempts to give high-leverage intel about the world of D.C. policy to people in a position to take advantage of that intel. So...
Generative AI hype has launched newsroom experiments around the world. Even though many of these early applications have become cautionary tales, the hype has endured for over two years since OpenAI publicly launched ChatGPT. In many ways, this is familiar territory for journalism. In a long line of digital technologies (smartphones, social media, the infamous...
OptOut News, a news aggregation app that shared journalism from “financially independent” and largely progressive news outlets like The Nation, The Intercept, and Grist, has shut down due to a lack of funding. Co-founder Alex Kotch — formerly an investigative reporter at the Center for Media and Democracy — told OptOut newsletter subscribers on Tuesday evening that...
Disney is cutting 200 positions across ABC News and Disney Entertainment, including shutting down FiveThirtyEight, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday night. From the Journal: The ABC news magazine shows “20/20” and “Nightline” are consolidating into one unit, resulting in job cuts, the people said. ABC is also eliminating the political and data-driven news site...
Billionaire newspaper owners are in the middle of a massive freakout about their Opinion sections during the second Trump administration. Last week, Amazon CEO and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos announced that the Post’s Opinion section would reorient itself “in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets…Viewpoints opposing those pillars will...
When the Taliban took over Afghanistan in 2021, Irish war correspondent Jane Ferguson was in Kabul and decided to stay to report on the aftermath, posting videos on Instagram. Ferguson, who has worked steadily as a freelancer covering conflicts in the Middle East for outlets like Al Jazeera, PBS, and The New Yorker, said that...
Among Ben Romo’s core ’80s memories as a kid growing up in Santa Barbara, CA: Placing third in a Big Wheel race on Leadbetter Beach. That accomplishment was documented in his hometown paper, the more than century-old Santa Barbara News-Press. It was the first time Romo remembers making the paper, but not the last; the...
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