In its Q2 earnings call Thursday morning, USA Today Co. chairman and CEO Mike Reed told investors he expects the partnership to “strengthen how we collect, connect and activate audience data to drive more effective and faster monetization across our platform.”

“Every visit, every session, and every moment of attention creates a signal,” Reed said. “When we connect those signals, they become actionable intelligence that allows us to engage users more effectively and monetize those relationships faster and at much greater value. The work our team is doing with Palantir is a direct extension of this strategy. We are applying Palantir’s AI-powered platform to one of the largest opportunities in front of us, converting the sheer scale of our audience into known, orchestrated first-party relationships, because that is what turns our reach into sustainable, higher value revenue.”

USA Today Co. owns more than 200 local newspapers in the United States, along with its national daily USA Today. The partnership with Palantir comes as search traffic continues to fall — a challenge faced by publications around the world, and one The New York Times mentioned in its own earnings report Wednesday. USA Today Co. reported 158 million unique visitors in the second quarter of the year, down from 180 million in the first quarter.

This decline “does not reflect lower demand for the content,” said Kristin Roberts, president of USA Today Media. “What it reflects is lower referrals from traditional search because of those consumer discovery changes that we’re seeing and witnessing.”

Palantir has been the subject of controversy in recent months for providing its technology to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the U.S. Department of Defense, and the Israeli military. The company’s co-founder and chairman is Peter Thiel, the billionaire entrepreneur who funded Hulk Hogan’s defamation lawsuit against Gawker, leading to the publication’s ultimate bankruptcy and closure.

USA Today Co. isn’t the only media company to enlist Palantir’s services. Axel Springer — which owns Business Insider, Politico, Bild, and The Telegraph — and Fox News have also partnered with Palantir for its data intelligence tools. Thomson Reuters also supplies data to Palantir, which had been used by ICE, 404 Media reported in March.

“It’s important to note all of our data remains our data,” Reed told investors. “It’s really just leveraging this incredible AI and software that Palantir has to allow us to move so much faster and to be so much smarter with the data we have today. And…take a lot of the anonymous interactions we have today and turn those into known relationships…The more known relationships we have, the more data we create, the more signals we create, the more actionable intelligence we have.”

Roberts told USA Today Co. employees in an email Thursday that the Palantir partnership could result in “better recommendations and offers based on what people actually care about” and “smarter subscription and advertising experiences” for consumers and subscribers.

“USA TODAY Co. complies with applicable data protection and privacy laws and maintains strong standards for data security and governance,” the company said in a statement to Nieman Lab. “We require this of our vendors and partners as well, reflecting our belief that safeguarding protected personal information is essential to our business and the audiences we serve. Our editorial decisions remain independent and are guided by our longstanding journalistic standards and ethics policies.”

Roberts noted that World Cup coverage across USA Today’s network “generated 97 million pageviews, with search driving nearly 65% of that traffic. That reinforces an important point — when content meets a real and urgent need — search still delivers. But we are not building our future on search, even in our strongest categories. Great content still finds an audience, and our opportunity moving forward is to ensure that our distribution tactics keep pace with the way readers and viewers want to consume content in digital spaces.”

“I can see a day where we turn off scraping or making our content available for the [search engine links],” Reed said. “We’re actually more hopeful that we can be proactive with Google in negotiating a fair licensing deal. That would be our preferred path — to have our content appear both in traditional search as well as in AI summaries. But if we have to cut them off and block them in order to get to a deal, then we’ll do that for sure.”

Read the full earnings report here.

Grokipedia allows humans to suggest edits, but Columbia’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism found in February that the tool was increasingly editing itself. “Grok-supplied edits spiked in December and have overtaken human submitters, making up more than three-quarters of the suggestions,” Tow Center fellow C.J. Robinson wrote.

Now, though, it appears that Grokipedia isn’t being edited at all. “The encyclopedia stopped editing itself and processing suggested edits from humans,” DiResta and the Stanford Cyber Policy Center Ronald Robertson wrote for Lawfare this week. “As far as we can tell, no entry has changed in more than three months.”

That matters, they say, because people actually use Grokipedia, and AI systems, especially ChatGPT, rely on its content:

The significance here extends beyond one internet encyclopedia. Grokipedia is not just a small xAI side project. The web traffic analytics firm Similarweb estimates that Grokipedia received 6.7 million visits in June 2026 and ranked 11,022nd among websites globally — substantial reach for a site launched less than a year earlier. Individual high-profile entries command significant readership: Grokipedia’s page-statistics API — which serves per-article view counts that are not displayed on the front-end website — records over 83 million views for President Obama and 16 million lifetime views for its Musk entry since October 2025.

Grokipedia’s contents also do not remain confined to Grokipedia. An Ahrefs analysis published in March 2026 found the site surfacing in roughly 356,000 citations across AI systems — most often in ChatGPT and Google’s AI Mode, and at lower volumes in Gemini, Copilot, and AI Overviews. That remains a small fraction of Wikipedia’s roughly 25 million such citations, but it is not trivial.

A reference work whose contents are silently frozen and whose editorial record is inaccurate could propagate incorrect or outdated information into answers that people encounter elsewhere. There are also potential reputational consequences for individuals with unreliable Grokipedia biographies who can no longer appeal to the AI for an edit…

As agentic AI systems begin to generate and maintain reference knowledge independently, the question is not only whether their output is accurate at a given moment. It’s whether their behavior over time is observable, and their record stable enough to be accountable for their contributions to the public information ecosystem. At the moment, Grokipedia is neither.

Boing Boing notes that Wikipedia is updated about a quarter of a million times per day.

Our book, published by Polity, argues it doesn’t have to be that way. AI can also offer journalism a rare chance to break that cycle and build something better. We draw on questions of creativity, democratic accountability, platform power, and human agency to offer readers a toolkit for reimagining journalism in the age of AI — not just as an industry, but as a profession dedicated to serving the public good.

The book engages with AI’s impacts on multiple levels, covering everything from the hands-on realities of AI-assisted news production and the shifting architecture of media power to AI’s implications for democratic life, journalism education, and the profession’s future. Below is a portion of Chapter 2, which examines how AI is already reshaping every stage of news production and asks whether these tools will reinvigorate journalism or merely accelerate its hamster wheel. This excerpt focuses on emerging applications of AI across five stages of the newsmaking process — story ideation, sourcing, verification, storytelling, and distribution — highlighting both their transformative potential and their limitations.

You can download a digital copy of Journalism in the Age of AI from our website for free starting August 6, and purchase paperback copies starting November 6 in the U.K. or January 19, 2027 in the U.S.

Smaller organizations have also stumbled. In November 2025, reporters at Suncoast Searchlight, a Florida-based nonprofit news organization, sent a letter to their board of directors after discovering their editor-in-chief’s undisclosed use of AI editing tools — which included instances where the AI inserted hallucinated quotes into reporters’ drafts. Some staff members were unaware that AI was being deployed on their work at all, raising important questions about transparency, editorial control, and ethical boundaries.

These uses of AI illuminate the emerging complications around authorship, accountability, and transparency — questions that grow more vexing as AI becomes so integrated into workflows that some people no longer consider it worth mentioning. While the need for disclosure is often underscored in debates about AI-generated news, the thresholds become murkier as AI permeates routine support activities and sometimes even directly modifies journalists’ work without their knowledge or consent. The line between tool and author therefore continues to blur, challenging foundational assumptions about who is responsible when storytelling goes wrong.

AI and distribution

Media distribution fundamentally shapes who can access journalism and under what conditions. For decades, news organizations had considerable direct control over their distribution pathways. However, the rise of digital intermediaries — search engines, social media platforms, news aggregators — has dramatically altered this landscape. Today, algorithmic systems increasingly determine which stories reach which audiences and provide the marketplace for monetizing them, forcing news organizations to adapt their editorial practices to accommodate the demands of algorithmic distribution. At the same time, AI empowers news organizations to rapidly remix their own content for multiple platforms and to expand accessibility.

Optimized distribution: Media publishers have traditionally owned large segments of their distribution channels. They often owned the printing presses and the delivery trucks. They owned the cameras and microphones to record the news, as well as the antennas to beam their stories across the country. With the advent of the internet, newsrooms also had significant control over their own websites. As social media platforms started to gain popularity in the 2000s, though, media publishers gradually became more dependent on platform distribution by tech companies like Google and Facebook, including their social media feeds, search engine results, and news aggregators.

Thus, news organizations have had to manage their own proprietary distribution channels while optimizing their content for algorithmic visibility. Some newsrooms even required reporters to build personal social media followings, effectively transforming individual journalists into distribution channels. Meanwhile, audiences increasingly encountered news through algorithmic feeds, where platform logic, not editorial judgment, dictated the final presentation.

Several news organizations have adapted by integrating AI into their distribution through two main strategies. Algorithmic optimization uses AI to decode platforms’ shifting preferences, advising journalists on ideal formats, optimal publishing times, and strategic keywords to maximize visibility and reach across platforms. Targeted delivery harnesses AI for precision audience segmentation, enabling organizations to serve personalized content to specific demographic or interest groups.

BBC News exemplifies this approach. In March 2025, the broadcaster announced a new department dedicated to AI-powered personalization. As then-CEO Deborah Turness wrote to staff: “We must become ruthlessly focused on understanding our audience needs, on delivering the kind of journalism and content they want, in the places they want it, designed and produced in the shape that they enjoy it.” The path forward, she argued, requires deploying “AI to support, enable and accelerate our innovation and growth.”

It isn’t just major organizations doing this, either. The Rural News Network, a collective of more than 500 local news nonprofits across the United States, created Text RURAL to solve a distribution challenge. With member organizations producing nearly 5,000 stories monthly, the AI-powered tool automatically selects, aggregates, and summarizes the most relevant content for individual users based on their location and interests. It then delivers personalized weekly news roundups via text message. It’s a practical solution that makes local journalism more accessible to rural communities underserved by traditional distribution channels. However, it is an automated solution that bears risk, as even major publishers have discovered in their experiments with AI summaries.

Automating content adaptation: News organizations are also using generative AI for automated adaptation, or the rapid generation of derivative products tailored to different platforms and accessibility needs. AI systems can automatically produce social posts, video summaries, audio versions, and translations from content originally created by human journalists. While these derivatives are typically reviewed before publication, they nevertheless reduce the time, cost, and labor required to meet audiences across multiple platforms while expanding accessibility.

Dow Jones Newswires launched a custom AI language service in 2024 targeting this exact opportunity. The system produces what it describes as “fluent” translations of hundreds of English-language stories daily into Japanese, Korean, and French. “It gives us an ability to very quickly, almost instantaneously, translate our very rich existing English-language content into a language that will attract other audiences,” observes Chip Cummins, The Wall Street Journal’s chief Newswires editor. The service reaches professionals “who prefer to read their business news in their native language or who are suddenly tapping into the US market as a place where they want to invest, or their clients are investing.”

Similarly, the U.S. television station WCPO 9 uses AI to automatically reformat content for different platforms. “AI helps us take horizontal video storytelling you might see on our broadcast or YouTube and convert it to vertical on Instagram or TikTok,” notes senior manager PJ O’Keefe, “so that, again, we can make as big of an impact as possible, on as many platforms as possible.”

Dow Jones’ approach includes transparency measures: each translated article carries a warning about AI translation and links to the original story. However, as WBEZ reporter Araceli Gómez-Aldana observes, current models still struggle with the “accuracy of the translation for news stories, cultural understanding, translating quotes for tone and understanding — not only a literal word-by-word translation — and adapting to various dialects and literacy levels.” In other words, there are still risks associated with this kind of functionality.

Despite these powerful capabilities, what AI cannot do is liberate news organizations from platform dependencies. No matter how sophisticated their AI tools become, newsrooms cannot alter the ethical, economic, or political decisions made by platform owners regarding content moderation, algorithmic demotion of news, or sudden rule changes. Platforms can unilaterally reshape their algorithms — as Meta has done repeatedly in prioritizing and then de-prioritizing news content on Facebook — leaving news organizations scrambling to adapt their carefully crafted AI-optimized strategies to new, often opaque, rules. This structural power imbalance constrains AI’s potential to transform news distribution in ways that truly benefit journalism.

To some people, I’m sure, the answer will seem obvious: Journalism’s just gotten worse. The news used to be produced by upstanding proud Americans who only cared about the truth, and now it’s the product of a cabal of latte-sipping leftist elites willing to lie about anything in order to promote their dark, anti-Christian agenda and destroy all that is good in the world. Let’s call this the Fox News hypothesis.

That argument, as common as it is, leaves something to be desired. People who lose trust in “the media” aren’t doing so solely in response to their own observations and experiences. They live in a social environment filled with pre-baked messaging on who’s got your back and who’s out to get you, and “the media” makes for a pretty convenient target. How much of the decline in media trust is actually about the media’s actions, versus the narratives that get spun about them?

That eternal question was one reason I was excited to come across a brand new dissertation written by a journalist-turned-academic named David Beavers. Beavers spent five years working as an editor and producer at Politico before moving to a PhD program at Harvard. Six years later, he’s a freshly minted scholar headed to Wake Forest, where he’s been hired as an assistant professor in the Department of Politics & International Affairs.

Beavers’ dissertation is titled “Undermining the Fourth Estate: Elite Criticism and Journalism’s Fragile Foundation,” and it aims to untangle the question of media distrust causality through a creative mix of journalism history, natural language processing, and field experiments. (It just won Harvard’s prestigious Charles Sumner Prize.) Beavers advances two major data-driven claims. First, the American system of journalism has historically relied more on rhetorical appeals than structural forces to proclaim and defend its legitimacy. The First Amendment lets anyone be a journalist, which is great — but its lack of professional gatekeeping has also left the field uniquely vulnerable to attack from those who seek to weaken it. And second, the decline in public trust in the media was both preceded by and driven by attacks on the press by political elites, especially at two key pivot points — white southern Democrats defending Jim Crow in the 1960s and 1970s and the Lee Atwater/Newt Gingrich generation of Republicans in the early 1990s. As a result, criticism of the press — which used to be relatively equal on both ends of the political spectrum — has become a decidedly conservative behavior.

Here’s the full abstract:

American democracy is predicated on having a public that is sufficiently informed to hold elected officials accountable and to make sensible decisions at the voting booth. But a decades-long decline in Americans’ trust in the press threatens to undermine the fundamental role the media plays in cultivating an informed populace. This dissertation asks: What explains Americans’ declining trust in the press? I address this question in three parts. In Part I, I examine the historical development of journalism as a profession to offer a theory for why American journalism’s institutional forms make it uniquely vulnerable to political efforts to undermine its legitimacy. In Part II, I quantify congressional rhetoric about the press between 1939 and 2023 and relate it to long-standing survey evidence to show that elite press criticism has driven down Americans’ trust in the media over the last half-century. Finally, in Part III, I turn from causes of Americans’ declining trust in the media to consequences and possible solutions. I examine the effects of media trust and elite press criticism on news consumption using web-browsing and newspaper circulation data, and I conduct a trio of original survey experiments to assess interventions aimed at restoring trust in reputable journalism. I conclude with reflections on the state of American media and American democracy — and how those two are fundamentally intertwined.

I gave Beavers a call to talk through his findings; here’s a lightly edited version of our conversation.

The Times added 280,000 digital-only subscribers between April and June, a drop from the 310,000 subscribers added in the first three months of the year. (The Times now has 13.3 million subscribers in total, “roughly on pace” to hit its goal of 15 million subscribers by the end of next year.) Total subscription revenue has increased to $538 million, with most of that coming from digital subscriptions. In an investor call, Times CEO Meredith Kopit Levien attributed the numbers, in part, to the decline of search traffic.

“We delivered our Q2 results against the backdrop of a rapidly changing information ecosystem shaped by a small number of big tech companies whose moves continue to result in less traffic to publishers,” Kopit Levien said. “The Times isn’t immune to that impact.”

Kopit Levien also emphasized that “long-term bets” on video are essential to the company’s continued success. Adjusted operating costs increased 10% year-over-year, in part due to “investments in our video journalism.” The Times hired eight video journalists in January and is currently hiring for 12 video-focused roles. In 2024, The Times experimented with pushing vertical video on its homepage and by 2025, it created a Watch tab in its main app.

“We’re now producing thousands of new videos each quarter to reach the enormous audience for video in all the places people watch, including our own destinations,” Kopit Levien said. “Just this week we launched a Shows tab in our flagship app, creating a new way to experience our long-form franchises in news, opinion, culture and lifestyle…This is all part of our strategy to engage the people we already have more, and engage more people. As we do that, we intend to make the Times as preferred a brand for watching the news as it is for reading and listening.”

Many of the original videos published this past quarter were of reporters explaining their reporting to the camera, which Kopit Levien said is a format that is “inherently humanizing and trust building.” She did not provide specific numbers on engagement, but when asked whether the heavy video investment has resulted in advertising revenue, Kopit Levien said it’s played a “minor role.” In the coming months, she said, the Times will “really focus on scaling production, scaling engagement, and then scaling monetization.”

The Times also said it spent $4.6 million on generative AI–related lawsuits in the second quarter of the year. In total, it’s spent $32.9 million on those lawsuits since it began breaking out their costs in earning reports in the first quarter of 2024.

Read Kopit Levien’s full comments from the earnings call here.

A lot’s happened to media in the ensuing decade — perhaps most notably, the pandemic-fueled rise in work-from-home arrangements that, again, could have reduced the number of journalists overpaying for a Brooklyn walkup. But Bloomberg’s Justin Fox has an interesting datapoint today that shows the concentration of media keeps on growing.

The nation’s media capital is in many ways far less central to the national conversation than it used to be, with TikTok, YouTube, Substack, artificial-intelligence chatbots and other new modes of communication sucking up so much of Americans’ time and attention. Yet in the production of certain kinds of media — journalism in particular — New York is more dominant than ever.

My measure of dominance is employment, which is incomplete and flawed but better than anything else available. Having looked into the centralization of media employment a decade ago, I was inspired to revisit the data by an online complaint (from Minneapolis) about “the New York-ification of Democratic politics.” What I found is that New York-ification of media has for the most part continued to grow even as media industries have continued to struggle.

Fox pulls labor data for a number of media professions, including magazines, book publishing, and broadcasting. But of most interest for our purposes is newspapers (a category which now also include digital-only publishers). In 2016, when I was writing about coastal concentration, 1 out of every 30 U.S. newspaper jobs (3.3%) were based in Manhattan. That was already up markedly from 1-in-48 jobs (2.1%) in 2000 — which was, roughly speaking, the final peak of the print newspaper business.

But that trend hasn’t retrenched in the years since — it’s accelerated. By 2025, 1 out of every 12 U.S. newspaper jobs (8.3%) was based in Manhattan. What was once one of America’s least centralized industries is increasingly squeezed into a few square miles of Midtown.

Check out the full post to see how the distribution of “news analysts, reporters and journalists” has become increasingly Acela-adjacent, along with other slices of contemporary media employment.

On May 4, the Pulitzer Prizes recognized these stories among the winners and finalists across 15 journalism categories. The reporters behind each of these stories also disclosed using AI to the judging committee. Ultimately, five award winners and three finalists this year disclosed AI adoption in their submissions — the most since the disclosure requirement was added in 2024.

For the past two years, I’ve spoken to Pulitzer-recognized reporters about how they used AI in their reporting. Both years, generative AI took a back seat to more conventional machine learning technologies, like using embedding models to produce complex data visualizations and pattern recognition models to analyze satellite imagery in conflict zones. This year, though, generative AI tools and commercial large language models (LLMs) were more commonly used, largely to speed up the process of combing through document dumps.

“To state the obvious, perhaps, AI is here to stay,” Marjorie Miller, the administrator of the Pulitzer Prizes, told me. “The industry [used to be] far more apprehensive about AI tools than it is today, with a clearer understanding now of what uses might be appropriate — data collection and analysis, for example — and when it might not, such as in writing and editing stories in any format that might be considered for a Pulitzer Prize.”

Miller cautioned that as AI evolves, reporters will need to “ensure and reassure” the Pulitzers that submissions are ultimately produced by human beings, even when AI is used as an assistive tool. Given recent controversies over AI-generated text allegedly appearing in prize-winning literary works, Miller also said next year the Pulitzers will include an AI disclosure question in their book entry forms.

Finding the needle in a stack of public records

In the days after deadly floods hit Kerr County, Texas in the summer of 2025, reporters at The Wall Street Journal had a clear reporting question: Had this area ever dealt with dangerous flooding before?

To find an answer, the reporters turned to public records. The team built a custom scraper that pulled every public meeting minute, agenda, and transcript from the Kerr County website.

Journalists are trained to find the needle in a haystack, but doing so on a breaking news timeline can be challenging. To speed up the document review, the reporters leaned on a pre-built internal tool called WSJPT (a play on ChatGPT). The tool standardizes basic LLM requests across reporting projects, including prompts for summarization, classification, and image description. In this case, the reporters used the tool to summarize every page of every document scraped from the county portal.

The team combed through these summaries using a combination of LLMs and more old-school natural language processing (NLP) techniques (e.g. stemming, lemmatization) to find sections that referenced past flooding events.

“We aren’t obviating the need for human investigation of a pile of documents — and I don’t think we would if we could,” said John West, a computational journalist at the Journal. “Instead, we’re trying to sort the pile so the most relevant stuff is right at the top.” West clarified that every section flagged as possibly relevant by these tools was read by a reporter, and then every document deemed relevant was read in full.

Based on this analysis, the Journal identified former Sheriff Rusty Hierholzer, who had pushed county commissioners to install a stronger flood-warning system a decade ago. In 2016, Hierholzer called for the installation of outdoor sirens, recounting an experience flying in helicopters and “pulling kids out of trees here (in) our summer camps” when floods hit nearby Kendall County in 1987, killing 10 campers. Hierholzer’s recommendations were not implemented at the time, the Journal found.

The findings were foundational to one news story and several follow-ups on the floods. The Pulitzers named the Journal’s overall coverage a finalist in the Breaking News category. West says this playbook — using a “mix of off-the-shelf and custom software” to summarize and parse documents — was also central to the Journal’s reporting on the Epstein Files this year. That coverage was a finalist in the Public Service category.

Like many of the investigations this year that disclosed AI adoption to the Pulitzer judges, no AI disclosure (such as a label, footnote, or accompanying methodology) appeared in the Journal’s own stories on the Central Texas floods.

“We did not disclose the use of AI. It functioned as a sophisticated way of searching through the documents, but we read the docs, and ran the findings down,” said West.

He contrasted that choice with a recent Journal investigation about toxic fume incidents on U.S. commercial aircraft. That story used LLMs to read more than one million FAA documents and to generate incident rates per airline and aircraft. For that story, which did disclose AI usage, West said he “got to write the longest methodology statement I’ve ever written.”

Translating on a breaking news deadline

On August 27, 2025, a 23-year-old woman killed two children and wounded 27 others during a mass shooting at the Annunciation Catholic Church in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The shooting rocked the local community, but in the hours that followed, there were few answers about the shooter’s motivations.

When news of the shooting first broke, reporters at The Minnesota Star Tribune gathered in a Slack channel to coordinate their coverage. They identified the shooter’s YouTube account and videos showing her turning the pages of a journal written in a language the team didn’t recognize.

Dana Chiueh, an engineer in the Star Tribune’s AI Lab (now a fellow at ProPublica), took screenshots of the videos and entered them into an enterprise ChatGPT account. The chatbot recognized the text as Faux Cyrillic, a variant of Russian typography that can be used to spell out English words.

“[Faux Cyrillic] is not a real language. It can be thought of more as a type of code that one might use if they were trying to conceal what they were writing,” said Chiueh, explaining that ChatGPT allowed them to quickly see if there was relevant background information buried in the code.

After hours of tedious manual screenshotting, Chiueh wrote a custom script to pull the screenshots from the YouTube videos automatically. Ultimately, ChatGPT was able to produce an initial translation pass on hundreds of journal pages, over 600,000 words.

“At first we were doing something really scrappy. That spirit of being able to quickly prototype and iterate is something that is really useful for a breaking news situation,” she said.

A team of journalists then put the translations into Google’s NotebookLM, a Gemini-powered notetaking tool they used to search for keywords and pull out themes. They found mentions of past jobs, relationships, and locations the shooter had visited, like pawn shops and shooting ranges — all information that informed the outlet’s shoe-leather reporting.

“We were very conscious that AI hallucinates, so we made sure that any quotes, context, and anecdotes were reviewed by a human translator,” said Tom Scheck, investigations editor at the Star Tribune.

Rather than sending the entire AI-generated translation to a professional, reporters flagged important passages for review by two Russian language academics at the nearby St. Olaf College. For the most part, the AI-generated translations were correct, but the academics found a few errors, including a passage that misrepresented the shooter’s potential motivation.

If it weren’t for the help of AI translation, Scheck says the Tribune would probably have hired a translator to go through the documents from the beginning, slowing down their turnaround time. Instead, the triaged translations informed an initial story on the manifesto the night of the attack and contributed significantly to a profile of the shooter published four days later. Both stories were a part of the coverage that won the Star Tribune a Pulitzer in the Breaking News category.

“AI allowed us to take a first pass on the content and then prioritize what we [might] use,” he said. “We know we have to run the marathon, but AI helped us start at mile marker five instead of at the traditional starting line.”

Making a trove of documents searchable

Over the past 25 years, the Chinese government has built up a sophisticated mass surveillance program. A series of investigations published by the Associated Press last year exposed just how many of the technologies fueling this surveillance apparatus were sold to China by American companies.

Reporters mapped the supply chains for state-of-the-art surveillance tools, tracking their development in Silicon Valley and deployment in China, implicating companies like Nvidia, Intel, IBM, Dell, HP, Cisco, Oracle and Microsoft. The reporting earned the AP a Pulitzer win in the International Reporting category.

Key to these stories were tens of thousands of leaked emails and databases from a Chinese surveillance company, as well as thousands of government records and procurement documents (like vendor bids, signed contracts, and invoices). AI was essential to sifting through these documents and making them searchable, according to Garance Burke, a global investigative journalist at the AP who worked on the project. The AP used LLMs to identify specific company contracts, summarize government records, flag specific people or technologies for further investigation, and organize all the information collected into more easily managed databases.

In other words, AI was an assistant in the early reporting and research stages of the investigation, helping to make sense of a massive pile of documents. The team unearthed evidence that IBM had worked with the Chinese defense contractor Huadi to design a national fingerprint database, and evidence that Intel and Nvidia helped enable AI capabilities on surveillance cameras used in Xinjiang and Tibet. The documents also showed that HP sold the Chinese police “digital fencing” products, which have been used to track when Uyghurs and other surveilled populations try to travel outside their home towns and provinces, among many other findings.

“The AI tools helped reporters search and review large volumes of public records more efficiently, but they did not replace the reporting or verification process,” said Burke. “Reporters manually reviewed documents surfaced through AI, independently assessed the accuracy of AI-generated summaries, and did not quote from those summaries.”

Using LLMs to double-check human work

Donald Trump is the self-declared “crypto president” — an industry booster who earned over $1.4 billion in personal crypto business dealings during his first year back in office. A team of reporters at The New York Times wondered if the administration’s pro-crypto stance had influenced the work of agencies that regulate the industry, namely the SEC.

To try to answer that question, the Times reviewed all of the SEC’s crypto-related enforcement actions dating back to 2017. The analysis surfaced a troubling trend. Since Trump took office again in 2025, the SEC had pulled back on more than 60% of its ongoing crypto cases, lessening penalties, freezing suits, and even dismissing cases entirely.

“It is unheard of for the agency to retreat from a swath of lawsuits against a single industry,” wrote the reporters in their investigation published last December. “Although the particulars of the crypto lawsuits differed, many of these firms had something in common: financial ties to Mr. Trump.”

The investigation is one of several stories that exposed Trump’s ongoing conflicts of interest with the crypto industry and earned the Times a Pulitzer win in the Investigative Reporting category.

Many of the Pulitzer awardees that used AI this year disclosed using LLMs to speed up and prioritize document review. The Times investigation stands apart. For their investigation, reporters downloaded more than 10,000 documents, including thousands of SEC news releases and over 700 federal court cases, according to Miller, the Pulitzers administrator. Reporters read and classified each of these documents manually over the course of several months. LLMs were only brought into the reporting process after this full human review was completed.

Reporters used OpenAI’s GPT-5 model to conduct a secondary review of the documents and check their work. They fed the model the documents from each of the lawsuits, as well as a detailed set of instructions on how to classify them. These classifications labeled “whether a case was crypto-related, whether it was inherited by the next administration and how liability was decided,” according to a methodology published by the reporting team.

The team compared the GPT-5 classifications with the ones assigned manually. When there were discrepancies, reporters went back and read the documents again to double-check their work. The Times declined to provide further details on this review process.

Hallucinations and other errors produced by LLMs are often cited as reasons not to use generative AI in investigative reporting. In this case, Times reporters turned the tables. They used LLMs as a tool to help keep human error in check.

In June, dozens of journalists, technologists, and academics gathered at NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute in Manhattan to discuss this growing threat to authentication and verification work. Hosted by Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy (CITP), the day-long workshop included expert panels, presentations, and breakout discussions. On Thursday, CITP published a report synthesizing the workshop’s findings and offering insight into the “fight for facts in the AI age.”

“Establishing one fact increasingly means establishing the facts beneath it,” write the report’s authors. “While AI tools can strengthen the verification process and introduce new opportunities to increase access to knowledge, there is an arms race with the volume of potentially fabricated facts.”

In response to the deluge of AI-generated media online, a host of verification initiatives, commercial products, and other tools have flooded the zone. The report suggests that many are not being developed with enough direct consultation from journalists.

One banner initiative in Silicon Valley to address authentication problems is C2PA, or the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity. The initiative, launched in 2021 by Adobe, Microsoft, the BBC and others, embeds cryptographically signed “manifests” inside media files. It effectively creates a label the moment a photo is captured in a camera, recording its full history and origins as the image is edited, published, and circulated.

Despite gaining the support of major news organizations like the Associated Press and The New York Times, C2PA has hit major snags when it comes to newsroom implementation. One anonymous newsroom mentioned in the report said the software it used to ingest and edit photos stripped the manifest; it had to pressure the developer to patch the issue. Since the publisher’s CMS didn’t support C2PA, the manifest was viewable on images internally but deleted when published for readers. Most CMS vendors currently do not support C2PA.

“Will audiences believe the news organization has a chain of custody for its files if it cannot offer ‘full transparency’ of the manifest?” the report’s authors ask.

The report also notes that many social media companies strip C2PA and other metadata from images circulated on their platform, further eroding the initiative’s effectiveness.

There are also safety concerns. Cryptographic signatures could endanger journalists and sources by attaching identifying information to photographs or videos they take. This presents an immediate threat to those working in authoritarian environments, according to a recent study by the human rights organization Witness.

Similar challenges arise with other authentication tools, including AI image and video detectors. Many of these tools operate with confidence ratings — they might spit out a 80% likelihood that an image is AI-generated. The report explains that these types of ratings aren’t useful to most reporters, given that readers usually think about authentication as a binary: is it real, or is it fake?

“These confidence ratings are not (easily) translatable to audiences, since they want to know if an image is genuine or not and not a confidence rating that reporters often cannot even explain since the authentication tools are often ‘blackboxes,'” write the authors.

Given these challenges with bringing authentication tools into newsrooms, the report suggests that there needs to be more collaboration between technologists and the news industry to better meet the need for authentication tools.

“We urge technologists to work with reporters to develop the tools together and then let reporters evaluate their usefulness,” write the authors.

You can read the full report here, including more recommendations and an overview of how AI is shaping verification work at large.

Pageviews increased across features, sports, business, and news content — “exactly the behavior we had hoped to drive,” Hughes said. The Inquirer is a for-profit public benefit corporation owned by the nonprofit Lenfest Institute; Hughes said the initiative was supported and accelerated by philanthropic underwriting.

Other local newspapers saw traffic gains driven by round-the-clock coverage of major stories. In California, The Orange County Register got 1.3 million more web visits in May than in April, a 54% jump. (The Register is part of Southern California News Group, which is owned by Alden Global Capital.) Toni Sciacqua, Southern California News Group’s managing editor for digital, attributed the spike to a big story right before Memorial Day about a chemical tank at threat of explosion in Garden Grove, prompting an unprecedented evacuation. The team drew from its breaking news playbook for wildfires, pushing out constant, timestamped updates that included language like “as of 2 p.m.” so people would know what was new since the last time they read. The Register sent newsletters throughout the day, updated social media posts, and scoured social media and Google search trends for questions the newspaper could answer. “Lots of people were looking for whether this would impact Disneyland,” Sciacqua said. “The answer was no, but we did stories specifically answering that question and saw a lot of interest in that.”

The team published evacuation zone maps that included local landmarks, shelters, and freeways. Simple explainers defining technical terms used by officials became some of the Register’s most-read stories. Once the team had a handle on the breaking news, investigative reporters did a deep dive into the company that owned the tank and looked for similar facilities in residential areas throughout California “to answer more questions readers outside the impacted area might have had, too,” Sciacqua said.

In Augusta, Georgia, both The Augusta Chronicle and The Augusta Press saw traffic spike by more than 50% in April. The Chronicle is a Gannett publication, and it’s one of a few around the country to see traffic upticks of more than 50% in the last few months, along with Florida Today and The Courier-Journal.

“I’m quite happy to say that our April traffic bump was largely a response to two pieces of longer-form, accountability journalism — totally unrelated, with totally separate collaborations, that just happened to drop close to each other,” Gabe Rosenberg, the audience editor at KCUR, told me in an email. “If I have any takeaway, it’s really just the importance of headlines that answer the question, ‘Why does this matter? Why should I care?’ Audiences found and shared both of these stories because they could emotionally connect with them.”

The first piece that contributed to the bump was a story about the Trump administration shutting down the country’s premier bee lab. It came from Harvest Public Media, a multi-state collaboration of public media stations that covers agriculture, the environment and food systems and is based out of KCUR. The story quickly blew up on Google Search and Discover, performing “astonishingly well” according to Rosenberg.

“[Harvest Public Media’s] coverage of the Trump administration’s actions on government agencies and their trickle-down effects have been particularly popular, as I’m sure they have been for many stations,” Rosenberg wrote. “I think in this particular case, the combination of the emotionality of bees as a poster image for pollinators and hurting the environment, the timing of these honeybee deaths that were news in and of themselves to most readers, and the narrative around the Trump administration led to a real home-run. Many of Harvest’s stories are national-focused, even while they are grounded in local reporting, so KCUR benefits a lot from their wide reach and appeal.”

KCUR’s traffic also got a boost through a story from another collaborative, the Midwest Newsroom. That story, about a police sniper in Missouri becoming a Missouri state trooper even though he had killed a two-year-old girl in a standoff, reached readers beyond the Kansas City metro area. The two stories together helped KCUR see nearly 170,000 more visits in April than in March.

KQED, based in San Francisco, also saw traffic bumps in April and May, thanks in large part to a tumultuous gubernatorial primary that saw Democratic frontrunner Eric Swalwell drop out of the race after being accused of sexual assault. The station’s primary elections coverage, along with a story about $700-a-month sleeping pods in San Francisco, led to major traffic bumps; KQED saw about 885,000 more visits in April than in March, and an additional 445,000 or so page visits from April to May.

“Underneath both content factors is a deliberate shift we’ve been making toward publishing the same reporting across formats, so a text story can find a second life as a vertical video months later,” wrote Peter Cavagnaro, director of communications and external affairs at KQED. “The sleeping pods piece is the clearest example: it ran in April and the vertical video version did about 900,000 views on Instagram Reels this month.”

LAist, which is home to 89.3 FM, also saw major bumps in May thanks to the California elections. According to Jon Cohn, LAist’s vice president for audience and community engagement, its Voter Game Plan and voter guides ahead of the primary led to a bump of more than 520,000 visitors in May, putting it at the top of our charts for biggest gainers by raw visits in May. (Nonprofit news publishers, too, saw traffic bumps in the quarter thanks to their coverage of primary elections.)

Here are the individual rankings for Q2 2026, broken up by month.

With the newsroom hobbled, the British publication’s management allegedly deployed generative AI tools such as ChatGPT and Claude to suggest headlines and write descriptions of photos for people using screen readers. The National Union of Journalists cried foul, calling the move a clear attempt to undermine collective bargaining.

As media and communication scholars, we saw the outrage over management’s alleged use of AI — the details of which the outlet’s management has disputed — as more than routine wrangling over adherence to labor law. The incident showed how AI is becoming integrated into daily news work through translation, interview transcription, research, writing, and audience analytics. At the same time, the incorporation of AI in newsrooms has raised new worries about accuracy and bias.

In our recent research, we examined how three different media outlets — Reuters, the BBC, and The Guardian — were deploying AI in their workflows.

We conducted a comparative case study, analyzing public documents published through 2025, including official AI policy statements, editorial guidelines, trial reports and industry presentations.

We found that there is no single story about AI’s integration into newsrooms. Instead, the way the technology is used appears to reflect the funding, values, and mission of each outlet.

Speed as market strategy

Reuters is a global wire service that syndicates news to other outlets.

Its coverage of financial markets and other fast-moving sectors, such as foreign exchange trading and corporate earnings, means that even a 30-second delay in reporting a central bank decision or a market-moving news event could cost traders significant sums of money.

For this reason, the company has heavily incorporated AI to speed up its workflow.

For example, the newsroom uses an AI tool the company developed called Lynx Insight to analyze financial data in real time, and another internal tool, Fact Genie, to process corporate press releases.

Thanks to these tools, Reuters has expanded its earnings coverage and can publish some breaking financial alerts in just six to eight seconds, turning what was once a race measured in minutes into one measured in seconds.

Reuters sees automation as a way to produce more content for different markets. Operating at speed, however, makes accuracy all the more challenging.

Reuters acknowledges that AI tools can introduce factual errors and requires its journalists to verify any AI-generated claims before publication. In other words, the high volume of AI-generated news alerts does not preclude editors from checking them for accuracy before they go live.

While speed always comes with risks, Reuters may also be well positioned to manage them because financial markets provide an immediate feedback loop, with traders quickly identifying and reacting to incorrect information. The same approach, however, could create greater challenges in political or investigative journalism, where errors may not become apparent for days, months or even years.

AI with guardrails

The BBC operates under a clear system of accountability. The publicly funded U.K. broadcaster depends on editorial impartiality for its credibility. Unchecked automation could put this core value at risk.

As a result, the BBC has taken a cautious approach to AI integration. Its main AI tools — At a Glance and BBC Style Assist — are used for tasks such as summarizing long articles and reformatting local news stories to match the BBC’s house style.

At a Glance creates bullet-point summaries of existing articles, while BBC Style Assist helps edit regional stories in the broadcaster’s signature style and voice.

Rewriting a story to match BBC house style can take about 30 minutes, and BBC Style Assist is designed to cut that time down substantially. The outlet also uses AI translation tools to reach audiences in Poland, Hungary, and Romania.

No AI-assisted story is published until a journalist reviews and approves it, a step that reflects the BBC’s emphasis on accountability. The BBC has acknowledged the limits of AI in its current form, publishing a study with the European Broadcasting Union in October 2025 showing that AI assistants misrepresented news content — through faulty sourcing, fabricated details, or outdated information — 45% of the time.

Rather than downplaying such findings, the BBC published them in an article on its media center and went on to create AI labels — a hexagon icon paired with the phrase “How we used AI” — that now appear at the top of content.

Principles before profit

When we conducted our research, The Guardian had an AI policy that barred the use of generative AI tools to create text or images intended for direct publication outside of exceptional and specific circumstances.

But in March 2026, The Guardian updated its guidance. The revised policy now permits limited use of generative AI for tasks such as suggesting alt text for images, analyzing parliamentary documents, or transcribing audio into text, provided the tool aligns with The Guardian’s editorial standards, is subject to human oversight, and receives explicit permission from a senior editor.

“Our approach to generative AI framework is designed to support our journalists’ expertise, never replace it,” the outlet told us. “Our journalists are always accountable for the journalism they create, and use of these tools requires absolute rigor and responsibility.”

In our view, The Guardian’s ownership model helps support a more cautious approach to AI. The outlet has been structured as a trust since 1936 to safeguard the paper’s editorial independence. There are no shareholders or sole owners. The outlet relies heavily on voluntary reader contributions in order to remain free to read.

This reader-funded model helps insulate The Guardian from commercial and political influence, allowing it to prioritize long-term editorial independence over short-term gains. Its principles on AI are clear: Any use of AI must help readers and respect both the public interest and creators’ rights.

When the paper’s management locked horns with workers during the 2024 strike, many staffers saw the use of AI to cut costs or counter labor actions as a betrayal of these principles. The incident highlighted the conflict that can occur when an organization’s values clash with pressures to keep things running.

Why this matters beyond the newsroom

Reuters, the BBC, and The Guardian each take a different approach to journalism, revealing unique ideas about the role of news in a democracy.

In our view, Reuters is more prone to view journalism as a business. The BBC is more likely to treat it as a public good. The Guardian’s approach to journalism is intertwined with its long-term values.

For these reasons, we argue that AI won’t uniformly change the news industry. No matter where it’s deployed, the time reporters and editors spend verifying AI’s accuracy can create what we call a “verification tax,” which can lessen the technology’s value. If newsroom staffers spend more time correcting chatbot errors than writing their own stories, the technology ends up being more trouble than it’s worth.

That said, the technology will likely accelerate differences already underway. Commercial news organizations will use more automation. Public broadcasters will include more human oversight. And independent outlets will focus more on stories written and reported wholly by people.

In the future, we think the most influential and successful newsrooms will not necessarily be the fastest or have the best AI tools. Instead, they will be those that use the technology wisely, balancing speed with accuracy, treating workers fairly, and protecting the trust and integrity that make journalism a valuable resource.

This article has been updated to include The Guardian’s dispute of the claims surrounding AI use during the 2024 strike.

In Nieman Lab’s quarterly ranking of nonprofit news outlets, four news outlets saw a bump in traffic thanks in part to their coverage of primary elections in May and June. We bring you four of these each quarter, looking at four different market segments: for-profit local news sites, local newspapers, nonprofit news outlets, and public media stations.

The 51st

Worker-led news cooperative The 51st attributed its uptick in site visits (from 120,000 in May to 179,000 in June) to its coverage of the Washington, D.C. primary election. The primary included high-profile races and the launch of ranked-choice voting, which The 51st cofounder Maddie Poore speculates led to increased readership of its voter guide, candidate profiles, and other stories.

Poore said the voter guide got 50,000 pageviews, and overall election coverage helped pull in 6,000 new newsletter subscribers. The 51st doesn’t have a paywall, but asks readers to register with their email addresses. Most of the traffic came from organic search.

“We found this heartening, in a time when many experts are writing eulogies for clickthrough from search engine results pages,” Poore said. “With our voter guides, profiles of candidates, and nuanced fact-checks, we’re providing information here that can’t be broken down at Google’s summary length. People still have to click through! Doing this successfully requires being super clear on your community’s information needs.”

CalMatters

In May, CalMatters topped our growth chart, receiving an estimated 3.8 million site visits. That’s up from 1.9 million in April. Editor-in-chief Kristen Go said the California gubernatorial primary drove readers to CalMatters’ voter guide, which often has record-breaking audience reach. But the impact of the voter guide extended beyond pageviews.

“In May we saw a surge in new members [and] a record-low monthly churn, and the coverage drove donations,” Go said.

CalMatters also created video guides for the primary. Journalists interviewed gubernatorial candidates for vertical videos, which led to organic shares on TikTok and Instagram.

The Colorado Sun

Coverage of primary elections in Colorado increased The Colorado Sun’s site visits to an estimated 1.9 million in June, up from 1.2 million in May.

Stephanie Rivera, the Sun’s director of audience and engagement, said the biggest traffic drivers were a voter guide published in early June, and election night coverage on June 30. The Sun published more than 30 election stories that got a combined 800,000 pageviews. Much of the traffic came from Google Search. For example, The Sun’s guide to secretary of state candidates got 51,000 pageviews.

“While this wasn’t considered a competitive race, nor did it have controversy surrounding it, I think it reminds us that voters want to make informed decisions beyond key races and will seek out balanced reporting to help them cast their ballots,” Rivera said.

NonDoc Media

NonDoc Media, a nonprofit news site covering Oklahoma, published 70 stories in the lead-up to the state’s primary elections in June. It got an estimated 81,000 site visits in May and 133,000 in June.

Editor-in-chief Tres Savage said NonDoc, an outlet with 10 full-time employees, increased its publishing pace leading up to the election to “ensure readers had timely, comprehensive information about candidates, races and ballot issues.” NonDoc also hosted five public political debates, “which contributed to generating audience interest and expanded our election coverage.”

Other gains

Mississippi Free Press

Mississippi Free Press saw its site visits increase by 302% between May and June — from 87,000 site visits in May to 353,000 in June.

June’s most-read story was about a police officer killing one-year-old Kohen Wiley on June 16. Mississippi Free Press (MFP) has since published 12 stories about Wiley’s death and compiled them on a separate landing page.

About 46% of traffic came from social, and much of that was from Reddit. Since then, MFP has posted its stories to Reddit more frequently. Audience manager Chris Ellis also attributed the growth and attention to MFP’s journalistic rigor.

“We did not hide the officer’s action behind passive or indirect language, nor did we make the vehicle the central focus of the story about a child’s death,” Ellis said. “We continued following the story, distinguished verified facts from official claims and gave the family the space to speak for themselves. Readers responded to that combination of clarity and humanity, sharing the coverage far beyond Mississippi.”

VTDigger

VTDigger, an outlet covering the state of Vermont, received 1.1 million visits in April, up from 863,000 in March. Audience and product director Taylor Haynes attributed the growth to a surge of traffic from Google Discover.

“Several of our top-performing stories received the majority of their traffic from Discover, which was a noticeable shift from what we had seen earlier in the year,” Haynes said.

VTDigger’s top story in April was a profile about a Vermont teenager who became the youngest runner from the state to compete in the Boston Marathon. About 87% of the story’s total traffic (380,000 pageviews) came from Google Discover, Haynes said. Three other major stories — about Medicaid, housing, and immigration — received 65% or more of their total traffic from Google Discover.

“A common thread was that they had relevance beyond Vermont and featured strong human-interest angles,” Haynes said. “While VTDigger is a state news organization, these stories appeared to resonate with broader audiences and aligned with the types of timely, widely appealing content that often performs well in Discover.”

Haynes said VTDigger started adding meta descriptions to its stories in April, and while it’s too soon to tell if that caused the Google Discover traffic bump, it’s something the team is monitoring.

Block Club Chicago

Much of what drove readers and traffic to Block Club Chicago in April was the outlet’s nuanced coverage of crime stories.

One story covered the release of a video related to the death of a Chicago police officer. Another reported on the shooting of two police officers in a neighborhood hospital.

“I would say this was a more crime-heavy month than we’ve seen in awhile, in terms of the types of stories that performed well,” cofounder and executive editor Jen Sabella said. “Block Club works to cover crime when we’re able to include context beyond a police narrative. All of the stories that performed well here fit that bill, which I think shows that people want news on crime impacting their communities, but with context and community voices included.”

As a result, Block Club Chicago saw those stories boom on Google Discover and enjoyed more engagement on Instagram and more podcast listeners.

The Intercept

The Intercept saw a 30% increase in traffic from March to April, CEO Annie Chabel said, totaling 2.1 million visits. The month’s top three stories were all scoops: FBI director Kash Patel’s previously undisclosed alcohol-related arrests, the Pentagon’s undercounting of the number of U.S. troops killed or wounded in Iran, and the story of an Alabama grandmother who was arrested for wearing a penis costume to a No Kings protest. (After The Intercept published the story about her case, she was acquitted.)

Chabel said The Intercept’s increase in visits came from a variety of sources, and “no single platform accounted for more than 9% of pageviews.”

“As Big Tech platforms increasingly serve users with AI slop instead of real news, readers are flocking to The Intercept’s independent investigative journalism by word of mouth,” Chabel said.

The Salt Lake Tribune

The Salt Lake Tribune attracted 3.6 million visits in April, up from 3.2 million in March. It saw another bump in May, to 4.3 million visits.

In May, the Tribune published 50 stories about Canadian businessman Kevin O’Leary’s proposal to build data centers in Box Elder County, Utah. Those stories got 400,000 pageviews combined, according to chief of content Danyelle White. Google Search and Discover accounted for more than half of referral traffic to those stories.

Some of that can be attributed to Google’s algorithm changes, White said, along with new editorial strategies.

“One of our tactics this year was to reduce the number of stories that failed to reach 1,000 readers,” White said. “So far, we’ve reduced those stories by 10%, freeing up more staff time to focus on stories that resonate with audiences.”

The depressing one-year anniversary is being marked by a slew of articles and updates on how public media is faring. The good news? The situation is not as bad as feared, thanks in part to a surge of public support — “white-hot rage-giving,” as a South Dakota Public Broadcasting executive put it to NPR’s David Folkenflik. But it’s unclear whether that level of giving is sustainable. “A boom in fundraising after a crisis often precedes a big decline when donors move on to the next emergency,” Current notes.

Here are some interesting bits from reporting on the anniversary.

An unprecedented level of donations gives stations “breathing room.” Tim Black, the CEO of WNIN in Evansville, Indiana, told NPR he’d “expected to pull about $770,000 from a reserve fund. But he hasn’t had to touch a penny of it. He says the station’s members have contributed a bit more than $1 million — about 40% more than usual.”

A recent Contributor Development Partnership report found that “all types of public media stations — radio, TV and joint licensees — saw double-digit percentage increases in total donors from 2024 to 2025,” Current notes. “For radio stations, the surge ended four years of year-over-year declines.”

“The number one thought on my mind in the last year has been, how do I retain these donors?” Rob Risko, VP of development and membership at LAist, told Current. “How do I keep this momentum going? How do I turn this movement into longevity?”

(It’s worth noting that the increase in donations and gifts has not prevented layoffs at stations large and small. Semipublic’s Public Media Layoffs Tracker counts 550 public media jobs lost between July 18, 2025 and May 27, 2026.)

Some states come to the rescue; others add their own cuts. Rural and tribal radio stations, which received a significant portion of their overall funding from the federal government, have been particularly hard-hit by the funding cuts. In response, Native Public Media (NPM) has established two new funds to sustain tribal broadcasting, the Alliance of Rural Public Media reported in April. And “New Mexico’s state legislature has included language in its FY27 budget to continue funding public media stations within the state, including four tribal stations in NPM’s network.”

Other states, though, have added their own funding cuts on top of federal ones. “In Alaska and Alabama, the next governor will influence whether state money for public broadcasting comes back (Alaska) or goes away (Alabama),” NPR public editor McBride notes. “The Wyoming legislature recently came close to cutting the $800,000 it contributes every year to public media, but restored the money to its budget after a public outcry.”

Some universities are walking away. More than half of NPR member stations are affiliated with a public university or college. Now, some of those institutions are reconsidering whether those relationships are worth the trouble, reports McBride:

Penn State University and the University of Missouri are both divesting their public media licenses.

After negotiations to transfer its license initially broke down, Penn State’s board of trustees voted last September to shut down WPSU as a way of saving $3.4 million a year in subsidies the university was supplying to the station. But in response to public pressure, they agreed to transfer the licenses to WHYY in Philadelphia. WHYY will take on the additional fundraising to keep WPSU, which serves central Pennsylvania, running with local programming. That deal is awaiting FCC approval.

The University of Missouri announced in 2025 a three-year window to convert the public media stations in St. Louis and Kansas City to community-run boards. The NPR and PBS stations in both communities are currently working to manage the transition. Mizzou is keeping KBIA in Columbia, which is run by the university’s legendary journalism school.

Other colleges that hold public media licenses are cutting the level of support they provide. WOUB in Athens, Ohio lost $1.2 million in federal funding, which resulted in staff cuts earlier this year. The station then learned that Ohio University was also trimming the station’s annual allocation, prompting the acting general manager to warn that more cuts may be coming this year, including possible program cuts.

Stronger together? WHYY and Penn State’s WPSU aren’t the only stations merging. The Public Media Bridge Fund, a philanthropic effort to sustain public media through the funding crisis, told McBride it is “currently reviewing around 20 applications for collaborations, mergers, and other cooperative agreements.” Boston’s GBH and New England Public Media merged in May. Rocky Mountain Public Radio announced earlier this month that it will acquire Community Radio for Northern Colorado. And this week, WAMC Northeast Public Radio announced its own collaboration with newsrooms around the region, including the Times Union, The Berkshire Eagle, and the Adirondack Explorer.

“The initiative reflects something we’ve long believed at WAMC,” the station said in its announcement. “Public media’s job isn’t just to produce good journalism, but to make sure good journalism finds its audience.”

Today’s edition looks at local for-profit news sites. (Eligible sites for this ranking are for-profit members of the trade group LION Publishers — LION standing for Local, Independent, Online News — so these are mostly digital-born newsrooms, not newspapers or TV stations.) The rankings for Q2 feature many of the same sites we told you about last time, like TAPinto, Oil City News, Muddy River News, and Lost Coast Outpost. This time, we’ve got details from local news sites in California, Illinois, Wyoming, and British Columbia. Below that are the Top 25 rankings for April, May, and June.

L.A. Taco

At L.A. Taco — which promises “street-level news stories that often cover L.A.’s most marginalized communities” — boomed 51% in May, and part of the explanation is right in the site’s name. May was the peak of the site’s annual Taco Madness event, which offers both an online 64-taco tournament and an in-person event that draws more than 2,000 people. “We love leaning into our roots and promoting small businesses that make delicious food with passion,” said publisher Alex Bloomingdale. (The winners: Los Dorados LA and Tacos Los Cholos.)

But the two biggest traffic drivers of the month were more electoral broccoli than birria de chivo. Two voter guides for L.A.’s June 2 election — one a detailed overview of the candidates’ positions, the other an interactive guide to all the endorsements made by 14 progressive organizations, noting which candidates were unanimous or consensus picks and where different groups were divided. It’s a nice reflection of the editorial approach of a site comfortable covering carne asada and ICE raids, lucha libre and the LAPD.

Energeticcity.ca

Energeticcity.ca has covered Fort St. John (you’ll never guess the city motto!) and the surrounding area in northeastern British Columbia since 2008. Its traffic in June was up 52% over May. Adam Reaburn, the site’s owner and general manager, cited a few high-performing stories and said the site’s been working on improving its SEO.

One twist: Because it’s a Canadian site, Energeticcity.ca can’t post its work on Facebook as a normal user. Three years ago, Meta banned Canadian news stories from its platforms in response to the Online News Act. So the only way for the site to put its stories in front of Canadians is buying a Facebook ad.

Facebook was often responsible for close to 40% of site traffic before the ban. Efforts to push readers to its newsletters and mobile apps have helped the site recover the lost visits. But now instead of posting to Facebook, Reaburn buys ads to reach its readers still on Facebook, “mainly to reach people who otherwise aren’t seeing our content anymore.”

“We’re honestly conflicted about it, because every ad dollar ultimately supports Meta, the same company whose ban cut us off in the first place,” he told me. “But we’ve decided it’s worth it if those ads convert Facebook users into newsletter subscribers, app users, or paying supporters, audiences we actually own rather than rent through a platform.”

The TRiiBE

In June, traffic to The TRiiBE, which covers the Black community in Chicago, spiked 65%. Tiffany Walden, the site’s cofounder and editor-in-chief, gave some of the credit to a profile of actor Cortez Smith, a West Side native who plays Nuck on “The Chi.” The site emphasizes cultural coverage in the summer months and this profile generated more than 20,000 pageviews.

“The TRiiBE strikes a balance between news and culture,” Walden said, “and we do that intentionally, as a way to showcase the multifaceted essence of Black Chicago.”

Buckrail

Buckrail, a site in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, saw its traffic jump 96% in April, and editor Marianne Zumberge credited an unusual source: the site’s tradition of running satirical April Fool’s Day stories. And these are very local April Fool’s Day stories, to the degree that some are almost incomprehensible to outsiders — like this year’s “Elk shed hunt canceled after researchers find mineral cure for CWB.” Or 2023’s “Bridger-Teton to utilize JHMR tram as migratory tool for bighorn sheep.” (Others are less opaque to us city dwellers, like “Flock of owls training to pick up litter in Yellowstone.”)

“They’re typically shared widely, which is fun,” Zumberge told me. “Apparently [this year’s elk-disease satire] was so convincing that people in the community still believe it to be factual. It got a lot of play.”

The Hendersonville Lightning

The Hendersonville Lightning covers a North Carolina mountain town of about 15,000 people, just south of Asheville. A typical story gets around 500 to 700 pageviews, according to editor and publisher Bill Moss. But its May traffic zoomed up 88% over April. The month’s top-performing stories were a pretty standard mix of local news (courts, zoning, crime), with No. 1 being about a record $101 million civil judgment in a suit over a retaining wall that collapsed onto construction workers in 2021.

Moss said he’s been surprised this year by unexpected traffic levels to seemingly garden-variety stories — like a Senate candidate’s campaign stop scoring 9,110 pageviews. The site’s daily newsletter is strong and growing, he said, and “we’re working on a new strategy to convert newsletter subscribers to paid consumers of the print and digital product.”

Now, it’s seeking to expand.

Following a feasibility study, the nonprofit LOOKOUT — whose tagline is “Fierce. Independent. Queer” — is working to move into Colorado and throughout the region. The outlet takes inspiration from ’90s street zines and the digital vanguard like Vice.

Beyond the Southwest, the Chicago-based Joyce Foundation has also supported a landscape study to gauge the need for such a publication in the Great Lakes region.

Currently based in Phoenix, the newsroom prints a quarterly magazine, produces about three separate newsletters each week to more than 14,000 subscribers, and publishes news, investigations, and accountability journalism on its website each week. The style marries the voice of an alt-weekly — “Join Our Drunken Live Blog of the Republican Governor’s Primary Debate” — with sharp and rigorous reporting.

The newsroom counts a full-time staff of four and a stable of freelancers, interns, and fellows. At this month’s Association of Alternative Newsmedia convention in Palm Springs, it picked up four awards, including one for excellence in journalism. The site doesn’t have a paywall. The organization hosts more than three dozen in-person community events across Arizona each year.

Recent stories include how the state liquor board debated queer culture for eight hours, how an heir to the U-Haul business tried to stop a gay leather bar from opening, and how Arizona’s leader of the Stonewall Democrats has a “history of incendiary conduct.”

“I’ve always been a bit of a rabble-rouser,” said LOOKOUT’s founding editor, Joseph Darius Jaafari, a tattooed 38-year-old Iranian journalist who has written for Rolling Stone, The Marshall Project, and others. “I like to poke, I like to prod, I like to be a bit of a jackass to The Man. That’s kind of, I think, why I went into this career in the first place.”

A grant from the American Journalism Project seeded the publication and the MacArthur Foundation supported its recent feasibility studies. But the founders worry that anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric from the White House has made it difficult to attract future or sustained funding.

“I do believe this is a pivotal moment, and philanthropy has the ability to step up and support organizations serving communities that are being targeted,” said Jake Hylton, LOOKOUT’s executive director.

The success and ambition of the local news operation is an example of a small, bootstrapped nonprofit newsroom building a community and relying on that community to help fuel its sustainability and reach new places.

“We cannot wait for philanthropy to fund us to do this,” Jaafari said about the site’s move into Colorado. “We’re going in there bare fucking bones.”

“People like us asking this everywhere”

The 2024 presidential election of Donald Trump galvanized Jaafari, a veteran journalist, and his partner, Hylton, who worked in real estate and housing advocacy. They thought about leaving Arizona, which they didn’t feel was a particularly safe place for queer and brown people.

“Very quickly, the conversation molded itself into ‘Oh, shit, there are people like us asking this everywhere. What can we do about that?'” Hylton said. “There are queer people everywhere, and the type of work we do doesn’t really exist this side of Ohio.”

Colorado is the first step as they seek to expand throughout the Southwest to include Utah, New Mexico, and Nevada. It’s also part of their own survival strategy as a news organization.

Colorado has a robust nonprofit news scene and a strong philanthropic journalism support network. The extent to which a new statewide outlet can break through and compete for funding will be a test for future growth elsewhere.

Last month, LOOKOUT’s founders hosted an invite-only event at a Denver bar for partners, funders, and local publishers. The gathering received support from the Knight Foundation and the digital marketing firm BlueLena.

Danika Worthington attended the party. As the membership manager for the nonprofit statewide Colorado Sun digital outlet, she has had an inside look at the state’s media scene while helping grow a startup through most of its eight years in business.

There is plenty to cover in Colorado’s queer space, both good and bad, she said, but she often feels that queer news is relegated to arts and culture. The Denver journalist, who has donated to LOOKOUT, said she’s excited for an outlet to take a serious approach to hard news in her state.

“I think it might even lead other publications to kind of step up their game,” she said, “or at least to partner with them.”

“Stories that wouldn’t have been told otherwise”

Jaafari had been working for the Gannett-owned Arizona Republic newspaper as an investigative reporter for about a year in 2022 when he said he approached his editors about covering the LGBTQ+ community more robustly.

After feeling rebuffed more than once, he started a monthly Substack newsletter.

“It was a protest, essentially,” he said. In more colorful terms, he described it as a “fuck you.”

The project grew but created friction at his day job. A $400,000 startup grant from the American Journalism Project allowed him to quit the Republic and work on his startup full time. He and Hylton built a website, produced consequential reporting, and launched a series of in-person events.

“I’m stealing everything I learned from my time at Vice and from little raggedy zines in the punk rock world,” Jaafari said. “I’m stealing every single brand and voice and guide, and everything from the old ’90s Christopher Street magazines and queer magazines … I’m stealing everything that is cool in our community and putting it into this.”

While the reporting is mission-driven, he doesn’t consider what he does as activist or movement journalism. “We don’t pull punches within our own community,” he said. “That, to me, is a defining factor of whether or not you’re advocacy.”

Earlier this year, reporter Tori Gantz exposed how two of Arizona’s most prominent LGBTQ+ advocacy groups were working on legislation that would allow pastors to discriminate against same-sex couples by not performing weddings. Jaafari reported a story that was critical of a popular Phoenix drag bar and how its actions were causing a rift in the community.

Jim Small, editor of the nonprofit Arizona Mirror digital news site, describes LOOKOUT as filling a needed gap in the state’s media ecosystem. Even when it reports on major stories that other outlets are also covering, he said, it takes a different approach and angles that provide valuable context and insight.

The Mirror re-publishes LOOKOUT’s work, but its newsroom has also partnered with it on joint reporting projects. That’s something the founders say they would like to do with outlets in Colorado and elsewhere as they move into other markets.

“The result has always been solid journalism, really unique stories, and doing the thing that I think we all want to do, which is telling stories that wouldn’t have been told otherwise,” Small said.

Partnerships, collaboration, and coordination

Last year, the consultant Fiona Morgan conducted a survey on LOOKOUT’s behalf and held focus groups that included LGBTQ+ people and allies living in western states. The goal was to better identify their needs and also to map what is currently available to them in terms of support.

She put a special emphasis on rural communities, she said.

Hylton said what the team learned from the feasibility studies is that growing throughout the region, and potentially beyond, will take partnerships and collaboration.

“We built this organization in Arizona on partnerships, we did it by listening, we did it by engaging with community first,” he said.

Next month, LOOKOUT plans to travel to a pride event in Pueblo, Colorado, a former major steel hub in the West about two hours south of Denver. Some who have been involved in local media there have complained about feeling neglected by the state’s broader local media support networks. Hylton said LOOKOUT is already in talks with the 5-year-old nonprofit Pueblo Star Journal about potential partnerships.

Expansions can be tricky. What looks good on a whiteboard and sells in a boardroom may crash against the reality on the ground. A potential partner or collaborator may view an emerging news organization as a competitor that could draw away scant resources.

Morgan, who has worked in the nonprofit and philanthropic news-and-information space for years, said she believes the folks behind LOOKOUT know what they’re doing and have a clear vision for where they fit in the media ecosystem.

“They are very sincere about wanting to support the mission by collaborating with the place-based newsrooms and LGBTQ organizations that currently exist, not replacing them,” she said. “I think what’s going to work is that they’re very strategic in how they planned this expansion, and I think they have been extremely thoughtful about it.”

The renewal email included one sentence in all caps: “THIS PRICE WAS SET BY AN ALGORITHM USING YOUR PERSONAL DATA.” (Subscription prices on The Wall Street Journal’s website are a bit lower: $16.25 per week for a print/digital subscription, after a year at 40% off, or $845 a year.) The reader canceled her subscription.

You may have encountered dynamic pricing — sometimes referred to as algorithmic, personalized, or surveillance pricing — when booking a flight or buying groceries on Instacart. It’s when a company’s algorithm decides what to charge you based on your purchase history and other behaviors. And news subscribers are increasingly noticing it when their subscriptions come up for renewal.

“Like many businesses, Dow Jones uses data to inform the marketing, positioning and pricing of certain consumer subscription products,” a Dow Jones spokesperson told me when I asked about our reader’s experience. “We do this responsibly, guided by robust governance and compliance protocols. Adherence to these protocols is actively monitored and enforced by stakeholders across the business including legal, privacy and compliance.”

Earlier this month, NJ.com subscriber Adam Lisberg got a renewal notice stating that his annual subscription price of $130 was determined by an algorithm using his personal data. NJ.com is owned by Advance Local; its website states that annual subscriptions start at $100 for basic access, while a premium subscription with various perks costs $200.

Algorithmic pricing comes to the news business — just got this renewal notice from nj.com that my $130 annual renewal cost was set personally for me. What are other people being charged?

[image or embed]

— adamlisberg.bsky.social (@adamlisberg.bsky.social) July 13, 2026 at 8:41 AM

Lisberg’s Bluesky post caught the attention of other NJ.com subscribers. One was being charged $145. New York Times’ New Jersey reporter Tracey Tully was told her subscription would renew at $175.

Dynamic pricing isn’t illegal in the United States unless it’s deployed deceptively, discriminates against protected classes, or violates antitrust laws. Last month, consumers filed a class action lawsuit against The Washington Post for failing to disclose its use of dynamic pricing. Tim Giordano is a partner at Clarkson Law Firm, the firm behind the Post lawsuit. He said that news subscribers have the right to understand how their personal data is being used.

“Journalism has real value, and news organizations have every right to pursue a profitable business model,” Giordano said. “But individualized pricing determined by opaque AI systems using personal data, and even legally protected characteristics, is outside the bounds of fair competition and consumer protection law. This kind of AI-driven price gouging gates essential information behind a paywall that moves simply depending on who you are. It undermines public trust in one of the core pillars of democracy.”

“It signals that really vulnerable for-profit news companies are racing to the bottom trying to survive on price and subscriber retention,” said Consumer Reports investigative journalist Derek Kravitz, who helped break the story about Instacart’s AI pricing last year. (After the investigation was published, Instacart suspended the experiment.)

Several states have introduced legislation to regulate or ban dynamic pricing. New York’s Algorithmic Pricing Disclosure Act, which went into effect in January, requires companies to tell New York residents about their use of dynamic pricing. California, meanwhile, banned competitors from sharing “common pricing algorithms” with each other to price similar products and services.

My colleague Andrew got a renewal notice for his Wired subscription on June 29 that set his annual subscription price at $40; because Andrew lives in Brooklyn, the renewal notice included the line, “NEW YORK RESIDENTS: PLEASE NOTE THAT WE ARE REQUIRED TO INFORM YOU THAT THIS PRICE WAS SET BY AN ALGORITHM USING YOUR PERSONAL DATA.” (New Yorker and Albany Times Union subscribers have received similar notices.) The email also mentioned that his $40 offer is below the annual rate of $80, “based on your past purchases and engagement with our products.”

News companies may disclose their potential uses of customer data for pricing in their privacy policies in a few different ways. I looked at policies from Dow Jones, Condé Nast, and Hearst. In these policies, the language generally refers to “personalized offers” and states that artificial intelligence and machine learning may be used to accomplish business objectives related to personal data collection.

Hearst, which owns the Albany Times Union, said it deploys dynamic pricing across all of its newspaper markets at renewal time. It did not disclose the retention or churn data, but that the approach “results in fair pricing for subscribers while supporting our investment in local journalism.”

“Like many newspaper publishers, for many years we’ve used a structured pricing approach based primarily on subscriber tenure and, more recently, digital engagement,” a spokesperson for Hearst said in an email. “What’s new is that New York’s law requires us to use specific language to describe this pricing practice.”

Have you been told that your news subscription price was determined by an algorithm using your personal data? Nieman Lab wants to hear from you. Please fill out a short survey here.

The problem, The Wall Street Journal reports, comes down to Google’s web crawlers, which the company uses to both index websites for search and train its AI models. Publishers can turn off the bots that crawl their sites, but doing so also means their site won’t turn up in traditional search. A few years ago, killing search discoverability to save your traffic would have been unthinkable. But, the Journal shows in a chart worth looking at in that story, traffic declined by more than 40% for some publications between June 2025 and June 2026, according to Semrush data. (The Guardian and the BBC saw gains.)

According to Cloudflare, bots now make up more than half of all web traffic, and beginning on September 15, the tech company will block multi-purpose crawlers — those that scrape for both search indexing and AI training — unless site owners opt out.

The Journal piece is the latest in a host of news stories about publishers threatening to leave Google. “We’ve been clear about what we want,” Cloudflare chief strategy officer Stephanie Cohen told Adweek earlier this month. “We want a technical solution that allows you to be discoverable without having to give your content away for free.”

“It’s time to take a stand and say enough is enough,” USA Today Co. CEO Mike Reed told the Journal. The company, which is currently suing Google over an alleged ad-tech monopoly, says it may turn off Google’s access completely if search traffic continues to decline.

“I wouldn’t call it a big decision because we’re blocking other crawlers,” Reed told Adweek. “For those with licensing agreements, they get our content. For those without, we block them.”

USA Today isn’t the only publisher considering blocking Google. According to the Journal, Reddit is reevaluating its $60 million per year deal with Google after seeing traffic declines, and Politico and Reuters are both considering limiting Google bot access and putting up registration walls. Last year, Penske Media sued Google over its AI summaries. People Inc. CEO Neil Vogel told the Journal that “Turning [Google] off and blocking them entirely is 100% on the table.”

Last month, a British regulatory court ruled that Google must allow publishers to opt out of participating in AI features without affecting traditional search results. Google is testing that ability in the U.K. (and has nine months to make the change) but hasn’t rolled it out globally. The Journal reports that the U.K.-based Economist has been “actively discussing” opting out of AI search, but its VP of generative AI (whom you might imagine has a bit of a stake in the whole AI thing) said that opting out of Google entirely isn’t an option because “traffic can be choppy and declining, but traffic is still traffic.”

Time, meanwhile, is trying to monetize the bots by using what the Journal calls “a sort of Trojan horse approach — creating text-based ads that regular readers never see but that AI crawlers might find.” The idea is that AI chatbots might then reference those ads when responding to user queries without knowing they are ads, like some sort of insidious sponsored content.

The fact that publishers are considering opting out of Google entirely marks a significant turning point. For years, anyone who wanted to be found on the internet had to operate by Google’s rules, making constant SEO tweaks to maximize reach. But Google also needs those companies to play ball; without them, its headline product would be gutted.

“No publisher wants to make do without Google, but many are increasingly prepared to do so,” Mark Stenberg wrote in Adweek. “Google, on the other hand, has no such backup plan.”

“The hierarchy of rulers in this totalitarian-like organization permit no deviation from its official line — and those who believe in and stand for the traditional American concepts of human liberty, dignity, and decency, do so at their own peril,” she wrote in an editorial that was both poetic and dangerous.

The councils constituted a network of white supremacy groups throughout the South, often with deep ties to prominent local citizens. They had already been targeting Smith with economic pressure, not for being a full-throated integrationist — she wasn’t — but for editorials in which she insisted on adherence to the rule of law, demanded fairness for all, and encouraged peaceful race relations.

Smith paid a steep price for her courage.

Death threats, arson in her pressroom, boycotts, and even the firing of her husband as a hospital administrator did not temper her fight for liberty and justice. She became the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing, in 1964.

Smith’s story is inspiring, yet by no means an isolated instance. But the long history of newspaper editorials may be about to end, a casualty of both changing news values and economic pressure.

From calls for reform to partisan attacks

Since the birth of this nation, newspapers large and small have published their own opinion pieces challenging the powerful, calling for reform and demanding accountability. The editorials weren’t always constructive. There were plenty of editorials criticizing Smith, and others were partisan attacks. But many reflected care for the community and calls for a better future.

Editorials — in their ideal form — are essentially letters from the newspaper itself to its readers explaining a problem, outlining the facts and then concluding what would be in the best interests of the community. You can agree or disagree, but the end result is that you gave it some thought, which is what the editorial writer intended anyway. Typically, the opinion is written by one journalist in consultation with the publisher, editor, and knowledgeable colleagues, and relies in good part on the newspaper’s own reporting.

In 1841, publisher Horace Greeley pioneered the standalone editorial page in the New York Tribune. The innovation, which separated the newspaper’s views from news articles, was widely adopted by other publishers.

Over the past 185 years, newspaper editorials have played a role in virtually every important social and justice movement in American history. William Lloyd Garrison’s call for the abolition of slavery in the Boston-based Liberator and the battle for women’s suffrage spearheaded by Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton in The Revolution in New York City presaged and helped inspire similar calls for justice in the pages of local papers across America.

And when President Franklin Roosevelt ordered the internment of American citizens of Japanese descent in 1942, just one newspaper — The Bainbridge Review, on Bainbridge Island, Washington — called it out as the unconstitutional act it was. The paper saw the rounding up of citizens in its own community and would not stand silent.

Losing the newspaper’s soul

During my career as editor-in-chief of USA Today and daily newspapers in Wisconsin, Florida, and New York, I’ve reviewed thousands of editorials. I can tell you that on the local level, newspaper editorials tend to be about more mundane and yet essential topics like supporting local schools, monitoring the use of taxpayer dollars and calling out ineffective government processes.

In his book Outrage, Passion & Common Sense on historic editorials, journalist Michael Gartner began by quoting legendary journalist William Allen White on their importance:

The editorial is the soul of the newspaper. Maybe the heart and the soul. And on a good newspaper that knows and understands and loves its hometown, or its home country, the editorial is the heart of the town, or nation as well.

Unfortunately, in a trend that began four years ago, editorials are quickly disappearing. Nominations for the Pulitzer Prize for editorials peaked in 1995 with 101 entries, but declined to just 25 this year, according to Pulitzer Prizes administrator Marjorie Miller. This led to combining editorials with other opinion pieces into a single category moving forward.

Major news companies have backed away

Some news companies have concluded that local editorials aren’t in their interests. Editorials and endorsements have largely been jettisoned, along with the men and women who used their institutional knowledge to look out for their communities.

Gannett, now USA Today Co. Inc. and the largest newspaper company in the U.S., and Lee Enterprises, the third largest, led the scaling back of local editorials beginning in 2022.

“In their place, [Lee] distributed to its papers standardized editorial pages consisting of commentary from national columnists and its editorial board,” Paul Farhi wrote for Nieman Reports when the change was made. “The change might have been a boon for those seeking yet another opinion about presidential politics, Congress, and international affairs, but it did little for commentary about events occurring down the street from Lee’s 77 daily newspapers.”

Gannett was candid about its reasons, saying that editorials were “frequently cited” by readers as a reason for canceling their subscriptions. Speaking truth to power was affecting the bottom line.

A group of Gannett editors were also quoted as saying, “Readers don’t want us to tell them what to think,” according to The Washington Post.

In my experience, that’s a straw man. Good editorials don’t dictate. They’re actually a balancing of ideas, looking out for a community with the perspective of a longtime and loyal resident who has seen it all. In fact, USA Today pioneered dual editorials, one offering its view, the other a differing perspective.

The public wants accountability

Granted, local editorials will yield fewer online clicks than major news or sports stories. But recent research indicates that readers remain hungry for the public accountability of government officials.

“As they have for the past four decades, most Americans say criticism from news organizations keeps political leaders from doing things they shouldn’t,” a Pew Research study  found in 2024.

Despite the steady decline in daily newspaper editorials, I believe there remain ways for news organizations to restore the spirit of editorials in an economical and high-impact model. Some suggestions for today’s newsrooms:

Publish editorials on an as-needed basis. They don’t have to appear daily, but if published only when something absolutely needs to be addressed, the community will take notice. Give them the authoritative local take that no one else can.

Create a community editorial board composed of civic-minded residents with distinct and diverse viewpoints and open minds. Identify the most important issues facing your community and ask the board members to explore them, looking for consensus, but acknowledging legitimate points from all sides. Publish an editorial at least once a month and promote it heavily.

Collaborate with any other news outlets in your town to reinstate endorsement interviews. In a decades-long tradition, newspapers routinely invited incumbents and those running against them to discuss why they would best serve the community. Ask the tough questions and leave it to each outlet how to use the end product. That could lead to differing endorsements by different outlets or simply a comprehensive Q&A that the entire community sees. Public officials would be hard-pressed to skip the interview if their opponents’ views are getting broad local exposure.

Any one of these approaches would help reinstate the accountability of public officials at a fraction of the costs once incurred by legacy news media.

In 1791, the first generation of Americans demanded that freedom of the press be part of the Constitution, counting on journalists to serve as a check on corruption and the abuse of power. Some debts are never fully paid.

I’ve been following Signal Hill since the beginning; last year, when Nieman Storyboard editor Mark Armstrong asked us for recommendations, I wrote that Signal Hill was “beautiful, weird, and mesmerizing,” and “the kind of stuff that made me want to be a journalist in the first place.” That remains true, but in the year since its launch the audio magazine has grown up. What started as an experiment is now on its third issue, which launched this month, and is even being broadcast on the radio.

At a time when documentary audio has contracted dramatically, Signal Hill seems to be the rare expansion. To learn more, I spoke with co-founders and editors-in-chief Jackson Roach and Liza Yeager over Zoom. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

We’ve considered it, but we can’t do bonus episodes that are at all the thing that Signal Hill is because every story takes eight months or more to make. It’s just so much labor. We haven’t completely ruled out doing some kind of lower-lift audio bonus for subscribers. We have a paywalled newsletter that our subscribers get, where we all write about different kinds of art that’s inspiring us and inspiring Signal Hill. So that’s kind of our answer to that for the moment.

In some ways Signal Hill reminds me of Audio Flux, which launched around the same time and is also focused on craft but has a very different output: while you’re doing these long documentary pieces, Fluxworks are always three minutes long. Do you think the space for non-corporate, craft-obsessed work is expanding again?

Within minutes, Jorge, who is an icon in Argentina, became a trending topic on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, sparking international confusion and outrage over the lack of verification.

But Jorge Messi was still alive. Messi’s family issued a statement saying that “in light of the accounts, rumors, and speculation circulating in recent hours, the family wishes to express its deep distress regarding the lack of sensitivity, respect, and scruples with which some individuals have treated a strictly private family matter…any account, statement, or information not originating from the family itself and its designated channels should not be considered valid or truthful.”

According to Spanish newspaper El Mundo, several advertisers pulled out of their deals with Luzu TV, and the channel fired Peña and the producers involved.

Distinguishing fact from fiction was especially difficult during this World Cup. The Luzu TV debacle was only the tip of the fake iceberg.

When Norway’s national team began training in North Carolina, a false narrative spread online that the team imported food from Norway because they didn’t trust American food. The Associated Press and other outlets debunked those claims (people just want their home comfort foods during times of stress!), but that didn’t stop the spread. According to social media monitoring platform Cyabra, 27% of the Twitter profiles contributing to that narrative were fake or bot accounts. Offline, I brought up the false claim to friends after seeing them on Instagram. It didn’t initially occur to me that they could be made up.

My For You tab on Twitter has also served me multiple fake quotes by Real Madrid coach José Mourinho — one of football’s most successful managers and biggest personalities — commenting on some of the tournament’s matches and controversies, like tactical choices of other coaches, refereeing decisions, and more. Mourinho is outspoken and funny, so the quotes seem believable at first glance. In reality, they’re posted by a handful of accounts that label themselves as parodies. But replies, quote tweets, and questions to Grok showed that people often believed them to be fact.

José Mourinho on Cristiano Ronaldo’s World Cup elimination:

“What Cristiano has done for Portugal is more than enough. People are obsessed with the World Cup as if it decides everything. Football is much bigger than one trophy.

If winning the World Cup is what makes you the… pic.twitter.com/pgrK1lGDp6

— Darren (@MUFCDarren_) July 7, 2026

Jose Mourinho: "The reason Argentina performed so poorly in the World Cup final is that they simply didn't deserve to reach the final. They should have been eliminated against Egypt, but they won purely because of the referee's decisions". pic.twitter.com/9uP55qybtu

— Goals Zone (@TheGoalsZoneHQ) July 20, 2026

View on Threads

On the Friday before Spain won the World Cup, my feed showed me a video of Spain’s Lamine Yamal and his three-year-old brother Keyne. Keyne went viral during the World Cup for his silliness, antics, and bond with his older brother. The video shows Yamal in a mirror, filming Keyne in a barber’s chair.

The tweet accompanying the video read: “Lamine Yamal took his younger brother, Keyne, to get a new haircut ahead of the FIFA World Cup final. ”

In the video, Keyne’s hair is dyed light blue — Argentina’s team color.

I looked up the Instagram handles tagged on the video. One was from the barber, and when I checked his profile, I found the blue hair video. It was real, but it had been posted on May 16.

The tweet had taken the video out of context, but has already been viewed 8.4 million times and has been liked over 46,000 times. A community note is now displayed under the video saying as much, but it wasn’t there when I first saw it.

Lamine Yamal took his younger brother, Kayne, to get a new haircut ahead of the FIFA World Cup final. pic.twitter.com/0hOxlcVm64

— Cleverly (@Cleverlydey4u) July 17, 2026

Then there’s artificial intelligence. The AI-generated Lionel Messi-bathing-Lamine Yamal memes are all fun and games, until they aren’t. When Germany played Curaçao during the group stage of the tournament, one Twitter user posted what looked like a screenshot of the match broadcast showing a person dressed up as Hitler in a Germany jersey in the stands among other German fans. The image was created with ChatGPT. But the tweet is still live, without a community note, and has been viewed more than five million times.

This edition of the tournament has been called “the World Cup of Ugh“, of “price shock“, and “more.” But for me, it’s been the World Cup of distrust: Seeing something suspicious, looking into it, finding out it was false, and being horrified by the sky-high engagement numbers.

The examples above are just ones that I’ve actually seen on my own feeds; There’s no telling how many other false claims are floating around unchecked.

The World Cup of misinformation is a thief; it’s stolen my time and excitement during my favorite sporting event. Misinformation doesn’t just sow distrust between the public and the media. It robs us of the ability to trust what we see with our own eyes. The controversial uses of the video-assisted referee (VAR) to “eliminate human error” during the tournament told us as much; a flawed technology is to be trusted more than the human referees’ instincts, ignoring the fact that technology, too, can be biased.

Football Twitter — the massive online community of soccer fans, spectators, and journalists — has long been my favorite place on the internet. For nearly two decades, I’ve scrolled, liked, retweeted, searched for commentary, writing, and clips of match moments, and followed journalists for their analysis.

Despite higher levels of bots and slop and lower levels of moderation, sports fans and journalists are still using Twitter. No real replacement for it has emerged.

Leaving Twitter also doesn’t solve the problem. Misinformation and slop are everywhere, all the time. A false claim might originate on Twitter, but then it’s screenshotted and posted to Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, Reddit, a WhatsApp chat, a Slack thread, a group text, and elsewhere. And community notes don’t carry over.

Journalists are doing their best to pre-bunk and debunk misinformation and provide news consumers with accurate information. News outlets are improving their verification systems and tools and producing their journalism in mediums that people like to consume. But misinformation still spreads faster than the truth.

Football is called “the beautiful game” for its simplicity and accessibility. The team that works together to score more goals wins. Every player is responsible for helping achieve that positive outcome. Unless that mentality takes hold against misinformation, during the next World Cup we all may be watching the same match, but we will likely never again watch the same reality.

Their study, based on surveys the team conducted between July and December 2025, looks at those behaviors holistically instead to capture a fuller picture of the different profiles and patterns in how Americans do, and don’t, engage civically.

Researchers Elisa Shearer, Luxuan Wang, Katerina Eva Matsa, Michael Lipka, Benjamin Toff, and Kirsten Eddy found that “rather than falling along a single spectrum, U.S. adults sort into four distinct groups that reflect different patterns of participation.” They call those groups Mobilizers, Connectors, Spectators, and Outsiders.

About one in 10 Americans are Mobilizers, the most active group across all different types of participation. They’re by far the most likely group to engage politically, taking actions like volunteering for campaigns and contacting elected officials.

A larger chunk of Americans, 28%, are Connectors. They’re highly engaged in actions like volunteering and making donations, but much less likely to be heavily engaged in politics.

Spectators account for nearly a third (31%) of Americans. They’re less likely to participate in either civic or political activities, but are distinguished by following the news at similarly high rates to those first two groups.

Finally, Outsiders (also 31% of Americans) are the least engaged Americans on all fronts. That is not to say they’re entirely disengaged; for instance, 41% of this group reported voting in 2024.

A few other takeaways from the study:

Younger Americans are more likely to be Spectators, while older Americans are more likely to be Connectors. Meanwhile, “similar shares of younger and older adults fall into the most and least engaged groups.” Younger Americans are also more likely than older Americans to privately share or discuss news on social media or a messaging app, while a similar proportion of Americans across age groups report taking those actions publicly.

There are similar patterns of engagement across party lines. But Mobilizers are slightly more likely to be or lean Democrat, and Connectors are slightly more likely to lean Republican. Outsiders and Spectators are more likely to identify as politically moderate.

The most engaged adults are the most likely to have negative feelings about the state of the country — but more engaged groups are also more likely to report positive feelings about the state of their local community. Connectors are less likely than Mobilizers to say they feel angry or fearful about the state of their community and the country.

The least engaged Americans are the least likely to trust the news — but everybody doubts the fairness of news organizations. “Most Americans, regardless of how much they take part in civic life, say news organizations tend to favor one side when covering political and social issues,” the researchers write. Also of note: Connectors and Outsiders are less likely to report trusting the information they get from social media than Mobilizers and Spectators.

Read more in the full report here.

Presenters from five nonprofit newsrooms described event experiments with different scales, scopes, and challenges. But some common advice emerged from their experiences: Don’t do it alone. Tap your partners to help with publicity. And lean into the thing your newsroom can offer your community that no other organization can.

“What is the thing that only you can offer to your audience?” Jewish Currents deputy editor Naomi Gordon-Loebl said. “That’s the thing to build your event around.”

The Swampscott Tides’ Moth-style storytelling evening

Years before co-founding the Swampscott Tides, Anne Driscoll was a storyteller for one of The Moth’s live events in Dublin. As board president of the small nonprofit newsroom in Massachusetts, she realized a local version of the storytelling event could serve the outlet’s mission, bring the community together, and attract local sponsors.

In 2025, the Tides hosted the first installment of what has become an annual event, “Fish Tales,” at the local high school. Six community storytellers — from students to “local celebrities” like the official magician of Salem to residents whose ancestors helped found the town — share a story at each event; each prepares by working with a storytelling coach (Driscoll and another Moth storyteller). Driscoll recommended giving a storytelling event some structure by selecting a locally resonant theme (for Swampscott, themes reflect “our coastal vibe,” she said, starting with “Changing Tides” in 2025, then “A Fish Out of Water” this year, and, in 2027, “Off the Hook.”) The event feels like “a celebration of Swampscott.”

“We saw this as an opportunity to build our audience engagement, but also to diversify our sources of support,” Driscoll said. The event generates revenue from ticket sales and sponsorships (including “Gold Fish” and “Swedish Fish” supporters). Swampscott is “three square miles; it doesn’t have a huge business base — but it does have a lot of banks,” and many of those have grant programs to support community events. The Tides applied to almost a dozen different banks for support, and several became sponsors. The nonprofit also secured a local cultural arts grant.

Per-event expenses totaled between $1,000 and $2,000. Profits were $26,000 in year 1 ($12,000 of that from sponsorships) and $30,000 in year 2. A volunteer sub-committee helps organize.

“All of it made for a low-investment, high-yield event,” Driscoll said. “Expenses were low, rewards were very high.”

The 51st’s D.C. trivia “game show”

How does a local news organization serve a transient city? Shortly after launching, The 51st introduced the column “Ask a D.C. Native,” inspired by Gothamist’s “Ask a Native New Yorker,” in which locals help transplants get to know the city.

“I wanted to turn it into a live event,” said Christina Sturdivant Sani, executive editor at the worker-led nonprofit and the column’s creator. “And I was thinking about a panel, and I was thinking about how boring a panel would be…” (Lots of knowing laughs from this panel’s audience.)

What would be more fun than a panel, she decided, was a game show. Drawing inspiration from local events she’d attended and heard about like Culture Tags (a gathering built around the party card game), Historically Black Phrases (a live adaptation of a book by that name), and the long-running D.C. high school quiz show “It’s Academic,” she envisioned “Ask a D.C. Native, Live!” as an evening of local D.C. trivia with D.C. natives competing.

First, Sturdivant Sani recruited an MC she had in mind, D.C. native and poet/artist/youth advocate Dwayne Lawson-Brown, to host for free. An artist residency she was doing at a local hotel and coworking space required her to host three events, so that gave her the venue. She and Lawson-Brown developed the categories and questions, which the hotel required a “trivia consultant” to review (“I thought it was unnecessary, but it actually helped,” Sturdivant Sani said).

The 51st has hosted five trivia events throughout the city since last May and has three more planned for this year. Next year, Sturdivant Sani is hoping to hold the event monthly. The best turnout they’ve seen is around 65 people, and their email list includes 300 people who have registered. The event is structured as four rounds of trivia, eight questions each — a photo round, a music round, and two audience rounds — in which two teams of three D.C. natives compete. The 51st sources prizes from local businesses, theatres, and restaurants. Recruiting contestants is consistently the biggest challenge, Sturdivant Sani said. Over time, The 51st has found ways to promote its stories through the event; the team has attendees complete information needs surveys, and some have signed up for The 51st’s newsletter.

The 51st hosted the event at the hotel twice before branching out to other locations. Venues now ask to host the event; The 51st has developed a relationship with a new restaurant in a local food desert, The Strand, and helped bring more people to it through the event. Finding the right location, Sturdivant Sani explained, has been key to connecting The 51st with the people it is trying to reach. The young newsroom started out with a built-in audience from previous publications that skewed white and transplant-heavy. “I’m a D.C. native, and I’m Black, and I remember Chocolate City, so I’m like, ‘No, we gotta get some Black subscribers and D.C. natives,'” Sturdivant Sani said. That’s one of the reasons she wanted to start this event series.

The first couple events were “a mixed crowd and multigenerational, which was really cool,” she said. “But then once we started hosting it on the Black side of town, you could tell we were really reaching the audience that we wanted to.”

El Paso Matters’ community run with a local twist

5K? 10K?

Not in El Paso, thanks to the news nonprofit El Paso Matters, which organized a 9.15K, a distance inspired by the local area code, 915. The run, development and events director Alyshea D. Johnson said, was an experiment that’s become the newsroom’s “signature fundraising event” and raises money through a mix of registrations, sponsorships, and donations.

The event’s theme is “One Run. Countless Stories.,” and it includes a street-festival style celebration following the run. The newsroom team had noticed an uptick in free runs and run club participation locally, and “we felt this run, although unconventional for a newsroom, really aligned with our mission of being community-first and community-driven journalism,” Johnson said.

In 2025, the event’s first year, the newsroom set a goal of 500 signups, and got well over 600. Pricing started out at $40 and went up closer to race day (“El Paso is a last-minute city, so that worked to our benefit,” Johnson said). Race registrants could donate when they signed up; of the 65 who did donate, 60 were first-timers, she said.

Social media was a major registration driver. El Paso Matters relied on local influencers to spread the word and “give us some legitimacy with their audience,” while also leaning into trends and “authentic” posts to attract engagement and break through. The social media emphasis might explain why many race registrants skewed younger than the newsroom’s typical audience demographic, giving El Paso Matters the chance to “connect with people that we hadn’t before.” The nonprofit followed up to give race registrants the opportunity to subscribe.

“Everybody got to run and have fun, but now they get to know El Paso Matters,” Johnson said. “We get to build trust, and in turn, that hopefully turns into support, whether that’s a subscribe from people that are meeting us for the first time or a donation, because they see what we’re doing for the community.”

Jewish Currents’ “Day of Politics & Culture”

“Jewish Currents Live: A Day of Politics & Culture” was always going to be an ambitious undertaking for a magazine run by a small team. In September 2024, Jewish Currents hosted over a thousand people in person on New York City’s Lower East Side, and hundreds more online, for an all-day event comprising a dozen sessions spanning “performance, learning, and discussion of the most urgent issues facing the Jewish left in 2024.” The sessions, which included a live podcast taping, dance, theater, a workshop, and panel discussions, featured 60 presenters (plus a comedy show and afterparty). By hard and soft metrics, the event was a success; Jewish Currents Live brought the newsroom hundreds of new members and subscribers, raised tens of thousands of dollars, and strengthened relationships with readers, speakers, partners, and funders.

That success is all the more notable because one of the biggest challenges of an event of this scale is finding a venue with space for a thousand people, “and ours canceled 10 days before for political reasons,” said deputy editor Naomi Gordon-Loebl.

In a last-minute, all-hands-on-deck troubleshooting effort, Jewish Currents pivoted to hosting the event across two venues half a mile apart. The cancellation ended up being “incredible publicity” that Gordon-Loebl thinks helped galvanize more people to show up in support. Jewish Currents was intentional in how it messaged to the public and to partners, and “in some ways, because [the venue] pulled out for political reasons, it emphasized the importance of the event,” they said.

Even without the venue curveball, “events like this are an enormous logistical lift,” Gordon-Loebl said, “and this one took so much of our financial resources [and] staff time [and] labor — it was a lot.” High-profile guests, they noted, are a moving target and often cancel last minute; the organization had to anticipate “what the needs and vibes will be of the event ahead of time” in making decisions like how long sessions should be, how long to leave between sessions, and which sessions to plot against each other.

Jewish Currents’ dozen partners and more than 100 “volunteers” were critical to the event’s success. (“We call them volunteers, but we pay them, and I encourage you to do the same,” Gordon-Loebl said.) While in the first year it was a request to partners to publicize the event, “this year, part of partnering is, you have to share it with your audience,” they added.

The event was ticketed, with discounted member pricing. “Charging even a little bit ensures that more people actually come,” program coordinator Noa Azulai said, adding that it’s helpful to have a sense of how many people to expect, especially when filling a big venue. Jewish Currents has also found an “add donation” button can bring in significant additional revenue on top of the ticket price.

Jewish Currents raised over $35,000 that it donated to another organization, but the event itself “was not actually the revenue driver; it’s not a gala,” Gordon-Loebl said. What actually drove revenue were fundraising and donations both before and after the event. “A lot of our donors really want to see community, they want to see participation, they want to see things happening in real time…We also need to be able to give them something that they can experience that’s not just an article,” Gordon-Loebl said. So an event like Jewish Currents Live “is an incredibly good sell for a donor.”

That said, “a lot of what came out of JCLive was not about the numbers,” Azulai said. “We brought our community together for a day that really demonstrated our communal power, solidarity, the tensions that were coming up in our community, and gave people a sense of communal pride and a place to gather.” The magazine will host the event again this year on Oct. 11.

The organization learned some surprising lessons about the elements of a successful event. “The best sessions were the ones that ran right towards the controversies in our community rather than away from them,” Gordon-Loebl said. “I encourage you to think about…the things that actually divide your audience, and open them up at an event.”

Jewish Currents’ organizational strength is “we represent a community, the Jewish left, that really doesn’t have any other publication exactly that is a home for it,” they added. The team leaned into that strength with Jewish Currents Live, offering a unique in-person gathering opportunity for that community. For other newsrooms planning events, Gordon-Loebl recommended thinking about, “What is the thing that only you do? What is the thing that you are the only place that can offer?”

Block Club Chicago’s block party

Six years after Block Club Chicago launched as a news org serving the city’s diverse neighborhoods, it held its inaugural Block Party in 2024.

“A block party is everything that you would see at a Chicago street festival,” VP of partnerships Maple Walker Lloyd said. The event featured the block party staples you’d imagine, and then some: food trucks, local bands, local DJs, a bouncy house for kids, but also jewelry and candle-making, Wiggleworms, and Jesse White Tumblers.

Between year 1 and year 2, Block Club Chicago learned a lot about which attractions would give it the most bang for its buck. “Always expect to spend more in year one; you’re learning, you’re trying to figure it out, and you’re also building relationships, so people are taking a huge, huge risk on you,” Walker Lloyd said. She recommended paying for an event planner in the first year of an event of this scale.

In 2025, for instance, Block Club decided to cut the expense of local bands, largely because that led to significant savings on AV costs; it added magic shows and a live podcast. Partnering with a local brewery for the block party’s second iteration led to savings on multiple fronts — Block Club didn’t have to pay for porta-potties, because attendees could use the brewery’s indoor bathrooms, and didn’t have to hire outside bartenders. (The savings from cutting a garbage contractor line item: $17,000.)

The block party, like all of Block Club’s events, is free and open to the public. In its first two years, about half of its revenue came from sponsorships from local businesses and foundations. Other revenue streams include vendor fees, a silent auction (one avenue to partner with local businesses willing to do in-kind donations), donations, and merch sales. Walker Lloyd specifically recommended creating an option for QR code donations on site.

In 2024, the block party generated $94,000 in gross revenue and cost $75,000, leaving Block Club with $19,000. In 2025, gross revenue dropped to $66,000 — but through strategic savings, expenses dropped even more, to $20,000, so Block Club came out with more than double the net revenue: $46,000.

“You don’t know what you don’t know,” Walker Lloyd said. “In year one, you’re experimenting, testing, learning, and growing. Then once you’ve got your year one down to a science, the above leads to streamlined logistics, and you’re setting yourself up for what’s important and what’s essential in the future.”

It’s a Tuesday morning news meeting at Business Insider’s headquarters in New York’s Financial District. More than a dozen editors have gathered in the conference room, while several more chime in remotely on Zoom.

Heller is shouting out senior correspondent Hugh Langley, who recently ran a feature on Google employees protesting the Pentagon’s use of the company’s AI products. It was a follow-up to his exclusive on leaked internal messages showing that Google is “leaning more” into national security contracts.

“He had a scoop, he had a follow-on spot, he had a discourse piece, and then another spot. It’s an example of how the work should flow,” said Heller, who joined Business Insider in September 2024 after more than 20 years at The Wall Street Journal.

Today, editors are discussing how best to frame their coverage of AI-related layoffs. Coinbase, the crypto exchange, has just cut several hundred employees in its attempt to become “AI-native.” Editors in London have been on the news for hours, and are handing off coverage to their New York counterparts. Heller is pushing for an exclusive.

“Have we called them for an interview?” she asks.

Business Insider says that since Heller joined the organization, the amount of “original content” it publishes has more than doubled. In 2024, the company says, about 40% of its content was scoops, exclusives, and other original stories. Today, that content makes up more than 80% of its output, as the publication has made a concerted effort to move away from news aggregation and break its own news. Last year, the newsroom landed 788 scoops, the most it’s ever recorded annually, former CEO Barbara Peng wrote in a recent memo.

Business Insider is trying to overhaul its editorial strategy as the digital news industry reckons with major traffic declines. Google’s AI Overviews and chatbot products like ChatGPT are killing traditional search traffic. Social platforms like Facebook and X have deprioritized news links.

In May 2025, Business Insider laid off 21% of its staff. “We must be structured to endure extreme traffic drops outside our control,” Peng wrote in a memo to staff that month. “We’re reducing our overall company to a size where we can absorb that volatility.”

On May 14, the week after I visited Business Insider’s offices, Peng announced another layoff of about 10 employees. Business Insider has around 250 people in its newsroom and nearly 500 employees across the company.

The May 14 layoffs make 2026 the fourth year in a row that Business Insider cut newsroom positions. Days later, Peng announced her own departure from the company. She has since been replaced by interim CEO Christian Baesler, who has been a senior advisor to Business Insider parent company Axel Springer.

Despite the continued contraction of its editorial staff and the leadership shakeup, Business Insider’s turn away from aggregation has shown some early signs of success — at least when it comes to audience engagement. In the first quarter of 2026, stories marked as “exclusive” saw almost two times the subscription conversions of non-exclusive stories, the company told me.

“Business Insider picked up a lot of other people’s stuff, which, to a certain extent, is a service to readers, but I felt long term, to develop an engaged audience that loves us and is coming back, it has to be for our stuff,” Heller told me in May.

“I love traffic. I want as much of it as possible, and I’m happy to get it from platforms,” she said. “But we need to own our destiny, have our own relationships with an audience that is going to be coming back to us directly on a regular basis. That is how we’re going to succeed over time.”

“The line between original content and borderline theft gets awfully blurry,” then-Reuters reporter Ryan McCarthy wrote in a 2011 blog post titled “Business Insider, over-aggregation, and the mad grab for traffic.”

The criticism was loud enough that in 2013, Blodget wrote a public response. “We assume the knee-jerk anti-aggregation attitude at some companies stems from the era in which big media organizations were like hydrants in the desert — the only place to find news and information,” he wrote in a post titled “Thank you for aggregating us!” “Now, of course, media organizations are like hydrants in the ocean and readers are drowning in choices.”

“Business Insider sits at the sweet spot of digital content: high traffic, low cost, with a combination of sassy voices and viral content,” David Carr wrote in The New York Times in 2014, adding, “While the ambitions of the journalism may be very different, Business Insider now has traffic that rivals The Wall Street Journal.”

Today, though, the aggregated posts that once got such high traffic are swept up in a flood of AI-generated summaries. In Google Search, AI Overviews display short-form article summaries above the fold. ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity can output summaries of trending news topics in seconds. Sometimes these outputs link to the publications that broke the story, and often they link out to aggregated articles — but either way, clickthrough rates are in the single digits at best.

It’s a perilous moment for newsrooms that made aggregation a pillar of their editorial strategy. The Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism noted in a January survey of more than 280 news publishers worldwide that “the majority of surveyed news executives believe that future success lies in being more distinctive, even if that means losing some overall reach and reducing the amount of general news.”

In 2023, Mathias Döpfner, the CEO of Axel Springer, wrote in a letter to staff that AI tools would soon be better at the “aggregation of information” than journalists, reported The Guardian. “Understanding this change is essential to a publishing house’s future viability,” he wrote. “Only those who create the best original content will survive.”

Business Insider had launched a paywall, BI Prime, for its exclusive reporting in 2017. Under editor-in-chief Nicholas Carlson, it built out its bench of staff reporters and expanded its special projects and investigations work, winning a Pulitzer Prize in 2022 for an illustrated account of a Uyghur woman’s experience in a Chinese internment camp. But senior editors told me that Heller’s arrival in the fall of 2024 marked a major shift in editorial priorities away from aggregation, and a significant newsroom restructure.

“I think the first thing I remember [Jamie] changing almost immediately was, we’re not going to aggregate anymore, and if you want to match that story you got to go match it yourself,” said Cadie Thompson, deputy news chief and executive editor, who has worked at Business Insider for more than a decade.

Rewrites of other outlets’ original reporting would no longer fly. Reporters were expected to independently confirm news with their own sourcing. An analysis piece would require a new story framing that could “move it forward,” as Thompson put it. Many general assignment reporters who had historically churned out aggregations were given beats for the first time and expected to stay on top of major industry or company developments.

Heller hired the publication’s first-ever standards editor, Tracy Connor, the former editor-in-chief of The Daily Beast. The standards desk has been key to scoops and investigations, which have required more rigor around right of reply, comment-line placement, and the handling of leaked documents and anonymous sourcing.

“As told tos” — polished firsthand narratives based on reporter interviews — have long ranked among Business Insider’s most-read stories. They tend to be advice-framed stories on topics like side hustles, job searches, lifestyle, and personal finance. (Some recent headlines: “I shaved my beard because I was worried it made me look older. Perception matters even more in the age of AI,” “I maxed out a credit card, traded in my car, and still struggled to afford the World Cup. Then I found a WhatsApp group“). But Thompson said they’ve been working on bringing the format into their news coverage.

When Spirit Airlines shuttered earlier this year, Business Insider ran an “as told to” detailing a flight attendant’s experience of losing his job. Similar stories ran regularly as layoffs swept through major tech companies, including a story on a Meta employee who lost their work visa and an Amazon employee who turned down an offer to come back to the company.

“There’s a lot of ways to be original, and scoops is the most traditional, fundamental way. They’re very important, and we hustle for them. They’re not the only way,” Heller said.

Reworking a newsroom to produce more original journalism is one challenge, but it’s been another to communicate that shift to readers. Last year, Business Insider launched an “exclusive” tag, a blue ribbon that labels original scoops on the site’s homepage and article pages. It also launched a slew of new newsletters, like Tech Memo, First Trade, and CMO Insider, that regularly spotlight industry-specific exclusives.

“We’re constantly showcasing our scoops…and trying to telegraph to the reader this is something that you’re only going to be able to read here,” said Heller. “The most important thing is to show. We have to do it, but we also have to tell.”

These changes have required renegotiating the relationship between the newsroom and the companies it covers. In the past, forwarding along a press release might have been all it took for a comms team to place a story. Earlier this year, Business Insider invited around 100 PR professionals to its headquarters to share the publication’s new coverage priorities and editorial standards. It is a message that has extended into one-on-one meetings with PR contacts, according to Thompson.

“I don’t want the press release, I don’t want the thing you’re gonna give everyone else. I want an exclusive. I want to sit down with this executive,” she said. “We’ve been around for a long time, you can know us one way, but just so we’re clear, here’s what our focus is now.”

Original reporting is also converting subscribers at the story level. In the first quarter of this year, the story with the highest conversion rate (factoring in paywall exposures) was an interactive map of data centers across the U.S., part of a years-long investigation that won a George Polk award earlier this year. The story that led to the most subscriptions was a deep dive into how AI slop killed the resume.

“I’m a firm believer that people are going to pay for something that they can’t get anywhere else,” said Steve Russolillo, who joined Business Insider as chief news editor in 2025 after more than 10 years at The Wall Street Journal. “If we’re aggregating that, by definition, it is something you can get somewhere else.”

At the same time, the subscription business Business Insider launched in 2017 has struggled. In 2020, Blodget set a goal to reach 1 million paying subscribers by 2025. In 2022, the site had around 185,000 subscribers; by 2025, that was down to just 135,000. Last November, Business Insider lifted its paywall for the final weeks of the year to boost advertising impressions, Status reported.

“Subscriptions are part of our business,” Heller told me. “It’s not the only part — we have a diverse array of revenue streams.”

Reporters have been largely on board with the focus on original reporting, said James Rodriguez, a real estate correspondent at Business Insider and secretary of the Insider Union. The union, which represents around 125 newsroom employees, is currently at the bargaining table for a new contract.

“Original reporting is not possible without humans. Period. Full stop,” Rodriguez said, noting that union members want more guardrails on AI and its potential to replace their work in that contract. After the 2025 layoffs, former CEO Peng sent a memo to staff saying that the newsroom was going “all-in on AI.” One way that touched down in the newsroom was through an experiment using custom GPTs to publish “quick news stories.” But the pilot has since wound down, with no news stories published on the “AI News Desk” since February and major corrections to some of the most recent stories.

“[Our negotiation] is really trying to codify what management has already said to us,” Rodriguez said, “that original reporting is going to be our North Star moving forward.”

The union is also pushing for a moratorium on layoffs. After the most recent round of layoffs this past May, the union released a statement citing concerns about Business Insider’s “willingness to repeatedly rely on layoffs to make up for poor strategic decisions.”

The cuts in May impacted about 10 jobs, mostly on the legal affairs desk. Heller told me the decision to cut the legal affairs desk was about refocusing the newsroom on core coverage areas like careers and business, and that AI adoption was not a factor in the decision.

“Our whole team needs to be focused on how we can distinguish ourselves and build a dedicated audience that’s super excited for our coverage and coming back for it. Part of that is by making calls on where we can best stand out,” she said. “I’m looking long term on where we’re headed and where we have the right subjects to succeed. I need to make these calls.”

This story has been updated to correct the number of members in the Insider Union.

In the final days of World War II, as the German Reich collapsed, Nazi officials ordered millions of party membership cards to be destroyed. The vast card index that documented membership across Germany survived largely because a paper mill operator, Hanns Huber, chose to hand the records over to the advancing US forces rather than pulp them.

For decades, discovering whether a relative had belonged to the Nazi Party — officially the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) — required either a formal request to Germany’s Federal Archives or trudging through microfilm copies housed at the U.S. National Archives in Washington, D.C. Earlier this year, when the U.S. National Archives began releasing digitized versions of the records online, public interest was so high that the website briefly crashed.

For German newspaper Die Zeit, the archive presented an opportunity. While the records had become publicly available, navigating them remained a challenge. Millions of membership cards were scattered across thousands of PDF files, making individual searches near impossible.

A team of reporters, data journalists, and data scientists set out to change that. A few weeks after the archive’s release was reported in German media, Die Zeit had built a searchable database that transformed millions of scanned membership cards into an accessible public resource. The project has since attracted millions of searches, with users uncovering the names of grandparents, great-uncles, and other relatives whose party membership had long remained hidden within the archive.

The database is also challenging a persistent misconception about Nazi Germany. While conscription to the Wehrmacht — the German armed forces under the Nazis — was compulsory, membership in the Nazi Party itself was not. Despite some professions carrying heavy social pressure to sign up, it remained voluntary to join.

Gregor Aisch, a visual data journalist at Die Zeit, and Andreas Loos, head of the newspaper’s data science and AI desk, spoke to GIJN about how the project came together, the role artificial intelligence played in making the archive searchable, and the unexpected response that followed publication.

Using AI to build a searchable archive

The foundation of the project lay in two vast collections of membership records: the Central Card Index and the regional Gau Card Index. Political scientist Jürgen Falter, who spent decades studying the Nazi Party, estimates that only 44% of the Central Index and 77% of the Gau Index survived the war. Even so, the surviving material represents one of the largest repositories of information about party membership. Together, the surviving records cover approximately 90% of all Nazi Party memberships between 1925 and 1945, although significant gaps remain.

Transforming that archive into a searchable database required processing 5,442 PDF files, each containing roughly 3,000 pages of scanned membership cards. Many members appear in both indexes, creating duplicate records that needed to be accounted for.

“We used AI mainly to extract textual information from images,” Loos explains. “The models could cope with even difficult visual data: Each register card may contain a mix of many fonts and handwriting, including Kurrent and Sütterlin, two old German handwriting scripts. All this could be read.”

Optical character recognition (OCR) converts images into machine-readable text. For the NSDAP project, the team combined several OCR systems, relying heavily on Google’s Gemini LLM to interpret handwritten and printed information from the cards.

For Die Zeit, the technology was not introduced as an experiment. Artificial intelligence was already part of the newsroom’s reporting, the NSDAP database simply provided an opportunity to apply those tools at an unusual scale.

“AI was already a major part of our toolkit,” Loos says. “Especially in combination with powerful search applications, it will play an increasingly important role in handling and analyzing large datasets.”

Because the records were created over two decades by different offices, using different administrative systems and inconsistent formats, extracting names, dates, occupations, and places of birth in a standardized way required extensive processing before the data could be searched reliably.

“The combination of name and place of birth is indeed not enough to identify a person with certainty,” Aisch says. “But if you also know the birth date, you can be very certain that you found your relative.”

Accounting for errors and gaps

As with many newsroom projects built using AI tools, the database required balancing accessibility with accuracy.

“A limitation is that OCR data obtained by LLMs may contain hallucinations, which in fact occurred from time to time,” Loos said. “One way to deal with this was to give our readers the opportunity to report mistakes via email, which enabled us to correct hundreds of records.”

Loos adds that while the team found the OCR to be highly accurate, assessing that accuracy was not always straightforward. The large language model occasionally expanded or interpreted information rather than simply transcribing it. “With LLMs, you often do not simply get a text version of the original, but text with added comments (e.g., “D”. [Düsseldorf]” instead of simply “D.”). This can even be helpful for a search function, but it is wrong when you want to do OCR canonically.”

In addition, some of the original text proved too difficult to decipher, so the team had to decide whether the data was completely unreadable.

“We thought at first that the handwriting would become our biggest problem — but that proved to be a solved issue by LLMs. So among the biggest problems were in the end, the costs and the performance of the backend,” said Loos.

Collaboration across the newsroom

The project drew together multiple desks across Die Zeit, each contributing a different layer to the story.

The data science and AI team handled the extraction and structuring of the records, transforming millions of scanned membership cards into searchable data. The data and visualization desk built the search interface and the scrollytelling features surrounding the project. Meanwhile, the Science and History departments provided archival research and historical expertise, helping frame the records within the broader history of Nazi Party membership.

“We wanted to make these membership records searchable in a way that would get you an immediate response,” Aisch explains. “But more importantly, we also want to provide the much-needed context for the story: What does it mean if you find your relatives in these records?”

While a search result could throw out the name of a party member, understanding historical joining patterns had the potential to add much needed historical context that extended beyond just finding a family member in the search.

Contextualizing Nazi Party membership

Die Zeit treated the searchable database as only one part of the investigation. Alongside the search tool, the team conducted a broader analysis of party membership patterns, using the records to examine who joined the NSDAP, when they enrolled, and how membership evolved over two decades.

Previous researchers, including Falter, had spent years studying the party through samples of membership cards. Access to millions of records offered an opportunity to view those patterns at an unprecedented scale.

The analysis traced the growth of the party from its re-establishment in 1925 through to the end of World War II. Membership surged after Adolf Hitler became chancellor in 1933, the influx so large that party officials temporarily froze admissions before reopening enrollment in 1937.

In total, roughly 10.2 million Germans received Nazi Party membership cards between 1925 and 1945.

The data also provided insight into who joined. Drawing on a 50,000-card sample previously compiled by Falter, the team visualized how membership was particularly common among civil servants and white-collar workers, while many industrial workers remained aligned with Social Democratic and Communist political organizations.

The records revealed changes across generations as well. During the war, enrollment increasingly shifted toward younger Germans who had previously participated in organizations such as the Hitler Youth and the League of German Girls.

“We know from these records who joined the Nazi Party, but we don’t know why they did it,” Aisch said. “People joined the Nazi Party in several waves. Only a relatively small fraction joined before 1933. After the Party took power, there was a huge spike in new memberships, and they closed the Party to new members. When they reopened it in 1937, you see the second huge spike. Timing is a key factor in understanding the motives.”

At the same time, the team chose to be cautious about the conclusions they drew. While the database proved effective for finding individuals, inconsistencies within the records limited the reliability of certain large-scale analyses.

“We would have loved to do more analysis like that,” Loos says. “However, for these purposes you need highly normalized data, and the dataset is at the moment much better for finding persons by name search.”

Personal histories revisited

Since publication, users have searched for family members, former neighbors, local officials, and others whose lives intersected with the history of the Third Reich. In many cases, the searches confirmed suspicions that had lingered within families for decades. In others, they raised entirely new questions.

The experience was not limited to readers. During the reporting process, Aisch himself discovered a membership card belonging to his own great-grandfather. “I knew from family stories that he was a ‘proud’ NSDAP member who boasted about joining before the party took power. Seeing his actual member record card with his photo attached somehow made this feel a lot more tangible,” said Aisch.

By making the records searchable, the database placed information that had long remained buried in archival collections into public view. For some users, that visibility has complicated family narratives that had remained largely unquestioned for generations.

An NSDAP membership card from 1937 belonging to a Franz Herbst, found in his estate. Image: Skallaub, Wikimedia, Creative Commons.

International attention and public response

The project quickly attracted attention beyond Germany, with the team eventually publishing an English-language version of the project to accommodate non-German readers.

International coverage largely focused on the database itself rather than conducting independent analyses of the underlying records. Outlets including CNN, the BBC, The Guardian, and Le Monde reported on the project, with many stories centered on the reactions of users who had discovered relatives within the records.

“We certainly did not expect the story to be picked up internationally so widely,” Aisch said. “In hindsight, it makes a lot of sense. The story that a German newspaper used AI to create a ‘Nazi search engine’ is just too good to ignore.”

The response in Germany was equally notable. Before publication, the newsroom anticipated criticism from readers who might be reluctant to revisit difficult aspects of family history, but the team were surprised at the positive reaction from Germans.

“Many readers thanked us for making these archives more accessible,” Aisch says. “Many were touched to find their relatives, even if they already suspected them.”

Building stories beyond the search

Since publication, Die Zeit has continued reporting from the records, with many of the stories focused on providing additional context for interpreting individual search results.

“We have built many follow-up stories around this dataset,” Loos says. “Many of them addressed user reactions or provided historical context for how the data should be read and understood.”

For the newsroom, ensuring that readers understood the limits of the database became almost as important as building it. A membership card can establish that someone joined the Nazi Party. It cannot fully explain why they joined, what role they played, or how their views evolved over time. The team viewed the search tool as a starting point for investigation rather than a definitive judgment on an individual’s life.

During the country’s northern war, a devastating civil war pitting the federal government against forces from the northern Tigray region that took place from 2020 to 2022, information flow collapsed almost entirely. Internet and phone lines were cut, major roads were closed, and independent reporting was largely shut out. Even so, images of violence continued to circulate online, often stripped of context and beyond the reach of verification. Ethiopian fact-checkers had to determine whether a single image or video might trigger panic, reprisals or displacement.

Rehobot Ayalew, then the lead fact-checker at HaqCheck, an International Fact-Checking Network–verified fact-checking organization, said the work narrowed to image and video verification.

“That was all we had.”

In a country where a single lie can ignite violence, fact-checking is a high-stakes effort with real-life consequences. Ayalew recalled how one false rumor about a rebel advance emptied an entire community.

“Most people fled their homes,” she said, “and struggled for months, even though everything was actually fine.”

In a nation of over 130 million, Ayalew estimated that she was one of fewer than 10 full-time fact-checking practitioners.

The conflict began in November 2020, when fighting broke out between the federal government and forces in the northern Tigray region. It killed hundreds of thousands of people, triggered a severe humanitarian crisis, and involved reported atrocities by all sides. Although a ceasefire was agreed in November 2022, the peace is fraying. The latest reports of renewed fighting have revived concerns that the information vacuum that defined the war years could re-emerge just as quickly as the violence itself.

During the 2020–2022 war, Ayalew and her small team, working from Addis Ababa, monitored a daily flood of social media claims whenever fighting flared. Verification depended on reverse image searches, metadata analysis, and sporadic contact with sources when communication was possible.

Much of what they assessed was images and videos capable of inflaming ethnic tensions. These included recycled footage from other conflicts, fabricated territorial gains, and propaganda designed to provoke fear.

One widely cited case involved a university professor whose ethnic background was falsely portrayed on Facebook as proof of political allegiance. Hate-filled posts followed. He was later killed outside his home, and his family sued Meta for failing to act despite repeated warnings.

“Fake information has claimed the lives of many Ethiopians,” said Ermias Mulugeta, a research editor at Inform Africa, the organization behind HaqCheck, and the former editor-in-chief of the weekly newspaper Addis Maleda.

“That is why fact-checking is crucial here.”

Muthoki Mumo, the Africa program coordinator at the Committee to Protect Journalists, said Ethiopia has become “one of the most difficult places for independent journalism in Africa,” particularly for reporters covering conflict or politically sensitive issues. Independent reporting, she said, is increasingly treated “as a criminal act rather than a public service.”

Recent incidents underscore how tightly access can be controlled. In February, the Ethiopian Media Authority declined to renew the accreditation of three Reuters journalists and revoked the agency’s credentials to cover the African Union summit, a move that came days after the publication of an investigative report on Ethiopia’s alleged role in Sudan’s conflict. In a separate incident, an AFP journalist was blocked from boarding a flight to Tigray, where fresh clashes had been reported.

As independent reporting shrank between 2020 and 2022, false content flourished. Ayalew spent much of her time debunking recycled visuals — old videos falsely presented as current military operations, misattributed images claiming to show drone attacks, and years-old photos reused to exaggerate battlefield gains.

The challenge of reach

Only about 21% of Ethiopia’s population has internet access, concentrated in urban areas. Yet rumors travel far through word of mouth.

“What circulates on social media actually reaches even the rural areas that don’t have access,” Ayalew said.

In rural Ethiopia, information flows through village elders, religious leaders, and community gatherings. A false claim posted on Facebook in Addis Ababa can be repeated in a village square hundreds of miles away within days, transformed through each retelling.

This created a paradox. Those most exposed to misinformation were least likely to see a correction. HaqCheck’s online fact-checks in English and Amharic mainly reached an urban, educated, already skeptical audience.

“They were not the ones being misinformed in the first place,” Ayalew said.

In highly polarized environments, corrections do not always settle disputes. When fact-checkers challenged claims from one side of the conflict, supporters often interpreted the intervention as biased.

“I’m questioning whether fact-checking alone really minimizes harm in our context,” Ayalew said. “Sometimes it feels like we’re working in a vacuum.”

A brief window, then collapse

After Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed came to power in 2018, Ethiopia’s media experienced a brief “honeymoon time,” Mulugeta said, with improved press freedom. The change followed years of political repression under his predecessors, Meles Zenawi and Hailemariam Desalegn; their regimes were accused of suppressing civil liberties, jailing political opponents and journalists, and using anti-terrorism laws to silence dissent.

Ahmed released thousands of political prisoners and lifted press censorship, actions that the Nobel Committee said helped advance “democracy and freedom of expression” when awarding him the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize. That window collapsed with the outbreak of the Tigray war in 2020.

“The media landscape is dying and shrinking,” Mulugeta said. Before, journalists mostly feared the government. Now, attacks can come from anywhere including from online communities, political factions, armed groups, or even fellow journalists.

Sustaining work meant “walking on sharp rice.” Mulugeta cultivated relationships with regulators, checking in regularly to gauge if he had crossed invisible lines.

“If you reach out to them, make them familiar with you, they will directly come to you before they take very harsh measures,” he explained. “They will give you a heads up.”

But push too far, and journalists disappear. Mulugeta has seen colleagues “suddenly get abducted and vanish,” only to be located weeks later in informal peripheral prisons.

Imprisonment is a constant threat. CPJ’s December 2025 prison census placed Ethiopia among Africa’s worst jailers of journalists. Five journalists listed face terrorism charges and are known for critical commentary and reporting on the Amhara conflict (a separate insurgency that erupted in 2023 when the federal government moved to disarm regional Amhara militias known as Fano). Others are held without charge in camps like Awash Arba, denied access to lawyers or family.

Together, all this reflects “a clear and troubling pattern of escalation of repression since 2020,” said CPJ’s Mumo. Threats extend beyond prison. She cited a Tigray militia threatening to shoot a journalist filming a protest.

In January 2021, Dawit Kebede Araya, a reporter for the regional broadcaster Tigrai TV, was gunned down by an unidentified attacker near his home.

In a different region that same year, two unidentified attackers shot and killed Sisay Fida, a reporter and coordinator for the Oromia Broadcasting Network.

In 2022, the Dimitsi Weyane TV station in Tigray  was hit by a drone strike.

CPJ also documents a rise in forced exile, with at least 54 journalists and media workers fleeing since 2020.

“This exodus reflects the severity of the pressure journalists face and the lack of meaningful legal protection at home,” said Mumo.

Ethiopia’s information crisis is compounded by deep ethnic divisions that permeate newsrooms themselves. In a nation where ethnic identity often determines political alignment and recent history is marked by violence along ethnic lines, the idea of a neutral press is aspirational at best. Reporters bring their own motives to stories, making editorial oversight extraordinarily delicate. Those motives, Mulugeta said, are often ethnic or political allegiances, which express themselves in excitement about certain stories, or as agendas embedded in the writing.

“I usually get a story from reporters, and when I read it, I know something’s off,” Mulugeta explained. “You’d see the excitement, the motive within the story.”

No winning side

During moments of conflict, which happen frequently in Ethiopia’s ethnically divided regions, misinformation surges dramatically.

“We usually get overwhelmed at that time,” Mulugeta said. “We filter based on timeliness and the flammability of that topic.”

During the Tigray war, transparency was HaqCheck’s primary safeguard. Each verification included a detailed explanation of the methodology, outlining the sources consulted, tools used and reasoning applied so readers could retrace the process themselves. It did not shield them from backlash.

Fact-checking images attributed to government forces often prompted accusations of sympathy for rebel groups. Verifying claims linked to armed opposition movements triggered counterattacks, branding the team as state propagandists.

“There was no winning,” said Ayalew. “If you checked one side, the other side attacked you.”

Criticism came from across the political and ethnic spectrum. Some staff quit, while others stayed but disengaged to avoid drawing attention.

“Once you are labelled, you do not get a chance to explain yourself,” Mulugeta said.

The label often made journalists targets of sustained online harassment.

“If you’re not impacted,” he said, “your loved ones will be.”

For Ayalew, being attacked by both sides became a perverse badge of honor. It meant she was doing her job correctly. However, the attacks did not stop at accusations of bias. As the only woman regularly appearing as a host on HaqCheck’s YouTube fact-checking program, Ayalew found herself singled out with deeply personal attacks. While her male colleagues went largely unchallenged, the comment sections were filled with gendered abuse directed at her.

She recalled comments questioning her appearance, criticizing her for speaking about politics, and making crude sexual references.

“They didn’t attack the content,” she said. “They attacked me — my appearance, my gender.” The attacks on her work were easier to handle than the personal ones, she said. When people from opposing sides challenged her fact-checking, it actually encouraged her because it meant she had hit a nerve and exposed a falsehood that mattered.

Gendered harassment is not unique to Ethiopia. Women journalists worldwide face similar treatment, but it was amplified by the polarized, high-stakes context of wartime fact-checking. It was Ayalew’s first sustained exposure to technology-facilitated gender-based violence.

“It opened my eyes,” she said. “This is what happens when women become visible.”

The silent crisis

The mental health toll on Ethiopian fact-checkers and journalists remains largely unspoken. In Ethiopia, Ayalew said, mental health is often treated as a taboo or dismissed as a luxury.

Fact-checkers often work without psychological support, spending long hours reviewing violent imagery and enduring coordinated harassment with little institutional backing.

Wartime fact-checking compounds the pressure. With only three or four fact-checkers on HaqCheck’s staff at the height of the conflict, taking time off felt impossible, as though stepping away meant abandoning colleagues who were equally overwhelmed.

During the war, Ayalew’s health began to deteriorate. She lost 10 kilograms (about 22 pounds) and initially believed she was physically ill. Medical tests showed nothing wrong. Eventually, she sought care at a psychiatric clinic, where a doctor advised her to slow down with work. She resigned soon after. One former colleague developed alcoholism, she said, while another journalist she knows attempted suicide and spent weeks in the hospital.

Mulugeta said he has attempted several times to secure pro bono psychosocial support for his team from mental health professionals, but never succeeded.

“We know journalists anywhere in the world are the front-liners, and fact-checkers are also the front-liners,” he said.

Fear adds another layer of stress. Colleagues are arrested, detained, or harassed by authorities.

“Will I be the next?” Ayalew said. “We don’t know for sure. We don’t know who we make angry in the process of doing our job.”

Burnout has been widespread. Exhaustion once led Mulugeta to step away from journalism altogether before returning months later.

“Like a phoenix,” he said. For his own well-being, he now relies on faith. “I’m a believer, a spiritual person, and I definitely pray,” he said. “My spiritual connection with Jesus gives me support.”

Ayalew raises the issue of mental health in every training and panel discussion she leads, trying to break the silence that nearly broke her. For her, managing the crisis means preventing it for others.

When the platforms pull back

Facebook has long been the primary conduit for misinformation in Ethiopia. Telegram and YouTube are also influential, and TikTok has recently surged among younger users. These platforms often fail to moderate content effectively because they do not understand local languages or context.

“Facebook doesn’t know the local language of Ethiopia, so it allows those derogatory words to stay on the platform for a very long period of time,” Mulugeta explained.

For years, Ethiopian fact-checkers struggled to get meaningful responses from Meta. That changed briefly after the lawsuit over the murdered professor, when the company began supporting media literacy workshops and engaging more with local organizations.

But moderation remained inconsistent. When Meta later announced it was retreating from third-party fact-checking, the impact was profound.

“It felt like a betrayal,” Ayalew said. Meta had once told them their work informed moderation decisions. “That gave us hope. Now, that hope is gone.”

Without meaningful action, perpetrators feel emboldened. Reporting hate speech often yields no response.

“People don’t even bother reporting anymore. They believe nothing will happen.”

For fact-checkers in Ethiopia, the dominance of social media over traditional news creates an almost impossible task. Verified reporting struggles to compete with viral content amplified by algorithms, while platforms that spread misinformation operate with minimal accountability. Decisions made thousands of miles away have consequences in fragile democracies, where online speech can translate directly into violence.

“We’re producing a society that tends to believe social media more than the mainstream media,” Mulugeta said. “It suppresses the impact of the fact-checking that you have produced.” He added, “When these companies retreat [from fact-checking], they don’t feel the impact. We do.”

Financial barriers

Ethiopia’s restrictive financial system creates serious obstacles for fact-checkers, compounding an already precarious funding landscape. Strict currency controls, limited access to foreign accounts, and bureaucratic hurdles make subscriptions to tools like satellite imagery, verification platforms, or research databases prohibitively expensive or impossible.

Google Street View, for example, does not work properly in most of the country, and outdated satellite data further limits what can be verified remotely.

“Even when we do social media monitoring,” Ayalew said, “we do it mostly manually, because we couldn’t pay for tools.”

This scarcity of resources is mirrored in operational funding. Inform Africa, once a prominent fact-checking initiative, is currently “on hold” due to financial constraints, Mulugeta said, leaving the country with even fewer resources at a critical time.

“Fact-checking is the most overlooked department,” he added. “But it is the most crucial.”

Like many independent media organizations, these outlets rely on unpredictable grants, a model that reduces staffing and limits their ability to respond to surges in misinformation during crises.

After leaving HaqCheck, Ayalew founded Niqu Ethiopia, a consultancy focused on prevention through media literacy: training journalists, influencers, students, and community leaders to recognize manipulation early.

“Fact-checking is important,” she said. “But it is not a long-term solution.” Much misinformation, she noted, is rooted in political grievances and ethnic divisions.

“If our politics are not healed, our information ecosystem will remain toxic.”

“I love journalism,” Mulugeta said. “I love how we voice the voiceless. I love shedding light on issues. That motivates me when I want to fall back.”

He acknowledges the economic hardships: “Journalism does not pay us enough.” Still, he sees the work as a responsibility rather than a career choice.

“Against all hardships, we should be standing steadfast. We should stick with the principles of journalism. There is no other option.”

“There are people who hate me, who do not support my agenda,” he said. “But people are reading my articles, even people who are not supporting me.”

His advice for young journalists entering the field is stark.

“They should be ready for everything,” he said. “This work is full of hardship and uncertainty.”

He stresses the human side of the work. Mental health cannot be ignored.

“There is no easy road in this profession,” he said. “But the work matters.”

Three years later, Capital B is up to a staff of 25 — six dedicated to Atlanta, three to Gary, and the remainder to the network as a whole. And now its ready to open a third local newsroom — this one farther from the Rust Belt but nearer its original home. The outlet announced today that its next local operation will be in Augusta, Georgia. While Augusta may be best known as the home of The Masters golf tournament — at a famously white country club — the city’s population is about 55% African American.

“This will be our third local market, expanding our Georgia presence and starting off a multiyear growth initiative to provide more local news to Black communities in the state and across the country,” the site said in an announcement.

But before we bring Capital B to a new town, we listen. We’ve spent the first half of the year working with Augusta-native journalists and trusted messengers to gain a deep understanding of the community’s news needs.

We learned that there’s a clear gap in consistent, community-centered local news, particularly coverage that reflects the needs and concerns of Black residents. Augusta’s communities deserve a stronger information infrastructure.

The site has posted its first job opening for Augusta, a founding editor. But it’s not a job meant for outsiders: “Applicants must currently live in the Augusta area or have demonstrated ties to the community.” (One of Capital B’s key findings from those local conversations: “The city runs on relationships. Augusta is a relationship-driven city.”)

The tournament has brought hundreds of thousands of visitors to major cities in the United States, Canada, and Mexico. It’s been directing new and returning news consumers to local news outlets for vital information about how to make the most of the World Cup and the tournament’s impact on their lives.

Over the last six months, local news publications have taken several different approaches to serving their audiences during the World Cup, from newsletters and library exhibits to videos and interactive maps. I spoke to a few of them about their initiatives and how they’re making the most of the world’s biggest sporting event.

Here in Boston, the biggest World Cup story has been about how Scotland’s fanbase, the Tartan Army, filled the city’s streets with joy while drinking the bars dry.

But much of what makes the World Cup so much fun in a major city is the passion that immigrant communities share for the sport, their teams, and their cultures. The city of Chelsea — a majority-Hispanic suburb across the Mystic River from Boston — received state grants and a donated projector screen to host Fiesta Futbol, near-daily showings of World Cup matches in the city’s main square.

With hundreds of people stopping by to catch matches, El Planeta, Boston’s largest Spanish-language newspaper, partnered with radio station WBUR to help the community partake in a longtime World Cup tradition: completing the Panini FIFA World Cup sticker album.

During each World Cup, Italian collectibles company Panini prints stickers of all the players from each country participating in the tournament. In the U.S., the album costs $5, and stickers come in $2 packs of seven. Given the tournament’s expanded format with 48 teams, this year’s album requires nearly 1,000 stickers to be completed.

I can say firsthand that this is a costly hobby, but one that’s rooted in first-time excitement for children and seasoned nostalgia for adults. El Planeta has long had a distribution partnership for albums and stickers with Panini, and when WBUR’s managing editor for audience, Meagan McGinnes-Bessey, got in touch about collaborating on a World Cup initiative, El Planeta executive chairman Javier Marin pitched the idea of giving away stickers and albums.

“It’s kind of like Pokémon cards,” McGinnes-Bessey said. “It’s approachable. It’s just a good time.”

WBUR and El Planeta first teamed up on COVID-19 coverage in 2020 on a story about Chelsea’s high rate of Covid infections amid a lack of resources to combat the pandemic. More recently, the two publications have republished and translated each other’s reporting on ICE raids in the city.

On June 27, Marin, McGinnes-Bessey, and a few reporters spent the afternoon in the Chelsea Square area handing out stickers and albums, getting to know community members, and letting community members get to know their journalism. Marin estimated that hundreds of families stopped by their table, and they gave out more than 600 sticker packs and 150 albums.

They gave out another 1,300 sticker packs on July 11. They also raffled off four boxes of stickers, each containing 50 packs, and distributed another 160 albums. While the original plan was to give out stickers and albums after people signed up for a WBUR or El Planeta newsletter, Marin and McGinnes-Bessey ended up loosening that requirement. That helped foster more natural conversations and engagement with the community, they said.

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“This is an amazing opportunity to demonstrate to the community that both WBUR and El Planeta are celebrating this tradition,” Marin said. “It brings happiness in the toughest moments.”

KCUR Kansas City

KCUR’s managing producer for podcasts, Suzanne Hogan, has a special relationship with soccer.

Her grandfather, Jose Portuguez, came from Costa Rica in the 1950s to study at the University of Kansas. He was a soccer fanatic, Hogan said, and found community with other immigrant groups in the city playing pickup soccer. He helped referee games and advocate for some of the city’s first dedicated soccer fields.

Hogan played soccer herself and grew up hearing his stories. As she got older, she came to understand how the game was intertwined with the fabric of the city. Throughout her career, she wanted to tell Kansas City’s soccer story but never found the right avenue.

Until the World Cup.

Hogan pitched the idea for a podcast, How We Became a Soccer City, to explore Kansas City’s relationship to the sport. The pitch was accepted into Arizona State University’s Great Game Lab — a fellowship program to “chronicle how some of the U.S. host cities became World Cup cities.”

“It seemed like a great opportunity to do the deep dive, in-depth enterprise reporting that we get to do in our podcast all the time, but really focus it on Kansas City’s soccer story,” Hogan said, “which I knew was rich in stories of immigrant groups and lots of efforts by different people who had never been given the spotlight.”

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The podcast is a four-part mini-series within KCUR’s monthly podcast The People’s History of Kansas City.

As the episodes were released, Hogan received tips from listeners who had their own family histories and anecdotes to share. She accumulated so much research over the course of reporting that it couldn’t all be included in the final episodes. So KCUR partnered with the Kansas City Public Library to host an interactive exhibit about KC’s soccer history, based on the podcast. The exhibit is free to visit throughout the tournament.

“You create podcasts or a story digitally and [they] just so quickly get lost in the feed, or buried,” Hogan said. “With something like this, if we were going to do it so in-depth and have all this never-before-seen archival footage, it [was] really nice [that] it was something that could be shared and celebrated during the actual event.”

Kansas City Beacon

Elsewhere in Kansas City, the nonprofit Kansas City Beacon leveraged its partnership with the Documenters program to find stories about the World Cup’s impact on the smallest host city. Documenters, run by the nonprofit City Bureau, trains and pays people to attend and cover public meetings.

The Beacon has been working with Documenters since August 2025 and has trained more than 60 notetakers so far, interim editor-in-chief Chris Lester said. In their weekly meetings, staffers discuss potential story ideas from the public meetings.

During one Mid-America Regional Council meeting, for instance, a few local mayors expressed concerns about low World Cup-related hotel reservations and wondered if fans camping outdoors might cause problems. Workforce and economic impact reporter Tom White saw that in the Documenters notes and ended up reporting on it.

Extended hours for bars during the tournament have also been a topic of debate in public meetings. When Kansas City granted 16 bars the ability to stay open until 5:00 a.m., White hung out at one for 10 hours to watch the Argentina vs Algeria match and immerse readers in the experience of World Cup nightlife.

“That’s not a typical story for us, to do a first-person observational narrative,” Lester said. “That was outside our usual boundaries, and it turned out really well.”

The Beacon is also experimenting with including more notetakers in the newsroom’s work. Lester recently deployed a few alongside staff reporters to interview small business owners in neighborhoods beyond the main Fan Fest area about how the World Cup has impacted them economically.

“I am really concerned about helping develop the next generation of potential journalists,” Lester said. “While it’s not the core priority of Documenters, my hope is that by getting involved in this program, a few people may become inspired to really pursue journalism as a career.”

Atlanta Journal-Constitution

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution launched a pop-up newsletter called “Kick It” to explore soccer culture in Atlanta communities. (The city, which hosted eight World Cup matches, is no stranger to major sporting events; it hosted the Super Bowl in 2019 and is set to do so again in 2028.)

“We’ve taken a look at the residents who live here and how they are activating the pride and celebration that they have as their countries are in the World Cup,” managing editor Janel Davis said. “We’ve been able to embed with those folks and tell those stories. We’ve [also] been able to provide a vast amount of utility content for folks who are coming here for the first time… What are ticket prices looking like here in Atlanta compared to other cities? Can I still get one last minute? What do I need to know before I take your public transportation?”

AJC video producer Fraser Jones briefly played soccer as a child, but didn’t keep it up. Before the start of the World Cup, he set out to learn the rules of the game and documented the process in a vertical video series titled “Soccer 101,” in which he enlists the help of high school soccer players to teach him the basics. The three-part series was sponsored by a local car dealership and the videos were posted to Instagram and Facebook, garnering 136,000 views on the former.

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“Once the World Cup is over, we can pivot this audience to stick with us,” Davis said. “We’re already doing that work on the front end, putting out surveys to these folks, asking if they’re interested in this kind of content beyond the World Cup.”

Los Angeles Times

Los Angeles hosted eight World Cup matches in 2026, will host the 2027 Super Bowl, and will be the hub for the 2028 summer Olympics. The city is used to tourists (and traffic), but the Los Angeles Times wanted to find a way to engage and retain newer and younger audiences. One way to do that? Being useful.

The L.A. Times reimagined its local restaurant and activities guides to let locals and tourists design their own Los Angeles adventures. After creating L.A. Times accounts, users can save places from Times guides to curate their own itineraries and plan routes through the city. They can also view train routes and populate real-time transit schedules from Google Maps data.

“We are not trying to compete with Google Maps,” senior product manager Jeff Poirier said. “We don’t have the resources to compete with them on a technical front. [But] we are local experts. Our reporters actually go to and eat at these restaurants, and do these hikes, and personally vouch for these recommendations. People trust that the L.A. Times knows what’s going on in L.A. The real value of the product is the content itself and the expertise of our reporters.”

The personalized dashboard launched ahead of the World Cup and will remain available after the tournament is over. The team has seen thousands of saves of locations since its launch last month. Some of its most saved guides so far have been ideas for things to do with teenagers and an essentials dining guide for L.A.

“Our guides content has historically been really great at converting subscribers,” Poirier said. “The goal of this project is to bring new people into the fold as registered users and to introduce them in a deeper way to the content that we offer in this area. The hope is that they see the value and want to be able to take greater advantage of this feature, see more of our guides content, which would ultimately bring them down the funnel to a paid subscription.”

HyperTexting, launched on iOS on June 29, says its goal is “to make finding and following website feeds as easy as podcasting.”

This is RSS — but you won’t find HyperTexting’s parent company using that word anywhere. The app’s founder, Caleb Hailey, told TechCrunch the problem that “bothered [him] for so long about RSS” is “why don’t more people care about this?” In his view, it’s time to retire the terminology entirely.

In an email, Hailey told me:

The Facebook News Feed will turn 20 on September 5, 2026. Facebook didn’t invent the feed — open standards like RSS led the way in the late 90’s — but it did a much better job of introducing mainstream users to news feeds. And the Facebook News Feed was a seminal moment in internet culture history as it influenced everything that came after to the point that today’s internet is all feeds all the way down. So instead of leading with the underlying technologies (RSS, Atom, JSON Feed, and OPML) we’re conducting an experiment to meet people where they are and use terms like “news feed” and the “for you feed” instead of more technical terms that could alienate certain groups of people.

Hailey isn’t the only one attempting to introduce the technology formerly known as RSS to a younger generation. (Nieman Lab predictors have been saying this was coming for a few years now.) The Electronic Frontier Foundation published a guide last month to “a tool that’s been around for decades that can help wrangle many of your feeds into something manageable.”

And earlier this year, the engineer and developer Terry Godier launched Current as a “guilt-free” RSS reader that doesn’t display how many unread posts you have.

“Every RSS reader I tried made me feel bad. Not because the apps were ugly or broken (most were quite good) but because they all seemed to agree on something I didn’t. That reading the internet was a task,” Godier wrote. That articles were items to be processed. That falling behind was a failure state. I didn’t have a name for this yet. I just knew I wanted a reader that didn’t make me feel like I owed it something.”

By the way, Nieman Lab’s RSS feed is here.

On Wednesday, the Times announced it will soon launch The Local, “a new journalism initiative aimed at serving and engaging communities.” The national news behemoth will kick off the new initiative in August with a pilot newsletter for the Twin Cities, which will be sent out three times a week, “with the goal of deepening our relationships with readers in Minneapolis and St. Paul and helping them feel more connected through journalism,” managing editor Marc Lacey and editorial director of newsletters Jodi Rudoren wrote in the announcement. “Our hope,” they added, “is that The Local: Twin Cities can serve as a model for similar future efforts elsewhere around the country.”

“We want to reach people who’ve never engaged with the Times, deepen our connection with occasional visitors, and serve our most loyal subscribers,” Rudoren told me in an email. “We don’t think what those people want from a local newsletter is all that different: original reporting and analysis, smart curation, reader-focused conversation, clarity, surprise, and delight.” She emphasized that the newsletter is free to access and will not be limited to Times subscribers.

Per the announcement, “the voicey newsletter will combine from-the-ground reporting and service with insightful curation of all the Times offers through a local lens.” The sign-up landing page notes the newsletter will feature “the latest news, culture, and sports from the Twin Cities.”

This isn’t the Times’ first foray into local journalism; most notably, since 2023, its local investigations fellowship has put its formidable resources at the disposal of local reporters and newsrooms across the country in partnerships that have produced Pulitzer-winning local journalism. But the service journalism emphasis of The Local is an entirely different proposition that suggests The Times wants to step up its efforts to fill the local news void, and/or sees commercial opportunity to build an Axios-style local newsletter network. (On Wednesday, Axios Local announced its expansion to its 40th and 41st markets, Cincinnati and the area north of Cincinnati.)

Earlier this year, an in-house ad voiced by A.G. Sulzberger himself caught our attention here at Nieman Lab because, rather than ask listeners to subscribe to The New York Times, he called on them to support any news organization “dedicated to original reporting,” and noted, “local newspapers in particular need your support.” My colleague Josh Benton has argued the Times has a responsibility to do more to support local news. “If the Times is going to be truly mission-driven — if it believes in its ‘core journalistic mission of helping people understand the world’ — it should be using its position of relative financial security to work harder on the biggest and most intractable part of the problem,” he wrote in 2024.

The Twin Cities are no news desert, as the Times acknowledges. “We chose the Twin Cities because it’s a region with a vibrant media ecosystem, hunger for news and tons of creativity,” Lacey and Rudoren wrote. “We’re excited to offer a unique and high-quality newsletter to complement what’s already there.” They specify that one of The Local’s goals is to “support local news outlets, viewing them not as competitors but as partners.” Per the announcement, the Times’ newsletter will promote other news outlets’ stories and journalists and “look for innovative ways to collaborate.” As examples of the kind of collaboration it anticipates, The Times notes it will record a special episode of the Wirecutter podcast at the Minnesota Public Radio booth at the state fair next month, and will sponsor The Minnesota Star Tribune’s North Star Summit in September. (Just last month, the Star Tribune announced layoffs and said it was exploring becoming a nonprofit.)

The Twin Cities newsletter will be co-hosted by Minnesotans: Shadi Bushra, formerly of MinnPost, and Jay Gabler, who joins the project from the Duluth News Tribune. Times Newsletters deputy Hanna Ingber is leading The Local, and St. Paul native Talya Minsberg will be the team’s senior staff editor, “serving as a crucial link between The Times and [the] journalists in the field, helping make the breadth of our coverage feel urgent and relevant and using video, social media, comments, graphics, data and other storytelling tools to build community.”

Read more about The Local and the pilot newsletter in the Times’ announcement here.

“Oh, there’s some big guys in here,” he said.

We were standing in front of a Malaise trap, a tent-like structure of cloth and mesh that is in essence a funnel of doom. Flying insects — along with the occasional suicidal and/or unfortunate wingless crawler — are herded into the top of the trap and then into a bottle of ethanol, which quickly kills and preserves them. Every couple of weeks, Jones, a senior environmental correspondent at Vox who focuses on biodiversity (disclosure: Jones is my former colleague, close friend, and a 2027 Nieman Fellow), visits the trap to collect the bugs and swap in new bottles, all in service of a lofty goal: to discover a new species.

New York City may seem like a counterintuitive place to try to find a new creature; it is, after all, a heavily built-up urban environment and not, say, the rainforests of Costa Rica. But that’s kind of the point.

“It’s an inversion of my usual work, because often I’m trying to go to these remote places and take stock of the last vestiges of some species that researchers are trying to save,” Jones told me. “Here, we’re finding new things in the most ecologically disrupted place on Earth. It’s not something that Vox has ever done before. I’m not sure any newsroom has tried to discover a species like this. Which is exciting, but also makes it a little bit daunting.”

It’s also a reminder that, even in our densest cities, we remain part of an ecosystem. For an insect, New York City — and particularly Central Park and Prospect Park, where Jones set up a second trap — is full of potential habitats. The bugs were there: all Jones had to do was find them.

“It’s an indication of how unexplored our world is,” Jones said. “If you can find a new species in New York City, think how many more there must be out there.”

Back in Central Park, Jones unscrewed the cap on a bottle of fresh, clear ethanol, attached it to the trap along with an excluder — a device to keep large insects like butterflies out — and screwed the cap onto the bottle filled with bugs and brown liquid that had previously occupied its place. This was his second time resetting the traps, which he checks every two weeks.

“I must have gotten a thousand insects in my first round,” he said as he slipped the bottle into a ziplock bag and then into his backpack. “I just have these bottles of bugs sitting in my freezer now.”

Half the work of finding a new species comes down to logistics.

The idea came to Jones when he reported a story on dark taxa, or groups of organisms that are estimated to contain more species than have been discovered or described by scientists. These organisms tend to be small, like insects and crustaceans that we can barely see with the naked eye (although a few years ago I wrote about the discovery of a new hummingbird in Ecuador), and often look so similar to other species that the only way to tell them apart easily is by examining their DNA. A recent paper in PNAS estimates that there are at least 14 to 20 million insect species on our planet — two to three times higher than previous estimates, and we have discovered only a fraction of them.

Jones wanted a firsthand look at what it takes to discover a species in 2026. So he reached out to Emily Hartop, a taxonomist at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology who studies dark taxa and had conducted a similar study using Malaise traps in Los Angeles that resulted in the discovery of nearly 50 new species more than a decade ago. Hartop connected Jones to Paul Hebert, an evolutionary biologist and founder and CEO of the Center for Biodiversity Genomics at the University of Guelph, in Canada. In 2003, Hebert and his team at Guelph invented a technique called “DNA barcoding” that allows researchers to identify new species using a short sequence of DNA. Every known species on Earth is given an identification number, and if a search through the database doesn’t turn up a match, it’s possible the person running the search has found a new species.

“I know we’ll find something new,” Hebert told me when I asked him about Jones’ chances of success (Hartop agrees with his assessment). “That’s not a question. We will certainly find many new things.”

Together with Hartop and Hebert, Jones came up with a plan: He’d need to apply for a research permit with the New York City Parks Department and talk to the Central Park Conservancy and the Prospect Park Alliance, the nonprofits that manage the two parks, to get permission to set up the traps. Hebert’s team at Guelph would send Jones the supplies he needed; Jones would collect the samples on a regular schedule and ship them to Canada, where they’d be barcoded.

The most likely species to be discovered from this project are small flies and parasitoid wasps, which lay their eggs inside other insects’ bodies. That’s where the taxonomists come in: after they’re barcoded, any potential new species will be sent to Hartop, who specializes in flies, as well as another taxonomist who specializes in parasitoid wasps. Jones also wanted to get a research organization based in New York City on board, so he reached out to the American Museum of Natural History. We were joined in Central Park by Sarah Kornbluth, a field biologist who’s an expert on bees.

“As a journalist, I felt sorely unequipped to put this project together,” Jones, who dropped out of an ecology Ph.D to pursue journalism, told me. He had to learn how to submit permit requests to the Parks Department, talk to the researchers to understand the sampling protocol, and fill out forms with the US Fish and Wildlife Service so that he could send the samples to Canada. “Shipping a bunch of dead insects in bags of ethanol is not like shipping a box of chocolates. It’s much more involved.”

Jones worked with Vox’s graphics teams to design signs with the names of the involved organizations as well as QR codes that would take passersby to a landing page Vox set up for the project. Signage was an important part of making sure people wouldn’t disturb Hartop’s project in LA, and Jones knew his traps in New York, even though they were set back from the trail, would draw many curious eyes.

Jones has received multiple emails from curious New Yorkers thanks to the signs, including a few science educators. At Prospect Park, where the trap sits in a patch of sunflowers by a busy path, a group of teenagers on a nearby path yelled out to ask Jones what he was trying to find. A few minutes later, a man pushing a stroller asked the same question. He stopped to listen, nodding along.

“Can’t wait to hear more about it!” he said, before continuing on his way.

Science and journalism are driven by the same central motive: to better understand the world. But they have vastly different processes and timelines. Science is often painstakingly slow and deliberate, with processes like peer review designed to ensure any new claims have been thoroughly investigated. Breakthroughs can take years, if not decades. That doesn’t generally work with the pace of journalism, particularly in 2026.

“There’s definitely a disconnect,” Hartop told me. “If I told a journalist ‘let’s go discover a new species, I’ll have an answer for you in a decade,’ that would not be such a compelling story.”

To try to close the gap, Hebert’s team will work quickly once they receive the samples; he told me he’ll know within weeks whether the bottles contain a species without a barcode. That will allow Jones to publish an update informing readers of the potential discovery at the end of the summer. During the time he’s at Harvard for his Nieman Fellowship, the taxonomists will be able to take a closer look at the samples, make sure they haven’t been sitting in a collection somewhere or mentioned in the scientific literature before, describe the details of any truly new species, and give them a name. (Vox is currently soliciting suggestions for potential names from the public.) The results will be published both as a story in Vox and as scientific papers — which, Hebert told me, could include Jones as a co-author.

“Some scientists might shy away from collaborating with journalists, because if it’s done improperly I think that it could come across as very performative science,” Hartop said. “It’s important to me that it’s not. It’s important to me that this process is real. But if I can do my science and be able to show people the reality and the complexity of it, that’s the most powerful thing that I can probably do as a scientist.”

Jones has been clear with the scientists that Vox will retain full editorial control over the stories that come out of the project. Vox is also paying for the project materials, the shipping and handling, and the costs of processing the samples in Hebert’s lab.

“I see one of my missions as a journalist as informing people about what’s going on on our planet,” Jones told me as we walked past a couple taking their wedding photos on a bridge over the Prospect Park lake. “I think we have to find more and better ways to tell people about biodiversity loss, because that message is not breaking through right now. And I think that means that we need to get more creative in how we’re telling these stories. We’re always talking about how we can reach new audiences, and something like this provides a direct outlet to people who are just walking through New York City. That, to me, is reason enough for this to be worth it.”

And, Jones said, he hopes it opens audiences up to “the wonder of insects.” Insects are essential to life on Earth, including ours: they pollinate our plants, clean up our messes, and keep ecosystems ticking along. Flies in particular, Hartop told me, get a bad rap. They’re associated with decay and uncleanliness, but that’s because they’re essentially nature’s sanitation workers — they’re there to clean those things up. A project like this has the potential to get people to consider their place in the world, and to reassess their assumptions about insects, cities, and the limits of our knowledge.

There’s an urgency to the project, too. As climate change intensifies, insects are being threatened just as all other creatures (including humans) are. Because there are so many left undiscovered, it’s possible we will lose an important species before we even find it.

“Every piece of DNA extracted puts a title on a book of life, and every one of these books is the largest book by a very big magnitude than the longest book ever written by a human,” Hebert told me. “I’m depressed to think about burning the books of life without ever reading them.”

The New York trapping project, then, fills out some of the gaps in the library.

“This project makes the city feel so much more vibrant and full of life,” Jones told me as we picked our way through some bushes in Prospect Park, making a detour so we didn’t disturb a pristine spiderweb. “I’m now seeing stuff I didn’t know existed. I’m taking more time to observe the insects when I’m walking to the park. [Once] you think insects are cool, you can do wildlife watching even in the middle of New York.”

That doesn’t mean he now loves all bugs.

“I hate mosquitoes,” Jones said, swatting at one. “I hate all the things that bit me today.”