To solve this problem, Syracuse University and Rebuild Local News teamed up last fall to build a curated, accessible local news database. Their Local News Research Hub formally launches this Thursday, May 21. “Our collective purpose is to provide a central, reliable home for data-driven insights into the changing media landscape,” the team states.

Joshua Darr, director of the Local NExT Lab and associate professor at Syracuse University, credited Democracy Fund’s literature review with laying the groundwork for an expanded, searchable database. The hub comprises about 170 studies total, including the 45 “artifacts” covered in that literature review, along with more than 120 new entries. Among these are peer-reviewed articles, dissertations, books and book chapters, and working papers.

“This is not only bridging academia to news practice or to policymaking,” Darr said; the team made a concerted effort to be multi-disciplinary in building the hub. They plan to continue updating the database, and are accepting submissions of additional research for inclusion.

The hub is searchable by discipline, research topic, and study type. Disciplines include Communication, Computer Science, Economics, Political Science, Public Health, Public Policy, and Sociology; research topics include Business Models, Community Connection, Economic Impact, Polarization, Print, and Voter Turnout and Engagement, among others. Each article in the database includes an AI-generated summary (vetted by at least two human researchers) that’s split into three components: a one-sentence Key Finding, a Study Description, and Practitioner Implications. These brief summaries are intended to help make the database useful and legible to audiences outside academia.

Here, for instance, is what comes up when you filter for communication studies on nonprofit local news.

Matthew Baker, Rebuild Local News’ first director of research, envisions supporters of local news policy as “power users” of the hub. (In beta, he said he’s already found it useful for his own day-to-day work, from gathering talking points to writing papers.) But he also hopes the database can be an entry point for people newer to local news as a civic priority. “Having something in one place, I hope, will also act as an attractor to newer users — people who are in adjacent spaces, or even legislative aides,” he said. “So I’m hoping that over time, it will serve to generate increased interest and attention on the fact that we do have relatively rigorous research that demonstrates that there is a crisis, but more to the point, the impact of that crisis.” He thinks the hub can open up the conversation around local news research and surface areas for exploration beyond individual academics’ research priorities.

Darr also thinks the database can be “useful for journalists making a case to nontraditional news funders,” including community foundations. “You have to make a case that’s not just ‘journalism is good, so we should employ journalists,'” he said. “It has to be much more of a nuanced argument about community health, community vibrancy, community economic success, and it’s a lot to ask each newsroom to show their own individual, unique impact in that way as they’re trying to build. That’s where I think academic research can have a positive effect on the ability to make that argument.” (Meanwhile, for other academics, he thinks “assembling a resource that makes writing lit reviews easier and exploring what’s been done may have a force multiplier effect on people wanting to do research on local news.”)

Baker pushed for a quantitative emphasis in the database — putting actual numbers like point estimates and effect sizes in the summaries wherever possible. Take the influential 2020 journal article by Pengjie Gao, Chang Lee, and Dermot Murphy looking at the impact of newspaper closures on public finance. In the database, the article’s summary leads with the numbers: “The loss of watchdog reporters in a city leads to cities having higher borrowing costs of 5-11 basis points and costs citizens roughly $650,000 per issue.”

While many academic articles underline statistically significant findings, that isn’t necessarily the most meaningful language for audiences trying to make nuts and bolts decisions about policy; a small, statistically significant finding on a 100-point scale isn’t as compelling or concrete as a measurable effect on interest rates or mortgage rates or taxpayer costs. Especially for a policymaker audience, Baker said highlighting numerical evidence helps “make the case that the juice is worth the squeeze.” Though the database is tilted toward quantitative research, Darr said that because there’s a divide in the research community between quantitative and qualitative research, he hopes the hub can help make each more accessible to the other. (Some local news researchers are working to better coordinate and standardize research approaches for measuring the health of local information ecosystems.)

The economic impact of local news loss is a major area of focus for Rebuild Local News because they see it as a powerful incentive for policymakers. That’s where a lot of the energy is in local news research these days, according to Darr, and the database backs that up; if you click one of the hub’s sample searches, “what is the economic impact of local news?”, more than half of the 23 related studies shown are from 2025, and only one predates 2020.

Darr said he’d like to see more research on some areas that are more difficult to quantify. “The thing we still kind of need to crack is the counterfactual,” he said. “I think a lot of the good that local news does is the stuff that it prevents from happening, and it’s hard to measure that.” That remains an important local news research challenge: “What would a community’s sense of itself look like without its local newspaper? We can look at communities where the local news has failed; we can look at communities that have both, but it’s hard to figure out a research design that gets at something as amorphous as that, but important as that, and that still varies local news.”

Darr encouraged feedback and additional research submissions for the hub. “This is not meant to be comprehensive; it’s meant to be collaborative,” he said. “The more people collaborating, the better.”

“I believe the established media hasn’t confronted the hard truth that this revolution isn’t just about consumers moving to different platforms,” Turness, the former CEO of BBC News, said. “It’s that they are choosing more direct forms of journalism in a more fragmented media universe.”

Turness and BBC director-general Tim Davie resigned from their roles last November following reports that a BBC Panorama documentary about January 6 edited a speech by Donald Trump in a misleading way. (“The edit wasn’t up to editorial standards,” Turness said at Semafor’s Restoring Trust in Media summit in February, “but I don’t accept the charge that it was a sign of institutional bias.”)

In recent months, Turness said, she’s been “on a journey to piece together the new map of our media ecosystem, to gain a deeper understanding of what’s really going on beneath its surface.”

“I believe the impact of this revolution on established news providers may be greater than the advent of the digital age or the arrival of social media,” she continued, “because they were, in truth, about new platforms, new spaces where high-quality, trusted journalism could still find its place — essentially, same journalism, different location. This moment of disruption is so potent because it goes to the heart of how the relationship between news provider and news consumer is shifting.”

Turness’s speech, the 2026 Sir David Nicholas Memorial Lecture, was organized by the ITN 1955 Club in partnership with The Media Society and the Broadcasting Journalism Training Council. Here’s the main text of the speech. I left out the introduction where Turness talks about her connection to U.K. production company ITN, where she was CEO from 2021–2022. I also added some links and subheds and highlighted some key points to make it easier to read the text. You can watch the full lecture here.)

“You might have expected me to use this lecture to talk about my departure from the BBC, to focus on the unique challenges facing the new director-general — and I do want to wish Matt Brittin well next week — or to talk about how the new charter should strengthen the BBC governance to protect its independence.

As you would expect, I do have views on all of this and more, because I love the BBC and I care deeply about its future. It is a brilliant organization made up of amazing people. At BBC News, I had the privilege to lead a talented organization of over 5,000, delivering powerful journalism to half a billion people around the world in over 40 languages. I can see some of my former colleagues in the room this evening, and I remain so grateful for their dedication.

But tonight my focus is going to be broader than the BBC, because disruption being faced by our industry transcends all news brands. It impacts all journalists and all journalism everywhere.

I don’t plan on painting a relentlessly negative picture this evening. Those who know me well would not expect me to deliver a “game over” or a “we’re all going to hell in a handcart” kind of speech. I am an optimist, a cup-half-full person. I believe there are very good reasons to have faith in a bright future for what I call the established news providers, a term I prefer to “old” or “legacy” media with the implication that they belong somehow in the past or cannot succeed in the future. For decades, these organizations have delivered outstanding, brave, impartial, urgent journalism vital to our society. They are needed now more than ever.

So while I will be diagnosing the challenge tonight, I’m also determined to set out a positive way forward. I’m not coming to you tonight as someone, though, who has discovered all the answers. Quite the opposite. Working in the news media all my career, I’ve had the privilege of a front-row seat to the rapid pace of change over so many years, both witnessing and driving it in the U.S. as president of NBC News, the nation’s largest news provider; launching NBC News International as a global business and overseeing the global brand Euronews after its acquisition in the UK; as CEO of ITN, the U.K.’s largest PSB [public service broadcaster] production house, and then most recently, as CEO of BBC News, leading the U.K.’s biggest newsroom, while supporting its global revenue business. All to say, not to boast, that leading organizations, reshaping brands, launching new revenue models, is what I’ve been doing, publicly funded and commercial, local and global, and it’s perhaps given me a unique breadth of experience.

These past few months, I’ve had a chance to look from the outside in, rather than the inside out. I’ve used my time since leaving the BBC to go on a journey, to piece together the new map of our media ecosystem, to gain a deeper understanding of what’s really going on beneath its surface, where investment in the industry is going, what’s driving growth, how consumer behavior is changing.

I’ve spoken to people right across the industry, here at home and in the U.S, because as we know, the tidal wave of disruption that hits us here often begins across the Atlantic. I’ve explored how podcasts and subscription journalism are creating new revenue models.

I’ve spoken with those launching new platforms and building new startups, and to the private equity investors placing bets on their growth.

With independent journalists who left big networks to build their own entrepreneurial brands, helping establish a new journalist creator economy, and to those who are on the precipice of untethering from their media motherships, excited to join the party.

I’ve listened to the talent agents who are building out their clients’ brands, and I’ve compared notes with social scientists and the audience data experts tracking this rapidly changing media landscape.

These conversations have been fascinating and enlightening. Having the time to talk with brilliant people and explore ideas without the pressure of running a giant news corporation has been a complete joy. So when Nigel Dacre invited me to speak to you, it felt only natural to use this opportunity to share a progress report of everything I’ve learned so far. It’s why I’ve titled my lecture tonight “The Revolution Reshaping News: A Dispatch from the Front Line.”

“The wholesale shift from one information ecosystem to another”

I believe the impact of this revolution on established news providers may be greater than the advent of the digital age or the arrival of social media, because they were in truth about new platforms, new spaces where high-quality, trusted journalism could still find its place. Essentially, same journalism, different location. This moment of disruption is so potent because it goes to the heart of how the relationship between news provider and news consumer is shifting from institutions to individuals, from big media brands to personalities, from PSBs to independent journalists, all with dramatic consequences for where news consumption is collapsing, and where it’s growing at speed.

We’re all familiar with the decline in TV news audiences, with nearly 4 million fewer people getting their news from TV in the last five years, and that includes streaming. Maybe that decline would be less steep if PSBs and others had an obligation to give news on their streaming platforms more priority and to optimize it. I think that finding news on rail 9 or 11 or 13 of a streaming player is just not good enough. At the same time, we’ve seen a trebling of the number getting their news from YouTube and a 10-fold increase on TikTok.

I believe the established media hasn’t confronted the hard truth that this revolution isn’t just about consumers moving to different platforms. It’s that they are choosing more direct forms of journalism in a more fragmented media universe. We’ve seen an explosion of independent journalism and commentators hosting podcasts, creating their own YouTube channels, and publishing articles on Substack, where they can monetize their work directly, from Piers Morgan Uncensored on YouTube, to Emily Maitlis, Jon Sopel, and Lewis Goodall’s The News Agents podcast. From the hugely successful The Rest Is… brand to Jim Waterson’s fast-growing London Centric on Substack, and in the U.S., from Tina Brown’s Fresh Hell, which I highly recommend, to news brands like Puck or The Ankler.

This creator journalism is not a side show. It is fast becoming the show. Just look at the audiences the biggest independent journalists in the U.S have built on YouTube alone. Joe Rogan, more than 20 million subscribers. Tucker Carlson, 6 million. Megyn Kelly, more than 4 million. Mehdi Hasan, nearly 2 million and growing.

If we’ve been wondering for years what would eventually replace the broadcast news mass media model, I think we’re seeing the answer now. These new forms of journalism are taking the time, the loyalty, and the trust that consumers used to invest in big, mainstream news providers, and they’re moving it to new platforms.

To understand what’s driving this, I spoke to Piers Morgan, who has built a YouTube audience of more than 4 million with Uncensored and is now expanding the brand with History Uncensored and The Royals Uncensored, which launched a couple of weeks ago. He told me that particularly young people are incredibly informed about what’s happening in the world thanks to constant social media updates, but what they really want to know is what they should think about the stories in the news. He claims his viewers perceive him to be authentic and intellectually honest. It’s clear this is not just another technology-enabled stage in a story of media progress. What we’re witnessing is the wholesale shift from one information ecosystem to another, and if we’re honest, one where established news providers have, so far, struggled to authentically play at scale.

I would argue this is because this revolution is a rejection of and a reaction against the very broad reach model that the established media is built on. In many ways, it is the antithesis of everything that news media has traditionally stood for. What do I mean by this? Success in the new world is driven by a recognition that consumer trust is now earned through authenticity, through independence, and through opinion. Authentic, with the informality and unpredictability of real conversations. Independent, with the freedom for the presenter to speak their mind. Opinionated, without the need to constantly tread carefully around issues. All creating the sense of a one-to-one experience, a feeling of intimacy and a greater connection, versus the polished, controlled formality that is in the DNA of the established media. And, yes, the impartiality. This is the uncomfortable truth that has been crystallized to me through my conversations over the past few months.

That’s not to say there isn’t brilliant, bold, and fantastic creative work going on across the industry to respond to these new consumer demands. I enjoyed watching Cathy Newman’s innovative new evening program on Sky News last week, which is seeking to crack this exact challenge. CNN has showed a willingness to experiment in this space, too, and found out just how difficult it is. Lead anchor Jake Tapper abandoned his CNN studio to anchor part of his program from his personal office with the backdrop of political memorabilia and large vintage podcast-style mics, an attempt to mimic the more informal YouTube style. It had, at the very best, mixed reviews.

This new authenticity is hard, because authenticity has to be authentic, and consumers quickly see through any attempt that feels manufactured or fake. A glance at the Apple or Spotify top 10 podcasts or YouTube’s most popular channels shows us that this space is dominated by independent media, and traditional media have just not yet been able to fully crack the code and break their way in. These new forms of content are driving growth in audiences and in revenues. This is a new gold rush, with private equity investors eager to fund the next big talent and turn their brand into an empire.

The value of the global podcast market alone is projected to grow from $32 billion last year to $114 billion by 2030. $32 billion to $114 billion just by 2030. In this fragmented universe, news and information content across YouTube, podcasts, Substack, newsletters, social media, and more are far bigger in aggregate than any broadcast reach can deliver.

I’ve been talking to the founder of Substack, Hamish McKenzie, who is writing a new book called How to Save the Media. He argues that the disruption of established media has happened in three phases.

First, there were the big media institutions that were the juggernauts of the news industry; if you like, the gatekeepers of the channels through which the content flowed, and they controlled the editorial and the advertising revenues.

Then came phase two, the social media platforms, where creators have editorial freedom over their content, but Big Tech are now the gatekeepers of distribution and advertising.

But now, Hamish argues, we’re in the third phase, where Substack and podcasts are a gatekeeper-free world, where creators have ownership of their editorial, of their distribution, and a share of the revenue. A world where individual journalists are paid by individual consumers for their work and can build a viable business of their own. The U.K. is Substack’s second largest and fastest-growing market after the U.S., with over half a million people now paying subscriptions direct to writers for their work, and it has spawned a raft of competitive platforms, such as Beehiiv, now providing alternative places to grow a direct consumer base.

This new phase of one-to-one direct relationships is becoming well and truly mainstream, accelerating the downward spiral of the one-to-many broadcast model. This point was made starkly by U.S. media journalist Dylan Byers in a discussion on his Puck podcast. He said that “the long inexorable decline of linear television, particularly television news, that I have been talking about ad nauseam for years, really feels like it’s arrived now.” His guest, a former NBC colleague of mine, Noah Oppenheim, agreed, saying, “The era of broad reach is over. We now inhabit a fractured landscape, where trying to aggregate millions of viewers is not just a fool’s errand, but not worth a ton of time and effort.”

Noah has a point. Days like today tell us when there’s a huge news story, people are still gathering on broadcast platforms. But the overall trajectory is doubtless going down. And it has been for some time.

“We have lost Sarah”

The move away from mass reach and its replacement with a fragmented media landscape is what defines this revolution I’m talking about. It is a long-term, irreversible shift more profound than we have so far understood, and it’s completely reshaping our industry.

This was brought home to me recently when I spoke to Sarah, the nurse who treated me when I found myself in A&E after my hand became embroiled in a fight between a cat and a dog. Sarah asked me about my line of work, and it triggered a fascinating conversation. It turns out she’s a total news junkie, obsessed with politics here and in the U.S. Despite juggling long shifts at the hospital and a five-year-old, she never misses an episode of The Rest Is Politics or The News Agents. She listens to Pod Save America and The Rachel Maddow Show. She’s just downloaded Substack.

Not once did she mention a traditional news provider, despite growing up on a typical diet of BBC and ITV content. I asked her why, and her answer was very simple: I trust them. I feel like I know them. I feel like they’re not led into one way of thinking. They have edge.

Sarah is exactly the kind of person all news organizations want to reach — engaged, curious, committed, but making very different media choices, trusting in a new and very different way. We have lost Sarah.

And the reason why this matters transcends the impact on any one organization. It matters because this new media diet is, in the main, driven by commentary and conversation. And because the established media has not yet broken into this new world at scale, it isn’t yet the home of frontline reporting by courageous journalists from dark and dangerous places across the globe, or, with notable exceptions, the home of risky undercover investigations that expose wrongdoing and uncover lies.

I was listening to media podcast The Grill Room last week, where they were asking, “Are creators the new Cronkites?” I believe the answer is very clearly “not yet,” but if the established media want to continue to be the ones to carry forward that legacy, then they must find a way to succeed at scale in this new world. Otherwise, how will consumers access vital journalism in the future? And just as importantly, how will it be funded? Because the advertising revenues are following the consumers onto these new platforms, and it’s those revenues that fund expensive journalism, reporting live from downtown Tehran or the front lines of Ukraine, standing up as the powerful, exposing corruption and taking on vested interests.

It’s not only our duty to follow the consumer, but our necessity to follow the money, because journalism costs, and even if you’re funded by a license fee, the journalism is funded by people being willing to pay it, essentially a subscription model. In a world of dictators and autocrats, state-run propaganda, disinformation, and AI slop, the need for this eyewitness journalism funded and delivered by the established news media is more critical now than ever. Reporters Without Borders revealed last month that for the first time in the 25-year history of the World Press Freedom Index, over half of the world’s population lacks access to free, fair, and fact-based journalism.

So the challenge is clear: Will we wake up to the existential nature of this great shift in our industry? Will we respond with the speed, urgency, and purpose required? Or will we be like the proverbial frog in boiling water, who knew it was getting warm, but failed to jump in time?

As Rosa Luxemburg famously said, “Before a revolution happens, it is perceived as impossible; after it happens, it’s seen as having been inevitable.” And this revolution has been coming for a long time, but it’s not too late. I did promise I was going to be an optimist, and I believe there is still time to join it. I believe the established news media has everything it needs to succeed, the assets required to win in this new world.

First, the talented, experienced journalists who have spent a lifetime carving out a reputation and the consumers who crave connection with them; brands that have meaning for audiences; and a legacy of trust. The irony is lost on no one that many of the biggest names leading this revolution built their profiles inside established media players.

However, my optimism here is conditional on whether the established media is willing to deploy those assets to win and not be left behind. So tonight, I want to share some conclusions that I’ve reached having listened to those on the front lines of this revolution.

“On every metric…the long-term trend was down”

As I see it, there are three clear priorities. Restore trust; understand what drove the decline and how it can be reversed. Reconnect, through authenticity; come to terms with what it will really take to give consumers the authentic, independent voices they crave. Reinvent the newsroom; create an engine that delivers across this fragmented landscape.

Let me take each of these in turn. First, restoring trust. I believe that to understand why audiences are moving from institutions to individuals, we have to understand the long-term decline in trust in those institutions, a shift accelerated by global events, societal change, and new technologies.

Social scientist Alfie Spencer argues that the rupture in trust goes back to the 2008 financial crash, when banks were bailed out but so many ordinary people lost their hard-earned homes and livelihoods and suffered for years. The system failed them, and they felt they’d been lied to. This sense of injustice and powerlessness, of feeling betrayed, impacted in trusting governments, banks, and, yes, the media, too.

Over the following decade, this dissatisfaction with the traditional political and social order translated into the rise of populist movements. It was fueled by the growing sense that the system no longer works for them, that the routes to get ahead are closed off, that their children are no longer guaranteed a better quality of life than the previous generation, that others are being put ahead of them — exacerbating an us and them mood in society. We saw some of the consequences of that in the rejection of established political parties at last week’s U.K. elections. They continue to play out in the political drama we’re all witnessing today and tonight.

Meanwhile, social media platforms connected like-minded people and became the home of the growing disinformation industry. Troll armies and clickbait factories flooded the social media landscape with viral lies that fed on the outrage. Add to this highly polarizing events: Brexit, the 2016 U.S. presidential election, and then the 2020 Covid pandemic, all whipping up a perfect storm where dissatisfaction and disinformation could thrive together.

As a result, we saw a loss of trust in experts. The idea of agreed facts started to be undone. The concept of truth became replaced by your truth and my truth, all weakening critical parts of our social scaffolding. Trust in news was a casualty, falling, according to [the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism], from 51% in 2015 to just 35% last year, a 16-point decline.

This downward trajectory was the reality when I walked in to BBC News late in 2022. The BBC was then and remains today the world’s most trusted news provider, but on every metric, in common with many other institutions and news organizations, the long-term trend was down. In brand terms, trust is the BBC’s USP, its unique selling point, in the U.K. and around the world. As a CEO, I was therefore clear that my number-one priority must be to build a plan to reduce that decline in trust.

And we did. Working with some brilliant colleagues, some of whom are in this room tonight, the changes we made helped to turn the tide of decline. Through radical interventions, we saw trust begin to grow again, even during the last U.K. and U.S. election cycles, when it usually takes a massive hit, with public views of the trustworthiness of BBC News increasing from 57% to 62% in the year 24-25.

So what did we do? We started, as I’ve again been doing now, by listening to audiences, to ask consumers across the U.K. and around the globe one question: What would it take to grow your trust in BBC News? The answer came back in many languages, but a consistent message: Five requirements, which became a mission statement for BBC News.

They told us to “Earn our trust.” We need clarity in the chaos, giving them the facts that they need to make decisions about their own lives. We need courage, reporting from difficult and dangerous places and to uncover wrongdoing. Fairness and respect. Fairness is in reflecting the true breadth of the broadening political spectrum. Respect, recognizing that license fee payers are stakeholders and should be given a voice and a say in the BBC’s journalism.

And finally, transparency. Show us your workings, pull back the curtain on your journalism and how you check the facts so that we know why we can trust you. And that’s how BBC Verify was born. It was a new, industry-leading forensic journalism and fact-checking service, which quickly became the leading global verification brand, with Ofcom research finding it had fast become the most-used fact-checking tool in the U.K. And crucially, because we tracked this closely, it proved to be the most effective of all our initiatives in growing trust with the audience. A year after its launch, surveys showed that those who had consumed Verify content said they were more likely to trust the BBC as a result.

It’s all about earning trust, and “Trust is earned” was the title of the BBC News mission statement and became the organization’s tagline. The humility in reprising that statement was intentional and relevant to this conversation about this revolution. It was saying, please don’t think that we are a big institution that’s here to tell you what you need. We work for you, and we are listening, and we are striving to earn your trust. It was a cultural shift, and in my view, an overdue repositioning of the brand and the relationship between those who pay and those who serve. They asked for clarity, for courage, for fairness, respect, and transparency. But today, four years on, once again, listening to consumers, there is a new priority that I would argue we urgently need to add: Authenticity.

“News providers are going to have to be more prepared to liberate their talent”

And this is my second priority, to urgently reconnect through authenticity. The dictionary tells us that authenticity is the quality of being genuine, real, or true to oneself, rather than a copy or an imitation, and it is this sense of being themselves that is drawing consumers towards independent journalists and personalities and away from established media brands. And yet a news organization’s human capital has always been its greatest asset and helped to define its brand. The audiences, presenters, and correspondents are the DNA of the organization, but now, that human capital, in the new world, must be deployed in a very different way.

News providers will need to accept that in future, the connection with their consumers must flow through a more direct relationship with their talent and one that feels less controlled, less formal, less corporate, human to human. What might this mean in practice? Well, it might mean going to a news organization’s website and instead of finding content organized only around topics, being able to follow individual correspondence and specialists.

Let me explain further. Imagine, as a Channel 4 News consumer, if you could follow your most trusted journalists, just as you’d expect to do on a social platform. You might choose to follow Lindsey Hilsum or Matt Frei, Victoria Macdonald or Alex Thomson. And let’s take the excellent Victoria Macdonald, Channel 4’s health and social care editor, as an example. In this world, you would access a live feed of her health articles and analysis, receive an authored daily newsletter, personalized news alerts on health stories as they break throughout the day with links to Victoria’s take on those stories; a take, her expert analysis on what she thinks of them. You’d interact with her in online Q&As and be invited to in-person events. You would be able to build a connected relationship between you, the consumer, and Victoria, the correspondent. Imagine this today, as consumers seek credible information in the hantavirus outbreak with disinformation raging online. This deeper human connection with Victoria would pay dividends in the form of trust.

For too long, we, the established media, have limited the potential of our talent to build these kinds of direct relationships and undervalued the potential for what I would call the “connected correspondent” to express their professional perspectives in a way that really relates.

But we all have to accept those connections will not only be made on our own platforms. Journalists will want to build those relationships in spaces where people are increasingly getting their news, on YouTube, on Spotify, on Substack, and TikTok.

News organizations may worry all this is a challenge to the primacy of their own brand, and believe me, I get it. But my recent conversations have only strengthened my view that news providers are going to have to be more prepared to liberate their talent; to strike a new deal, if you like, with a compelling offer that outweighs the value of going it alone in the new talent economy.

This new deal could see news organizations providing capabilities, technology and support to enable their talent to be present in their own rights on the platforms and in the formats where growth now lies, while the talent agree to sign up to a set of values and principles, to impartiality, to the lines cannot be crossed, because I believe that it is possible to strike a different balance that retains the principle of impartiality but doesn’t let it get in the way of an authentic human conversation or written article.

I could see news organizations promote online routes to other platforms where consumers can discover more from the talent they trust. It might mean forging new business partnerships with their talent, with shared incentives and revenues. There isn’t a one-size-fits all template fit for this new deal, but without a willingness to embrace this kind of thinking, the draw will be too great and the opportunity too attractive, and the best will simply leave.

Now, if some of this sounds far-fetched, this is a reality right now in the U.S. news market. I recently spoke to Olivia Metzger, one of the most successful news talent managers in New York, who I worked closely with when I ran NBC News. Olivia told me that she used to spend — and we’re talking two or three years ago — most of her time negotiating exclusive multi-year deals for her clients to lock them in with big networks. Now, she spends the majority of her time trying to extract her clients from those same deals, offering maybe 20% of their time to the networks, while she helps them to monetize their IP and grow their brand with the rest of their time.

I’ve been speaking to some of those who’ve made the leap away from the established media. I’ve mentioned Piers Morgan. He told me, “Many more mainstream journalists could, and I know actively want to, do the same, if only their timid bosses let them off the leash and were more adventurous in the way they utilize their talent. If they don’t, then the inexorable migration” — there’s that word, again, inexorable — “of younger viewers and listeners away from mainstream media to YouTube channels like mine will continue at speed.”

I’ve also spoken to former CNN presenter Don Lemon, who has used that freedom to develop a groundbreaking new form of journalism on YouTube, pursuing a story as it develops, sometimes live-streaming for hours at a time, most famously leading to his arrest while covering an ICE protest at a Minnesota church back in January.

It’s enabled him to build his brand, what he calls the Lemon Nation, and a community of followers, his Lemonheads, who read his daily Lemon Drop newsletter. He claims he can now offer news “without corporate overlords” to his new direct consumers.

Closer to home, I caught up with Amol Rajan, who has walked away, or is about to, from Radio 4’s Today program to embrace this new world as an independent creator and entrepreneur, while remaining the host of University Challenge. He was buzzing with startup energy and ambition for how he can deploy his unique brand of accessible, intelligent journalism in this new world. We’ll all discover in the autumn whether Amol really is a traitor or a faithful when he heads to the castle with Claudia and the other celebrities.

Piers, Don, Amol. They’ve all reached the conclusion that to pursue growth in a world where authenticity is prized and rewarded, they must step away from established media players. And no doubt others will follow. So the challenge is, are we willing to make the new deal with our talent that is more appealing than to go it alone?

“Surviving this revolution that’s reshaping news will require nothing short of the reinvention of the newsroom”

And this takes me to my third priority, which is that surviving this revolution that’s reshaping news will require nothing short of the reinvention of the newsroom. Now, I know how hard news organizations are reforming and reinvesting. Believe me, I do. I know how tough it is to drive transformation and change in a 24/7 business during a relentless news agenda. In my time leading BBC News, I was fortunate to work with some outstanding leaders who understood the consumer challenge and delivered the change. Together we launched a live streaming operation. We reinvented digital products, integrated vertical video and live social media–style news formats. In fact, our live page covering the murder of Charlie Kirk saw over 63 million pageviews globally, with so many younger consumers. We invested in InDepth, a talent-led longread form of journalism on the BBC platform, and newsletters. We launched podcasts and visualized them; discovered new audiences on YouTube; and we aggressively grew a TikTok following with a 62% year on year growth to now reach 2 billion monthly views. We reached new audiences in new ways with new formats. We felt we were creating a truly digital-first offer.

But the brutal truth is, even with all this innovation, most large news organizations remain structured around the needs of broadcast, with key decisions being made with a broadcast-first approach, and the machine geared to the broadcast output. Yet I would argue that if the established media are to thrive in this revolution, then they need to start from where the consumer is, allocating people and resources on that basis, starting again to build a truly digital and social production studio that enables them to produce and distribute content in the formats and on the platforms that consumers want, a greenfield, or a startup approach, if you like. This studio must be capable of delivering a flywheel of content, from visualized podcasts to short clips, from newsletters to live streams, analysis articles to long reads, longform documentaries to live events, all supporting the talent-centered model that I described earlier. The output from this digital studio would become the building blocks of the broadcast offer, turning today’s newsroom model upside down. This flywheel newsroom, as I call it, is what a genuinely digital-first model looks like. It provides the broadcast, but it’s designed for the future.

For the avoidance of doubt, I am not saying we should be killing off the concept of the evening news bulletin. I’m saying we should make it differently. It’s no coincidence that, arguably, the world’s most successful news media story of recent times is rooted in a moment of total reinvention. Yes, I’m talking about The New York Times, which under the leadership of Mark Thompson decided to radically reinvent itself back in 2013. I was around the corner at NBC News and watched it all happening. Relentlessly investing in products, data and technology; launching the trailblazing The Daily podcast and a suite of newsletters; acquiring The Athletic to bolster sports coverage and Wordle as the core of a new daily challenges offer. By taking a ruthlessly digital-first approach, they transformed the Gray Lady, the epitome of old-school print media with a declining distribution model, into a data-driven media powerhouse, now with over 13 million overall subscribers, driven by a 16% year-on-year increase in subs. The reinvention of The New York Times is evidence that even in the most established of news media, it is never too late and you’re never too old to change.

So, I’m almost ready to file my dispatch from the front lines of this new revolution, having shared what I’ve learnt, from consumers to creators, from investors to innovators. I’ve said nearly everything I want to say tonight, but before I sign off, let me leave you with one further, perhaps provocative. thought: The lure of opinion and the amount of energy now generated by opinion-led journalism in all these spaces.

“The extent to which freedom of speech should become a companion to impartiality”

Debate and opinion have always been a critical part of the established news media’s broadcast offer, from LBC to Five Live, from Question Time to election debates and local radio phone-ins. Yet replicating this in the digital world has somehow proved so much harder. Instead, opinion today is the preserve of online spaces that have increasingly become echo chambers that keep people in their own tribes, reinforcing polarization, driven by algorithms that give you more of what you already think and what you already like, designed to incentivize division rather than promote understanding.

I believe established media operations have an opportunity to become the new town square, creating digital spaces where people are exposed to ideas different to their own, spaces that are thought-provoking and even provocative, that offer a kaleidoscope of thinking mirroring the diversity of opinion across the country.

I’m not arguing that correspondents working for organizations with a duty of impartiality should be giving their own opinions, or a free-for-all, with anyone able to self-publish on trusted news platforms and comment. What I’m asking is the extent to which freedom of speech should become a companion to impartiality. Hosting the debate and keeping people talking will be doing a great service to the public. Why wouldn’t an organization have a walled off op-ed section online, clearly signposted and thoughtfully curated, commissioning its own range of voices and linking to articles out from other news providers? Why wouldn’t they curate a range of podcasts from different perspectives, ensuring diversity of thought across the portfolio as a whole?

For PSBs, this will no doubt throw up some challenges. But from my initial conversations with regulators, there are no deal-breaking blockers. I think it’s time to trust that audiences are well-versed in navigating the difference between news and opinion, particularly if it’s clearly signposted.
And I’ve just found myself wondering if we’ve now reached the tipping point where the risks of getting into this space are outweighed by the consequences of not doing so.

I think that might be enough provocation for one evening. So I’ll come to a close tonight. I wanted to run towards some inconvenient truths and to be clear about the scale of challenge, but I hope that I’ve also been clear that established news providers possess all the assets and the equity required to respond and to prevail. I believe we are in a new golden age of journalism. The explosion of new platforms has opened up new routes for journalists to reach consumers with more original, thoughtful, intelligent writing and storytelling than ever before. In a world of AI slop and exploitative algorithms, consumers are seeking out this journalism and choosing human to human connections.

As Ted Turner, the legendary media disruptor who we lost last week, would famously remind the CNN newsroom, the news is the star. I believe news is the star and must remain the star in this new world, and that’s up to us. So this dispatch is rooted in optimism and confidence in the future of established news providers, provided that they are willing to do what it takes to restore trust by understanding what drove the decline and how it can be reversed, to reconnect through authenticity, by coming to terms with what it will take to give consumers the authentic, independent voices they crave. Reinvent the newsroom by creating the flywheel news engine for growth across this fragmented landscape, and to consider how to become the town square, creating the meeting place for ideas that can be the antidote to the echo chamber.

If the established media can do all this, then I am confident it will not just survive, but it will thrive as an essential part of this revolution that’s reshaping news. Thank you very much.”

In February, three Southern college media outlets — The Duke Chronicle (Duke University), The Daily Tar Heel (University of North Carolina — Chapel Hill), and the Red and Black (University of Georgia) — had major traffic gains as nonprofit news organizations.

The Red and Black’s February traffic increased by 36% over January, and then by 40% from February to March. It had about 210,000 visits in January and ended March with over 401,000.

Editor-in-chief Katie Guenthner said the growth is a combination of factors, including four February stories that made national news, along with newsroom workflow changes like publishing stories at 5:00 a.m. instead of 8:00 a.m., linking every Instagram Reel to a story on the website, and streamlining cross-team communication so published stories are pushed out on social media faster.

The Duke Chronicle’s visits were up 34% in February, from about 245,000 in January to 365,000. Editor-in-chief Dylan Halper told me via email that it’s likely due to three stories about a university professor’s longstanding relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. The Daily Tar Heel also saw a 29% increase in February, up from 245,200 visits in January to 317,700.

The overall top gainers by percentage were Buffalo-based Investigative Post (February) and education inequality outlet The Hechinger Report (March).

Investigative Post saw its traffic increase by 241%, from 46,000 in January to 159,000 in February. Much of that came from Investigative Post breaking a national story about the death of a blind Rohingya refugee who was detained by Border Patrol on February 25. Executive director and editor Jim Heaney said that story and its related follow-ups garnered more than 240,000 pageviews.

In March, The Hechinger Report’s traffic increased by 171%, up from 197,000 visits in February to 541,000. Director of audience development Nichole Dobo said multiple factors contributed to the skyrocket. About 45% of March traffic came through Google Discover, which Dobo attributed to an algorithm update to the product.

Dobo also said five stories in March each got more than 40,000 pageviews through Google Discover. Those stories were about conservative attacks on math curriculums, New York State’s reading programs, an opinion piece from an Arkansas teacher, another op-ed about working class students, and a trend story about universities trimming bachelor degree programs down to three years. Those five stories together brought in more than 766,000 pageviews, Dobo said.

“Our mission is to report on inequality in education, and we have made a big effort to show expertise on topics that serve our mission as a nonprofit newsroom,” Dobo said. “It is why we do so well on [Google] Discover on topics like math instruction and higher education. We’ve done consistent, quality coverage on those topics. It is for our human audience, but this kind of consistency also sends the right signals to the algorithm.”

Dobo said the Hechinger Report also revamped its impact tracking strategies late last year. One change: adding short survey questions to every story. On the math curriculum story, for example, 41% of readers who read the story and answered the survey question said they looked for more information about the issue after reading, which “strongly signals readers are hungry for more stories on the topic of math instruction,” Dobo said.

“Overall, across all stories in March we logged about a third of readers saying a story changed how they think about an education issue and 21% talked to others about it,” Dobo said. “These are great things to know so that we can better understand how our journalism is being used out in the world.”

Other gains

Injustice Watch: Injustice Watch is an investigative nonprofit focused on reporting on the Cook County court system in Illinois. Its traffic shot up through the first quarter of the year, from 36,000 visits in January to 56,000 in February to 124,000 in March. That growth is a result of Injustice Watch’s local election coverage, particularly its judicial election guide published on February 12 ahead of Illinois primary elections on March 17.

“This year, for the second time, we also had live election night results for the judicial races — which were not available anywhere else, since the AP doesn’t publish results for these down-ballot races,” managing editor Jonah Newman said.

The guide garnered 120,000 visits online and is always a popular feature that’s frequented during election season, he said. Injustice Watch also passed out 170,000 print copies across the county.

Capital B: Capital B — a digital nonprofit that covers Black communities in the United States — saw its traffic increase by 77%, from about 149,000 visits to 264,000.

Director of audience and innovation Mark S. Luckie said that traffic has been up across Capital B and its local verticals covering Atlanta, Georgia and Gary, Indiana. Traffic comes from a mix of sources, including social, Newsbreak, and Google.

“Google Search has been an increasing source of traffic for Capital B due to both distinct coverage of news and centering how it impacts Black communities and stories that have been undercovered and thus receive high search placement,” Luckie said in an email.

While he did not attribute the growth to any one story, he said two pieces — one about data centers and another about rural land seizure — were highly shared on X and Bluesky.

El Hilo: Radio Ambulante’s explanatory podcast, El Hilo (“the thread”), deep dives into one major story each week in Latin America or U.S. Latino communities. Its website traffic grew by 115% between January and February, from 53,000 visits to 116,000.

El Hilo’s website is its third-largest source of downloads, behind the major listening platforms, editorial director and host Eliezer Budasoff said. The team doesn’t typically focus on month-to-month traffic because listeners find episodes long after their release. But Budasoff said three February episodes — about Trump and Venezuela, Latinos in Hollywood, and organized crime in Mexico — likely performed well due to changes in the show’s format implemented at the beginning of the year.

“The main change is an adjustment in the focus of the episodes, which are now more analytical, reflective, and explanatory,” Budasoff said. “We’ve deepened the dimension of analysis and meaning-making based on current events, something that El Hilo has always had, but which has now become the central axis when planning production. We always provide context to understand the news behind the headlines; that’s one of the pillars of the show, but we reduced the narrative load to focus more on what what’s happening means.”

Adirondack Explorer: The Adirondack Explorer‘s visits grew by 86% in March, from 173,600 visits in February to 324,200. Editor-in-chief Melissa Hart that was mainly due to two stories: one story about an old growth forest that was picked up by Google Discover and a column about a trip to Yellowstone National Park that surfaced often in search.

“We hadn’t made any new changes to our content mix per se, but that particular story was part of ongoing coverage around mapping old growth forest and old trees’ important contribution to carbon sequestration,” Hart said. “While we don’t have immediate follow-ups planned, it’s definitely a topic we’ll continue to write about.”

Yale Climate Connections: Yale Climate Connections, a digital publication based at Yale University, saw a 54% increase in visits from February to March. Editor-in-chief Sara Peach said that was an unusual development; the publication usually sees its highest traffic during September and October — hurricane season.

Extreme weather, however, pulls in audiences all year around. Two of March’s top stories were about the ski industry’s response to climate change and record heat waves around the United States in February and March. Yale Climate Connections also attracts audiences with its Spanish-language coverage and international focus. In March, stories about a Mexican ranch and Indian musical instrument artisans were also top performers.

“Our main audience strategy is to encourage readers to sign up for newsletters in English and Spanish,” Peach said. We’re focusing on the newsletters because we view owning our audience list as more sustainable than relying on search traffic or algorithm-driven platforms.”

National Catholic Reporter: The National Catholic Reporter‘s traffic grew by 362,000 visits from February in March. Managing editor Stephanie Yeagle didn’t attribute the growth to any group of stories, but rather to an overall increase in organic search traffic, “showing that our team is writing on topics that interest people and winning at SEO.” Several stories have also been picked up by mainstream news outlets like The New York Times, CNN, and NPR. NCR also added weekend editor coverage, allowing NCR to report and respond to breaking news faster.

Executive editor Michael O’Loughlin, who joined the publication in January, said NCR has also been working on implementing his editorial vision of focusing on three areas of coverage: “hard news and analysis; stories that offer readers hope; and light-hearted pieces that explore the fun and quirky sides to faith.”

The flagship Minnesota Star Tribune saw almost 18 million visits in January, which is about 10 million more than December and a 138% increase, according to data Nieman Lab drew from Similarweb. That’s “about double” the Star Tribune’s usual traffic in January, vice president for communications and brand marketing Chris Iles told me. “The only time we’ve seen more traffic was in 2020 when we lifted paywalls during the pandemic and murder of George Floyd,” he said.

The Star Tribune didn’t lift its paywall entirely this time, but it did launch an unpaywalled live blog “as a form of public service journalism,” and allowed subscribers unlimited gift articles. The live blog was the newspaper’s top traffic driver in January, Iles said, and that month’s total gifted articles was double the 2025 monthly average. Its second most-read story identified the first of two American citizens killed by federal agents, and its third most-read story reported that the ICE agent who shot Renee Good had been dragged by a car in an earlier incident.

While the live blog was free to access, it may also have played a role in converting new subscribers; “we found that the live blog was a top touchpoint among subscribers that joined in January,” Iles said. The Star Tribune “nearly doubled” its subscription rate in January compared to the 2025 monthly average; 78% of those were annual subscriptions.

The Star Tribune and its in-house agency Foundry North went on to launch a brand campaign, “Because the world is watching.” The campaign positioned the Star Tribune “not just as a news source for Minnesotans, but as a critical window for the world to understand potential national and global implications” of Operation Metro Surge. The world really was watching; in January, traffic from outside Minnesota accounted for 61% of total sessions, Iles said, 177% higher than the 2025 monthly average. (Meanwhile, the Star Tribune’s Local News Fund received donations from 44 of 50 U.S. states.) At the same time, in-state traffic was 37% higher than the 2025 monthly average. The Star Tribune’s biggest sources of non-direct traffic in January were Google Search and Google Discover.

It’s worth noting audience bumps weren’t limited to Minneapolis’ local paper of record. TwinCities.com, the digital presence of the Alden-owned Pioneer Press, saw about 638,000 more visits in January compared to December, about a 39% jump and one of the biggest upticks in visits month-over-month of any local newspaper.

First, there’s The Cornell Daily Sun, the eponymous university’s independent student newspaper (while the Sun is still a for-profit newspaper, many other student publications are nonprofits these days; Hanaa’ took a look at standout examples of recent audience growth among nonprofit student media). In February, the Sun saw almost 117,000 more visits than in January, about a 44% uptick. Editor-in-chief Sophia Dasser attributed that jump to a deliberate foray into covering campus stories with a national angle.

“The February jump was driven pretty cleanly by two stories, both tied to Cornell’s appearance in national political coverage,” Dasser said. Those articles: “Hegseth Moves to Ban Tuition Aid for Military Members Seeking Graduate Education at Cornell, Top Universities” (58,800 visits) and “Epstein Corresponded With Cornell Undergraduate, Son of Powerful Law Firm Chairman” (46,100 visits). Those stories remain the Sun’s top two performers year-to-date. Google was an important referrer for the Sun, and Dasser noted that the newspaper’s reporting surfaced prominently in “Epstein Cornell” searches.

February happens to be editorial board election season for the Sun, Dasser said, and several incoming editors, including her, “were eager to broaden the paper’s coverage in a more national direction and so this kind of coverage was the product of that.” (She also pointed out that half of January falls during Cornell’s winter break, when the Sun has a lighter publishing cadence, so a portion of the month-over-month delta is likely “structural.”)

MyRGV.com, the online presence covering the Rio Grande Valley for AIM Media Texas newspapers The Monitor, Valley Morning Star, and The Brownsville Herald, saw more dramatic traffic spikes in February; its site received about 328,000 more visits in February than in January, a 283% increase, and its traffic grew another 32% in March. But digital content manager Emily D’Gyves told me the uptick has been a bit of a mystery to the team.

One story that wildly overperformed was “Public housing authorities requiring tenants prove legal residency” — D’Gyves said that story garnered about 95,000 users, when its stories typically see somewhere between 1,000 and 15,000 users, and other popular stories from the month had less than 25,000 users. In March, the same thing happened with two other stories: “DMV quietly passes legal status rule for vehicle registration, renewal” (almost 269,000 users) and “At 102, Clarence Hicks of Pharr reflects on being among the 45K remaining WWII survivors” (about 129,000 users). On the DMV story, its analytics platform Microsoft Clarity registered major upticks in traffic from states including California, Arizona, and New York. “We thought maybe the topic of immigration created an uptick in the analytics, but we’ve been covering that beat heavily before those stories blew up,” D’Gyves said. “Honestly, we weren’t really doing anything different.” The traffic influx lasted for about three weeks, and was “genuinely something we hadn’t seen before!”

D’Gyves has also noticed “strange, excessive drops” in traffic some months, and has heard similar reports from other digital media peers in Texas. Her best guess is these could be AI-related shifts, as the news org is starting to see users coming from ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot.

When I asked Nick Falsone, editor of Pennsylvania’s lehighvalleylive.com, about its traffic uptick in March, he also pointed to AI playing a role — but on the production side.

In March, Lehigh Valley Live had about 514,000 more visits compared to February, about a 53% increase. “March was a good month for us, buoyed by a couple of strategic changes we’ve made,” Falsone said. First, the team has started coordinating more closely with its PennLive colleagues on coverage with statewide relevance. Second, though, they’ve been using Advance Local’s in-house AI tools, which Falsone said “have enhanced our journalists’ ability to provide more comprehensive local coverage, including community news, traffic and weather updates, concert announcements, business openings and more.” Specifically, they “streamline the process of gathering data for stories,” which he said has increased the outlet’s local coverage while “freeing up our reporters to spend more time in the community.” Reporters and editors are still ultimately responsible for everything Lehigh Valley Live publishes, he added.

(It’s also worth noting Lehigh Valley Live is an Advance Local publication, and Josh has written a bunch about why Advance Local outlets tend to punch above their weight when it comes to digital audience. Unfortunately, it appears the digital-savvy chain is not just serving that audience journalism — this week, Popular Information reported that Advance Local has published mountains of gambling slop since 2022.)

When we write about local news here at Nieman Lab, we spend a lot of time on local papers, nonprofit news sites, and public radio stations — the sort of sites that usually aspire to produce quality watchdog journalism. That’s in part because investment capital in digital news media has tended to go to sites more national in scope (Politico, Axios, Vox) or topic-focused (The Verge, The Information, Morning Brew). But there are plenty of for-profit digital-first operations in cities and towns around the country, and some have achieved remarkable success with readers.

So we’re debuting a new regular set of traffic rankings for you — the top local for-profit digital-native news sites. This joins our similar rankings for local newspapers, nonprofit news sites, and public media outlets. Over the years, we’ve told you about plenty of local for-profit successes, from Ohio’s Richland Source and Idaho’s BoiseDev to North Carolina’s The Assembly and California’s Lookout Santa Cruz — founded by longtime Nieman Lab columnist Ken Doctor. Now, you’ll be able to see which sites are happy to open up Google Analytics each month.

First, a few words on who’s eligible for this list. There is no single database that lists all U.S. local for-profit news sites — just as there is no single list of local nonprofit news sites. So as we do with our nonprofit rankings, we rely on an external trade association to define our universe of sites. To be eligible for these rankings, a news site must be a for-profit member of LION Publishers — LION as in local, independent, online news. According to its latest lists, LION has 223 for-profit members and 218 nonprofit members.

That certainly means that there are some local for-profit digital natives that we’re missing — but we need to have a defined universe of sites to compare, and LION’s membership criteria fit the sorts of sites we’re interested in. (If your site really wants to be included, LION dues range from $140 to $550 a year, depending on your site’s annual revenue.) Also, we’re using LION’s own judgments on whether a site qualifies as for-profit or nonprofit. There are a surprising number of outlets that mix spiritual elements of the two — L3Cs, B corps, for-profits with an attached nonprofit, future nonprofits still in the process for 501(c)3 status — so we’re relying on LION’s delineations.

Here are a few of the remarkable for-profit local sites you’ll find in these rankings, followed by numbers for the first quarter of 2026.

TAPinto

TAPinto is to our for-profit traffic rankings what The Conversation is to our nonprofit rankings — the site whose success and structure virtually guarantee it the No. 1 spot in the rankings each month. Just as The Conversation is actually a global network of sites combined under a single domain name, TAPinto is a network of more than 100 local neighborhoods-and-suburbs news sites in New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, and Florida. Because they all publish at the same tapinto.net domain, their traffic gets combined here — even though individual sites are franchised out to local editors/publishers. Those franchisees pay a $5,000 fee upfront, plus about $8,000 a year and 10% of site revenue.

Muddy River News

Muddy River News is a local traffic monster in Quincy, Illinois, a town of just 39,000 residents along the Mississippi River. Founded in 2021 by Bob Gough, the former news director of local TV station WGEM, it’s an example of a digital outlet that has become much more popular than the market’s incumbent. In Similarweb’s most recent traffic estimates, Muddy River News drew 6.5× the monthly visitors of the Quincy Herald-Whig, the local newspaper that traces its history back to 1835. For context, its 858,624 visits in March were higher than the totals for the daily newspapers in larger cities like Memphis, Wichita, New Haven, Chattanooga, Richmond, and Boise. Its staff is up to seven full-time employees and a handful of part-timers.

Oil City News

Oil City News is a major traffic driver in Casper, Wyoming and one of the state’s largest websites, claiming 2 million pageviews per month. Publisher Shawn Houck was previously the CEO of Adbay, a local marketing and advertising agency, and he now runs sibling hyperlocal news sites in other parts of the state. Last year, Oil City News expanded into print, launching the 12-page Oil City Weekly. In March’s Similarweb numbers, Oil City News’ visits were more than 9× those of the local daily, the Casper Star-Tribune — still the state’s largest newspaper.

Lost Coast Outpost

Lost Coast Outpost describes itself as “Humboldt County’s home page. That’s Humboldt County, California.” In case you were to think LoCO was a stodgy old daily, the fact that its about page lists the site’s “official sonnet” should dissuade you. (“O mighty lighthouse rise to banish dark! / Illume, you scribes, benighted towns, cesspools / Of envy, lust, despair.”) The Outpost is owned by Lost Coast Communications, a local media company that also owns four radio stations, and it commits itself to a certain NoCal vibe:

Sometimes there is some sort of countywide emergency underway, and we drop everything to find out what is going on and get that to the public. That’s what you’d call “breaking news.” Other times we spend days or weeks to find out something interesting and perhaps alarming about a local branch of government, say, or a local company’s business practices. That’s what you’d call “investigative reporting” or “enterprise reporting.” Then other times we take a funny video of a dog leaning on a car horn in Old Town. If there’s a name for what kind of reporting that is, we don’t know it. But it doesn’t matter. It’s a thing about Humboldt County, and for Humboldt County. People like it.

Lost Coast Outpost’s monthly traffic, according to Similarweb, is around 10× that of the local daily newspaper, the Alden Global Capital-owned Eureka Times-Standard.

“What’s interesting to me is less the volume than what the audience came looking for,” Michael Olson, deputy digital managing editor at MPR, told me in an email. “They weren’t chasing breaking alerts.” He continued:

They were looking for context and wondering what is true and trustworthy in a highly charged environment flooded with disinformation. Stories that explained or contextualized stood out and earned the time of our audience. We also saw high social shares from our followers, who appeared motivated to help their friends and family understand what was happening in Minnesota. They wanted the people they care about to get the information from a credible source that provides full access freely available without a paywall.

The top-performing single story from that period was about a police chief in the small town of St. Peter getting federal agents to release a resident they’d taken into custody, Olson told me.

Donations also picked up tremendously during this period: according to Jeff Moores, MPR’s director of membership, the station pulled in 25,000 new members and counting in fiscal year 2026, up from 14,000 in FY25 and 8,000 in FY24. That’s the most new members MPR has ever gained in a single year, driven by both the station’s coverage of ICE and by cuts to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting; 4,000 new members signed up in December and January alone.

“People want a local source they can trust to make sense of what’s happening. When a national story lands in Minnesota, that’s an important moment that we have to deliver on,” Olson wrote. “[MPR] journalists were already on the beat and the audience knew where to find them.”

In March, Nebraska Public Media and KUT in Austin, Texas, saw some of the biggest jumps in website visits. In Nebraska, the increase mainly came from people who were looking for information about the biggest wildfires in the state’s history. According to Maggie Berndt, director of communications and engagement at the station, the March 14 special edition of the Nebraska Update podcast was the show’s top-performing episode since it launched in November of last year. The podcast, and a Facebook post promoting those special reports, seem to have been the main drivers of the 211,000 or so more visits to the Nebraska Public Media website compared to February, a jump of more than 80%.

At KUT, which saw about 110% more traffic in March than in February, visits were largely driven by coverage of a mass shooting at a bar and busy street in Austin, as well as coverage of the state’s smokable hemp ban.

“Every smokable hemp ban story — by our transportation reporter, Nathan Bernier — has gotten a lot of attention,” wrote Andy Jechow, KUT’s director of digital audience strategy, in an email. “Nathan says he had noticed the general news coverage on this topic was missing some nuance, specifically when it came to covering the science of cannabis. As a result, his stories are rich in detail.”

Bernier has also been experimenting with longform videos on YouTube, which Jechow says have garnered high interest. Additionally, Jechow told me that KUT has been stressing the importance of SEO to its editors and reporters, and its SEO strategy includes limiting search headlines to 60 characters, inserting SEO keywords into every story in the CMS, and creating list of bad SEO terms to avoid in URLs. That strategy worked in March; KUT got a traffic boost from Google Discover for its shooting and smokable hemp ban coverage.

“I’m definitely concerned about the impact of AI search on our website and our overall digital strategy, but I have yet to see any kind of noticeable drop in traffic that some national publishers have reported,” Jechow wrote. “I feel like our website is in the strongest position it’s ever been in, and our data backs that up. With that said, things could flip upside down tomorrow.”

Here are the individual rankings for Q1 2026, broken up by month.

“I think belonging is trying to figure out ways for the audiences to feel heard and seen, to engage or learn more,” said Matt Adams, director of audience growth and engagement at The Texas Tribune. In other words, it is less about broadcasting and more about listening.

Publishers are increasingly thinking about this type of richer participation that helps readers not just feel informed, but connected. Take South Africa’s Daily Maverick, which is known for investigative journalism and political analysis. It already has a paid membership option, Maverick Insider. Its newest launch, Daily Maverick Connect, aims to enhance a sense of community, with belonging at the center. Most of Connect is open to anyone (though there are some exclusives for paying members) and users are encouraged to use their real names.

“The name we originally planned was ‘Ubuntu.’ In South Africa, that’s a word that sort of means ‘community,’ ‘belonging,’ or ‘working together for the common good,'” explained Sarah Hoek, the Daily Maverick’s community manager. They ended up calling it Connect instead (partly because a lot of other forums out there are also called “Ubuntu”), but “that was our mindset going into the project,” Hoek said. “Belonging is definitely something we are thinking about.”

Connect launched last fall and is hosted on the Daily Maverick’s site — no Big Tech platforms here. “It’s like the ultimate Facebook group, if all the cool Facebook groups were in one place,” Hoek said. (There are “hubs” for professional networking, home towns, and home hacks, for instance.) “That’s the hope for Connect: that it’s everything you need about life, work, the country, the news — all in one place.”

Connect also gives readers direct access to Maverick’s journalists, who read and interact in the forums. “I think our readers need a space to connect with like-minded people,” Hoek added. “And I also think they need a space where our journalists are accessible so that they can be a part of the reporting.”

There’s little more emblematic of belonging than turning up to something in real life, and many news organizations have realized the power of events, both emotionally and commercial. (For example, more than half of Semafor’s 2025 revenue came from live events.) Adams pointed to the Tribune’s range of events, from the yearly “TribFest” to “community coffees” with local reporters.

At the German newspaper Die Zeit, belonging is built up through regular small-scale meet-ups, and also the larger Leserparlament, which goes on the road to two large cities each year.

“The most direct expression of belonging is our events,” says Wencke Tzanakakis, head of Freunde der Zeit (Friends of Zeit), the membership program for subscribers. “A subscriber who sits in a room with a Zeit journalist and challenges something they wrote isn’t just consuming journalism, they’re participating in it. That changes the relationship. It makes the subscription feel like affiliation, not just access.”

Die Zeit also uses its newsletters as community builders. Its weekly books newsletter drives as many as 3,000 people to monthly online discussions, demonstrating belonging in action: The reader has established a habit and chooses not only to return on a regular basis, but also to participate.

Heiko Scherer, CEO of the community platform Tchop, works with publishers on audience engagement and community-building products, giving him a cross-industry perspective on audience loyalty and retention. He is emphatic about shared identities, smaller communities and niches and giving readers a meaningful role.

“Belonging is about more than just contribution,” he said. “It’s about realizing that what you’re creating is both the readers’ space and yours.”

Like Tzanakakis, he believes audiences need to recognize themselves in content. “Belonging” has to be built into product design, he said, and he argues that it should shape the experience of using a site rather than being an afterthought. The placement of comments matters, for instance, he argued: If they only appear at the bottom of articles, readers will see that their contributions aren’t prioritized.

Everyone I spoke with noted that strong journalism is a prerequisite for a media organization to create belonging. Adams noted that The Texas Tribune has “passionate readers” because of its authoritative reporting on Texas policy and politics.

The Texas Tribune frames support as a way of helping to sustain civic information and navigate life in Texas. It recently launched two local newsrooms, the Austin Current and The Waco Bridge.

“The Waco Bridge Facebook page has become kind of a community, with the ways that people are commenting,” Adams said. “I think a lot of larger-scale newsrooms forgot about Facebook because it doesn’t really drive traffic anymore, but Waco actually has a really strong presence there.”

Hoek and Tzanakakis agreed that community would be impossible without rigorous and impressive journalism.

“I think our readers don’t just love Daily Maverick, they also love our country,” said Hoek. “We’ve come through a difficult history, and there’s this feeling of wanting a democratic South Africa to continually be better. Daily Maverick has positioned itself as part of that. So the belonging that people get by being part of our membership is to forward that mission of protecting and defending truth, creating a better South Africa.”

Die Zeit’s Tzanakakis is keen to ensure that subscribers outside big cities feel involved. “Our Zoom webinars help us really engage with and listen to those readers who live in small towns,” she said. “We don’t want to forget them.”

That concept of listening leads directly to another major issue in media: Trust.

“I think trust is absolutely key to belonging,” Adams said. “You can’t belong to something unless you trust it, and you have to feel there are other like-minded people there.” The Texas Tribune is trying to build trust through in part through its explainers and guides — “taking topics we know Texans are interested in and explaining what the effects will be, giving people an entryway into the work we’re doing here so they can see us as a trustworthy source they might want to engage with.”

Tzanakakis agreed that belonging is closer to trust than membership. Membership is more transactional, she said, while “belonging is closer to family and friends, brands and people you trust.”

Measuring belonging can be complicated. Scherer is critical of traditional engagement metrics, arguing that “too often engagement is just a rephrase of page views, time spent on site, [and] duration of sessions,” missing “the active part” and reducing everything to consumption. Instead, he feels a variety of metrics is needed: direct traffic and app opens, subscription tenure, renewal and retention rates, frequency and regularity of visits, involvement in community features, and referral behavior.

Newsletters are a key belonging metric for the Tribune. Adam tracks the stories that leads readers to sign up for a newsletter. Tzanakakis looks at clicks from newsletters to events and the site, while Hoek checks any kind of participation, whether that is liking or reacting to a post or voting in a poll.

Hoek was keen to emphasize that Maverick Connect is a still an experiment (it currently lists 2,499 members).

And Tzanakakis fears that community-building tends to attract people who were already inclined to engage. “We’re probably quite good at deepening belonging for readers who are already committed,” she said. “But what about those who say they simply don’t have enough time for Zeit journalism in the first place? We’re constantly experimenting with formats for exactly those reader groups, and we don’t have a clear answer yet.”

The decision by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) found that EU copyright law doesn’t prohibit individual countries from setting up systems that give news publishers power to negotiate compensation terms and regulatory bodies the authority to enforce national law.

The ruling comes after Meta sued Italy’s national telecommunications regulatory agency (AGCOM) in Italian court in 2023. Italy had enacted EU copyright directives into national law in 2021, and in 2023, it granted AGCOM the authority to request traffic and advertising data from platforms related to news content, intervene in negotiations between publishers and platforms, and fine platforms that didn’t comply with its orders. The law also allows AGCOM to define benchmarks for for fair compensation, while platforms only pay for news content they use and are not allowed to restrict the visibility of publishers’ content during negotiations. Publishers have the right to refuse the use of their content or provide it for free.

Courthouse News Service described Italy’s rules as one of “Europe’s toughest systems for making platforms negotiate over news content powering feeds, search results and online traffic.” Meta claimed that EU copyright laws were meant to protect publisher content, not create “a regulator-backed bargaining system with mandatory negotiations, transparency obligations and penalties hanging over tech companies,” according to Courthouse News Service. The Italian court referred the case to the CJEU, which heard the case in February 2025.

The ruling on Tuesday rejected those claims, saying the law was designed to allow publishers to charge for the use of their content, recoup the costs of news production, and preserve a free press.

“At a time when AI systems and platform interfaces increasingly intermediate access to journalism, this ruling sends a very clear signal: quality journalism has value, and dominant platforms cannot simply appropriate it on their own terms,” Angela Mills Wade, executive director of the European Publishers Council, wrote in a post on LinkedIn.

“The rights established in Article 15 imply, by their nature, that publishers of press publications may make the authorization of those uses subject to any remuneration which they deem appropriate,” the judgment reads. “…Article 15 of Directive 2019/790 is intended to ensure that those publishers may recoup the investments required by the production of those publications with such a remuneration. In those circumstances, an information society service provider cannot validly argue that a national legislature fails to have regard to that directive when it establishes a system intended to ensure fair remuneration for those publishers.”

The ruling also refuted Meta’s claims that the law hinders competition and its ability to conduct business in the country. Instead, the court said the law aims to level the playing field between publishers and platforms by requiring the platforms to provide financial data about their use of news content — information publishers didn’t previously have access to.

“Only information society service providers possess the information enabling the economic value of online use of press publications to be assessed, such as the revenues generated by or expected from such use, with the result that publishers of press publications are in a weaker negotiating position than those providers as regards the determination of the remuneration at issue,” the ruling reads. “Furthermore, the obligation to refrain from limiting the visibility of publications in search results during negotiations between those providers and those publishers serves to prevent pressure being exerted on those publishers or the economic value of the use of their press publications being concealed.”

But even those who don’t have an unpopular billionaire owner to blame can still see disappointing results. America’s largest chain USA Today Co. (née Gannett) has seen total subscriber count decline 28% in the past year (even as digital subscription revenue has increased thanks to less discounting). And today’s leadership change at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution — which has been one of the biggest talkers about the importance of digital subs — shows the strains as well. Here’s NPR’s David Folkenflik:

Andrew Morse had helped usher ABC, Bloomberg and CNN into the digital age. In January 2023, he turned his sights on Atlanta, with a $150 million plan to reinvent its leading daily newspaper.

In taking the reins of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Morse set an ambitious goal: to grow the number of digital subscribers from 53,000 to a half-million by the end of 2026. He laid out a new strategy, with new content and an infusion of new energy. The paper abandoned print at the end of last year to go all-in on digital innovation. The plan so far has achieved modest results: 101,000 digital subscribers.

Morse acknowledges falling short, but says the paper ultimately will reach what he calls its “North Star.” Morse won’t be there when it happens. After nearly three and a half years, he says it’s time for him to step aside.

Morse had previously led an earlier Atlanta-tied digital subscription disappointment: the short-lived and ill-fated CNN+, which lasted all of 32 days in 2022. The AJC is one of only two newspapers still owned by the Cox family, which has made many billions in other businesses but has not been known as a digital innovator in news.

On one hand, the AJC has the advantages of being in a massive market (about 6.5 million people) and being the state’s unquestioned dominant newspaper. Killing print entirely, as the paper did on Jan. 1, should have also been a major pivot point for remaining print subscribers to move to digital.

But modern Atlanta has a reputation as a weak market for newspapers, with a population heavy on recent transplants. (It’s sort of the opposite of the Advance Local markets — places like Flint, Syracuse, and Cleveland — where the economy might not be booming, but the residents are much more likely to be long-term local news readers.) Atlanta’s the seventh-largest media market in the United States, but in the time we’ve been tracking local newspaper web traffic since last summer, the AJC has never cracked the top 30 nationally. And its print circulation before shutting off the presses was only around 40,000 — which, for comparison’s sake, was already below peers in much smaller markets like Hartford (DMA No. 32), Milwaukee (No. 38), Little Rock (No. 58), Albany (No. 62), and Syracuse (No. 88).

Morse’s departure — though “Morse says family concerns drove his choice” — suggests the numbers after that Jan. 1 pivot have not been encouraging.

He checks his particle meter to make sure the room is sufficiently smoky, then steps around the table to turn on an air purifier on the floor. This is no ordinary air purifier. It is the Coway Airmega Mighty, the longtime top pick at Wirecutter, where Heffernan serves as the chief reviewer of products that clean our air and water.

This is a big moment for the Mighty. This test, followed by identical procedures for other purifiers over the next two days, will determine if it retains the crown it has held since 2014. Heffernan will test seven purifiers, including the Mighty and its new sibling, the Mighty2. It is down the hall still packed in its original box. It will be tested tomorrow.

“Yeah, man,” Heffernan says with a hint of sarcasm. “This could be the end of an era.”

Flaws, not dealbreakers

Wirecutter is headquartered in an unmarked black building in Long Island City, New York, that also serves as a laboratory and photo/video studio. Ben Frumin, Wirecutter’s editor-in-chief, likens the office to Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory — full of energy and oddities. Much of the testing happens on the lower level, in big rooms filled with everything from living room chairs to robot vacuums. Upstairs is a studio where stylists assemble artsy photos of axes and nail clippers and the 39 best gifts for your mother-in-law.

Wirecutter employees are invited to take part in many of the tests. In one room, eight mattresses are lined up in two rows. “WELCOME TO MATTRESS TESTING!” says a sign on the wall. “Grab a pillow and a disposable pillowcase! Get comfy!” In another room, six massage guns are displayed on a table for staffers to test. The instructions say:

The qualities we’re most interested in

• Grip options
• Massage options (speed, patterns, etc.)
• Device weight
• Button placement

Indeed, device weight and button placement are important considerations for Wirecutter testers because they are representing us, a nation of consumers that doesn’t have time to lie on eight mattresses or use six massage guns before we decide what to buy. Wirecutter testers are our surrogates in a confusing economy, helping us choose the best stuff.

Wirecutter could be seen as a web-savvier knock-off of Consumer Reports, the granddaddy of review publications that was especially popular with your granddaddy. But instead of publishing pages of complex charts as Consumer Reports does, Wirecutter narrows recommendations to a few top choices. It tells you “the best office chair for most people” while also revealing “flaws, but not dealbreakers.”

It was founded in 2011 by Brian Lam, a former editor from the technology site Gizmodo, and relies largely on affiliate revenue, fees paid by retailers such as Amazon when customers click through to buy products. Wirecutter also earns money from advertising.

The New York Times bought Wirecutter in 2016 for $30 million as part of a strategy to increase reader retention with products beyond news. It’s joined by cooking, games, and The Athletic, and the strategy has paid off: Far more subscribers buy a Times bundle than just news alone. Frumin says being part of the Times has enabled Wirecutter to more than double its editorial employees, from about 80 when he arrived in 2019 to 180 today. He says traffic has more than tripled in the past few years, to 15 million readers per month.

Product guides such as the one for air purifiers are the Wirecutter staple. But writers also publish essays such as “The Victorinox paring knife has been our favorite as long as Wirecutter has existed,” Heffernan’s ode to a $7 kitchen tool. Frumin says the publication has a distinctive voice of “your obsessed helpful geeky cool friend.”

Wirecutter employees emphasize their respect for Consumer Reports and the rigor it brought to this unique form of journalism. “They are the OG,” Heffernan says. “Anybody doing this stuff owes an awful lot to them.”

As he says this, a woman across the big room is moving from bed to bed, testing the mattresses.

Impressed by the Blueair

Heffernan’s tests could have dramatic consequences for the Mighty’s long reign, but they are quite boring to watch. He goes through the same steps for each one: lighting the matches, waving them up and down, checking his particle counter and then switching on the machines. He leaves the room for about 30 minutes and returns to check the meter.

He typically does two tests for each machine — one at a high setting that he calls “when you burn dinner” and one at a setting that is just below his quiet-room level of 50 decibels,

Over the two days, he tests seven machines, including the Windmill, the Winix 5520 and the Dyson HushJet. (Wirecutter has evaluated more than 70 purifiers over the past decade, but Heffernan only retests models that have become picks.)

Heffernan says an air purifier is wonderfully simple, just a fan and a filter. The fan sucks in air, moves it through a filter and blows out the cleaner air. “One thing we’ve never figured out how to do is make a video of an air purifier test because it is so boring. It literally is just a machine sitting alone in a room.”

The tests are rigorous and will play a big role in his final ratings. But his choice will also reflect subjective aspects such as ease of use, style and whether the device has design problems such as lights that glow too bright at night.

The classic Mighty performs impressively in Heffernan’s tests. In the burned-dinner test, it reduces particulates by 99.6%. He also is impressed by the Blueair’s large Blue Signature. “Good lord!” he says after he sees the results. “That was an effective air purifier.”

As the testing continues, it becomes clear that his choice has come down to a battle of the siblings: the Mighty vs. the Mighty2.

“I need somebody to write about shovels”

Heffernan, 48, is well-suited for this unusual job. He has a degree in economics and is a seasoned journalist who has written for publications such as The Atlantic and Esquire. He also is a do-it-yourselfer who loves building and fixing things. In addition to writing for Wirecutter, he publishes a monthly DIY column in the Times on topics such as “Let’s learn how to paint furniture” and “Let’s restore all your rusty metal.”

He has a goatee and rectangular glasses and wears the same thing pretty much every day: jeans, a T-shirt or sweatshirt, and a yellow knit cap that he rarely removes. He has two identical caps because one has a hole. A former colleague recommended him for the job, which led an editor to recruit him. Heffernan remembers the email as “I need somebody to write about shovels.” (Heffernan had just written a piece for Slate about how much he loved his coal shovel for clearing snow.)

His reviews show his versatility for assessing air and water purifiers, as well as door locks and artificial Christmas trees. (“If you’re planning on sticking with a tree for a long while, the unlit Balsam Hill 7.5-foot Unlit Classic Blue Spruce looks great and lasts for years.”)

Unlike many of his readers, Heffernan is not a big shopper. “I don’t want more shit in my house,” he says.

He is passionate about great devices and frustrated by lousy ones. He marvels at the smart design of the O-Cedar Quick Wring Bucket (“everything you could wish for in a mop bucket”) and he adores the Cuisipro Surface Glide 4-Sided Box Grater (“makes quick work of fussy tasks that would take me much longer if I used my knives”).

Heffernan can be equally passionate about the worst products. Don’t get him started about the Molekule purifier, which was so loud that he could hear its “jet-like whine” from 40 feet away on the other side of a heavy door. (He disliked the Molekule so much that he removed its innards and repurposed it as an umbrella holder now at Wirecutter’s main entrance.)

He takes his work seriously and emphasizes his independence. Although Wirecutter earns money when readers click links to the products he and other writers recommend, he says he feels no pressure to recommend or criticize anything. He doesn’t talk with people on the business side of Wirecutter and has no idea how much the company earns from his reviews.

“Trust is the only thing that makes this place survive,” he says.

Surprised by the new design

At last, it is time for the unboxing of the Mighty2.

The new model is something of a gamble for Coway, the South Korean company that makes the Mighties. The original has been Wirecutter’s top pick for 12 years, so the new model risks being a flop like New Coke or Caddyshack II. But the original Mighty has become dated because of its rounded corners and round buttons and a big round intake that looks like it came off a jet engine on an old Boeing. The time has come for a fresh design.

Heffernan cuts open the carton and lifts out the new model. He removes the wrapping and steps back to take a good look.

The Mighty2 is boxy, with sharp corners and less prominent buttons. The air intake is still round, but it lacks the almost cartoonish look of the original. The intake on the Mighty2 is subtle and less garish.

Heffernan is surprised by the new design. He puts the old and new Mighties on the table in the conference room. They are about the same size, but the rounded corners of the original make it look dated compared to the sleek design of the new one. For Heffernan, it is like an old friend has suddenly appeared at his door looking lean, clean-shaven and well-dressed. He says this “is more of a moment than I expected it to be. It kind of just feels wrong.”

He puts the Mighty2 on the floor, plugs in the cord and then goes through his routine lighting the matches and turning on the purifier. As it comes to life, it makes a few gentle beeps and a blue light comes on. He leaves the room to let it do its work.

When he returns about 30 minutes later, he notes the particle count and does some quick math. In the burned-dinner test, the Mighty2 has reduced particulates by 99.1%. It is essentially no different than the Mighty, which reduced it by 99.6%. That means his decision about the top pick will now depend on other factors — the buttons, the lights, noise and ease of use.

The new model “clearly is going to get strong consideration,” he says, laughing at his own serious answer. “I mean that seriously. I need to think more about it. I need to live with it longer.”

“Exceptional, efficient and easy to live with”

On May 4, Heffernan’s review was published on Wirecutter’s home page. A headline shouted the news: “For the first time in 10 years, we have a new favorite air purifier.”

Heffernan’s review got right to the point: The Mighty2 outperformed its older sib and was the new top pick. “It’s quieter, more energy efficient, and easier to adjust and maintain than the original Mighty it’s based on.”

Heffernan praised the new model’s modern style, energy efficiency, its intuitive control panel, the easy removal of its prefilter, and its new sound. “It’s a special kind of quiet…pleasantly reminiscent of cabin noise.”

Of course, the Mighty2 had a flaw, but not a dealbreaker. “The control panel is less tactile than we’d like.”

His 6,500-word review mentioned dozens of other models but emphasized his longtime admiration for the Mighty. “A legend for a reason,” said one subhead.

After the review was published, Heffernan discussed what it takes for a company to have a top product for so long. “The original Mighty is a great machine and had just proven itself time and again,” he said. “It’s a machine that does pretty much everything well and does it reliably for a long time.”

But the Mighty2 was better.

Heffernan said Coway listened to feedback over the past 10 years and methodically addressed the problems that bothered its users. “They really took their time to come out with a new one — and I think it shows.”

The Mighty2, he said, “is awesome.”

War has never been fought only on the ground. Clausewitz’s concept of the “fog of war” once described the uncertainty and confusion that cloud battlefield decision-making. Errol Morris’ 2003 documentary made the phrase a shorthand for the moral and informational ambiguities of modern conflict. But in the digital age, where war is also filmed, edited and promoted online, the fog is getting thicker, and wars are becoming more difficult to cover.

The conflict between the United States and Iran makes this point clearer than ever. As images, videos, and narratives flood social media, it is now becoming even harder to tell what’s real and what’s not, with both the rise of AI and the changes in digital platforms reshaping how war is seen and understood.

This is not the first conflict after the launch of ChatGPT. But it may be the first one where generative AI has played a key role in the information war.

In 2026, AI-generated content has surged across social media, both in volume and visibility. Fake drone footage, fabricated satellite images, edited clips, and synthetic statements are spreading widely, often reaching millions of viewers.

In earlier conflicts, such as the early Israel-Hamas war, misinformation still relied more on recycled or miscaptioned real footage. Now, even official accounts are openly sharing false content. To understand how these narratives spread (and how to cut through them) I spoke to five investigators, researchers, and journalists working on the front lines of this treacherous information environment.

A war of memes

The U.S. and Iran are waging a parallel struggle over narrative, image, and public perception online. In doing so, both camps have adopted a distinctive style of communication that speaks fluently the language of the internet: trolling.

What might once have been dismissed as online provocation has increasingly become part of the grammar of geopolitical messaging, where irony, mockery, and spectacle are used to project power, ridicule opponents, and shape how audiences interpret the conflict.

On the U.S. side, official White House accounts have posted videos featuring drone footage of bombings and strikes intercut with clips from films like “Top Gun” and “Braveheart,” as well as references to video games like Wii Sports.

The Iranian camp, by contrast, has fully embraced AI-generated media, producing Lego-style animated videos, obviously fabricated deepfakes, stylized music videos, and even old, unrelated funny clips as in this tweet from Iran’s embassy in Spain.

The U.S. projects a message of military dominance and authority. Iran mocks Trump and U.S. foreign policy, using humor and parody to undercut American authority, and adapting his messages to different audiences around the world.

While deepfakes and other types of disinformation are trying to deceive audiences, AI and non-AI slop pursue a different goal: Despite the obvious fakeness of it all, these images are used to push a specific narrative and worldview.

Emerson T. Brooking is director of strategy at the Digital Forensic Research Lab of the Atlantic Council and the author of the book Likewar: The Weaponization of Social Media. He says Iranian propaganda and U.S. propaganda tap into two different sides of internet culture. But he thinks they both represent a new generation of war propaganda that started to take shape after Hamas’s attacks on October 7, 2023.

Research supports the notion that this is not an entirely new phenomenon: In Ukraine, memes rallied around battlefield defiance and Russian embarrassment. But after October 7, memes were indeed used to justify retaliation, challenge sympathy for Gaza, or accuse opponents of selective outrage, making the attacks a recurring engine of propaganda.

This time both Iranians and Americans have been leaning into different internet aesthetic cultures while pushing for different narratives. For example, Iran has presented itself as a global defender against U.S. aggression, painting Trump as a “puppet” of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu while taunting him about the Jeffrey Epstein files.

“The White House is leaning into a different internet cultural aesthetic, with sizzle reels and supercuts that incorporate video game imagery and periodic uses of AI,” said Brooking. “There is no story in that content. It is a series of explosions or acts of destruction. The subtext is: If you do not do what we say, we will do more of this to you.”

Brooking points to Iran’s famous Lego videos as the real innovation of the war. “They are so novel that people keep watching them,” he told me. “They are actually quite long, running several minutes. But the point is that they are telling a story, and you only really get it if you sit through them.”

This inflation of memes, parody and slopaganda presents a real shift in information warfare. As combat is presented through playful or entertaining lenses, it can dehumanize and desensitize the public to civilian harm. That’s the view of Sam Dubberley, director of the Technology, Rights & Investigations Division at Human Rights Watch. Dubberley and his team use open-source investigation tools (often known as OSINT) to verify, expose and document human rights abuses.

I recently met Dubberley at a neighborhood coffee shop in Oxford. During our conversation, he shared his concerns about this trend. The rise of memes in war is not an issue in terms of verifying the events they investigate, but it can present a human rights issue.

“Our great fear is a ramping up of the rhetoric of war as a game,” he said. “For us, the important thing in conflict is to minimize civilian harm as much as possible. But if you are using memes, video games or Lego videos, war doesn’t seem real. If you’re having this kind of memeification of war, the rhetoric then ramps up, which could lead to more conflict and more civilian harm.”

Alexios Mantzarlis is a true pioneer of fact-checking. He co-founded Italian fact-checker Pagella Politica and was the founding director of the International Fact-Checking Network, which he led from 2015 to 2018. He recently founded Indicator Media, an outlet that specializes in open-source reporting and online investigations, as well as studying and exposing digital manipulation.

Mantzarlis told me that AI-generated content is most effective and most misleading when it appears alongside real material, because people are less able to scrutinize it in the quick, distracted way in which they usually consume information online. Even if viewers could recognize something as fake if they paused to examine it, in practice people just scroll down and take in a quick impression of what they see.

“Unfortunately, for most people, even the Iran war doesn’t really matter that much,” he said. “So, as they scroll down, [AI-generated content] just sticks around in the back of their mind whether it is realistic or not.”

The liar’s dividend

Governments are not using AI just for trolling. More notably, and perhaps more insidiously, they are also deploying it to spread false narrative and manipulate global audiences.

Propaganda has always been part of war. But according to the sources I spoke with, AI and social media have amplified it to an almost unfathomable scale. It’s not just AI slop. Bad-faith actors are using these tools to fabricate military footage and even deepfake images of the war’s victims.

The U.S. attack that killed more than a hundred Iranian girls in a school in Minab became perhaps the clearest example of this. After the strike, false and AI-generated images circulated alongside authentic images of the victims and their graves, making even real evidence easier to doubt.

Mahsa Alimardani, associate director of the Technology Threats and Opportunities program at Witness, has seen this in her own investigations. Her team has received an unprecedented number of requests for AI forensic examinations in recent weeks. She says that the problem we are seeing in Iran is the structural collapse of trust in authentic content and documentation.

“What we’re seeing in Iran is a textbook case: Opposition media and diaspora accounts dismissed verified images of civilian casualties from the Minab school strike as AI-generated or recycled, based on nothing more than aesthetic judgments,” she explained. “‘The lighting is too good.’ ‘It looks like a performance.’ No forensic methodology, just vibes. And those claims spread widely before fact-checkers and other investigators confirmed the images were authentic.”

Alimardani is Iranian herself, so she has also been receiving requests from friends, asking her to verify what they see online amid the fog of war.

“Iran is this laboratory for the worst types of pollution that can exist in an information space,” she told me. “This is a laboratory for us to see worst-case scenarios, especially the kind my team at Witness has been talking about for a long time: how AI is really going to affect what we trust and what we believe.”

Manisha Ganguly operates in a similar space. She is the visual forensics lead at The Guardian and a pioneer in using OSINT to investigate war crimes in conflicts. While she doesn’t rely on single artifacts or sources for her own work, AI-generated images remain a concern because they can make false or misleading information appear credible.

“The influx of AI-generated satellite imagery is allowing state-aligned actors to cosmetically validate official accounts, or knowingly, incorrectly apply OSINT to align with ideological narratives,” said Ganguly.

She offered the example of The Tehran Times, a state-linked English-language newspaper that shared a post on X with satellite images of “an American radar in Qatar” destroyed in an Iranian drone strike, which was found to be AI-generated. The post was viewed almost a million times under the banner of what seems to be a legitimate news outlet.

That example points to a broader problem. Once AI-generated images circulate under the authority of seemingly legitimate outlets, they do not just spread falsehoods but also erode trust in authentic evidence.

Alimardani argues that AI has introduced a new kind of fog to war, one in which real photos can be dismissed as fake and fake images can be used to depict real events. Once even a single fabricated image is exposed, it can be used to undermine trust in genuine evidence as well, making reality itself harder to verify and even real evidence of war crimes easier to deny.

“The lies spread much faster and we haven’t quite tackled how to deal with this. This has created just a lack of trust for everyone,” she told me.

Dubberley from Human Rights Watch said the growing volume of deepfakes has not fundamentally changed how investigators examine potential war crimes, but it has made the work slower and more difficult. Investigators can quickly identify obvious fakes. But the wider spread of false content causes broader public doubt, creates more noise to sort through, and makes it harder to establish the facts of what actually happened.

“While it doesn’t affect our investigations, it slows us down,” Dubberley said. “It makes people question everything and it takes us longer to pierce through this fog of the noise online and in social media. That’s what’s challenging.”

The slowdown matters beyond public debunking. Organizations like Human Rights Watch and Bellingcat are also preserving digital evidence for possible future legal proceedings. AI adds another layer of authentication: investigators must now show not only where and when an image was taken, but whether it was synthetic or manipulated.

How to fight propaganda

Most of these narratives spread online. But under which conditions do they become mainstream? Online platforms are not just channels for distribution. They are also part of the machinery that helps create, shape, and amplify this kind of content.

Brooking, the investigator from DFRLab at the Atlantic Council, said algorithms are central to this process. “No social media platform today allows you to discover content solely based on who you follow or what your stated interests are,” he said. “Algorithms have been instrumental. You would not have this kind of information conflict without them.”

That makes provenance — the ability to verify where an image came from and how it has been altered — increasingly important. But Alimardani said standards such as C2PA are not yet widely deployed enough to help most people during fast-moving conflicts. “Most phones don’t sign images at capture, most models do not embed provenance when they create content, and most platforms don’t display provenance signals to users,” she said. “So in terms of the immediate information environment around, say, the Iran conflict, provenance isn’t yet a factor.”

If adopted widely, provenance would not stop misinformation from spreading, Alimardani said, but it could give authentic content a verifiable chain of custody. The bigger issue, she said, is the collapse of trust in authentic documentation, as it happened in the case of the Minab school. “This is what we call the liar’s dividend. The mere existence of synthetic media gives people — and especially bad actors — a rhetorical tool to dismiss real evidence,” she said.

Mantzarlis from Indicator Media stressed this is an especially difficult moment for information integrity. Platforms have rolled back some of their interventions and pulled back support for journalism at the worst possible time. Even so, he argued, platforms still have a responsibility to reduce harm, and this starts with recognizing that not all AI content poses the same kind of threat.

Mantzarlis drew a distinction between AI content that is deliberately deceptive and AI content that is merely low-quality or spammy, and argued each requires a different response.

“We need takedowns, labels, and explicit interventions for the truly fake material,” he told me. “But we also need some broader agreement to contain the spaces in which visibly fake but still harmful slop exists — either because it is hateful, or because it is propaganda pushed by state media or authoritarian regimes. It may not violate platform policies, but that does not mean it should be force-fed and available to everyone at all times.”

Platforms are not the only actors making verification more difficult. Satellite imagery coming from the Middle East is currently being restricted or limited by the companies providing it. Many of the investigators I spoke to found this deeply concerning, since those restrictions make it harder to verify events on the ground and create more room for deception. The lack of reliable imagery makes it far more difficult to understand what is happening on the ground.

“With the new imagery restrictions being imposed by these commercial satellite providers, this process [of verification] is significantly delayed and is harming public interest reporting,” Ganguly said.

Despite these challenges, journalists, investigators and fact-checkers still serve as an evidentiary authority tasked with piercing through this AI-powered fog of war, and provide a counterweight to state-sponsored propaganda.

Many of the experts I spoke to mentioned that the best defense against AI-driven disinformation is still basic reporting: being on the ground, talking to trusted sources, and understanding what is credible.

Mantzarlis argued that, for journalists who cannot access a place directly, that means being transparent about uncertainty, sharing what is known and unknown before full verification is complete, and using available AI and other technological tools.

“It is a continuous kind of escalation between defenders and their opponents. Fact-checkers, journalists, and platforms are always going to be playing catch-up. But that does not mean they have to be miles behind,” he said.

In the weeks since the event wrapped, Semafor has been experimenting with how AI models can help produce new insights — and editorial content — about Semafor World Economy. The result is a new AI-assisted editorial product called Semafor Intelligence. Drafted by journalists, the report is based on an analysis by a custom-built AI tool. The first edition boils down countless hours of transcripts from the flagship event into nine key themes about the global economy and where it’s headed.

Each banner topic — including supply chains, the Iran war, and the AI race — leads to a bottom-line analysis and relevant quotes from onstage speakers.

“This is AI doing something that’s really hard for people to do,” Ben Smith, co-founder and editor-in-chief of Semafor, told me. “Even if we weren’t moderating interviews, editing stories, talking to sources, and doing all the things journalists do [during an event], it would be impossible to really consume all the information — all that speech — and walk away with a really clear sense of everything that was said and what the prevailing opinions were.”

Smith is quick to clarify that Semafor Intelligence is not an AI-written product. While the tool initially output more than nine central themes, journalists reviewed, consolidated, and curated the final list. Humans also wrote and edited the copy. Each quote in the report links to timestamped YouTube videos of the event, ensuring accuracy.

“AI tools are incredibly powerful, but we’re also intensely aware of our responsibility to our audience that we’re giving them really high-quality material that is not hallucinated,” said Smith.

In a thread on X, Reed Albergotti, Semafor’s tech editor, said that he built the first iteration of Semafor Intelligence in less than an hour using OpenAI’s coding agent, Codex. That prototype was later refined and tested with help from Alastair Clements, Semafor’s senior director of data and insights. The current version of the tool leans on several different machine learning models, including an embedding model from Voyage, an AI company owned by MongoDB. Embedding models can convert text datasets into vectors — lists of numbers that capture the meaning of each piece of text. For journalists, these vectors make it possible to map out the ideas in that dataset and see which themes naturally cluster together. This process, called “vectorizing,” has been used by other data journalists to analyze giant text corpora, including Elon Musk’s entire tweet history.

While these past reporting projects might have taken a team of journalists weeks or even months to conduct, Semafor claims it built its custom tool for Semafor Intelligence in a matter of days. Meanwhile, the whole product pipeline only cost a few hundred dollars to run, according to a more detailed blogpost about the methodology published on Semafor.

“Nobody sat through all 250 sessions, and nobody could have read all 250 transcripts and analyzed them in this way,” wrote Albergotti on X. “AI created a lot more work for us but also allowed us to give readers something valuable.”

The new tool will likely help the newsroom push out more editorial content to support its growing events business. (According to The Wall Street Journal, roughly half of Semafor’s $40 million in revenue last year came from events.) Semafor Intelligence is slated to create similar reports about the next editions of Silicon Valley & The World and The Next Three Billion, the publication’s two other signature events.

“Our audience doesn’t want AI slop, and they also don’t want human slop, which there is also an enormous amount of on the internet,” said Smith. “They expect really high-quality analysis and whatever tool we’re using to get there is secondary.”

“The discovery mechanisms for video are much better. Video as a medium is extremely personable and transferrable,” Nina Lassam, vice president of audio and video news at The New York Times, told Nic Newman, the report’s author and a senior research associate at RISJ. “People share clips on Instagram, on TikTok, and on YouTube Shorts. I think the audience is new, and I think it is bigger.”

Many publishers are also prioritizing daily news and conversational podcasts, moving away from expensive, highly produced Serial-type shows. News podcasts have “become more reactive,” Phil Maynard, head of podcasts at The Guardian, said. “Podcasts that were taking two to three days to turn around weren’t necessarily what the audience wanted, or at least, it wasn’t the only thing they wanted. They also wanted reactive stuff, and they wanted the people that they trust most to tell them what’s just happened.” So The Guardian launched The Latest, a daily 10-minute video podcast, as a spinoff of its deep-dive Today in Focus.

“Podcasts fit well into my routine because they allow me to stay informed and entertained without needing to dedicate exclusive time to them,” Ben, a 23-year-old from the U.K., told RISJ.

Does video change that? It’s hard to watch a podcast on YouTube while walking the dog or doing the dishes. In interviews with 50 regular news podcast consumers from the U.S., the U.K., and Norway, RISJ found that people switch back and forth between audio or video depending on where they are, and may primarily be listening even if they have a video of a podcast on. “If I am working remotely from home and don’t have anything going on, I would say that it is definitely about 80% listening to video, the other 20% audio,” Jamie, a 47-year-old in the U.S., said. “And then when I’m working away from home, then I would say the majority of time it is about 80% audio, 20% video.”

Another American, 31-year-old Nathan, said video podcasts let you “see the emotions better” and, because he’s already a heavy YouTube user, defaults to it for podcasts, too. “He knows that podcasts exist on other platforms (e.g. Apple),” the report notes, “but says he has never even explored that option because it is so convenient to have them in the same place as his other favorite content.”

YouTube is not the only platform offering video podcasts. The report notes that “by 2024 there were over 250,000 video podcasts on [Spotify] and half of the top 20 shows, including the Joe Rogan Experience and Alex Cooper’s Call Her Daddy, are now available in video.” (Apple Podcasts did not begin supporting video until this year.)

Not every podcast works well as video. Notably, The New York Times’ flagship The Daily — which remains the most-mentioned news podcast in the U.S. in RISJ’s research, followed by another audio-first product, NPR’s Up First — remains primarily audio. (Its tagline: “This is how the news should sound.”) “Making The Daily exactly the same in video would be a challenge. The production of the show is established in audio and our listeners have grown to value the relationship they have with that journalism in audio,” Lassam said.

“Whilst we are really interested in and are investing in video podcasts,” said Nicole Jackson, The Guardian’s global head of multimedia, “we are also keenly aware that there is still this huge audio-only audience out there.” That means doing some video interviews even for audio-focused investigations, and creating promotional videos for social media. The Guardian’s Football Weekly now has a full-video version.

“The challenge for the business overall is that we are both trying to maintain discoverability from the collapse of search and the growth of AI, while also maintaining high numbers of highly engaged subscribers,” said John Shields, The Economist’s director of podcasts. “And podcast videos crystalize that dilemma.”

You can read the full report here.

This tweak to citations is just one of several updates to AI Overviews and AI Mode that Google launched on Wednesday.

The changes come as publishers have increasingly come forward to share stories of plummeting Google referrals since the launch of AI Overviews. Over the past two years, referral traffic from search engines has dropped by 60% for small publishers, 47% for medium publishers, and 22% for small publishers, according to a March 2026 study by Chartbeat.

Google has rolled out “subscription linking” offerings in the past on search. The labels don’t appear for all users, only for those who’ve linked their subscriptions to their Google accounts. The blog post encourages publishers to reach out to Google to learn more about how to encourage paying readers to link their accounts.

Other changes to citations include a website preview that pops up when someone hovers over an AI Overviews or AI Mode link. These previews may include publisher names or website titles, giving users a better sense of where their click might lead. And Google claims that, overall, more publisher links will appear in AI Overviews and AI Mode as part of these updates, through increased citations “next to the relevant text.”

Other updates to AI search include a new dynamic section that will suggest topics related to the original search query. It will appear below AI-generated summaries and link to related articles or more “in-depth analysis.” One example shared by Google shows the results for a search about green urban spaces. In this case, the new section appears with the title “Further Exploration” and suggests a report on urban planning by the World Economic Forum or a website about the architects who designed The High Line in New York City. The update could, however, push traditional article links further down the page.

The new updates also tacitly acknowledge just how dominant Reddit has become in the Google search experience. A new dynamic panel will also pull from social media platforms and other forums like Reddit to “preview” online discussions about a given topic.

These might include quotes from a user’s review of a gadget or suggestions for troubleshooting a problem. A link to the specific community and the creator handle may appear beneath the quote. One example shared by Google titled the section “Expert Advice.” Ironically, this feature is unlikely to elevate traditional expert voices, but those of hobbyists and, more generally, crowdsourced opinions.

This update will also likely create less incentive for users to click through to Reddit if they can gain insights from the platform without leaving search. In 2024, Google signed a content licensing deal with Reddit, which is reportedly valued at $60 million per year and allows the company to integrate its content more deeply into search experiences.

You can read more about the updates to AI Overviews and AI Mode on Google’s blog.

This story has been updated clarify that the titles for new sections in AI Overviews and AI Mode are dynamic and change based on the search query or response.

The idea in a nutshell was this: Two giant American tech companies, Google and Meta, had abused Australian news publishers by “taking” their stories and including them in their search results and social feeds. Publishers were due compensation for this wrong — but the tech giants refused to negotiate over how much. So the government ordered these negotiations to take place; Google and Meta would need to strike individual deals to pay some undetermined number of publishers some undetermined amount of money. If the government felt they’d paid publishers enough, then that’s that. If it didn’t, though, the government could mandate further bargaining and, eventually, require third-party arbitration that could cost companies bigly.

I am in favor of publishers getting money, and I am in favor of Google and Facebook being the ones writing the checks. But the system had major problems, both philosophical and practical.

Last week, the Australian government announced a successor to the News Media Bargaining Code — the (annoyingly similarly named) News Bargaining Initiative. It’s a clear improvement. Indeed, with a single change, it’d be close to an ideal system. But without that change, I suspect it’ll end up repeating many of the old system’s flaws.

You can read my 2022 piece for a lengthy discussion of those flaws, but here’s a summary of the two big ones.

Problem 1: The code lied about what problem it was addressing.

Australian media companies, like their peers around the world, have long complained of the tech giants’ “theft” of their intellectual property. That “theft” consisted of…letting Facebook users link to news stories and Google including news stories in search results. Those things are not theft; social media platforms and search engines are legal. And if you want to argue that they are theft, then why are they theft only for a small set of news companies and for not every site on the internet?

The intellectual property theft claims have always been a way to paper over publishers’ actual complaint, which is what this has always been about: Google and Meta have a near-monopoly on digital advertising revenue. More than 80% of all Australian digital ad dollars go to those two companies. It turns out that putting ads next to search results and social feeds is a much more lucrative and scalable business than putting ads next to news stories. News outlets used to make enormous sums from advertising in print and broadcast media, but online, they earn a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of what these two tech giants do.

This is, to be clear, a very legitimate complaint! Google and Meta having that much market power is a dangerous thing from an antitrust perspective. It is perfectly appropriate for both Australian publishers and the Australian government to be concerned that their nation’s media is being undercut by a new revenue paradigm they can’t win at. Liberals will argue quality journalism is a civic good essential to an informed democracy. Conservatives will argue this is an important Australian industry that deserves protection. Populists will argue the need to confront American cultural imperialism. They’re all correct.

But it’s not the complaint the News Media Bargaining Code was based on — which was that including news stories in search results and social feeds is somehow a violation of publishers’ rights and that they are due financial compensation for it.

You might say that’s just a philosophical quibble. But Meta turned it into a very practical one when it called Australia’s bluff — twice. First, in 2021, it announced that, if the problem was really how Australian news appeared in Facebook feeds, it had a solution: banning Australian news stories from Facebook. Problem solved, right? Of course not — because the “theft” of letting someone share your story on Facebook was never the actual complaint. Meta lifted the ban after extracting concessions from the plan. (It repeated the move in Canada when faced with a similar program — except there, it’s never lifted the ban, making it clear to governments that it considers news very much optional on its platforms.)

Then, two years ago, Meta announced that it was done negotiating these deals with publishers and let all existing ones expire. Did the government then follow through with what the News Media Bargaining Code allowed — declaring Meta in violation of its obligation to negotiate fairly and force them into mandatory arbitration? No. Instead it did…well, nothing, really. It didn’t pursue further action (called “designating” Meta, in the code’s parlance) because it believed that doing so would just lead to Meta blocking news on Facebook again, and it wanted to avoid that outcome.

This has never, ever been about the platforms’ “theft” of news. It has always been about the platforms’ dominance of the digital advertising market and the hole that has left in publishers’ budgets.

Problem 2: The code had zero transparency and uneven power.

The code set no firm requirements on what these “negotiations” needed to entail. It didn’t set how many publishers needed to be paid or how much. It just said that Google and Meta needed to show a good enough effort that the government wouldn’t designate them as unfair bargainers. Which basically came down to vibes — the companies weren’t required to share the totals with other publishers or even with the government itself. It was all done in secret. Deals contained clauses forbidding publishers from revealing how much they got.

That’s an artifact of the code’s fundamental lie that this was about business negotiations between private companies. Google was supposed to figure out how much it “owed” News Corp for the crime of including Brisbane Courier-Mail stories in search results, and News Corp could keep saying “higher” until it got a number it was happy with. It was a private act of theater.

This had several negative knock-on effects. First, the country’s largest news publishers — Rupert Murdoch’s aforementioned News Corp and Nine Entertainment, owner of the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age — had some actual power in the negotiations, because they were big enough to plausibly complain to the government if they felt they weren’t getting enough. But smaller fry were either given perfunctory take-it-or-leave-it offers or excluded altogether.

(It surely didn’t hurt that the largest reported payments went to News Corp, which just happened to be a big supporter of the conservative Prime Minister Scott Morrison, whose government came up with the scheme.)

The contracts were also dishonest about what the tech companies were buying. On paper, the deals were all about G&M licensing news stories for Google News Showcase and Facebook’s News tab. In reality, those were nullities as products that were constructed in part to be vessels for these payments to happen.

These are significant problems, and they all come down to that fundamental act of pretending what this is all about. If this is about how individual companies have been wronged, and all the government is doing is bringing the two sides to a negotiating table, then you can argue this secrecy and imbalanced power is fine. Cloaking a government-mandated subsidy in the language of “bargaining” made the system worse at every turn.

What the News Bargaining Initiative changes

Morrison’s party was ousted in 2022 and he was replaced by the liberal¹ government of Anthony Albanese. While his government was the one that declined to “designate” Meta after it stopped paying publishers, it recognized that a new approach was needed. After much process, it unveiled its proposed result last Wednesday: the News Bargaining Incentive.

It’s an improvement. But unfortunately, the Albanese government seems intent on continuing to dress up a public policy decision as the marketplace at work, and that will continue to weaken the system.

The NBI, as the name implies, still aims to offer an incentive for Google and Meta to bargain with Australian publishers. But it creates a different backup mechanism if they don’t do so to the government’s liking.

First, it expands the targeted companies from two to three — Google, Meta, and now TikTok. Second, it creates a 2.25% tax on those companies’ Australia-generated revenue. The government expects that tax would generate more then A$300 million a year. And third, it gives the companies a way out of paying that tax by instead negotiating deals with publishers.

Here’s how it would work: For every A$1 that Google pays to News Corp via a negotiated deal, Google’s tax liability will be reduced by A$1.50. And for every A$1 that Google pays to what the government defines as a “small or medium” publisher, that tax liability will be reduced by A$1.70.

That’s a good change. Instead of an incentive to overpay the loudest potential voices (*cough* Murdoch), tech companies will have a (mild) incentive to pay more to smaller outlets. The NBI also adds a (minimal) requirement to spread the money around by saying companies must make deals with at least four different media companies to offset their entire tax liability. (Under the old system, there was no rule saying a company couldn’t just give News Corp or Nine a giant lump sum and declare itself done.)

Is the NBI more honest about what this money is actually for? Well, yes and no. Not rhetorically — at his announcement press conference, Albanese still paid homage to the idea that this was about compensation for content being “taken”:

We think that investment in journalism is critical to a healthy democracy. It matters. It’s something that defines the way that Australian society operates. And frankly, if the work is being done by the people here at this press conference and in other places right around Australia, then your work needs to have a monetary value attached to it. It shouldn’t just be able to be taken by a large multinational corporation and used to generate profits for that organization with no compensation appropriate for the people who produce that creative content.

Still talk of “taking” without “compensation,” alas. At the same press conference, Treasury official Daniel Mulino was closer to the mark:

What we know is that news media organizations are having to deal with large digital platforms which have very substantial market power, and that’s undermining the traditional business model.

But what’s important is that the Albanese bill itself actually gets this right. It makes it clear that tech giants will be subject to this scheme regardless of whether they have anything to do with the news. As the government’s own explanation of the bill puts it:

A significant social media or search service does not need to carry news content to attract an NMI.

In other words: Meta, don’t try to pull that banning-news-on-Facebook trick again.

The addition of TikTok to the program also shows how little this has to do with news “theft.” Google and Facebook do at least display headlines from news stories in the act of directing users’ attention to them. But TikTok? TikTok bans the sharing of links in all but a few specific contexts, and it wants nothing more than to keep you scrolling from vertical video to vertical video, forever. The idea that it is engaged in compensation-worthy theft of news is laughable.

Unfortunately, the NBI is only marginally better on transparency and market imbalance than the old code was. Tech companies would have to report their deals to the government in order to cancel their tax liability — so at least someone would know how much money was changing hands. But there’s no language requiring those deals to be reported publicly. Which means that Australians will still have no idea how much money outlets are getting — and, more importantly, other publishers won’t know either. So smaller outlets won’t be able to be more informed bargainers, and tech companies will still be able to play politics or favorites however they wish.

The solution that’s under everyone’s nose

So what happens, under the NBI, if the tech giants decide not to play along? What if Meta sticks to its guns and says we still won’t make any deals?

Well, they’d have to pay that 2.25% tax to the government. And what would the government do with that money? It would give that money to Australian news organizations based on a simple formula — how many journalists they employ. Albanese:

Importantly as well, this is not about government revenue. Every single dollar will go back to journalists to pay for the journalism that you all produce here in the Gallery, but newsrooms right around the country produce as well.

Here’s Anika Wells, the government’s minister for communications:

The News Media Bargaining Incentive means if a platform doesn’t do a deal with a news publisher, the money will come to us and we will deliver that funding to news organizations based on how many journalists they employ. The more journalists they have, the more money they will get under this proposal.

That sounds…awesome?

A straightforward formula that directly incentivizes news outlets to hire journalists. (There is zero requirement that tech company money given directly to publishers be spent on journalism at all. News Corp could use it all on a new jet for Lachlan if it wanted to.) It would completely eliminate the uneven bargaining power among small and large outlets. It would eliminate the need for kabuki-theater “negotiations.” And of course there’d be more money to go around, since tech companies are getting those 150%/170% incentives to make deals.

Such a plan would create a reliable, sustainable revenue source that Australian news publishers could count on. No more need to hope that your corporate office did a good job at the negotiating table, debating made-up numbers. I think it’s fair to assume that Google, Meta, and TikTok will keep increasing revenue in the coming years, which means that the amount going to publishers would automatically increase as well. And if some new platform comes along that starts to eat up ad revenue, they’ll get automatically added to the program when they reach a certain size.

In fact, a tax like the one Albanese is proposing is exactly what I proposed back in 2022:

Google and Facebook are too big and powerful for the good of society. Their business, highly targeted advertising, is one that naturally tends toward monopolies: the more data you have, the bigger you get; the bigger you get, the more data you have. And while they make some fine and useful products, they aren’t creating the civic good that the earlier advertising gods — newspapers and other local news organizations — did by doing good journalism on a huge scale.

So tax them. Say you’re going to put a 1.5% tax on the targeted digital advertising revenue of all companies with a market cap over $1 trillion, or annual revenues over $20 billion, or whatever cutoff you want. That would generate billions of dollars a year in a way that doesn’t warp competition or let Google and Facebook use their cash as a tool for targeted PR payoffs.

Then decide how to spend it. Maybe you subsidize reporter salaries in a big way…Maybe you give it all to public media…Maybe you distribute it as vouchers to [Australians] so each of them can spend $100 a year on news subscriptions at no cost to them.

There are lots of ideas! Some you might like, some you might not. But they’re all better than giving Rupert Murdoch $50 million a year and small local publishers zilch because of who they know and how much the tech giants value their silence.

What’s frustrating about the News Bargaining Initiative is that it…incentivizes bargaining. It creates this powerful, transparent system to sustain journalism — and then asks everyone involved to make the same sort of shady secret deals the old system encouraged. The Albanese government has been very clear that it doesn’t want tech companies to pay this tax and would rather they keep striking deals. Albanese:

We have engaged in extensive consultation. At this point, the three organizations, Meta, Google, and TikTok as well have been consulted with and we’ll continue to engage with. But we want to see these deals done as were previously done under the previous regime.

Mulino:

I’ll just conclude by saying that the intention here is that digital platforms will enter into deals, and that’s very much the way this has been designed.

Wells:

The News Media Bargaining Incentive encourages platforms to enter into deals with news outlets and to contribute its fair share to Australian laws. Platforms should do deals with news organizations. If they decide not to, they will end up paying more.

Albanese again, in response to a question about what happens if Meta decided not to do deals:

Then they will be subject to higher payments than they will if they do a deal with the news organizations. That’s why there’s this incentive being put in and the distinction that’s there between paying 2.25 per cent or paying 1.5 per cent. And by having that incentive, what we’re encouraging is for organizations to sit down with news organizations, get these deals done, and then we can move forward.

In other words, the Albanese government wants to create an efficient, equitable way to give more than A$300 million to Australian news outlets — and then ignore it, because it would rather give around A$200 million to a subset of those outlets who can do well in secret negotiations.

To make the News Bargaining Initiative better, all it has to do is reverse the incentives. Instead of offering tech companies a discount for striking secret deals with the most powerful news companies, give them a discount for paying the tax. Or don’t offer them a discount at all! There is no reason to believe that Google’s negotiators are going to distribute money more equitably than a clear, uniform government passthrough program that pays per journalist. Australia shouldn’t be asking them to. Relying on backroom deals will benefit the tech companies (by paying less) and the Murdochs (by emphasizing their market power), but no one else.

This one change would repair the damage done by the News Media Bargaining Code’s fake free-market framing. This isn’t about individual news companies seeking compensation for imaginary thefts — it’s a question of public policy. The Australian government has good reasons to want to support its local media industry, and it has designed a good mechanism to do so. It should use it. Kill the bargaining — keep the tax.

1. Perennially confusing to us Americans, the major conservative party in Australia is named the Liberal Party, with the liberal party being the Labor Party.

The redesign goes beyond updated logos and typefaces; some of the changes are structural as well as aesthetic, geared toward showing audiences all the work that goes into the nonprofit newsroom’s journalism, the many ways to connect with that journalism, and more information about who produces it. “Many of our investigations come with supporting material, including visual explainers, details on our methodology or ways to send us tips,” ProPublica’s chief product and brand officer Tyson Evans wrote in a note explaining the changes. “Our new design allows us to package these pieces together, so it’s easier for you to find the full picture.”

Translations and audio narrations for stories are now more prominent. The newsroom will also include more details about its journalists and partners, “along with their photos and how to contact them securely if you want to contribute to our journalism.” But Evans added that ProPublica is still “working to keep the focus on what matters most: our reporting and visual storytelling.” A plum-colored hero banner highlights its joint Pulitzer win this week with The Connecticut Mirror. The homepage now showcases some investigations from the newsroom’s archives, such as its reporting on the FDA and USAID from 2025, both Pulitzer finalists.

Evans framed the new logo and typefaces as “bolder and cleaner, while maintaining a connection to the classicism of our name, and do a better job traveling across the many screens where you can find our work.” He added, “Our previous visual identity was built for a different era, it launched before mobile phones and social media were ubiquitous, and it was due for an update.”

ProPublica partnered with the branding studio Gretel to “to rethink a system that hadn’t kept pace with the myriad of ways our journalism actually reaches people now, across social, video, newsletters, films, podcasts and more,” Evans wrote on LinkedIn. The refreshed logo, typography, and “refined color palette” are “built to work everywhere readers, listeners and viewers find us.”

The newsroom plans to roll out more changes in the coming months. Read more about the thinking behind the redesign here.

The Intercept wanted to bring the story to more people on and offline, and had previously been inspired by ProPublica’s mobile billboard campaign in 2025. So on April 1, it sent a mobile billboard to John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York, one of the busiest airports in the United States. From 7:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., it circled JFK terminals asking travelers “Do you trust ICE with your phone?” and advising them to “turn it off at the airport. It’s harder for authorities to pry data from your phone if it’s shut down.”

 

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The billboard, which cost The Intercept $5,000, included a QR code linking to Mazurov’s original story. The Intercept also moved the piece to the top of its homepage so that travelers would see it if they searched for the publication.

“We do a lot of reporting to defend fundamental rights, but we also need to be out there expressing our First Amendment right to do this and to be oppositional in a place where ICE had been posted,” Chabel said.

Ahead of the airport campaign, The Intercept also pitched news creators about featuring Mazurov’s story, and three agreed. The Instagram video of The Intercept’s billboard at the airport, for example, is a collaborative post with A Girl Has No President, a news content account with 1.1 million followers. The video received more than 200,000 views (The Intercept’s posts normally get around 10,000 video views on Instagram) and around 2,000 shares.

 

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Creators Philip DeFranco and Hemu Rahman published their own videos on their platforms summarizing the reporting and listing The Intercept as a collaborator. DeFranco’s YouTube Short has more than two million views, while Rahman’s Instagram reel has more than 90,000. The Intercept didn’t pay the creators, CEO Chabel said, but the experience working with them opens the door to more types of collaborations in the future. Chabel estimated that the story reached about six million users across all platforms.

“This was the first time we were trying a stunt like this where we really didn’t know what to expect,” Chabel said. “These content creators have an enormous following that can really amplify important reporting, and we have to start to think about them as part of our ecosystem.”

Chabel said a key to the campaign’s success was identifying creators to work with and vendors to use ahead of time. That allowed the team to pull the campaign together within a few days.

“We want to use [this strategy] when we have a message that really is resonant with our readership and when it’s something with a call to action,” Chabel said. “As we go forward and we have more service pieces, this is something we’ll likely try again.”

“It’s one of those huge, gigantic things that sort of go beyond sports,” said Alexander Abnos, senior sports editor at The Guardian U.S. “It’s like a life-measurement mechanism.”

It’s also an opportunity for journalism to look a little different. I spoke to the people at three publications — including a one-time, single-issue magazine — to get an idea of what their journalism might look like this June.

A 156-year old operation gets a brand-new newsletter

The Guardian has been covering soccer (or football, as its U.K.-based staff would call it) since at least 1870, when it published a match report for the first-ever international soccer match, between England and Scotland. But while The Guardian U.K. has since grown into a robust soccer-coverage operation, with match reports and the Football Weekly podcast, its American operation until recently had just one person — Abnos — covering the sport. That changed in the lead-up to the World Cup, with the hiring of two staff writers, two video producers, and an assistant editor.

For the World Cup, Abnos told me, the Guardian’s U.K.-based soccer team will be doing what they do best: covering matches, writing up analyses, and giving plugged-in fans a look at team dynamics behind the scenes. But Abnos thinks the World Cup is also an opportunity to reach fans, particularly Americans, who are only just beginning to get into the sport.

“I think part of the reason a lot of people, especially in the U.S., gravitate toward soccer is that it is connected to the rest of the world in a way that our other sports aren’t,” Abnos said. Abnos and his team are giving them an entryway into the sport with The World Behind the Cup, a newsletter dedicated to World Cup history that will run for eight issues before the tournament begins.

The newsletter will be helmed by Jonathan Wilson, a U.K.-based soccer writer with an encyclopedic knowledge of the sport’s history who has been watching World Cups since the 1982 tournament, when he was six.

“I didn’t know what was happening at the time, but in retrospect, I clearly recognized the World Cup is this incredible gateway to the world,” Wilson told me. With the newsletter, he plans to dive into the sociopolitical realities of that gateway, starting with a story about how countries use the tournament as a way to project a national identity. It’s a particularly potent time to be covering those issues, given the political realities of the United States in 2026, and Abnos has been talking to his colleagues in the Guardian’s D.C. bureau about how their coverage might overlap with his team’s usual fare.

Once the tournament begins, Abnos told me, subscribers to The World Behind the Cup will start receiving Wilson’s regular newsletter, which features match recaps and other updates from the world of soccer. Abnos and his team are also planning to experiment with shortform video throughout the tournament, and the Guardian Football Weekly will be live-taping from the United States throughout the tournament — the podcast team will spend the group stages taping from L.A. and then move to New York, where among other things they will do a sold-out live show at the Bowery Ballroom.

All of that, Abnos said, should help build up the Guardian U.S.’s soccer audience. “We’re not here just for the World Cup,” Abnos told me.

Abnos, who grew up in Kansas City, has a personal hope for the World Cup: That he’ll get to go to that city’s Arrowhead Stadium to cover the Argentina-Algeria match on June 16.

“Schedule-wise it’s not a great fit, and I’d have to take a kind of crazy flight to get there, and I’ll only be able to be there for 24 hours and basically wave hi to my family,” he said. “I don’t care at all. I cannot wait to go there.”

“Live coverage is going to be absolutely key to what we do.”

In 2022, the year it was acquired by The New York Times, The Athletic sent 21 reporters to Qatar to cover the World Cup. This year, it’s sending over 100.

“Our live coverage is going to be absolutely key to what we do,” said David Jordan, The Athletic’s head of global soccer. “It’s always a huge driver of audience, but also a big surface that people come to for the first time when they see our coverage. The demand, increasingly, is on instantaneous coverage.”

Much like Abnos, Jordan thinks the people coming to the Athletic will be equal parts diehard soccer fans and people who are experiencing soccer for the first time and want to learn more about it. So The Athletic is launching three daily newsletters — one for “every level of soccer fandom” — as well as podcasts and explainers in text and video. They’re also launching a dedicated World Cup home page and a predictions game for the tournament, similar to one they ran for this year’s March Madness, so that audiences have even more reason to come back each day.

“We’re aware that there’ll be lots of people who will come to this World Cup on the day it starts and be like, ‘What is this?'” Jordan said. “We want to meet that challenge of speaking to the largest possible audience we can, from newcomers to diehard fans, but we also want to use this moment to grow our soccer audience [even after the World Cup].”

But it’s not all match reports and rule explainers: this year, The Athletic is speaking to fans from all 48 World Cup nations for a project about the language of soccer and what their national team means to them. The hope, Jordan told me, is that the project will give readers of The Athletic a deep understanding of teams and countries they previously would never have given much thought to.

“Sport and politics are going to overlap in this tournament in particular,” Jordan said. “Trying to understand these teams and what they’re really about, through the voices of the people who follow them and care about them, would be really cool. There’s a lot of fun to be had at the World Cup. If we can be a place that brings people joy and that they go to enjoy themselves, then, then I think we are doing something right.”

A lifelong friendship — and shared love of the game — in podcast form

When Daniel Alarcón and John Green were growing up in boarding school together, they’d watch European soccer matches on VHS tapes that their soccer coach brought to practice in a duffel bag. This January — more than 30 years later — they decided to launch a soccer podcast. They called it The Away End.

In some ways, it’s surprising the podcast didn’t happen sooner. Both co-hosts are more than comfortable in front of a mic and camera; Alarcón, a 2021 MacArthur “Genius”, cofounded Radio Ambulante, the award-winning Spanish radio show featuring stories from around Latin America, and also hosted the New York Times/Serial Production podcast The Good Whale. Green, the bestselling author of books like The Fault in Our Stars and Everything is Tuberculosis, hosted The Anthropocene Reviewed, from WNYC, and has been making videos for the vlogbrothers YouTube channel with his brother Hank since 2007.

The Away End, Alarcón told me, came out of a conversation he was having with Sean Titone, another childhood friend and Managing Executive Producer at iHeartMedia, at their high school reunion.

“It’s the kind of thing where you’re at a reunion and have a few drinks and are kicking around lots of ideas,” Alarcón said over WhatsApp voice message. “And then the next day we went ‘oh, that actually is a good idea.'”

Green and Alarcón describe The Away End, which exists both as a podcast feed and YouTube channel, as “the only soccer podcast that regularly name checks Toni Morrison.” The topics range from stories from Alarcón and Green’s lives, answers to write-in questions from listeners, deep-dives into national teams and individual players, and shout-outs to literature from various countries participating in the tournament — that last one because, Alarcón said, literature is a great way to get to know a country.

“I really want the show to be fun, and I want the show to be welcoming,” Alarcón told me. “The identity of the show is about our friendship. It’ll have something for people who are serious football nerds like me and John but is also welcoming if they’re new to the sport. I hope and expect the extended community that John has built will love the show, and I think a lot of people who listen to Radio Ambulante will be interested in this material too.”

While Alarcón won’t be attending any World Cup matches himself (“I hate FIFA with such an unalloyed intensity that I kind of just don’t want to be there,” he said), he plans to watch with friends and family near his home in Bogotá as well as with friends in New York when he visits.

And, he said, he hopes the show continues beyond the World Cup, though that’s partly up to iHeartMedia, which distributes the show. Soccer inevitably collides with politics and culture, and there’s plenty more to talk about outside of the World Cup.

But, Alarcón said, there’s one more reason to keep the show going.

“It’s helped me reconnect with an old friend.”

A one-time Golden Goal

Miguel Salazar and Alex Shephard are not, on paper, sports journalists; Salazar works for the New York Times Book Review and Shephard is a senior editor at The New Republic, where he and Salazar met. Nor are they magazine publishers. Yet they are, for this World Cup, launching a limited-time newsletter and single-issue magazine called Golden Goal, named for a type of tiebreaker that is no longer used in professional soccer.

“We have a group chat with a bunch of people who watch soccer, and one of our longest-running bits was that the glossy soccer magazine of our dreams would cover these more evergreen stories, or stories that are more out of left field, or aren’t in the news,” Shephard told me. “The idea of soccer explaining the world is a little hackneyed; there are plenty of places you can go if you want to understand what’s happening in soccer right now and what that says about the world. What we’ve kind of lost are things that take a step back and are more reflective or quiet or just try to figure out the meaning of things. Not their significance or their impact, but what they mean.”

After years of kicking the idea around, Salazar and Shephard decided to finally turn the bit into reality for this year’s World Cup. They started by reaching out to writers and designers whose work they admired to see if they would be interested. All of them said yes — even though, as Salazar and Shephard pointed out, they would likely be paid little, if anything; some writers asked for payment in the form of a Golden Goal-themed jersey instead of money.

“I think the fact that this is a decidedly non-professional, non-profit seeking thing is part of its appeal,” Shephard told me, “as is the fact that it’s something that we’re just doing once and throwing it out there for the fun of it.”

Designers Alejandro Torres Viera and Eduardo Palma came up with the magazine’s visual language of bold colors and big text alongside Salazar and Shephard, and Versa in Illinois is printing the magazine, which will have a single run of somewhere between 500 and 1000 copies.

“We love print, but also we want to create something that feels like it exists, as opposed to just being on the internet,” Salazar said. “Part of the approach is to create something that’s also literary, that feels artful, and I don’t think we can do that and be responsive or reactionary to the day to day news cycle.”

Golden Goal is decidedly international, with writers from around the world contributing to create a picture of what the World Cup looks like from places that otherwise might go overlooked in soccer coverage, like Uzbekistan and Haiti. The newsletter will allow Golden Goal to be slightly more in the mix as the World Cup plays out, but even that will only publish once a week and not necessarily respond to the news. A piece by Bolivian novelist Rodrigo Hasbún about his country’s national team, which ran just before they played against Iraq for a spot in the World Cup, is entirely about the 1994 World Cup — the last time Bolivia qualified for the tournament — and makes no mention of the fact that Bolivia eventually lost to Iraq, which means it won’t be in this year’s World Cup either.

“So much soccer media is driven by digital demands,” Shephard said. “I think one of the weaknesses is a loss or an erosion of perspective, and what we’re trying to do is find a way to regain some of that. In some ways that’s a challenge, because you have to think about what is worthy of lasting that long.”

Salazar and Shephard launched Golden Goal on Kickstarter in late February with a goal of $10,000, which they hit in less than two weeks, though they recently added a stretch goal of $15,000 after realizing they will have higher costs than they previously estimated. They’ve been spending the time since then building up their Instagram presence — a collaboration with Copa90, the soccer-focused YouTube channel, brought in many Bolivian followers after Hasbún’s piece went live — and putting the magazine together, which Salazar said has taken up “about 80%” of his time outside his day job. Once the magazine is printed, it will be sent to Salazar and Shephard’s homes in New York, after which they’ll have to spend even more time sending them out to Kickstarter backers.

They’ll also be hosting events in New York during the World Cup. They started with a trivia night at a bar in Brooklyn, which they plan to repeat, and are also planning a screening of the film Offside, by Iranian director Jafar Panahi, followed by a panel discussion with Iranian writers, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM). There will be a launch party, because every magazine — even if it exists only once — needs a launch party.

“The community that we’re building is obviously ephemeral, because it’s just rooted to this magazine that is going to come out once and probably never again, but I think it does answer a kind of calling for a space that you can occupy as someone who might be ambivalent about the tournament in a lot of ways,” Shephard said. “One of the things that I’m most proud of is how little of it is about Donald Trump and [FIFA head] Gianni Infantino..”

Instead, said Salazar, who is Colombian and remembers his father waking up at unreasonable hours to watch the 2002 World Cup, which was hosted by Japan and South Korea, the idea is instead to focus on how this tournament — run by a famously corrupt institution and used to whitewash the reputations of countries at the expense of taxpayers and host cities — can be deeply personal.

“A lot of the players [on the Colombian team] are sort of like me, in the sense that some of them left Colombia very young, and they’re part of this diaspora, but are still representing the country, and that helps me feel joy and a sort of kinship with my country in ways that I don’t feel day to day,” Salazar said. “We’re reclaiming the tournament, almost, for us and for our readers.”

This story was updated with details about The Away End.

TV and radio still play an important role in American news consumption, while AI is at the very bottom of everyone’s list. Radio still far outpaces podcast listenership, even among younger people. One thing that’s unclear: Whether AI is popping up on social media or in search engines, which are the third and fourth most popular sources of news among Americans. Google’s AI tools have become increasingly prominent in search, so I’d suspect there’s a good chance AI still influences how Americans get their news even if they do not directly turn to chatbots.

The majority of Americans — 7 in 10 — access a paid media service of some kind, even if they don’t pay for it themselves. Older Americans are also more likely to pay for those products, which include news sources as well as television and streaming services, possibly in part because they are more likely to have the disposable income that enables them to pay for them. “Those who pay for news express notably higher trust in both local and national sources’ abilities to verify information and help audiences understand complex issues,” the study authors write. “Younger audiences do not reject traditional journalism outright, but they do not grant it automatic authority. Unlike older adults, who show stronger, categorical confidence in local and national outlets, teens and young adults distribute trust more evenly across traditional news and independent creators.”

The kind of news people look for also varies by age. Younger people tend to gravitate toward lifestyle news, while older Americans consume hard news. The most commonly avoided topics are “celebrity news, political content, and news encountered on social media or during personal conversations.”

Across the board, Americans are stressed and fatigued by the news, but local news is a bright spot. “While most feel capable of finding relevant content and identifying trustworthy information, the emotional toll they feel in doing so is considerable,” write the study authors. “Very few Americans say news gives them a hopeful view of the world; and a substantial portion report feeling overwhelmed or finding news too stressful. American teenagers and adults assign responsibility for misinformation primarily to politicians and social media actors rather than news organizations, with local news receiving the least blame — a pattern that may help explain why trust in local journalism remains comparatively resilient even as media fatigue grows.”

Those have been the three pillars of journalist Casey Newton‘s technology newsletter, Platformer, since it launched in 2017. But, Newton wrote Monday, two of them — link roundups and news analysis — may no longer work so well for his audience in a time of AI automation. So he’s experimenting with changes to Platformer’s offerings, spending more time on original reporting and scoops, less on aggregation and analysis.

“We’re betting that the value in tech journalism is moving away from aggregation and predictability,” Newton wrote, “and toward original reporting and surprise.”

There’s a lot to think about here for anybody who runs a small publication or sends out a daily newsletter. To be sure, Newton’s case is unique: Platformer is a paid newsletter whose tech-savvy readers are more likely to be using AI than the audiences of more general-interest publications. But the concerns he has now will become relevant to other beats and topics — politics and business, to name just a couple — sooner rather than later. So I asked Newton a few questions via email. Here’s our conversation, lightly edited for clarity and with a bunch of links added for context. By the way, Newton said readers have responded positively to his proposed changes: Monday was Platformer’s largest day for new paid subscriptions this year.

1. I have to add here: If these briefings are written by AI, that obviously must be disclosed to readers up front.

Meanwhile, in Italy, the country’s main journalists’ union called for two strike days over publishers refusing to accept basic rules on the use of artificial intelligence. And at The New York Times, according to Axios, editorial union leaders told the newspaper’s management its AI standards are too vague and inadequate, creating editorial problems and trust issues.

As AI is becoming a defining issue for labor unions, I spoke with four journalism union representatives from the United States, the Philippines, and Greece to find out how their organizations are protecting their members from any potential labor changes that AI might bring.

The unions versus AI

No union I spoke to reported having any of their members being replaced by AI. But one of their central concerns has always been ensuring human staff is protected as these technologies become widespread. Collective bargaining agreements help enact these protections. Some agreements implicitly state that AI cannot be used to displace a member of the staff, like the News Media Guild, while others mandate higher severance pay if layoffs are AI-related, such as the PEN Guild.

However, AI use at work raises many complex issues beyond layoffs, said Tony Winton, chief administrative officer of the News Media Guild, which represents newsrooms like the Associated Press and The Guardian in the United States. Unions have the right to bargain not just over whether jobs remain, but also over working conditions and how AI changes the way people do their jobs.

“The more difficult issue is which uses are allowed, short of something that actually changes the size of the workforce, and there are a lot of very thorny issues here,” he said. “We have an active working group of members who want to expand this conversation with the AP. The contract language we have is good. But as more and more uses are being found for the technology, we need to have a conversation.”

The specific uses of AI in a newsroom, and how they impact the work of journalists beyond layoffs, is something that all union representatives I spoke to cited as grievances they have brought to their management. While they care about core issues like jobs, pay, and working conditions, Winton said, AI also raises serious concerns about journalistic accuracy, for example, that managers need to address.

“AI has struggled with a lot of fabrication problems,” he said. “So, for a person with a byline and a public identity, AI is a real concern. You don’t want to incorporate inaccurate work into your reporting that affects not just journalism quality, but also the reputation of the person whose name is attached to the story itself.”

Ariel Wittenberg is a public health reporter and the unit chair of PEN Guild, which represents workers at Politico and E&E News. Like Winton’s, her union has not seen layoffs due to AI yet, but her concerns extend towards the way AI is used, and how it can impact journalists’ work and journalism ethics.

She described two recent incidents at Politico, where managers were required by contract to warn the union in advance and negotiate before using AI in ways that meaningfully affect employees’ job duties. Politico ignored this clause and deployed two AI initiatives without telling them: one used AI to generate written coverage of the Democratic National Convention and the other one was a deal with Capital AI to automatically produce reports.

“We think they violated the contract, which says that any AI use has to be done in accordance with Politico’s standards of journalism ethics and with human oversight,” said Wittenberg. “If something is coming back with inaccuracies, if it’s not following our stylebook in other ways, and there are no corrections policy applied, that is not up to our political ethics.”

“An existential threat”

Establishing protections on AI-related issues hasn’t been easy for journalists working in other latitudes. A newsroom manager who is also a director for the National Union of Journalists of the Philippines (NUJP) spoke to me on the condition of anonymity about how difficult it is to establish protections for workers on these kinds of issues.

He said most newsrooms just have general provisions of using AI responsibly and ethically. But nowhere is it stated that AI will not be used to replace journalists. “This is an existential threat,” he told me. “My hope is that at some point [managers] will realize it and then we will have to adjust our policies on it.”

The Philippines’ national union does advocacy work, whereas specific employer unions are the ones with bargaining power. While there is no authoritative count, the latter ones in the Philippines are limited in number, unevenly distributed, and much less institutionalized than in European countries. The newsroom of the manager I spoke to, for example, doesn’t have a union in place.

“[The] most the NUJP can do is to issue statements to create noise, to try to advance the conversation, and to call attention to certain issues,” he said. “The most you can do is to recommend. We have to set these policies in stone and encourage media owners to craft a policy that would protect their workers from the threat of AI.”

Journalists in other countries face a similar challenge. Greek journalist Sotiris Triantafyllou, president of the Panhellenic Federation of Journalists’ Union, describes AI adoption in his home country as not quite as expansive as in Northern Europe. This has allowed his union to be ahead of the curve domestically. In 2025, for example, they launched a code of ethics now adopted by the five unions of the federation.

“Now we are in discussions with managers and media owners. I don’t know what will happen in the future. But for now they agree with us, and I think they are in a mood to protect journalists,” Triantafyllou said.

“Like nailing Jell-O to a wall”

What all the union representatives I spoke to are looking for is a bottom-line commitment to human-led journalism and that AI does not take over skilled labor. There is broad support in using AI “housekeeping” tasks like transcription, translation, and summarization of large datasets. But pushback arises when managers implement tools that automate creative and journalistic work.

“We try to protect the central role journalists play because we believe that AI cannot replace them,” Triantafyllou said.

Unions often have to play whack-a-mole to deal with all the potential effects AI can have on workers. The initial question was perhaps “Will AI come for my job?” But now a myriad of other questions arise: if an employer sells journalistic information to a model, should employees who produced that content be compensated? Is the use of AI optional or will employees be replaced if they don’t adopt it? Will there be universal training for employees to apply these tools?

“It’s a moving target. It’s like nailing Jell-O to the wall, because you think you’ve got something done, and then the technology changes again,” Winton said. “When you are hired to do a job, you are hired to write a story for a publication, not to be part of this blob of AI that goes on forever. There’s a lot of interesting things that people are thinking through.”

Some news organizations, for example, are now trying to increase their output with the help of AI and AI-assisted reporters, such as U.K. local news publisher Mediahuis. Recently, Fortune editor Nick Lichtenberg came under scrutiny after a profile detailed how he used AI to crank out more than 600 stories. On these use cases, the journalists I spoke to believe in having a seat at the table: as AI-writing is becoming an unavoidable reality of journalism, journalists should have a say in how AI is used in their newsrooms rather than just executives looking to adopt the technology.

The newsroom manager and union director from the Philippines believes that while AI writing in journalism is seen as deeply unsettling because it threatens human creativity, authenticity, and editorial craft, its spread is still inevitable as economic pressure will push newsrooms to adopt it.

“It’s sad and tragic in a lot of ways, and many of us are mourning the kind of journalism we are used to, but the reality is ChatGPT, Gemini, and others are already capable of replicating the way humans speak and write, and they’ve been able to do so for quite some time now,” he said.

Despite these ongoing challenges, unions seem more important than ever. The representatives I spoke to highlighted a number of victories, from proactive negotiation with management in the case of Triantafyllou in Greece to providing binding arbitration in the United States.

“AI is something that is already impacting our industry, and union contracts are one way that journalists can have a say in how AI is deployed, rather than leaving those decisions up to news executives or corporations,” said Wittenberg.

A difficult balance

Few industries show financial distress as clearly as the news industry: repeated waves of job cuts, declining engagement, and precarious business models. In light of these existential challenges, AI has been presented as both a problem and an opportunity for growth.

No newsroom wants to be left behind, and some are resembling Silicon Valley in their language of adoption, pursuing rapid experimentation, “content scaling,” and liquid content.

Wittenberg has found AI to be a useful tool in handling large data sets or doing menial tasks like transcriptions. But she thinks some newsrooms have lost sight of why audiences come to them: because they want accurate and factual news.

“In the rush to innovate, news organizations think they are competing with tech companies,” she said. “The reality is that we are still news organizations and that means that we have an obligation to our ethics and to give our readers accurate factual news and to be held accountable when we make mistakes.”

My source in the Philippines admitted that protecting media workers from AI’s potential harms will be difficult because the news industry largely regulates itself and media owners are not naturally incentivized to put strong protections in place.

“They are looking at how they can make news more efficient, how they can save more money, how many employees they can let go because AI can do the work that they’re doing,” he said.

In his view, despite having limited power, journalists and their unions should still push to protect their own rights and the industry as a whole as many concessions will happen due to public pressure and broader public opinion.

“There’s always been that kind of divide between those who own the news media and those who are the news media,” he said. “As journalists, we have to be prepared because this is going to be an uphill battle.”

For years, Poliszuk had published stories on Southern Venezuela, which is made up of sparsely populated states that cover large swaths of the Amazon Basin and the Orinoco River Basin. Through field reporting, Poliszuk had exposed illegal gold mines, narcotrafficking operations, and crimes against indigenous groups scattered throughout the region’s rainforests. Now in exile — first working from Colombia, then Mexico — Poliszuk was forced to reimagine how to do his work from thousands of miles away. He began experimenting with satellite-based investigations.

Satellite imagery has long helped investigative journalists gather intelligence on conflict zones and track changes in remote landscapes. Now, in a new wave of satellite-based investigations, reporters are leaning on machine learning models to automate parts of this work and scale up their analysis to an unprecedented degree.

This innovation is most visible in environmental journalism. Poliszuk is just one in a cohort of South American investigative reporters who have used geospatial data and AI-powered pattern recognition to track illegal mining, large-scale logging operations, and cattle ranching across the Amazon.

As illegal gold mining spiked during the COVID-19 pandemic, Poliszuk knew there was a story in documenting the growth of these mines across Venezuela’s rainforests. But manually combing through the satellite images for over 50 million hectares of rainforest wasn’t practical. Poliszuk wondered if he could train a machine learning model to detect the scars of mining pits in these images, as well as the neighboring airstrips that are cut into dense vegetation and used to transport minerals.

With financial and editorial support from the Pulitzer Center’s first Rainforest Investigations Network (RIN) fellowship and technical support from the nonprofit Earth Genome, Poliszuk was able to do just that. In January 2022, he co-published his first article using the custom machine learning model in a series in El Pais titled “Corredor Furtivo [Clandestine Corridor].”

Poliszuk was able to identify 3,718 gold mining locations in the Venezuelan states of Amazonas and Bolívar. Some of those mines were operating inside protected indigenous lands and Canaima National Park, which is home to Angel Falls, the world’s tallest waterfall. By crosschecking maps identifying mining activity with crime data from Venezuelan authorities, Poliszuk was also able to determine whether the mines were run by Venezuelan syndicates, Colombian guerilla groups, or Brazilian garimpeiro (prospectors).

The week after Poliszuk published one of his first stories in the El Pais series, the Venezuelan military announced that it had bombed several illegal airstrips operating in the region.

“I have 20 years’ experience covering [illegal mining]…thanks to this technology I can show people the dimension of this phenomenon,” Poliszuk told me. “Thanks to this movement, we have understood that we can track by the air what we cannot prove on foot.”

The view from above

Even for journalists who aren’t working in exile, field reporting in the Amazon comes with a litany of accessibility issues and security risks. Poliszuk said a trip from the Venezuelan capital to one of the mines in the state of Amazonas involves a two-hour flight, a six-hour car ride, a four-hour boat ride, then another four-hour trek through the jungle — often through dangerous territory occupied by armed militia. These same groups often hold monopolies on oil and gas in the region, which can make fuel expensive and difficult to procure.

“It’s dangerous. It’s challenging. You cannot go there like you can go from Boston to Washington, or Caracas to Maracaibo,” he said.

The same year Poliszuk pitched his project to the Pulitzer Center, Brazilian journalist Hyury Potter incubated a similar investigation with the RIN fellowship. He also used machine models from Earth Genome, which collaborates with many journalists to conduct AI-based environmental and human rights investigations. Potter went on to publish several major investigations in Intercept Brasil that identified hundreds of previously unreported airstrips in the Brazilian Amazon and documented the explosion of illegal gold mining on protected indigenous lands. The New York Times published its own investigation based on the satellite imagery analysis, collaborating with Potter and the Pulitzer Center in the reporting process.

“It was like a think tank trying to figure out how to do this work,” said Poliszuk of his time in the RIN fellowship. “It was a very good time to think about a new journalism — another way of doing things.”

Based on the strength of these early investigations, the Pulitzer Center decided to build a dedicated platform that uses machine learning to track mining activity across the nine countries that are part of the Amazon Basin. Earth Genome built the interface and contributed the underlying geospatial detection models. The nonprofit advocacy group Amazon Conservation contributed fundraising support and helped develop impact metrics. In 2022, the three partner organizations launched Amazon Mining Watch.

“That was the beginning — inspired by the works of Joseph and Hyury, we were able to extrapolate and cover the entire Amazon,” said Gustavo Faleiros, the former director of environmental investigations for the Pulitzer Center.

The earliest days of Amazon Mining Watch relied on small, task-specific machine learning models. These models were trained by Earth Genome itself and customized only to identify gold mining sites and airfields in satellite imagery. These days, though, Earth Genome is experimenting with more powerful geospatial foundation models — models pre-trained on huge amounts of data, including satellite imagery, but also radar, land cover, and elevation data.

It’s likely these larger models will make geospatial investigations even more accessible to journalists, and not just ones covering the Amazon or illegal mining.

“In the same way that people figured out how to do unsupervised training of AI models for text — techniques that grew into large-language models — they have done the same thing in the geospatial data space,” said Edward Boyda, a physicist and co-founder of Earth Genome. “With very little additional input from a user — maybe just a few examples — the model can be effectively tuned to detect a wide variety of objects on the Earth’s surface.”

Beyond the Amazon

The Pulitzer Center and Earth Genome are now partnering with the nonprofit Code for Africa to bring a similar platform to the African continent. Earlier this month, the organizations announced the launch of Africa Mining Watch. The platform will use geospatial detection models to track mining operations across the tropical bend, a region that includes the Congo Basin, the world’s second-largest tropical rainforest. It’s expected to launch publicly in July.

On Earth Day last week, 25 journalists from across Africa took part in a seven-hour virtual mapathon to experiment with the platform and test out its ability to identify mines in their coverage areas.

“My hope is that Africa Mining Watch will be a platform that’s not as connected with the gold mining story, but with the strategic minerals story,” Faleiros said, pointing to the cobalt, copper, and coltan mines found across the Congo Basin.

Earth Genome is also building its own platform to harness these foundation models for journalists. The tool, Earth Index, allows a reporter, researcher, or policy maker to go into the platform and select a region on the world map. After they select examples of the thing they are interested in identifying — say, an artisanal gold mine in Ghana — the platform highlights other potential gold mines in the region.¹

In its invitation-only beta stage, Earth Index has been used to investigate illegal logging in Albania, commercial flower farms in Uganda, and palm oil production in Brazil. Boyda says they plan to release Earth Index publicly in late April.

“The idea with Earth Index is, instead of giving people the data, give them the tool to make their own data,” said Boyda. “Somebody who’s working in a specific area will know that context better than we ever could. With this tool, they can go and build the data set that they want.”

This story has been updated to correct where Earth Genome is based.

1. While LLMs have been criticized for their environmental footprint, including the energy and water consumption of data centers used to train them, Boyda says the models underlying Earth Index are a fraction of that size. Currently, Earth Index uses a foundation model built by the Technical University of Munich, which has about 20 million parameters, as opposed to the trillions likely found in the latest commercial LLMs. Processing two years of global embedding for the latest Earth Index release used 190 kWh of electricity, which comes out to about a week of an average house’s electricity use, according to Boyda.

Now, journalists and digital rights nonprofit organizations are pushing back against this trend and advocating for news publishers to lift their restrictions.

On Monday, Wired first reported on the publication of a new petition organized by the digital rights nonprofit Fight for the Future. The open letter does not call for any specific policy from publishers, but “applauds” the Wayback Machine for its work “at a time where many major media outlets are questioning whether to allow the Wayback Machine to continue to preserve journalism.” The petition has already been signed by over 120 journalists, including Cory Doctorow, Taylor Lorenz, and Ron Suskind.

“The Internet Archive is a national treasure. I use it daily, and have for many, many years. I cannot imagine doing the work I do without it,” MS Now host Rachel Maddow wrote in a testimonial published alongside the letter.

“The Internet Archive preserves over two decades of original reporting on music and popular culture by MTV News,” wrote Michael Alex, the founding editor of the now-shuttered music and popular culture news site. “History needs stewards. The people of the Internet Archive do an outstanding job of preserving irreplaceable work and making it available to journalists and researchers.”

PressProgress reporter Brishti Basu also signed the petition, detailing an incident when the Vancouver Police Department edited a press release after she published an article criticizing it for making misleading statements. The department then publicly accused her of falsifying information.

“I was able to use the Wayback Machine to immediately prove that the police department had changed their initial statement to make it look like I had lied in my article,” wrote Basu.

The petition follows a blog post published last month by the digital rights nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which cited Lab’s reporting. Joe Mullin, a senior policy analyst at EFF, called on new publishers to lift their limits on the Wayback Machine and instead take violating AI companies to court.

“In many cases, articles get edited, changed, or removed — sometimes openly, sometimes not. The Internet Archive often becomes the only source for seeing those changes,” wrote Mullin, noting that Wikipedia links to over 2.6 million news articles preserved by the Wayback Machine across 249 languages. “There are real disputes over AI training that must be resolved in courts. But sacrificing the public record to fight those battles would be a profound, and possibly irreversible, mistake.”

The recent rallying efforts by digital rights organizations echo public comments made by Wayback Machine’s director, Mark Graham, in the weeks after our reporting was first published. In February, Graham published an opinion piece on the tech policy blog TechDirt.

“Whatever legitimate concerns people may have about generative AI, libraries are not the problem, and blocking access to web archives is not the solution; doing so risks serious harm to the public record,” Graham said.

• A dangerous, unregulated form of gambling that allows for degenerate betting on real events, unfettered by the economic and legal rules that keep stock markets and sports betting in check, creating an opportunity for corruption and insider trading on a scale we have never seen before.
• Perfectly legal crystal balls that could replace polling and happen to come with a side of money.

Whatever they are, they’re constantly changing, and they’re increasingly becoming a part of the news business. In the last few months, Kalshi, a New York-based prediction market, has struck deals with CNBC, CNN, Fox News, and the AP, among others. Polymarket, another prediction market, announced a partnership with Substack in February and one with Dow Jones in January. Both Kalshi and Polymarket are also been positioning themselves as news providers in their own right — Polymarket, for example, borrows the language of news organizations (“BREAKING” and “JUST IN“) in its social media presence, which is dominated by tweets about the news followed by a link for users to bet on that news (and is also filled with misinformation).

Keeping up with prediction markets is practically a full-time job, and for a few journalists they’ve become an opportunity to stake out a new beat at the intersection of politics, culture, finance, technology, sports, and even possibly true crime.

“I see a lot of connections to things that I’ve covered in the past,” said Kate Knibbs, a senior writer at Wired who recently established herself as that publication’s resident prediction markets reporter. “I see it as an extension of the crypto boom. It’s a future of money story, an industry story, and very much something that is emerging as a natural extension of ongoing trends in American culture.”

Knibbs’ beat started percolating in her mind when she was on maternity leave. On the day she got back, she wrote a memo to her editors about covering prediction markets, which they were thrilled to receive — they had been talking about asking Knibbs to cover them anyway, because they knew she was interested in them.

For Knibbs, the beat is interesting not only because of potential future effects of prediction markets but also because of their ties to the past. “Someone was asking me, ‘Aren’t you worried that this is going to be like NFTs, and it’s just going to fizzle out?’ And I went, ‘Well, it literally is NFTs. It’s the same story.’ And you don’t get NFTs without Occupy Wall Street in my book. It’s all mixed together. I think we have this huge appetite for products like prediction markets because of the overall precarity of ordinary people’s finances.”

Dustin Gouker, an independent journalist who writes the prediction markets-focused newsletter Event Horizon, got interested in prediction markets because of his history covering fantasy sports and gambling. Until around 2018, he said, sports gambling involved going in person to a bookie — usually in Nevada — and placing a bet, getting a physical ticket to confirm the bet, waiting for the game to end, and then returning to the bookie to cash out any wins. The rise of sports gambling apps like FanDuel and DraftKings changed that dynamic, making gambling accessible to anyone with a smartphone. Prediction markets took that one step further, allowing people to bet on granular details of all kinds of events beyond the world of sports. “The velocity is supercharged,” Gouker told me from his office in Oregon. “You can lose a lot of money really quickly.”

Gouker writes two daily newsletters — Event Horizon and The Closing Line, about sports betting — and uses a combination of reporting methods to find stories. A friend helped him build a custom dashboard that plugs into Kalshi’s API to track trades, allowing him to quickly spot any notable movement, and he reactivated his X account, which he was on the verge of deleting, because he found much of the social chatter about prediction markets was happening on that platform.

“I wake up every day and I’m like, this is the world. I’m still in the fever dream,” Gouker told me. “It feels very Republican-coded, but that’s also because that’s why they exist, right? This would not exist without the Trump administration.” The Trump administration has sued states over their attempts to regulate prediction markets; Donald Trump Jr., the president’s son, is an advisor to Kalshi and sits on Polymarket‘s advisory board.

Gouker frequently gets texts from people within the prediction markets space about things they think he’d be interested in. His coverage is often critical (a recent newsletter was headlined “Prediction markets need to stop doing dumb shit”), but he says that’s a necessary balance to the narrative pushed by the prediction markets themselves.

“I’m a pain in the ass, but I’m a needed pain in the ass,” Gouker told me. “Am I overly harsh on them? Maybe, but I think there’s enough people glazing them out there in the world. If they do something good, I say that too.”

Knibbs, meanwhile, uses the service Unusual Whales to track particularly large movements on prediction markets, and often finds herself talking to academics and lawmakers about legal efforts to regulate them. She’s one of the few reporters on her beat (Suzy Khimm also covers prediction markets for NBC News, but NBC declined to participate in this story) and she is trying to approach sourcing holistically, talking to as many people in as many fields as possible.

“I’ve been dying to report stories about how the government is approaching this, because it blows my mind that we haven’t seen anyone arrested for insider trading yet,” she said. “I think if arrests are made, we’re going to get a new level of insight into what is actually going on here, because there will be criminal complaints that we can read and hopefully things that we can FOIA. Right now, it’s pretty opaque.”

Both Gouker and Knibbs have played around with prediction markets to some extent, but neither is a big gambler. (“That’s not my vice,” Knibbs said.) Gouker has used Kalshi to place the occasional bet on college sports, and Knibbs made $50 on PredictIt when she correctly predicted that John Fetterman would be elected to the Senate in 2023. Both also think it makes sense for news organizations to use prediction market data in their reporting, as long as they’re accepted as flawed forecasting tools rather than gospel truth. But Knibbs is concerned about how prediction markets and journalism might overlap in other places.

“What is deeply disturbing to me is all of these efforts to really enmesh the prediction markets in media companies,” she said. “I’m concerned about a world in which editorial is being told that they have to use certain phrasing in order to clear up any ambiguity in how these markets resolve. That’s really gross and would be a violation of editorial independence.”

Knibbs is also on the lookout for “the first big journalist insider trading scandal.” There’s information asymmetry, she points out: Journalists often learn information before the public does, and often have off-the-record conversations that could give them insights other people might not have. They’re also underpaid, which provides them a financial incentive to act on that information. She’s not the only one concerned about that possibility; this week, ProPublica updated its code of conduct to ban journalists from placing bets on news events on prediction markets.

Gouker is less concerned than Knibbs — he points out that the history of news organizations making ad deals is similarly fraught with thorny editorial questions — but he is curious about what will happen to prediction markets if the political winds shift. Prediction markets have been positioning themselves as something akin to the news, and while that might help them build legitimacy it could also open them up to the same political attacks the news has faced since Donald Trump’s first run for the presidency back in the 2016 election.

“Will Republicans continue to lead on prediction markets when the story is not one that they want to hear or see?” Gouker asked. “If Kalshi says there’s an 85% chance the Democrats will win the House, are Republicans going to say that’s fake news? There’s this huge intersection of politics and government and tech here. At some point, does the monster start eating its own tail?”

The answer, we learned Tuesday, is no: The Venetoulis Institute for Local Journalism, the nonprofit parent organization of The Baltimore Banner, reached an agreement with Block Communications to acquire the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, which was slated to shut down in May.

It’s a dramatic, if not entirely unpredicted, development for two news organizations whose opposite trajectories reflect some broader trends in the world of local news. The Post-Gazette is a beleaguered, historic metro daily whose union completed a divisive 1,133-day strike over health benefits last November. The NewsGuild technically won in court, but in January, Block Communications announced the newspaper’s financial losses were untenable and that it would print its final edition May 3.

The Banner, meanwhile, is a national poster child for nonprofit news success. Since its founding in 2022, when Maryland businessman and Venetoulis chairman and founder Stewart Bainum pledged $50 million over about five years to the news outlet, it has won a Pulitzer, grown into the state’s largest newsroom, and rebranded from The Baltimore Banner to The Banner, even expanding coverage into D.C.’s suburbs after Washington Post layoffs. (The Banner has not yet broken even.)

When Josh wrote about the Post-Gazette’s expected closure back in January, he observed that the Block family’s internal divisions and baggage might have stymied philanthropic support of local news in Pittsburgh. “Pittsburgh has been kind of stuck,” he wrote. “There’s pent-up capacity for something like the Lenfest Institute-era Philadelphia Inquirer or The Baltimore Banner — either a nonprofit conversion of the local daily or a robust competitor/replacement for it. But Block family drama — along with the neverending strike — complicated things enough to prevent much action.”

He even added: “The fact that the Post-Gazette announced a closure date that’s still five months off means there’ll be time for some combination of Pittsburgh’s foundations, universities, and institutions to react. Maybe that looks like the Blocks donating the Post-Gazette to a nonprofit that carries on with a decent-sized newsroom — a version of what the Salt Lake Tribune has done.”

Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, but The New York Times reported that Bainum and his wife Sandy will commit an additional $30 million over the next five years “to help expand The Banner and turn around the Post-Gazette.” In a note to Banner subscribers Tuesday, Venetoulis Institute CEO Bob Cohn wrote that the “generous investment is designed to taper over time as revenue grows, putting us on a clear path to full financial sustainability.” The transaction will take effect May 4.

The Times also reported that Venetoulis was neither the only nor the highest bidder for The Banner — Alden Global Capital, the hedge fund known for gutting newspapers, was among the rival contenders.

“The Block family has worked to find the best possible source for responsible local journalism for the Pittsburgh region and we believe we have succeeded,” said Karen Johnese, chairperson of Block Communications, Inc, in a statement. Block Communications did not return my call for comment.

In his note to Banner subscribers, Cohn framed the acquisition as a move that lifts all boats and, specifically, “strengthens our work in Baltimore and throughout Maryland.” Spreading the cost across a broader business, he wrote, accelerates The Banner’s path to sustainability and “makes the model stronger and more durable here in Maryland as well as in Pittsburgh….Throughout this growth, our commitment to Maryland remains unchanged and central to everything we do.”

“From its launch in 2021, the Venetoulis Institute had a vision to create a nonprofit business model to address the local news crisis playing out across the country,” Banner VP of editorial and business development Monique Jones told me in an email. While that work began in Baltimore and has expanded across Maryland, the ambition of the Venetoulis Institute “has always been to take that model to other regions.” The Venetoulis team sees promise for replicating The Banner’s model in regions that “[care] deeply about the impact of local news on its communities with audiences willing to pay for news and a supportive business and philanthropic environment.”

Venetoulis expects to reach sustainability “in the next few years,” and has no plans for acquisitions or expansions beyond Maryland and Pennsylvania at this time, Jones added.

According to the Post-Gazette’s reporting, Venetoulis plans to continue the newspaper’s two print publication days; Jones confirmed those plans. While the Times reported that new ownership plans to hire back “a large number” of the Post-Gazette’s employees and run advertising and sponsorships locally, Bainum told the Post-Gazette that the “current business model does not support the size of the current newsroom,” which stands at around 100, adding, “We’re going to have to thoughtfully address that.” Jones said it’s “too early to know” how many Post-Gazette employees Venetoulis will rehire. She added that Venetoulis plans to combine back-end operations including finance, HR, subscription marketing, and technology into a shared services platform that supports sustainability across both organizations.

“Local journalism is essential to a strong community, but across the country the business model has been under severe strain,” Bainum said in a statement. “We believe there is a path forward — one that combines great journalism with a diversified business model built on scale and exceptional talent.”

“Banner leadership has already publicly indicated that it intends to cut jobs and not uphold our union contract,” the Pittsburgh NewsGuild noted in a statement. “Asset sales do not inherently get companies out from under the legal liabilities they have already incurred. The Nov. 10, 2025 U.S. 3rd Circuit Court ruling requires the company to pay back all bargaining unit employees for the costs the paper illegally passed onto them. That liability does not go away with the sale of the paper.”

“We are excited for this historic institution to survive,” the NewsGuild added, “and eager to ensure that it operates in a way that respects the people of Pittsburgh, and the journalists who strive to serve them.”

Updated April 15 with additional answers from The Banner.

But social traffic is down, too. Last week, when I was analyzing how links hurt publishers on Twitter, I asked analytics platform Chartbeat for data on how Twitter referral traffic has changed.

The decline is stark. Global Chartbeat clients’ traffic from Twitter has fallen by 70% since 2022 when Elon Musk acquired the platform.

But it’s not just Twitter. Facebook traffic has declined steeply, too.

Users are also spending less time on publishers’ sites after they click through from Facebook or Twitter. This chart looks specifically at engaged time on news and media sites:

Charts made with Claude.

To better understand the trends and challenges in the growing landscape, CNTI partnered with Project C — a research hub on creator journalism — to survey 43 independent information providers and creator-journalists in the United States. Twenty-six of the survey respondents also participated in in-depth interviews about their work. Nieman Lab readers will recognize some of the names here: Taylor Lorenz (User Mag), Kat Tenbarge (Spitfire News), Ryan Teague Beckwith (Your First Byline), and Barbara “Bob” Allen (The College Journalism Newsletter), among others.

The report, titled “U.S. Indie Info Providers: Professionally Diverse, Mission-driven, Sometimes Lonely, Rarely Earning Profit,” finds that while “indie info providers” increasingly see themselves as mission-driven small business owners, only five of the 43 respondents said they could “fully fund their lifestyle” with content creation income; just over 50% (23) said they “can’t fund their lifestyle at all” with their content. Less than one in three interviewees had a “formal or developed business strategy,” according to the report.

Like many journalists working in legacy newsrooms, news creators find their work meaningful and fulfilling, but they also worry about making ends meet and consider cash flow and managing finances to be some of their greatest challenges. Many of the creators interviewed said they rely on a mix of income sources, from freelance and consulting work to savings and support from a partner.

“Journalism isn’t immune to the larger trend of the gig-ification of labor,” CNTI senior research manager Jay Barchas-Lichtenstein told me. “Most people in the U.S. think that journalism is stably funded and that access to quality information should be a right. But instability in the industry is actually a big driver behind the indie trend. These trends are in tension: If you believe information is a public good, someone still has to pay for it. If something is valuable to you, find a way to support it financially. That’s especially true if you have the means to do so for people who don’t.”

Of the 43 survey respondents, 35 identified themselves as journalists. Many had previously worked as reporters in legacy newsrooms, others had held management positions in news, and some had no journalism experience at all. CNTI found that the news creators with only newsroom experience felt the least prepared when it came to business and operational management. Ten out of 26 interviewees had taken professional development courses to learn business skills.

Subscriptions, memberships and donations, and advertising were the most common revenue streams. Only a few respondents have found a “third pillar” to fund their content. “One sells software related to their reporting and uses some paywalled games to drive subscriptions, and the other serves as a broker for market research, connecting their professional audience to paid opportunities for a finder’s fee,” the report says.

Asking for money is also hard. Four interviewees cited imposter syndrome as a hurdle and felt as if other content is more deserving of reader revenue. Former journalists without business experience also struggle with pricing and marketing their work.

Monetizing content sometimes also conflicts with creators’ beliefs about information access. Some of the creators interviewed serve audiences that are less likely to have disposable income for a subscription publication, so they can’t rely on subscriptions or donations.

“News is so important it should not be gated…[but] news is not free to produce,” one creator said.

One of the most financially successful interviewees — whose publication serves a niche group of professionals — told CNTI that “Writing for a wealthy group of people is the only way at this point, as far as I can tell, to run a media business…90% of media businesses just write for upper-middle-class people if not just upper-class people.”

Other interesting findings from the report include:

Creators largely work alone, but rely on each other for support. Independent news and information creation is a growing field. Interviewees said they work long, intense hours, and often on their own. They look to other creators for inspiration and advice, and pay it forward when they can.

“I still dedicate a lot of time when people ask me about starting your own business or about being a solo in the newsletter world,” one creator told CNTI. “Because people did that for me and I have an ethical obligation to share that, especially now that I’ve been doing this a little bit longer.”

Maintaining a presence on multiple platforms is exhausting, but necessary. Most of the creators interviewed are active on at least three platforms to distribute and promote their work. They weigh which platforms to use based on multimedia offerings, audience preferences, and revenue potential. They described maintaining a presence on multiple platforms as time-consuming and “frustrating” but necessary so as not to become dependent on any one source for reach and revenue.

“Seeing what happened to Twitter, it was very clear to me that any tech company could implode that quickly,” one creator said.

AI has pros and cons. Some interviewees were concerned about audience use of AI as an information source. (At the same time, none of them “described using AI tools like LLMs as a distribution platform.”) Several used AI for business and production tasks, but almost none used it to actually create content. A few creators avoided AI entirely, and some were actively opposed to its use.

“I think that people should use their big brains, and you can put that in there,” one creator told CNTI.

Read the full report here.

Posts with links definitely do worse. The New York Times, which includes links in 88% of its tweets, has 53 million followers and a median of 383 engagements (likes + comments + RT’s) per tweet — an engagement rate of 0% when you calculate average engagements per follower. CNN‘s engagement rate? Also 0%. Engagement-maxing accounts like @GlobeEyeNews and @LeadingReport, which don’t include links in tweets, perform much better, with engagement rates of 0.95% and 0.45%, respectively.

But links aren’t the only thing that make or break a tweet. I used Claude to analyze the text of all the tweets in my sample and point out possible patterns. Here are a couple things that make a news tweet perform well on X.

Breaking! Across the board, tweets that begin with “Breaking” or “Breaking News:” have higher engagement. New York Times tweets that began with “Breaking News:” had an average 3,232 engagements, four times the average. A similar pattern held for tweets from the AP, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal. (CNN rarely uses “Breaking” in tweets.)

Breaking News: Law enforcement officials are said to have disrupted a plot to assassinate Nerdeen Kiswani, the leader of one of New York’s most active pro-Palestinian protest groups. https://t.co/xWdsleQRRl

— The New York Times (@nytimes) March 27, 2026

Breaking News: The U.S. will allow a Russian oil tanker to reach Cuba, letting critical fuel in after months of what amounted to a blockade. https://t.co/FsMPauYJ72

— The New York Times (@nytimes) March 29, 2026

BREAKING: Trans women athletes are banned from the Olympics by a new IOC policy on female eligibility. https://t.co/ZgLxRn9DO9

— The Associated Press (@AP) March 26, 2026

Breaking news: Two U.S. military aircraft were shot down in separate incidents Friday while conducting combat operations against Iran, setting off a search-and-rescue effort that remains ongoing for one missing crew member, U.S. officials said.https://t.co/jiwiNNYKZr

— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) April 3, 2026

Globe Eye News and Leading Report begin just about every tweet with “BREAKING.”

Trump quotes: Fox News’s most-engaged tweets were direct quotes from Trump, no editorializing added. Its most engaged-with tweet in my sample was his Easter message.

PRESIDENT TRUMP: "I'm proud to join with Christians across the country and around the world to celebrate the most glorious miracle in all of time: The resurrection of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ."

"To be a great nation, you must have religion — and you must have God. In… pic.twitter.com/1iIc1SKp4G

— Fox News (@FoxNews) April 4, 2026

~Vagueness~: Globe Eye News tweets that did not include sourcing information got nearly twice the engagement of tweets that did include a source. In other words, unattributed claims do better. Here are Globe Eye News’s most-engaged tweets in my sample:

BREAKING:

Iran announces the Strait of Hormuz is open to all countries except the United States, Israel, and their allies. pic.twitter.com/hyV49YFPs7

— Globe Eye News (@GlobeEyeNews) March 14, 2026

BREAKING:

France sold its gold stored in New York and purchased an equivalent amount in Europe.

All of France’s gold reserves are now located in Paris. pic.twitter.com/b9DgIbzZBC

— Globe Eye News (@GlobeEyeNews) April 6, 2026

Meanwhile, Globe Eye News tweets that included an “according to” — whether it was “according to” X news outlet or “according to” an investigation — were among its poorest performers.

BREAKING:

President Trump says China should help the US keep the Strait of Hormuz open, according to FT. pic.twitter.com/b8HeJPQWpT

— Globe Eye News (@GlobeEyeNews) March 16, 2026

BREAKING:

US responsible for deadly bombing of Minab school in Iran that killed 175 children and other people, according to preliminary investigation findings. pic.twitter.com/igkcetSm72

— Globe Eye News (@GlobeEyeNews) March 11, 2026

On Monday, TMZ — the American tabloid outlet known for entertainment and celebrity news — announced that its staffers are now covering Washington D.C.

“Our 3 intrepid producers — Charlie Cotton, Jacob Wasserman and Jakson Buhaj — are working The Hill,” the story reads. “So we’re in D.C. … on the hunt for good stories. We’re also going to explore the intersection between pop culture and politics. We have a lot in store in that department!”

TMZDC Staff Starts Today!!! https://t.co/KmnBdeJTaA pic.twitter.com/s7wpG8lMtW

— TMZ (@TMZ) April 13, 2026

The announcement comes after TMZ spent the last two weeks crowdsourcing photos and information to hold politicians’ feet to the fire during the longest partial government shutdown in United States history.

The Department of Homeland Security has been partially shut down since February 14. On March 26, TMZ published an interview with Rebecca Wolf, a furloughed TSA employee who was struggling to make ends meet.

TMZ was outraged, founder and executive producer Harvey Levin said in a statement to Nieman Lab, and put a call out to its audience to send in photos and sighting of politicians on spring break trips. Its following is massive; TMZ has 8.2 million followers on both Instagram and X, 6 million TikTok followers, 5.1 million YouTube subscribers, and had 47 million visitors to its website in March, according to SimilarWeb.

“We wanted to use our platforms to show how Congress — Dems AND Republicans — have betrayed us,” Levin said. “We spontaneously came up with the idea to juxtapose members of Congress on their Spring Break against federal workers who are losing their homes, their cars, their livelihoods.”

Since then, TMZ has published several stories about elected officials on vacation while unpaid DHS employees try to figure out how to pay the next month’s rent.

South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham “lives it up” in Disney World. California representative Robert Garcia was snapped at a Las Vegas Casino. New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was seen at a New York Yankees game. On March 27, President Donald Trump signed an executive order to backpay TSA workers, though the department is still partially shut down.

The photos are the paparazzi-like iPhone shots we’re used to seeing of celebrities. As Substack writer Joe Mayall tweeted, “TMZ found an interesting political niche. By covering politicians’ corruption like it’s a celebrity scandal, it attracts both audiences.”

“@TMZ has this opening because DC journalism is failing at holding the powerful in Washington to account in the Trump era,” another user tweeted.

The images seem to have resonated. I looked at TMZ’s 100 most-liked posts between March 26 and April 13. TMZ’s most-liked X post in this timeframe was a photo of Cruz on a flight out of D.C. on March 27. The post has more than 73,000 likes, 11,000 retweets, and 4.8 million views.

Senators Ted Cruz and John Thune leave D.C. amid the government shutdown.

Exclusive details: https://t.co/CUnFtLge3r pic.twitter.com/q9B9IDLAsw

— TMZ (@TMZ) March 27, 2026

Its most retweeted post is an “exclusive” story that spotted several congressional members on a trip to Scotland. For comparison, its entertainment stories from this timeframe have a median of 7,000 likes and a few hundred retweets.

Not everyone has been amused by the coverage. Capitol Hill staffers are nervous about their employers’ impending “TMZ moment,” according to Politico. On April 5, Florida senator Rick Scott tweeted a photo of himself at Disney World, saying “Hey TMZ. Yes, I’m at Disney with my grandkids. Should we be in DC? Yes! But I don’t get to make that decision.”

“Well, challenge accepted,” TMZ tweeted with its story about Scott’s post.

“Our D.C. presence will sometimes be fun,” Levin said, “sometimes intensely serious.”

About two dozen Guild members picketed ProPublica’s headquarters in New York City’s Hudson Square neighborhood during working hours, as simultaneous picket lines formed in front of the publication’s offices in Chicago and Washington D.C. On the uncharacteristically cold April morning in Manhattan, strikers bundled up in winter gear as they chanted and carried signs reading “ProPublic Workers: Deserve Fair Pay” and “Thoughts Not Bots.”

The Guild has been negotiating its first collective bargaining agreement for two and a half years, and the one-day action was intended to put new pressure on ProPublica’s management to agree to several contract proposals. The union is seeking “just cause” protections for terminations, wage increases to keep up with the rising cost of living, and contract language that would prohibit layoffs resulting from AI adoption.

“We have been trying to do this quietly at the bargaining table for two and a half years, and I’m as shocked as anybody that we are out here,” said Katie Campbell, a video journalist and member of the contract action team for the ProPublica Guild. “We need to have this done.”

The Wednesday action marked the first time a major U.S. newsroom has gone on strike, at least in part, over AI protections.

Bargaining committee members told me there has been little movement from ProPublica management since the strike authorization vote passed on March 20, with the support of 92% of the Guild. That includes the dispute over a provision that would restrict layoffs because of AI technologies. Management has offered expanded severance for AI-related layoffs as a counter proposal.

“Broadly trust in journalism is in a really fragile place,” said Campbell, noting the rise of “AI slop” and AI-generated disinformation on social media. “I would think that we would want to be leading the way on something like this. We have an opportunity to be a place that people know that they can always go to and trust that it’s going to be work that’s produced by humans.”

On social media, the Guild encouraged readers not to “cross the digital picket line” by refraining from visiting ProPublica’s website or engaging with its stories. They also asked readers not to attend a virtual event about its news app on Wednesday afternoon, which was held while workers who’d organized the event were on the picket line. A petition launched Wednesday calling for ProPublica to agree to the Guild’s contract terms had received roughly 4,200 signatures by Thursday morning.

In a statement to Nieman Lab, Tyson Evans, the chief product and brand officer at ProPublica, said, “ProPublica is committed to reaching a fair and sustainable first contract to cement the strong pay and benefits we’ve always provided our staff.” For our story on the Guild’s strike authorization vote, Evans said that ProPublica has never had a layoff in its 18-year history and that the publication is “confident we can continue to navigate future changes responsibly.”

Susan DeCarava, the president of The NewsGuild of New York, joined strikers in front of the ProPublica offices yesterday. During a spare moment on the picket line, she told me that while this strike may be setting precedent for her union, it likely won’t be the last over AI adoption in newsrooms.

“We’re going to see more and more concentrated conflicts between media bosses and journalists and media workers over who has a say and how AI is used in their workplaces,” she said.

For one, The New York Times Guild is currently in contract negotiations after its last agreement expired in February. Already, AI language has taken center stage in the Guild’s initial bargaining sessions, including over a proposal that would see Guild members receive a share of the revenue earned when their work is licensed for AI training.

During a midday rally on Wednesday, striking ProPublica employees played acoustic renditions of Bruce Springsteen’s “Dancing in the Dark” and the feminist labor song “Bread and Roses.” The backdrop for the performance: “Scabby the Rat,” the inflatable rodent used by unions across the U.S. to condemn strikebreaking activities.

New York City labor leaders from the Communication Workers of America (CWA) and the AFL-CIO addressed the crowd, as did Lily Oberstein, the chair of Business Insider’s union, another unit of The Newsguild of New York. Oberstein encouraged members to continue their fight for AI protections, pointing to Business Insider’s own layoffs of 21% of staffers last year. In a companywide memo at the time, CEO Barbara Peng said that Business Insider would be going “all-in on AI” as part of the decision.

Beyond the strike, the ProPublica Guild has also taken its dispute over newsroom AI adoption to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). On Monday, the Guild filed an unfair-labor-practice charge, citing a “unilateral implementation of AI policy.” The filing claims that ProPublica published AI editorial guidelines on its website last month, without first bargaining with union members over its tenets and language.

“We previewed these principles with the bargaining committee before publishing them and they offered no meaningful edits,” Evans said in a statement, calling the complaint “unfounded.”

While the dispute over AI may be the most novel part of this strike, more fundamental job protections are top of mind for some employees. That includes a provision that would require a legitimate and documented reason for firing employees, or “just cause.”

“There are people who are doing really huge investigations and award-winning work, then suddenly management’s pushing them out. That’s my biggest concern,” said Asia Fields, an engagement reporter and unit member. “ProPublica has such a great reputation — and it deserves that reputation. The journalism is so good, but I think people are surprised to know that management’s been so resistant to even basic protections.”