Take your pick because those two options — and many more — appear in a newly unredacted court filing in the ongoing New York Times v. OpenAI/Microsoft case. The motion was filed by a group of news publishers led by The New York Times. The most inflammatory language was not written by the Times’ lawyers, however, but by OpenAI’s and Microsoft’s own executives.

“Millions of people around the world will soon consider large models ‘hoovering up’ all their work to be an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions,” wrote Brent Hecht, Microsoft’s director of applied science, in the unearthed documents. “Almost no one intended for content they created to be used in this fashion, nor are they compensated for its use,” he wrote

In an emailed statement, a Microsoft spokesperson said Hecht’s comments “reflect one employee’s individual perspective, are not a legal analysis, and do not represent the company’s views.”

AI companies have publicly argued that their training falls under the legal doctrine of fair use. Publishers, however, have long warned that the AI companies’ plan to take content without compensation will severely undermine the news industry whose work trains those models. It appears at least some within the AI industry agree with the assessment.

Internal Microsoft communications identified the “real risk” that generative AI could “significantly disrupt the employment of the very people who generated the data on which the foundation model was trained.” A separate policy document put it like this: “LLMs are a product that destroys its supply chain.”

The current approach has created a “doom loop,” according to another internal Microsoft document.

“Our AI content strategy has started a ‘doom loop’ that will hurt the performance of our models and the entire web at the same time,” the document reads. “It is highly unusual that an end-product threatens the economic foundations of its essential suppliers, but that is the situation we have created for our LLM business with respect to its ‘content supply chain.’”

Elsewhere, Nick Turley, OpenAI’s head of ChatGPT, acknowledged that publishers face an “existential threat” from OpenAI’s products. The AI tools “are largely substitutive, period” and “will get more and more substitutive as they get better.”

OpenAI president and co-founder Greg Brockman told his colleagues: “[W]e are excellent at news btw. every time i do any generative stuff on NYT it seems to predict the next sentence pretty well.” Brockman also wrote that OpenAI’s model “seems to be particularly good at predicting text of news articles like whenever i have it complete in the middle of a sentence in a NYT article, it seems to complete the sentence on point.”

The filing also shows that OpenAI employees went out of their way to evade news paywalls to scrape websites. (When told about “a hack to get around nytimes paywall,” Brockman responded “ah nice.”)

Previously, these statements were heavily redacted or under seal. Some portions remain sealed.

“Easy to see why the AI companies had so many redactions,” wrote Digital Content Next CEO Jason Kint, who first shared the unredacted documents on X. “Their own people wrote the lede for NYT.”

You can read the court documents here.

“Betting the House” is a “pop-up newsroom” that consists of Emily Atkin, of the climate newsletter HEATED; Rachel Ramirez, a former CNN climate reporter who now writes a newsletter called The Confluence; Chase Cain, formerly of NBC and now the creator of the YouTube channel Chase What Matters; Ben Tracy, previously a climate reporter and CBS and now a video producer at Climate Central; and Tracy Wholf, who now runs the company WereWHOLF Media after being laid off from her job as coordinating producer of CBS’s climate team.

The project received support to cover reporting costs from Covering Climate Now, an organization founded by Columbia Journalism Review and The Nation in association with The Guardian and WNYC in 2019 to support climate journalism.

Over the course of five months, Atkin, Ramirez, Cain, and Tracy chose a topic to report on together — they landed on housing — and went out to report stories across the United States on the topic. Atkin went house-hunting in Florida’s “climate danger zone,” Cain reported on the home insurance crisis looming over New Orleans, Ramirez wrote about a clash between private property rights and public beaches in Hawaii, and Tracy produced a video about how coastal homeowners in North Carolina and Connecticut are adapting to a changing shoreline. Wholf, stepping into a role similar to the one she had at CBS, acted as editor and coordinator, organizing team calls and looking over drafts.

“The idea, really, is that as much as this is a climate story, it was also about how we can create new models for independent journalists to operate,” Wholf told me. “When major publications all report on the same thing, it elevates a topic and it gets more attention. So we decided to do the same thing and swarm-report on housing.”

The “pop-up newsroom” has a dedicated landing page on Covering Climate Now’s website with links to each journalist’s newsletter or YouTube video, and the journalists are all linking to the other works in the project on their own channels. Wholf says this works because the journalists don’t feel they’re in competition with one another and that they all have distinct individual styles. Ramirez’s newsletter, which focuses on oceans, for example, draws a different audience from Atkin’s, which describes itself as a “newsletter for people who are pissed off about the climate crisis.” The hope is that by linking to each other’s stories, each journalist will see a boost in subscribers — paid or unpaid — to their own channels.

“It’s taken a lot more time and energy than I initially anticipated, but it’s also felt like it’s been worth the investment,” Wholf said. “We need to start coming up with new ways in which we can function and operate and grow, and so our real goal here is to just try it out. We see this as, hopefully, an example that any beat could follow.”

“The Medill survey provides a warning to news leaders,” Stephanie Edgerly and Tim Franklin write in the report released this week. “Respondents showed clear distrust of AI in the news-gathering process. Discomfort with AI was widespread.”

Medill surveyed 1,223 adults in the Chicago area and found few respondents were comfortable with AI use for coverage prioritization, writing news stories, or generating images or video. About half of respondents were comfortable with AI use for editing spelling and grammar, while 22% were “very uncomfortable or uncomfortable” even with that application.

The researchers say the survey “can be taken as a microcosm for what is happening locally across the country.”

Two-thirds of respondents did not report any use of AI to find or consume local news in the past week; only 11% asked an AI chatbot a question about local news instead of using a search engine.

A few other tidbits from the report:

• Fewer people are paying for local news. The number of people who have supported a local news organization financially by subscribing, donating, or becoming a member dropped from 19% in 2024 to 14% in 2026.
• Search engine use for local news is down. The percentage of respondents using a search engine to find local news daily declined to 34% from 41% in 2024.
• Newspapers are outpacing TV in the transition to digital (but both are in trouble). While broadcast, newspapers, and radio are all hemorrhaging audiences, “newspapers are far ahead in the critical task of going where the audiences are,” Edgerly and Franklin write. Of people who say they get local news at least once a month from a newspaper, 47% got that news via the newspaper’s website, app, or email. On the other hand, among those getting local news from TV at least once a month, 62% watched the broadcast and only 15% went to the TV station’s website, app, or email. “This shows that local TV news still has a long way to go to fix its audience problem,” the researchers write.

Read more and find the full report here.

It’s true. At The New York Times, I’m a deputy editor on the newsroom development and support team. Our job is to help reporters and editors learn new skills and tools through training and product rollouts. We train colleagues on AI, storytelling formats, engaging in the comments, and much more. And we build new tools that save our coworkers time so they can focus on making journalism.

Throughout my journalism career, I’ve worked on countless newsroom change initiatives at organizations big and small. You might say that I’ve been on the “new thing” beat, always studying emerging technology, and collaborating with colleagues to teach it to reporters and editors.

So, what gives? Well, it may sound counterintuitive, but the lessons in Saying No to New can serve as a secret weapon for newsroom innovation.

The first thing I tell people is that my book is not about saying no to all new things. It’s about resisting the pull of new things that distract us from what matters in life. Science tells us that humans are naturally drawn to novelty, which is why it can be so easy to get carried away by the hype of the next shiny new thing.

In our personal lives, that may be new stuff that costs money, creates clutter, or drains our time and attention. In a newsroom, that may be using technology in a way that conflicts with our journalistic standards. The book’s title, Saying No to New, acts as a sort of counterbalance to our bias for novelty.

But the book is also about leaning into newness — the right kind of newness. One of my central lessons is this: If you can get good at avoiding the wrong type of new, you’ll also get good at identifying the right type of new. At the Times, we are always on the lookout for new tools that help reporters parse complex data sets, or new workflows that save editors time. We help journalists grow their careers by teaching them new skills that will set them up for the future.

This nuance is important and core to the work my teammates and I do. Journalists certainly shouldn’t resist all new things if they want to stay relevant in this age of constant disruption. But we also shouldn’t recklessly embrace every newfangled thing that comes along. Striking that balance is the trick. You can do it with a strategy that investigates, interrogates, and experiments with new things.

Here’s how, drawing upon a decision-making framework I outlined in my book and examples from my career training journalists.

Embrace uncertainty

Humans do not like uncertainty — so much so that researchers have found that the more uncertain something becomes, the more stressed we become.

This matters when we’re training journalists on something new because a new thing is by definition an uncertainty. We don’t know how it will work, what will go wrong, or what will go right. Any new endeavor in a workplace is a journey down an uncertain path.

Here’s the problem: Because humans are allergic to uncertainty, we instinctively try to avoid it. One way is by thinking we can accurately predict the future. This is a phenomenon called the overconfidence effect. The more unknown something is (and thus, the more uncertain something is), the more confident we become in our ability to forecast the outcome.

This can get us into trouble at the start of a new initiative because we may set unrealistic expectations about it. This is known as the planning fallacy. When this happens, we “spin scenarios of success while overlooking the potential for mistakes and miscalculations,” wrote Daniel Kahneman and Dan Lovallo in a 2003 piece in Harvard Business Review.

To overcome these psychological hurdles, we should embrace uncertainty. My team always tries to keep an open mind at the start of a project. We outline our plan but also take note of what we don’t know. We expect messiness at the start of something new.

This is especially the case with AI. When we are preparing to train reporters and editors on a new AI tool, there is a lot we do know. We know that the Times has stated clear principles for responsible experimentation, like how the technology should always be used with human guidance and review. But there’s also a lot we don’t know. For example, we don’t know all the different ways a reporter might want to use a tool for research. We don’t know for certain whether the tool will end up being useful or not.

This mindset allows us to lead with curiosity and not assume we have all the answers. It also makes any new initiative a collaboration with our colleagues so we can work with them to find answers to our burning questions.

Size it up

It’s a myth that caution and skepticism are signs of resistance to a new tool. In my experience, when my colleagues start asking questions, it means they’re curious (they are journalists, after all).

They want to know how something works, but also why we’re doing something new in the first place. Why should they use a new tool? What purpose does it serve?

Don’t avoid these questions. Lean into them. Size up the new workflow task in your content management system or the new AI tool. Spell out why you’re doing something — and specifically, how it serves the journalistic mission. Interrogate the value it will bring to the daily work of a journalist.

With every new thing my team works on, we think about what motivates New York Times journalists. Reporting. Editing. Finding the truth. Telling compelling stories. We push ourselves to understand how the new thing will serve those motivations.

We have a policy on our team that every new project must start with a proposal. The proposal involves six simple prompts:

• Overview: A one-sentence problem statement.
• Proposal: What you’re going to do and why.
• Goal: One sentence that explains what you expect to achieve as a result of the project.
• Who: Who is working on the project, who from leadership is overseeing it and who needs to be kept informed.
• When: When it will start and when it will end.
• How it will work: A short outline of the steps you plan to take.

By drilling into these details, we remove the noise and hype of a new thing and focus on what matters.

When in doubt, try it out

We can never be 100% certain about the outcome of a new project. But that doesn’t mean we can’t remove at least some of the uncertainty about it.

The single best way to improve our predictions about what a new thing can and cannot do is by trying it out. My team starts any new initiative with a pilot phase. The pilot allows us to dip our toes into a new thing before rolling it out to the entire newsroom. For us, that often means training a limited number of journalists and studying the results.

Keeping the project contained has several benefits. It allows us to observe and ask questions. And it lowers the stakes — we expect missteps at this stage because, again, we couldn’t have predicted what would happen. If we’re rolling out new technology, we collaborate closely with our colleagues in product to gather feedback about the tool.

Last year, we wanted to explore how we might teach journalists the ins and outs of easy-to-use AI tools that could be used to help them find information and sift through datasets. As a pilot, we had members of our team spend time with two newsroom departments, teaching the tools and answering questions, while also paying close attention to the potential use cases and challenges. Then we stopped, assessed how it went, and used the pilot to design a program we would later bring to other desks.

Learn to learn

I interviewed Adam Cifu, a general internist at the University of Chicago Medicine. I wanted to understand how he assesses new things in the medical field. I mean, who better to learn from than someone who makes life-or-death decisions?

Dr. Cifu told me about something called evidence-based medicine, a framework for making smart decisions. He said that an essential principle of evidence-based medicine is what doctors do after a new treatment or procedure has been rolled out. Doctors will examine the results of a new drug, for instance, to determine whether or not it worked as intended.

Although the stakes are quite different in our line of work, there is an analogous step when introducing new things to journalists. As a new thing gets implemented within an organization, we must also evaluate the results and learn from what we find out. We want to know how many people are using it, how they’re using it, and whether it is being used in ways that we hoped — and then use that data to make informed choices going forward.

Last year, my team partnered with the Audience team at The Times to train reporters and editors on how to participate more in our story comments to engage directly with readers. As we made our way across the newsroom, training our colleagues on the best practices for facilitating great conversations with readers, we carefully observed the results. In addition to a central question — are people doing it? — we also measured the quality of the comments themselves.

This assessment gave us a multi-dimensional view of the outcome, which we then used to make adjustments in future training efforts.

As journalism reached breakneck speed to produce mountains of content for insatiable digital platforms, it “drifted away from where people actually live their lives,” Parris Jr. wrote last year. He predicted 2026 would “push us back toward the physical and tangible in the spaces we work, the ways we engage, and the products we create.” And he pointed to one civic space well positioned to serve as a starting point for that work: libraries.

After several years leading engagement journalism initiatives at ProPublica, The New York Times, and The City (now The City Reporter), and securing an MLIS from library school along the way, Parris Jr. has spent the past year as a John S. Knight fellow at Stanford refining his vision for the Library Newsroom Project. Through the project’s first pilot, a partnership with the Brooklyn Public Library’s Sunset Park branch, a group of community members has published more than a dozen editions of a free, print monthly bulletin called the Sunset Park Sun.

In August, Parris Jr. outlined his vision for “propagating” the Library Newsroom Project’s Brooklyn pilot in other communities around the country. “I once described the larger ambition as opening 16,000 community-led newsrooms, one in every public library in the country,” he wrote. Now, he thinks about the work in more expansive terms. He believes the goal should be “creating 16,000 places where neighbors can look more closely at where they live and make something public from what they find.”

I was curious about many aspects of the Library Newsroom Project (LNP), including other pilots in the works, its origin story, and its possibilities and limits as a form of local news. I sent Parris Jr. a bunch of questions; our email conversation has been condensed and edited for length and clarity.

“Google is sending us fewer people who aren’t going to subscribe,” Thompson said in an interview with longtime media journalist Peter Kafka. On the Friday episode of Channels, Thompson answered questions as the CEO of a profitable media company — and as a news creator himself.

Thompson has 1.6 million followers on LinkedIn and about 6,500 on YouTube. His videos and podcasts are produced independently of The Atlantic’s editorial team but provide revenue that gets reinvested into the newsroom. (The latest episode of The Most Interesting Thing in AI is sponsored by PwC.)

The Atlantic currently has 1.6 million paid subscribers, Thompson said. The magazine reported a profit in 2024 and has been in the black since.

Other tidbits from the hour-long interview:

The Atlantic is getting micropayments from AI startup Parallel Web Systems, Thompson said. The startup — founded by former Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal — is building web search infrastructure for AI agents (rather than humans). Most AI deals involve fixed-fee licensing but Parallel’s Index platform compensates news companies under a different rubric.

“Rather than paying only for content access, crawls, or citations,” Index pays more for “content that is uniquely valuable, hard to replace, or used in high-value agent work.”

Thompson, a prolific AI user himself, said personal experience helped convince him to pursue a deal. 

“We got excited about this because I was running all [of] these agent farms and realized [that] the vast majority of traffic coming out of my computer was no longer human. It was my agents running requests,” Thompson explained. “I was like, ‘God, we need to build an Atlantic business model for that.’ That led us to Parallel.” 

Thompson on the boundaries The Atlantic put in place when becoming one of the first news companies to sign with OpenAI back in 2024:

I prefer them paying us than not paying us, right? And many of the AI companies don’t pay. We set up a whole bunch of boundaries in the contract: How much can you summarize? Can you quote an author? Can you try to get your model to write like an author? These things we care about because we want it to be harder for AI to replace what we do.

Thompson said it’s been “a surprise” how little traffic is directed back to The Atlantic from ChatGPT.

He said the news org would be willing to resign a deal with OpenAI as long as there is “a fair exchange of value.”

“What are you giving us, and what are we giving you? Is it fair?” Thompson said. “And if it’s not, well, then we’ll block you from the site, or we’ll sue you, right? That’s the deal.”

A few years back, The Atlantic made a play for Substack-like newsletter subscribers. Thompson concluded the revenue-sharing experiment “didn’t work,” though he’s pleased some of the recruited authors — such as Tom Nichols and Charlie Warzel — have stuck around as regular Atlantic contributors.

“Maybe we didn’t set the numbers right,” he said. “Maybe the writers we recruited in weren’t right for that model.”

You can listen to the full Channels episode on Spotify or wherever you like to hit play on podcasts.

“They want to know how topical things will impact their lives, and what they can do about that,” she said. “You have to work a bit harder to meet that need. But it can be the difference between a 10-minute read of an article and somebody being willing to come back again and again.”

At the end of May, the Mail launched a six-week weight loss program — “The 30g Plan” — fronted by nutritionist Emma Bardwell. Promoted in print and online, it was months in the making and built around audience demand.

“We know weight loss is something our subscribers are very interested in and have very set views on, as they like common sense and practical fixes,” Forster said. “Emma’s plan is sensible and fits into the real world. She’s got her own story about how she used it in her own life. That is bang on for us.”

The series, which includes recipes and shopping lists and answers audience questions, illustrates a wider journalistic trend of helping readers live better. Sometimes called “service” or “utility” journalism, the approach provides content for people who want help with everyday decisions — moving, relationships, personal finance, food — and aims to offer a service beyond questions that AI can easily answer.

Providing guidance was the inspiration for Pensions & Prosecco, an independent publication from journalist and audience strategist Katie Binns and wine expert Elizabeth Hawthornthwaite.

Binns wrote about money and (U.K.) pensions for publications like The Times of London for years. “The thing with pensions is that they’re so easy to put off,” she said. “Lots of people don’t really know where to start, and I wanted to see if there was a format that could help change that.”

Pensions & Prosecco launched last November with live events, a newsletter, and social content. The events, so far only held in London, are small — around 30 attendees each — in order to be genuinely useful. Prosecco is always served, along with alcohol-free options.

“It’s a lot of confidence-building,” Binns explained. “Traditionally, journalism has been brilliant at helping people understand the world, but now I think people want journalism to help them navigate it. That doesn’t mean journalists becoming advisers or campaigners, but instead that we have to think harder about what someone can actually do after they’ve read a story.”

Pensions & Prosecco aims to turn intention into action. The same could be said of the new AI chatbot being developed by U.K. consumer brand Which?

Which?, the U.K. equivalent of Consumer Reports, long offered advice on the best items to buy and advocated for consumers’ rights. Now the publication’s leadership is exploring how AI could make that advice more personalized.

The move is part of a broader investment into health and wellbeing consumer advice, aimed, in particular, at younger and female audiences. New content areas include vitamins and supplement reviews and guidance on skincare, sleep, and exercise equipment.

Meanwhile, The New York Times’ Wirecutter has joined with American Public Media to launch a weekly radio show that aims to “make trustworthy, practical guidance more accessible to listeners seeking clear, independent advice in their daily lives.”

That word “trustworthy” is key. Trust in AI and creators is lower than trust in established news brands, leaving a gap publishers can fill.

Bloomberg has increased the number of explainers and other types of service journalism it produces. In June, it launched Bloomberg Money.

The site had always run some personal finance stories, but “we noticed in our analytics that those stories, especially the ones that were more service-oriented or actionable, tended to overperform,” said Katie Boyce, head of digital editorial at Bloomberg. “We decided it was something we really wanted to double down on and make a push for subscribers.”

The aim is to supply fairly sophisticated personal finance coverage, with the assumption that Bloomberg readers already have a baseline understanding of how to manage their money. “It really plays into the topics we think a Bloomberg audience would care about,” Boyce said, “whether it’s personal investing, real estate, or retirement.”

The hub, with the tagline “Everything you need to navigate your financial life,” has both U.S. and U.K. versions. It is cross-platform and includes explainers, original reporting, practical guides, a weekly TV show, a free newsletter sent out three times a week, and a live dashboard of key financial indicators.

Boyce has been pleasantly surprised to find that 62% of those using the hub so far are new to Bloomberg, while there has also been “strong engagement” from the existing subscriber base. Subscribers who read Money stories were 13% more active than average in the first month.

Bloomberg journalists do not offer financial advice, but Boyce said the initiative is still all about “helping people make smart decisions.”

“Our journalists are asking experts the right questions so our users can learn from them and make informed decisions. If readers finish a story having learned something they can take away, then we’ve done a good job in terms of utility.”

Pensions & Prosecco’s Binns agreed that the best evidence journalism has worked is what people do next.

“The things I care about the most are when people tell us about the actions they’ve taken — when someone says they’ve checked their state pension forecast for the first time, increased their pension contributions or booked their complimentary financial advice session with our sponsor after an event,” she said. “It just feels like we’re solving real audience problems, rather than simply talking about what we think matters.”

That sense of listening to the audience has also informed Forster’s experience at the Mail. The 30g Plan series was originally aimed at existing subscribers, but, put behind the new Mail+ paywall, it’s attracted new readers too.

Any publisher would want to keep new visitors, and, to that end, the Mail recently launched The Reset, a newsletter that’s “all things weight loss” and also covers anti-aging, skincare, and wellness. “We felt that was the best kind of way to keep these people and show them that we’d listened to what they were concerned about,” Forster said.

Boyce was keen to emphasize that journalism can’t only be about utility — it has to be unique and leverage expertise unavailable elsewhere. But, she said, “I think expectations have changed. Audiences expect to be able to take something away from the journalism they’re consuming. It’s not enough anymore just to give a headline or answer a simple question. AI and social have really taken that over.”

Ultimately, usefulness is becoming a core part of subscription strategy, as well as a way of attracting new audiences.

“People still want information, and they want good information, but information on its own isn’t enough,” said Binns. “They want context and someone to explain why something matters, what’s normal, what needs attention first, what can wait and what a sensible first step looks like.”

“Our journalism needs to help users learn something new, understand why a headline matters, and get a sense of what to expect next,” Boyce added. “If you can make it actionable and personal, there’s real value in that for subscribers.”

The year? 1986. What just a few years earlier had been called a “science boom” in the media industry was now dubbed a “science crash.” Cries of despair came from the science and science journalism communities, worried that interest in science “was a fad.”

The same worries have now reappeared 40 years later, as publishers have cut the science and environmental reporting staff at many newspapers and magazines. Perhaps the biggest shock came in late June 2026, when Scientific American was sold to new owners, who immediately laid off 15 staff members and cut salaries of many others. But it followed layoffs of science and environment writers at The Washington Post (where one of us, Chris Mooney, worked for nearly 10 years), The Wall Street Journal, National Public Radio, and CBS News.

One longtime science writer recently worried he was writing a eulogy for science journalism. Another said, “We’re in a greatly diminished journalistic enterprise in this country.” On Bluesky, one commenter said, “The media mass extinction rolls ever onward.”

So, as scholars of science journalism, we wondered: Is this just a cyclical repetition of worries that appear anytime there’s a setback in this field? Or is something new and more troubling happening?

The answer is a mix of both.

The moral panic

Scientists have complained about media coverage of science for more than a century, calling it both inadequate and, frequently, inaccurate. Despite many years of increased coverage and better-trained science journalists, scientific organizations routinely call for more and better science journalism.

Less clear is whether nonscientist adults actually want more and will pay to consume science content to a greater extent than they already do — at least when not delivered by celebrities like astronomer Carl Sagan in the 1980s or, in the current era, the former NASA engineer turned award-winning YouTuber and Netflix star Mark Rober.

In 1987, one of us, Bruce Lewenstein, analyzed the crash of the science boom. Bruce concluded then that an audience clearly did exist at the time for science journalism, though it might not have been as large as some commentators — and publishers — had hoped.

The commentary about a crash, in Bruce’s analysis, represented a moral panic — a real concern, but one where interested parties often exaggerate how serious or widespread a problem is. In reality, science journalism continued to thrive in the decades after the 1980s science boom, as new programs developed to train science journalists, new outlets appeared, and new formats arrived as the internet grew.

What the data shows

Perhaps the current concerns are again a moral panic: real, but not quite what people are claiming. As it happens, the other of us, Chris Mooney, has been collecting data to update the earlier analysis.

It appears today’s doomsayers have some points in their favor: Out of 29 prominent popular science magazines created in the United States since the 19th century, only 11 remain. And eight of the closures have happened since 2000.

Unfurl the caveats: This preliminary effort only tracks print magazine closures. And it only includes magazines covering broad scientific areas — not just one field, such as astronomy — and targeted at a general, popular audience. For instance, it largely excludes educational, alumni or membership publications. But we feel the main titles are here.

And the message is unavoidable: In science media, many efforts fail. They always have. For instance, McGraw-Hill launched an ill-fated mass media science magazine, Science Illustrated, back in 1946 — and saw it fold by 1949. There are many other such stories across the decades.

By far the starkest recent print loss is Popular Science, a title that traces its origins back to the Popular Science Monthly of 1872. As recently as 2011, Popular Science had a total distribution of well over 1 million magazines each month. But it cut back to bimonthly, then to quarterly, and then no print at all by 2021. By the end of 2023, there was no digital magazine. It continues to publish online science content and two podcasts.

National Geographic, another of the magazine giants, has also struggled. In 2023, it laid off multiple staff writers, according to reporting by The Washington Post, and ceased monthly newsstand sales. The magazine continues to publish in print.

That three of the oldest and best-known publications — Scientific American, Popular Science, and National Geographic — have all faced cutbacks in recent years surely points to something deeper afoot.

It’s not just journalism about science

Surveying the field of popular science publishing, two items of context seem relevant. First, it’s not just science journalism that’s in trouble. The entire structure of journalism is changing. The struggle of print publications goes far beyond the science realm and fundamentally reflects the rise of the internet.

The changes have arguably been even harder on print newspapers than print magazines. For instance, from 2000 to 2025, data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics shows a loss of roughly 80% of U.S. newspaper jobs, versus about 65% of jobs in the publishing of periodicals. Just as we finished this article, the hedge fund-owned McClatchey chain of newspapers announced major cuts to its newsrooms — apparently between 30% and 50% of the editorial staff at some publications, at some even more. Both newspapers and magazines have suffered from dramatic shifts in the market for advertising, which has moved online, and from how younger generations consume information.

Some of journalism’s challenges today are economic, some are political. And those are interrelated — the current fervor for profits encourages corporate consolidation and works against smaller outlets willing to forgo money in favor of meeting other goals. Those goals can include recruiting young people into science, or presenting the value of expert knowledge, or expressing awe at the natural world.

And second, in some ways, information and commentary about science is more widely available than ever. Web-only publications, social media feeds, YouTube — all offer those interested in science a much wider array of information than used to be available. It was over a decade ago now that the internet surpassed television as the primary source of science information for the public, according to survey data compiled by the National Science Foundation. The most promising new online venue for science journalism and communication today may be Substack, where individual journalists or personalities can garner their own dedicated, paying audiences.

So science communication is thriving, but that’s different than science journalism. What growth there is tends to favor quick takes and attitude, rather than institutionalized journalism with its commitment to verifying information as well as its costly trappings, including reporters who can spend months on a single project, a gaggle of editors, and, yes, lawyers.

Much online science information remains unfiltered — pushed by corporations, institutions, and some influencers for promotional purposes. Such communicators rarely dig deep for the errors, extended stories or conflicts of interest that are the lifeblood of journalism.

Concerns about failures of science journalism really amount to concerns about the collapse of institutional journalism more broadly. The social role of journalism — in a classic phrase, to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable — remains vital. But as journalist and media critic Tom Rosenstiel writes in his new book, The Next Journalism, new intellectual models need to emerge.

So, to answer our own question: Yes, some of the current concern may be overblown moral panic. But some of it is entirely justified. Still, we retain hope that science journalism will survive this economic, political, and technological shakeout. To do so, it will need to be as innovative as the researchers it covers.

Smith was a member of The Athletic’s pilot program for creators. Through that six-month partnership, he garnered 27 million views across 24 videos he produced with The Athletic, more than half of the 50 million video views the entire program cohort produced.

“What we built was a blueprint: proof that the creator economy and legacy media aren’t competing,” Smith wrote on LinkedIn in April about the partnership. “We’re much more powerful together.”

Smith’s success on social media has also afforded him opportunities to pursue different ventures. This past spring, he launched Geo Sports, a site for sports geography, history, and trivia games; they’ve have been played more than 15 million times.

I chatted with Smith about how he started out, access in sports journalism, and legacy media’s embrace of news creators. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

People have felt grave doubts about the press long before the Internet or social media, at times when politics was polarized and at times when it was not. In the United States, the steady decline in media trust from 1970 and onwards has, in my opinion, been badly misread. It has produced or justified anxiety about what we have come to call “the media” among journalists and pundits alike.

In the same era (1970–present) when measured trust in most American institutions has declined, leading news institutions have undergone a dramatic transformation whose reverberations have yet to be fully acknowledged — even by journalists themselves. Dissatisfaction with journalism inside journalism and outside grew in the 1960s. What came to be widely acknowledged as either “he said, she said” journalism or “false balance” journalism or “bothsidesism” has been the object of sharp, even derisive, and ultimately potent critique. As multiple scholars have documented, news since the 1960s has become deeper, more investigative, and more likely to take “holding government accountable” or “speaking truth to power” to be essential goals. In these past six decades, mainstream media not only continued to be fact-centered and verification-oriented but also guided by a more explicit avowal of the public service function of holding government accountable, just as important a value as the ideal of “objectivity” itself.

There is a large literature on the question of trust in the media, some of it very rich and carefully done, including work by the editors of (and other contributors to) this volume.^{1 2 3 4} At the same time, there is a kind of romantic — or just plain mythical — nostalgia for a media past that never was and that in a democracy never should have been. In this chapter, I will illustrate two bits of mythology — one about the founding era of the United States and one about the highly trusted media of the 1950s and 1960s. Both are clearly errors that should be flushed out if we are to arrive at a clear-minded assessment of the media skepticism that so many bemoan today.

The first myth

The first myth is wonderfully illustrated by something that historians of the founding era have long known but that I only learned quite recently. Journalists at ceremonial occasions celebrate the First Amendment of the Constitution as “first for a reason.” One example is Jill Abramson when she was executive director of The New York Times.⁵ And that reason? The reason, they say, is that the founders recognized free speech and notably a free press as fundamental to the republic they were building. And why? Obviously (to us) because the press is crucial to holding power to account. What’s wrong with this story?

What seems to have been largely forgotten is that the first ten amendments to the U.S. Constitution, widely known as “the Bill of Rights,” originally were 12 amendments that the young Congress sent to the states for ratification. In that group of 12, what we know as the First Amendment was third. However, the first two amendments were rejected, not ratified. One concerned the population size of congressional districts and the other pronounced that Congress could not award itself pay raises until after a subsequent election. So “freedom of religion, of speech, and of press” were not “first for a reason.” They were first by accident!⁶ Also important is that the newspapers the founders were acquainted with did little or no original reporting. They were still republishing news items shipped from Europe for much of their content, and they ran many voluntary contributions from readers. They were often outspoken, including criticism of President Washington and subsequent presidents, but they were issued by a printer from his print shop, managed by himself and a few apprentices. There was no newsroom. There were few or ordinarily no people hired to “report” the news. I have great respect for the authors of the U.S. Constitution, but they did not recognize newspapers as fundamental units of the republican government (the founders had contempt for “democracy” as such, because they believed an elected government was too likely to descend into mob rule).

The second myth

The second and even more important mythological point is that a better moment in the history of U.S. journalism was the period of greater trust — presumably the 1950s and 1960s — from which era trust in the media has sadly descended.

But should we accept that the decline in trust in the media is sad? Let me begin here with a question, rarely considered in the “declinist” presumption around us: How much trust should there be in a healthy constitutional democracy? To telegraph my position: I think there was far too much trust or general public complacency about the practices of journalism in the pre-Vietnam, pre-civil rights movement, pre-Watergate, pre-women’s liberation, pre-Stonewall era.

Consider, for example, the results that journalist and media critic Carl Sessions Stepp⁷ found when he compared ten metropolitan daily newspapers from 1963 to the same papers in 1999. He judged the 1963 papers “naively trusting of government, shamelessly boosterish, unembarrassedly hokey and obliging,” and he found himself particularly surprised to find stories “often not attributed at all, simply passing along an unquestioned, quasi-official sense of things.” In the “bothsidesism” style of news, still dominating newspapers in 1963, quoting one party to a dispute or an election contest and then quoting the other was the whole of the reporter’s obligation. Going behind or beyond the statements of the quoted persons, invariably elite figures, and appointed or elected political officials was not required. It was particularly in the work of investigative reporters in the late 1960s and 1970s that reporters became detectives seeking documentable evidence to confirm a view of the reality of recent events they were pulling together. Later, as digital tools for reporters emerged, the capacity to document and to investigate expanded, and a reporter did not require the extravagant resources of a New York Times newsroom to be able to write authoritative stories.

The anxiety among journalists that the public no longer trusts them reflects a reality that public opinion polls support — trust in the mainstream media has been in decline since about 1970. But something else has changed in the same period from the late 1960s forward: journalism. Journalism became less a reproduction or representation of the opinions of political office-holders — and more an independent-minded journalism free and indeed eager to criticize people in power. The public learns more than it used to about failings of governments and governmental officers and infers more regularly and readily and with more apparent justification that government (and other powerful institutions) should not be trusted. While trust in the media may be unhealthily low today, it was surely unhealthily high in the 1950s and early 1960s. To put it too simply, U.S. journalism shifted from what I will call a collusional (if there is such a word) press in which reporters protected politicians — both Republicans and Democrats — in exchange for politicians’ accepting them into their elite circles.^8 9 What the media became in the 1970s and after was more independent-minded, critical (of both Democrats and Republicans), more investigative, and more enterprising than the journalism of the 1950s.^10 11

This chapter focuses on developments in the United States but they are paralleled elsewhere in the world. See, for instance, the study by Esser and Umbricht¹² that examines the media systems of six different Western nations. At the same time, investigative reporting not only expanded greatly in various countries around the world but also internationalized with cooperative ventures like the International Consortium of Investigative Reporting (ICIJ). This and other international efforts (including the spread of dedicated “fact-checking” organizations) have advanced the complexity, ambition, and relative independence of journalism globally.¹³

Journalism Past was far less balanced through a societal narrowness of who gets covered than Journalism Present. The journalism of the 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s was less “fair and balanced” journalism in its faith in political insiders, omitting from consideration altogether the concerns and voices of a variety of social groups that lay outside narrow assumptions about who counts as “the public” that journalism is supposed to serve. The so-called mainstream media could reasonably have been called the “white media” or even the “white heterosexual male media” — or, worse still, the white heterosexual male media with a dangerously oversimplified understanding of what counts as a democratic society. That, at any rate, is the path I propose in this chapter.

When trust was too high: Collusional journalism

People often recall — or think they recall — that long-time CBS News television anchor Walter Cronkite was in his day “the most trusted man in America.” If you Google that phrase (as I did on October 11, 2021, and again on October 11, 2025) you immediately come up with Walter Cronkite. Why? Because a public opinion poll in 1972 asked respondents which of the leading political figures of the day they trusted most. Cronkite’s name was thrown in as a kind of standard of comparison — how do any and all of the politicians compare to some well-known and well-regarded non-political figure? Seventy-three percent of those polled placed Cronkite as the person on the list they trusted most, ahead of a general construct — “average senator” (67%), and well ahead of the most trusted of the politicians, Senator Edmund Muskie (61%). Chances are that any other leading newsperson, or probably a movie star or athlete, would have come out as well or better than Cronkite. In other words, the main reason Cronkite was “most trusted” is simply that he was the only non-politician among the persons listed in the poll.¹⁴

So the notion that Cronkite was unusually “trusted” is a phantom best forgotten. Somehow, people have wanted to believe that somewhere, just before all the ruckus began over civil rights and Vietnam and uppity women and the heroes of “Stonewall” who brought on a new, public self-respect for lesbians and gays and other people of non-standard sexual identities, at some time just the day before yesterday, the media had been a pillar of central, neutral, moderate, unquestioning Americanism. It ain’t so.

When Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson ran in 1952, he railed against what he called the “one-party press” — a Republican press, that is, and certainly he was right if you looked at the corporate ownership of the country’s newspapers, their antagonism toward Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal, and their overwhelming editorial-page support for Republican candidates. If you go back very much further than the 1940s, you reach a moment when “trust in the media” would have been an incomprehensible phrase. News outlets were understood to be and understood themselves to be advocates for one party or the other, not neutral truth-tellers. Readers trusted their own favored paper and distrusted the others.

In common parlance, there was no “news media” or “mainstream media.” There was “the press” and that, Richard Nixon decided in his presidential years, was too cozy and familiar a term. Journalists were, in his estimation, united against him — and he was not entirely wrong. Journalists went gaga about Jack Kennedy, bowled over in the 1960 campaign and the early days of the Kennedy administration by the charm of Kennedy, his wife Jackie, and his good-looking family. Nixon was a respected figure in Washington, but far from beloved, and certainly not charming, and he never got over the resentment he felt about journalists’ swooning over Kennedy.

Things would only get worse after Nixon became president. He felt aggrieved by journalists and the idea that they were biased against him led him to plan strategically to muddy their reputation. To refer to journalists as “the press” ceded them an emotional upper hand, an aura of rectitude armed with First Amendment privilege. Nixon judged that aura an unacceptable advantage and urged his staff to use the term, “the media.” William Safire, the public relations professional who became a speechwriter for Nixon, recalls in his memoir, “The press became ‘the media’ because the word had a manipulative, Madison Avenue, all-encompassing connotation, and the press hated it.” Nixon judged journalists to be his dedicated opponents, Safire recalls, and reports that he personally heard Nixon declare to his staff that “the press is the enemy” at least a dozen times.¹⁵

There was a moment, beginning in the late 1950s, when watching the television networks became part of everyday life for most Americans, however soporific those shows could be. This may have been the beginning of something called “the media.” Until then, Americans would have been hard put to identify a Thing that today people recognize as “the mainstream media.”

The full entrance of “the media” into the American vocabulary arrived at about the same moment as distrust in the media intensified — but in a one-sided fashion. Barry Goldwater and his supporters, in his 1964 campaign for the presidency, were convinced that the media, notably the three major television news networks, were deeply biased against the Republican candidate.¹⁶ Nixon’s later effort to make “the media” rather than “the press” the more common term for journalism may or may not have made a difference, but it was indicative that “the media” was something of a novelty for Americans and one that, early on, Republicans found more threatening than did Democrats.

Too often these days, low trust in the media is linked to some feature of the digital age — it’s an Internet problem or a Facebook problem or a Twitter problem or a generalized social media problem. Social media, after all, offer a microphone to individuals who want to promote any old picture of reality, no matter how lunatic, that suits either their politics or their crackpot sense of humor. This may well contribute to distrust of any and all assertions coming from unknown entities beyond our immediate social circles. But sharply declining trust in the media, as the academic literature clearly demonstrates — going back notably to Ladd’s detailed and thoughtful Why Americans Hate the Media.¹⁷ It predates George W. Bush and his unnamed adviser, who in 2004 spoke sneeringly to the New York Times Magazine of journalists as “the reality-based community”.¹⁸ It precedes the rise of Donald Trump, and it precedes social media. A full-bodied sense of “the media” as a powerful — and dangerous — social and political force found its voice before the digital era.

What has not become part of the common understanding is how dramatically journalism changed in the decades just prior to the Internet. The most significant change in American journalism between the 1950s and the early 2000s has been the rise of a more aggressive, more independent, more evidence-based, and more interpretive journalism. Various historians, social scientists, and journalists have documented these changes.¹⁹ With Katherine Fink, I have added to this literature, too.²⁰ In what Fink and I have called “contextual reporting,” the journalist’s work is less to record the views of key actors in political events and more to analyze and explain them. More than other concurrent changes, this one altered the front page, and in a way that put a premium on the story or stories behind the story. The move from writing down what political leaders said to contextualizing what they said and did, and why, offered a new model of journalism. This is also reflected in the changing role conceptions of U.S. journalists for whom the importance of acting as a watchdog has steadily increased, particularly since the 1980s.²¹ In consequence, studies have shown that an increasing negative depiction of politicians did go hand in hand with a decline in public confidence ratings of the press, described as “killing the messenger-effect”.²²

The new model seeped into the work of journalism with little fanfare. Journalists continued to defend their work as “objective” or “balanced” while, in practice, transforming what they meant by such terms. Fink and I found that in 1955, in the Washington Post, New York Times, and Milwaukee Journal, 85% of front-page stories were conventional who-what-where-when stories and 9% contextual. Focus on that first figure and track it through succeeding years: in 1955, 85% of all front-page stories were conventional who-what-where-when stories; in 1967, 79%; in 1979, 60%; in 1991, 51%; and by 2003, 47%. In 2003, then, 52% of front-page stories were contextual reporting, a percentage about six times greater than what it had been in 1955. This shows that contextual journalism emerged as a powerful and prevalent companion to conventional reporting. The news media became an institution to reckon with as never before, and not because news organizations had political agendas of their own — although sometimes they did — but because they had attained a preeminent role in civil society as a monitor of government action, the cardinals of accountability for American democracy.

This does not mean that all was well with American journalism by the 1990s, but it does mean that concern that the news media have fallen from the great days of Ida Tarbell or the great days of Woodward and Bernstein has been overdone. The Ida Tarbell days of muckraking lasted just a few years and never extended very far beyond a handful of middle-class national magazines; “muckraking” as Teddy Roosevelt derisively labeled it at the time, really didn’t influence the daily press. And when Woodward and Bernstein, more than half a century later, broke open the Watergate story, it would be months before any other news organization assigned reporters to the story. Investigative reporting a la Woodward and Bernstein did come to have some influence beyond the Washington Post, but it has never been a quantitatively significant part of any news organization’s budget or time on the air or space on the page, at least, not until the establishment of ProPublica (founded in 2007) and other substantial online news organizations that devote themselves primarily to investigative reporting.

What did change, and it changed in a major way, was a move from who-what-when-where reporting to analytical “how” and “why” reporting, often focusing on a broader time frame than the past 24 hours, offering a context for the story at hand.

People of an ardent conservative persuasion judge the media to be very liberal; people of powerfully liberal convictions find the media to be pawns in the hands of conservatives. This is a familiar enough phenomenon to have acquired a name in social psychology — the “hostile media effect”.²³ The familiar response of journalists has been that “we must be doing our job right if we have offended people of extreme views both left and right.”

The evidence is clear that in the 1940s, 1950s, and into the late 1960s, there was a chumminess among leading politicians and public officials and the reporters who covered them. What is not as well known is that this boys’ club atmosphere (there were women journalists and black journalists, but they were not welcomed in this world) was well institutionalized and fully embraced by the American Society of Newspaper Editors in their annual convention, normally held in Washington, D.C. The ASNE was the most prestigious association of leading editors and reporters from its founding in the early 1920s on. At the annual meeting, top public officials met these journalists in private plenary sessions, not open to journalists generally nor the public at all. Journalist historian Gwyneth Mellinger has documented this fully.²⁴

From both sidesism to assertive watchdog journalism

Our age, like so many others, is an age of both credulity and skepticism, but what may be distinctive about our time is that the skepticism is approved, encouraged, and taught. Complaints about snarkiness in reporters and columnists did not begin with social media. The capacity of journalism to demean and destroy is not a new discovery. But there is something different now, as there has been since roughly 1970, and that is the institutionalization of skepticism as a value. To be accepted as a grown-up, there has come to be a cultural pressure to be knowing, critical, and skeptical, if not cynical.

What is “trust”? And what is “the media” or “the news” or “journalism” that people are trusting or distrusting? What do respondents in surveys think the question is that they are answering? Does the person who distrusts the news reports on politics also distrust the news reports on the weather or on sports? Does news of the private lives of celebrities evoke more or less trust than news about coronavirus vaccinations?

As has been noted, the question of declining trust in the news media is vexed not only by the complications for survey respondents of understanding what “trust” means but also because “the media” is not a readily comprehensible entity.^25 26 What further complicates the analysis of declining trust is the underlying premise that the high levels of trust we have descended from were a good thing. But clearly, trust in institutions is salutary for democracy only to a point. The decline in trust in most institutions that public polling has documented since the late 1960s was a decline from what arguably was much too high a level of trust. This is clearly true with the federal government, the media, banking, corporate America, organized labor, and organized religion. Trust must be distinguished from complacency, the kind of complacency that (along with gerrymandering) makes most seats in Congress permanent sinecures, the kind of complacency that accepted President Eisenhower’s lies about the U-2 spy plane, President Kennedy’s lies about the “missile gap,” President Johnson’s lies about the war in Vietnam, and President Nixon’s lies about Watergate. It required the cultural revolution of the 1960s and 1970s to bring down that overgenerous level of deference to American political institutions and to yield a level of “civic skepticism”²⁷ more fitting for a democratic society.

What people don’t like about the media is its implicit or explicit criticism of their heroes. In a two-party system like the United States, the president is invariably either Republican or Democrat, and confidence in the president or the presidency is typically significantly higher among Republicans when there’s a Republican president and higher among Democrats when there’s a Democratic president. To the extent that the news flatters an opponent or criticizes a fellow partisan, trust will decline in ways that have little (or even nothing) to do with trust in the institution, only with portraits of the incumbent leader of the institution (see also Chapter 10). Moreover, people answering a poll may not be trying to accurately report their level of trust but rather acting politically to align themselves with their favored party’s perceived critique of the media.²⁸

Journalism in a knowledge society

To get some perspective on the “trust in media” question, we might think of the media as but one of a set of knowledge-producing institutions in a “knowledge society.” When sociologist Daniel Bell²⁹ popularized the term “post-industrial society” in the early 1970s and took universities to be the central institution of contemporary society, he wrote that modern societies place science and cognitive values at their center, bring scientists and social scientists (at least economists) more centrally into governmental policy-making, and bureaucratize intellectual work. He wrote that it would have been reasonable to name “post-industrial” society the “knowledge society” or the “information society” or the “professional society,” and he offered only contingent reasons for landing on “post-industrial”.³⁰ In any event, the university becomes, in Bell’s view, the central institution of the post-industrial world after World War II, accelerating in the 1950s because it is the location for the formation of professionals in science and engineering and for the advancement of research in these areas, research generating greater technical control over the natural and, to some extent, the social world. Academics, if they think about these matters at all, have largely given up the effort to locate a central guiding value or principle for higher education, but they nonetheless have implicitly adopted a principle of approved skepticism. One might equally call it a dogma of humility, the conviction that what we know and what we profess, whether in physics or in sociology or in literary studies, will over time be challenged and will be reconstituted in a different shape, and that this is how human knowledge advances, toward a new temporary consolidation (and another and another thereafter), not toward a finished unity. At the San Francisco Women’s March early in 2017, a child held up a sign that read: “What do we want? Evidence-based science. When do we want it? After peer review.” This says a lot.

Since 1945, more and more journalists have come to their work with a college education. Of journalists 55 years or older in 1971, 55% did not have college degrees; of those 55 and older in 2002, only 22% were not college graduates. Of 25–34-year-old journalists in 2002, only 7% were not college graduates. Over time, their readers were more likely to have college degrees, too. Between 1940 and 1970, the percentage of the adult population with college degrees grew from about 3% to 20%. In 2018, that percentage was 35%.³¹

Equally important, college students received a more critical education. Academic culture itself, like journalism, adopted more “adversarial” habits in the 1960s — not politically adversarial but intellectually adversarial. Faculty came to expect students to learn to “read against the text” in courses in the humanities, not simply to learn to revere accepted canons of high culture. And in the sciences and social sciences, students were increasingly encouraged not to memorize textbooks but to imagine themselves as fledgling scientists, moving on to the next level of insight by criticizing the assumptions, methods, or reasoning of the exemplars whose work they were assigned to read. Students heard the message that the morally right way to go through life was with an “open mind,” one eager for new evidence, not permanently stuck in yesterday’s convictions.

In a key early statement of this position, a faculty committee at Harvard in 1945 published General Education in a Free Society, the so-called Red Book, which insisted that the focus of college education should be “mental skills” and not common knowledge. The committee had begun with the opposite position but discovered that “they could not agree on a set of canonical works that would form the core of their own curriculum.” They also objected to treating modern science as “peripheral to general education” as it was in the view of earlier advocates of general education like Robert Hutchins at the University of Chicago.

This may seem far afield from journalism, but as journalism became a more sophisticated, more interpretive, less rote, and ritualistic practice, it became a newly recognized member of the knowledge professions or, one might say, a knowledge ecology.

The change in the media’s role was the joint product of several closely connected developments: government — especially the federal government — grew larger and more engaged in people’s everyday lives; the culture of journalism changed, and journalists asserted themselves more aggressively; and many governmental institutions became less secretive and more attuned to the news media, eager for media attention and approval. As the federal government expanded its reach (in civil rights, economic regulation, environmental responsibility, and social welfare programs like food stamps, medical insurance for the poor, and for the elderly), the women’s movement proclaimed that “the personal is political,” and as stylistic innovation in journalism proved a force of its own, the very concept of “covering politics” changed.^32 33 American journalism changed profoundly from “inside Washington” politics toward a widening focus on economic, social, and cultural life and toward a deepening of investigation and analysis to bring these additional corners of life to the public stage. Probably no example has been of such global significance as the #MeToo movement, powerfully propelled by investigative journalists at the New York Times and the New Yorker magazine and influencing comparable revelations around the world.

New norm of transparency makes public information public

News coverage became more probing, more analytical, and more transgressive of conventional lines between public and private, but this recognizes only part of what influenced a changing journalism. Not only did the news media provide a more comprehensive and more critical coverage of powerful institutions, but also powerful institutions adapted to a world in which journalists had a more formidable presence than ever before. “Until the mid-1960s,” historian Julian Zelizer simply observes, “the press was generally respectful of the political establishment”.³⁴ The decline of this respect helped bring more attention to political scandal. So did legislation to make governing more public, for example, through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) in 1966 that established a formal procedure for citizens to request the release of information that an agency of the government held, and to take the agency to court if it failed to release the information in ways the law required.

But FOIA was just the beginning of a new faith in “transparency” in government. The Legislative Reorganization Act of 1970 brought more “sunshine” to Congress. The National Environmental Policy Act of 1970 required federal agencies to provide and publicly release “environmental impact statements” making possible lawsuits to prevent or modify anticipated government actions affecting the environment; the campaign finance laws of 1971 and 1973 required public disclosure of campaign contributions; the Inspector General Act of 1978 and other legislations were transparency-oriented milestones. Politicians and government officers were now more often held accountable. The character of democracy shifted from one in which voters normally could express and act on disapproval of government incumbents only on election day to one in which the government was under a more continuous public surveillance.³⁵

This tied journalism to a new, more interpretive ideal. It made reporters themselves experts as never before. It requires time and often teamwork and a lot of resolve, persistence, and patience. It should also require acknowledgment that journalism has changed — and changed for the better. But popular recognition of this powerful and sweeping change has been swamped by the apparently irresistible story of the digital transformation of journalism, as if no other changes in news-gathering matter.

Post-1945, there has been a politicization of everyday life, a sprawl of rights-consciousness, and a new availability of low-cost civic engagement from 10K runs for breast cancer research, benefit concerts, blogging, and hashtag-spawned social movements. In this era, representative institutions constituted through elections remain central, but they are powerfully supplemented in ways notable enough to qualify as a new species of democracy. Various terms for this new model of democracy have been offered — from “audience democracy”³⁶ to “between-election democracy”³⁷ to “counter-democracy”³⁸ to “monitory democracy,” perhaps the most fitting.³⁹ Monitory democracy empowers civil society to hold the government accountable, not only at the voting booth on election day but in 24/7 surveillance of governmental activity or what Keane calls “the continuous public chastening of those who exercise power”.⁴⁰

In monitory democracy, we expect from the media “accountability journalism,” the watchdogging of government and other powerful institutions; we expect the media to offer a model of reasoned discourse about public affairs; and we expect the media to provide a representation of and a tolerance for various legitimate viewpoints (what counts as “legitimate” is, of course, contentious).

But the media are just one important institution that makes a monitory democracy work. Journalism has adapted to monitory democracy by adopting for itself more self-consciously and assertively than ever the role of holding government accountable to its constitutional duties and to a broad obligation to serve the public. “Accountability,” as a general term for holding the government accountable to the public, or to national laws and traditions, comes into frequent use at about the same time, growing rapidly from the 1990s on.⁴¹ “Accountability journalism” or “accountability reporting” are, likewise, terms of relatively recent invention. Leonard Downie, Jr., among the editors who oversaw the work of Woodward and Bernstein and later succeeded Ben Bradlee as the Washington Post’s executive editor, is not sure who invented the term but believes that he was one of the first or perhaps the very first to make regular use of the term to describe the kind of journalism he believed the most important. Downie writes, “I believe I was the first to use the term accountability journalism widely and often”.⁴²

In the United States, monitorial mechanisms have grown more extensive and more powerful from FOIA forward. Consider the Inspector General Act of 1978. Within a few years, it established in every Cabinet-level agency and most other major federal agencies an office of inspector general empowered to audit the department on an ongoing basis. Through semiannual reports and many other occasional reports on the agency each “IG” is empowered to monitor, the inspectors general make public an assessment of the agencies’ waste, fraud, and abuse of the public trust. In fiscal 2014, the then-existing 72 IGs supervised 14,000 employees with a total budget of $2.6 billion. The IGs initiated over 5,500 indictments, closed 5,900 successful prosecutions, and 5,200 suspensions or debarments, and issued 6,900 audits, inspections, and evaluation reports.^43 44 If you have been blissfully unaware of the position of inspector general across federal departments and agencies, you may nonetheless have heard of Michael Atkinson, IG for the Intelligence Community, a position he held from May 17, 2018. He was appointed to that position by Donald Trump, who had nominated him for the post. In September 2019, the whistle blower whose statement led to the House impeachment inquiry concerning President Trump, submitted his or her allegations to IG Atkinson, as is the requirement for whistle blowers in the intelligence agencies in accord with the Inspector General Act (1978) and the Intelligence Community Whistle Blower Protection Act (1998). Atkinson made the determination that the whistle blower’s complaint was “credible” and “urgent.” He forwarded it to the President’s Office of Legal Counsel. Finding no serious response there, he circled back to reporting it, again as required by statute, to the Congress. And that propelled the impeachment inquiry against Donald Trump. President Trump dismissed him from his office on May 3, 2020.

I have read dozens of New York Times news stories that are based directly on inspector general reports, always properly credited, but rarely taking a sentence or two to explain what the IG’s office is, let alone its relatively recent origin. Journalists do not inform their readers about what IGs do, nor do scholars of the media and democracy. The failure of journalism to do a bit of civic education when its reporting derives from IG reports does not differ much from the work of political scientists, political historians, or journalism scholars who have done scarcely anything to shine a light on the work of the IGs. There is only one academic book I know of that takes up the topic in the past couple of decades.⁴⁵

Conclusion

If Keane is right, democracy has morphed from legislative to monitory since 1945 and more intensively so since the early 1970s. If Bell and others are right, society has become less social-elite-centered and more university-centered and science-centered since 1945. And if I am right, journalism has also changed dramatically in the period 1965 to 1980 or 1990 — never quite abandoning the ideal of “objectivity” but in practice demanding of the best journalism a more interpretive and less strait-jacketed stance in the world. There is now less need to trust journalists, in a sense, because they identify their sources more often than they did in the 1950s and 1960s. But there is more reason to question them because their ambition to explain events and not to just record them inevitably requires sophisticated thinking on their part and just as inevitably calls on their own expertise and judgment.

In other words, people trusted “the media” more than the media deserved in the period up until the 1970s when measured trust levels began to fall, and it is perhaps not so strange that trust in news media has fallen in the United States (and many other countries) during a period when critical thinking has become a stronger norm and when journalism has become not only better and more professionalized but also less strait-jacketed and more independent, more critical, more assertive, and more empowered by the new norm and practices of transparency.⁴⁶ Perhaps it might seem paradoxical that media trust should fall as media quality improves, but in light of all the other developments that have taken place since the 1960s, it would probably be more surprising if media trust had not fallen.

1. Fawzi, N., Steindl, N., Obermaier, M., Prochazka, F., Arlt, D., Blöbaum, B., Dohle, M., Engelke, K. M., Hanitzsch, T., Jackob, N., Jakobs, I., Klawier, T., Post, S., Reinemann, C., Schweiger, W., & Ziegele, M. (2021). Concepts, causes and consequences of trust in news media – A literature review and framework. Annals of the International Communication Association, 45(2), 154–174. https://doi.org/10.1080/23808985.2021.1960181
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The website from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), launched during President Obama’s first term, provided constant updates on the agency’s climate research in plain English, alongside vivid charts and graphics. It lasted 15 years, until the Trump administration gutted the site in 2025; the entire staff was disbanded through layoffs or unrenewed contracts, and the URL now redirects to NOAA’s website instead. Text on the site, dated June 24, 2025, says the redirect was done to comply with an executive order and White House policies, and that “future research products previously housed under Climate.gov will be available at NOAA.gov/climate and its affiliate websites.”

Anyone who has been paying attention to the Trump administration’s second term will recognize the shuttering of Climate.gov as one part of a larger project to obfuscate reality, particularly around science and climate change. Cuts to NOAA and the National Weather Service have created gaps in weather data. Over the summer, the Department of Energy deleted more than 1,600 pages about energy efficiency and utility bill savings amid brutal heatwaves that stressed power grids across the country — around the peak of a cyclospora outbreak that would have been caught sooner if not for cuts to the federal surveillance programs that usually track food-borne illnesses. If the federal government was once the sun around which most scientific research in this country orbited, it has now become a black hole.

There is, however, some light in the dark. In August 2025, a group of former Climate.gov staffers launched a crowdfunding campaign to bring back the Climate.gov archives and continue its work, under a new name: Climate.us. It was spearheaded by Rebecca Lindsey, the program manager and longtime editorial lead of Climate.gov, and raised $530,000 over six months through a combination of individual donors and grants from foundations. This year, Lindsey and her colleagues hope to raise an additional $300,000. The team incorporated as a nonprofit with fiscal sponsorship from Multiplier, a California-based nonprofit that focuses on environmental and social justice issues.

The new site, which launched in June, looks much like the old one, but with a few notable changes. The team is less than a third of its old size — three people rather than the 10 who ran the site at NOAA — and many of the links that used to redirect to other NOAA sites now redirect to resources hosted by Climate.us itself, likea copy of the Fifth National Climate assessment, which no longer exists at its original URL.

I spoke with Lindsey over Zoom about the origins of Climate.us, the challenges of picking up where the government left off, and her hopes for the future. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

It was a 15-year effort that the government had made in trying to understand what the public wants to know about climate change, and then figuring out the best way to provide it to them. And so when everything started happening after the new administration took over in early 2025, it became clear that we were not going to be able to continue with business as usual as we had more or less done during the first Trump administration. We began getting instructions from NOAA [political appointees] to scour the site and find content that might be perceived to be in conflict with the executive orders on [DEI] and the Gulf of Mexico, and so that happened almost immediately. That was late January or early February.

Then NOAA experienced the loss of about 600 to 800 probationary employees as part of the DOGE-led purge, and myself and several of my colleagues also were fired. The remainder of the Climate.gov team were contractors, so their contract was still in place. They continued to keep the site running through the spring, but in May [2025] they found out that the contract was not going to be renewed and they were going to be removed too, so that was the entire team at that point. When I was fired in February, it was not clear that there was any sort of climate targeting because hundreds of other NOAA employees from all over the agency were also fired. But with the decision about the contract, it was obvious Climate.gov was being targeted, and they were not going to let the program operate anymore. All of us were devastated by that.

Six years after launching Lookout Santa Cruz, CEO Ken Doctor writes, the local news org is “thriving.”

“It’s fun to point to our 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News (covering the disastrous flooding of January 2023), but it’s the daily impact of big accountability stories and smaller know-your-city stories that makes us proud,” Doctor wrote. “We now reach more than half the adults in Santa Cruz County each month, and we are still growing our audience quarter by quarter. And though many have said it couldn’t be done, Lookout Santa Cruz achieved profitability on earned revenue — membership and advertising money — in 2026.”

No silver bullet has emerged to solve the crisis in local news but the most robust local outlets are relying on diversified revenue, with subscriptions or memberships and locally sold ads often serving as key revenue streams. Research also suggests that disciplined, low-overhead operations are more durable.

Doctor, a long-time contributor to Nieman Lab, made the move from media analyst to media CEO in 2020. He credited “a good year and steady progress, both on membership and advertising,” for the milestone.

Lookout launched a second newsroom in Eugene, Oregon, in 2025. The local news company expects to have 10,000 members across both locations by the end of the year.

“Lots of things [got better] over time,” Doctor told me, “and the Eugene launch has worked even faster, at about 60% of expenses covered by earned income in less than two years.”

About 60% of Lookout Santa Cruz’s revenue comes from advertising, with another 40% from memberships. In both Eugene and Santa Cruz, Lookout Local has more than 40 marketing partners. Average deal sizes range from $1,500 to $6,000, A Media Operator reported earlier this year.

A third newsroom and a consulting arm called Lookout Growth are on deck for 2027. Doctor hopes to have Lookouts in five locations — all in cities on the West Coast — by the end of 2028.

First rumored last month, Apple Reference Image will work with the camera cluster on the just-announced iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max. With the feature turned on, iPhone photos can be, in effect, saved twice — once as a normal, editable photo and once as an Apple Reference Image. The reference image will have a unique ID embedded in the image’s metadata that proves that the image was actually captured by a real iPhone camera, not generated by GPT-Image, Nano Banana, or any other AI image model.

Think of it as a counterpart to something like Google’s SynthID. SynthID is a signal that Gemini embeds in AI-generated images to proclaim: “This is fake.” Apple Reference Image will instead say: “This is real.”

But Apple and Google take significantly different approaches in generating this proof. SynthID embeds its signal directly within the pixels of the image — invisible to humans but visible to AI-detection tools. Apple Reference Image data is instead injected into the image’s metadata; the actual image isn’t altered. Capture telemetry data (like hardware IDs and sensor signatures) is sent up to Apple’s Private Cloud Compute, which then creates a unique signature tying the reference image to that specific iPhone. (Apple promises it doesn’t see the actual photo, only data about it, and the process only runs on photos you choose to sign.)

If you think of SynthID as a tag that follows an image around the web, Apple Reference Image is more like a receipt the photographer can show later as proof of origin. (Apple calls it a “digital negative.”) If AI-doctored versions of a photo start circulating online, a photojournalist could produce the reference image to conclusively prove what the camera sensor originally saw.

Camera companies like Nikon and Canon have embraced a different metadata-driven provenance standard named C2PA Content Credentials — C2PA standing for the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity. Google also supports the C2PA standard in its Pixel phones, and C2PA has some European media company members (Die Zeit, France TV, AFP). But Apple hasn’t signed on to using Content Credentials — and now we know it believes it has a better approach.

CrowdTangle’s end came slowly. Meta disinvested in the tool over years by cutting funding, disbanding teams, and restricting users. When the company finally announced in March 2024 that CrowdTangle would cease operations in August, a petition signed by more than 100 social media watchdog groups and others warned that, as a result, “almost all outside efforts to identify and prevent political disinformation, incitements to violence, and online harassment of women and minorities will be silenced.”

Now, a new crop of AI-powered tools is trying to fill the void. Arbiter is one of the projects leading the way. The platform uses large language models (LLMs) and AI agents to pull posts from social media platforms and analyze them at scale. It collects data from social media APIs, academic data dumps, and third-party data scraping companies. The platform currently works across several social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter (X), YouTube, TikTok, Reddit, Bluesky, and 4chan.

At the beginning of this year, Arbiter began onboarding its first news organizations, which now include the German public broadcaster Deutsche Welle (DW), the Argentine fact-checking organization Chequeado, and the Filipino news site Rappler. Users from more than 100 organizations have registered. For journalists trying to report on the harmful content distributed by social media platforms, access to a robust tool built independently from those companies is essential.

“We need independent mechanisms because it’s often been the case that incentive structures have clashed, and then good work that was done got washed away,” said Swapneel Mehta, the co-founder and president of SimPPL, the nonprofit behind the tool. “I want to build resilient mechanisms because the fact-checkers and journalists that we support can’t deal with their work being threatened…They have enough external challenges to their work.”

Prompt Arbiter with a question in plain language about a topic on social media and it will automatically identify keywords, label and cluster posts pushing specific narratives, extract claims, identify accounts pushing the same message across platforms, and output an AI-generated summary report. It can also produce reports on multiple platforms at once, tracking how narratives move across the internet.

One of Arbiter’s most novel features is its ability to map out trend lines for specific narratives, including when they first emerge and when they peak on specific platforms. The feature aims to help journalists see what false or misleading narrative might be on the horizon. It is one that Mehta says sets it apart from other “social listening” tools on the market, many of which are built for the PR and marketing industries.

“Social listening systems tell you where conversations are happening as they blow up. [They] send you alerts,” explained Mehta. “The problem is, as journalists, you want to be ahead of the alert. You want to be the one providing the alert, not receiving the alert.” As he puts it, by that time “the harms are done.”

How Arbiter sees what’s next

Arbiter is the flagship product from SimPPL, a nonprofit that has spent years exploring how to bring AI into the work of reporters and researchers working on information integrity. Mehta co-founded the AI research lab in 2021 with Dhara Mungra, another data scientist who now leads SimPPL’s product team.

Mehta’s past work includes developing a civic and health misinformation classifier system at Twitter, conducting research at Adobe and the University of Oxford, and coaching grantees of JournalismAI, a program out of the London School of Economics that supports AI projects in newsrooms around the world.

Arbiter is trying to solve a few problems that journalists and fact-checkers frequently face on social media. One is the poor quality of search results on platforms. “You really want a contextual layer on top. [For instance,] if I’m searching for climate skepticism, it’s not going to literally search for the word skeptic in all the posts,” Mehta told me.

Another challenge is making sense of the social media data that journalists can get their hands on. Simply plugging these data sets into commercial LLMs often returns few actionable insights. “Anyone who’s dealt with more than 100,000 pieces of data knows that throwing them at an LLM first blows up your credit card bill and then gives you garbage outputs that you can’t control,” he said.

To make sense of its data, Arbiter isn’t building on top of a single foundation model, but instead leaning on eight to ten different AI models within its stack. “From encoding your queries, to figuring out the right posts to retrieve, identifying coordinated networks within these posts, semantic similarity, network mapping, all use different [models],” said Mehta. Some of these layers are model-agnostic, and Arbiter allows newsrooms to select their preferred LLM provider.

One of the first newsrooms to test Arbiter was Nest Center, a media NGO based in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. Among its initiatives is the fact-checking site and Facebook page, the Mongolian Fact-Checking Center (MFCC). In recent years, Nest’s fact-checkers have reported on coordinated disinformation campaigns from Russia and China, Mongolia’s neighbors to the north and south.

“We were dependent on CrowdTangle, and then Meta gave us the Meta Content Library,” said Duuya Baatar, the cofounder and chairperson of Nest Center, referencing Meta’s own replacement tool for CrowdTangle. Released in November 2023, the Meta Content Library (MCL) has been criticized for restricting journalists’ access and removing the automated insights and sophisticated search features found in CrowdTangle. (Nest has MCL access as a member of Meta’s third-party fact-checking program, the U.S. version of which was shuttered in early 2025.)

“If you’re looking at a specific post, and if you want to look at a specific narrative, then MCL is okay. If you want to analyze how the information ecosystem is changing, then MCL is nowhere near CrowdTangle,” she said.

That’s the need that Arbiter has been meeting in Nest’s early testing. Soon after the newsroom received access, Baatar entered a prompt about a recent Mongolian Supreme Court ruling. The court had found that a criminal code outlawing the dissemination of “false information,” which had long been used to harass and intimidate journalists, was unconstitutional. The parliament was then tasked with drafting a replacement to the code.

Arbiter’s review of Facebook flagged some surprising commentary posted by several smaller accounts. Instead of focusing on “false information,” these accounts said Parliament’s replacement code would focus on “libel” and “defamation.” That, Baatar knew, would bolster the government’s ability to suppress press freedom in Mongolia.

“It was only my first use of Arbiter, and I was thinking that’s strange. I mean, as if that’s gonna happen,” Baatar told me. But weeks later, the Mongolian parliament announced a working group focused on folding libel and defamation into the criminal code.

Though Baatar had dismissed the early warning signs from Arbiter at the time, she said it bolstered her trust in the product. Now, three Nest Center staffers have full access to Arbiter and use it to monitor content in Mongolian on Facebook. (One of Baatar’s first notes to the Arbiter team was to improve its Mongolian capabilities, and they’ve gotten much better since January, she told me.)

“It helps us see certain narratives that are not popular now, but may become popular later,” she said.

Currently, all the newsrooms trialing Arbiter are using it for free. That accessibility has been key for the Nest Center, which can’t afford alternatives like Meltwater and other AI-powered social listening tools that weren’t built primarily for journalists. Arbiter is still exploring revenue streams beyond newsroom subscriptions, since Mehta says he’s conscious that many of the news organizations that could use the tool are cash-strapped.

Despite these advantages, though, Baatar doesn’t consider Arbiter a full replacement for CrowdTangle. “The only concern that I hear from my team is the volume of what it can actually get from sources,” said Baatar. While MCL is better for monitoring specific posters and specific posts because of the volume of content you can access through Meta directly, Arbiter is stronger at trend lines and emerging narratives. “MCL plus Arbiter is coming close to Crowdtangle.”

Finding the data workarounds

Arbiter went through months-long review processes to gain access to the APIs of major platforms, including Facebook and Instagram. Still, the tool is subject to Meta’s strict limitations on its API usage, most importantly rate-limiting: Using the API alone, Arbiter can only access so many posts at a time.

To build out its access, Mehta said he’s been working with third-party data providers that have vendor agreements with platforms, identifying carve-outs to collect public data without violating terms of service, and leaning on data donations from academics and civil society organizations. That last approach, he says, is inspired by the work many disinformation researchers have done on WhatsApp, using data donations to access posts on the otherwise encrypted messaging app.

In the long term, Mehta says he doesn’t see Arbiter as adversarial to social media giants and wants to continue working with Meta and other platforms through their APIs as long as they are willing. But he knows he can’t count on that access.

“Often these processes start off when you’re a small organization and they approve you because you don’t pose any kind of concern for management,” he said. “But as you grow, the kind of work you do changes.”

Disinformation researchers have been the target of major lawsuits in recent years for terms of service violations. In 2023, Elon Musk’s X sued the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) for allegedly “scraping” the platform and improperly using a third-party social listening tool called Brandwatch. The case was later dismissed. But Arbiter has still been working with a team of lawyers to review its processes and find any legal vulnerabilities in its current API workarounds.

“The last two or three years have been focused on figuring out the legal ways to activate the work that we’re doing,” Mehta said.

When it comes to CrowdTangle itself, Mehta says his goals for Arbiter go beyond simply servicing the newsrooms that used to rely on it. The tool’s ability to conduct analysis across platforms, not just Meta-owned ones, is one of its strongest features. Identifying a claim emerging across YouTube and X and Facebook, all at once, was something CrowdTangle could never do.

Still, the service’s shuttering loomed large in our conversations. “CrowdTangle is not a service that was mandated or regulated to continue being offered at any point. Platforms could decide that this was not a net positive and stop offering it,” said Mehta. If platforms will not take on this responsibility, he says someone else should be able to. “These are public conversations, and collecting public conversations in the public interest should not be illegal.”

Greenberg will launch The Upgrade on September 15, “bringing his investigative approach to the process and business of travel.” Harris-Bridson will launch Flamingo Media in January 2027 to cover “the increasingly interconnected market spanning entertainment, creators, brands, platforms, technology and capital.” And Covucci will expand FOIAball, which uses public records to uncover stories inside college football, to do even more reporting on “the powerful institutions and forces surrounding college sports, including political influence, surveillance technology, labor rights, and wealthy donors.”

Beehiiv, unlike (ahem) some of its newsletter platform competitors, does not take a percentage of paid subscription revenue. Instead, publishers that have outgrown the free plan pay a monthly subscription to Beehiiv. Members of the Media Collective get that monthly fee waived, as well as other perks like media liability insurance and pre-publication review.

When looking for candidates for the Beehiiv Media Collective, chief customer officer Preeya Goenka said she looks less to fill a specific, super-original niche than writers with a clear vision and the ability to stick to a publishing schedule.

“It might sound funny, but the actual topic or the industry is almost the least important part of what we look for [for the Media Collective],” Goenka said. “It’s more like, do they have a really good sense of what they want to write about?”

“A sense of consistency in publishing is one of the key factors for growth and for success,” Goenka said, using three times a week as an example. “A lot of times people are like, ‘Hey, I have this idea and I’ll publish when I have the time.’ We’d love to support them however we can, but they’re probably not the right fit for this program.”

Since the launch of the Media Collective in late 2024, its members have earned more than $5 million. One major success from the Beehiiv Media Collective is Oliver Darcy’s Status, which now has four full-time employees, plus part-timers working on sales and the podcast. The newsletter has 130,000 subscribers, including “several thousand” paid, Darcy told Peter Kafka in early August.

Like other success stories from the collective, Darcy worked for years at a legacy newsroom (CNN). Other members were recently with Wall Street Journal (Joanna Stern), Vanity Fair (Richard Lawson), Washington Post (Dave Jorgenson), and CBS News (David Begnaud).

You can read more about the Beehiiv Media Collective here.

These days, things look a little different. What was once a fledgling nonprofit newsroom is now a Pulitzer-winning powerhouse and one of three newsrooms that make up the Deep South Today network, along with two in Louisiana: Verite News in New Orleans and, as of last year, The Current in Lafayette. (The Garrison Project also folded into Deep South Today last year, and founder Ethan Brown is now Deep South Today’s special projects editor, leading criminal justice-focused work across the three newsrooms.) By the end of this year, Deep South Today will launch a fourth newsroom, Arkansas Today.

Ganucheau, a Magnolia State native who was the first reporter Mississippi Today hired, became the publication’s editor-in-chief in 2020 and is now the first executive editor and chief content officer for Deep South Today. The network has more than 80 employees, and a budget that surpasses $10 million. Earlier this year, it launched an investigative reporting center in partnership with The New York Times. A $3 million donation from board chair Andy Lack supports that effort and will establish a video operation called Deep South Today Studios.

Deep South Today’s leaders believe their network model — independent editorial operations that share infrastructure including payroll, tech, and business and audience staff — is critical to bringing more reporting to an underserved part of the country. “I think it’s the only thing that can work in a region like the Deep South that is under-resourced and is also serving a population that doesn’t have as much access to capital and financial resources,” said Deep South Today CEO Warwick Sabin.

Deep South Today’s revenue mix is roughly 55% philanthropy, 30% membership, and 15% earned revenue, Sabin said. “We’ve been looking at the philanthropy in these early stages as seed capital to build the infrastructure that allows us to maximize the revenue from the other sources,” he said. That includes growing memberships and earned revenue. Deep South Today wants to keep its reporting free to access, however, and securing grants will remain crucial.

Mississippi and Louisiana have the highest poverty rates in the country and some of the lowest levels of median household wealth. Regionally, the South’s nonprofit sector has fewer assets compared to the rest of the country. In that local economic context, philanthropy — specifically, national philanthropy — “is always going to be a really important part of what we do,” Sabin said.

Ahead of the launch of Arkansas Today, I spoke with Ganucheau and Sabin about the lessons they’ve learned so far and how they think about sustainable growth.

Plans for Arkansas

Sabin, a University of Arkansas alum who lived in Little Rock for almost two decades, “was already aware of the need for more local news in the state based on my own personal experience and observations,” he said. In 2024, the team conducted an analysis of existing media in the state, with support from the American Journalism Project. Sabin, Ganucheau, and other Deep South Today leaders have spent the past two years visiting the state and listening to Arkansas residents and journalists. “We’ve had a lot of conversations with the existing media in Arkansas to make sure that, first of all, we understood the needs even from their perspective, and where we could be complementary and additive, and definitely not disruptive or competitive,” Sabin said.

A civic information needs census the newsroom conducted this summer in partnership with Civic News Company indicated low levels of satisfaction with local information on topics from housing to political information. Nearly three-quarters of respondents said they thought news organizations in the state should do more investigative reporting. Respondents also said they preferred formats like social media posts and short videos over long-form text investigations.

The media makeup of Arkansas reminds Sabin of Mississippi when Mississippi Today was founded in 2016, he said. The dominant legacy media organization has been diminished by cuts — Sabin compared Mississippi’s Clarion Ledger to Arkansas’ Democrat-Gazette – and large swathes of the state are undercovered or uncovered. (Of the state’s 75 counties, four do not have a news source and 46 have only one, according to Medill’s 2025 State of Local News report. Arkansas has 8.1 Local Journalist Equivalents per 100,000 people, putting it around the middle of the pack in this year’s Local Journalist Index.) Beyond serving as its own destination for news, Sabin thinks Arkansas Today can prop up smaller rural newspapers around the state as a sort of wire service, as the Mississippi newsroom does, with the Associated Press moving away from newspapers.

Deep South Today sees need and demand for local news and information across the state, but plans to begin with reporters in Central and Northwest Arkansas. Although Northwest Arkansas is a relatively wealthy, fast-growing part of the state, Sabin says the region’s sources of local news have not kept up with its growth. (Access to local news varies by county, and current local news providers in the region include The Bentonville Bulletin and an Axios local newsroom.)

Ganucheau has not yet finalized Arkansas Today’s editor-in-chief, but he aims to announce the hire this month. The exact launch date of Arkansas Today will be their call. “We’re going to let [that person and the team they hire] be the architects of what this ultimately becomes in both staff structure, in beats, in coverage areas, in workflows, in all of it,” Ganucheau said. “It’s going to be their show to run, and we’re handing them not a blueprint, but a lot of research, a lot of findings, and a lot of connections and relationships that we’ve built over these past couple years.”

Staffing plans include an Arkansas-based audience editor and video editor, as well as a full-time investigative reporter, data journalist, and New York Times fellow. On the business side, Deep South Today has hired a managing director of sales and a senior director of development and partnerships.

“With Arkansas being this blank canvas,” Sabin said, “we’re able to pilot some things that we could then end up scaling across the rest of our network if they’re successful.”

The network, he added, is “aggressively looking at other places to expand.”

Doubling down on video

In 2024, Mississippi Today’s political team spent nearly six months investigating a powerful committee chair in the state legislature and published a multi-part series about how he helped steer millions in state taxpayer dollars to his own backyard. The series, Ganucheau said, got around 50,000 pageviews total, which he called both “a fine number in a state like Mississippi” and “a little disappointing to me.” So an editor got the lead reporter in front of an iPhone camera to read a 90-second script summarizing the investigation’s findings, and added some B-roll and charts.

Within 48 hours of posting that vertical video across Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and YouTube, it had roughly 600,000 views, Ganucheau said. Now, he said Mississippi Today is averaging 300,000 to 400,000 users on its website per month. This May, the news org garnered just under 5.5 million video views across platforms, a “high watermark.”

Early video experiments were successful enough that Sabin was able to fundraise off the increased engagement, first to expand Mississippi Today’s video work, then to replicate it at Verite. The newsrooms’ videos have performed best on TikTok, Ganucheau said, followed by Instagram Reels and Facebook Reels.

The work in those newsrooms led to the creation of Deep South Today Studios. While individual newsrooms have their own video teams and products, Deep South Today leadership now want to provide more centralized resources to supercharge newsrooms’ work, including creating more capacity for experimentation. Deep South Today board chair Andy Lack, former chairperson of NBC News, agreed to back the idea.

Ganucheau said he’s excited by indications that video can reach and engage new audiences. Deep South Today’s video viewers skew younger and more diverse than its text audience.

“I used to be very afraid of going to read the comments sections,” he said. “But going to Mississippi Today’s TikTok or Verite’s TikTok accounts right now and reading the comments under those videos is one of the greatest joys of my career so far — we’re seeing deep-level engagement with our journalism, with our reporting, in conversations with people who we’ve struggled to reach forever and struggled to get their actual engagement with the work in this way forever.”

As enthusiastic as he is, though, Ganucheau knows there’s a catch.

“The way that we can reach people in ways that we’ve never even dreamed of before is unbelievably amazing,” he said. “And I have no idea how to monetize it, shy of going to get grants and donations from people who see that success and that potential for what it is.”

Deep South Today, along with the rest of the industry, is “scrambling…to figure out how can we monetize this work in a way that’s not totally reliant upon these tech companies that we don’t control.” To this end, the remit for the Deep South Today Studios director includes developing a video monetization strategy.

Lessons learned from Mississippi

Before becoming part of Deep South Today’s central leadership team a year ago, Ganucheau served as Mississippi Today’s editor-in-chief for five years. “It took us a few years at Mississippi Today to get our legs under us — to figure out who we needed to be for Mississippians, who we wanted to be collectively as a newsroom and as a team serving the state,” he said.

One challenge was figuring out the right staff structure. When Ganucheau became editor-in-chief in 2020, the reporting staff had grown from the six or seven in the original launch plan to around 16, while the editing team had stayed the same size, making Ganucheau one of two editors for the 16 reporters. He added a third editor to try to correct the ratio, but it took another year or two to figure out that the right structure for the newsroom was a teams-based model, with designated editors for beats including education, healthcare, and government and politics, and each editor guiding teams of no more than four to five reporters. This structure has the added benefit of making fundraising conversations easier; “the regular pitch to funders effectively became, ‘If you want this specific reporting to be as strong as possible, we also really need this dedicated editor for these reporters,'” Ganucheau explained.

“It sounds so simple or easy to think of it this way now, in retrospect,” he said. “But we really battled [over] what is that right staff structure that’s going to support the type of journalism that we want to do, and how can we sustain it?”

Mississippi Today, with its focus on accountability reporting, has faced a challenge that’s familiar to many newsrooms specializing in investigative deep dives: How much daily, breaking coverage should the team do?

“I think that there were moments when we probably could have or should have done more daily or breaking news coverage than we ultimately did,” Ganucheau said. “Whether you’re a big national newspaper or a small startup nonprofit, every newsroom leader struggles with how [to] strike the balance between the quantity of output, the number of daily stories you do, versus the depth and quality reporting that takes more time and energy and resources over the long haul.”

Part of the challenge of getting that balance right, Ganucheau said, is that it requires staying on top of a constantly shifting local media landscape. Like most of the country, Mississippi lost daily coverage and newspapers between 2020 and 2025. During and after the pandemic, several newspapers in the state reduced their print frequency, and others shuttered. In 2022, the Clarion Ledger stopped printing a Saturday edition. More recently, the Associated Press’ two full-time Mississippi journalists took buyouts (though the news org later hired a multimedia/video journalist for Mississippi).

Ganucheau says he was too slow to see and respond to those changes with his predisposition toward prioritizing investigative stories over daily coverage. Emily Wagster Pettus, one of the AP journalists who took buyouts, joined Mississippi Today as senior editor last year and succeeded Ganucheau as editor-in-chief. Under her leadership, Mississippi Today has ramped up its daily coverage.

One strength of the network model, in Ganucheau’s view, is it harnesses Mississippi Today’s hard-earned lessons into a head start for Deep South Today’s other newsrooms. But it’s critical to him, and to the network’s leadership, that story ideas come from the local newsrooms, not from the top down.

For-profit newspaper chains loom large for Ganucheau as a case study in mistakes to avoid. “We have seen over time what’s happened when these companies regionalize a copy desk, or regionalize editing support, or regionalize story selection…It’s not local once you do that,” he said. “What we’re trying to do and build at Deep South Today is the opposite of how all of that has worked in the for-profit legacy world, and to me, the way that we avoid that is to let our individual newsroom leaders truly lead on behalf of their audiences.”

Looking ahead

Ganucheau and Sabin are both wary of taking Deep South Today’s success for granted.

“We are all eyes very wide open about how this could go in the wrong direction,” Ganucheau said. “I think that the biggest risk that we face in this particular moment is trying to do too much too quickly.”

That, he continued, is “a weird reality for us — we are trying to plug these enormous holes in local news in a region of America that just needs it so desperately, and we’re trying to do it in a sustainable way.”

Deep South Today strives to maintain a startup-like culture. “We’re trying to be as lean and mean as humanly possible,” Ganucheau said. As the organization grows, its leaders almost constantly assess what additional support to add, and how to fund it sustainably — an exercise that needs to happen “almost week by week at this point — it feels like if you wait a month to take a step back, it could be too late in some moments,” he said. “It’s [the] constant threading of that needle.”

“I don’t think tomorrow is certain,” Sabin agreed. “There’s too much change happening in the industry and in technology and in consumption habits. The economic landscape is always uncertain whether you’re talking about the business of journalism or the philanthropic landscape, so I think we’re all going to have to keep hustling and adapting and evolving according to circumstances.”

I suppose there are numerous candidates for that title. The debut of the iPhone in 2007? The launch of Google AdSense in 2003? The first YouTube video in 2005? All worthy nominees.

But for me, it’s the debut of Facebook’s News Feed. In 2006, on the day after Labor Day,¹ Facebook engineer Ruchi Sanghavi blogged about what she called Facebook’s “Facelift”:

You’ve probably noticed that Facebook looks different today. We’ve added two cool features: News Feed, which appears on your homepage, and Mini-Feed, which appears in each person’s profile.

News Feed highlights what’s happening in your social circles on Facebook. It updates a personalized list of news stories throughout the day, so you’ll know when Mark adds Britney Spears to his Favorites or when your crush is single again. Now, whenever you log in, you’ll get the latest headlines generated by the activity of your friends and social groups…

These features are not only different from anything we’ve had on Facebook before, but they’re quite unlike anything you can find on the web. We hope these changes help you stay more up to date on your friends’ lives.

Before that day, getting updates on your friends meant visiting each of their Facebook pages in turn. It wasn’t too different from the actual printed college “facebooks” that inspired the name — a set of pages you’re meant to flip through, looking for specific people. But combining them all into a single stream meant Facebook was no longer just hosting your friends’ stray thoughts — it was shoving them right in front of your face. As Michael Arrington wrote at TechCrunch:

It’s interesting because Facebook clearly gets the idea of an attention metastream, where page views aren’t the currency that matters but rather how effectively the service allows users to communicate. Facebook users will now have a much easier way of staying up to date on what their friends are up to. It may mean less page views for Facebook in the short run as users rarely have to leave their home/admin page to see what’s going on with friends, but if it makes users love Facebook more (is that possible?), it’ll pay off in the end.

(Yeah, gosh, is it even possible for users to love Facebook more?!?)

Users hated it, even protesting outside Facebook’s offices. It was one thing to post about your breakup to a place where your closest friends could find it; it was another to broadcast it on the metaphorical dorm loudspeaker. But people adjusted, the protests stopped, and one of the greatest money-makers in human history was born — soon to be duplicated in some form or another in just about every digital product.

So it’s somewhat fitting that today marks one of the most significant efforts by a national government to regulate and disrupt Facebook’s feeds — treating them more like a public utility than a private corporation’s product.

The Albanese government in Australia has announced its proposed “Digital Duty of Care” for major online platforms, which includes a requirement that Australians be able to “turn off” the algorithms that inject content from people and companies you don’t follow into your feeds. (In PR-speak, “My Feed, My Way.”) In other words, it’s a switch that would return you to the Facebook News Feed of 2006. Clare Armstrong for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation:

Every Australian will be able to choose whether they want their social media content served up by algorithms or not under a federal government proposal to “empower” people online.

Labor will seek support for an opt-in/opt-out system where platforms like TikTok, Instagram or Facebook would be required to send account holders a push notification asking them to decide if they receive recommended content.

The social media algorithm controls come under broader “Digital Duty of Care” draft laws that shift responsibility onto big tech to proactively reduce foreseeable harms or face fines of more than $100 million.

The bill (text here, explainer here) would require platforms to let users turn off all recommended content — and, more important to Facebook, block all targeted advertising. (It doesn’t require platforms to offer ad-free options; a user who turned off targeted advertising would just be served non-targeted ads.) The bill would also give users the right to reset the data profile a platform uses to target content at them.

“Just as we have basic safety standards for cars, toys or food, the duty of care applies basic standards for the online products we use every day,” communications minister Anika Wells said. This proposed internet time-machine will now go before Australia’s Parliament for approval.

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1. The post actually went up on September 5, 2006, not September 8 — but today’s also the day after Labor Day, so I’m counting it as the 20th anniversary. Sue me.

But this approach only works if those who believe in the free press — including elected officials — offer unconditional support. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has not.

On Aug. 21, 2026, the Pentagon fired the publisher, editor and a reporter at Stars and Stripes, citing insubordination and unauthorized media appearances. But the firings took place after the outlet ran a string of articles that cast the Pentagon in a poor light.

A view from the front lines

The newspaper, which is often simply called Stripes, has served overseas military forces and their families since 1918, with a 23-year break between World War I and World War II.

It has continuously remained in print since World War II, providing Americans serving overseas on American military bases everywhere from Okinawa to the Azores with news on topics ranging from high school football games to troop deployments.

When I was a reporter at Stars and Stripes in the late 1990s, I covered both the good and the bad from Bosnia and Kosovo during the NATO peacekeeping missions: the armed unit that doled out cash to Bosnians after the military ran over their farm animals; the soldiers who guarded a school so that the children of separate ethnic groups could attend together; and the military contractors who received no-bid contracts.

While some big stories are also written about in other news outlets covering the military, many of them are only discovered because Stars and Stripes’ civilian and military journalists work and live alongside service members in Europe, the Middle East and the Pacific.

It’s the very same premise behind good local newspapers: There’s little meaningful journalism about local issues without journalists who live and work in the communities they cover.

Stripes was able to provide the only eyewitness account of the negotiations that led to Germany’s surrender in 1945 because its reporter was in the schoolhouse in Reims, France, where Allied and German officials hashed out the terms.

Stripes journalists were also on the front lines of the Vietnam War, with The New York Times describing Stars and Stripes as the only military information outlet giving American troops in Vietnam a candid account of the war’s progress.

More recently, a Stripes reporter based in Bahrain was able to report how U.S. military families were experiencing Iranian drone attacks in Manama, which hosts the headquarters of the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet. She was able to report on the attacks firsthand because she was right there, evacuating alongside them.

Reporters clash with the Pentagon

It was another Stars and Stripes journalist who first reported on the problems aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln in July and August 2026.

The aircraft carrier was in the midst of an exceedingly long deployment due to the U.S.-Iran war. There had been food and water shortages, disrupted mail service and long, grueling workdays with little time off. Some sailors were experiencing mental health struggles, and at least one jumped overboard.

The reporter, Alison Bath, who is based at the headquarters of the U.S. Navy’s Sixth Fleet in Naples, Italy, had interviewed active-duty sailors and family members of sailors aboard the ship. She explained how she had reviewed “dozens of public social media comments and posts by crew members.”

Bath’s story and the follow-up accounts from other media outlets clearly angered Hegseth, who said it “completely misrepresented” the situation.

The media frenzy over the USS Lincoln largely overshadowed the work of another Stripes journalist, Lara Korte, who reported on the hardships, confusion and financial costs endured by military families who had to suddenly evacuate from U.S. Central Command headquarters in Bahrain starting on March 2, 2026.

Like Bath, Korte had interviewed several military family members, one of whom shared with Korte the audio recording of a virtual town hall meeting that the military held for the families. A Navy admiral said on the recording that the military “was in uncharted territory” and had little guidance for families who didn’t know where to live or how to retrieve their cars and belongings.

Though the Pentagon didn’t dispute Korte’s reporting, she was fired for “insubordination” alongside the editor-in-chief, Erik Slavin, and publisher, Max Lederer, on Aug. 21.

Bath is still employed by the paper.

You can’t manufacture credibility

Unlike most shuttered or shrunken news outlets whose advertising model was upended by the internet, Stars and Stripes has long been shielded from market forces thanks to a subsidy from the Department of Defense that covers roughly half its budget.

While this funding could be seen as anathema to journalistic independence, the U.S. government has mandated since the 1950s that the paper have editorial freedom.

Even before then, U.S. military leaders protected the newspaper’s independence. Gen. John J. Pershing, who commanded the American Expeditionary Forces in Europe during World War I, and Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, who commanded Allied forces in Europe during World War II, each ordered military commanders not to interfere with the newspaper. So did Navy Adm. John S. McCain Jr., father of the late Sen. John McCain and the commander‐in‐chief of U.S. Pacific Command during the Vietnam War.

That’s not what’s happening under the Trump administration.

In March 2026, the Pentagon instituted new guidelines requiring that Stripes content be “consistent with good order and discipline of the military.” The following month, the department fired Jacqueline Smith, the newspaper’s ombudsman charged with protecting its editorial independence.

Chief Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell described the moves as part of an effort to “refocus” the outlet away from “woke distractions that siphon morale.”

There’s always been a struggle between military leaders who want to control the reporting at Stripes and those who recognize that freedom of the press is exactly the kind of right that the U.S. military fights for.

Many current and former military commanders see a real benefit in the outlet’s editorial independence because of the values it communicates and the information it provides

Retired Army Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling is one such supporter. In an Aug. 25, 2026, article in The Bulwark website, he described the ways in which he relied on the newspaper’s reporting when he was a commander in Europe.

“Every major military command has an extensive communications apparatus,” Hertling wrote, “but none of those organizations can manufacture credibility. Credibility comes from readers believing that when something goes wrong, somebody will tell them. That’s why Stripes’ early reporting on the USS Abraham Lincoln was so important.”

Public media only works with no strings attached

On Aug. 27, the fired publisher, editor and reporter filed a lawsuit against Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell, the Defense Department, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and another public affairs official, Andrew Brey, alleging that they were fired in retaliation for news coverage that was unflattering to the military. The suit argues that this violated both their protected rights to free speech and Department of Defense policies and regulations.

The department hasn’t specifically responded to the allegations, but it did agree to a one-week reprieve of paid administrative leave as a federal judge considers the lawsuit.

The three journalists are being represented by the same legal team that represents the fired former employees of Voice of America, another government-funded news source that the Trump administration attempted to dismantle in 2025. Like Stripes, Voice of America received government funding even as it sometimes reported unfavorably on the government. And like journalists at Stripes, Voice of America reporters have died doing their jobs.

But despite the Trump White House’s unrelenting attacks on public, nonprofit and for-profit media outlets, the government funding model is having some success at the state level. The organization Rebuild Local News estimates that states will spend US$74 million supporting local journalism in 2026 via fellowships, media training, tax credits and more.

While the group’s leaders say these initiatives demand constant scrutiny to ensure there’s no creeping government interference or political strings attached to the funds, many supporters of local journalism see promise in this model. Government funding for independent media has long existed in Europe, Australia, New Zealand and elsewhere. Some of these outlets are widely trusted by the public.

But that trust doesn’t come easily. It requires political and military leaders to repeatedly reaffirm the ideal of a free and independent press — even when the coverage doesn’t go their way.

The Trust has been in discussions with the Vermont-based company about a possible acquisition for several months, according to Tom Wiley, the Trust’s CEO. Majority owner Bob Miller and minority owners Judy Kearns and Biddle Duke approached the Trust “looking for a way to ensure that VTCNG continued to serve its vital community role,” Wiley said.

“Establishing a sustainable future for our community newspapers has been our priority for several years,” the owners said in a statement. “By selling these publications to the National Trust, not only can they survive but there will be investment in expanding coverage to thrive in a climate where local news is so important and increasingly difficult to find.”

VTCNG currently operates “near breakeven,” according to Wiley, and “market forces have increasingly challenged the group’s financial performance.” The announcement states the Trust is paying a “nominal fee” to acquire the newspapers and it’d be accurate to describe the acquisition as “closer to a donation,” Wiley confirmed. The Trust plans to retain the entire VTCNG team, which includes 15 full-time and two part-time employees. Bill Stille, who has leadership experience at newspapers including The Buffalo News and The Columbus Dispatch, will serve as a transition and transformation adviser for the VTCNG team, where his remit will include identifying opportunities to strengthen partnerships and establish collaborations across the state.

The Trust relies on philanthropy but “more than 80% of revenue across the National Trust is earned through activities like subscriptions, advertising, commercial printing and events,” according to Wiley. None of the Trust’s state subsidiaries are yet profitable.

Some of the Trust’s acquisitions moved into the red under its ownership, as Corey Hutchins and Nieman Lab have previously reported. Last year, the Trust sold the majority of its Colorado newspapers to Arizona-based Times Media Group in a move its leaders said would allow it to double down on serving the seven communities where it still has a presence. At the time, chief growth officer Will Nelligan described the remaining communities the Trust serves in Colorado as “rural places and small cities where a for-profit operator wouldn’t go and where a traditional non-profit news model can’t work.”

In Vermont, the Trust will join a news ecosystem that includes the statewide nonprofit news pioneer VTDigger, which has faced turnover and financial losses of its own, as The Boston Globe reported this spring.

“Each state is unique, as is our role in them,” Wiley said. “We are eager to be part of what we view as a robust, collaborative news ecosystem in Vermont.”

In July, the Trust expanded its Georgia portfolio by acquiring two McClatchy newspapers, the Columbus Ledger-Enquirer and The Macon Telegraph (which shares a coverage area with the Trust’s startup, The Macon Melody).

Being approached by owners hoping to find a solid steward for their community newspapers — as the Trust was in Vermont — is not an uncommon phenomenon. The Trust regularly hears from newspaper owners and community leaders across the country, Wiley said.

“We will expand when we see a financially responsible way to serve our mission of driving the reach and impact of local journalism,” he said. “That includes instances when there will be a continued reduction in local news access or pending closure resulting in news deserts.”

Read more in the Trust’s announcement here.

Updated to attribute comments from the National Trust via a spokesperson to CEO Tom Wiley.

Trump’s power over what the federal government calls bodies of water seems near total. But he can’t control what the news media calls them. (Though he certainly tried with the Associated Press last time.)

Last October, I checked in to see how much success Trump had had getting “Gulf of America” into news copy. The answer: Not much, outside MAGA media.

And with his attention turning again to geography, I thought I’d check in to see if more outlets had been convinced. The answer: Nope. The opposite, in fact — “Gulf of Mexico” is increasing its lead.

I used Media Cloud to find all mentions of “Gulf of Mexico,” “Gulf of America,” or both in news stories between Feb. 1, 2025 and Aug. 26, 2026 — the day before “Lake America” was born. I looked at three different groups of news outlets, as defined by Media Cloud:

• 247 major national news outlets — think The New York Times, CBS News, the Chicago Tribune, TMZ, and Rolling Stone. (But this isn’t just the so-called “MSM” — a sprinkling of partisan sites like Breitbart and AlterNet also make the list.)
• 572 sites that Democrats tweet about more than average (and which thus likely have more Democratic readers) — a mix of explicitly liberal publications (The Nation, Mother Jones), mainstream outlets (The Boston Globe, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette), and magazines and magazine-like sites (Vogue, Pitchfork).
• 406 sites that Republicans tweet about more than average (and which thus likely have more Republican readers) — a list that includes Fox News, The Gateway Pundit, and The Federalist, but also less partisan outlets like the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, the Orange County Register, and a ton of local TV stations.

For each group, I added up how many times each category of outlet used only “Gulf of Mexico” and only “Gulf of America” in a story over each rolling 28-day period. (I’m not counting stories that use both, which are mostly stories about the renaming controversy.) Then I calculated the ratio of “Mexico” to “America” for each period and charted them below. (Note that the Y-axis is logarithmic. I tried using a linear scale, but it would have made the chart very, very tall.)

Three things stand out. First, “Gulf of Mexico” is overwhelmingly the more popular term, across all three of the groups.

Second, “Gulf of Mexico” is getting more popular over time, not less. When I last wrote in October, national outlets were producing roughly 3.75× as many GoM-only stories as GoA-only ones. By August 26, the day before “Lake America,” that ratio was about 7.2×. And the outlets that Democrats disproportionately favor have basically eliminated “Gulf of America” entirely — reaching a ratio of 69 “Mexicos” for every 1 “America” at its peak in late July.

If you run LOESS regressions on each group to determine the smoothed trend line across the entire timespan, you get this:

• National outlets go from using “Mexico” 1.24× as much as “America” to using it 7.23×.
• Democrat-favored outlets go from 2.51× to 26.89×.
• Republican-favored outlets go from 0.58× — that is, using GoA 72% more than GoM — to using GoM 3.13× as much as GoA.

Third, even the news sites that Republicans favor couldn’t quite accept “Gulf of America.” They could only stick with favoring GoA over GoM until around April 15 of last year — less than three months after Trump’s executive order. They’ve been on Team Mexico ever since, other than handful of days sprinkled in May and September 2025.

But categories are one thing — how about individual news sites? Here’s a (sortable) chart answering that question for the 292 sites that used either “Gulf of Mexico” or “Gulf of America” at least 10 times in this period. Click the filters to look at only Dem-favored, only GOP-favored, or all outlets, and sort the table by either GoA share or GoM share.

Of the 123 Republican-favored sites in this list, only 15 used “Gulf of America” solo in more than 50% of stories. (Fox Business, with 83% GoA, is the most loyal.)

In contrast, of the 117 Democrat-favored sites that published at least 10 stories mentioning the Gulf, 30 have never mentioned “Gulf of America,” even once. And among all 292 outlets, of all stripes, 157 used “Gulf of America” solo in less than 10% of stories.

All of which suggests that, while Donald Trump can get Google and Apple to follow orders, getting any media uptake of “Lake America” outside MAGA outlets will be a struggle.

The filing says the DOJ’s decision to intervene is an attempt to ensure that American AI companies remain “competitive” and are free to “develop a robust AI industry.”

The filing makes grand pronouncements about the harms that could come from a ruling in favor of The New York Times and the other plaintiffs in the news industry. A court finding that training large language models on copyrighted material isn’t covered by “fair use,” the DOJ says, would “threaten national security,” “give a competitive advantage to foreign adversaries,” and thwart “creative and scientific progress while hindering American prosperity.”

“The Administration is siding with a handful of trillion-dollar companies at the expense of the countless American creators whose work they stole,” said Graham James, a spokesperson for the Times, in a statement. “Both AI and creators can thrive — AI companies simply need to pay fairly for the content that makes their products possible, as copyright law requires.”

“If the administration’s position was accepted, it would result in an unprecedented, uncompensated transfer of IP rights from news organizations to tech companies,” said Matt Topic, a lawyer at Loevy & Loevy who is representing The Intercept in the case.

In its review of case law, the Trump administration largely reproduces a reading of “fair use” that has been put forward in court by many of the biggest AI players, including OpenAI. It argues that LLM development is “transformative,” meaning that the model and its outputs are different enough from original news articles and other content ingested from new publishers to constitute something “new,” or create a different “utility” than the original works.

OpenAI’s models aren’t trying to “directly entertain or educate” the way a Times article does, the administration argues, but are instead performing tasks like writing, translating, and solving problems.

The filing acknowledges the Times’ claim that ChatGPT has been used to reproduce the Times’ copyright material in its entirety. But it dismisses that concern as irrelevant, arguing that the litigation concerns the training of LLMs, not their outputs, and that the models’ most common uses should be separated from “how persons might hypothetically or anomalously” use ChatGPT.

The filing also cites the Times’ own LLM use as a reason to side with OpenAI in the case, arguing that LLMs “help people, including those working in creative fields, make things and get things done.”

I’ve reported for Nieman Lab on how the Times has used LLMs in Pulitzer-winning investigations and to source leads for beat reporters. Sometimes, the newsroom has used GPT models. The filing, however, cites and quotes a Futurism article, arguing that it shows “authors at the New York Times itself are using LLMs to help them ‘conceptualize and edit’ articles.”

That phrase from Futurism’s story actually references a controversy earlier this year when a freelance contributor used AI to structure and edit her first draft of a “Modern Love” column. The Times requires substantial AI use to be disclosed to readers, even from freelancers, but no disclosure appeared in that column and it’s unclear if the freelancer’s editors knew about her AI use before the column was published. It’s not a particularly compelling argument for how the Times is reliant on AI.

The DOJ also argues that a ruling in favor of The New York Times would hurt small and independent news publishers. Underresourced newsrooms can use LLMs “to compete,” the filing says — “by, for example, using an LLM to generate an image to accompany an article — which otherwise might require a photographer or license” or by “directing users to dissenting sources that offer contrary information.” (The Los Angeles Times famously did just that last year when it published an AI-generated counter perspective on the Klu Klux Klan beneath an opinion column.)

Another argument in the filing is that if OpenAI loses, all AI companies would need to pay licensing fees, disproportionately benefiting legacy media outlets due to “the sheer volume of their written publications.”

“It is not in the public’s interest for the largest technology companies to have an oligopoly on LLM training due to licensing entry barriers that function primarily as large subsidies for old mainstream media companies,” the DOJ claims.

It’s an odd position to take. Yes, anyone following the current state of AI licensing deals would tell you that small news publishers have barely seen a dime from OpenAI, even though much of their content has still been scraped to train LLMs. In many other countries, OpenAI has only signed deals with one of the largest news organizations in the country, leaving the rest behind. But legal precedents requiring payment for content could create leverage and new revenue streams for small publishers, since they have rarely been invited to the table to date.

Few small and nonprofit news organizations are suing OpenAI because litigation is so expensive. Many are concerned with copyright violations, but have let the Times take the lead on setting legal precedent as the most resourced newsroom in the U.S. (The Times has spent more than $30 million on AI-related litigation.)

“[The lawsuit] is not simply moral, it’s for the ultimate sustainability of these news organizations and these unique voices,” David Barlow, general counsel for The Intercept, another plaintiff in the Times case, told me in March 2024. “The principle of being able to take content without compensation is critically important to us — and so is our survivability. They go hand in hand.”

After being laid off in May 2025 from The Daily Dot, along with much of the news staff, Covucci decided to unleash his prodigious public records skills on the multi-billion-dollar world of college football. Many of the top programs, after all, are housed at public institutions subject to the Freedom of Information Act. His newsletter, FOIAball, has garnered roughly 7,500 subscribers, including 420 paid subscribers, in its first year. Subscriptions are $70/year or $7/month.

FOIAball has a rollicking, confiding, they-don’t-want-you-to-know energy — whether its subject is federal surveillance at college football games or the Spotify playlist Dianna Russini (allegedly) made for Mike Vrabel or how one university used a friendly charity to get tax-free NIL money or Pitbull failing to deliver a fight song commissioned by Florida International University.

Covucci got his start “in the blogging days” writing five or six times a day for the men’s humor site BroBible, where he also FOIAed the contents of Osama Bin Laden’s porn stash. His writing voice, as he puts it, remains “a little trolly” and “a bit mischievous.”

“This stuff is interesting and fun. You’re talking about really rich people. You’re talking about exciting football teams. You’re talking about big institutions and government and surveillance and all sorts of silly things,” Covucci said. “I get why some larger institutions want to be buttoned up, but I wish there could be more energy in media. This stuff is absurd. It would be silly for me to not cover it in that way.”

“I don’t want to say it’s, like, a totally new style of writing, but I haven’t seen too many people blending investigative reporting and personal essays,” he added.

Some of the sillier stuff includes which college team spent the most on fireworks in 2025, urinal algorithms, and whether Brutus, Goldy, Sparty, or The Duck (all mascots) made the most in booking fees. Covucci prides himself on each issue containing original reporting.

For now, though FOIAball uses “we” on its about page, it’s the royal we. FOIAball remains a one-man newsroom. More subscribers could mean hiring. With extra hands, Covucci said, he’d like to cover college basketball and Olympic sports. But making a living is the goal for now. Covucci aims to double his current number of paid subscribers in the next year.

Building FOIAball as a business feels like running “both a sales operation and a nonprofit” at the same time, Covucci said. He described a frustrating and fundamental tension with paywalls: He needs readers to pony up because they’ve fallen in love with FOIAball, but how will they if all the best content goes behind a paywall? Although the number of subscribers has steadily risen, Covucci hasn’t found a silver bullet for getting people to open their wallets. Right now, he mixes hard paywalls with softer “institutional support” asks.

“So much of it is trial and error,” Covucci conceded.

While hard paywalls can work when a story goes viral (see: this Aaron Rodgers post on X), subscriptions from a single big story tend to be “soft” and “drop off,” Covucci said.

Instead, he’s found direct, transparent appeals to readers convert better than hard paywalls on their own. One example from February, when he had 165 paid subscribers:

Normally, I show up in your inbox and tell you something you don’t know. That’s what great journalism is. Today, I’m doing the opposite. I’m going to tell you something you already know.

Paywalls don’t really work.

Covucci compared two scoops from the previous week and how they affected his subscription numbers. “Just one person” subscribed to read a paywalled report, while three paid on a free-to-read scoop. He leveled with his readers:

Building a paid subscriber base is a grind. I don’t mean that it is a drag or a pain. Just that it is a long process over time. There is no hack. I can’t publish one huge scoop that makes 200 people give me money. A good story earns two; the next story doesn’t. The scoop after that maybe gets one. The next zero. […]

What makes people really pay isn’t any one piece. It’s them falling in love with what they are reading. Believing in the mission. Caring about the coverage. Appreciating the voice and style and breadth. They want to ensure the publication stays afloat. Maybe even thrive.

I sincerely hope those thoughts have crossed your mind.

The email (which also included a discount on subscriptions) was a success. Generally, Covucci said, a hard paywall has been less effective than catching a nonpaying reader “at the right point,” after they’ve been reading for a while, and making a direct, personal ask to support the thing they already like. More recently he’s also been experimenting with “catchy, clicky text” in front of the paywall instead of paywalling the entire post. In both cases, beating the bystander effect is key.

“When readers see paywalls, I think they assume, ‘Oh yeah, plenty of people click through that, so I don’t have to,’” Covucci said. He’s done the same. “I think we’re all guilty of [thinking], ‘Someone else will do this.’ And not just in supporting media, but in lots of things.”

Later this month, Covucci will be announced as part of the next class of the Beehiiv Media Collective. Being in the collective means he won’t have to pay the roughly $120/month to the platform and will get other perks, including legal help and mentorship.

Covucci very diplomatically praised all FOIA officers when asked about securing the public records that serve as the backbone of his reporting. Still, some records have proven easier to acquire than others. Michigan State? Prompt and professional with requests. Less than 100 miles away at Michigan? Covucci said he has requests that are well over a year old still waiting to be fulfilled. Covucci said universities in Texas, Florida, and South Carolina are among the best at fulfilling requests as required by the law.

“I have found that southern conservative states are actually better at public records than northern liberal states,” Covucci said. “My theory is whereas liberal-leaning states think FOIA is great in practice, they sort of love the government and don’t want people to be bashing it, whereas conservative states are like ‘Here, take these government papers. We hate this thing. It’s probably wasting our money.'”

A decade ago, Georgia changed its public records procedure after the University of Georgia’s head football coach visited legislators and answered questions about the competitive disadvantages public records could pose. (Colleges in the state can now wait 90 days to respond to public records requests related to athletics.)

“I try to be understanding because it is a funky situation where these big, practically professional sports teams have just been slapped to the side of public institutions,” Covucci said. “I understand that it’s a bizarre situation, which is why I do it. I find the whole thing very fascinating.”

Using a combination of AI tools, custom code, and qualitative interviews, the researchers — Carrie Brown, Tara George, and Yi Luo — looked at metrics like relevance to New Jersey audiences, content types, and general communication approach to make a (delightfully highway-themed) interactive report. A few standout findings:

• About half (49.8%) of posts were highly specific to New Jersey. This, the authors write, “suggests these creators are making deliberate choices about what to cover, and much of it overlaps with the kind of community-level reporting that traditional news outlets have reduced.”
• Only about 1 in 4 posts (a combined 24.4%) were classified as news, opinion, or educational content. The most prevalent content types were, perhaps unsurprisingly, “lifestyle” (31.8%) followed by “promotion” (24.2%). (Content categories were a slight point of contention; the AI models generally agreed on categories, but human coders sometimes didn’t, which perhaps speaks to the blurriness of the types of things news influencers tend to post about.)
• The majority of influencers studied don’t see themselves as journalists, even if they cover things that local papers might have covered in the past, like sports, local restaurants, or community events. They don’t always fill the reporting gap left behind by local newspapers. “Most influencers produce opinion and commentary content rather than original investigative reporting,” the authors write. “They tend to react to and contextualize existing news rather than break stories — functioning as information brokers who amplify, curate, and add local perspective to coverage originating elsewhere. Attribution to the original sources is inconsistent.”
• Monetization is all over the place. “A minority of influencers support themselves entirely through content creation; others earn little or nothing from it,” the authors write. “Revenue sources include brand sponsorships, platform creator funds, affiliate marketing, and event fees — but creators described them as unstable and unpredictable.”
• Influencers have to put much more work into community management and audience engagement than traditional journalists do. Political influencers in particular have to deal with trolls, though they also have audience members who rise to their defense. Ambiguity, one journalist-influencer told the researchers, actually helps build trust.

You can find the full report here.

“The plan is to do long-term projects, uncovering misdeeds in government, business and organizations,” Richard Pérez-Peña wrote. “Nothing quite like it has been attempted, and despite having a lot going for it, Pro Publica will be something of an experiment, inventing its practices by trial and error. It remains to be seen how well it can attract talent and win the cooperation of the mainstream media.”

Nearly 20 years later, ProPublica is as remarkable a success story as we’ve seen in digital journalism. After launching with about 20 staffers, it expects to hit 250 this year. And one of its most remarkable transitions during that time is its growing interest in local news. What was once resolutely an Acela-corridor newsroom now has reporters in 20 states, plus structured partnerships with more than 20 local newsrooms, from Anchorage to Tucson, Tulsa to Burlington.

The site’s latest expansion is to California. In May, it announced a new California “investigative reporting hub” — ProPublica’s sixth — and it just named Bernice Yeung to run it. The longtime ProPublican who oversees its local initiatives is Charles Ornstein. He’s spent the past decade building its local work from a single site in Illinois to something that — with California now covered — very nearly covers the entire Lower 48. I spoke with Ornstein about the new operation out west, how ProPublica thinks about its increasingly scattered newsroom, and how it focuses on making local stories resonate nationally. Here’s a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.

So in late 2016, we announced the start of ProPublica Illinois. In 2017, we announced the start of the Local Reporting Network. That was really our first effort to say we have a role to play in this ecosystem. So fast forward to now, and we have 21 active partnerships through the Local Reporting Network. And with the addition of California, we will have 33 reporters on staff in 20 states who are covering local issues. And the reason that’s important, from my perspective, is that these are people who are sending their kids to school in those states. They’re worshiping in those states. They’re going to the grocery store in those states. They’re watching political ads in those states. They understand those states — they’re not parachuting into them. And I think that that gives us real visibility into what’s going on in lots and lots of different places.

The last time you and I talked, we were talking about the 50 State Initiative. As of October, we will be up to 30 states within that — so we have 20 more to go. And we want to pick those 20 and execute in those.

Part of working in this area and local journalism specifically is that you don’t know how the local ecosystem is going to change. And I think part of our role will be in response to what happens. But I also think we’re not just waiting for things to happen to do things on our own. We have a lot of exciting initiatives underway, and I think the key is to execute on them.

Assembly Bill 2222, known as the Community Newsroom Employment and Workforce Sustainability Act, creates refundable tax credits for the state’s news outlets based on the number of journalists they employ. After passing the State Senate on Sunday night, it passed the Assembly with a supermajority of at least 54 votes and will be sent to Gov. Gavin Newsom to be signed into law. The program will be funded by limiting California’s corporate tax deductions for executive compensation above $1 million and redirecting a portion of the revenue to local journalism.

Rebuild Local News, the nonprofit sponsoring the bill, explains the bill:

The Community NEWS Act creates refundable tax credits for employing full-time and part-time journalists and sole-proprietor local news providers. (“Refundable” means that credits in excess of an organization’s tax liability are paid in cash, like a grant.) The job retention credit is worth $20,000 per journalist for up to five positions, plus $15,000 per every additional journalist. Part-time journalist positions would be supported with $7,500 credits. A $15,000 “new hire” credit would be awarded to news organizations that expand journalist headcount, which can be stacked on top of the retention credits.

For example: A nonprofit community news website with three full-time news staffers covering the Central Valley would be eligible for $60,000 a year under this program. If the publication hired one more reporter — or converted a freelancer or part-time staffer into a full-time editorial employee — the publication would earn $95,000 in benefits.

In other words, “if you hire more people, you get more money,” Matt Pearce, Rebuild Local News’s director of policy, said on Monday. “If you lay people off, you get less money. If you don’t employ anyone, you don’t get anything.”

“California has, in recent years, been enacting several policies to support local news outlets — [like] the Berkeley Local News Fellowship program, the Propel Initiative, and AB 1511, which directs more advertising to community and ethnic media,” Pearce said. “The exciting thing about AB 2222 is that if it’s enacted, it becomes a bedrock for those other policies to multiply their benefits.”

AB 2222 follows the Illinois Local Journalism Sustainability Tax Incentive Program, which was enacted in 2025 to support local journalism in the state. In its first year, Illinois news outlets claimed $4 million in tax credits. New York allocated $90 million of its 2025 budget to local news payroll tax credits.  Earlier this year, New Mexico enacted the Local Journalist Employment Tax Credit, through which qualifying news outlets can claim up to 30% of a journalist’s wages in tax credits.

“Policymakers like the journalist employment subsidy partially because it’s very clear, and has a basic sound economic principle behind it: If there’s not enough local news, you can have more of it if you make it cheaper to produce local news by employing journalists,” Pearce told Sophie Culpepper in July. “Simultaneously, it is a policy that can reach across many different types of media outlets and business models in a transparent and broad way.”

The op-ed itself is about whether the Treasury Department should continue trying to lower long-term bond yields. (Druckenmiller says no.) The piece has a few telltale signs of being produced by AI. (“This wasn’t liquidity management, it was price management.” “If the 30-year must trade at 5.5% to clear, that isn’t a crisis. It is an invoice.”) NOTUS reporter Jeff Stein rang him up to ask and Druckenmiller acknowledged it.

Now, in most cases of that-smells-like-AI discourse, this is the moment where the writer offers some combination of denial, explanation, and apology — and the piece gets an editor’s note or taken down altogether. What made this episode different is that neither Druckenmiller nor Journal editorial page editor Paul Gigot offered any regrets or shame. “I write everything using AI now for the same reason I use a calculator when I do math problems,” Druckenmiller said.

“AI is a fact of modern life…nobody can doubt that his op-ed is his genuine opinion,” Gigot said. In a follow-up column, Gigot said there was no need to disclose Druckenmiller’s AI use, arguing that “it wouldn’t be honest for me to grandstand that our contributors never use a tool like AI. Mr. Druckenmiller’s sin against the media pharisees was admitting its use.”

Lots of op-eds, he noted, are actually written by PR staffers rather than the name in the byline, much the way we accept that politicians employ speechwriters — how different is AI? (New York Focus ran 54 recent op-eds from New York politicians through the AI detection tool Pangram. The majority of them were flagged for having at least some AI-generated text.)

I wanted to see if other U.S. newspapers were following the Journal’s lead in blessing the use of AI in opinion pieces. I reached out to editors at 24 prominent newspapers, and none that I heard from were willing to follow Gigot down that path. There were slight distinctions around how aggressively different papers police AI use — for example, proactively asking all contributors to state that they haven’t used AI versus only asking when a piece smells fishy. But most echoed the San Francisco Chronicle’s Matthew Fleischer: “Our audience is paying for the words and thoughts of human beings.”

The Oregonian

Helen Jung, opinion editor:

We don’t have a policy on AI for opinion submissions yet, though I’m working on one…But broadly, our goal is to publish op-eds written by local community members that advance their personal opinions and arguments on issues specific to Oregon. So, I don’t see an AI-generated response to a prompt as meeting that standard.

I have fed submissions through AI detectors, though I don’t find them super reliable. I know in some cases, an author has used AI to polish a piece, though the research, thought process and writing was theirs (according to them). But generally, each op-ed that I select for publication goes through at least a couple back-and-forth exchanges of edits and revisions between the author and me, so pieces can and do change significantly at times.

I think one thing we’ll need to grapple with in developing a policy is this: Businesses, nonprofits and governmental agencies very frequently have paid communications staffers who write op-eds on behalf of the organization’s leaders. We don’t have an issue with that. So I feel like it’s unfair to prohibit everyday community members from using a tool to improve what they have written (though again, not to generate content).

I will say that letters to the editor don’t get the same editing attention that op-eds do, although I have a freelance editor who fact-checks the letters and works with authors when she makes significant edits. The need for consistency is another reason we should get that policy together sooner than later.

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Brandon McGinley, assistant managing editor for opinion and community:

I should preface my remarks by saying that the Post-Gazette no longer has an opinion section. While I did serve as Editorial Page Editor from Aug 2023 to May 2026, upon acquisition by the Venetoulis Institute for Local Journalism (owner of the Baltimore Banner), the PG’s opinion pages were discontinued…

With that being said, I’m happy to let you know how we used to handle the question of AI composition. (I should also note that by “we,” I’m referring to a team of 2, including me, who pushed out a ton of content.) The short answer is that if we sussed out AI usage in composition, we wouldn’t take the piece.

However, given the limitations imposed by our skeleton team, we did not proactively ask contributors about their AI use. That might be different now, if we still ran op-eds, because the tech and its adoption have advanced so quickly that AI composition is less obvious to the naked eye and more and more people use it as a matter of course. But until May, we relied on our gut.

The Denver Post

Megan Schrader, editor of the editorial pages:

The Denver Post has a policy that we do not publish columns or letters to the editor that were written by artificial intelligence. The piece must be original to the author and exclusive to us for it to be considered. Generally, I reject guest commentary submissions that read like they were written by AI. If someone has pre-arranged to write on a specific subject for me and I suspect the submission was written by AI, I ask directly before we publish it. We also use Grammarly’s AI detector to screen the letters to the editor and columns. I am certain, despite these efforts, that we have published AI-written material unknowingly, but we try to prevent it.

We have run one or two letters in the past where we asked the letter writer to disclose that AI wrote the response. The letter writer explained the prompt they used and which service they used and then included a small portion of the response in quotes and attributed it to ChatGPT. I am not sure if I would do this again going forward, and I definitely would not do it for a full column submission.

We are looking at making certain these policies are clear and easily available on our website.

San Francisco Chronicle

Matthew Fleischer, editorial page editor:

Our online submission form for op-eds asks all writers to disclose any use of AI. As for how we communicate what we learn from that prompt to the public: We’re OK with AI research, fact-checking and basic copy editing and do not require that to be disclosed.

We have thus far not run a piece where someone has disclosed AI use — or has obviously used AI without disclosing — for the writing of a piece. I suppose someone could have submitted something and not disclosed. Anecdotally, however, AI Opinion pieces are almost always pretty bad and easy to spot. I’m loathe to explain the giveaways, because the people who submit these pieces without disclosing will know how they’ve been caught and adjust their practices.

So, I don’t think we’ve been fooled. But it’s possible.

We would not knowingly run a piece written by AI. If the writer used AI for certain parts of the piece, we would ask them to rewrite in their own words.

My general view is that our audience is paying for the words and thoughts of human beings. Where AI can help people express their own ideas more accurately that’s great. Argumentation should have a factual basis and AI is a useful tool for both fact-checking and finding primary source materials that strengthen rhetoric. But the human writing of a piece — with all the quirks and flaws that can come with it — is an essential part of the package we provide to our readers.

Los Angeles Times

Philip Gray, op-ed editor:

The Los Angeles Times embraces artificial intelligence as a research and reporting tool, but not for generating content. We are not OK with outside contributors submitting AI-generated text.

Our guidelines online for submitting an op-ed state that submissions should not include AI-generated text. It is not a regular topic of discussion during the back and forth of the editing process.

If we knew that a submission that we were editing included AI-generated text, our response would be to remedy that, not simply to disclose it to readers. We would either decline the submission or work with the sender to excise any AI-generated portions of the piece.

USA Today

A USA Today Co. corporate spokesperson:

You can find our opinion submission guidelines here, which state: “We do not accept submissions that include content generated by artificial intelligence (AI) and language learning models (LLMs).”

As a matter of policy, we do not accept submissions written with any assistance beyond basic spelling and grammar checking tools. Our reviewers are trained to flag submissions potentially written using AI in order to comply with the policy.

Atlanta Journal-Constitution

David Plazas, opinion editor:

We post our AJC op-ed guidelines on our website. One of the bullet points says this: “Essays must be originally written by the author, not AI, and must be exclusive to the AJC.” So, we want authors to write their original thoughts and not employ AI to pen them.

Our standards policies require us to disclose use of AI. Since I arrived in May 2025, I have not had to do that and have not knowingly published any essay written by AI.

Chicago Tribune

Chris Jones, editorial page editor:

[Are you okay with a contributor using AI in the writing or editing of an opinion piece?]

No. Not at this juncture. We are looking for human opinions, crafted and honed by humans. Period.

[Do you routinely ask contributors if they’ve used AI? Only when a piece seems unusually AI-like? Or not at all?]

They attest in our agreement with them that they did not use AI. When a piece seems unusually AI-like, we use software to try and figure that out.

Here are a few other metro newspapers that make a ban on AI usage in op-eds explicit on their websites:

The Boston Globe: Submissions must “not be created using Artificial Intelligence (spell check, punctuation, and grammar suggestions built into Google Docs or Microsoft Word are fine, but using AI tools to generate the content of the submission, explain ideas, create a draft, make writing or tone suggestions, and/or suggest alternate phrasing or word choices is not).”

The Philadelphia Inquirer: “A few other things that we don’t accept…items written by or with the assistance of large language models or other artificial intelligence programs.”

The Seattle Times: “We do not accept AI-generated op-eds.”

Kansas City Star: “Please do not use artificial intelligence to generate the text of your letter.”

The New York Times: “All writing and visuals that freelancers submit to The Times must be the product of human creativity and craft, and all submissions must consist solely of their original reporting, writing and other work…Freelance contributors must not submit any material for publication that contains content generated, modified or enhanced by [generative AI] tools, or that has been input into these tools.”

An MS NOW memo reported by Semafor offers new details on the subscription offering.

On Sept. 9, the network plans to launch a paid membership program “aimed at engaging its existing ‘super fans,’ and offering ways to reach and monetize new audiences that are not everyday cable news viewers,” Semafor’s Max Tani reported on Wednesday. MS NOW president Rebecca Kutler framed the membership program as the first in a suite of planned direct-to-consumer offerings.

MS NOW was renamed after NBCUniversal split off the progressive network and other cable networks into a separate company called Versant. Now, it joins networks from CNN to Fox News to its former sibling NBC News in making digital audiences and monetization a priority as audiences and revenue from TV steadily decline. In 2024, two years after launching and shuttering its streaming platform, CNN put up a paywall ($3.99 a month or $29.99 a year for “basic,” and $6.99/month or $69.99/year for “all access”). NBC News has done the same ($5.99 a month, or $59.99 a year), while Fox News offers subscriptions to its streaming platform Fox Nation for $8.99/month or $71.49/year. CNBC, a part of Versant, is also rolling out its own premium consumer product.

The MS NOW membership will be priced at $7.99 a month, or $79.99 per year, and will “offer perks like members-only content verticals, opportunities for subscribers to interact with the network’s personalities, community features for members to engage with each other, and a 24/7 network feed,” Tani wrote. He added that MS NOW “is leaning more into the parasocial relationship its fans feel with its journalists,” including with live events.

The membership program is based on online survey responses and interviews with 18,000 network viewers, according to Tani. MS NOW told him they found “the network’s fans felt the news media ecosystem was too fragmented, and wanted to get news in one place.” They also found target audiences “wanted online spaces to interact with people they agreed with” and “expressed excitement at the possibility of interacting with the platform’s journalists and personalities.” Kutler noted that the network sees little overlap between its TV viewership and the current audience for its free online content.

Read more in Semafor here.

Backstory, an experimental tool from Google’s AI research lab, Google DeepMind, is helping India Today sort through this stream of slop, scams, and disinformation.

After uploading an image and entering a basic question, Backstory can automatically run checks to determine whether the image is AI-generated, whether it shows signs of manipulation, and where else the image has appeared throughout its lifetime on the internet. Built on top of Google’s Gemini family of large language models (LLMs), Backstory also leans on AI agents to decide which authentication tools it will use and in what order it will use them. The final output is an AI-generated report summarizing what Backstory found out about the image, with citations, as well as a log of the steps it took along the way.

At India Today, Backstory is primarily used to take the first pass on fact-checking a piece of content, speeding up the beginning of the verification workflow.

“On our team, almost everybody uses Backstory in combination with other things. We use it as a quick reference — it gives you some context, it gives you some direction,” said Bal Krishna, who leads the fact-checking team. “It is doing all the work you might have done with five different tools, five different logins, in the same place. That’s the beauty of it.”

In the past, reporters at India Today might have needed to separately run an image through an AI image detector, conduct a reverse image search, and then stitch together a timeline of its historical appearances. Backstory will do all those things at once and, for now, it is entirely free to use.

“The unique value add for Backstory is that there are a number of bites at the apple,” said Zoe Darmé, a product manager for Frontier AI Research, the team at DeepMind building the tool. “A lot of times when we’re talking about looking at an image, trying to understand it in context, people are focusing on one part of the chain. Backstory is really trying to pull it all together into a single user experience.”

Backstory is still only available through Google’s Trusted Testers Program, but India Today’s fact-checkers are among the thousands of journalists, OSINT experts, librarians, and information literacy researchers Google has brought on to trial the tool. The team is currently collecting feedback from this group to make improvements.

That’s already a departure from the many AI authentication tools built without adequate input from journalists, according to a report published in July by Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy.

Many other commercial AI detections tools don’t take into account more nuanced forms of manipulation — like divorcing a photograph from its original context — that journalists encounter all the time. A lot of these tools also output percent confidence ratings. For example, they might spit out an 80% likelihood that an image is AI-generated. These ratings are a “black box” with little clarity provided on how ratings are decided or ways to communicate those numbers to readers, according to the report.

Darmé told me she thinks of journalists as Backstory’s core users, but does hope to make the tool more widely available in the future. Even if Backstory launched publicly, she says it will most likely appeal to a niche audience invested in the nuances of image verification, and looking to answer more than the binary question of whether an image is “real” or “fake.”

According to Mike Caulfield, a digital literacy expert and creator of the SIFT method, building for this niche might be even more impactful than building a universal tool for anyone on the internet.

“Information environments work in this very intermediated way, where what actually has the most impact on an information environment is to help the helpers,” Caulfield told me, explaining that vetted information flows out from trusted sources, including journalists and fact-checkers, but also more casual hobbyists he calls the “family fact-checker.”

Caulfield describes Backstory as filling a hole in the market by building for these helpers. He notes that not every beat reporter who needs to verify an image is going to have subscriptions to high-quality AI detection tools, or the expertise to use the dozen of tools in an OSINT specialist’s toolbox.

“There hasn’t really been a tool for something in between the general user and that highly specialized user; between Bob from Peoria [Illinois] — not to pick on Peoria — and Craig Silverman,” said Caulfield, name-checking the disinformation expert and investigative journalist. “This is a tool that really hits that underserved middle.”

As part of its AI detection features, Backstory can run a tool call for SynthID — a way to check for watermarks embedded in images created with Nano Banana, Google’s AI image generation model. Backstory also checks an image’s content credentials, looking for encrypted metadata added by companies who have signed onto the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA) standard, including Google, Adobe, and the BBC.

Caulfield, however, says the tool’s ability to trace the history of an image online is often its most useful feature. That feature allows journalists to see an image in its original context, and chart how that context may have changed over time.

“The integration aspect — telling the full story of the image — turns out to be the really time-consuming part,” said Caulfield. “Backstory takes an initial process that would take you 50 minutes, and it can shrink it down to three.”

This feature takes on a challenge that long predates the rise of AI-generated imagery. “If you talk to any fact-checker, I don’t think anybody is going to tell you that they wouldn’t have loved to have this tool in 2016,” he said.

Google DeepMind, like many of the largest AI model makers, has contributed to the more recent explosion of AI-generated imagery on the internet. Nano Banana has been routinely criticized for contributing to disinformation about politicians and public health, and even for its use by online scammers.

Most recently, Google Earth came under fire in late July for integrating Nano Banana into its platform, allowing users to easily manipulate and alter 3D satellite images. Just a day later, Google announced it would roll back the feature and build “stronger guardrails” after examples of false and misleading imagery spread widely online.

Darmé says the decision to build Backstory wasn’t a direct response to these types of criticisms, but it was an attempt to address deteriorating trust in media content on the internet at large.

“Having worked on tools that brought image generation to a large population of users, having listened really closely to feedback from users in terms of what they wanted, there’s a clear user need,” she said, explaining DeepMind’s investment in building an easy-to-use provenance tool. “That might be something slightly different than [feeling] this team has one-to-one personal responsibility to release a tool because we also are in a company that releases Nano Banana.”

Like most tools powered by LLMs, Backstory can’t guarantee accuracy. A disclaimer appears at the bottom of the tool, similar to the one that appears on Google’s general AI assistants: “Backstory can make mistakes, so double-check it.”

A common problem with using LLMs to authenticate images is conflation, when the models mistake one image with another that is visually similar, according to Caulfield. “If you put in an image that can be described in the same way as another image that’s very popular online, it’s not uncommon for the LLM to confuse the two images,” he told me.

This problem surfaced in my own testing. After prompting Backstory to generate a report on the history of my own headshot, it ended up mistaking my image with the headshot of another journalist, Carlos Maza. His headshot came up with the same text search terms, including “man with curly hair,” “black cap,” “smiling.” Backstory output a full report on the history of Maza’s headshot on the Internet, before I fed my name into the tool and it eventually corrected itself.

There are other limitations with the tool. Right now, Backstory can only process images, though the team is exploring video and other modalities, according to Darmé. In its context tracing reports, Backstory can also only reference images that have been indexed on search engines. Even when Backstory claims to have found the origin of an image, it could have had a life beyond the tool’s view.

“It’s possible that something might have originated on TikTok, which is not indexed. It might have originated on WhatsApp or Signal or any other closed group,” said Bal Krishna. “Using Backstory you should keep these limitations in mind. We always do.”

Due to these current shortcomings, Bal Krishna says India Today does not cite Backstory’s AI-generated reports directly in its published fact-checks, and reporters are expected to manually confirm any information they pull from the tool.

Still, he considers Backstory the “first robust tool made by a big tech company that was offered to fact-checkers” for image verification, and is hopeful it will only improve as feedback from testers is folded into the product.

When I asked if Backstory had sped up the daily work of his fact-checkers, he responded, “There is no doubt about it.”

But one publication is over it. If you want to write for The Food Section, you’ll have to pick up the phone.

“We’re switching to a pitch-by-phone system come September,” founder Hanna Raskin announced on Tuesday. “Having been deluged by AI-generated and enhanced story ideas this summer, we’re re-humanizing the process with a dedicated hotline (which has the added benefit of weeding out supposed reporters who aren’t in the habit of ringing up strangers.)”

The Food Section reports on food industries and issues in the American South, with bureaus in Asheville and Charlotte, North Carolina. It was the first solo newsletter to win a James Beard award and the first newsletter to win a National Magazine Award, according to its About page. Raskin currently takes story pitches through a Google Form.

Raskin told me that she’s noticed an increase of AI-generated story pitches since The Food Section upped its pay rates for freelancers on July 17. Raskin estimates that a quarter of recent pitches were “wholly AI, meaning neither the writer nor the proposed story appears to exist in the real world.”

“Like most editors on the receiving end of slop — some of which was disturbingly calculated to appeal to a publication that prides itself on exposing social injustice — I found the situation incredibly depressing,” Raskin said. “What was especially worrisome was I felt myself becoming more inclined to dismiss pitches from writers without sterling portfolios or connections to journalists in my professional circle. That’s hardly compatible with cultivating new voices or encouraging young reporters.”

Raskin plans to keep the pitchline open at designated hours and will see what happens. (“I’m not a fool: I’m sure there is an AI way to game this system too,” she noted. “But my hunch is it will work until it doesn’t.”) She’ll also coordinate with journalists to take pitch calls at times that work for them.

“We understand that many great writers — meaning the kind which aren’t AI — have hourly-wage jobs and other unmoveable obligations,” she said.

Media workers continue to battle the onslaught of AI pitch slop. Last summer, Wired and Business Insider retracted published stories by an “AI freelancer” named “Margaux Blanchard.” In July, Futurism reported that PR firms are using AI publicists to spam journalists with pitches.

Raskin plans to share the phone number in The Food Section’s newsletter next month. You can read the publication’s full pitch guide here.

“I follow Coach,” the seller told Dominic. “$120?”

@theathletic Follow along with @COACHKOE │ SPORTS CARDS at The National Sports Collectiors Convention as he helps a young collector on his journey to find a Caleb Williams card! Sponsored by eBay. #chicagobears #calebwilliams #sportscards #nfl ♬ original sound – The Athletic

The Athletic published the 97-second video of Coach Koe and Dominic to TikTok. It’s one of around 75 videos The New York Times’ sports site has published with sports-focused creators since launching a pilot partnership program last September. Others include explainers, like “How did this 21-year old go from playing college golf to beating Scottie Scheffler less than two months after turning pro?” and another on “one of the most expensive pieces of grass ever sold.”

Ahead of the World Cup this summer, The Athletic also produced videos asking sports creators in different countries about their tournament predictions and favorite soccer moments. And at the start of last year’s NBA season, The Athletic partnered with the social media–based basketball publication @halfpast*noon on a post about breakout stars.

All told, the videos have gotten a combined 50 million views, said Adam Park, The Athletic’s director of video growth. Since last September, The Athletic has also gained 100,000 followers across its different platforms.

The Times has joined forces with creators in the past. Last summer, The Athletic inked a seven-figure deal to license “Pablo Torre Finds Out,” a sports journalism podcast by Pablo Torre. NYT Cooking has also been partnering with independent food creators to diversify its video content and reach new audiences.

Most of The Athletic’s video content is still made in-house with its journalists, but the publication sees creator partnerships as a way to find new audiences. Younger people, in particular, tend to prefer getting their news via video, rather than reading or listening. Park said the existing audience of The Athletic is “quite even across age demographics” but noted the creator-led videos were helping the sports news site work with younger creators that have developed similarly young audiences. The Athletic declined to share details about its audience demographics.

“We have internal creators that host, do podcasts, or social video, but we really wanted to tackle the idea of taking a large-scale newsroom and translating that into more of the human, personal touch of a creator,” Park said. “How do we translate to younger audiences, and make our newsroom accessible to everyone? This felt like the easiest way of doing that.”

Finding the right creators to collaborate with means “a lot of watching TikTok and YouTube,” head of creative development Craig Custance said. Park and then-video growth manager Jordan Pun (who now works as the head of social analytics for MrBeast) compiled lists of creators whose content they thought would mesh well with The Athletic’s brand.

“It was really important to us, as we started connecting with creators, that we found people that wouldn’t feel completely off brand,” Custance said. “The Athletic is not a place of hot takes. If we were to bring in really strong, opinionated creators, it just wouldn’t fit. If we’re connecting with their audience, it would just be a mismatch. We had a lot of conversations about whether the people we’re reaching out to match our journalistic DNA, our storytelling, and our deep analysis.”

The workflow relies on lots of communication between the Times newsroom and the creators, Park said. Sometimes the creators pitch ideas to editors, who will provide feedback and previous stories The Athletic has published on the subject. Other times, editors will flag newly-published stories with creators who might be interested in talking about the reporting in their videos. Creators are paid for their work, though The Athletic declined to provide details or payment rates for the partnerships.

One creator they worked with, Frank Michael Smith, was proactive in finding stories that worked for both his audience and The Athletic, Park said. Smith, who covers several sports and has more than two million TikTok followers, pitches his ideas, scripts the videos, then sends them to The Athletic for editing and a fact-check. Once the edits are in, he produces the videos and files them. The Athletic also has editors who oversee the particular sport or team mentioned in the video review the piece.

Smith then publishes them with The Athletic as a collaborator. Between October 2025 and April 2026, Smith published 24 videos with The Athletic, pulling in 27 million views in total.

“What we built was a blueprint: proof that the creator economy and legacy media aren’t competing,” Smith wrote on LinkedIn in April. “We’re much more powerful together.”

Vertical video — both with journalists and creators — has been a commercial opportunity for the publication. EBay sponsored at least two videos from the Sports Card Convention, including the Coach Koe video. The Athletic’s daily World Cup video recaps, anchored by different journalists, were sponsored by Amazon Prime. Fan interview videos on the street were sponsored by Apple TV. One video, where Smith explains how Spain and Argentina stacked up against each other ahead of the World Cup final, was sponsored by Kalshi. Other creator videos are unsponsored.

The videos aren’t straight advertisements for those companies. Instead, Custance said, the ideas for the videos originated in the newsroom with editorial purpose, and advertisers were approached afterwards.

“We were going to do [the videos] anyway,” he said. “It’s like getting an ad on your story. Now we’re generating revenue with it as well, which is ideal.”

Today, The Athletic usually has at least one creator on its production calendar to produce content, Park said. The Athletic is currently hiring for a video growth manager to lead and expand the creator program.

“We started out as a longform, written company and have evolved constantly since day one,” Custance said. “For us, this is how the audience wants to consume sports news and analysis — on TikTok and Instagram.These [creators] are the people that have found the most effective ways to do it. How can we tap into that and expand our journalism in that way?”