The bad news? Even those hard news stories don’t convert enough readers to sustain the cost of producing them.

Those findings come out of one of the most remarkable bits of journalism research I’ve ever read — a granular analysis of a newspaper’s web traffic at a scale we’ve never seen before. We’re talking more than 1.2 billion user sessions, covering more than 600 million individual article visits, all of them tied to unique user profiles, over a four-year period. Researchers were able to track each reader’s path — how often they visited, what types of articles drew their attention, and what they did each time they were confronted with a paywall and a decision: offer up a credit card or go find something else to read online.

“I think, at least among people who study communication, the conventional wisdom is that most people are interested in entertainment and sports, only incidentally exposed to politics coverage at all — they don’t really seek it out,” said Gregory J. Martin of Stanford University, the paper’s lead author. “If they get it at all, it’s by accident. That, I think, is kind of the conventional wisdom, both among scholars of journalism as well as among people who actually run newspapers.

“Our paper is making the point that that is basically true — if you look at visits. Those are the sort of articles that generate the most traffic. But willingness to pay in attention is really different than willingness to pay in dollars.”

All of that sounds like good news for those of us who would like local newspapers to protect their most civically useful beats — the “iron core” of journalism — whenever there’s another round of cuts to be had. If your newsroom still lives and dies by Chartbeat — if pageviews are all that matters to management — it’s missing out on some critical intel. The stories that get visits might be the ones you should be doing fewer of if your goal is chasing subscriptions. Smarter newsrooms have known this, at least intellectually, for a while, of course. But here’s hard data proving it.

But what about that bad news? Because Martin et al. have all this data tying reporters to stories to visits to subscriptions, they also have a go at testing whether hiring an additional journalist might even pay for itself. If more local news means more digital subscriptions, could we be at a point where a reporter’s salary might be covered by the extra subscriptions that her work generated? If that were true, it’d be an excellent case for further investment in newsroom capacity.

Unfortunately…it’s not. Even in the most optimistic scenarios, the authors find, one reporter’s digital subscriptions don’t come close to paying one reporter’s salary.

Here’s a chart showing the relative share of a marginal reporter’s salary covered by marginal digital sub revenue. (Note that the researchers don’t have access to this newspaper’s reporters’ actual salaries; they’re using market averages.) Adding a local news reporter will generate digital subscriptions all right — but only enough to cover something like 1/4 of their salary. Even during peak Covid, a health reporter’s digital subs would only cover around 60% or so of their salary.

To be fair, Martin notes that this methodology only accounts for the digital subscription revenue that an individual reporter might generate. Newspapers make money in other ways — from print (somehow!) and from online ads (theoretically!). But neither of those is going in the right direction, and the connection between an individual reporter’s work and revenue is much more abstract. “In a world where newspapers were exclusively online, for the staff, the digital subscriptions alone wouldn’t have covered the the cost, at least during this period,” Martin told me.

So that’s the paper’s central conundrum. If a newsroom wants to optimize for digital subscriptions — which for more than a decade has been the closest approximation of a sustainable business model for high-quality local news — it should lean into hard news. But no matter how hard it leans, the underlying numbers remain dangerously unstable.

1. “Editorial” is the strangest beat in the analysis; Martin told me it contained the work of only one opinion staffer who wrote a few times a month. The number of articles that “beat” covers here is so small that I think it’s best ignored as a category.

“We started talking about doing a media season probably five years ago,” said John Biewen, host of Scene on Radio. His cohost for this season is media scholar and longtime collaborator Chenjerai Kumanyika, who also co-hosted the seasons on whiteness and American democracy. “It intersects with all of these huge topics that we’ve taken on before. It’s very much related to the quality of our democracy, or perhaps the lack of quality of our democracy.”

To report out the season, Biewen drove to North Carolina’s border belt, a news desert a couple of hours away from his home in Durham, where he spoke to everyday North Carolinians — many of whom work in agriculture — about how they got their news.

“We wanted to do a fair amount of looking over the shoulders of ‘ordinary people’ as they consume media, or hearing about how they experience the news,” Biewen told me. “Three of the four counties that we went to are news deserts. It’s a diverse and economically challenged part of the country. So we could have gone to 100 different places, but it seemed like that was enough good reason, and the fact that it was a couple hours away from me by car was convenient.”

Biewen and Kumanyika also spoke with other media scholars, including Penny Muse Abernathy, who lives in the border belt herself, to try and answer a central question: is the news broken, or has it never worked at all? Kumanyika lays out his theory in the first episode:

When was the media telling people the truth about white supremacy and how pervasive it is, the truth about U.S. history and how brutal it is, or the truth about U.S. behavior around the world? Or the way America’s economic system works and why folks are struggling to get by? This idea that Americans used to agree on things — that we ever really had a consensus as a society? Nah.

Biewen and Kumanyika hope their season travels widely; Scene on Radio has a dedicated audience that is interested in structural deep-dives, but, as Kumanyika told me, the news affects peoples’ understanding of the world, which means it could potentially have broader appeal than any of the show’s past seasons. They’ll be doing some live shows to help grow that audience, including a session at the Tribeca Festival in New York in June.

“The news is a lot like the police,” Kumanyika said. “Everybody has a strong opinion about it.”

But widely staffed newsrooms and large print runs don’t automatically mean plentiful space for investigative or watchdog journalism.

It’s only gotten worse since 2012, when Shinzo Abe was elected prime minister, and new laws to limit journalist access to data and even criminalize certain forms of reporting due to national security concerns have caused Japan’s press freedom rankings to tumble. In 2016, UN Special Rapporteur on the right to freedom of opinion and expression, David Kaye, released a report raising concerns that Japan’s “independence of the press is facing serious threats” and that weaknesses in whistleblower protection and fear of punishment were harming journalism.

“Investigative journalism needs to be supported by press freedom,” said Yasuomi Sawa, a professor of journalism at Waseda University. “The role that investigative journalists play is undervalued in this country due to the lack of education about how information is crucial to maintain our democracy and how journalism is indispensable to hold those in power accountable.”

In fact, there is just one GIJN-affiliated news outlet in Japan — the nonprofit Tokyo Investigative Newsroom, or Tansa. Despite the odds, Tansa has, over a decade, worked on several longform investigations on issues ranging from gender, health, politics, and the environment.

“We feel there is a strong demand for nonprofit and independent media like Tansa, independent from political power and the economic spheres of large corporations, and I feel the public needs more exploratory, investigative media,” said Makoto Watanabe, Tansa’s founder and editor-in-chief.

After being disillusioned by the failure of editors at the Asahi Shimbun, where he previously worked, to properly cover the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster, Watanabe founded Tansa in 2016. While the site remains much, much smaller than the Yomiuri or the Asahi Shinbun’s thousands of staff, Tansa has slowly grown to seven people — Watanabe, three reporters, and several support staff.

A new model for Japan

While independent investigative media are common in the United States, Europe, and even in nearby South Korea and Taiwan, in Japan, establishing a nonprofit newsroom hadn’t been done before. That historical hurdle has been, and remains, a struggle for Tansa.

“Most of our donations from major foundations and institutions are from overseas,” noted Nanami Nakagawa, a reporter at Tansa since 2020. “Donations from individuals in Japan are difficult to obtain.”

At the same time, the need for what Tansa is doing has grown. With mainstream media like Asahi Shimbun abandoning or cutting their investigative units and other large media preferring to maintain cozy relationships with the government and large Japanese companies for their ad money, Tansa often finds itself the only one willing to dig into complicated topics that expose wrongdoing at some of Japan’s most powerful companies.

Investigations that Tansa has published over the past decade include an exposé on student suicide at a school in Nagasaki, a report linking illegal PFOA toxic pollution to the Japanese conglomerate, and a deep dive into Japan’s post-war era forced sterilization campaign.

While Tansa has gained a reputation for exploring topics that mainstream media mostly ignores, it has more recently found ways to collaborate. One recent investigation uncovered a vast network selling sexual images and videos of girls and women taken without their consent. Japan’s national broadcaster, NHK, aired a documentary series made in collaboration with Tansa, bringing the story to its millions of viewers around the country.

“It was very important, as Tansa has investigative skills, and NHK is such a huge media organization with a big TV viewership,” said Sawa.

Impact: The Mother Files investigation

Early this year, Tansa published their latest investigation, a collaboration with the South Korean award-winning nonprofit Korean Center for Investigative Journalism (KCIJ), digging into a massive tranche of files that implicated many of Japan’s top political leaders in a shady network of foreign funding and influence. Called the True Mother Files, the series, released over several weeks, highlighted links between numerous leaders in Japan’s longtime ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and conservative funders, the Unification Church, and religious leaders in South Korea and the United States.

“We read the entire 3,000-page document thoroughly and reported on how the collusion between LDP politicians and the Unification Church came to be, including the process and historical background, not just the content of the documents,” explained Mariko Tsuji, a reporter at Tansa since 2016.

The timing was ideal, coinciding with a general election, where an Abe protégé, Sanae Takaichi, was running for prime minister on a nationalist platform. It also was released just as a sentencing decision was being made in the trial of Tetsuya Yamagami, who assassinated Abe due to anger about the ruling party’s links to the Unification Church, which he blamed for his family’s impoverishment. The series resonated with readers.

“During an election, the Japanese media usually avoids publishing criticisms of specific politicians. Tansa, however, considered the relationship between the Unification Church and LDP politicians to be vital information that could influence voting behavior,” said Tsuji. “[It] resonated strongly and gained significant reactions from the public.”

For Tansa reporter Nakagawa, all the hard work is starting to pay off, as Tansa’s standing in Japanese society is growing. “It’s only in the past couple of years that we started seeing a significant increase in donors,” she said. In fact, they’ve enjoyed a big surge in support and new donors since publishing the True Mother exposé.

For Watanabe, what’s even more important is that there is growing awareness in Japanese society of the need for independent media and investigative reporting that prioritizes the public’s interest first and foremost. “During the last 10 years, we have seen a rise in disbelief toward mass media and an awareness that we need media that reports for us,” said Watanabe.

Collaboration and building Japan’s investigative culture

As a major economy, Japan’s reach spreads far beyond its borders. As the only newsroom partner of GIJN, Tansa often receives requests to participate in global collaborations and has played a role in many, including Oceans Inc., led by the Environmental Reporting Collective; Blowing Unsmoke on the global tobacco industry with OCCRP; and Coal Crusades with several outlets in the Asia-Pacific region. But they’re limited by their size and ongoing domestic investigations.

“There are many occasions where we would have to turn down those requests, depending on the workload we have at the moment. We feel very regretful about that,” said Watanabe.

When considering joining a collaboration, Tansa takes a few things into consideration — the links to Japan, the potential for mutual benefit, and if the collaboration aligns with its mission as a media outlet. “Tansa stands with victims and those bullied by those in power,” said Watanabe. “Alignment on this stance is what we value most.”

Watanabe, Tsuji, and Nakagawa are fully aware that one small nonprofit newsroom can’t cover everything in Japan, nor take on every worthy collaboration. The sector, as a whole, needs to grow.

“We need more media outlets like Tansa to be established — competing as rivals where necessary, but collaborating to invigorate journalism,” said Watanabe.

One organization trying to expand Japan’s investigative journalism culture — and expand the space for collaboration — is the country’s Journalism Practitioners’ Forum (J-Forum), which brings together mainstream and independent media outlets along with freelancers.

“It’s great to see the very conservative and progressive journalists talking side-by-side, with respect as colleagues, and looking for the possibility of more collaboration,” said Waseda professor Sawa.

He is also hopeful about the future of Japanese independent media, as he is seeing the emergence of new outlets expanding into investigative reporting, though with different models than Tansa.

Examples of these include Voice of Nara, Frontline Press, and My News Japan, all small, independent news outlets. The challenge will be finding a way for this cohort to find ways to finance sustainable investigative reporting.

“The media landscape is changing rapidly right now, I really look forward to seeing more to come,” said Sawa. “We need more variety and diversity in Japan’s investigative journalism ecosystem, which can make the information environment richer.”

The Star Tribune has 495 employees, including a newsroom of 200 journalists. The cuts will affect every department and the newsroom will be reduced to 175 people, the Star Tribune said.

CEO Steve Grove told employees in an email that the company will also explore becoming a nonprofit owned by a foundation. The newspaper is currently owned by Minnesota billionaire Glen Taylor, who bought it in 2014.

“Grove said Taylor has ‘only ever invested money in its future and never once taken a profit from it,’ but that it was time to make a long-term plan for the organization’s future stewardship,” the Star Tribune’s reporting says.

Last year, the Star Tribune laid off 125 employees when it closed its Minnesota printing facility and moved its printing to Des Moines, Iowa.

In May, the Star Tribune won the Pulitzer Prize for breaking news reporting for its coverage of a Catholic school shooting in August 2025.

“But vital journalism is not a guarantee of profitability,” reporter Christopher Vondracek wrote.

Read the full story here.

So both the Star-Tribune and the AJC are cutting 15% of their workforces.

However, one is exploring a nonprofit structure to insulate itself from its right-wing billionaire owner, the other kept their right-wing billionaire owner but went fully digital.

Would love to see they diverge from here.

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— Alex Ip 葉清霖 (@alexip718.com) June 3, 2026 at 3:44 AM

Minnesota has unfortunately been the site had some of the most consequential news events of the last year, and the journalists at the MN Star Tribune stepped up enormously, even taking home a Pulitzer. Now they're about to go through another painful round of cuts. www.startribune.com/minnesota-st…

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— Jessica Lussenhop (@jlussenhop.bsky.social) June 3, 2026 at 9:28 AM

The senior AI engineer position is one entry in a list included in a “Future Newsrooms Study” report from FT Strategies and WAN-IFRA. The report, published this week and set to be released annually, is designed to help publishers “future-proof their newsrooms.”

The report’s authors combed through 6,687 LinkedIn job listings, classified 234 as strategy roles, and narrowed those down further to 16 “emerging strategy function roles” in four categories:

• Audience strategy: “Embedded audience editors who shape coverage, distribution, and platform choices across desks”
• AI innovation in editorial: “Editor-coders who shadow reporters, find AI-solvable pain points, and build prototypes themselves”
• Editorial-led product and design: “Designers and product directors sitting at the editorial table, reimagining the news object itself for AI-native interfaces
• Newsroom engineering: “Editorial-led engineering teams shipping AI features every few weeks, with the editor-in-charge personally reviewing pull requests.”

I looked up all the jobs to see how they’re described and what the companies say they’re looking for. (Politico, for instance, says in its posting for an editorial director of newsroom engineering: “We want to invest in a newsroom team so that we can move from quarterly experiments to shipping AI features every couple of weeks, and building Politico-specific models that competitors can’t replicate.”)

You might consider these listings inspiration for new positions in your newsroom. Or maybe you’ll find them interesting as you think about your next gig. (I tried to note below whether the job postings are still open, but I’m obviously not the hiring manager for any of them, don’t email me!)

Anyway, here are the jobs. I’ve listed them from highest salary range to lowest; the ones that don’t give a salary range at all are at the end.

Position: Editor, newsroom development and support
Publisher: The New York Times
Location: New York
Posting still up? Yes
Years of experience required: “5+ years of experience managing people whose portfolio includes media innovation”
Salary range: $200,000 to $230,000
From the description:

The New York Times is looking for a leader to reimagine and guide its Newsroom Development and Support (NDS) team, a vital department responsible for ensuring the evolution of internal tools and practices that empower our journalists to produce their best work.

You are a dynamic person who can lead the continuing transformation of those in the newsroom who create journalism and those who support its creation. You have a strong journalistic foundation to guide this department into its next chapter. And you have the flexibility required to oversee a team that includes journalists, technologists, trainers and project managers.

The NDS team comprises two distinct groups: the editorial development arm designs training programs based on updated tools and develops curricula covering topics from clear writing to effective tagging; the newsroom technology group focuses on internal and external tools, including publishing, planning, and data management, and serves as the newsroom’s liaison to product, design, and engineering teams.

Position: Audience deputy, off-platform
Publisher: New York Times
Location: New York
Posting still up? Yes
Years of experience required: “10+ years of editorial experience including managing audience teams”
Salary range: $180,000 to $210,000
From the description:

Reporting to the Newsroom Audience Director, you will be the primary architect of our strategy for reaching and engaging readers on search and social platforms, ensuring The Times’s journalism remains visible and relevant as the digital landscape is reshaped by AI and shifting platform dynamics.

The role requires a change-oriented leader who can identify emerging trends, make fast but accurate editorial decisions, and deploy resources against the highest-impact platforms, coverage and tactics. You will be careful with framing and timing, communicate with desks and across teams effectively and proactively, and serve as the key conduit for translating how platform changes, including the disruption driven by AI features, impact our audience to newsroom and business leaders.

Position: Product director, multimodal, news product
Publisher: New York Times
Location: New York
Posting still up? No
Years of experience required: “7+ years of product management experience, including ownership of product strategy and roadmap. “
Salary range: $160,000 to $190,000
From the description:

The New York Times is looking for a Product Director to lead our Multimodal product team within the News Product Mission. Our goal is to be the entry point for news for tens of millions more people around the world by being their first read, watch or listen — every day.

We’ve focused on making our journalism more accessible through format innovation for years. Over the next few years, we want to go further. We are building toward an experience where people can come to The Times and engage with the most important and interesting journalism. This experience will allow people to engage in the format that works for them every day.

The Multimodal team and the News Product Mission works on editorially-grounded initiatives with our journalists at the speed of the news cycle. We want a product leader who is passionate about the news, eager to work in a fast-paced environment, and invested in creating news product experiences that reflect the same level of excellence as our journalism.

You will report to the VP of News Product and will manage a small team of product managers. You will partner closely with newsroom leaders, journalists, engineers, designers and other partners to shape strategy and deliver high-quality multimodal experiences across our platforms.

Position: Head of product design
Publisher: The Washington Post
Location: Washington, D.C.
Posting still up? Yes
Years of experience required: N/A
Salary range: $159,100 to $265,100
From the description:

The Washington Post is looking for a design leader with exceptional taste, product intuition, and a point of view about the future of interfaces. This isn’t only a role for someone who wants to manage a design team; it’s for someone who wants to shape how journalism is experienced globally.

You will define how millions of people engage with news in a world being reshaped by AI, platform disruption, and declining trust in high-quality information and expertise. You will help transform The Post into a portfolio of products more adaptive, more human, and more essential to daily life than ever before. Few roles offer this level of influence over such an important product category that does so much for the public good at such a critical time for the industry and the world.

The Washington Post is in the middle of a fundamental reinvention. Design is a primary driver of how we grow, differentiate, and serve the public.

Position: Technical product manager — content platform
Publisher: Bloomberg
Location: New York
Posting still up? Yes
Years of experience required: “A minimum of 5+ years of product management or related experience”
Salary range: $140,000 to $295,000
From the description:

The Content Platform team owns the end-to-end platform and strategic direction for Bloomberg’s unstructured content across core domains including News, Research, Media, and other content types. The team is responsible for the canonical content model and the ingestion, storage, projection, and distribution capabilities that make content reliable, reusable, and consumable across downstream systems — particularly AI-driven use cases. Working in close partnership with Engineering, Data and other Product teams, the group ensures content is discoverable, indexable, and usable at scale across both the Bloomberg Terminal and Bloomberg’s Enterprise lines of business. In addition, the team is accountable for platform-wide metrics, measurements, and statistics, providing transparent, quantifiable insight across every stage of the content lifecycle. Its mandate is to set the strategy, standards, and roadmap for unstructured content as a shared Bloomberg platform — ensuring consistency, scalability, and long-term leverage as content and consumption models evolve.

We are seeking a Product Manager to lead Delivery & Consumption for the Content Platform. In this role, you will define how canonical content is exposed and consumed across Bloomberg systems, including the Terminal, Enterprise products, search, and AI use cases.

You will own the projection layer and the distribution interfaces that make content accessible to downstream consumers. Working closely with engineering, AI, and product teams, you will ensure content is delivered in forms that meet latency, scalability, and reproducibility requirements while maintaining a consistent canonical model.

Position: Senior product manager — AI product
Publisher: USA Today Co.
Location: Remote
Posting still up? Yes
Years of experience required:
Salary range: $120,000 to $125,000
From the description:

USA Today Co. uses AI build‑out across our newsrooms and product surfaces with journalistic standards, and this role sits at the center of that work. You will turn real newsroom workflows into working AI products like rapidly working prototyping, pressure testing what’s real, and then partnering with core product teams to ship and scale what works.

You’ll join a small, hands-on AI product group embedded in the enterprise, working directly with reporters, editors, and internal stakeholders to uncover high value problems, design and test AI‑powered solutions, and generate the evidence needed for investment decisions. Once ideas show product market fit sign, you’ll own the handoff: translating prototypes into crisp specs and collaborating with engineering and editorial to launch, iterate, and maintain them in production.

This is a builder operator role. You move quickly from idea to working demo, and you bring rigor to what sticks — defining success, measuring impact, and killing what doesn’t deliver.

Position: Senior product manager
Publisher: The Atlantic
Location: New York, NY
Posting still up? No
Years of experience required: “5+ years in product management, preferably at a media, subscription, or consumer tech company”
Salary range: $115,000 to $175,000
From the description:

We’re looking for a Senior Product Manager who’s creative, driven, and genuinely excited about journalism. Someone who sees technology as a way to get great ideas in front of more people — and who wants to help shape how The Atlantic reaches readers in a changing media landscape. You’ll work on products that matter: our Pulitzer Prize-winning journalism deserves a reading experience that lives up to it.

The right person for this role is a sharp problem solver and an opportunity finder who shows up with ideas and perspective. They move fast, try things, learn from what doesn’t work, and keep going. You’ll report to the Product Executive Director and work closely with editorial, design, engineering, and data science. It’s a collaborative team that cares deeply about the work — and we’re looking for someone who does too.

Position: Senior editor, AI innovation
Publisher: CNN
Location: New York, Atlanta, or Washington, D.C.
Posting still up? Yes
Years of experience required: “7+ years of experience in journalism, digital media, product, or a related field with hands-on work in editorial workflows”
Salary range: $87,000 to $162,500
From the description:

CNN is seeking a Senior Editor, AI Innovation to prototype, test and deploy AI-powered tools, workflows and systems that advance our distinctive reporting and newsroom efficiency. Embedded in editorial operations, this role partners closely with reporters — particularly on investigative, enterprise, and data-driven work — to develop practical, scalable AI solutions that enhance research, editing, information management, and production. The role requires strong technical fluency, editorial judgment, and expertise in prompt-driven and agentic AI systems, with a focus on ensuring all AI-assisted work meets CNN’s standards for accuracy, objectivity, fairness, and transparency.

Position: Editor, audience — news
Publisher: CNN
Location: New York, Atlanta, or Washington, D.C.
Posting still up? Yes
Years of experience required: “3+ years in digital journalism, audience or content strategy, or analytics”
Salary range: $77,000 to $143,000
From the description:

The Audience Editor is the embedded, desk‑specific partner to Audience Strategy & Insights, translating audience signals into clear editorial choices. You will supply the desk with essential performance learnings; shape framing, formats, and distribution to meet audience demand; and collaborate across Search, Social, Home, Newsletters, and Product to maximize reach, habit, and engagement (including among subscribers).

This role sits at the intersection of editorial judgment and evidence — collaborative, rigorous in approach, and focused on measurable outcomes. You will work closely within our Audience Strategy & Insights operating model and in partnership with DART (Data, Analytics, Research & Testing) to turn insights into action and build repeatable practices the desk can rely on.

Position: Podcast social video editor
Publisher: Vox
Location: New York
Posting still up? Yes
Years of experience required: “5+ years of experience creating social-first video content and motion graphic assets for media brands, preferably including podcasts”
Salary range: $76,000 to $95,000
From the description:

As a Podcast Social Video Editor you will drive the creative vision for short-form social content across the Vox Media slate and oversee the producers who make it. You’ll align workflows and standards, build the content calendar, and steward performance and quality. You will ensure each show’s social media output meets its unique audience while fitting within network-level strategy.

Position: Senior channel manager, YouTube, BBC children’s & education
Publisher: BBC
Posting still up? No
Years of experience required: N/A
Salary range: £45,000 to £58,000
From the description:

This role has responsibility for leading a portfolio of YouTube activity for BBC Children’s & Education, including line management of YouTube Channel Managers. You will oversee the strategic planning, delivery and performance of YouTube content across channels; supporting creative development, use of audience insights and effective collaboration with internal teams. You’ll also be responsible for signing off content and ensuring all output meets editorial, legal and compliance standards.

Position: Senior AI engineer, AI Lab
Publisher: The Economist
Location: London
Posting still up? No
Years of experience required: “3+ years experience building with LLMs or NLP pipelines (ideally hands-on with OpenAI, Claude, Cohere, Gemini, Mistral, HuggingFace)”
Salary range: N/A
From the description:

This is a full-time role at the centre of our new AI Lab, a small team exploring how generative AI might shape the future of Economist journalism. This role will focus on building and fine-tuning LLM-powered systems with a particular focus on editorial tone, style transfer, retrieval workflows, and multimodal generation (especially audio).

You’ll ship products from zero-to-one and see your ideas directly influence how millions of readers interact with our journalism. If you enjoy working close to design, iterating fast, and building novel interactions across text, voice, and visuals, we’d love to hear from you. You’ll be one of the first three engineers in a dedicated lab, working alongside the Tech Lead, Design Lead and Product Lead.

Position: Editorial director, newsroom engineering
Publisher: Politico
Location: Arlington, Va.
Posting still up? No
Years of experience required: N/A
Salary range: N/A
From the description:

We’re at an inflection point: AI is reshaping how audiences find, consume, and interact with news. Politico’s advantage remains our original reporting, our judgment, and our distinct voice. But to protect and extend that advantage we need the newsroom at the center of innovation — moving faster, experimenting more boldly, and turning pilots into reliable infrastructure rather than one-off demos.

We want to invest in a newsroom team so that we can move from quarterly experiments to shipping AI features every couple of weeks, and building Politico-specific models that competitors can’t replicate. We also want to invest knowledge and technical thinking in our newsroom to more closely connect our journalism with our innovative product building.

Politico is seeking an editorial-minded technical leader to lead this team and serve as our Editorial Director, Newsroom Engineering. This role will be a player-coach who turns newsroom priorities into tools, workflows, and platforms that help our reporters and editors move faster without sacrificing accuracy or voice.

You’ll run team’s agile rituals; personally review high-risk pull requests; evaluate outcomes; and contribute code. In 2026, the team’s mandate is to help every desk leverage AI and other new technologies in practical, novel ways. Adoption and impact are the bar for success with KPIs measured by minutes saved, time-to-publish, quality preserved, and active usage. You’ll also be responsible for translating editorial priorities into a living roadmap. You’ll identify use cases and opportunities for workflow improvements by staying connected to newsroom priorities and fostering relationships with editors and reporters.

Position: Manager, product design
Publisher: Philadelphia Inquirer
Location: Philadelphia
Posting still up? Yes
Years of experience required: “10+ years experience in digital product design, including experience leading or coaching designers”
Salary range: N/A
From the description:

The Philadelphia Inquirer is looking for a Manager, Product Design to lead a team of designers creating thoughtful, reader-centered experiences across Inquirer.com, our mobile apps, newsletters, and emerging platforms.

This is a hands-on, coaching-focused role. You’ll help designers do their best work through clear feedback, strong project guidance, and close partnership with product and engineering. You’ll set a high bar for quality and process, and you may jump in directly on important projects when needed.

Reporting to the VP, Product, you’ll work closely with product management, user research, engineering, newsroom leadership, sales, and consumer marketing to improve subscriber growth, engagement, and retention.

Position: Assistant manager, content and AI innovation
Publisher: South China Morning Post
Location: Hong Kong
Posting still up? No
Years of experience required: N/A
Salary range: N/A
From the description:

The Assistant Manager (Content & AI Innovation) is a hybrid role dedicated to empowering the newsroom through artificial intelligence, automation, and data-driven growth strategies. You will bridge the gap between editorial needs and technical execution — designing, building, and deploying AI “agents,” automation workflows, and even non-AI skillsets to boost productivity and efficiency aligned with professional and quality journalism.

Position: Technical product manager
Publisher: The Sun
Location: London
Posting still up? No
Years of experience required: N/A
Salary range: N/A
From the description:

Working in the Sun product team, you will be responsible for our core platform and innovation initiatives. You will own the strategy and development for the foundational, shared technologies that power our entire digital estate, ensuring they are robust, scalable and enable other product teams to deliver value faster. Additionally, you will be our champion for innovation, tasked with exploring, prototyping and integrating new technologies and techniques. This includes investigating how AI can support our future plans and how our newsrooms can leverage new tools to drive efficiencies, ensuring The Sun stays at the cutting edge of digital media.

Today’s interview is worth a look. It’s with Stephen Totilo, a long-time video games journalist who is two years into running his own solo operation, Game File. (He spent nine years as editor-in-chief of Kotaku.) There’s a lot of interesting detail about the realities of running a solo Substack — both in Zierer’s write-up and the full interview on YouTube. Here are a few that stood out to me.

• Totilo has accumulated 27,000 total subscribers and — most importantly — 1,400 paying readers who spend $10/month or $100/year for access to two more full newsletters per week. (Free subscribers get one, plus teasers of the other two so they know what they’re missing.) That’s a healthy $140,000 in annual revenue — but Substack’s cut and Stripe fees eat into that.
• When Totilo gets an important exclusive interview, they usually get put behind the paywall. But he wasn’t prepared for how many free readers would use the free trial he offers to subscribe, read the article, and then cancel within an hour: “Just wait out the trial! Maybe there’s going to be other good stuff for you here!”
• One thing he misses from his pre-newsletter days: the community of readers who’d live in the comment section. Since most readers see his pieces in their inbox, there’s an extra bit of friction required to get them commenting on the website: “Everything feels a little quiet compared to the Kotaku experience.”
• Loved this excerpt from one of Totilo’s interviews, with game developer Nick Kamen, on how his company thinks about pricing and consumer price sensitivity:

  “We had this joke of, like, how much is a game really?” Kaman told me, as we chatted last month.

  “In a player’s mind, what does it mean to spend five bucks? Well, that’s five bucks. But six bucks? Well, that’s still five bucks.

  “Four bucks is also kind of five bucks,” he continued. “Three bucks is two bucks. And two bucks is basically free.

  “So we’ve got these tiers: You know, twelve bucks… that’s ten bucks. But thirteen bucks is fifteen bucks.

  “And we found that eight bucks is still five bucks. It doesn’t become ten bucks. Seven ninety nine, that’s five bucks, right?

  “So, eight bucks going to five bucks is the biggest differential we could find in pricing, so we found it very optimal.”

Check out Zierer’s write-up or watch the whole thing on YouTube or below.

The last weekend of May, Sylvia Salazar was waiting for her flight to take off when she pulled out her phone and explained why protestors were on a hunger strike outside Delaney Hall, an ICE facility in New Jersey.

As passengers found their seats and loaded their luggage into the overhead compartments behind her, Salazar, wearing a hat that said “Vote,” spoke in a low tone about how detainees in the facility had been served food with maggots and ICE officers had teargassed protesters. As of this writing, Salazar’s short explainer has more than 2,000 likes.

This is the type of political education content Salazar, 46, has been creating for nearly a decade for her brand, Tono Latino. Her videos, in English and Spanish, explain public policy, corruption, and the impact on Latinos in the U.S. Recent videos include explainers on Trump’s $350 billion slush fund and why Trump sent Jared Kushner to negotiate an Iran peace deal.

She has more than 116,000 followers on Instagram, 30,000 on TikTok, and 9,000 on YouTube. She also sends out a Substack newsletter, Latino Lens, with a paid version for $6 per month. She’s currently one of 20 cohort members of the Latinos, Media, and Democracy program at the Digital Democracy Institute of the Americas.

Salazar’s political work started when Donald Trump was elected president in 2016. An immigrant from Colombia living in Portland, Oregon, she was shocked by the result and started looking into the election’s Latino voter turnout.

“That’s what hit me like a punch in the face,” Salazar told me. “In the six presidential elections leading up to the 2016 election, the Latino voter turnout had been below 50%.”

Salazar began to understand that one reason for low Latino turnout was that political and civic engagement messaging often weren’t effective, leaving Latinos across the country underinformed about policies that affected them. The realization was personal: Salazar had been living in the United States since she was 18, but didn’t really understand how the U.S. government and political system worked.

At the time, her career in computer engineering took a turn when the company placed her in a public relations role. She studied up on her own and, in 2017, launched a newsletter covering U.S. and Latin America news in Spanish for others like her.

Salazar was more comfortable behind the keyboard than in front of the camera. But when a mentor told her that she “was never going to be as passionate and as engaging [in writing] as I am in person, and that Latinos watch more videos than anybody else,” she took on the challenge.

Salazar considers herself a political educator who relies on mainstream and independent journalism to do her work. When we chatted via Zoom in mid-May, she was wearing a blue custom sweater with the words “fueled by facts and receipts” embroidered on the front. Our conversation about her own political education, informing bilingual communities, and building audience trust has been edited for length and clarity.

Today, local investigative reporting is still the Monitor’s core mission. But a 16-town listening tour of the state last summer surfaced demand for another kind of local journalism: coverage of elections and public meetings.

“Mainers [bemoaned] the loss of hyperlocal journalism and the insights that they used to get into the civic governance of their town and their community,” said executive director Micaela Schweitzer-Bluhm. The Monitor’s team heard anecdotes about people going to vote in local elections only to leave without voting because they didn’t understand the issues on the ballot. “Particularly in western Maine, we were hearing: We just don’t have local journalism anymore,” she said. That got the newsroom’s leadership thinking: What role could the Monitor play in meeting that need?

The answer they’ve landed on is Monitor Local, a “hyperlocal civic news service focused on communities in Maine that have little to no journalism bringing attention to what’s going on in their local government” and giving readers the information to engage as local citizens. It’s the latest example of a statewide news organization expanding coverage by homing in on community-level, hyperlocal news needs (some metro dailies have done this too).

Monitor Local launched last November in four counties in downeast and western Maine, where the need seemed most acute based on the listening sessions. (The Monitor had already zeroed in on those areas a few years ago as part of its effort to better serve the state’s rural communities with its in-depth reporting.)

The outlet hired veteran local journalist and editor Judy Meyer to lead Monitor Local; in addition to reporting herself, she edits a network of freelance correspondents working out of communities in those counties. (Relying on community members as freelance correspondents has appeal for many local newsrooms, especially in rural areas.) The nonprofit Journalism New England provided $50,000 in seed funding for Monitor Local and trained a couple of Monitor Local correspondents through its 12-week “Career Lab,” a model not just for producing local journalism, but for making community residents into local journalists.

Since November, Meyer and Monitor Local correspondents have covered the runup to and outcomes of Town Meetings, a major county budget controversy, and lots of housing and zoning debates. A correspondent broke a story about a pier collision that prompted a Coast Guard investigation. Another reported on Bowdoin’s proposal for a student campsite in Kingfield, where residents then signed a petition opposing the campsite; the college just withdrew the application. Similarly, Meyer reported on the Maine Library Commission’s proposal to impose new state requirements that might have forced small, volunteer-run libraries to close — the backlash led the proposal to be postponed and dropped, and commissioners are gathering more feedback for a new proposal. Monitor Local’s budget controversy reporting inspired the Monitor to take a broader look at other county budget processes.

Monitor Local reporting is included in the Monitor’s daily newsletter and rounded up in two weekly regional newsletters on Saturdays. Since launching Monitor Local in November, the Monitor has seen 14% growth in its Downeast Local newsletter and 26% growth in its Western Local newsletter, Schweitzer-Bluhm said. Readers have also discovered Monitor Local’s reporting through word of mouth, community Facebook groups, and Reddit. Like the rest of the Monitor’s reporting, Monitor Local coverage is frequently republished in other local newspapers across the state; so far in 2026, 19 news outlets have republished Monitor Local reporting “for a total of 261 instances,” Schweitzer-Bluhm said.

Some counties where Monitor Local is active still have a local newspaper, like The Quoddy Tides in Washington County, one of the outlets that has republished the Monitor. “We’re not trying to replace other newspapers,” Schweitzer-Bluhm said. “We’re trying to provide a news service that serves readers in those communities, and that allows hyperlocal papers that do exist to use their resources in other ways that we’re not going to do.”

That generally means sticking to a civic lens, so Monitor Local doesn’t cover topics like school sports or business openings. However, a correspondent did cover the winner of the Maine State Spelling Bee, an eighth grader from Machias. That story was “an outlier,” Meyer said, “but it was such a spectacular win for a student in Washington County where students often struggle, so I saw it as a reflection of the positive learning environment in [winner] Tristan Singh’s public school, which ties directly to school district priorities and educational attainment — often driven by budgets decided by school boards and approved by voters. So, maybe a stretch, but certainly grounded in civic life.”

The nonprofit puts cohorts of community reporting fellows from local newsrooms through a 12-week journalism training program, with weekly 90-minute online classes taught by journalism educator Katina Paron. The fellows report and write stories that Paron edits, typically over multiple rounds, and the stories are published by the fellow’s nominating newsroom (similar to some student journalism partnerships with local newsrooms).

“We spend a lot of time going back and forth to make sure we can get the best story that we can, and do our best not to tell them what to do, but to ask questions and to point out things that we don’t understand or don’t make sense or where we think it could be stronger to help them make decisions,” O’Mara said. She estimated fellows put in about 10 hours of work per week on average; they’re paid a “learning stipend” of $300 a month for participation in the program. Fellows have included students, grandparents, and ages in between.

The Career Lab’s ethos is similar to the Documenters program adopted by many newsrooms. “I would not try to tell you that our 12-week program will teach somebody how to handle enterprise journalism or a big investigative piece,” O’Mara said. “I will tell you that it teaches them how to cover town council, city hall, school board, the business that closed on Main Street and the new one that’s coming in, the handicap access to beaches, the things that make a town tick and help a town have all of the great outcomes that we know [local] journalism brings” like lower borrowing costs for local government, a greater sense of connection, higher civic participation, and even better public health outcomes.

“I think [journalism] is a big club, and we should open the doors, and there’s room for different people with different skill sets,” she added.

Meyer’s concern going into the Career Lab program “was that people who were interested in doing this were bringing an agenda with them,” she said. But Schweitzer-Bluhm said the people that want to work for the Monitor have generally understood that impartiality is core to the publication’s mission.

The Career Lab’s second cohort just wrapped up; over three months, four fellows produced 31 stories for Maine newsrooms. Two of those fellows are Monitor Local correspondents. Meyer plans to recruit more fellows for a Career Lab cohort starting in September.

Melissa Razdrih told me she began reading the Monitor soon after moving to Maine in 2021. She had done some work for political blogs like FloridaPolitics, contributed a few stories to The Quoddy Tides, and considered starting her own local blog, but responded to the Monitor’s Career Lab application instead. She completed the community reporting fellowship in May.

The cohort heard from guest speakers, including a lawyer who discussed defamation and working reporters from newspapers including the Portland Press Herald. But Razdrih said she learned the most when she had to post a lengthy correction on her first story. She was reporting on solar streetlights. “I didn’t know at the time how complicated energy is in Maine, and so I kind of stepped into this really complex issue with a lot of nuance that I didn’t understand, and the context that I used in the article wasn’t as applicable as I thought it was,” she said. “That was a very humbling experience.”

Since then, Razdrih has developed a beat around Washington County agriculture; one of her stories about a proposed farm bond in the state’s congressional session was republished on the front page of the Portland Press Herald.

Razdrih estimated she spends 20 to 25 hours per week on reporting, aiming to file two stories per week. She’s paid per story by the Monitor as a freelancer, and balances that work with teaching art on Mondays at her daughter’s school.

“In Maine, we’ve got a lot of writers,” Razdrih said. Both for those with writing backgrounds and those who have other professional experience, she thinks teaching the basics of journalism to people already in the communities where local reporting is needed “makes so much sense.”

“Our profession has been too quiet, too passive, and too fragmented in the face of abuses by the companies leading the AI revolution,” Sulzberger said. The New York Times Company, he said, has spent more than $20 million suing OpenAI, Microsoft, and Perplexity, and “as AI companies are doubtless aware, most news organizations lack the resources to go to court to enforce their rights.”

Sulzberger:

Tech giants strip-mine news websites without permission or compensation. They repackage these stolen goods as their own, siphoning off the audiences and revenue that otherwise would go to the news organizations that created this work. And this happens not just once during the training process, but countless times every single day.

As a result, I fear we are careening toward a future with fewer and fewer journalists to do the expensive, difficult work of original reporting — going to places, talking to people, digging up information, covering important issues and events, providing context and analysis, investigating the powerful. A future where a crucial wellspring of a healthy society and a stable democracy — the truth, understanding and accountability provided by original journalism — continues to dry up.

Sulzberger also offered some advice on ways news organizations can make themselves more resilient to AI:

Use AI the right way. Newsrooms should create thoughtful standards for the responsible use of AI. Then they should be aggressive and creative in putting the technology to work to improve their journalism and strengthen their businesses. A.I. can bring real value to organizations that find the right ways to embrace it, and a shift of this size will lay waste to any organization that refuses to evolve. There’s nothing inherently bad about AI technology — it’s the actions of the companies behind it that need reforming.

Be a destination first. A world increasingly intermediated by AI platforms would leave news organizations even more at the mercy of tech giants to share traffic, credit, and money. The clearest path to support quality reporting will be through direct relationships with audiences. Being a destination doesn’t mean ignoring the broader internet. You still must make new relationships where people are, which is usually a tech platform. But to deepen those relationships — to make them loyal, habituated and valuable — your audience must learn it’s better to engage with you directly rather than through someone else.

Focus on original reporting. Many news organizations undermined and commoditized themselves trying to feed the constantly shifting preferences of search and social algorithms with clickbait, aggregation and hot takes. The economics of that approach will get even worse. To be a destination in a world intermediated by AI, you’ll need journalism so distinctive it has its own gravity. The heart of that is original reporting. The public has no other source for this work. Neither does AI.

Explain why journalism matters. AI companies have giant megaphones and have studiously and selectively communicated the benefits of their work while also downplaying the harms. The news industry must, in turn, make the case that original reporting is an essential ingredient in healthy societies, secure nations and strong democracies — and show how the actions of the tech giants are putting it at risk.

You can read the full keynote here.

Okay — now what about the “fake news” media? All the misinformation out there online: Is it more unfair to your side of most arguments or the other one?

Decades of communications research has found that, all else equal, people do tend to think that the news media is rooting against people like them. It’s a phenomenon known as the hostile media effect, and we know that the more politically committed someone is to a party or ideology, the more likely they are to see the news media as biased against them. (Want to know why trust in news has decreased as American politics have gotten more partisan and tribal? There’s a big part of your answer.)

But does that same phenomenon also apply to online misinformation? That’s the subject of a new paper just published in the journal Political Communication. It’s titled “The Hostile Misinformation Effect: How Ideological Congruence Drives the Assessment of Misinformation Targets,” and its authors are Patrick van Erkel, Michael Hameleers, Aqsa Farooq, Katjana Gattermann, Marina Tulin, Elske van den Hoogen, and Claes de Vreese, most of whom are attached to the Amsterdam School of Communication Research at the University of Amsterdam. Here’s the abstract:

Misinformation is increasingly seen as a key challenge to democratic societies. Our study is one of the first to shed light onto the citizen perspective when it comes to the perceived target of misinformation during election campaigns. In doing so, we extend on a classic concept in the (political) communication literature, the hostile media effect, and examine whether this applies to misinformation as well, a so-called hostile misinformation effect. Do citizens believe that their political in-group is being targeted more by misinformation than their political out-group? Our argument is based on motivated reasoning and social identity theory and extends to the role of several crucial moderating factors.

Using data from a panel study conducted during the 2024 European Parliament elections across Germany, the Netherlands, and Poland (N = 4,045), we find clear support for a hostile misinformation effect, as citizens believe their own political party was much more targeted than the political opponent. Moreover, we demonstrate that particularly political interest, party identity strength, ideological extremity, and being right-wing make people more susceptible to the phenomenon. Our findings demonstrate that the hostile media effect can be extended to the domain of misinformation perceptions. Moreover, they explain why people perceive to be surrounded by misinformation, and help contextualize literature suggesting that people associate misinformation with various other information disorders and threats.

To understand what van Erkel et al. are arguing, let’s step back and understand the original hostile media effect. The original paper (Vallone, Ross, and Lepper) gathered a group of 144 Stanford students, many of them drawn from pro-Israel and pro-Arab groups on campus. Researchers asked them a set of questions to record their views on the situation in the Middle East and their familiarity with recent events there. They then showed them six segments from the national evening newscasts (ABC, NBC, CBS) about the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacres, in which thousands of Arab civilians in Beirut-area refugee camps were killed by a militia backed by the Israeli Defense Forces.

Everyone saw the same six segments, which added up to about 36 minutes. Then they were all asked to evaluate the stories for any bias. Pro-Israeli students strongly believed that the news stories were biased against Israel. And pro-Arab students strongly believed that the stories were biased against the Palestinians and other Arabs. These were, again, the same stories.

Pro-Arab subjects saw the news programs as “applying lower standards to Israel” than to other countries (i.e., “excusing Israel when they would have blamed some other country”). They also felt that the news programs “did not focus enough on Israel’s role in the massacre [in relation] to the role of other parties.” Finally, they believed that in light of all the potential positive and potential negative information that could have been used, the editors of the news programs succeeded in making a stronger positive case for Israel than a negative case against Israel.

Pro-Israeli subjects, in contrast, saw the news programs as “applying higher standards to Israel” (i.e., “blaming Israel when they would have excused some other country”), felt that the news programs “focused too much on Israel’s role in the massacre [in relation] to the role of other parties,” and believed that in light of the potential information available on both sides of the issue, the editors of the news programs had succeeded in making a stronger negative case against Israel than a positive case for Israel.

Subjects on both sides also concluded, after watching, “that the ‘personal views’ of the editorial staffs of the news programs were opposite to their own.”

Interestingly, the study made an unusual finding about people with high levels of knowledge — news junkies, you might think of them. Remember, the students had all been asked questions to test their knowledge of the conflict. The people who’d done well on those questions, who knew the most about the conflict? Their ideology drove how their knowledge interacted with their opinions on bias. High-knowledge pro-Israelis were more likely to think the news stories were anti-Israel. High-knowledge pro-Arabs were more likely to think the stories were anti-Arab. But high-knowledge subjects who didn’t have a strong opinion one way or the other were less likely to see bias.

In other words, for partisans, more knowledge made people see more bias in the news. But for neutrals, more knowledge made people see less bias.

Further research has found other factors that contribute to increased perceptions of media bias: higher levels of interest in politics, more extreme views, right-wing ideology, increased hostility toward political opponents, distrust of institutions, and a number of psychological traits like need for closure.

It’s into that body of research that van Erkel et al. stride, asking whether or not the same phenomenon applies for misinformation.

Researchers surveyed about 4,000 people in Germany, the Netherlands, and Poland around the 2024 European parliamentary elections — both before and after the elections themselves. People were asked to identify which political party they would vote for, as well as which party they would “absolutely not vote for.” European electoral systems are, of course, filled with many more major parties than the American one, so they were able to tease out a less-binary set of data than pro-Israeli/pro-Arab, or pro-Democrat/pro-Republican.

Later, the subjects were asked to think about online misinformation surrounding the election — not necessarily misinformation they themselves had seen, but their impressions of the current universe of political misinformation at that time. They were asked, on a 1-to-7 scale, the degree to which they had “the impression that misinformation particularly targets” both their favored party and their least favorite party.

Van Erkel et al. didn’t expose them all to a common corpus of media, the way the original hostile media effect researchers did. They weren’t reacting to specific Facebook memes or TikTok videos. Those 1982 TV clips gave partisans something concrete to react to, while this open-ended conception of “misinformation” gave subjects space to apply their own notions of what the media universe looks like.

(It would be interesting, though, to ask people more specifically about misinformation they had seen. On one hand, partisans are less likely to consider a particular item as “misinformation” if it favors their party — they’re more likely to consider it good information. But on the other, social media algorithms are very good at shoveling that sort of politically congruent misinformation at people — think of your uncle’s Facebook feed.)

So what did the researchers find? As with the news media, people tend to believe that misinformation disproportionately targets their side: 49.6% said their preferred party was at least somewhat “particularly targeted” by misinformation, versus only 21.5% who said that it wasn’t. When asked about their least-favorite party, the numbers flipped: 27.3% said that party was at least somewhat particularly targeted, while 43.8% said it wasn’t. The effect was similar across all three countries — though in the Netherlands, it was less strong once the election date had passed.

Nothing too unexpected there. But how would specific factors play out? People with higher levels of political interest were more likely to see their own party as targeted. Same with people who were more attached to their political party or whose ideology was more extreme.

But there was — as in other bias-perception research — a significant difference on the left versus the right.

When comparing citizens on the political left with those on the right…we find that the hostile misinformation effect is significantly more pronounced for citizens that are more right-wing…Overall the hostile misinformation effect is 1.3 points stronger [on a seven-point scale] for those fully on the right compared to those fully on the left, holding all other variables constant….although the effect is present across the whole political spectrum, it becomes more pronounced as citizens become more right-wing.

Researchers also wanted to test if people’s perceptions of hostile misinformation were different after the election, depending on whether or not their preferred party had won or lost. The results didn’t find any statistically significant impact — but surprisingly, it was people whose party had won who seemed to view their party as particularly targeted, not the losers.

Our argument is based on motivated reasoning and social identity theory and extends to the role of several crucial moderating factors. We argue that, alongside a direct effect, the hostile misinformation effect is moderated by the extent to which voters are interested in politics, partisan identity, ideologically extreme positions, and electoral performance of the in-party…

Building on the concept of the hostile media effect, our findings suggest that similar underlying assumptions apply to voters’ assessments of misinformation targets: they are more likely to consider their own political party as victim of misinformation campaigns than opposing parties. This finding that perceptions of bias extend beyond (traditional) media coverage to perceptions of bias in misinformation campaigns is particularly relevant in the context of a new media ecosystem where there is potentially more misinformation abound, and a polarized political context where people are more inclined to process information with party considerations in mind.

If you think back to November 2016, you may remember a spree of stories attributing Donald Trump’s surprise victory, at least in part, to “fake news” — misinformation spread on Facebook, mostly. (I may have contributed to that spree.) But as a term, “fake news” became useless almost immediately as Trump made it his preferred term for news stories that were critical of him. “Fake news” is, in a polarized political environment, in the eye of the beholder. But no matter the reality, this study confirms that people’s perceptions of misinformation are driven by the same sorts of emotional identities and motivated reasoning that shape how they view the mainstream media.

But it turns out NOTUS isn’t the only rising media star in town. The Washington Star, a conservative-leaning newspaper and onetime Post rival that shut down in 1981, has started publishing again under media executive and New York Sun publisher Dovid Efune, The New York Times reported Thursday. What’s more, The Washington Star Company is suing NOTUS over the Star name; the plaintiff filed a trademark infringement lawsuit in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia on Thursday, Law360 reported.

Efune previously revived The New York Sun after it shut down in 2008, and claims it is profitable today, per the Times. The Washington Star has begun publishing on Substack, and Efune told the Times’ Katie Robertson that he aims to have a website live in the next two months and publish a weekend print newspaper by the end of this year. He said he plans to hire up to 50 full-time journalists and contributors. The launch of the new Star, he added, “accelerated our timeline to scale up.”

The Washington Star is back!

Join us today: https://t.co/iFwKDPlKJI pic.twitter.com/3ApgVSozfW

— The Washington Star (@TheWashStar) May 28, 2026

NOTUS publisher and backer Robert Allbritton has ties to the reanimated newspaper, too; his father owned The Washington Star. Allbritton recently told Columbia Journalism Review replicating that name would be too “backward looking,” but CJR described the new NOTUS name as an “homage” to The Washington Star. The plaintiff’s lawsuit explicitly expresses concern that the NOTUS rebrand, coupled with Allbritton’s family connections to The Washington Star, will confuse readers, and argues the “confusingly similar” name will violate The Washington Star’s trademark.

A NOTUS spokesperson said the publication would vigorously defend against The Washington Star Company’s suit, per the Times.

Read the full Times story here, Law360’s reporting on the lawsuit here, and an explainer from City Cast DC here, which notes, “For the record, City Cast DC will not be rebranding as City Star DC.”

Updated with information about The Washington Star Company’s trademark infringement lawsuit against NOTUS.

Based on my conversations with publishers, editors, and media analysts, the answer might be yes, but perhaps not in the ways the news industry might expect.

The logic of the small bet

Across the global news industry, subscriptions have become the dominant response to the collapse of print advertising. Those models depend on conditions that are less common across much of Africa, and the data bears that out.

Nic Newman, a senior research associate at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, said reliable data on willingness to pay for news in the region remains limited. Surveys tend to capture highly educated audiences that are difficult to compare with the broader population. Even so, he said, the overall pattern is clear. Across much of the continent, willingness to pay for general news remains low. “People expect news to be free,” Newman said.

In Europe and North America, readers typically pay with credit cards or digital wallets linked to bank accounts. In Kenya, digital payments are dominated by M-Pesa, the mobile money platform that has made the country a global case study in financial technology. Everyday transactions run through mobile money rather than cards.

Mobile data can also be expensive relative to incomes, shaping how audiences consume news. Many readers prefer formats that load quickly or can be accessed intermittently. For publishers, that combination of low willingness to pay and unfamiliar infrastructure has made Western-style subscription models a difficult import.

“Income levels, device access, and payment systems are different,” said Greg Piechota, researcher-in-residence at the International News Media Association. “These markets require adapting to local circumstances.”

At The Standard, this adaption has meant rethinking not just pricing but the entire payment experience. The paper’s micropayment experiment is not simply a commercial decision. It is a bet on infrastructure, a wager that the friction of digital payments, long a barrier to subscriptions in African media markets, can be reduced enough to create a new class of casual paying readers.

“You realize that print revenues are going down,” Vidija said. “The only hope we have is to maximize digital with the various products we can come up with.”

Here’s how Vidija described the newspaper’s journey. The Standard first tried a full paywall, locking all content. It then experimented with a metered model that allowed three free articles every month before prompting readers to subscribe, only to find many simply created new email addresses to reset their access.

The paper eventually settled on a freemium model. About 60% of its content sits behind a paywall, while the rest remains free. Micropayments are one entry point; weekly, monthly and annual subscriptions are the other ones.

The pricing is designed to guide behavior. A reader who pays for individual articles every day will spend more over time than a subscriber. “A smart audience will sit down and look at the rates and opt for monthly or annually,” Vidija said.

In this sense, micropayments are less a permanent feature than a gateway to a more valuable relationship. It is a low-commitment starting point designed to build the habit of paying and eventually nudge readers toward longer subscriptions.

Whether the strategy is working is harder to say. Vidija acknowledged that key metrics like traffic, pageviews, and registered users inevitably fall when a paywall goes up. He attributed The Standard’s relative success to consistency. Competitors tried paywalls, retreated, and tried again. The Standard held its position. “When people start trusting your brand, they start coming back,” he said.

The skeptic’s view

Not everyone in Nairobi’s media ecosystem is convinced that micropayments are transformative. Eric Mugendi, editor-at-large, partnerships and initiatives at Africa Uncensored, has watched these experiments with a mix of sympathy and frustration. His organization tried formal subscriptions through Shahara. This platform was built to distribute its work and allow audiences to pay for it directly, and was also open to other creators, integrating Stripe and M-Pesa pay-bill numbers, with limited success. Patreon worked somewhat. None generated significant revenue.

Instead, Africa Uncensored leans on voluntary contributions tied to specific investigations. At the end of its investigative documentaries, such as the ones on fake fertilizer and medical negligence, journalists appeal directly to viewers. “Our stories tend to touch on issues that are personal and important,” Mugendi said. “By giving people a way to contribute, we extend the connection they feel to the story.”

But Mugendi’s deeper critique goes beyond mechanics. He argued that Kenya’s mainstream media struggles with subscriptions not because readers are unwilling to pay, but because the product does not consistently justify payment.

Readers can find much of what mainstream outlets publish freely available elsewhere, on blogs, on social media, on Telegram channels where pirated newspaper PDFs circulate every morning. “We don’t have a good enough product that people would want to pay for,” he said. “A lot of mainstream platforms haven’t really figured out the value proposition.”

He points to structural problems. Major media groups price digital subscriptions as though they were equivalent to print, despite lower production costs. Publications within the same group often require separate subscriptions. Editorial priorities, he said, do not always reflect audience needs. Health, the economy, and education, issues central to daily life, are often subordinated to political coverage that readers can get directly from politicians’ own social media accounts.

“You still have politicians on the front page, even though people’s lives are worse than a couple of years ago,” Mugendi said. “The issues people actually care about get sidelined.” His prescription is not to abandon subscriptions or micropayments, but to build something worth paying for first.

Newman said the debate over reader revenue is often framed too narrowly as a question of payment systems. In reality, it is also a product challenge. Publishers must offer journalism worth paying for while making the act of paying effortless. “If you have to think every time you want to pay for an article, that is a real barrier,” he said.

What the global data shows

Piechota has spent years studying reader revenue strategies across multiple continents, and he placed the Kenyan experiments in a wider context, one that is both encouraging and sobering. Micropayments, he said, are a recurring idea in the media industry, resurfacing every few years as publishers search for ways to capture casual readers.

The appeal is straightforward. Subscriptions tend to attract heavy users, often more educated and affluent readers who consume news frequently. Casual readers, who visit occasionally and may value quality journalism but are not ready to commit to a recurring payment, have few products designed for them.

Micropayments, in theory, serve the casual reader. In practice, Piechota said, the evidence from wealthier markets has been mixed. The problem, he said, comes down to lifetime value. Over time, a subscriber typically generates far more revenue than the equivalent number of one-off article purchases from the same reader. When publishers introduce micropayments, some readers who might otherwise have subscribed instead opt to pay per article, reducing total revenue.

“Instead of getting 20 cents for an article, maybe it is better to give a free trial for a full subscription and then start charging,” Piechota said. “If you look at this user over three years, you will make more money.”

​​Piechota is careful to note that he has not seen hard data from Kenyan publishers on whether micropayments are cannibalizing subscriptions or complementing them.

The Daily Nation has publicly reported rapid growth in digital reader revenue, but the breakdown between subscription and transactional revenue has not been shared with researchers. Its parent company, Nation Media Group, said digital revenue rose by 11% in 2025, with paywall subscribers more than doubling, even as print circulation declined, though it did not disclose total subscriber numbers or the share of revenue from subscriptions versus one-off payments.

Based on patterns observed elsewhere, Piechota said day passes are likely more popular by volume, while subscriptions generate more revenue overall.

Even so, subscriptions are not entirely out of reach. In South Africa, News24 has surpassed 100,000 paying subscribers, suggesting that reader revenue can scale on the continent. Yet such successes remain concentrated in markets with higher incomes and more developed digital ecosystems, leaving publishers elsewhere to explore alternatives.

What makes Africa genuinely interesting to Piechota, however, is not micropayments themselves but the infrastructure in which they operate.

In Kenya, that infrastructure is already in place. According to Kenya’s central bank, Kenya had 90.4 million registered mobile money accounts as of January 2026, many tied to multiple SIM cards per user. The payment system is built around small, everyday transactions. Nearly 60% of devices are now smartphones, with most connections running on mobile broadband. The internet, in practice, is accessed through the phone and paid for in small, frequent increments, the same behavior micropayments for news are trying to capture.

That infrastructure is not easily replicated elsewhere. Mobile money payments that are routine in Kenya remain uncommon in Europe and North America, where credit cards dominate. African publishers have therefore been forced to solve a problem (frictionless small-value digital transactions) that their counterparts in wealthier markets have largely been able to ignore.

“Publishers in Africa are smart by not doing what other publishers are doing, but rather searching for how to make it work in their environment,” Piechota said. “This is innovation. This is agility.”

He also points to a broader structural argument. African markets may be leapfrogging in ways that matter. Desktop internet never fully took hold across much of the continent. The transition to digital went directly from feature phones to smartphones. This has made mobile-first thinking an operational necessity, and one that publishers in other markets are now scrambling to replicate.

But micropayments alone are unlikely to sustain most newsrooms, Newman cautioned. Even if readers are willing to pay small amounts for individual articles, the revenue generated from those transactions will rarely match the income from subscriptions or other revenue streams. “If you’re only paying tiny cents for individual articles, that is not going to fund the investments required,” he said.

The deeper diagnosis

Taken together, the picture that emerges from Nairobi is neither entirely hopeful nor cautionary.

The Standard’s micropayment experiments represent a genuine, careful adaptation to local conditions, the kind of audience-centric iteration that media researchers describe as a prerequisite for sustainable reader revenue. Africa Uncensored’s voluntary-contribution model suggests that emotional investment in specific journalism can mobilize reader support even without formal subscription architecture.

Piechota’s global view suggests that the frictions these publishers have had to solve — mobile payment integration, small-value transactions, casual-reader engagement — are problems the rest of the industry will eventually have to solve too.

Across the global news industry, Newman said, publishers are increasingly relying on combinations of revenue streams rather than a single model. Some pair subscriptions with voluntary contributions; others experiment with micropayments alongside traditional paywalls. “Ultimately it’s about mixing different models,” he said, depending on the audience and the market.

But the harder questions Mugendi raises remain unresolved. A payment mechanism, however frictionless, can’t substitute for editorial quality or relevance. And there is a risk, visible in wealthier markets, that micropayments become a ceiling rather than a floor, catching readers who might have been converted to long-term subscribers if the alternative had not existed.

Experiments in emerging markets may also shape how publishers elsewhere think about reader revenue. As news organizations test different combinations of subscriptions, donations and micropayments, the future may lie less in a single model than in adapting to local conditions.

“African markets have something to teach Western markets,” Newman said, “just as Western markets have things to teach African markets.”

Vidija is clear-eyed about the goal. “This is building a pathway to long-term subscriptions,” he said. “We are saying, if we continue investing in big analytical pieces, we can position ourselves as a brand that Kenyan audiences can trust.” The micropayment, on this reading, is not the destination. It is the door.

Whether enough readers will walk through that door, and keep walking, is the question that newsrooms from Nairobi to New York are still trying to answer.

“The deal structures, price precedents, intermediary take rates, and governance norms taking shape now will be difficult to revise once they are normalized,” write the authors Courtney Radsch and Karina Montoya, both from the institute’s newly named Center for Media & Digital Governance. (It previously went by The Center for Journalism & Liberty). “The question of whether publishers, journalism, or creators of any sort can make a credible collective claim before market structures crystallize will not stay open indefinitely.”

One of the most interesting sections of the report is a deep dive into new AI content licensing marketplaces, which often take a cut of the revenue they bring in for publishers. This includes new startups like Sphere, ScalePost, Defined, and TollBit, but also ones operated by Big Tech companies. Last summer, Cloudflare, which services about 20% of global web traffic, launched its “pay-per-crawl” marketplace, which allows publishers to set rates and charge AI companies each time one of their bots crawls their content. In February, Microsoft announced its Publisher Content Marketplace (PCM), which follows a “pay-per-use” model that allows publishers to sell “rights-cleared content” at set prices to Microsoft, and potentially to other AI developers.

Most commercial AI products repeatedly scrape news publications and retrieve up-to-date information from websites in order to answer specific user queries. This is known as retrieval augmented generation (RAG). The promise of these marketplaces is that they are building out new infrastructure that would allow news publishers to earn revenue from RAG systems. But many middleman marketplaces are also taking a big cut of that revenue, the report notes.

A startup like ScalePost takes roughly a 15% cut of the revenue earned by “rights holders.” The authors estimate, based largely on interviews with stakeholders, that Cloudflare is taking about a 30% cut of revenue.

ProRata.ai, a startup that has developed its own answer engine built exclusively on licensed publisher content, shares subscription and advertising revenue with publishers 50/50. However, each publisher is paid proportionally based on attribution, or how often their content appears in the answer engine’s results. As of last summer, over 500 publishers had signed up with ProRata.ai.

Meanwhile, startups like TollBit and Sphere allow publishers to retain 100% of their revenue. Instead, they charge AI companies a separate transaction fee.

It is yet to be seen just how much Microsoft will take from publishers that participate in its PCM.

The report points to Spotify as an important benchmark for evaluating these various “take rates.” Historically, Spotify has taken a 30% cut of revenue from streaming. Despite many drawbacks, that model has allowed music rights holders to earn significant revenue and propped up the industry during its transition to streaming. Still, the report concludes that further scrutiny of these marketplaces is needed, particularly when Big Tech is the one building the scaffolding.

“Regulatory attention is warranted on these platform operators in order to mitigate their data access advantages and ability to set de facto (and potentially coercive)  standards for an industry in which no independent standards yet exist,” the authors write.

You can read the full report on Open Markets, including more specific policy recommendations.

Correction: This story previously stated that TollBit takes 10-15% of revenue from rights holders. TollBit actually allows rights holders to keep 100% of revenue and charges AI companies a transaction fee. The name of the startup Sphere has been corrected.

At launch, the app is focused solely on U.S. polling data. After installing the app, ChatGPT users can use it to ask questions about The Economist’s ongoing Donald Trump approval rating tracker, which offers a variety of charts and data points broken down by state, demographic, and voting issue.

Through the app, The Economist aims to reach ChatGPT’s more than 900 million weekly active users where they are.

“Younger audiences are adopting tools like ChatGPT as a first port of call for answering questions or finding information. It’s increasing dramatically, and that’s not a trend that passes us by,” Josh Muncke, the vice president of generative AI at The Economist, told me. The team wanted to see “if we could build something relatively quickly and relatively lightweight that would allow us to test this new way of discovering content from The Economist.”

Back in December, OpenAI rolled out its app store, allowing brands to create third-party experiences within ChatGPT for the first time. These apps go beyond the “no-code,” tailored AI assistants — or CustomGPTs — that are available in the GPT Store. Instead, developers can build out their own interfaces and chat logic. ChatGPT apps are built on the Model Context Protocol (MCP), a standard that helps ChatGPT connect its models to external tools and data sources. All apps need to be submitted to OpenAI for review before they can appear in the app store.

While some market and business intelligence platforms, like MT Newswires and Dow Jones’ Factiva have already launched ChatGPT apps, so far The Economist is out front among consumer news publications. According to Muncke, his team at The Economist began working seriously on app development at the start of this year.

Currently, The Economist has no AI licensing deals with OpenAI or other major commercial AI developers. In part, the decision to narrow the initial pilot of the app to U.S. polling data was to minimize the chance of undercutting The Economist’s subscription offerings, or give ChatGPT access to too much of its content for free. Muncke’s team worked closely with The Economist’s data journalists and reporters to put up guardrails and fine-tune the app’s visual presentation.

“The Trump tracker is already an experience that is in front of our paywall,” said Muncke, referring to the underlying project that lives on The Economist’s site. “We thought we can explore this surface that as a publisher we think is important [without] directly exposing the depths of some of our premium written content.”

The app launch comes in the midst of a high-stakes midterm election cycle, just after Trump hit an all-time low net approval rating (-24) across his two presidential terms.

For users curious about how Trump is polling leading up to November, the app can answer questions about which state has the highest Trump approval rating, how his approval ratings compare to his first term, and how popular he is among young voters, among other queries. The focus on charts and other visualizations is meant to offer an experience distinct from what a user might get in a basic written response from ChatGPT about polling news.

The Economist hopes the app will build brand awareness among younger audiences. In general, ChatGPT refers very little traffic to news publishers’ sites. Rather than chasing clickthroughs, Muncke describes the launch as a fact-finding mission of sorts for The Economist to learn more about ChatGPT users and, more generally, the emerging audience turning to chatbots for news.

“We’re testing the waters,” he told me. “We’re trying to do that in a sensible way that still is connected to the principles of trustworthiness and quality and integrity of The Economist, rather than just move fast and break things. That’s not the business model we’re in.”

“The RACE to build AI infrastructures is unfolding town by town across America. In some places, data centers are welcomed,” Brockovich writes on the site (emphasis hers). “In others, they are delayed, contested or abandoned altogether. This MAP captures the real-world footprint of that race — revealing patterns of growth, conflict and uncertainty.”

As data center demand continues to grow rapidly, so are concerns about their impacts; in March, Andrew and I wrote about how investigating data centers is quickly becoming its own beat. As of publication, Brockovich’s map — similar to a map published by Business Insider, whom Andrew and I talked to for our story — shows the locations of 33 operational data centers, with 44 under construction and 27 proposed. There are also 2,716 community reports so far, and undoubtedly more will follow.

But why?

I mentioned here a couple of weeks ago that I’ve been studying economics to find more rigorous frameworks to describe why “creative destruction” has been better at destroying than recreating the news industry. The decline of original news by traditional media has not nearly been offset by the rise of newer media, mostly to the detriment of our democratic societies. The loss of local media in particular is associated with greater loneliness, lower awareness of public officials, and more corruption. It’s like an invisible tax levied on our communities that we pay civically, cognitively and sometimes even literally, in the form of higher local bond prices due to more wasteful government spending. Increasingly, this invisible tax is being silently levied by Big Tech.

These economic tools are helping me round out the story I have to tell about why things go wrong and how they could be made better.

(Alas, the post where I talked about re-learning calculus led at least a dozen of my readers to instantly unsubscribe. My managerial economics textbook indicates that if I want this newsletter to grow and not shrink, a marginal analysis would show I should write about something else. Unfortunately my English and journalism degrees are still in charge of my writing and, like the Green Goblin mask in “Spider-Man,” keep whispering that I should follow my muse.)

Over the last couple of weeks, I went on a detour to bone up on the subfield of behavioral economics, starting with a couple of its seminal books, Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow and Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s Nudge (the 2021 “final” edition). Kahneman and Thaler won Nobel prizes in economics for their psychological work, which demonstrated that the story told about human nature in mainstream neoclassical economics is basically false.

A basic premise of modern behavioral economics would go like this: People aren’t omnipotent utility-maximizers who always buy the best product obtainable at the best cost. People are people, and our brains make us perceive or do weird stuff that is not always aligned with statistical reality or our own best interests. (I always eat too much candy even though I know it’s bad for me, and I have crystal-clear self-awareness about this even at the precise moment I reach for the Hot Tamales at CVS.) But “irrational” is not a good description for predictable behavior. What’s truly irrational is not seeing it coming. A lot of the stuff we do can be explained by the quite ordinary cognitive shortcuts we take when coping with complex environments: such as the mostly terrible way we use the internet, which is mostly terribly using us.

This type of story about the psychological fragility of the news consumer will not be new to the veteran of media theory. We’ve been onto this game for more than a century, since Walter Lippmann’s 1922 Public Opinion. The book was a devastating portrait of the limitations of human psychology in comprehending the complexity of modern society, which readers like John Dewey correctly understood to be an indictment of a foundational mythology of self-government. Lippmann thought actually-existing modern democracy needed paternalistic experts to function properly. Dewey thought trust needed to remain with the little guy. (Nicholas Carr recently wrote an excellent account of this debate here.)

The future of news in the 20th century belonged to Walter Lippmann’s democratic paternalism. The winner-take-all nature of advertising markets, the artificial scarcity of broadcast spectrum space, and the forbidding industrial moats associated with the costs of news production and distribution, gave rise to the era of 20th century mass media, which still anchors our perception of what “media” is today. Huge newsrooms, huge audiences and huge profits concentrated control in hands of a small number of experts and businesspeople over what the public read, saw and heard.

Press criticism in the mass media era was important and interesting to read, because the experience of news consumption was a common one that could be studied, analyzed, criticized. If someone was harming society, you knew their name and what they were doing, which meant they were easy to blame — and even shameable. The mass media and its weaknesses (a deference to power, its bias toward affluent audiences, its of-the-times bigotry, its fondness for inflammatory but statistically insignificant crime stories) were legible and, by being legible, were confrontable.

The centralization of media production thus also concentrated power in the hands of journalists, who developed a strong craft mentality with anticommercial (or economically “irrational”) norms that lead to things like joining a union or a self-governed membership organization with independent codes of journalistic ethics, like the Society of Professional Journalists or Investigative Reporters and Editors. It wasn’t just that journalists had a romantic guild mentality about the importance of pursuing truth: It was that the centralization of industrial power gave journalists the means to exert a Galbrathian countervailing influence on their employers. Media owners might refer to this internal conflict as an “agency problem,” which is a fancy term for complaining about authoritarian workplaces that aren’t fully totalitarian.

Much of what people liked about 20th century mass media — mostly accurate public-interest news, delivered by skilled craftspeople on the front page and the top of the hour, where it was harder to ignore — was a shotgun marriage of journalistic norms with economic opportunity. Many of these norms remain in place today, perhaps even in defiance of low expectations. Most of this year’s Pulitzer Prize winners were commercial media organizations managing fiduciary duties to pursue profit with newsrooms that leveraged complex divisions of labor to pursue labor-intensive and probably loss-leading news projects that, to my eye, look a little lighter on AI wizardry in 2026 than industry innovator rhetoric would prefer to see. This year’s honorees even includes great newspaper villain Alden Global Capital, which won one Pulitzer Prize this year and was finalist for another.

A centennial update of Walter Lippmann’s Public Opinion for democratic media in 2026 would probably come to the same conclusion about the limits of human cognition under modern society, whose complexity is increasing at a logarithmic pace. The new part would be the displacement of the paternalistic expert class that Lippmann thought would be needed to manage this complexity.

The needs of your average media consumer, wherever imperfectly met by big news outlets, are now confronted with an embarrassment of options that seek to fill every marketplace desire imaginable, thanks to technological innovations driving content production and distribution costs to zero.

The dollar cost of encountering content has also fallen toward zero thanks to ad-supported platforms and massively subsidized AI agents. But the mental “decision costs” of finding accurate information have been driven skyward for consumers wandering a swamp of mostly terrible choices. The top-of-the-hour paternalism of 20th-century mass media has been traded in for the 21st-century paternalism of slop-slinging algorithms indifferent to the accuracy of the product or the compensation of journalists whose work feeds the entire ecosystem, usually without credit. What was once legible about media consumption has become increasingly illegible, depreciating our old tools of analysis and confrontation.

In one of those tremendous ironies provided everywhere by capitalism, I most frequently see the old criticism of mass media profit-seeking online when someone at an alternative platform is practicing some good-ol’-fashioned product differentiation. “You’ll never see THIS story in the legacy media!” Often you can, but shit is hard to find these days, and the energy required to believe a media stereotype (stereotypes frequently being true) is vastly lower than paying the cognitive tax of looking elsewhere for a longer/slower/duller version of content that’s already right in front of you.

Kahneman describes this as a cognitive fight between System 1, our brain’s automatic system, and System 2, our reflective system. And System 2 is very lazy. Algorithmically delivered media is perfectly turned to the biases of your System 1, and why not? Like a true scientist, the platform has been carefully gathering data to better predict what you’ll actually do next. It’s the experts and the advocates who wish that citizens had a surplus of civic impulses that, sometimes, we don’t. Whatever else you can say about it as a form of government, democracy is a lot of work.

The mass media era is fully and completely dead, and people have recently stopped using terms like “mainstream media.” Now there’s a bewildering eddy of bigger media and littler media and no Habermasian “public sphere” whatsoever. Bari Weiss’s right-wing makeover of CBS News is apparently more interesting to read about than to watch: The network’s dwindling audiences are probably switching to the nation’s now-number-one streaming channel, YouTube.

When I go out and chat with people, I have no idea what kind of media they’re consuming, if any at all. Some people just ask AI: OpenAI reported in February that ChatGPT is getting about a million prompts a week for local news. Others randomly encounter news when TikTok passes a news creator at them. They have to describe the videos to me. I deleted the app and have lately been preferring to take my news via print as if I were a million years old and the past 15 years of media innovation I lived and worked through and helped foment never happened. Ironically, by weaning myself off a longtime digital news addiction (apart from a couple mostly national apps), I’m probably far closer to the modal consumer news experience than when I was a Los Angeles Times reporter, which is to say: News is not something a lot of people are actively seeking out. “News finds you nowadays,” a survey respondent told the Pew Research Center.

We are all part of the counterpublic now. And a counterpublic tends to distrust whoever’s in charge. There’s a counterpublic occupying the White House as we speak, and it’s notable for the time it spends looking for someone else to blame for what’s going on.

I work on things like news subsides to support the supply side of news production. But in environments of overwhelming choice (like ours for digital media), Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein call for “libertarian paternalism” to help overwhelmed people make better consumer decisions. This repulsive term has the quality of being honest in that intentionally combines two unlikable words to describe a solution to the conundrum of how you guide flawed humans toward outcomes they might be happier with without depriving them of free choice.

Thaler and Sunstein’s preferred tool of libertarian paternalism is the “nudge” — intentional little features of “choice architecture” (how you structure people’s decisions) that gently guide people toward better outcomes. One of the most powerful nudges is a default, which is actually a major feature of traditional media, which would give prominent places to stories on the front page or in the newscast not because it might necessarily be the most engaging story of the day, but because it might be the most civically important. Our internet has mostly abandoned the principle of nudging people at important news.

Let’s take artificial intelligence’s structural hostility to journalism. A recent study by Aengus Bridgman and Taylor Owen of the Centre for Media, Technology and Democracy in Canada showed that ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Grok had been scraping Canadian news outlets (including paywalled stories — plunder!!), because the contents of those outlets’ work would appear in the AI bots’ responses. This news content was appearing unattributed. However, the bots would usually list attribution after being prompted — meaning that the data was in the AI model, it just wasn’t offering it up without extra user exertion. And users usually don’t like extra exertion. This is bad design that only harms news providers and consumers, especially given AI’s well known weakness of providing inaccurate, made-up outputs in addition to just ripping off news outlets and undermining their revenue models, which are based in some form or another on aggregating audience attention. The rapacious and uncompensated AI scraping of the open web is having the perverse effect of incentivizing more high-quality journalism to get gated behind paywalls where bots can get more easily blocked, ultimately driving up the costs of quality journalism to everyone on a social level.

Social media, too, could choose to feature quality news outlets as “defaults” or provide subtle “nudges” on content that prompt users to donate or subscribe to the news outlets providing high quality news videos on platforms like Instagram, which don’t pay for themselves. (I am worried about the rise of the “too-good Instagram news video” — I’m glad news outlets are becoming fluent in visual media, but I don’t know if they’ve gotten fluent in getting revenue from it.) Integration with donation or subscription tools could be made practically frictionless. Or hey, maybe sharing a better cut of advertising revenue. Doing so would, if anything, provide even stronger incentive for news outlets to keep providing high-quality visual content to platforms like Instagram at no actual cost to Instagram itself, which might make people feel better about Instagram (which is currently getting sued for creating an overly addictive product, mostly through evil nudges). Mostly, however, the platforms seem to find this a hassle or too controversial, if they even care about media at all: you’re probably just not innovating hard enough. Two things that are true is that more and more people are relying on creator economy journalists to provide them information, and that many of those creator economy journalists are doing it while going broke.

Google itself, the granddaddy of search, was once the greatest “nudger” of all toward media via its powerful “News” tab and other search features, which was its one redeeming feature in exchange for having illegally monopolized both the search and digital advertising marketplaces. But Google’s growing reliance on AI summaries for search seems to be contributing, at least in part, to a decline in the rivers of referral traffic it once provided to news outlets. New research of the impact of AI on news consumption via search indicates that it’s the smallest outlets (who benefit most from search discoverability) seeming to suffer the worst:

You probably couldn’t create a more anti-news internet if you tried (and some people seem to have tried). There are lots of things that have gone wrong for the news media in the 21st century, but the feature they have in common is the destruction of incentives to produce accurate information. Addressing these problems doesn’t require one fix but many — not just for the news outlets and journalists on the supply side, but to help out the exhausted, burned out, confused consumers on the demand side, who are getting drowned in content sludge.

Our digital economy has levied a gigantic cognitive tax on news consumers trying to find accurate information. The cost is just too much to bear.

The once-bipartisan idea that the nation’s media should exist to serve democracy continues to fade with it, too.

As a media historian, I think the story of CBS Radio News’ rise and fall cannot be told without telling another parallel story: the story of how the U.S. stopped demanding that media serve the public interest.

When CBS was born in 1927, radio was ascendant, and this new form of mass communication was spurring vibrant discussions about how media could better serve democracy.

Americans had already seen how concentrated wealth during the Gilded Age had tilted the news ecosystem by overemphasizing the concerns of the rich while glossing over inequality, graft and corruption. World War I further demonstrated the power of mass media to shape public opinion through propaganda, reinforcing calls for democratic oversight of broadcasting.

Just how to regulate radio was up for debate. But there was broad consensus across party lines that government could play a role in protecting the public from concentrated media power and, with it, foreign misinformation, bad-faith special interest messaging or fraudulent advertising.

The formative years

CBS radio traces its origins to the United Independent Broadcasters, a network of 16 local stations founded by music manager Arthur L. Judson. When Columbia Records bought a stake, it was renamed the Columbia Phonographic Broadcasting System.

Early broadcasts simply involved announcers reading short breaking-news dispatches distributed by the United Press wire service. Within months, Columbia sold its share to investors including William S. Paley, who streamlined the name to CBS.

Paley was no public media crusader. He was a businessman who wanted radio to turn a profit. But his management reflected a belief that radio could serve two masters: the public interest and advertisers.

He hired journalist Paul J. White to run the news division and created a regular news segment called “Something for Everyone.”

Though they differed on how best to achieve it, Democrats and Republicans agreed that radio ought to serve the public interest. In other words, because the airwaves belonged to all Americans, broadcasters had obligations beyond profit. They needed to provide reliable information, platform diverse viewpoints, and cover matters of public concern.

A cartoon from the March 22, 1924, edition of The Literary Digest reflects the fear that radio would be subsumed by corporate interests.

In the 1920s, then-Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover was charged with formulating federal radio policy. Though he was a staunch, pro-business conservative, Hoover was also an engineer who thought that the radio system should be “free of monopoly” and, like any machine, could be gradually improved so it would better serve democracy.

“The ether is a public medium, and its use must be for the public benefit,” he said in November 1925.

Republican President Calvin Coolidge signed the Radio Act of 1927 into law. Passed with overwhelming support, it required radio stations to demonstrate a commitment to “public interest, convenience and necessity” in order to receive a license.

Forging the public’s trust

By the time the 1934 Communications Act created the Federal Communications Commission, a regulatory agency tasked with licensing broadcasters and enforcing ownership rules, the idea that radio should serve the public had been normalized.

In 1935, Paley made Edward R. Murrow — the man most associated with CBS Radio’s public service mission — head of news programming.

With fascism threatening democracy across Europe, Murrow launched “World News Roundup” in 1938. The longest-running news program in American media, it featured live reports transmitted by shortwave from locations around the world. American audiences huddled around their radios nightly to hear CBS’ reports, which showed how live news could unite a nation and cultivate a richer information ecosystem than the uniform propaganda of Europe’s fascist strongmen.

CBS’ gripping coverage of World War II solidified its importance as an American institution. Murrow’s signature tag lines — “this is London” and, later, “good night and good luck” — helped forge the public’s trust in CBS’ reliable and informative programming.

The dangers of delusion and amusement

After the war, television challenged radio’s dominance. Paley understood that Murrow had built a deep trust among listeners, and he put him in charge of CBS News as the network expanded its programming to TV.

Yet Murrow grew uneasy with shifts in the network’s coverage, which, in his view, increasingly served the economic interests of its owners.

Speaking to the Radio Television News Directors Association in 1958, Murrow lamented how radio and television had forgotten “to operate in the public interest.” He worried that “we have currently a built-in allergy to unpleasant or disturbing information” and saw mass media increasingly “being used to distract, delude, amuse and insulate us.”

Without serious reporting and civic responsibility as their animating principles, radio and television were losing their democratic utility, becoming mere “wires and lights in a box.”

Corporations gain the upper hand

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, many of the rules dating from when CBS Radio News was born, like ownership restrictions and requirements for educational programming, remained on the books.

But during this period, media companies started spending enormous sums of money on donations to legislators who could do their bidding — and capturing the regulatory bodies that were supposed to be holding them accountable. The spirited debates about how radio could better serve democracy largely disappeared. Instead, the conversation shifted to whether government should have any role at all in regulating the media.

Principles that once had broad public support — producing public interest news as a quid pro quo for licensing, limits on foreign ownership and fairness rules that required stations to give equal time to both sides of an issue — faded away.

Any societal obligation outside of earning profit started being described as a threat to the American way of life. Those arguing that media should be regulated like a public utility in a pluralistic democracy were effectively ignored.

After President Bill Clinton signed the 1996 Telecommunication Act, critics argued that industry lobbying had helped dismantle much of the public interest framework that had long governed American broadcasting. The legislation relaxed ownership caps and cross-ownership rules, allowing a small number of large corporations to acquire far more stations and weakening the older public interest obligations tied to broadcast licensing.

Before the act, corporations were limited to owning 40 radio stations. Now, conglomerates like iHeartMedia and Audacy can own thousands.

“The tube is flickering”

Through it all, CBS Radio News’ top-of-the-hour bulletins remained on the air, a reminder of its original public mission. Yet increasingly, the deregulated radio ecosystem failed to perform that function.

Back in the 1920s, you could hear editorials arguing that the radio should not be given over to “propagandists, religious zealots and unprincipled persons to grind their own axes.” By the early 2000s, divisive shock jocks and hosts feeding on partisan anger dominated the radio dial.

In a 1938 radio address on CBS’ ethical commitments, Paley argued that “broadcasting as an instrument of American democracy must forever be wholly, honestly and militantly non-partisan.” By 2016, CEO Les Moonves defended CBS’ decision to increase its coverage of President Donald Trump’s spectacularly divisive politics to juice ratings: “It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.” Four years later, Trump awarded one of radio’s most polarizing partisan propagandists, Rush Limbaugh, the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

In his second term, Trump has abused his power over the media ecosystem. In 2025, the Trump administration’s FCC approved the merger of Paramount Global, the parent company of CBS, with Skydance Media. But it only did so after Paramount Global settled a lawsuit Trump had filed against CBS for $16 million.

Though many talented journalists and producers remain, CBS News’ recently hired editor-in-chief, Bari Weiss, has worked to make the network more friendly to the Trump administration. She temporarily shelved a “60 Minutes” segment critical of Trump’s use of El Salvador’s CECOT prison and promoted a friendly town hall with conservative commentator Erika Kirk, the widow of assassinated political activist Charlie Kirk. Ratings at the network have collapsed.

Though Paramount Skydance is using its enormous debt load to justify taking CBS Radio News off the air, the conglomerate is trying to purchase CNN’s parent company, Warner Bros. Discovery, in a move that would only further the monopolization of the news media.

Americans can’t say Murrow didn’t warn them.

“The tube is flickering,” he said in 1958. And unless Americans reclaim their right to information not colored by profit motive and special interests, “we will soon see that the whole struggle is lost.”

No news publisher has confirmed to Nieman Lab that an AI company has already scraped their content from the Wayback Machine. Still, in the five months since we published our story the number of news sites blocking the Internet Archive has continued to rise.

Overwhelmingly, these sites are local news outlets.

Our new analysis shows that more than 340 local news sites across the United States are now limiting the Internet Archive’s ability to access and preserve their stories. Many sites in our sample are owned by five of the seven largest local news publishers in the country: USA Today Co., McClatchy, Advance Local, MediaNews Group, and Tribune Publishing. The latter two are both subsidiaries of the “vulture hedge fund” Alden Global Capital.

Researchers, historians, and citizens around the world rely on the web archives of local news sites to do their work.

“Blocking the Internet Archive’s web crawlers threatens one of the most effective ways that we capture and store news content for the long term,” Edward McCain, a journalism librarian at the University of Missouri, said. “In the present we may have some workarounds, but in the long run, it weakens a vital link in primary source materials that we need to understand where we’ve been and where we want to go.”

Working journalists are among the most frequent users of the Wayback Machine’s local news archives. Over the last month, online petitions have called for news media companies to allow the Internet Archive to preserve their journalism.

“I cover news within a larger news desert in New York’s Rockland, Sullivan, and Rockland counties. This means I need to heavily rely on archival data of old news articles from now deceased, or zombie-fied, media outlets,” wrote B.J. Mendelson, the editor of The Monroe Gazette newsletter, in one recent petition signed by over 200 journalists. “Without the Internet Archive, my [work] would be incredibly difficult to do.”

In the face of publisher concerns, the Wayback Machine has highlighted its efforts to minimize abuse of its site, including implementing systems that limit bulk downloading and working with vendors like Cloudflare to monitor bot activity. “We are in conversation with many publishers and appreciate the opportunity to address their concerns,” Mark Graham, the founder of the Wayback Machine, told Nieman Lab, noting that the Internet Archive’s terms of use only permits using its collections for scholarship or research purposes.

Meredith Broussard, a data journalist and professor at New York University, said that as profit margins for news thin, it’s only become more important to news publishers to protect their intellectual property.

“This is the same fight that everybody has been having with the Internet Archive since its inception,” Broussard said. “Internet Archive is a very old-school, ‘information-should-be-free’ organization. But the people who are invested differently have different priorities. There are lots of different historical and legal and economic issues that are colliding in this situation. AI companies [are] the catalyst for the latest skirmish in a very old battle.”

Alden Global Capital is another major local news chain that has rolled out new restrictions on the Internet Archive. About 60 of those sites are owned by MediaNews Group, the Alden subsidiary that operates dailies across the country, including The Mercury News, the Denver Post, and the New York Daily News. Another seven publications are operated by Tribune Publishing, most notably the Chicago Tribune.

Alden has been criticized for aggressively acquiring U.S. newspapers and stripping them of resources for short-term profits. Alden did not respond to requests for comment.

In July 2025, Alden ran an editorial in more than 60 of its daily newspapers openly criticizing OpenAI and other AI companies that have used news content to train their models without compensation. “Securing permission from, and fairly compensating, those publishers who created this great foundation of knowledge is the right, just and American thing to do,” read the editorial. Both Alden publishers are part of the major copyright infringement suit against OpenAI and Microsoft that includes The New York Times and is currently winding its way through federal court.

Some independent local publishers, like The Baltimore Banner, are open to AI chatbots surfacing their stories without licensing deals. But they’re still concerned that a “back door” like the Wayback Machine’s might hurt their chances at being cited properly.

Last year, The Banner worked with the company DataDome to analyze crawler activity on its site. The findings were striking: about 25% of The Banner’s site traffic was coming from bots, including crawlers operated by the Internet Archive, according to Biswajit Ganguly, the chief technology officer and AI strategist at the Banner.

Based on that analysis, The Banner started blocking the Internet Archive, later adding one of its crawlers to its robots.txt file. It still lets major AI companies through, including crawlers used by ChatGPT and Claude.

As Ganguly explains it, the new restrictions on the Wayback Machine are less about negotiating licensing deals or preventing The Banner’s stories from appearing in AI products, and more about ensuring those products trace information back to The Banner instead of linking to sites that aggregate its work.

“We didn’t want the bots to be trained on our content, and then spit out answers based on the content without any kind of references, link, or attribution to our sources,” said Ganguly. “If ChatGPT finds something in the Wayback Machine…we were not sure how well it would be attributed back to us.”

He added that The Banner is still gathering information on how AI search products interact with news about the Baltimore region and the publication is open to lifting its block down the line.

“The threat is definitely not the Internet Archive,” Ganguly said. “But it’s a question of how the other actors are going to provide references or attributions and links back to the real creator of the content.”

Blocking as leverage for payment

Local publishers aren’t the only ones ramping up these efforts. Condé Nast, another arm of Advance Publications, has rolled out a coordinated effort to disallow the Internet Archive. Vogue, The New Yorker, Pitchfork, Vanity Fair, Bon Appetit, and Wired currently disallow four crawling bots from our list. (Last month, Wired covered the existential threat these blocks pose to the Internet Archive). Condé Nast did not respond to a request for comment.

The Atlantic has been working with Cloudflare to block the Internet Archive since last summer and added one of the Internet Archive’s crawlers to its robots.txt file in an update earlier this year, according to Anna Bross, The Atlantic’s SVP of communications. She said the decision is part of the outlet’s “aggressive” blocking policy.

“Our default is to block: No one should be scraping The Atlantic’s journalism without permission, regardless of the use,” Bross said.

The Atlantic’s CEO Nick Thompson commented on our January reporting in a video posted to LinkedIn in April. He said blocking the Internet Archive is important for publishers that want to maintain leverage when negotiating licensing with big AI companies.

“Because of the damages that can be done when you let all your content be scraped, because of all the leverage you lose, there will be worthy products that you previously gave your data to and now you can’t,” said Thompson.

Major international publishers have also started to block the Internet Archive, including the leading newspaper in Brazil, Folha de S.Paulo. Folha added three Internet Archive user agents to its robots.txt file in February.

“Folha believes that the sustainability of professional journalism — the very material the public record seeks to preserve — depends on protecting intellectual property,” said Sérgio Dávila, Folha’s editor-in-chief. “If AI companies wish to use this archive for training, they must enter into licensing agreements rather than rely on third-party repositories.”

Dávila noted that Folha invests in its own digital archive, Acervo Folha, which includes digitized editions of print issues going back to the paper’s founding in 1921. Access to Acervo Folha is available to paying subscribers.

What can be done?

Archiving is expensive; the technical infrastructure, storage, and expertise can be cost-prohibitive to smaller news organizations.

Before the rise of digital news, many papers maintained physical archives, often staffed with in-house librarians. Today, due to the contraction of the newspaper industry, most of those dedicated archiving roles are gone and the move to digital publishing has only complicated the issue.

A new content management system (CMS) can often lead to major archival losses. In 2024, thousands of articles vanished from the sites of the Daily Hampshire Gazette and the Greenfield Recorder in Western Massachusetts during a CMS switch. When publications close many former owners don’t want to shoulder the cost of maintaining a site. In 2022, a decade after The Hook, a Charlottesville weekly, went under, its archived site went offline, along with over 22,000 stories.

The Internet Archive is often touted as a hero of the web for taking on the Herculean task of preserving the entirety of the internet, and for stepping in when news organizations fail to preserve their own work.

In December, the Internet Archive partnered with the Poynter Institute and Investigative Reporters and Editors to train a cohort of 33 local and national news outlets on how to develop and implement an archiving strategy. The initiative, funded through a Press Forward grant, aims to train 300 newsrooms in digital preservation and in using the Internet Archive’s services by the end of 2027.

Most of the initial cohort is made up of independent and nonprofit local newsrooms, including Outlier Media, Charlottesville Tomorrow, and The 51st. Wired is the only publication in our dataset restricting Internet Archive access that is participating in the program.

As Broussard, the NYU professor, points out, while the Internet Archive is one of the few efforts to make archives free, it isn’t the only effort to archive news. News publishers have long licensed their journalism to commercial archives like ProQuest and LexisNexis, which are often available in libraries, universities, and for individual subscriptions. They’re not free, but they do exist. At least several publications in our sample appear in ProQuest databases, including the Chicago Tribune, The Baltimore Sun, Honolulu Civil Beat, and USA Today.

Economic incentives are a valid reason for publishers to want to keep their contents out of the Internet Archive, Broussard said, but news outlets should have a long-term, multifaceted preservation strategy. Even with a plan in place, the reality for many publishers is that it’s unlikely that they’ll be able to save everything.

“Every news organization, especially local news organizations, generally launch thinking, ‘we’re going to put stuff on the internet and it’s going to be there forever,’ and that’s not true,” Broussard said. “Anybody who told you the internet is forever lied.”

Correction: An earlier version of this story stated that NOLA.com was owned by Advance Local. It is currently owned by Georges Media Group.

On May 11, it was standup-comic-turned-media-mogul Byron Allen acquiring a 52% share of BuzzFeed for $120 million, which he plans to use to make a…competitor to YouTube?¹ Sure thing. And today, nine days later, it’s James Murdoch, son of Rupert, who is spending more than $300 million to buy most of Vox Media.

A decade ago, BuzzFeed and Vox Media were valued at $1.7 billion and $1 billion — further evidence (as if we needed any) that 2016 was another universe. Here are the Times’ Benjamin Mullin and Jessica Testa:

James Murdoch is acquiring roughly half of Vox Media, a dramatic expansion in American media for the younger son of the media mogul Rupert Murdoch. The deal includes Vox Media’s podcast network as well as New York magazine, a publication once owned by Mr. Murdoch’s father.

Mr. Murdoch, 53, emphasized that he was not looking to acquire a “daily news business” but rather wanted “longer-form, thoughtful journalism that can really speak to the culture,” he told The New York Times in an interview on Tuesday. “We want to create platforms where really amazing, talented people can come and do the best work of their lives.”

It’s a little sad that the third part of Vox Media that Murdoch is buying — Vox.com — doesn’t get mentioned in the Times story until the 10th paragraph, but that’s probably another sign of how far from 2016 we are. Here’s the corporate press release (Lupa Systems is Murdoch’s holding company):

“This acquisition aligns well with our existing holdings and investments and reflects both our interest in the forward edge of culture and our deep commitment to ambitious journalism and agenda-setting conversations,” said James Murdoch. “It will allow us to apply new tools across the businesses we are building, adding substantial production, distribution, and editorial capability to our group.”

Lupa’s acquisition of New York Magazine includes its must-read verticals, The Cut, Vulture, Intelligencer, The Strategist, Curbed, and Grub Street. Vox brings multiplatform leadership in video, text, and podcasts like Today, Explained. The Vox Media Podcast Network, home to popular shows such as Pivot with Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway, Criminal, and Where Should We Begin? with Esther Perel, has been the fastest growing business within Vox Media and will immediately put Lupa at the top of the podcast field, which now reaches 58% of Americans monthly, according to Edison Research, including two out of three people between the ages of 18 and 54.

Murdoch’s “existing holdings and investments” include the Tribeca Film Festival and Art Basel. Longtime Vox Media CEO Jim Bankoff will continue with the Murdoch-owned part of the company.

Vox Media’s collection of brands. The ones Murdoch isn’t buying are marked in red.

The parts of Vox Media that Murdoch isn’t buying — SB Nation, The Verge, Eater, The Dodo, and Popsugar — will be spun off into their own yet-to-be-named company. You might think of them as the ancien Vox Media — the blog-born sites that the company was originally built on. SB Nation (2005) and The Verge (2011) were the original two Vox Media sites. Eater (launched 2005, acquired 2013), Popsugar (launched 2006, acquired 2022), and The Dodo (launched January 2014, acquired 2022) also predate the April 2014 founding of Vox.com. Here’s the staff memo from Bankoff:

Eater, Popsugar, SB Nation, The Dodo, and The Verge are each in a strong place as distinct brands, and we have no plans to separate them. Each will continue under its current leadership, and Ryan will keep working closely with those leaders to deliver on every brand’s individual strategy. We have made real progress building a brand-led business, including a commercial structure designed to support each brand’s unique opportunity.

I confess that I have little confidence in Allen’s quixotic plans for BuzzFeed, whose business had already been poorly positioned in the years since Peak Facebook. But New York and Vox Media’s podcast network both seem to have steadier foundations and, with Bankoff and much of current management staying on, should be able to keep things going.

Maybe it’s unfair, but I can’t get my mind off of “Succession.” In Season 1, Waystar Royco — the show’s stand-in for Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp empire — acquires Vaulter, a digital media company very much of that BuzzFeed/Vox Media wave (though it was really more like Gawker Media than anything else of that era). But by Season 2, it appears the financials aren’t working out for its particular collection of verticals (and unionization is on the march), so Logan Roy orders it shut down.

Then in Season 4, the Roy kids team up to plan Vaulter’s spiritual successor, The Hundred, a digital news site whose pitch deck managed to include all the era’s most annoying media-VC-isms:

A digital hub delivering all the essential information needed to navigate the now. The world’s leading experts provide humanity’s most valuable knowledge in bespoke bite-sized parcels, designed to improve the lives of subscribers and the world in general. The antidote to the modern malaise of empty-caloried input-overload…An independent bespoke information hub with the hundred greatest top writers, experts and minds in every field from Israel-Palestine to A.I. to Michelin restaurants. It’s a one-stop info shop, with high-calorie info-snacks…It’s like a private member’s club, but for everyone. It’s like clickbait, but for smart people.

The Hundred is, according to Kendall Roy, “Substack meets Masterclass meets The Economist meets The New Yorker.” Of course, in the show, The Hundred gets quickly abandoned as an idea too. But if you were looking today at Vox Media’s properties, which ones look most like Vaulter? Probably the brands that were born in that early-2010s boom for bloggy, advertiser-friendly verticals. And which ones look most like The Hundred? Probably the brands that have elite cultural cachet (New York), news-cycle relevance (Vox.com), and expert-driven parasocial relationships (podcasts).

Look, neither of those fictional news sites is going to be a flattering comparison — it’s television, and they’re both played for laughs. But I can’t stop feeling like James Murdoch has decided to pass on Vaulter and buy The Hundred. For my money, Vox Media has been the most competently run of its peer digital media companies; while BuzzFeed and Vice had higher valuations at their peaks, the Vox Media assemblage of brands has maintained high quality and revenue diversification better than the rest. They’re the digital Condé Nast. It’s sad to see it broken up, and I worry about a great site like The Verge being put on an ice floe on its own. But I suspect both halves of the company could have sustainable futures ahead.

1. It’s typically not a good sign when straight news stories about your strategy are using the word “quixotic.”

“I really wanted my own channel, to do things on my own terms,” Stern explained in her announcement. “With more humor and personality. And because we’re at a moment where we need tech guidance more than ever.”

Stern isn’t the first journalist to tread this path; last year, I wrote about Dave Jorgenson, the former Washington Post TikTok Guy who left to start Local News International, and Joss Fong and Adam Cole, the co-founders of Howtown, who had previously worked for Vox and NPR. Newpress, a relatively recent creator collective, is helmed entirely by veteran journalists.

Like those journalists, Stern is relying on a mix of subscriptions and sponsored content (denoted by a large label and her use of a large golden mic in her videos). But Stern isn’t leaving legacy media entirely behind: a longtime NBC contributor, she now has a deal with the channel that lets it use her content and customize it for its own platforms, which provides a baseline of stability that many independent journalists would be envious of.

I spoke with Stern about her vision for the channel, the work of building up a new audience from scratch, her new book — I Am Not A Robot: My Year Using AI to Do (Almost) Everything — and how she’s using AI in her work. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

I’ve also talked to Dave Jorgenson [of Local News International] and Joss Fong and Adam Cole [of Howtown], and one thing in common for all of you is that you left large publications to do your own thing. They told me something similar about how they like having a team and the structures of journalism around them.

Speaking of which: you laid out those tenets on your website, and you clearly identify as a journalist rather than a creator. What’s behind those decisions?

The second donation of $33 million, from a donor who chose to remain anonymous, is meant to “build and acquire tools and services that will be shared with public media organizations across the nation.”

The network has also been flooded with member donations in the wake of federal defunding. NPR has to “fill a gap of $8 million in its $300-million annual budget,” Folkenflik reported. Without member donations, the network had “initially estimated it would come up $30-45 million short.”

Major gifts and member donations will not, however, prevent layoffs. NPR announced Monday that it’s restructuring and offering buyouts, in addition to beginning that technological transformation. NPR CEO Katherine Maher sent a memo to staff laying out the changes, and NPR media correspondent David Folkenflik has more details.

Three hundred staffers, “mostly within newsgathering desks in the newsroom,” will be offered buyouts with the goal of 30 people accepting by May 26; if they don’t, “more targeted layoffs would ensue,” Folkenflik writes. (NPR currently has 425 newsroom employees.) Some other bits from the piece:

— There are a few details on tech:

The network plans to overhaul its app and reshape its user experience across platforms to enrich the experience for listeners, readers and even viewers of its digital and streamlining products. And NPR’s senior corporate leaders — some of whom have deep roots in the world of tech — are pivoting from the mantra of “reaching people wherever they are” to encouraging people to use NPR on its own platforms.

— The network projects it will see $15 million less in member station dues this year. From Maher’s memo:

Federal defunding has hurt public media, and many of our Member stations are no longer able to pay fees at prior levels. NPR’s new Membership model incorporates a $15 million reduction in fees, based on our projections of station capacity. Meanwhile, economic uncertainty, a tough newscycle, and softness in radio listening has led to lower projections in sponsorship revenue.

— Several desks are merging:

NPR’s National and General Assignments desks next month will merge with a focus on deep dives, natural disasters, and news deserts. NPR’s regional bureau chiefs will become part of a new desk that works closely with member station journalists.

Beyond that, Evans says he is merging NPR’s desks covering culture, education, religion, addiction and sports to make a society-and-culture desk. He is unifying science and climate coverage in a single desk. And he plans to fold the global health team — now part of the Science desk — into the International desk….

NPR’s Washington desk will expand to include the states team and NPR reporters who focus on power and money. The new desk on power and policy would take in developments on the local, state, regional and national level.

In a caveat at the top of the conversation, Thompson said he would leave many of the most “controversial issues” that he wanted to ask Altman about to “journalists at The Atlantic.” But for one brief moment, Thompson did ask the OpenAI co-founder how he thought media companies can survive the decline of traditional search, and the rise of AI agents, who may browse the web on a human’s behalf. Here’s that section of the conversation:

“I can give you my best theory, and I’ll caveat this by, no one knows. This is what I hope will happen and what I’ve wanted to happen for a long time. What really makes sense in a world of agents is we try a sort of micropayment-based approach. So, if my agent wants to come read Nick Thompson’s article, Nick Thompson or The Atlantic can set a price for the agent to read it — might be different than a human reading it.

My agent can read it, pay $0.17,  and give me a summary of that. If I want to go read the whole article, pay $1, or however that works. If my agent wants to calculate something for me that’s really difficult to do, it can go rent some cloud compute somewhere and pay for that, but I think there will be need to be a new economic model for these agents doing lots of small transactions and exchanges of value with each other on behalf of their human controllers or whatever, all of the time.”

Thompson didn’t press Altman for more detail, but did note that the challenge would be adding up those pennies to match the $80 that one human currently pays to subscribe to The Atlantic. After Thompson said that challenge “was my problem, not your problem,” Altman disagreed. He responded, “It’s sort of all of our problem, but yes.”

The micropayments model is not merely a hypothetical, but one already being explored by a host of Silicon Valley startups and more established Internet infrastructure companies. Tollbit collects “digital tolls” for AI bots, monetizing every access and scrape. Prorata.ai compensates publishers proportionally for how much their IP shows up in AI answers. And last summer, Cloudflare launched its pay-per-crawl marketplace to facilitate these transactions for the roughly 20% of all websites that use its services.

Altman’s answer is an indication that OpenAI may be moving toward these emerging business models for news publishers. They’re a notable departure from the lump-sum content licensing deals that have been the hallmark of the company’s business with news publishers since the launch of ChatGPT in 2022.

Despite the tangent on publishing, most of the conversation on the podcast revolved around OpenAI’s model development, including its use of synthetic data to train AI models, its efforts to build agentic products, and the problems with AI sycophancy. You can watch the full interview on YouTube.

This story has been updated to clarify that Sam Altman appeared on the “The Most Interesting Thing in AI.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“The wholesale shift from one information ecosystem to another”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“We have lost Sarah”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other gains

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

TAPinto

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

Muddy River News

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

Oil City News

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

Lost Coast Outpost

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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