In my Nieman Lab prediction this time last year, I wrote that “in 2026, the use of AI as an information gateway will only rise further.”

As it turns out, I was right. In new research that I published with my colleagues Rasmus Kleis Nielsen and Richard Fletcher, one of our many findings is that generative AI systems are becoming ever more significant information intermediaries, both when intentionally used and when incidentally encountered.

For our new report, “Generative AI and News Report 2026: From Standalone Tools to Information Infrastructure,”  we surveyed audiences across nine countries, including the United States, on their use of AI in their everyday lives, what they think its impact will be on different sectors of society, and what they think about its use in news and journalism specifically. I obviously think you should read the whole report, but here are some of the major takeaways.

The use of standalone conversational AI systems such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini continues to grow rapidly, with 51% of respondents across the six countries where we have past data saying they now use AI weekly (49% in the U.S.). That’s a faster spread, at least in the U.S., than smartphones or the internet saw.

Many people also encounter AI through “incidental” AI exposure in the AI-infused services and platforms they’re already using. Search engines such as Google and Bing are key drivers: 57% of respondents across countries said they saw or engaged with AI-generated answers or summaries in the last week. News media, too, drives AI exposure. An average of 24% of respondents across nine countries said they’d seen a label noting that content was made with AI in the last week, and 20% had seen a bullet-point AI news summary.

Despite all the talk about AI agents, we find that, so far, they haven’t broken into the mainstream. The vast majority of respondents across all nine countries (67%) said they had not used an AI agent in the last week. Fourteen percent used one for a real task and 13% tried one just to experiment.

Conversational AI as a friction-reducing information intermediary

Our data provides solid evidence that a broader transformation of the information environment is afoot. Conversational AI systems have arrived as information intermediaries. Trust is not the main reason people use them. Instead, people see conversational AI systems as friction-reducing machines that get them information more quickly.

“Getting information” continues to be the most common use case. Thirty-eight percent of respondents across countries (35% in the U.S.) said they had used generative AI for getting information in the last week, up from 24% in 2025 and 11% in 2024.

We looked more closely at what people do when they say they use AI for getting information. Across the six countries we’ve surveyed since 2024, we primarily see a mixture of search-equivalent behaviors like “researching a topic” (24%) or “answering factual questions” (18%). People are also increasingly turning to AI for advice (20%).

Using AI directly for news, meanwhile, remains a niche activity, as we demonstrated in the Digital News Report earlier this year. But that use is increasing: 9% of respondents across our six core countries say they use AI for news, up from 6% in 2025 and 3% in 2024.

Many people don’t hold clear or strong views about whether AI output is trustworthy. But people who do rely on it for information trust it. Across the nine countries, 75% of those who used AI to answer factual questions trusted the answers, as did 76% of those who used it for advice and 72% of those who used it for news. Only small minorities expressed distrust.

At the same time, trust and trustworthiness do not, at this stage, seem to be central to why people rely on AI systems. Instead, people tend to see these systems as friction-reducing machines. The convenience of getting a faster and easier answer was chosen by 64% as the main reason they use AI, followed by the interactivity afforded by natural language interfaces (56%). Only a minority (21%) said they use AI because they get more reliable information from it than from other sources.

As AI systems become widely used, their growing popularity is likely to affect the use of legacy content offerings and digital platforms and services. As my coauthor Rasmus Kleis Nielsen put it on LinkedIn, rapid growth in AI use isn’t just eating into what news sites have to offer. It’s eating into search, too — with people who use AI for information saying they use not just news, but search engines less, too, and by a wider margin. Challenging times may be ahead not just for news publishers, but also for the incumbent digital giants previously seen as unassailable.

Persistent attitudes: People’s views on generative AI in journalism and news

As in previous years, we wanted to know what people think of AI’s use in journalism and news. We find that people’s attitudes here are remarkably entrenched and negative — though they also haven’t worsened significantly.

People across countries remain uncomfortable with the use of AI in the newsroom, especially with the idea of news being made entirely or primarily with AI. On average across nine countries, just 12% of respondents say they are very or somewhat comfortable with news made entirely by AI. That figure rises to 19% if there is some human oversight. This has hardly changed since 2024, and the gap between human- and AI-made news appears in every country we surveyed.

This also remains true regardless of whether it is breaking news or reporting. People are even more uncomfortable with AI being used for commentary or opinion — formats where the expectation that a human should share their view is strongest.

Zooming out

Our findings raise several important questions for journalists and publishers navigating the rise of generative AI.

First, generative AI is becoming an increasingly significant information intermediaries, with a number of possible knock-on effects on news. People are using AI to reduce friction by getting “good enough” outputs for some information needs — and skipping legacy platforms, established publishers, and the time and effort it takes to find the best available information. Discovery, brand attribution, data collection, and monetization all grow more challenging for publishers in this context.

Second, even though use continues to grow, the public remains skeptical of AI in news. This isn’t just a challenge for newsrooms’ internal adoption. It also shows that publishers using AI need to communicate to audiences what’s in it for them.

Third, beyond news, our findings speak to wider debates about AI’s societal impact. As in other studies on this topic, we find that uptake of AI is uneven. Weekly use is more common among people in professional occupations than those in entry-level or service occupations. Most people rely on free — usually less advanced — AI models.

The differences in how — not just whether — people use AI may become a new dividing line. As AI researcher and OpenAI cofounder Andrej Karpathy recently argued, there is a widening “gap in shared understanding of LLM capability,” with most people not seeing what has left those inside AI firms both excited and worried.

Expectations of what AI will do differ far more between daily users and people who have never used it than between any other groups in our survey. When two groups form very different views of the same technology because they have such different starting points, there will likely be consequences.

This doesn’t matter just for people’s individual choices around whether and how to make use of AI in their own lives. It also matters where AI is adopted and governed through collective decisions — in public services, for example — that apply to those who do not use it. 

Sarah wrote about the Local Journalism Initiative in its early days. A study earlier this year found that reporters paid with LJI funding believed they maintained their roles as watchdogs and wrote balanced stories, though two-thirds of interviewees were concerned about the perception of a conflict of interest. A growing number of journalists say the benefits of government subsidies for journalism outweigh the drawbacks.

A recent report in The Tyee suggests government support is essential to the survival of local media in Canada. (The Tyee has received support from the Local Journalism Initiative.)

“It’s either this or death, frankly,” LJI program director and Canadian Association of Journalists president Brent Jolly told The Tyee. “It’s not about local news editors getting their marching orders from the Prime Minister’s Office like some conspiracy theorists want you to think. It’s about infrastructure.”

Lisa Sygutek, publisher of the Crowsnest Pass Herald in Alberta, credited the LJI with growing the publication from “a 16-page paper to a 24-page paper.”

Read more in The Tyee’s look at Canadian local news here.

If there’s one big takeaway from the past two decades of local news struggle — the often perilous, occasionally brilliant transition from dominant newspapers to online media — perhaps it’s this: Passion alone isn’t enough.

A newspaper newsroom filled with committed editors and brilliant reporters still stares into the same headwinds as its more middling peers. The devotion of those leading a nonprofit outlet can mean little if revenue can’t keep the doors open. And even when the money is less important — when journalism is somewhat protected from the demands of the market — passion is still a finite resource, and it’s not always renewable.

That truism came to mind when I was reading a recent article by Sima Bhowmik of the University of Vermont and Andrea Lorenz of Kent State. It looks at one specific corner of the contemporary news ecosystem: journalism schools that use their students to fill voids in local coverage.

J-schools, after all, have faculties full of experience and students who need it. A few decades ago, an early-career journalist might have spent a few years covering city council meetings and school board budgets before moving up the chain to a bigger outlet. That path barely exists these days, and journalism programs know their students need the chance to do real work. What if these reporters-in-training could handle some of the local stories that the city’s daily no longer can?

If you happen to live near a college with a journalism program, you’ve probably seen this idea — often called the “teaching hospital” model — in action. Here in the Boston suburbs, many of the stories I read about my town are written by Boston University students. According to UVM’s Center for Community News, where Bhowmik is a post-doc research fellow, there were 282 such efforts as of 2025, producing local news inside 205 colleges and universities. Those numbers were up from 227 programs in 172 colleges the year before — a boom fueled by a surge in philanthropic funding for these partnerships.

Bhowmik and Lorentz’s paper — published in Journalism & Mass Communication Educator — is the result of interviews with 118 faculty and staff at 101 of those colleges, and their major takeaway is one that will be familiar to many in local news: They’re exhausted.

Participants repeatedly used phrases such as “at capacity,” “don’t have the bandwidth,” “not enough hours of the day,” and “it’s just a lot” to describe the workload. Several described long workdays and exhaustion, with one participant saying the amount of editing “just about kills me every semester.” At many institutions, faculty workload was intensified by staffing shortages, retirements, hiring freezes, and budget cuts. This left faculty with little time to provide the one-on-one coaching necessary to elevate student stories to publishable quality…

“What’s happening in the academic ecosystem is so phenomenal, thanks to these really passionate founders on the faculty,” Bhowmik told me. “But the extra work they’re putting it isn’t always getting acknowledged within the system. A professor might be editing 10 or 20 stories a week, by students without much experience, on top of a full teaching load. There’s a lot of overwork and some dissatisfaction, even though they know how important the work is.”

(See above: Passion alone isn’t enough.)

Here’s how one faculty member described their situation:

Think about it: Like, how many reporters does the average assigning editor at a mid-sized newspaper supervise? Half a dozen? So try, like, 20 of them, and each of them is writing for a different outlet maybe, which has its own set of deadlines and editor. And they’re all at varying skill levels, and broadly, they’re all pretty new. Their copy requires a lot of work, their reporting often requires a lot of handholding.

Another talked about the responsibility of getting student work up to the level a news outlet expects. You can’t just give a meh student story a C- and be done with it if a local editor is expecting publishable copy.

It takes a lot of work to get student work up to the quality of professionally published work. And a lot of students start out with really good ideas, do some good reporting by the time they’re done in the semester, it needs work, and that tends to fall on the faculty person. And that’s a lot of work outside of uncompensated work…But bridging that gap between what a student produces at the end of a semester and what can actually be published is still a big gap that needs to be addressed.

And aside from the editing work, faculty described the administrative burden of being the connective tissue joining two distinct worlds. Negotiating pitches, coordinating deadlines, dealing with revisions, shepherding copy flows — all of it with students who are juggling other courses, work-study jobs, and the life of college student — can be “difficult to sustain without administrative support, dedicated staff, or funding for editors,” they write.

Just to save a few dozen proud Mizzou alums from emailing me: Yes, the “teaching hospital” model is not a new idea. The idea of giving journalism students real-world experience in public-facing outlets has been central to the Missouri Method for more than a century, and other major journalism schools have long done versions of this work. But Bhowmik notes that many of these new efforts are in smaller colleges with smaller journalism programs — places without the in-house infrastructure of a Columbia Missourian or KOMU, where media partnerships involve more ongoing negotiation. That can leave more of the pressure of sustainability on one or two overworked faculty members. As Bhowmik and Lorenz put it:

…faculty labor is not incidental to the model; it is the hidden infrastructure that allows student work to move from classroom assignment to public-facing journalism. We argue that passion may help launch these programs, but passion alone is not a sustainable staffing model. If universities treat these initiatives as ordinary courses while expecting faculty to function simultaneously as instructors, editors, partnership managers, and newsroom supervisors, the model remains vulnerable to burnout and institutional instability.

None of this, of course, is to say that these academic-publisher partnerships aren’t performing valuable roles in hundreds of communities. These programs have generated thousands of stories that otherwise might never have reached the public. But the sort of exhaustion Bhowmik and Lorenz describe reminds me a lot of what we saw in the first wave of local nonprofit news outlets in the late 2000s and early 2010s. Many of those were founded by idealistic journalists — often refugees from the local daily — who saw the opportunity to do something new and valuable for their communities. They put in long hours editing stories, selling ads, pitching foundations, and building audiences. And within a few years, a lot of them were burnt out, and their outlets suffered for it.

In the decade-plus since, funders have gotten smarter about building institutional capacity — knowing that passion can only fuel so much. The world Bhowmik and Lorenz describe inside these journalism programs makes me think that department chairs and deans would be wise to consider a similar pivot to make these academic-publisher partnerships sustainable for the long term.

What a week! Recap it with the second edition of the Nieman Lab News-About-News Quiz, your weekly incentive to keep up with the latest happenings in the world of digital journalism. All questions are based on the week’s Nieman Lab stories or articles elsewhere that we’ve linked to in What We’re Reading. The quiz will appear here through November as a trial run; if people seem to like it, we’ll keep it going in 2027. Good luck!

Meta has indefinitely delayed its proposed commercial terms of service, which would have permitted the company to scrape the websites of Meta Business account users.

On Thursday, the company took down the preview link to the proposed terms and published an update to its Business Help Center that reads: “We recently shared that we were updating the Meta Commercial Terms, Product Catalog Terms, Self-Serve Ad Terms, and Ad Creative Generative AI Terms. These updates are now paused and will not take effect on November 20, 2026. We are continuing to consult with stakeholders and will provide a further update when we have more to share. In the meantime, our existing terms remain in effect.”

Meta — which owns Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Threads — has repeatedly pushed back the terms’ effective date since Nieman Lab first reported on them on October 15. The terms were first set to take effect on October 30, sparking global outcry among news publishers, politicians, and trade organizations. On October 16, Meta removed the word “train” from its terms and limited the use of future scraped content to “advertising and business products.” On October 23, Meta moved the effective date back by three weeks to November 20.

Last week, Meta pledged to consult news publishers and industry leaders ahead of putting new commercial terms into effect.

“We’ve heard publishers’ feedback on our proposed ads and business terms update. We care deeply about our partners and do not plan to make policy changes without a full consultation with industry groups and leaders,” vice president of communications Andy Stone tweeted on October 28. “We’re committed to getting this right, and as we expect this consultation could extend beyond November 20, in which case we’d delay implementation of the updated terms.”

Since then, courts in Norway and Brazil have issued preliminary injunctions to block the terms from taking effect as a result of lawsuits filed by media organizations in both countries. The United Kingdom’s Competition and Markets Authority has opened a formal investigation into Meta, examining whether the company was “abusing a dominant position by imposing exploitative terms on publishers and advertisers.”

In the United States, the proposed terms stoked bipartisan concern. At the end of October, Sens. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) and Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) sent letters to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg asking him to withdraw the terms.

For Nikita Redkar, a big part of filming a video is putting together an outfit.

In a July video about youth-led protests in India, the 33-year-old is walking around New York City explaining how movements grow when people with opposing views come together on the things they do agree on. She’s wearing a white tube top and black jeans with sunglasses holding her hair back, along with a matching gold necklace and earrings that look like soda can tabs. You can’t see her shoes, but they clack enough for you to know she’s wearing a heel.

In another about comedian Shane Gillis’s Saturday Night Live monologue in which he called women “whores” for wearing shorts to the gym, she’s seated on the floor of her living room wearing a black silk velvet top with a pink faux-fur collar and sleeve cuffs. In the style of a Get Ready With Me video, she explains how 2000s comedy and pop culture entrenched misogynistic ideas of gender roles while applying her makeup.

A full-time news creator who mostly focuses on American politics and culture through a leftist and feminist lens, Redkar calls herself a “professor at Bimbo University.” The girliness is the point, she told me.

“I want to show that you don’t have to sacrifice these parts of yourself to be taken seriously,” Redkar said. “You should be taken seriously no matter what.”

Four years into news content creation, Redkar has more than 943,000 TikTok followers, 674,000 Instagram followers, 33,000 YouTube subscribers, and 16,000 Substack subscribers. (Her handle on all of them is @nikitadumptruck.) She aims to explain issues in a way that’s funny and accessible — whether she’s attending protests outside the United Nations (“Get ready with me to bully Netanyahu”), traveling through Europe (“Spend the day in socialist hellhole Denmark with me”), or explaining the negative impacts of private equity companies (“A private equity boyfriend is this summer’s hottest accessory”).

Redkar and I chatted in October about how she does her job, leaning into her femininity to explain the news, and what her relationship with social media is like. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

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A post shared by Nikita Redkar (@nikitadumptruck)

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A post shared by Nikita Redkar (@nikitadumptruck)

College football already has an Orange Bowl, a Peach Bowl, and a Citrus Bowl, so on its face, there’s nothing outlandish about the concept of an Onion Bowl.

But this matchup wouldn’t be titled to evoke some locale’s bumper crop, à la the Famous Idaho Potato Bowl. Instead it would market “America’s Finest News Source,” The Onion. (Today’s top headlines: Bain Capital Acquires Tibetan Buddhism For $35 Million; Abdul El-Sayed Makes History As First Physically Healthy Senator; Chuck Schumer Delivers Victory Speech To Previously Enthusiastic Crowd.)

On Thursday morning, Onion CEO (and past Nieman Lab contributor) Ben Collins announced the publication’s quest to buy naming rights for a bowl game, both on Bluesky and on the podcast Pablo Torre Finds Out:

Some VERY big, fun news:

The Onion is extremely close to buying an honest-to-goodness, Division 1 college football bowl series bowl game.

Yes, we're trying to pull off The Onion Bowl.

A few days before Christmas, potentially in Texas.

But we've already been banned once. And we need your help.

[image or embed]

— Ben Collins (@bencollins.bsky.social) November 5, 2026 at 8:32 AM

For those unfamiliar, American college football seasons traditionally end with a few dozen bowl games, scattered around the country (and occasionally outside it). Nearly all of these games sell naming rights to one company or another, leading to fun combinations like the Poulan Weed Eater Independence Bowl, the TaxSlayer.com Gator Bowl, and the Union Home Mortgage Gasparilla Bowl. Collins wants to buy the rights to one of the several bowl games that are still without a sponsor for their games next month.

This absurdity — though no more absurd, I suppose, than the Snoop Dogg Arizona Bowl presented by Gin & Juice by Dre and Snoop — serves as the excellent marketing hook to get people to buy a $75/year print subscription, a major driver of The Onion’s revenue.

“We are a just a few thousand subscribers away from hitting 100,000 subscribers, which would catapult us above Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post in print circulation,” Collins wrote. “This would make us the 4th biggest newspaper in the United States. So we need more people to sign up before Christmas.”

Indeed, only three U.S. newspapers have a daily print circulation over 100,000 — The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and the New York Post; The Washington Post and USA Today have already fallen below that line. (At the risk of being pedantic, though, The Onion appears in print monthly, not daily, making it a bit of an apples-to-oranges comparison. Also, The Onion gets to make up its stories.)

Collins says The Onion actually got quite close to buying the naming rights to the New Orleans Bowl, which last year lost its longtime naming sponsor, the…Ohio-based freight-shipping concern R+L Carriers? The Onion was prepared to pay “mid six figures.” But the organization that runs the bowl, the Greater New Orleans Sports Foundation, apparently said no deep into the process, a move Collins attributed to “politics.” (I reached out to the Greater New Orleans Sports Foundation for comment — a sentence I did not expect to type today — but did not hear back.)

So the guys who sell bowl games ushered us to what we thought was a pretty good fit: The New Orleans Bowl.

I love New Orleans. I love having crawfish out of the back of a pickup truck at 3 a.m. The game would've been in the Superdome two days before Christmas. Good fit! Right? Right???

— Ben Collins (@bencollins.bsky.social) November 5, 2026 at 8:38 AM

Then the folks who run the New Orleans Bowl, a commission that includes representatives of the city and state of Louisiana, found out our plans to highlight our mascot:

The Sickos Guy.

[image or embed]

— Ben Collins (@bencollins.bsky.social) November 5, 2026 at 8:39 AM

Despite getting all approvals from ESPN and scraping together the cash, right as we were about to sign the paper work to put The Onion Sports Bowl in New Orleans, their state-funded commission called us and said it straight up: "No."

We asked why. They said politics. And the Sickos Guy.

— Ben Collins (@bencollins.bsky.social) November 5, 2026 at 8:40 AM

While the New Orleans Bowl might be out, several currently-brand-free possibilities remain, including the Frisco Bowl in newly blue Texas — the state also home to The Onion’s rival to the death, Alex Jones.

Mongabay’s most successful videos are about weird animals.

But not every video from the environmental newsroom can be about strange — or strangely cute — animals. Some have to be about shrimp farm pollution. Or a deforestation crisis brought on by cacao farming in Liberia. That’s where the challenge comes in, Mongabay video managing editor Lucia Torres has found. Turning that kind of journalism into something people stop scrolling for isn’t easy.

“Generally mass audiences are less interested in environmental content on YouTube [and] Instagram,” Torres said. “We have to compete with recipes, music videos, etc.”

Mongabay, founded in 1999 by Rhett Butler as a one-person news operation covering rainforests, now has 150 people on staff. It produces original content in English, Indonesian, Spanish, French, Hindi, Portuguese, Bengali, and Swahili. Mongabay’s largest bureaus — after the catch-all “global” newsroom — cover Africa (20 people) and Latin America (19 people). Mongabay has about 83,000 followers on Instagram and its English-language YouTube channel has 60,000 subscribers. It also has country-specific channels; Mongabay Indonesia has 109,000 followers.

Mongabay publishes around 150 to 200 videos a year with a team of four full-time and one half-time producers. These include short vertical videos on YouTube Shorts and Instagram; evergreen explainers around “complex enviro-problems”; twice-monthly features; and lengthy investigations or short documentaries.

To reach new audiences with its environmental journalism, Mongabay started experimenting with behind-the-scenes reels in late 2024. At the time, Mongabay’s Instagram reels averaged 2,000 to 3,000 views. Torres said she was inspired by behind-the-scenes videos from National Geographic, The New York Times, ProPublica, and contributing creator Izzy Sasada. An early behind-the-scenes video — on pollution from those shrimp farms — drew about 14,000 views. Additional videos from California and Indonesia each got about 6,000 views. Mongabay started to dive deeper with videos that featured sources and reporters filming from the field.

“We’ve also been sharing data with the newsroom about which kinds of framing are reaching more people right now, so writers and editors can consider whether they might want to incorporate how people are responding to problems into their stories,” Butler said. “But we aren’t overly prescriptive, so ultimately it’s up to editors and writers how they use this information.”

Looking at the 3,422 articles published between June 1, 2025 and August 31, 2026, Butler found that the median story featuring hope or a solution got 41% more traffic than articles that only described the crisis or threat. (Articles classified as being about an “action confronting a threat” got 43% more.)

Today, 71% of the 100 most-read stories on Mongabay’s English-language site can be classified as “hope / solution / agency” or “action confronting a threat,” Butler said. Only 21% were “doom only.”

The video team has done something similar. The environmental newsroom’s short series Stranger Creatures leads with “the wonder of wild creatures first,” Torres noted. The conservation or endangered species angle follows.

“We’ve stopped framing stories as a climate problem, and started framing stories from a solutions-oriented, action-driven perspective, community-first, or fun-stuff first,” Torres said. “Climate is implicit now in the stories.”

What video won’t be, at least for now, is a revenue generator. Almost all of Mongabay’s revenue comes from contributions and grants, according to its annual report. (Events, licensing, and advertising “are insignificant at this point,” Butler said.)

“I’m not bullish on video becoming a material source of revenue for Mongabay, given how the space has evolved and our position in it,” Butler said. “Ten years ago I was a lot more optimistic on that front.”

Part of the problem, he said, is incentives. “Building a video strategy around advertising creates an incentive to prioritize views, which may not align with our broader organizational emphasis on impact,” Butler said. “The stories that attract the largest audiences aren’t necessarily those most likely to inform decisions or prompt action.”

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2026/11/the-new-york-times-stays-on-track-to-reach-15-million-subscribers-by-the-end-of-2027/ Wed, 04 Nov 2026 14:30:47 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=254872

The New York Times added 420,000 new digital subscribers in the third quarter of 2026, keeping it on track to achieve its goal of hitting 15 million subscriptions by the end of 2027. The Times now has 13.76 million total subscribers, the company said in its earnings report released Wednesday.

Almost all of those subscribers — 13.22 million of them — are digital-only. The Times counted 540,000 total print subscribers in the quarter. This time last year, it had 570,000 print subscribers.

A few other highlights from the earnings:

• The Times spent $3.8 million on its ongoing lawsuit against OpenAI during the quarter. In total, it’s spent $36.7 million on generative AI–related lawsuits since it began breaking out those costs separately in earning reports in 2024. In a statement, New York Times Company president and CEO Meredith Kopit Levien referred to “human-made journalism” as one of the Times’ advantages.
• Affiliate and licensing revenue was up, “primarily as a result of higher licensing and higher Wirecutter affiliate referral revenues.” (Wirecutter is trying to diversify its business model beyond affiliate revenue as AI drives down its organic search traffic.)
• In the investor call following the earnings report, one investor asked whether the Times expects subscribers to use AI agents to haggle over subscription prices. So far, Kopit Levien said, “we’re not seeing an impact…[but] we’re continually evaluating how third-party automated tools interact with all of our platforms. It’s just worth saying, we have the ability to permit, to restrict, or to block specific tools.”
• An investor asked about the Times’ video strategy. Kopit Levien’s response in full:
  

  Let me just start by saying, we’ve got really big ambitions in video for The Times to be as preferred a brand to watch as it is to read and listen. This is a kind of long bet that we can grow engagement from the audience we have, and also grow audience, because we’re going to engage new people in different ways. I’m not sure what you’re referring to operationally. We’ve been in a sort of steady state of scaling production in the newsroom of video, and that’s happening in myriad ways. We’ve got a big and expansive shows group, and I referred to that in my prepared remarks, where we’re putting a lot of resource and energy into a growing stable of shows that are getting more and more cultural resonance.

  We also continue to have a big effort on visual investigations, which we’ve referred to in prior quarters and in prepared remarks. I referred today in my prepared remarks to a very big effort in the development of short-form video. We’ve talked about that pretty extensively, so a lot of reporter video. Then also now, we’re rolling out more assertively some short-form video franchises, like the one I mentioned from our fashion critic, Vanessa Friedman. We’ve got another one coming from one of the hosts of The Daily. All that, I would just say, reflects a sort of big effort to sort of harness the investment we’ve already made in extraordinary journalists and journalism and put it into new forms.

  I think you’ve heard both [EVP and CFO Will Bardeen] and I talk about this is a key area of investment, and we expect it to drive more engagement, and ultimately, over time, we expect that to enhance our monetization.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2026/11/anthropic-openai-google-and-microsoft-will-make-it-easier-for-publishers-to-opt-out-of-being-scraped/ Mon, 02 Nov 2026 17:15:45 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=254860 Right now, if you don’t want your site to be scraped by AI companies, you have to block each company’s crawlers individually. On Friday, Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft said they would support a common robots.txt signal that, per OpenAI, “makes it easier for publishers and website operators to communicate the same preference to multiple participating providers at once.”

Anthropic engineer Kevin Kelley proposed the common signal as part of work for the Internet Engineering Task Force, and Anthropic is already supporting it. OpenAI says it will do so “in the coming months,” and Google and Microsoft say they’ll do so next year.

Meta VP of communications Andy Stone called the common signal “an important step,” writing in a tweet that the company supports “publishers’ ability to express preferences about how their content is used for foundational generative AI training.” Meta is under scrutiny for proposed commercial terms that would allow broad scraping; last week, it agreed to delay implementation of those terms.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2026/11/elon-musks-grokipedia-is-littered-with-mistakes-but-wikipedia-could-still-learn-some-things-from-it/ Mon, 02 Nov 2026 15:59:14 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=254843

When I saw Grokipedia’s articles about me, the memories came rushing back: my 19 years in minor league baseball, including that impressive season with the Montgomery Rebels when I hit 20 home runs. I was lean back then — 6 feet tall and 168 pounds — and earned a career batting average just under .300. I became a minor league coach and managed the Chicago White Sox for a short stint in 1970, which Grokipedia said “highlighted [my] readiness for higher-level responsibilities.”

I then attended Arizona State University, switched to a career in journalism, created the fact-checking site PolitiFact, won a Pulitzer Prize, and now teach journalism at Duke University.

Ah, the memories!…except that I never played minor league baseball, never managed the White Sox, and can only dream about being 6 feet tall. (I’m 5’8″.) Grokipedia, the AI-written encyclopedia of Elon Musk, has confused me with Marion Danne “Bill” Adair, who died in 2002.

That article and another one about “Bill Adair (journalist)” — which really is me — illustrate the many flaws of Grokipedia, which launched a year ago. The articles are littered with mistakes and superfluous details. They are terribly written and ridiculously long. If Grok, the AI engine that wrote this turgid prose, were a student in one of my writing courses, I would give it a D.

Still, the articles provide valuable lessons for Wikipedia editors who are debating how and when to use AI. Grokipedia adds new content and context that Wikipedia often lacks. It shows that AI is actually pretty good at finding tidbits in the far corners of the internet and summarizing them in sweeping prose. It can also provide balance to articles that need it.

Grok can’t write worth a lick, but it shows how Wikipedia can take advantage of AI at a time when overworked editors are trying to keep the encyclopedia alive.

Musk launched Grokipedia as an alternative to Wikipedia, which he said was too liberal. (He called it “Wokepedia.”) Still, he trusted it enough to have Grok copy hundreds of thousands of its articles, which is permitted under Wikipedia’s Creative Commons license, and then add content from elsewhere on the internet.

With his usual bluster, Musk said his encyclopedia used a new version of his large language model that was good at “cogent analysis.” He said programmers told it to “cycle through the million most popular articles in Wikipedia and add, modify, and delete.”

When Grokipedia launched, Musk said he had big aspirations to overtake Wikipedia, which has 68 million articles in more than 300 languages. He said his encyclopedia would be more complete and more balanced and would make smarter use of images and video.

Maybe someday.

For now, Grokipedia is a massive collection of overly long articles that are often out of date. Its flaws have been well-documented: Articles are littered with mistakes, peddle conspiracy theories, rely on low-credibility sources, and sometimes skew to the right. And although Grokipedia shows edit requests from readers and whether they are approved, the site is not as transparent as Wikipedia, which reveals details about its editors and every change they make.

Last spring, Grokipedia mysteriously stopped updating, according to a report by researchers Renée DiResta and Ronald Robertson. It resumed in late September, still a hot mess, but with a more colorful homepage that always seems to feature its article about Musk.

Grokipedia has two articles about me: the conflated baseball player one and “Bill Adair (journalist),” the real one, which is incredibly boring, even to me. Both borrow heavily from Wikipedia’s articles about us and enrich them with details found on assorted websites.

Wikipedia’s article about me is nicely concise — just 700 words. It is written in the encyclopedia’s signature dry style and doesn’t contain any errors. The article recounts my career, some of the major news events I’ve covered, the two books I’ve written, and the awards I’ve won. But it highlights trivial events from my career, fails to emphasize larger ones, and lacks any criticism of my work. (I have not tried to improve the article because Wikipedia’s conflict of interest policy prohibits people from editing their own bios.)

By contrast, Grokipedia’s “Bill Adair (journalist)” is painfully long — 5,600 words. Its greatest value would be to help someone suffering from a sleep disorder.

Like a college student trying to meet a word count, Grok stuffed the article with needless details and redundant descriptions. The article tells you about my work with PolitiFact and then tells you again and again. It explains the site’s rating scale eight times and mentions my academic title four times.

Despite labels that say “fact-checked by Grok,” both articles had lots of errors. I spotted 32 in the journalist one and so many in the baseball mashup that I couldn’t count them all. Mistakes are not surprising in AI writing, but I discovered interesting patterns that reveal the weaknesses of large language models.

In the article about the real me, only seven of the errors were hallucinations in which Grok seemed to create a detail out of thin air. No, I did not win an award from Manhattan College, and no, PolitiFact did not begin by fact-checking the Tampa mayor’s race.

Five other errors showed Grok was a lazy researcher that did not look broadly enough to check a claim. Grok said I am the director of Duke’s journalism program, but I left that job five years ago. The sources cited in the article don’t explain Grok’s mistake, so it seems likely it remembered an old announcement and failed to see a newer one that named my successor.

The most prevalent errors were in a broad category I’d all cluelessness. These mistakes showed Grok didn’t fully understand what it read, like someone who skimmed an article too quickly. My favorite in this category was when I got credit for a big scoop in 2000 that George W. Bush had a DUI conviction, which the Grokipedia article said had an impact on “late-election discourse.”

I wish! Yes, I was among the many journalists who covered that story, but I had no scoop.

Together, the errors reveal that Grok is a knucklehead. It doesn’t know what’s important and what’s not. It is simply mashing together details from many web articles about me. Grok only knows what it found on the internet and it lacks experience and perspective to sort out what’s important.

The writing is dreadful. The articles read as if Grok was trained on too many online resumes and corporate memos. Grok uses words and phrases like “commenced” and “transitioned” and “multidisciplinary practicum” and “hypotheses on fact-check efficacy.” A typical sentence: “Adair’s approach in this position reflected a commitment to undiluted sourcing and causal analysis of policy impacts, influencing subsequent innovations in political journalism.”

Take a close look at that sentence and you’ll see it’s just a mush of buzzwords. I don’t know what “undiluted sourcing” is and have never used the phrase, nor would I refer to “causal analysis”…of anything. Grok is trying to impress us with an MBA vocabulary but is really just an epic bullshitter.

Bernadette Meehan, CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation, which provides money and technical infrastructure for the encyclopedia, has called AI “an existential threat” to Wikipedia.

The 25-year-old encyclopedia has long been a source and beneficiary of Google searches. Wikipedia provides the answers and in turn benefits from readers clicking through to read articles. But when people make a query to a chatbot, they often get the answer they need in an AI summary and don’t click through to read the encyclopedia article. That threatens donations because fewer readers see Wikipedia’s fundraising pitches.

Wikipedia has banned content generated by LLMs, but that hasn’t stopped many contributors — some well-intentioned, some not — from dumping an avalanche of AI-written content on the site. That has put a huge burden on the site’s “New pages patrol,” the editors who approve articles, because they must weed out the lousy content. (Wikipedia has a helpful guide of LLMs’ favorite words and phrases, such as “tapestry” and “meticulously” and sentences that start with “additionally.”)

Still, terrible as it is, Grokipedia offers lessons in how AI can help Wikipedia.

Grok’s voracious internet searches sometimes find things that human editors don’t. The long article about me includes a substantive discussion of my research about lying in politics and my work with fact-checkers around the world, neither of which are in the Wikipedia version.

Grokipedia also provides some welcome balance. When it offers context, Grokipedia can be a little heavy with hype (“His work has been lauded for innovating transparency in media…”) But it also included a “Criticisms and Controversies” section that details complaints that PolitiFact is biased against Republicans. That section has a healthy back and forth about the critiques and my response. That kind of balance could be helpful for Wikipedia, which has taken heat from Musk and others for being too lefty.

Musk’s encyclopedia also has a playful spirit that Wikipedia could learn from. Grokipedia’s homepage features random samples of recent edits that provide a glimpse at how the site is being improved. Another Grokipedia feature reads articles aloud in an AI voice you select: Eve, who sounds like a BBC anchor; Ara, a serious woman with crisp diction; Leo, who might have been a professor at Oxford; and Sal, whose name suggests a sports bar but whose voice is NPR.

My big takeaway from Grok is the importance of human judgment in curating knowledge. Grok is a bot trying to behave like a human editor. Its many mistakes and lousy writing show that AI is not ready to replace Wikipedia’s talented volunteers. Still, Grok shows that AI can be a tool that helps them research and write better articles.

After seeing an AI encyclopedia up close through my experiences with Grok, I come away with hope. Yes, AI can be a sloppy researcher and an awful writer. But Grok’s performance, shaky as it was, highlighted AI’s readiness for higher-level responsibilities.

Bill Adair, the Knight Professor of the Practice of Journalism and Public Policy at Duke University, is writing a book about how Wikipedia editors are adapting to the age of AI.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2026/10/the-nieman-lab-news-about-news-quiz-october-30-2026/ Fri, 30 Oct 2026 13:00:16 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=254724

For decades now, news publishers have been yammering on about “gamifying” the news. But what about gamifying the news about the news?

Welcome to the Nieman Lab News-About-News Quiz, a weekly incentive to keep up with the latest happenings in the world of digital journalism. All questions will be based on the week’s Nieman Lab stories or articles elsewhere that we’ve linked to in What We’re Reading. (And unlike other ways of gamifying news events, we promise not to bankrupt anybody.)

The quiz will appear here for the next four Fridays as a trial run; if people seem to like it, we’ll keep it going in 2027. Good luck!

0 of 10 answered

1. 1 of 10

   

   Among journalists, what has been controversial about Secrets, Bob Woodward’s upcoming memoir?

   • The introduction includes his personal mobile phone number
   • It reveals he nearly left The Washington Post for The New York Times in 1986
   • He reveals the names of multiple previously anonymous sources
   • He describes legendary editor Ben Bradlee as “the worst speller I’ve met”
   • He writes that he always liked “Bernward” more than “Woodstein”

2. 2 of 10

   Which U.S. senator described Meta’s new proposed terms of service as “a gross abuse of its power”?

   • Bernie Sanders
   • Adam Schiff
   • Amy Klobuchar
   • Tammy Baldwin
   • John Fetterman

3. 3 of 10

   Which Italian news outlet is launching a U.S. operation aimed at covering Italian-American communities?

   • Corriere della Sera
   • La Stampa
   • Agenzia Giornalistica Italia
   • Sky TG24
   • La Gazzetta dello Sport

4. 4 of 10

   

   Instagram is considering allowing users extra-long videos on its platform. How long, exactly?

   • 15 minutes
   • 30 minutes
   • 60 minutes
   • 90 minutes
   • 120 minutes

5. 5 of 10

   “PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE DO NOT DO THIS. Oh, wait, you already did. Ok, I’m out.” What is this New York Times commenter opposed to?

   • Wirecutter’s addition of a specific bath towel to its Hall of Fame
   • The newspaper’s coverage of the New Haven restaurant scene
   • A Bret Stephens column on the Iowa Senate race
   • Increased monthly subscription rates for The Athletic
   • An AI feature to help users make recipes fit their dietary restrictions

6. 6 of 10

   A study found that adding information about sources to news videos increased what?

   • Intent to share
   • Annoyance
   • Trust
   • Desire to view again
   • Thumbnail appreciation

7. 7 of 10

   Former 60 Minutes boss Bill Owens just joined an online startup. Which one?

   • Semafor
   • Newpress
   • Puck
   • Vice
   • 404 Media

8. 8 of 10

   A new study aims to reframe a term popularized by Penny Abernathy to describe a place with few or no local news outlets. What is that term?

   • news void
   • news hole
   • news vacuum
   • news desert
   • news abyss

9. 9 of 10

   An Egyptian court has ordered what prominent independent news outlet shut down?

   • Zawia3
   • Mada Masr
   • Al-Manassa
   • Saheeh Masr
   • Raseef22

10. 10 of 10

    Zack Addy is upset at his lack of success as a freelance journalist: “Over three months I sent roughly nineteen cold emails to editors, publications, and possible clients. One human reply. Zero paid work came from any of them.” What’s one reason Addy may have struggled to sell stories?

    • He is habitually unable to conjugate certain verbs
    • He insists on being paid in an obscure cryptocurrency
    • He ends all emails with “Smell ya later, chief”
    • He only does Zoom calls wearing a balaclava
    • He is a bot

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2026/10/press-forward-gave-20-million-to-205-local-newsrooms-over-two-years-heres-how-some-of-them-spent-it/ Thu, 29 Oct 2026 20:52:01 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=254661

Most local newsrooms in the U.S. have one thing in common: They need more money, and many dream of dollars they can use however they want.

In 2024, Press Forward, the nonprofit trying to mobilize a philanthropic army for local news, announced it would give at least 100 small local newsrooms — those with annual budgets under $1 million — just that type of unrestricted funding. Almost 1,000 newsrooms applied. Ultimately, Press Forward distributed $20 million to 205 outlets. Most of them received $100,000 each, split over two years.

I wondered what the recipients had done with the money, and which problems it had (or hadn’t) solved. Between May and October, I spoke or emailed with more than 30 grantees.

The grantees represented every U.S. state, came from cities, suburbs, and rural areas, and published in multiple languages. They included for-profits and nonprofits, print and digital-only publications, college newsrooms, and public radio stations. Statewide newsrooms with fully staffed teams like The Maine Monitor, scrappy news startups like 285 South, and community newspapers powered by freelancers and part-time staff like the Copper River Record in Alaska all received funding.

For many newsrooms, Press Forward was the first grant they’d ever applied for. “Many of the country’s newsrooms are small, and few get foundation grants,” said Press Forward executive director Dale Anglin. The open call was designed to change that and to distribute the money quickly. Grantees were required to complete two LION sustainability audits a year apart; Press Forward is analyzing that data now and will release its findings next month.¹

“People tell me that what Press Forward did was unusual and rare within philanthropy,” said María José Ramírez Braiz, founder and CEO of Midwest-based grantee Te Lo Cuento News.

“They said to us at the beginning of the grant period, before the shit hit the fan with the federal government, ‘If you need this money to keep the lights on, keep the lights on,'” said Copper River Record editor Allison Sayer, one of the paper’s two part-time staffers. “I feel that this was really a gift.”

First-time grant applicants and recipients, in particular, said Press Forward’s recognition gave them credibility and visibility with other funders. And publishers described the funding as a morale boost that validated low-paid work.

“It has been a life-changer, a lifesaver for us,” said Gretchen Sporleder Orr, who publishes the World Journal in southern Colorado with her husband. Her voice broke when she talked to me about the funding. “I don’t know if we would be in business right now if it wasn’t for the Press Forward money.”

The Real WV “would not still exist without Press Forward,” said Stephen Baldwin, the site’s volunteer publisher. (He’s also the former minority leader for the West Virginia Senate and a pastor of two churches.) The outlet was one of eight grantees that received just two $25,000 grants over two years. “There’s not exactly a lot of capital floating around West Virginia for nonprofit news,” Baldwin said, “and without this outside impact, we wouldn’t be able to do this work.” But he hopes that the site can be less reliant on grants in the future.

The funding did not save every recipient. One grantee, Atlanta Civic Circle, shut down earlier this year. Atlanta Civic Circle did not receive its second $50,000 grant because it didn’t complete the first LION audit, Anglin said. (Atlanta Civic Circle did not respond to my request for an interview, but executive director Saba Long wrote on LinkedIn in June that “the funding environment for local nonprofit journalism is extraordinarily difficult right now.”) Other recipients have merged or transformed since applying for the grant.²

Medill’s annual State of Local News report, released this month, describes a local news ecosystem in a “state of precarity.” That state of precariousness helps explain how $100,000 over two years can be a “godsend,” a “miracle,” and not enough. As one grantee put it, “Right now, these are shanties built on a beach, waiting for a hurricane to come through.”

“Press Forward reached newsrooms that don’t have existing relationships with major national funders,” said Nina Ignaczak, the founder, publisher, and editor of Planet Detroit. “The challenge now is whether the commitment holds.”

“A stabilizing force”

The funding helped newsrooms keep the lights on, whether they used it to pay bills, pay down debt, make payroll, or as a buffer when something went wrong.

“The flexibility that Press Forward has given us has allowed us to fill — I wouldn’t say emergencies, but unexpected gaps,” said Richard Young, founder and executive director of CivicLex in Kentucky. It brought on a consulting editor to keep city hall coverage going after losing a reporter, and purchased new software. Without the funding, CivicLex likely would have had to dip into its reserves, he said.

Bob Bonnar, publisher of the News Letter Journal in Wyoming, used the first payment from Press Forward to upgrade computers and cameras and give some staffers raises. “That chewed up the money very quickly,” he said, “and I probably should have held some of it back because the News Letter Journal ended up having a pretty rough year in 2025.” He had to use about half of the second $50,000 payment to repay an operating loan. The rest covered the remaining revenue shortfall and kept the organization in the black through the winter.

Vandana Kumar, publisher of the California-based ethnic media outlet India Currents, described the funding as a “stabilizing force” that allowed the newsroom to keep operating despite a contraction in philanthropic giving and cuts to local government advertising.

The Copper River Record built infrastructure to host digital ads and created a new website. It held listening sessions with Native villages in its coverage area and donated subscriptions to local Tribal offices. It improved the design of its print newspaper. Sayer paid freelancers to complete Press Pass training and pursued other professional development. And she was able to take on more ambitious stories about PFAS and “forever chemicals.”

The Press Forward funding was “the biggest single windfall in nearly 20 years for our small community newspaper,” Sandpoint Reader publisher Ben Olson told me. The Idaho-based paper used the money to travel to the state capital for Press Club awards and design a new media kit, which Olson said has improved ad sales. The Reader also paid a large chunk of its printing bill, paid its rent a year in advance, and gave staffers bonuses. (The bonuses helped the paper become 100% employee-owned; Olson’s two employees bought in when Olson’s business partner and co-owner retired.)

The open-ended nature of the grants gave Colorado’s World Journal “the flexibility to be able to make a change, do a thing, and then pivot as needed,” Sporleder Orr said. “When we were in the toilet, all I could think about was, like, ‘Is there going to be anything in the post office today so that I can make payroll?’ ‘Oh, my God, we’ve got to pay rent.’” Sometimes she and her husband skipped their own paychecks to pay staff. The grant gave them “emotional bandwidth” to plan ahead.

“Sustainability isn’t just about having the funding”

Many grantees used the funding to hire full- or part-time staffers. Sometimes, that worked out well.

The Mānoa Mirror, an online newsroom based at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa, received two $25,000 grants, which it used to hire a managing editor, a student editorial coordinator, three student reporters, and a social media producer. (The managing editor was paid a stipend, and the other positions were part-time.) The work had previously depended on “faculty goodwill and volunteerism, which was not sustainable for long,” said Hye-ryeon Lee, who was professor and chair of the school of communication and information until retiring this summer. With the new hires, the site went from publishing a few stories a month to publishing daily.

The Real WV’s first LION audit pointed to a need its small team had already recognized: hiring someone to sell ads. It hired a public school teacher with sales experience (including selling ads for the yearbook) part-time.

The funding allowed Te Lo Cuento News to pay contributors consistently and to add contract, part-time positions including a sales manager, an office administrator, and a couple of reporters. The only position it could sustain beyond the grant period is the part-time sales manager, Ramírez Braiz said.

The Texas Spur is one of five weekly newspapers owned by Paragraph Ranch Media. Originally, the team planned to use the Press Forward grant to secure a loan to improve company housing and hire a journalist based in Spur (population 863 as of 2020). But nobody took the newspaper up on the free housing offer, said editor and general manager Barbara Brannon. So the company hired four early-career journalists (two full-time, two part-time) living in its 10-county coverage area. Three of the four left for jobs in other industries halfway through their second year. The one who stayed is doing well as a regional sports reporter, Brannon said, and a hire who replaced a person who left is now managing editor for The Post Dispatch.³

The turnover Brannon experienced isn’t unique to Spur. Other newsrooms also found hiring with grant money challenging.

Sometimes, that was because of location. “Had we been able to find the right people from the outset, I believe the grant would have had a greater impact on the business,” said Anton Kaufer, regional publisher for Hagadone Media Montana. In rural Northwest Montana, though, recruiting and retaining staff is a challenge, and Hagadone’s Mineral Independent struggled to replace its salesperson and office manager after they retired. The experience “reinforced for us that sustainability isn’t just about having the funding,” Kaufer said. “It’s also about having the people in place to make the most of it.”

The World Journal tried placing an ad for a salesperson with the Colorado Press Association and got “absolutely no interest,” Sporleder Orr said. “People living in northern Colorado don’t particularly want to come live in a teeny-tiny town in a rural, broke part of the state.” (She credited the grant with giving her the mental space to fire a salesperson who wasn’t working out, then regroup.)

Other times, the money just wasn’t enough. “The reality is that $100,000 over two years isn’t a lot,” one grantee who asked to stay anonymous told me. “You can’t hire somebody with that.”

EcoRI’s experience illustrates those limitations. Before receiving the Press Forward grant, EcoRI had used other grant funding and reserves to hire a director of development in a one-year contract position. In its grant application to Press Forward, the team proposed converting that role into a full-time staff position with benefits.

The salary limited the hiring pool, though. The development director position paid $65,000 a year, which “is really not the market rate for a director of development” in the area, publisher and cofounder Jo Detz said. (She said it should be more like $90,000.) The staffer they ended up hiring came from another state and hadn’t worked in news before. In a staff position, he cost more than he was bringing in. Detz laid him off and eliminated the position last December. She called the experience “heartbreaking.”

“At the point where I knew this wasn’t working,” she said, “there wasn’t enough runway to pivot, rethink, rehire.”

Beyond the salary limitations, Detz thinks the development director didn’t have enough runway to succeed. The kind of development the staffer was hired to oversee — major gifts and individual giving — is a long game; “that position would need at least two or three years to begin to see some benefits,” she said. Now, she’s back where she started, juggling fundraising with her other work.

“I know it’s crazy to say that $100,000 over two years wasn’t enough,” she said, “but it was not enough to make a meaningful difference to our revenue strategy.”

Planet Detroit’s Ignaczak was in a unique position: Around the same time the newsroom received the Press Forward grant, Planet Detroit also received a $500,000 three-year grant from the MacArthur Foundation. That grant allowed her to hire a managing editor, she said.

Ignaczak believes general operating support is what small nonprofit newsrooms need. But to be effective, “I really think fully funding a revenue role for a minimum of three years is what needs to happen to build sustainability, if that is the goal,” she said. “And $100,000 over two years is not enough to achieve that.”

Print and operating in the physical world

NotiVisión Georgia, a Spanish-language local news outlet with one full-time staffer, is committed to print in a world moving away from it. The print newspaper is the only way the outlet has been able to use to “generate real economic value,” said CEO Mónica Pirela, because it’s where local companies want to place ads. The organization spent some of its Press Forward funds on printing and distribution. Pirela wears “every hat” right now, and the organization’s top need is a dedicated sales manager, she said.

California’s BenitoLink, meanwhile, used some of the Press Forward funding to begin printing in 2025. That will allow it to apply for newspaper of record status and get paid for running legal notices.

In Minnesota, Swift County Monitor-News publisher and owner Reed Anfinson called the grant a “godsend” at a time when tariffs and rising gas prices have driven up printing and delivery costs and weakened advertisers’ budgets. The for-profit Monitor-News put some of its Press Forward funding toward redesigning its print newspaper. Anfinson also purchased materials as part of an “Out of Sight/Out of Mind” advertising campaign stressing the value of print. (He created the campaign himself, using Midjourney for the images.) For news organizations in small towns, Anfinson believes, digital revenue will never be enough to sustain operations.

“The space to ask what our readers really need”

Some organizations used the funding to expand their remit beyond news.

For instance, the Copper River Record partnered with the Copper River Native Association to include weekly language graphics in the paper for Ahtna, a critically endangered language, coordinating with a local kindergarten class. That project required a lot of time and investment up front, Sayer said, but it can continue beyond the life of the grant.

Planet Detroit used some Press Forward funding for reporting, but “the most significant thing the grant made possible wasn’t any single story,” Ignaczak said. The grant gave the team time to work on its Civic Action Toolbox, which turns reporting into civic engagement prompts. In a story about a local ballot proposal, for instance, the embedded toolbox flags upcoming public meetings, links to contact information for local representatives, and suggests an organization to follow. The tool is also in beta testing with other newsrooms.

“The whole project came from having the space to ask what our readers actually need from us beyond information, and then building toward that,” Ignaczak said. “Unrestricted funding makes that kind of work possible.”

Anfinson of the Monitor-News took the unusual step of writing a grant application on behalf of the local school district, which was losing students to adjacent districts. He used some of the Press Forward funding to match a $2,500 grant to the district. The district then ran $5,000 in ads in a “goodwill effort” to stem declining enrollment. The partnership helped to raise the Monitor-News’s profile, he said, by highlighting the benefits of newspaper advertising.

“It felt like a lot of pressure”

Press Forward required grantees to complete two LION sustainability audits. But it also offered optional coaching via the media consulting company Blue Engine to help implement the first audit’s recommendations. Of the 205 grantees, 154 participated in coaching, Anglin said.

The coaching kicked off in January, with most individual coaches and grantees meeting monthly. Multiple participants said the support would have been more beneficial if it were introduced earlier. This was a tradeoff of Press Forward moving quickly to get money out the door, Anglin said.⁴

This was the first large, unrestricted grant Austin Common had ever received, and it struggled with how to spend the money. “It felt like a lot of pressure,” said Amy Stansbury, the site’s editor-in-chief and only full-time staffer.

Stansbury wanted to bring on the organization’s first full-time employees, but didn’t want to make those hires (and spend all the grant money) until she had a clear plan. The coaching helped her figure out which hires made the most strategic sense and how to budget for them.

A few publishers were lukewarm about the substance of the coaching, but the majority I heard from were enthusiastic. At first, Baldwin was skeptical and worried the coaching might amount to “checking a box.” In practice, though, he said it’s been “tremendously helpful” for tasks like writing the job description for the Real WV’s sales position.

Sporleder Orr called the coaching “incredible.” The monthly sessions helped her with everything from tackling grant proposals to improving her Google Analytics skills. The combination of money and coaching, she added, “makes sure that the recipients don’t just continue doing business as usual.”

“This secret shadow world”

In addition to the funding, Press Forward paid for grantees to attend conferences. Anglin said 111 grantees attended the Lenfest News Philanthropy Summit in Philadelphia in 2025, 81 attended the same conference (which I also attended) in 2026, and 87 attended the Business of Local conference in Salt Lake City in 2025. A handful of grantees attended affinity conferences.

Stansbury found attending conferences for the first time helpful and eye-opening. It taught her “there’s this secret shadow world of [invitation-only] foundation and grant funding.” Press Forward’s travel support to attend a national conference was “transformative” for India Currents, Kumar said, giving it visibility and access to relationship-building.

To small newsrooms, the grant felt like a Press Forward stamp of approval that put them on the map for other funders. The Mirror’s Lee called the Press Forward funding “instrumental” in securing a $20,000 grant from a local foundation. But that was an exception among publishers I heard from; most didn’t feel the visibility and credibility conferred by the grant directly translated to other funders giving them more money.

So several publishers, including Ramírez Braiz of Te Lo Cuento News, would like to see Press Forward go a step further and make individual introductions to funders. “Those more personal introductions can make a major difference for small organizations,” she said.

Ramírez Braiz also called for “more shared learning around outcomes and impact.” Few grantees had a good sense of what others in the cohort were up to, and some were interested in more knowledge sharing with peer organizations, though the day-to-day grind of keeping one’s own newsroom running was a common impediment.

“Folks in the local news ecosystem don’t know how good they have it”

Since 2023, Anglin said, Press Forward’s network of more than 130 funders has invested $258 million directly in newsrooms. That suggests that over half of the more than $400 million the coalition says it’s invested has gone to newsrooms.

When Press Forward first announced the direct funding for newsrooms, it “felt really awesome,” the grantee who asked to stay anonymous told me. To the grantee, it was meaningful to see Press Forward give funding to more organizations than planned in response to the scale of need. But when Press Forward went on to a second funding round in which single organizations, including both newsrooms and newsroom-adjacent organizations like the International Women’s Media Foundation and LION, received as much as $1.5 million for infrastructure projects, the same grantee said it felt like “a slap in the face.”

“Many of the problems newsrooms face aren’t unique to them individually,” Anglin said. “If we are attempting to solve problems at scale, we have to intervene not just at the newsroom level, but at the systems level, too.” She said that because many of the infrastructure grantees serve multiple newsrooms, “investing in them creates a multiplier effect across the industry.”

The argument that funding support organizations and infrastructure lifts more boats is “a cop-out,” this publisher said. “I think the philanthropists know it, I think the associations know it, and I think the potential grantees that are not funders or associations or intermediaries know it.”

Young had a different perspective. Because of CivicLex’s broad scope, it seeks out funding from both democracy funders and journalism funders. Young thinks local news funders are way ahead on getting dollars into local communities.

“I think Press Forward has done one of the more effective jobs of anything I’ve seen in the broader landscape of my world, and the civic renewal space, of delivering resources to the local level,” he said. (He added, “No one is ever happy in the local news ecosystem when I say that folks in the local news ecosystem don’t know how good they have it. That does not win me a lot of friends.”)

Philanthropy as “infrastructure”

Most publishers I heard from see grants like this as critical to continued operation, yet they’re wary of overreliance on philanthropy.

Young said he’d be surprised if local news is still a focus for national philanthropy in eight years. “Filling your cup up with money that will be impossible to recover in four years is a danger zone,” he added.

Right now, more than 80% of Planet Detroit’s revenue mix comes from foundations. Ignaczak said the organization hopes to bring that down to 50% by 2028. “But for nonprofit newsrooms covering environmental and public health issues in a mid-size metro, general operating grants aren’t a crutch,” she said. “They’re infrastructure.”

As for Press Forward, “Time will tell, as these grants go away, what impact [they’ve] actually had on the newsrooms that received [them], how many have managed to build sustainability,” she added. “I think a newsroom that needed $50,000 to survive to next year had problems that $50,000 isn’t going to solve.”

LOOKOUT executive director Jake Hylton believes there’s enough funding to go around. “While there may not be enough to support every single newsroom at a very large amount,” he said, “I do believe that there is a larger investment in news that could be done.”

A second grantee who asked to stay anonymous was blunt about their fears for the future. “We’re scared shitless about 2027,” this person said, “because not only is the Press Forward money not returning, we also see none of the national grants that sustained us in 2024 and previous years.”

“We’d love to be thriving, but we’re happy to continue to survive”

The Copper River Record was in the black before receiving this grant, and the lean paper’s fixed overhead remains low. For the Record, Press Forward has been like “a fairy godmother,” Sayer said.

“I’m not going to lie: I will miss having the money to say yes to any reasonable story,” she continued. “But I think that, even going back to our original budget, the strength of what we learned will continue to help us deliver a higher quality paper that is more relevant to the communities we serve.”

The Sandpoint Reader, Olson said, is “surviving” right now. “We’d love to be thriving,” he added, “but we’re happy to continue to survive when many print publications aren’t.” He credited the Press Forward grant with giving the burned-out team “the chance to fall in love with our industry again.”

Sporleder Orr feels nervous about what’s ahead, but with the World Journal in a much more comfortable cash flow position, she and her husband are “in a way better mental state about the business.”

“We feel good about the future right now, that we are going to be able to keep going and make it,” she said. “We’re back to, ‘This is what we do ’til we die.'”

1. Grantees are included in LION’s public database capturing median staffing, revenue, and audience numbers from audits completed by more than 400 newsrooms. LION’s data suggests local newsrooms with budgets under $1 million are common; about three-quarters of the newsrooms that completed its most recent audit reported revenue under $1 million.
2. Press Forward paused grants to the St. Louis Argus after other local outlets reported the organization was taking their work without permission. Press Forward required the Argus to complete training from the Maynard Institute, then gave it the funds.
3. Not all the successful hires have journalism backgrounds. One current managing editor is a former school superintendent. “Every day that we have to teach someone from another field how to craft a lede, or cover a public meeting, or sell an ad by column inches, we are still grateful,” Brannon said.
4. “For this program, the timeline was tight,” Anglin said. “Our grantees have told us where we can do better, including offering coaching sooner, and we plan to incorporate that feedback in the future.” The open call launched a month after Anglin was hired, which meant she was still hiring the rest of Press Forward’s staff. Press Forward did not hire Graham Ringo, the grantee engagement and support manager who built out the program pairing audits and coaching, until several months later.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2026/10/only-32-of-americans-have-high-confidence-that-news-orgs-will-report-midterm-election-results-accurately/ Thu, 29 Oct 2026 18:35:18 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=254763 About six in 10 Americans said they have at least “some” confidence that news organizations will report the upcoming midterm election results accurately, according to a new national survey. But only 32% said they had “quite a bit” or “a great deal” of confidence that journalists would do the job.

In the survey from Medill Local News Initiative and the Alliance for Trust in Media, 37% said they had either “not too much confidence” or “no confidence at all” that news outlets would accurately report the election results.

The survey was completed by a nationally representative sample of 1,057 U.S. adults either online or by telephone earlier this month. The findings echo other national surveys, including a Gallup survey that showed trust in media to report “fully, accurately, and fairly” at 33% — an increase from an all-time low last year.

The Medill/Alliance survey found about half of Americans said they had “not too much confidence” or “no confidence at all” in news outlets to investigate voter fraud claims thoroughly. U.S. President Donald Trump has cast doubt on elections on 70% of days since returning to office — starting with false claims about voter fraud on the first day of his second term.

In another bleak result from the same poll, slightly more survey respondents said journalists manipulate the news for political or commercial purposes than report it accurately. Across the survey, Democrats reported being more confident in (and trusting of) news organizations than Republicans. Nearly 80% of Republicans said journalists try to manipulate the news compared to 38% of independents and 24% of Democrats.

More on the survey, conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago, here.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2026/10/the-new-york-times-is-adding-more-ai-features-to-its-cooking-app-and-users-arent-thrilled/ Wed, 28 Oct 2026 18:51:20 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=254678

Sometimes, adding just one new ingredient to a stew can ruin the whole thing.[sidenote]Olives, yecch.[/sidenote] And that’s how at least some New York Times readers see its addition of AI features to its popular Cooking app.

Here’s Genevieve Ko, NYT Cooking senior editor and columnist, explaining the new features:

I naïvely assumed A.I. wouldn’t affect my work as a recipe developer and my role at NYT Cooking, where I oversee the editorial side of our recipes and related stories. But as artificial intelligence improved, our product and engineering colleagues saw its potential to help us create features Cooking users wanted.

We’ve just launched our latest tool, which gives cooks the ability to apply modifications to our recipes. We’re rolling it out gradually to monitor how it performs (whether it’s working fast enough, for instance) and to see how people are using it (as of now, we’re getting a lot of requests for ingredient substitutions). The tool is currently available to all Cooking subscribers on our iOS app, and we plan to make it available more broadly soon.

The Times had previously rolled out AI features aimed at converting volume-based and weight-based measurements (“What’s one cup of bok choy in grams?”) and scaling a recipe up or down to serve more or fewer people. The main new feature is focused on ingredient substitutions.

Say you’re cooking braised white beans and greens with parmesan, NYT Cooking app in hand. But you notice that you’re out of chard and only have spinach. Cooking veterans know that chard is a rough-and-tumble green that has some backbone[sidenote]There’s a reason one type of chard is known as “perpetual spinach.”[/sidenote], while spinach is a comparative wimp that will wilt the moment you look at it funny. If you need to sub in spinach for chard, how would the recipe change? Would you, for instance, add the spinach later than you would the chard to account for its pathetic stamina? That’s the sort of thing the new AI feature could account for.

Cooking staffers “spent countless hours evaluating sample after sample to get the chatbot answers to closely align with how we would answer as culinary experts,” Ko writes. “We applied the same rigor as we do to editing, grounded in Times standards.”

But because Ko knows that any AI-powered features are likely to be controversial with a Times audience, she spends quite a lot of space addressing potential objections, everything from “the impact of data centers” to “the concentration of power among A.I. companies” and “the risk of A.I. escaping our control.” These features are designed to enable “the tactile physical pleasure of cooking” and getting a “very real, very human creation” on your table.

Broadly speaking, commenters weren’t buying it.

“What a massive disappointment,” wrote Susan from New Jersey. “The internet is full of AI cooking content. I pay you because I prefer mine done by people.”

“This decision misses the mark by such a wide margin it’s baffling,” says Ian from Los Angeles. “And the disclosure just as baffling. It would not be inaccurate to summarize the piece as saying ‘I know doing this is bad and I don’t want to be associated with the bad thing so that’s why we are doing the bad thing.'”

“Nobody wants this, it’s bad for cooking, it’s bad for the NYT,” writes Bill from Pittsburgh. “Wasting a column trying to gaslight yourself and your audience into believing that it’s anything but is an embarrassment and a waste of everyone’s time.”

“PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE DO NOT DO THIS,” says Judah Mann of New York. “Oh, wait, you already did. Ok, I’m out.”

Or as Naomi from California puts it: “I am sad that AI has breached the one online resource I truly love.”

Because I enjoy the irony, I scraped the 171 comments left on the Times’ announcement and asked Codex (running GPT-6.1 Sol, at medium thinking) to do some sentiment analysis. (Twelve of the 171 were comments left by Times staffers; I’m excluding them here.) Roughly 77% of the reader comments were negative about the new AI features, it found, versus 14% positive and the remainder neutral or mixed. Among the biggest categories of complaint: This shouldn’t require AI. AI is destroying the environment. AI is not why I’m paying the Times $390 a year. The adjustments the AI produces are going to be bad.

Dozens of commenters asked for a way to turn off the feature. “No, not at this time,” Ko responded, “though this feature is completely optional to use.” Indeed: Don’t ask AI to substitute your chard and AI won’t substitute your chard.

One consistent thread was that cooking is supposed to present you with difficulties and challenges and the whole point is figuring them out by yourself. “Anyone using AI for cooking has no sense of taste and no desire to work out the intricacies of cooking and baking,” writes Michael King from Brooklyn. “To use AI for recipes is beyond the pale. If you are going to use AI, then just cut to the chase and defenestrate yourself.” Or BJ from North Carolina: “So, you’re telling me that I’m too stupid to figure it out on my own?”

Meanwhile, the few positive comments tended to focus on how the AI feature had, in fact, made dietary substitutions easier for them. “I love the new AI feature because it quickly (and so far) accurately converts recipes to gluten free,” Anne Wagner from Kansas City writes. “I don’t cook for stress relief,” says Andy from San Francisco. “I cook to put dinner on the table. Anything that makes the process a little faster or smoother is welcome.”

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2026/10/meta-pledges-to-consult-publishers-before-finalizing-its-new-terms/ Wed, 28 Oct 2026 18:23:04 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=254681

Meta will complete “a full consultation” with news industry leaders before implementing its controversial new terms — even if it means another delay, an executive for the social media company announced today.

“We’ve heard publishers’ feedback on our proposed ads and business terms update. We care deeply about our partners and do not plan to make policy changes without a full consultation with industry groups and leaders,” vice president of communications Andy Stone tweeted. “We’re committed to getting this right, and as we expect this consultation could extend beyond November 20, in which case we’d delay implementation of the updated terms. Until then our existing terms remain in place.”

Meta did not answer Nieman Lab’s questions about which news industry groups and leaders Meta plans to consult.

The proposed terms have drawn criticism because they would permit broad scraping of websites “associated with” business accounts, and potentially allow Meta to use that scraped content to train its AI models, with no option to opt out. Last week, Meta announced it would push back implementation of its new terms to November 20 in order to “explain to our partners and stakeholders what’s changing and what’s not — including how Meta uses web crawlers and the fact that content owners will still be able to use robots.txt to signal preferences,” a Meta spokesperson told Nieman Lab. Meta had previously revised its new terms to remove the word “train.” No version of the terms has included language about respecting robots.txt preferences.

Shortly after Stone’s announcement, a Norwegian court blocked Meta’s terms from taking effect on November 20 until the court had assessed their legality, the country’s public broadcaster NRK reported.

The ruling comes one day after the Norwegian Media Businesses’ Association (MBL) filed the first known lawsuit filed against Meta over its commercial terms. MBL represents a coalition of major Norwegian news publishers, including the country’s largest newspaper groups and NRK.

“We are satisfied that the court has agreed with us that Meta holds a dominant position in the relevant market and that the new terms are unreasonable,” said Lene Eltvik Vindfeld, MBL’s board chair, in a news release. “We are also pleased that the court recognizes that the alternative is that media companies risk losing control over editorial content built up over many years.”

Since Nieman Lab first reported on the terms on October 15, publishers and politicians around the world have pushed back, filing complaints with national competition authorities, calling on the European Commission to investigate, and writing letters to Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Two United States senators — California Democrat Adam Schiff and Tennessee Republican Marsha Blackburn — each separately wrote to Zuckerberg, insisting that the company withdraw the terms as they’re currently written.

“After I raised serious concerns about Meta’s plans to scrape and abuse creators’ content, I am pleased the company is finally acknowledging the concerns of publishers and content creators,” Blackburn said in a statement to Nieman Lab on Wednesday. “While this is a step in the right direction, a vague promise to consult with industry stakeholders and potentially delay implementation is not nearly enough. Meta must commit to meaningful changes that protect the intellectual property rights of American creators, and I will continue holding the company accountable until it does.”

On October 21, the European Publishers Council signed onto a joint letter to the European Commission, asking the Commission to block the terms from taking effect. The letter claims that Meta’s terms violate the Digital Markets Act, a law passed in 2020 to curb the dominance of big tech companies and create fairer competition across the region.

EPC executive director Angela Mills Wade said on Wednesday that the organization has not heard from Meta about its letter or its concerns.

“We welcome Meta’s offer to consult publishers fully, and to delay implementation if necessary,” Mills Wade said in an email to Nieman Lab. “However, that consultation must lead to binding contractual safeguards…Using Meta’s services to reach audiences or advertise should not mean granting wider rights to exploit publishers’ journalism, whether collected from websites or uploaded to its platforms. Publishers must retain control over additional uses of their content, including for AI, and the ability to negotiate licenses and payment.”

This story has been updated to include a statement from Marsha Blackburn.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2026/10/vox-launches-its-first-app-with-an-eye-toward-building-paid-memberships/ Wed, 28 Oct 2026 12:02:57 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=254654

Vox has launched its first mobile application, the publication best known for its explanatory journalism announced Wednesday morning.

The app, which puts Vox’s text, audio, and video in one feed, is the company’s latest bet on growing paid membership. Users can choose between a home tab of featured pieces or a chronological feed of the latest stories. While the app is free to download and browse, it’s catered toward serving Vox journalism to paid subscribers in one place. Vertical videos and podcasts are free to watch and listen to, but only paid subscribers can read text stories and listen to podcasts ad-free.

Vox declined to share specific paid membership numbers, though the company said in May that it had “tens of thousands of paid subscribers.” The program was launched in May 2024. James Murdoch — son of media mogul Rupert Murdoch — purchased Vox.com along with the Vox Media Podcast Network and New York Magazine for more than $300 million in May 2026.

Growing membership is a “key priority,” managing editor for audience and membership Bill Carey said. Vox believes launching the app is one way to do that. A Vox membership costs $5 per month, or $60 per year, and offers ad-free versions of podcasts and unlimited access to all of the website’s contents.

Strengthening its relationship to its audience is only becoming more important for Vox. The app launch comes at a time when news publishers are increasingly trying to keep users on their own platforms amid growing preferences for AI summaries, news creators, and industry-wide traffic declines.

“The move toward developing our membership program in the last couple of years has really been about understanding how important it is for us to build more community and to foster that loyalty [of our] audience,” Carey said. “When we were looking at that, it really felt like an app was a good way to continue pointing in that direction.”

Vox isn’t the only news outlet focusing on mobile apps. The Verge — Vox’s former sister publication under Vox Media — named traffic declines as one of the reasons why it plans to launch its own app next year. The Wall Street Journal’s head of digital, Taneth Evans, recently said that the Journal makes its app more useful to users by offering all of its mediums in one place. Evans also said that news publishers “need to give people reasons to open an app beyond simply offering news.”

“Websites will become a service for agents,” Evans said. “Apps are gonna be the thing that humans will connect with.”

Vox declined to provide website traffic numbers, but data from Comscore shows that the website’s unique visitors decreased by 36% year-over-year between September 2025 (7.4 million) and September 2026 (4.8 million). Archived data from SimilarWeb shows the site had 20.8 million visits in September 2021.

Vox is one of the most popular news brands on YouTube with more than 12.7 million followers. The publication has one million Instagram followers, plus Substack subscribers and paid Patreon members. Vox launched its Patreon in November 2025, though its two video series exclusive to the platform have not been updated since January.

“Even if there wasn’t a decline in search traffic, as everyone has been seeing — and we still get members from search — we want to create that relationship with our audience,” publisher and editor-in-chief Swati Sharma said. “People know Vox and they have a relationship with Vox. We have a younger audience that’s on all of these different platforms. I think it is definitely a part of building that relationship ourselves.”

That the app makes all Vox content accessible in one place for current and future members also signals the “un-siloing” of the newsroom overall, Sharma said. Vox currently has 78 editorial employees.

When Sharma, who has helmed Vox.com since 2021, first arrived, she found that Vox’s main mediums (text, audio, and video) “weren’t in service of one another.” The “silos” allowed teams to build their own audiences and products. But while teams discussed story ideas with each other and during editorial meetings, “they all [needed] to go into their creative spaces and find what works for their medium and not be in service of just one larger section.”

That’s changed over the past five years, Sharma said. Each team — text, video, and audio — does a little bit of everything now. Text reporters appear on podcasts and in videos, while podcasters and hosts also write their own newsletters.

“In a lot of newsrooms, there’s one dominant form, and at Vox, there wasn’t. They’re all really important,” Sharma said. “[Senior correspondent] Dylan Scott is on our Unexplainable podcast talking about Alzheimer’s. [Host and editorial director] Astead Herndon does a newsletter and a Substack Live every week, and he does a podcast. That’s the future for us, and that’s where our whole newsroom is moving, where those silos are done and you can basically do everything.”

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2026/10/creators-who-show-their-sources-build-trust-survey-finds/ Tue, 27 Oct 2026 15:00:48 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=254599

About one in five U.S. adults regularly gets their news from news creators on social media platforms, but it can be difficult for audiences to suss out which personalities to trust amid an avalanche of misinformation, hot takes, and polarizing content.

New research spearheaded by a team of journalists and political scientists shows that giving audiences a peek into the reporting process can help bolster their trust in the news.

Proof News, a nonprofit newsroom focused on tech accountability, in collaboration with researchers at the French university Sciences Po, shared social news videos with 2,000 U.S. adults to measure their perceptions of trustworthiness. Participants were randomly assigned one of Proof’s yet-to-be-published short-form news videos.

Some participants viewed videos with labels describing the sources, others saw videos with labels describing the newsroom’s ethical standards, and some saw videos without a label. The Sources labels appeared on cards embedded at the end of the video, like a credits reel, or were placed into the video description, the text accompanying the video.

[img wide]When viewing a short-form news video, survey respondents saw a label noting sources, newsroom standards, or no label at all.[/img]

Participants then rated the videos on various trust metrics. We found that labeling videos did increase trust — particularly a label that described the video sources in the description and, to a slightly lesser extent, a label describing newsroom standards in the credits.

This effect was particularly prominent among survey respondents who identified as Democrats or reported having high trust in science. Those groups, when shown the sourcing label in the description of a general news video, reported higher assessments of transparency and trust in the journalist.

There were fewer statistically significant increases in trust metrics with labels for text articles, but Sally Lehrman, founder of The Trust Project, said the findings were still intriguing.

“I’m excited to see the results,” Lehrman said. “Methods and references really do resonate…People are asking, where did the journalist get this information, and how can I trust it.”

[img wide][/img]

Lack of standards

As audiences increasingly turn to social media for news, there is a growing public discussion about how trustworthy creators are, especially when it comes to disclosing their funding and relationships. In January, The Wall Street Journal wrote about corporate and foreign interests using influencers to push agendas. In August, The Washington Post reported that the Pentagon secretly hired conservative military veterans with large online audiences to amplify Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s messaging, and a New York Times investigation revealed online influencers received funding from political campaigns without disclosing the connection in their videos.

Some creators have begun trying to distinguish themselves from this type of behavior through their own disclosure efforts.

Journalist and creator Dave Jorgenson, who has nearly 1 million followers across TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram, has started publishing a transparency report on his website, Local News International, revealing his sources of funding alongside his editorial standards.

Ultimately, he thinks disclosures of political funding should no longer be voluntary but mandatory. “Platforms should be regulating themselves,” Jorgenson said in an interview. “You can’t really force that unless there are laws.”

Proof used Jorgenson’s ethics and transparency statement as a model for the newsroom standards label in video testing and found that it increased viewers’ trust in the news outlet and the likelihood that they would share a general news story.

New York City is already considering disclosure requirements in the wake of revelations in the Columbia Journalism Review that exposed the inner workings of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s connections with influencers. The author of the article, Anya Schiffrin, a senior lecturer at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, testified at a September city council meeting that creator relationships — both paid and unpaid — should be disclosed to viewers.

“It’s important for democracy that we have standards,” Schiffrin said.

Proof for a new model

Proof News, which launched in 2024, pioneered an Ingredients label that takes cues from the scientific method and names the journalists’ hypothesis, sources, limitations, and the story’s findings.

To test whether the label worked to increase viewer trust for short-form vertical videos, we stripped down the Ingredients label to a bullet list of sources followed by an asterisk denoting the reporting limitations. The survey showed the label had a consistent positive effect when placed in the video description, the text box that is often located under the video.

The team also tested how labels performed on online text news articles. The survey showed 1,600 U.S. participants original, unpublished Proof News stories without a label, with a Proof Ingredients label, a label modeled after the Trust Project that described the reporting process, and a label describing newsroom standards.

[img wide]Journalists designed three different labels: one about the newsroom’s standards, one about the reporting process, and one inspired by the scientific method, stating a hypothesis, sources, limitations, and findings.[/img]

There were fewer statistically significant increases in trust metrics with the print labels. The most significant findings were an increase in perception of transparency when the reporting process label was used on a polarizing story and an investigative story.

One possible explanation for the differing results between labeling video and text articles is the “ergonomics” of the medium, said Damien Bol, a professor at the Center for Political Research at Sciences Po who helped lead the survey design and data analysis.

“When reading a text, for example, people can quickly skim through it or skip parts of it, whereas a video forces them to follow the story second by second, even when watching at double speed,” Bol said. Different formats, Bol said, shape the “experience of consuming a news story.”

Influencing the influential

Earlier this month, Julia Angwin, an author of this article, hosted a private convening of creators at Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy to discuss creating shared standards that could be conveyed through a label or other public statement.

The group of 30 leading content creators from news, science communication, education, history, and other evidence-based fields discussed how they could distinguish their work by signaling to viewers their commitment to standards that could include disclosing funding sources and the use of artificial intelligence. Creator-led efforts to bring this to fruition are ongoing.

San Diego-based journalist Lisa Remillard, who has more than 4 million followers on her TikTok channel “The News Girl,” said that making videos with verified facts can feel like a small club. But if she can’t independently confirm something, she’s “not putting that out there.”

Remillard’s audience appears to appreciate transparency. Earlier this year, she published a video describing her editorial standards — and was richly rewarded for it. “I think clearly defining those ethics and standards resonated with my audience and gave them a reason to want to financially support my work,” Remillard said.

Jessica Yellin, the founder of the political podcast, YouTube channel, and social media brand “News Not Noise,” has also called for news creators to voluntarily sign a Creator Constitution, agreeing to journalistic standards such as citing sources, fixing errors, and disclosing financial relationships.

She said labeling sources is about the “signal.” Even if audiences don’t take the time to digest every word, Yellin observed, “It’s the act of showing it that matters.”

Julia Angwin is the founder of Proof News and the founding director of the Independent Media + Audience Project at the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School. Annie Gilbertson is managing editor of Proof News. Rina Palta is editor-at-large at Proof News and senior data scientist at the Independent Media + Audience Project.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2026/10/a-gross-abuse-of-metas-power-california-senator-adam-schiff-tells-meta-to-scrap-its-new-terms-of-service/ Tue, 27 Oct 2026 13:52:44 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=254602

Democratic Senator Adam Schiff of California is urging Meta not to implement its forthcoming commercial terms on November 20, his office announced Tuesday.

In a letter sent to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Schiff called on the company to respond by Monday, November 2 with the specific steps it will take to address user concerns.

“Forcing publishers to choose between surrendering their off-platform IP or forfeiting a primary channel of public communication is a gross abuse of Meta’s power as a powerful platform with critical access to consumers,” Schiff wrote. “Meta must not nullify federal IP protections and fair market competition through the unilateral insertion of fine print into terms of service contracts.”

Specifically, Schiff told Meta that it should “provide explicit guarantees that external technical boundaries like paywalls and robots.txt protocols will be fully respected.”

“Meta’s verbal assurances that it will not supersede robots.txt files, which are voluntary server flags, do not appear to constitute enforceable legal protections,” Schiff wrote. “Without the insertion of specific language codifying Meta’s policy to respect robots.txt signals into the latest contractual terms, users lack any reliable means by which to protect their content.”

Schiff’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Schiff is the latest elected official in the United States to raise concerns about Meta’s commercial terms, which have now drawn bipartisan criticism. On Friday, Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee said that the terms “indicate Meta is attempting to exploit American creators and businesses by granting itself sweeping authority to scrape content from any website associated with Facebook and Instagram business accounts.”

Blackburn, who chairs the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology and the Law, called on the company to withdraw the terms.

The terms were previously set to take effect on October 30. Because the terms offered no way to opt out, news of them set off an outcry from news publishers, politicians, and press associations on both sides of the Atlantic. Meta then delayed the effective date of its new terms of service for business accounts to November 20.

On Tuesday, a coalition of Norwegian news publishers sued Meta over the terms and is asking the Oslo District Court to block the terms from going into effect. The legal action, led by the Norwegian Media Companies Association, is the first known lawsuit filed against Meta over its commercial terms.

Nieman Lab first reported on the terms on October 15. They would allow the mass scraping of websites “associated with” business accounts on Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Threads. Virtually every news organization has at least one business account. On October 16, Meta removed the word “train” from its terms and limited the use of future scraped content to “advertising and business products.”

“We are extending the effective date of our updated Commercial Terms and Self-Serve Ad Terms to November 20 to allow more time for us to explain to our partners and stakeholders what’s changing and what’s not — including how Meta uses web crawlers and the fact that content owners will still be able to use robots.txt to signal preferences,” a Meta spokesperson told Nieman Lab in a statement Friday.

A Meta spokesperson said on October 17 that the company revised the language because it “wasn’t clear in the initial consolidation of terms that robots.txt preferences are respected. News sites, like all other content owners, still have the ability to disable the crawler via robots.txt flags. That has been the case, and it has not changed.”

As of October 27, Meta has made no other changes to the terms aside from the implementation date. No version of the terms includes language about respecting robots.txt preferences.

Read the full letter here.

]]> Meta headquarters in Menlo Park, CA. https://www.niemanlab.org/2026/10/the-independent-journalism-atlas-looks-at-wells-and-springs-in-news-deserts/ Mon, 26 Oct 2026 19:56:55 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=254580 What do we mean when we talk about news deserts?

The term has become a shorthand for areas devoid of local news coverage. But a new essay from the Independent Journalism Atlas recalls that when Penny Abernathy popularized the term through her research, she used it to describe a more nuanced picture:

To show what information can look like in news deserts, the Independent Journalism Atlas — an initiative that aims to “[document] independent creators who inform, educate, and advance public knowledge outside traditional media structures,” cofounded by Liz Kelly Nelson, Justin Bank, and 2025 Nieman Fellow Ryan Kellett — took a closer look at 46 of the 238 news desert counties identified in this year’s State of Local News report from Medill.

“Look at the ground and news moves like water,” writes Bank. “It doesn’t stop at a county line. It runs off the surface, sinks underground and comes up wherever someone digs.” The team found that “in more places than the desert map shows, someone has picked up a shovel.” (That might help explain why people who live in news deserts don’t feel deprived of local news.) The team identifies a few patterns in how information looks and travels in news deserts, including “surface” information, wells, and springs.

Posts from the local sheriff, weather alerts, and obituaries from the funeral home are all examples of “surface” information that “runs off,” Bank writes, typically telling you what happened without telling you why.

Wells are newsrooms that form when a local paper shutters. The team points to the Anaconda Weekly Review in Deer Lodge County, Montana, as an example of a well appearing in a county Medill identified as a news desert.

Springs, meanwhile, are “harder to spot” than wells because they’re smaller and more ad hoc. The Independent Journalism Atlas applies this label to efforts like the Gallatin County Board Illinois Unofficial Facebook page, which livestreams the board’s public meetings and posts its agendas.

The team also paid attention to coverage of news deserts by outlets in neighboring counties. They found high school sports are often a gateway to coverage, pointing to a channel covering southern Illinois high school sports that interviewed the principal in Harrisburg, the seat of Saline County, another news desert county.

In recent years, efforts to “map” local news through different lenses have proliferated. The Independent Journalism Atlas is one such effort, focused on news creators. A better understanding of information sources in news deserts matters, Bank argues, because “you can’t tend a basin you haven’t mapped.”

Read the full essay here.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2026/10/i-went-looking-for-the-source-of-one-little-statistic-that-was-easier-said-than-done/ Mon, 26 Oct 2026 15:17:15 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=254562

Apparently, 75% of your emotions are generated by smell.

Or that’s what the internet says, anyway. The statistic appears everywhere from marketing books and articles to academic papers about the power of scent. As a perfumer (someone who creates fragrances) and journalist who writes about these things, I came across it several times, and when I finally wanted to cite it for an article about the impact of scent on mood and memory, I went looking for the original research.

But I couldn’t find it.

This wasn’t a totally new experience for me. One time, while working on a workplace story as the editor of a hospitality trade magazine, I couldn’t find the source of an employee retention statistic, so I wrote the people who included it in a study. They wrote back to say they had no idea what I was talking about.

In this case, there was no such dead end. I followed link after link, figuring surely I would get to the bottom of it, but every source pointed to another source, which pointed to another, and somehow none of them led to the original research I was looking for.

I asked ChatGPT, Google Gemini and Claude for help. They gave me links to wellness blogs, aromatherapy companies, and authoritative-looking PDF reports. But as I ruled each one out as the original source, the answers became more circular, and the trail ate itself.

Me: Where did the statistic that 75% of emotions are generated by smell come from?

Google Gemini The Sense of Smell Institute.

Me: Great. Which study?

Gemini: There isn’t a specific study. The statistic was popularized through scent marketing research.

Me: So where did the number come from?

Gemini: Martin Lindstrom’s 2005 book Brand Sense.

Me: Does the book contain the original research?

Gemini: Lindstrom commissioned extensive research into sensory branding through the research firm Millward Brown.

Me: Does that research establish that 75 percent of emotions are generated by smell?

Gemini: Would you like to know how lavender and citrus can influence your mood?

A breakthrough! Or so I thought

Lindstrom did look like a real lead. Several writers and businesses traced the number to the Danish author’s 2005 book Brand Sense: Sensory Secrets Behind the Stuff We Buy. Simon & Schuster’s page for the book says it outright: “Research shows that a full 75% of our emotions are in fact generated by what we smell.” Aha!

I bought the book and read it. While there is talk of emotions and the senses, the number isn’t in there.

Next, I wrote to Lindstrom’s company asking them to point me toward the original research. They sent me a link to a copy of Brand Sense and told me I would find the research in the book.

I tried another route. Brand Sense was based in large part on an international study by market research company Millward Brown. The 75% figure has been attributed directly to that research. So I went looking for the Millward Brown study. But I couldn’t find it anywhere.

Does 75% even make sense?

There were other questions: Does the stat even make scientific sense? How would you measure the percentage of emotions generated by smell? Do people with no sense of smell experience 75% fewer emotions? And what about emotions that seem to have nothing to do with the senses at all, like grief over someone’s death, a breakup, or anxiety over losing your job?

I asked Kristen Lindquist, a social and affective neuroscientist and psychology professor at Ohio State University who studies emotion. She had never heard of the statistic.

“I imagine if somebody had done that study I would be aware of it,” she told me.

There is a relationship between smell and emotion, and it may be possible to measure something like this, she said. Researchers could, for example, ask people throughout the day how they’re feeling and whether what they’re feeling is related to something they’re seeing, hearing, touching or smelling. But that still wouldn’t make emotion the product of one sense. “Emotions really arise from all of our sensations,” Lindquist said, including signals from within our bodies. Our brains process all of that information together to figure out what is happening and what it means for us.

So, what about that breakup?

“If you get dumped and you smell some nice cookies, are you going to feel 75% better?” Lindquist said. “Probably not.”

When repetition becomes evidence

There’s a name for the particular way an unsupported claim can acquire the appearance of fact through citation: citogenesis. Coined by Randall Munroe in an XKCD comic, the term describes the process by which an unsupported claim gets repeatedly cited until the citations themselves make it look like truth.

I called Jodi Schneider, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Information School whose research includes scientific evidence and citation integrity, to talk about it. I sent her the 75% statistic, and she went looking for the source herself.

“It was not a casual ‘Let me look for 20 minutes, and there it is,'” she told me. “I would find a thing, [it] would go to something else, and that would be a dead end.”

Her conclusion: “It’s hard to source.”

The problem, Schneider said, is that repeating a claim is much easier than investigating it. “Somebody says something, it sounds like a thing you’d like to know or repeat, and you don’t trace it back to where it came from. You just pass it on.” Then repetition becomes the “evidence,” and “if you hear the same thing from multiple places, it’s harder to question.”

This psychological phenomenon is known as the illusory truth effect: We’re more likely to believe information we’ve encountered before. The effect was first demonstrated in the 1970s and has since been replicated many times. More unsettlingly, research has found that repetition can make a false claim seem more believable even when it contradicts something we know to be true.

In other words, seeing the same statistic everywhere doesn’t just make it look well sourced; it makes it feel true.

It’s hard to fully check every claim. Writers build arguments from dozens of pieces of information, and tracing each one all the way back to its origin can take an absurd amount of time.

Newsrooms have spent years cutting staff and budgets, including the fact-checkers and copy editors whose job was to catch this kind of thing. At the same time, the volume of information journalists have to sort through has exploded. Finding a source for a claim can take seconds. Establishing where it actually came from can take hours (or an eternity).

Meanwhile, the consequences of not checking facts compound. Once a bad claim gets published, it becomes another source for the next journalist, another search result for the next reader and another apparent confirmation that the claim must be true.

Then came AI

AI is making that problem worse. It repeats the same unsupported claims while stripping away some of the clues that might otherwise make us suspicious of the source.

“The polish that generative AI can put on just about anything is already a challenge,” Schneider said. More importantly, “Generative AI is really, really good at being persuasive, even if the claims inside the persuasion have no basis in reality.”

Most people are not going to track a statistic through six articles, buy the book everyone cites, email the author, and start calling academics. They don’t have the time or energy for that, and they shouldn’t have to do it anyway. One of journalism’s roles is to provide information that’s more reliable than TikTok or whatever nonsense Google Gemini spits out.

When we get it wrong, we don’t just add another bad source to the pile. We give the claim credibility and put it in front of more people. And once they’ve seen it, the illusory truth effect suggests they’re more likely to believe it the next time. (Research has also found that repeated misinformation is more likely to be repeated than new misinformation, and can continue to influence people even after it has been corrected.)

Nobody is going to die because they believe smell generates 75 percent of their emotions. But replace that claim with one about a vaccine, a war, an election or a medical treatment and the same failure becomes considerably less benign.

That’s why the difference between finding a source and finding the source matters. I found hundreds of sources for the 75% statistic. I still haven’t found the source. That doesn’t mean it’s not out there.

I just can’t find it.

Can you find the source of the 75% stat? Email staff@niemanlab.org.

Elizabeth Bromstein is a writer, editor, and perfumer.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2026/10/meta-delays-rollout-of-terms-that-would-allow-broad-scraping-of-news-sites-legal-experts-are-still-skeptical/ Mon, 26 Oct 2026 09:00:31 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=254546

Meta has delayed the effective date of its new terms of service for business accounts to November 20 in the face of mounting pressure from the global news industry.

Nieman Lab first reported on the terms on October 15. They would allow for the mass scraping of websites “associated with” business accounts on Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Threads. Virtually every news organization has at least one business account. On October 16, Meta removed the word “train” from its terms and limited the use of future scraped content to “advertising and business products.”

The terms were previously set to take effect on October 30, with no way to opt out, setting off an outcry from news publishers, politicians, and press associations on both sides of the Atlantic.

“We are extending the effective date of our updated Commercial Terms and Self-Serve Ad Terms to November 20 to allow more time for us to explain to our partners and stakeholders what’s changing and what’s not — including how Meta uses web crawlers and the fact that content owners will still be able to use robots.txt to signal preferences,” a Meta spokesperson told Nieman Lab in a statement Friday.

A Meta spokesperson said on October 17 that the company revised the language because it “wasn’t clear in the initial consolidation of terms that robots.txt preferences are respected. News sites, like all other content owners, still have the ability to disable the crawler via robots.txt flags. That has been the case, and it has not changed.”

As of October 23, Meta has made no other changes to the terms aside from the implementation date. No versions of the terms include language about respecting robots.txt preferences.