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

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

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

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

Other updates to AI search include a new section that will suggest topics related to the original search query. Called “Further Exploration,” it will appear below AI-generated summaries and link to related articles or more “in-depth analysis.” For example, a search about green urban spaces suggests a report on urban planning by the World Economic Forum or a website about the architects who designed The High Line in New York City Highline. It could, however, push traditional article links further down the page on a search result.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What the News Bargaining Initiative changes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The solution that’s under everyone’s nose

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

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

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

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

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

That sounds…awesome?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mulino:

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

Wells:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A one-time Golden Goal

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This story was updated with details about The Away End.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The unions versus AI

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“An existential threat”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Like nailing Jell-O to a wall”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A difficult balance

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The view from above

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Beyond the Amazon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Updated April 15 with additional answers from The Banner.

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

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

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

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

Charts made with Claude.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other interesting findings from the report include:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read the full report here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Fox News (@FoxNews) April 4, 2026

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

BREAKING:

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

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

BREAKING:

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

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

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

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

BREAKING:

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

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

BREAKING:

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

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

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

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

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

— TMZ (@TMZ) April 13, 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— TMZ (@TMZ) March 27, 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

While having coffee with the founder of National Voter Registration Day, Montana native Matt Singer, Montana Free Press founder and executive director John Adams had a lightbulb moment: Maybe local news could benefit from that kind of national focus.

About a year later, that idea has become the first “Local News Day.” On April 9, more than 1,300 local newsrooms, around 200 partners, and 15 sponsors are participating in the “national day of action to celebrate and strengthen trusted local news and information.” (Update: As of Monday, April 13, a public dashboard and directory counted 1,462 “participating newsrooms” in the Local News Day network.)

The initiative “isn’t about fundraising specifically as much as it is about drawing the public’s attention back to local news,” Adams said. An era of constant distraction tends to “pull our attention away from local,” toward platforms and national and international news. Local News Day is designed to show the public that local news is useful and relevant to their daily lives.

The requests to the public are straightforward: “Sign up to get an email. Tune in to your local public radio station. Subscribe to a local news source,” whether for-profit or nonprofit. Regardless of business model, medium, or definition of local, “if you’re producing local journalism, we want to bring audiences to your doorstep, and that’s really what Local News Day is all about,” Adams said.

The campaign is supported by the social impact agency Impactual, where Singer is a partner. Sponsors include Press Forward, The New York Times, BlueLena, Google, and WordPress and Newspack along with their parent company Automattic. WordPress built a database of local news organizations called the “Local News Finder.” (It’s also supported by Google’s mapping technology.) The database divides outlets by audience (local, regional, and statewide) and type (newsroom, broadcast, radio, podcast, newsletter, and content creator). Newsrooms apply to be included, and some press associations have applied on behalf of their members. This isn’t the first local news mapping project, and others have learned that creating an exhaustive database of local news sources is challenging, but Adams hopes it will eventually be “one of the most comprehensive resources for locating local news in the country.”

In early discussions of Local News Day, there was some concern about redundancy or competition with NewsMatch, the end-of-year fundraising campaign for nonprofit newsrooms organized by the Institute for Nonprofit News. Adams said his vision is focused more on attention and audience-building than on fundraising. He thinks the timing can complement NewsMatch; if a community member discovers a local news organization during Local News Day, by the time NewsMatch rolls around, they might be ready to donate. (Still, if my inbox is any indication, plenty of newsrooms are making explicit fundraising asks as part of their Local News Day campaigns.)

Suggested Local News Day actions for newsrooms include launching a new product, holding an event, or dropping the paywall for a day. Montana Free Press, for instance, is asking its most loyal readers to use a unique referral link to get others to sign up for Montana Free Press; if 10 people use their link to sign up, the referrer gets a custom MFP Local News Day Yeti tumbler. If 20 sign up, they also receive a tote bag. On Thursday evening, MFP will also hold a livestreamed local event highlighting some of its reporting on how federal immigration policy has played out in rural Montana. (Meanwhile, Axios reported that Nextdoor, a Local News Day partner, launched verified accounts for local journalists. Local news was central to the company’s redesign last year.)

The long-term goal is to identify and share some best practices for audience growth from the single-day experimentation of over a thousand newsrooms, Adams said. But for the largely volunteer team behind Local News Day — many, like Adams, running their own local newsrooms while lending their time to the national project — this year, “it’s a big push to get as many people participating as we can.”

The campaign aims to generate a million news subscriptions and at least 500,000 social media follows across platforms. It’s partnering with Junkipedia, a social media analysis tool, which will help measure the reach of Local News Day across the internet, and hopes participating news organizations will share their outcomes and experiences with the organizing team.

Adams is already thinking about future Local News Days: He said he envisions more centralized partnerships between the Local News Day organizing team and institutions like libraries and universities in “Phase Two.” For now, he’s excited by the scale of Local News Day and the conversation being generated already, including county, village (!), and state-level Local News Day proclamations.

Similar to NewsMatch, Local News Day organizers are offering promotional materials and messaging tips while also leaving room for personalization. Adams said organizers took Press Forward messaging research from last year to heart and are intentionally keeping their messaging positive.

“The narrative over the last 15 [to] 20 years has been decline, desertification, distress — it’s been this really negative narrative, and that’s turned off a lot of people,” Adams said.

“Everybody knows the old, tired story of ‘news industry failing’; we don’t need to continue to talk about that,” he added. “Let’s talk about all the good things that are happening and draw the public’s attention to something they can be a part of right now to build something new and exciting.”

Back in 2016, the analytics company Parse.ly published a report: “Does Twitter matter for news sites?“

The report found that Twitter drove little traffic to most news sites, generating only around 1.5% of most publishers’ traffic. But, the authors wrote, “Twitter excels at both conversational and breaking news…Though Twitter may not be a huge overall source of traffic to news websites relative to Facebook and Google, it serves a unique place in the link economy. News really does ‘start’ on Twitter.”

Ten years later, the site formerly known as Twitter still drives very little traffic to news sites. But it’s also bad for conversational and breaking news.

Earlier this week, Nate Silver published “Social media has become a freak show.” Silver wrote that X has become “next to useless” for following breaking news like the war in Iran because its algorithm penalizes posts that include links.

“The New York Times has 53 million followers, and yet its tweets often produce only a few hundred likes, retweets, and replies even when they reveal urgent, breaking news,” Silver wrote.

The NYT published a link to critical original reporting on Iran 45 minutes ago. A good, fair story. They have 53m followers. The engagement metrics you display say they got 94 likes and 33 retweets out of that. Is that accurate? And if so, shouldn't you work on a better algo? pic.twitter.com/CMD8mfQRn7

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) April 6, 2026

X head of product Nikita Bier pushed back, blaming the Times’ low engagement on its paywall — but also on the quality of its tweets:

For what it’s worth:

NYT has not experimented with their captions on posts in 20 years since the launch of Twitter.

While the entire world has evolved their posting style to convert people to their newsletters (e.g., threads, etc), NYT still has their social media manager…

— Nikita Bier (@nikitabier) April 6, 2026

Big news publishers are in a strange place when it comes to X right now. Most are still posting to it (with notable exceptions like NPR and The Guardian), and they still have millions of followers. But with news business models increasingly revolving around subscriptions, publishers are focusing most of their social media efforts on sending people to their own sites. They may not see much incentive to “evolve their posting style” as Bier suggests.

I wondered, though: Is The New York Times unusual among big publishers in the “link plus sentence” tweet format? Are any major publishers moving beyond that format and seeing more engagement on X as they link less?

I used Claude to help me scrape the 200 most recent tweets from 18 large publishers’ X accounts and track the engagement (likes + comments + retweets) on each. Six of those publishers have paywalls: Bloomberg, CNN, Forbes, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post. Nine don’t: Al Jazeera English, AP, BBC¹, Breitbart News, CBS News, Daily Wire, Fox News, NBC News, and Reuters. The last three accounts I looked at — Leading Report, unusual_whales, and Globe Eye News — are not news publishers, but aggregate breaking news in tweets without links. (Here, for example, is an example of a Leading Report tweet: “BREAKING: Iran has halted direct talks with the US, per WSJ.” They’re sometimes referred to as engagement-maxing accounts.

These charts make it pretty clear that links in tweets hurt engagement. The connection was so apparent in my analysis that a graph including all 18 publishers is almost unreadable: The traditional, link-loving publishers are clustered in the bottom left corner (lots of links, little engagement) in a nearly indistinguishable mass of bubbles, no matter how large their followings are.

If you want an easier-to-read version of the chart, here it is with some of the publishers stripped out.

Nonetheless, most of the publishers in my sample link out a lot. (I couldn’t find any biggies who are following Elon Musk’s advice to write a description of a story in the first tweet, then follow it with a link in a second tweet.) The New York Times, with 53 million followers, included links in 88% of its tweets; CNN, with 61.7 million followers, had links in 90% of tweets; The Wall Street Journal, with 21 million followers, had links in 98% of its tweets. Some examples:

Bitcoin’s founder, Satoshi Nakamoto, has remained hidden for 17 years. A trail of clues — and a year of digging by our reporter, John Carreyrou — led us to a 55-year-old computer scientist in El Salvador named Adam Back. https://t.co/s6Jy00IDdk

— The New York Times (@nytimes) April 8, 2026

(A note on the Bitcoin story: X’s Bier pointed to this tweet as a better example of how to share the Bitcoin story on X. They don’t feel meaningfully different to me, though — both are just a couple of sentences and a link. Carreyrou’s tweet, published Wednesday at 12:40 a.m., has been liked, commented on, or RT’d 9,242 times, and the Times’ tweet, published a few hours later, has been liked, commented on, or RT’d 8,361 times.)

Accused Gilgo Beach serial killer Rex Heuermann pleads guilty to the murders of eight women https://t.co/GeVNtAP68y pic.twitter.com/e8XJonGAT4

— CNN (@CNN) April 8, 2026

I checked my ego at the door. Now I’m playing faster, scoring lower and enjoying the game more. https://t.co/O8TIPMDrA6

— The Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) April 8, 2026

At the other end of the spectrum, the engagement-maxxing account Globe Eye News (with just 886,000 followers) never linked out in the tweets in my sample and saw massive engagement: A median 8,418 engagements per tweet. The New York Times, with a following more than 53 times larger, had a median 383 engagements per tweet.

BREAKING:

US demands Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz immediately. pic.twitter.com/pVTbzyHcQy

— Globe Eye News (@GlobeEyeNews) April 8, 2026

BREAKING: Oil prices plunge toward $90 a barrel and US stocks surge 2.7%, per AP.

— Leading Report (@LeadingReport) April 8, 2026

Trump says there may be a joint US-Iran venture for Hormuz Tolls.

— unusual_whales (@unusual_whales) April 8, 2026

Fox News (28.7 million followers) is an outlier among the traditional publishers, including links in just 9% of its tweets. Most of its tweets contain videos or graphics instead. That strategy works: Fox News had the third highest median engagement in my sample after Globe Eye News and Leading Report.

BREAKING: "From the very beginning of Operation Epic Fury, President Trump stated this would be a 4 to 6 week military operation to dismantle the military threat posed by the radical Islamic Iranian regime."

"Thanks to the unbelievable capabilities of America's war fighters, the… pic.twitter.com/d1W4G0rckb

— Fox News (@FoxNews) April 8, 2026

'GOD IS GOOD': Secretary of War Pete Hegseth gives grace to God for protecting America's heroes in the Middle East throughout Operation Epic Fury. pic.twitter.com/mU8YNIUW3H

— Fox News (@FoxNews) April 8, 2026

Links are not the only thing keeping big news publisher from high engagement on tweets; there are lots of factors. But this analysis shows that the way that most big news publishers, with the exception of Fox News, really haven’t changed the way they tweet, even as the platform’s incentives have changed.

1. Well, to clarify: The BBC recently added a paywall for U.S. users, but I looked at the BBC’s U.K. account, @bbcnews.

“The first thing newsrooms can start by doing is making it ridiculously easy for their own journalists to discover their internal archives,” Lawal said. “It’s important for the archives not to feel far off and locked away.”

Once a user-friendly internal database is in place in a newsroom, he says, journalists can be encouraged to develop new products and stories from the material.

Archives for institutional memory

Beyond editorial products, some newsrooms are also using their archives to tell the story of the newspaper itself.

Le Roch points me to an example from the French Catholic newspaper La Croix, which a few years ago published a dossier in which they used their archives to address the paper’s antisemetic past.

“I find that very interesting — a newspaper acknowledging and explaining its own history via its archives,” Le Roch said. “Not every newspaper is comfortable doing that. But a paper’s history inevitably shapes the editorial line today. When you write as a journalist, it’s your own voice, but you are also writing under the name of a newspaper with a long history.”

She suggested I speak with the team at Charlie Hebdo about this, and how they use their archives to help onboard new journalists in particular — which seemed like a good idea, because if there is any newspaper that has consequential, complicated history in French media and society, it’s Charlie Hebdo. The satirical weekly paper has long been associated with a combative, irreverent strain of French republicanism, and many people will remember it was the target of a terrorist attack in 2015 that killed 12 people.

Each of the journalists I spoke to there had a lot to say about the role of their archives in shaping their journalism.

Jean-Loup Adénor, the magazine’s deputy editor-in-chief, told me about how new team members are encouraged to spend time in the archive room, reading past issues and books about the paper’s history.

“This allows them to do two things,” says Adénor. “First, to better understand the ideological positioning of the paper and the causes Charlie has defended; and second, to draw inspiration from the tone and the freedom we have in writing here.”

“I’ve worked in more traditional media like France Info and Ouest-France, and there, it’s easy to imagine yourself in a rigid framework,” he explained. “But it’s much harder to project yourself into a free one. That’s what’s both reassuring and intimidating about the freedom here.”

“When I started at Charlie, I wanted to understand exactly what the paper was, so I spent a lot of time in the archives reading old issues,” said Yovan Simovic, a journalist who started at the paper in September 2023. “The editor-in-chief often tells us: You are completely free in your writing here. But that freedom is a bit frightening, and you don’t immediately understand what it means. So going to read the old issues, understanding how they spoke, how they described the world, how they wrote — all of that helped me to understand what he meant. Of course, we don’t want to copy [previous journalists], but it helps to see how free we are by seeing what they were able to write.”

Each of them had a favorite piece from the archive they could point to — for Simovic, it’s a piece of embedded reporting done in Afghanistan by journalist Agathe André, for Adénor it’s the survivors issue published the week after the 2015 attacks — and told me how they’d pinned articles or cartoons from past editions to the walls of the newsroom for inspiration.

Adénor suspects that understanding your newspaper’s history is particularly important at Charlie Hebdo.

“Maybe the emotional attachment to the paper is different at Charlie than at other newsrooms. I’m trying not to be too grandiloquent in what I say, but the fact is, for secular, left-wing, republican-left journalists, working at Charlie Hebdo is not trivial,” Adénor says, referring to the price many of journalists have paid (and continue to pay) to work there.

“I feel a responsibility to do my job as well as possible, and that requires knowing the paper’s history. I’m not a historian, and I don’t aim to become an expert, but I do need to understand the major milestones.”

He feels he owes it to the audience as well.

“Many of our readers have followed the paper for decades. They often know the paper better than we do. So when we receive criticism, it helps to understand where it’s coming from, historically.”

“You feel a kind of responsibility to respect that memory by understanding it,” agreed Etienne Le Page, an intern who started last autumn. “You can’t just write without context. You need to know what happened at the paper in the past, and how the paper functions and continues. That’s something you learn to do by reading past editions of the paper.”

Now, an appellate court has upheld the core findings of L.A. Press Club v. Noem and ruled in support of an injunction. In an opinion released last week, the panel of judges wrote that the plaintiffs are “likely to prevail on their First Amendment retaliation claims” because of an “avalanche” of evidence that shows DHS was acting with “retaliatory intent.” In other words, the court found that ICE officers were trying to punish the plaintiffs for exercising their First Amendment rights.
“Shooting projectiles at reporters, targeting observers, and injuring demonstrators is not crowd control. It’s retaliation,” said Matt Borden, a partner with BraunHagey & Borden LLP, a firm representing the plaintiffs, in a statement about the ruling.

That said, the judges also ruled that the original injunction was “overbroad in several respects” and sent the case back down to the lower courts in order to “fashion a narrower injunction.” In particular, the opinion took issue with the fact that the restrictions also “cover non-parties” attending protests in the Los Angeles area.

“Here’s the takeaway: Keep recording,” said Adam Rose, the deputy director of advocacy at the Freedom of the Press Foundation in an video about the ruling posted on Tuesday. “This case exists because of videos, because of photos, because people documented what was happening in real time.”

A federal court recently upheld journalists’ First Amendment rights by ruling that DHS used unlawful force against reporters at LA immigration protests last year.

Watch @adamrose.bsky.social explain, and if you’re a journalist facing a press freedom violation, contact @pressfreedomtracker.us.

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— Freedom of the Press Foundation (@freedom.press) April 7, 2026 at 11:50 AM

“If you are a journalist and you can’t tell the story, you are the story,” said Rose.

Among dozens of violent incidents against journalists in L.A., the original suit included evidence that ICE officers shot a journalist in the head with a rubber bullet, leading to a concussion, and hit another journalist in the arm with a tear gas canister, causing a hematoma and burns. The plaintiffs called for specific limits on ICE’s use of force, including the assault and dispersal of journalists without cause, the use of chemical and projectile weapons on members of the press, and the firing of weapons at “heads, necks, or other sensitive areas.”

In the original opinion, judge Hernán Vera wrote that ICE’s actions “undoubtedly chill the media’s efforts to cover these public events and protestors seeking to express peacefully their views on national policies.” He also said that an injunction was necessary to “curtail the federal agents’ indiscriminate use of force targeting journalists standing far from any protest activity.”

The Southern California suit has not only set precedent for restricting ICE’s use of force against the press, but also inspired similar legal actions by U.S. press organizations. Last summer, the Chicago Headline Club led a federal suit against DHS, citing incidents of violence against members of the press, elected officials, clergy, and peaceful protesters during ICE’s Operation Midway Blitz in the city. In November 2025, a judge issued a preliminary injunction limiting ICE’s use of force in Chicago. Soon after, Border Patrol Commander Gregory Bovino pulled out of the city, and the plaintiffs voluntarily dismissed their suit.

“The retreat of DHS agents from Chicago is due in large part to the bravery of our plaintiffs and every Chicagoan who spoke up about the brutality they experienced because they exercised their First Amendment rights,” said Katie Schwartzmann, counsel at Protect Democracy, in a statement at the time.

It was technology and culture reporter Taylor Lorenz who first told news creator Vitus “V” Spehar to think of themselves as a journalist.

It was 2022 and Spehar — the 43-year-old best known for their explainers as @UndertheDeskNews on social media — was two years into explaining the news online. They were interviewing Lorenz for their podcast and initially brushed it off. “No I’m not, I’m a TikToker,” Spehar said at the time.

“She was like, ‘No, and actually, that’s irresponsible for you to say. What you are doing is journalism and you need to understand the ethics and expectations. The public thinks you’re a journalist, so you need to be one,'” Spehar recalls Lorenz telling her.

Spehar’s videos — which cover U.S. politics, policy, and culture — are conversational and easy to watch. Donning their signature glasses and sometimes a suit, they don’t shy away from playing trending music, acting, or doing a little dance to help viewers understand news events (like the firing of Department of Homeland Security head Kristi Noem.)

Today, they’re one of the most successful news creators in the industry, with nearly five million followers between TikTok and Instagram. In addition to posting daily news recap videos, Spehar also streams a live newscast on YouTube, sends out a Substack newsletter to more than 184,000 subscribers (nearly 7,000 of whom are paid), interviews politicians, and appears on cable news like CNN and MSNOW. Spehar was also a 2025 fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy.

I chatted with Spehar in February about why they first started reporting from under their desk, how they stay on top of the news cycle, and the business of being a news creator. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

“We’re not a newspaper company and we haven’t been for quite some time,” Julie Pace, executive editor and senior vice president of the AP, told the AP’s own David Bauder. While they once accounted for the majority of the AP’s revenue, big newspapers now only make up 10% of the organization’s income. That revenue has fallen by 25% over the past four years, in large part because Gannett and McClatchy, two of the largest newspaper companies in the U.S., stopped publishing AP wire content in 2024. According to Bauder, the AP had also learned that Lee Enterprises, another large newspaper publisher, was seeking an early exit from a contract that was set to expire at the end of the year.

Pace told Bauder that whether or not the company conducts layoffs will depend on how many people take the buyout. Still, Pace said, “The AP is not in trouble…We’re making these changes from a position of strength but we’re doing so now to recognize our changing customer base.” The AP will be upping its video teams, as well as adding journalists to beats “on topics of known customer interest.” It will also still have journalists in all 50 states.

Lately, the AP has been looking to tech companies for revenue (and says its revenue from such deals has grown by 200% over the last four years). It’s made deals with Google and OpenAI, and in March announced a deal to provide election data to the prediction market Kalshi. Elections in particular are a big money-maker for the AP; last year ABC, CBS, NBC, and CNN all signed up for its service providing election data.

According to the AP News Guild, the union representing AP staff, 120 people were offered buyouts. The union also said that the AP ignored a union request to bargain over artificial intelligence.

“AP continues to get rid of experienced staff and flirt with artificial intelligence” the union said in its statement, “ignoring the opportunity to differentiate AP stories as ones that are and always will be created by human journalists.”

Statement from on #AP buyouts today from the union's executive committee. @NewsMediaGuild pic.twitter.com/jB9DICuNiD

— AP News Guild (@APNewsGuild) April 6, 2026

I got my start in journalism by writing stories for the Associated Press in Curaçao.

Really sad to see the abandonment of reporting and the written word.

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— Karen Attiah (@karenattiah.bsky.social) April 6, 2026 at 1:43 PM

The Associated Press is pivoting away from… journalism. We’re well and truly cooked folks.

[image or embed]

— Meghan Herbst (@megherbst.bsky.social) April 6, 2026 at 1:40 PM

uh oh what are they gonna put in the w*shington p*st … https://t.co/pIxTb1sFia

— Caroline O'Donovan (@ceodonovan) April 6, 2026

Well, as they say on @LinkedIn, I might be really Open to Work soon! I'm still loving what I'm doing at AP, but new challenges are fun too. If you know of something that might align with my skills and interests, hit me up!https://t.co/Q1v4rKp35X

— Mike Sisak (@mikesisak) April 6, 2026

Massachusetts has some of the highest housing costs in the country. The problem is exacerbated on Cape Cod’s Outer Cape, a region that includes Provincetown, Truro, Wellfleet, and Eastham. In a community where the same one-bedroom apartment can be rented out for $2,500 per month year-round or $5,000 a week in the summer, the incentives for short-term rentals are overwhelming, leaving few to no options for young reporters whose salaries start at $45,000 a year.

This reality makes it challenging for the Provincetown Independent to attract the early-career reporters it wants to employ and train. The local weekly newspaper founded in 2019 is a for-profit, public-benefit corporation supported by a parallel nonprofit, the Local Journalism Project. Core to that nonprofit’s mission: educating, training, and financially supporting aspiring reporters. But how do you educate and train young reporters if they can’t find a place to live?

Essentially, you can’t, which is what the Local Journalism Project’s board has been learning the hard way. “We had raised money for young journalists; we had money sitting in the bank [for] young journalists,” board president Willow Shire told me. While they receive an abundance of “stellar applicants,” Shire said, without a place to live, “all of these candidates were turning [the Independent] down.” For the few who did choose to come to the Cape, the seasonal rental market meant they generally had to move multiple times a year. “We didn’t anticipate [housing] being as big a problem as it turned out to be,” Provincetown Independent co-founder and editor Ed Miller said.

Last year, the LJP board decided it needed to take a big swing. The nonprofit launched a capital campaign to raise $500,000 with the goal of purchasing a condominium to house three early-career Provincetown Independent reporters.

It exceeded its goal in two months, and purchased the three-bed, three-bath property in October for just under $1.5 million, making a cash down payment of $448,500 and taking out a $1,046,500 mortgage. Three reporters moved in within weeks; they pay 30% of their salaries as rent, well below market rate.

More than a century after the heyday of company towns, employer-owned and assisted housing is part of the policy landscape in other communities where people struggle to work where they live. On the Outer Cape, from restaurants to healthcare, “housing is a conversation for every business out here,” said Local Journalism Project executive director Janet Lesniak. The Local Journalism Project had previously taken a page from the Cape Cod Baseball League’s book to set up homestays for its seasonal fellows. Other newspapers in the broader region are also getting proactive about providing housing for their reporters; the Vineyard Gazette, on Martha’s Vineyard, advertises its new fellowship as including housing in “a furnished, well-appointed two-bedroom guest house.” But taking out a mortgage to buy a standalone condo is a strikingly bold investment in making local journalism accessible to young reporters.

“We did not expect to be in the housing business; we didn’t particularly want to be in the housing business,” Shire said. “But it is in the critical path of the mission. So here we are…We determined the need, we raised the funds, we found the properties, and we are teaching young journalists what a circuit breaker is.”

What makes a successful capital campaign?

The capital campaign brought in donations from close to 100 local individuals and family foundations; gifts ranged from $10 to $150,000. On top of reaching its goal — thanks in part to large donations from board members — the campaign attracted “a significant number of new donors,” Lesniak said. Some donors were longtime subscribers or seasonal readers, and others were inspired by the mission of educating and investing in young journalists. And, Miller said, “there’s a certain kind of donor who really prefers to give money for something concrete, brick and mortar.”

To Miller, the campaign’s success was, in part, a testament to the Indie and LJP’s years of work communicating the importance of local journalism, and explaining their own unusual structure. After six years operating the newspaper as a hybrid for-profit in relationship with a separate nonprofit, the community had gotten used to both paying for the newspaper via subscriptions or newsstand purchases and supporting its public service function with donations to the nonprofit. “In the early years, it was sometimes hard to explain to people” why the newspaper was asking for both sources of support, he recalled. “But we don’t get those questions anymore. I think people really get it.”

“We were stunned” by the success of the capital campaign, Miller said. But he also attributed its success to a shared understanding of the challenge of year-round housing for young people on the Cape, which “has been kind of the number-one topic of concern and civic debate for a while now — the whole community is really aware of what a problem it is and how important it is to have younger people able to live here and work here.”

“So the project made sense to people,” he said. (It occurred to me that this campaign, by tapping into such a relatable local issue, maybe even humanized the Indie’s journalists.)

One (home) leads to another

Not only did the Local Journalism Project reach its fundraising goal and purchase the condo; a community member (and friend of Shire’s) has since agreed to donate an additional three-bedroom home in Eastham to the nonprofit.

While this home needs to be gutted and renovated after not being maintained for the last 20 to 25 years, Shire is taking advantage of local community networks and philanthropic spirit to complete the renovations for “an amazingly small amount of money,” which she said has already been raised (she expects the total price tag to come in under $100,000, including a new roof).

Specifically, Shire’s partner, Jaime DaLomba, is serving as the pro bono project manager; she said he’s been working on the renovations seven days per week. A welder born in Provincetown, DaLomba has leveraged the depth and breadth of his connections with other local craftspeople to convince others to donate time and basics like paint. The renovations only began in January, but Shire said progress is on track to have the home move-in ready by June 1.

“You need to be embedded in your community at all levels — we’re embedded with the local tradespeople, the lobstermen, the local painters, the local Ace Hardware store owner,” Shire said. “Your donors are critical — we have two really big donors, and we couldn’t do it without them. But we also couldn’t do it without Jaime, who quit school in 10th grade and is a welder. So you need everybody.”

“Very lucky timing”

Jack Styler‘s path to the Provincetown Independent was, in some ways, unlikely. He’s from Milwaukee, and did not study journalism. But after graduating he moved to Kazakhstan, where he did some blogging. Clips from that blog helped him get an internship at The American Prospect in Washington, D.C., and an editor there helped connect him with the Provincetown Independent. He joined as a staff reporter in June of 2024. Last month, his stories covered everything from Flock camera surveillance to a Pedicab cap bylaw to the deaths of two fishermen after a scallop boat capsized.

On the Cape, Styler’s first living arrangement consisted of sharing the second floor of a house with two other reporters; the first floor was a short-term rental, but the Local Journalism Project leased the second floor, three-bedroom apartment “on a longer-term basis.” He left the Indie for a yearlong Fulbright in Latvia, but returned as a reporter last summer. Between August and October, he bounced from a room in a house in Wellfleet, where he lived with a retired couple, to a guest house available for about a month in the same town. Then the Local Journalism Project closed on the condo.

“I moved in right away, because I was going to be without housing,” Styler said — he needed to move out of the guest house the same week the Local Journalism Project closed. “So it was very lucky timing.” He moved in with no furniture, and slept on an air mattress. It’s his first time living in a house with his own bathroom.

I commented that bouncing around that frequently sounded exhausting. “I think that out here, it just is the reality for so many people that it wasn’t an unexpected thing that I would have to jump between a few housing situations before getting permanent housing,” he said. “That’s pretty typical out here…Housing is probably the number one issue for people of all types, all walks of life on the Outer Cape. Young reporters at the Indie have definitely experienced that as well.”

Two other reporters, his roommates, moved in a couple weeks later — one a new staffer, the other someone he’d overlapped with in the summer of 2024. They were able to furnish the house quickly with donations.

Living in the condo has put the reporters, board members, and other Indie staff on intimate terms. For instance, when the lock on the bathroom door didn’t work, Styler told me Shire helped teach him to reattach the strike plate so it could lock.

“That was the moment I realized, ‘oh, right, we actually own this house,'” Styler said. “We’re able to make normal renovations, easy renovations, ourselves. And that felt kind of empowering, because…Instead of a faceless corporate entity, like so many landlords I’ve rented from, these are people who are doing this because they want to support the work that we do, and are also being helpful in a million different ways.”

Indeed, board members are on call for everything from installing a mailbox to troubleshooting a plugged drain, Shire told me. (She confirmed she showed Styler how to use a wood chisel and screw gun to fix that bathroom door; he emailed her when he successfully used the screw gun to fix the rickety top of a table missing its screws.) Styler, his roommates, and Indie staff worked together to install blinds for the first time.

The home, Styler said, is in the heart of Provincetown. That’s ideal for the local reporters.

“I think it’s super important for us to live where we live, which is right smack in the middle of Provincetown,” he said. The town “can get pretty quiet during the winter, but if there’s anything going on, our house is both not super loud, but pretty much in the middle of things, which is really, really helpful for a local reporter.”

The condo purchase, Styler added, helps him “envision a longer-term tenure at the Indie.” If you’re moving at least twice a year, he reflected, every time you move is a natural “hinge point” where you might question whether the lifestyle is sustainable and consider not just moving elsewhere on the Cape, but pursuing a different opportunity.

“I think that the idea that the Local Journalism Project actually owns this house, and that as long as I continue to do good work as a journalist and they’re happy with what I’m doing, that I should have stable housing here, is a real relief,” he said, “and kind of takes away those hinge points where you’re naturally looking for other opportunities to work other places or move other places.”

The new four-year agreement guarantees a 32.5% increase to the minimum salary for reporters, more paid time off, and journalists’ input on the use of artificial intelligence. Here’s what the contract announcement says about AI:

Provisions on use of generative artificial intelligence that include:

• At least 60 days notice to the Guild of intention to use a new generative AI system that will have a meaningful impact on terms and conditions of employment of bargaining unit employees in their performance of their work
• The ability for the Guild to negotiate effects of AI introduction, enhanced severance of four additional weeks per year of service (and a minimum of 12 weeks) for layoffs directly and primarily due to the use of generative artificial intelligence
• Ability to withhold byline or raise ethical objection to use of AI in an employee’s work
• The creation of a committee made up of Guild members and VTDigger staff members who are not in the Guild to make recommendations for the organization’s AI usage policy. The policy will include an editorial review process to determine which editorial content is subject to the policy and an acknowledgement that generative AI tools do not adequately substitute for human judgment in the creation, distribution and promotion of journalism.

A story published Thursday by The Boston Globe reports that VTDigger is struggling. CEO Sky Barsch is leaving after three years on the job, along with editor-in-chief Geeta Anand, who joined last year. VTDigger brought in $2.7 million in revenue in 2024, and increased that number by roughly 10% in 2025, Globe media reporter Aidan Ryan writes, but ” has been operating in the red since just before its founder left in 2022, and the chief executive who succeeded her is now leaving. Meanwhile, VTDigger is in the market for its third top editor in just over a year after a bruising contract negotiation with the newsroom union.” VT Digger has more than 9,000 paying members.

“The current mishegas, stemming from acrimonious contract negotiations with Digger’s union over the usual (pay and benefits) as well as how AI will and won’t be used, is a consequence of what sounds like a poisonous relationship between the two sides,” media analyst Dan Kennedy wrote Thursday.

While Barsch told Ryan she isn’t leaving because of what happened at the bargaining table, “there were hard moments.” Meanwhile, the piece cites “a number of reasons for [Anand’s] departure, including the challenging contract negotiations, Barsch’s decision to leave, and a health issue that she had been dealing with.”

Digger founder Anne Galloway — who left the nonprofit in 2022 — was more candid. “If the guild continues to be unreasonable like this, news organizations like Digger will go out of business,” Galloway told Ryan. “It’s going to be hard to attract good leadership with the kind of antagonisms that have become so endemic to the organization.”

According to the Globe, negotiations became tense when the guild started publicly campaigning for AI protections. Per Ryan:

Amid the fight, a Reddit post called on people to “target” Barsch, editor Geeta Anand, and VTDigger board members, according to Galloway and Kevin Ellis, a former Vermont Journalism Trust member.

“When you’re using that kind of language in a Trump environment, that’s frightening,” Ellis said in an interview. (The word “target” was later changed, Vermont’s Seven Days reported.)

Norm Welsh, administrator of the Providence News Guild, which represents unionized VTDigger employees, maintained that the talks were “relatively smooth.”

“I think it was a normal course of negotiations,” Welsh said. “I don’t think anything was meant personally.”

The VTDigger Guild is the latest newsroom union to push back on companies’ embrace of AI. Last month, the ProPublica Guild voted to authorize the first U.S. newsroom strike over AI protections. In November, an arbitrator found that Politico violated its contract with its unionized journalists when it rolled out two AI-powered editorial products. As of last month, 58 newsroom unions under the NewsGuild had some form of AI protections in their contracts.

Read the full story in The Boston Globe here.

That’s an amount that few people are willing to pay. There are some initiatives that do things differently, like the publication Flaming Hydra, which has 65 contributing members — and looks more and more like a magazine, complete with print editions for top-tier subscribers — and the app Noosphere, which Hanaa’ wrote about last year. But the true holy grail of newsletters, the thing that would give readers the closest thing to a bespoke magazine without making them pay full price for a bunch of individual subscriptions, is the bundle.

“Whoever figures out a way to bundle independent journalism subscriptions will be a hero,” independent journalist Marisa Kabas, author of The Handbasket, wrote on Bluesky in February.

Last week, Kabas followed up with an announcement. “Exciting news,” she wrote. “We’ve finally found a way to do a paid indie media bundle so you don’t have to separately subscribe to so many newsletters.”

Kabas had teamed up with Katelyn Burns, author of Burns Notice, and Kat Tenbarge, author of Spitfire News, to offer a 30-day bundle of all three newsletters, allowing readers to access them with a one-time $8.50 transaction — half the price of paying for all three individually.

The idea had been percolating for a while. A few months earlier, Kabas had heard from Michaël Jarjour, an ex-Twitter partner manager and co-founder of Trustfnd, a new service that allows independent journalists to create newsletter bundles and tap into each other’s audience bases. “I wasn’t able to give the idea much energy while I focused on my work and business,” Kabas told me in an email, but it was certainly something she was interested in. The discussion was revived in February, when Burns told her she’d been talking to Jarjour about launching the first paid subscription bundle. Burns, Kabas told me, was “foundational to making this happen.”

Trustfnd (pronounced “trust fund”) solved a key technical problem for Kabas, Burns, and Tenbarge: Their publishing platforms (The Handbasket and Spitfire News are on Beehiiv, and Burns Notice is powered by Ghost) don’t have a built-in way to create a bundle of any sort, whether cross-platform or on a single platform. This is true across newsletter services; Substack and Patreon also do not offer bundles.

This is partly by design. “We’ve always talked about doing this, but it gets pretty messy and complicated if the entities in the bundle aren’t actually a part of the same company,” Tyler Denk, CEO of Beehiiv, told me in an email. He outlined some potential concerns:

• What if person A drives 10x more signups than person B and person C, do they all split evenly?
• What if person C decides they no longer want to be a part of the bundle, do they take those subscriptions with them? If so, what price do they pay?
• If a reader subscribes to the bundle but primarily engages with only one newsletter, who “owns” that subscriber for purposes of future direct communication, re-engagement campaigns, or list sales?
• What if person C grows dramatically mid-bundle and wants to reprice their standalone? They’re now locked into a bundle price that undervalues them.
• What if one newsletter in the bundle publishes something controversial that creates reputational blowback for the others?

“There’s a bunch of other complications, but the concept itself I think is interesting,” he said. “It’s worth thinking on a bit more, but I do think a lot of these people are going to run into future issues with the bundle.”

Alex Kisielewski, Vice President of Partnerships and Business Development at Ghost, told me over email that bundles are “definitely on our radar,” and that Ghost has seen an uptick in requests for bundle support over the last six months. “Independent journalists are looking for ways to collaborate more, whether that be sharing audiences, co-publishing, or pooling resources,” he continued, but “there’s no getting around the fact that it’s complicated.” He echoed some of Denk’s concerns about billing and subscriber management, as well as technical challenges around access control. “We’re watching this space, and I’m glad the folks at Trustfnd are building specifically in this space,” he said.

Trustfnd works by tapping into Ghost and Beehiiv’s APIs. Independent journalists connect their newsletters to their Trustfnd accounts, and then connect their Trustfnd account with the accounts of whomever they want to team up with for a bundle. “It’s like a network effect as a service,” Jarjour told me over email. “We want them to stay independent entities but move like one when it comes to growing their owned audience.”

Bundling, Jarjour told me, allows newsletters to grow faster and more cheaply because each newsletter can tap into a shared audience funnel; readers who subscribe to The Handbasket, for example, will now be exposed to Burns Notice and Spitfire News. (Existing subscribers of each newsletter also get discounts on the bundle, adjusted according to which newsletter — each of which has a different individual subscription price — they subscribe to.)

“Turning followers (you rent) into subscribers (you own) is a collective challenge for journalism,” Jarjour wrote. “That’s why I felt the solution needs to have a collaborative element as well.”

And, he said, “I had some money on the side because I got fired from a fancy tech job by a lunatic who hates journalism [Jarjour left Twitter in February 2023, five months after Elon Musk took over]. So I wanted to build something I believe will make journalism stronger against even its worst enemies.”

Ghost and Beehiiv are the only platforms that currently support paid bundles — Trustfnd currently offers 30-, 60-, or 90-day bundles, and the Kabas/Burns/Tenbarge bundle is currently just for the first month, although Kabas said she would “definitely be supportive of a year-long trial.” Ghost and Beehiiv were easy to integrate with because they are open platforms, but Jarjour said he and his cofounder, René Pfitzner, who was previously the CEO of an ecommerce platform, are starting talks with closed platforms (such as Substack and Patreon) to integrate with them as well.

Trustfnd is currently in beta, and free for journalists to use, but plans to charge a fee (which they are currently trying to figure out) rather than take a cut of revenue. In the near term, Jarjour said he hopes to grow Trustfnd by building out bundles and creating a service for “legacy brands to get in on the action by building networks of independent journalists around their brands.”

“Our longer term vision is to enable independent entities to move like one when that is useful,” He continued. “So they can grow, earn, and spend money together. Like a new kind of news organization.”

This story has been updated to include comment from Ghost.

“Starting in May, all newly published stories on sltrib.com and in the app will be free to read — no subscription required,” wrote CEO and executive editor Lauren Gustus in a note to subscribers.

We’ve been telling you about this shift for a while now — this Sarah story from September, this Sophie story from October, and this Hanaa’ story from November. The Tribune is in a unique position among American newspapers, having converted to nonprofit status in 2019. In the years since, it’s achieved financial stability and had the space to think about some foundational questions: What should a nonprofit newspaper look like? What does it owe to a community that a for-profit might not?

One answer: It wouldn’t limit access to quality local news to people willing or able to pay. “We believe trusted, independent journalism is a right — not a luxury,” Gustus writes. “And at a time when misinformation spreads faster than ever, expanding access isn’t just important — it’s necessary.”

Here’s how it will work: When the switch is pulled in May, current digital subscribers will be converted to monthly donors at the same level. (The base rate for a digital subscription is currently $10/month.) The paper says it’ll make it easy for current subscribers to opt out, but I’m guessing most people will keep paying — hey, now it’ll be tax-deductible.

Those who transition to regular donors will get to keep a few exclusive benefits: the ability to comment on stories and the e-edition (still a surprisingly powerful draw for many iPad-wielding ex-print subscribers). They’ll also have exclusive access to older stories; it’s only newly published stories from May on that will be free to all.

How will they pull it off? In 2025, the Tribune made about $2.6 million in digital subscription revenue — about 20% of total revenue. That’s about to go to $0. The goal is to make that up with additional donations, which will obviously depend on how many current subscribers will be happy to continue being charged for a (mostly) free product. A limited test the paper ran found that 87% of subscribers stuck around as donors after being told they’d be getting the news for free. (The Tribune received a $1 million pledge from a local couple for the transition, with a 1.5× match that has been met.)

As a nonprofit, The Salt Lake Tribune is in a meaningfully different position than most American newspapers. But I think there’s a potential lesson for for-profit papers, too. At this late stage in the decline of the newspaper business model, a lot of digital subscribers are paying for civic reasons at least as much as practical ones. Salt Lake City’s metro area, defined broadly, has about 2.7 million people. As of last fall, the Tribune had 32,166 digital subscribers and 7,716 print subscribers — only about 1.5% of the market. It’s hard to build a “mass” media company on those numbers, but they can support a civic institution. Patronage isn’t just for Patreon.

Press Gazette reported that the move is part of the publication’s multi-year transformation plan, Project Berger, which aims to make The Guardian “more visual, digital, and experimental.”

Feast is one of almost 60 newsletter offerings from The Guardian, per Press Gazette. The food newsletter has more than 100,000 subscribers and open rates close to 70%.

The Guardian’s head of newsletters, Toby Moses, told Press Gazette that he saw food reporting as a natural starting point for The Guardian’s Substack foray given the strength of its own coverage and the platform’s “thriving” food scene. Some of The Guardian’s individual food writers already have their own Substack newsletters.

The Guardian is just the latest publication to experiment with Substack; The Financial Times and The Economist recently launched Substack newsletters, Press Gazette notes. New York Magazine began publishing on Substack last spring; Consumer Reports revived its 1940s-era print newsletter on the platform last November.

Read more in Press Gazette’s story here.

The site’s most successful stories in January were a very Colorado mix: a dispute over clearing forest land to build a road to 19 proposed luxury homes; a solo hiker killed by two yearling mountain lions; an Air Force captain setting a skydiving-in-formation world record (104 people!); and a local lawyer’s proposal to rename dozens of Colorado mountains. (Many of them to light-related names — ROYGBIV Peak! — and seven to each of the deadly sins. Damned Colorado bureaucrats, denying the people the chance to climb Lust Peak.)

This is the latest installment in our regular look at web traffic at the nation’s nonprofit news sites — a group which, for our purposes, is defined as the nonprofit members of the trade groups LION Publishers and the Institute for Nonprofit News.

January was a good month; the 100 most-popular nonprofit news sites totaled 72.1 million visits in January, up from 64.6 million in December. 70 of December’s top 100 saw traffic increase in January. Some of the biggest gainers included Columbus’ Matter News (up 297%), Illinois’ Lansing Journal (up 261%), Sahan Journal (up 181%; it was also the biggest traffic gainer in Q4 2025), Oaklandside (up 115%), Mississippi Today (up 113%), and The Texas Observer (up 114%)

Here’s January’s Top 25, followed by some additional detail on what worked well that month for The War Horse (up 238% over December), National Parks Traveler (up 75%), Votebeat (up 236%), and inewsource (up 211%).

The War Horse

The War Horse, which covers the U.S. military and veterans’ issues, saw its traffic jump 238% from December to January, from about 90,000 visits to 306,000. Hrisanthi Pickett, the site’s audience engagement editor, attributed the increase to a January 14 personal essay by an Army colonel reflecting on his retirement. (“The morning after my retirement ceremony, I opened the closet and stared…Who am I now, without the uniform?”)

“We did not do anything different when it came to publishing or promoting the story,” Pickett said. “The story found its own audience in private messaging groups (i.e., WhatsApp, Telegram). This was a bit frustrating to track.” The traffic uptick lasted about a week, and while it led to new newsletter subscribers and followers on social, the relative opacity of messaging platforms has made it difficult to replicate the success, she said.

National Parks Traveler

January traffic to National Parks Traveler was up 76% month-over-month, jumping from 113,000 to 198,000 visits. Editor-in-chief Kurt Repanshek said, unsurprisingly, that the Trump administration’s impacts on the National Park Service have been a major driver of interest. Two January stories stood out. One was this piece on an internal NPS email saying that placing a sticker over Trump’s face on your National Parks pass could invalidate it.

The other was this piece on Donna Shaver, one of the world’s preeminent experts on sea turtle conservation, being forced to resign her position at the Padre Island National Seashore after being critical of cuts to conservation programs. “This has been an ongoing story for some years, and there is great interest in how Shaver is being treated by the NPS,” Repanshek said. “I believe the story broke on a Saturday morning, and by Monday it had been viewed by more than 100,000.”

Votebeat

Votebeat had a banner January, with visits spiking 236% from December, from roughly 21,000 to 72,000 visits. (Those Similarweb estimates line up pretty well with Votebeat’s internal visits numbers, which were 22,957 and 88,903, respectively.) Lauren Aguirre, the site’s growth and community editor, pointed to this piece on a Wisconsin court battle over absentee voting (a hit on Google Discover) and this one on whether Trump can cancel the midterms (did well in search). About 30% of Votebeat’s traffic now comes from search, “a meaningful increase compared with our early years as a newsroom,” she told me.

inewsource

inewsource, the stalwart (if frustratingly uncapitalized) local news site in San Diego, saw its visits increase about 211% in January, going from about 36,000 to 111,000 in Similarweb’s estimate. Giovanni Moujaes, the site’s assistant editor for audience and innovations, said it’s seen “a pretty considerable traffic boost from Google Discover and other Google properties” over the past year. One area they’re investing in: Nextdoor. (“While not a large source of web audience yet, our Nextdoor community continues to grow, with two of our reporters regularly engaging with users on the platform.”)

In a new “policy advisory opinion,” the Board expressed concerns about how effective Community Notes would be in a litany of circumstances, “including in repressive human rights regimes, in particular electoral contexts and in ongoing crisis and conflict situations.” Overall, the Board warned that expanding Community Notes outside the U.S. could “pose significant human rights risks and contribute to tangible harms that Meta has a responsibility to avoid or remedy.”

In January 2025, Meta announced it was getting rid of its fact-checking program in the U.S. Launched a decade ago, the program relied on a network of third-party fact-checkers to verify content and flag disinformation. These partnerships with news and civil society organizations have been essential to the platform’s moderation practices on Meta, Instagram, and Threads.

In place of proper fact-checkers, Meta has rolled out Community Notes in the U.S., which rely on crowdsourced, user-generated footnotes to label content that is false or misleading. The decision coincided with the beginning of the second Trump administration and an explosion of AI-generated imagery on Meta’s platforms.

While Community Notes started stateside, the company also announced last year that it has plans to expand the program globally. That’s where the Oversight Board has stepped in. The Board was asked by Meta last fall to review whether certain countries or territories should be omitted from the expansion, and issue more general recommendations on the global rollout.

In addition to cautioning Meta from using Community Notes in the many countries worldwide that meet its criteria for concern, the Board also outlined several structural problems in the Community Notes model. For one, it creates little incentive not to post false or misleading content. The Board found in its review that there are “no strikes for posting content that receives a community note,” and more tellingly, there are no punitive effects on reach or monetization of posts.

The Board also found that crowdsourcing moderation would inevitably “privilege dominant political, ethnic, or minority groups.” It’s a concern that should not be taken lightly given the company’s past complicity in the genocide of minority groups in Myanmar and Ethiopia through failures to moderate hateful content. Back in 2018, Facebook apologized for its role in “offline violence” in Myanmar.

“Delays in note publication, the limited number of published notes and its dependence on the broader information environment’s reliability raise serious doubts about the extent to which community notes can meaningfully address misinformation linked to harm,” wrote the board.

The Board stopped short of recommending that Meta end the Community Notes program entirely, instead writing that more “sufficient testing and detailed data” would be required for an evaluation. Regardless, it is worth noting that Meta is not legally required to comply with any of the Board’s recommendations, and that it has only implemented them in about 75% of cases.

The Board’s opinion has already put some renewed pressure on Meta to halt its global Community Notes rollout, and even to restore its fact-checking program in the U.S.

“The Oversight Board advises Meta not to expand community notes in countries and contexts that are particularly fraught, because community notes can be manipulated by large groups,” Angie Drobnic Holan, the director of the International Fact-Checking Network (and a 2023 Nieman Fellow) wrote in a post on Poynter. “Isn’t the United States today a place experiencing one or more of those conditions?”

In the first six months of its U.S. rollout, Meta’s chief information security officers said that its platforms have only published 900 Community Notes. By comparison, Holan notes that in the same period across the E.U., professional fact-checkers helped Meta apply labels on roughly 35 million Facebook posts.

“Meta should restore professional fact-checking for the benefit of the American public, and it should do it before the next election cycle,” she wrote.

You can read the full Oversight Board advisory opinion here.