Nieman Lab

Publishers pressure Meta to nix new terms that would let the company scrape their websites

Hanaa' Tameez — Thu, 22 Oct 2026 19:26:54 +0000

The largest news publishing trade association in the United States is calling on Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to suspend the implementation of the company’s new commercial terms of service, set to go into effect on October 30.

In an open letter to Zuckerberg published Thursday, News/Media Alliance’s president and CEO Danielle Coffey wrote that Meta should “withdraw these terms and should hold discussions around future changes with NMA and publishers.”

The terms, first reported by Nieman Lab on October 15, would allow for the mass scraping of websites “associated with” business accounts on Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Threads. There is currently no option to opt out. On October 16, Meta removed the word “train” from its terms and limited the use of future scraped content to “advertising and business products.” But legal experts told Nieman Lab the revised terms would still permit mass scraping.

“News publishers will be forced into providing their valuable journalism to support the development of products that may be used to compete with them for readers and advertisers, under duress and without compensation,” Coffey said in her letter. “It is wholly unreasonable for the mere use of a Meta business account to require publishers to grant unrestricted access to their websites (and even content posted by their users), for the benefit of Meta to develop its business products.”

NMA represents more than 2,000 news publishers in the United States. The discussions, Coffey said, should focus on four core issues:

Meanwhile, publishers’ and media advocates’ concerns about the new terms of service are mounting in Europe.

On Thursday morning, the Movement for an Open Web (MOW) — a U.K. nonprofit organization that advocates for an accessible internet — filed formal complaints with the U.K. Competition and Markets Authority and the European Commission’s Directorate General for Competition, calling the terms “unfair,” and “exploitative” and saying they “threaten to cause immediate and irreparable harm to businesses.”

“The terms go live in a few days’ time, and once they’re in force the damage will be done — you can’t unscrape that content,” said Tim Cowen, a MOW cofounder.

MOW’s complaints follow comments from CMA executive director for digital markets Will Hayter, who said during a parliamentary committee session on Tuesday that he had sent a letter to Meta and scheduled a meeting with company representatives to learn more about the terms. In Germany, the German Association of Free Press and the Federal Association of Digital Publishers also sent a joint letter to the European Commission, calling on the institution to block the new terms from going into effect until it conducted a complete review.

On Wednesday, four European press associations — the European Magazine Media Association, the European Newspaper Publishers’ Association, the European Press Council, and News Media Europe — sent a joint letter to the European Commission and its heads of technology and competition. The letter, viewed by Nieman Lab, claims that Meta’s new terms violate the European Union’s Digital Markets Act, a law passed in 2020 to curb the dominance of big tech companies and create fairer competition across the region.

The joint letter calls on the Commission to block the terms from “taking effect in their current wording — or in any wording producing identical or similar effects — to safeguard publishers’ rights.”

“Publishers, whose content has long been subject to sweeping unfair and unlawful exploitation by dominant gatekeepers, including for AI-related purposes, thus face an unacceptable choice: abandon a key distribution channel or consent to the exploitation of their professional content without negotiation, licensing and remuneration,” the letter reads. “These conditions could also undermine publishers’ rights in ongoing or future AI-related legal proceedings.”

The Association of Information Media (AMI) in Spain, which represents more than 100 news outlets in the country, echoed its support of the letter in a statement on Thursday.

“Technological innovation and the development of artificial intelligence cannot come at the expense of content creators’ rights or the economic viability of professional journalism,” the AMI statement reads in part. “Defending publishers’ rights does not mean hindering innovation, but rather ensuring that it develops while respecting the law, competition, and media pluralism.”

Read the full News/Media Alliance letter here.

The Ringer bets on Substack’s network over its own website

Sarah Scire — Thu, 22 Oct 2026 19:13:23 +0000

“Very interesting that The Ringer’s writers write on Substack and not…The Ringer.” “What’s the point of the website then?” “Hold up. You’re telling me The Ringer would rather make money on writing than not make money on writing?”

These were some of the responses after The Ringer’s Zach Lowe announced his new newsletter. The Lowe Post, which covers the NBA, joins The Ringer’s Sean Fennessey, Tom Pelissero, and Bryan Curtis on Substack. (The Lowe Post is $10 a month, and has already become one of Substack’s bestselling sports newsletters. Fennessey’s newsletter is $5 a month; Pelissero’s is $8 a month, and Curtis’s is free.)

Though podcasting has been his main gig for a while now, Zach Lowe is one of the best sports writers in the country — witty, warm-hearted, and a true lover of basketball and the Mets. In his inaugural newsletter, he wrote about how he feels his sports analysis loses a step when he’s only talking, not writing.

On the one hand, of course Lowe should have a newsletter. But his Substack, and those of his colleagues, are not independent side hustles. Each has Spotify and The Ringer branding.

As a digital media business, The Ringer has always been flexible and opportunistic. It was initially published on Medium when it launched in 2016. The publication moved to an ad and tech partnership with Vox in 2017. It was acquired by Spotify for $250 million in 2020 and, five years later, signed a distribution deal with Netflix to bring some of its video podcasts (including The Bill Simmons Show, The Zach Lowe Show, and The Rewatchables) to the platform. The website has always been free to read.

The Ringer declined to comment on its Substack strategy and would not tell me whether the writers receive a share of subscription revenue. (The lack of comment has garnered its own press coverage.) Though The Ringer has referred to the new newsletters as being in “partnership” with Substack, there’s no separate financial relationship between the two companies, Substack confirmed.

If you find this a little strange, you’re not wrong. The Substack-Ringer whatever-this-is is a confusing move that is raising a lot of very 2026 questions. Here are some things I’m wondering.

Why is The Ringer giving up on its own website?

While Grantland — the beloved sports writing site created by Ringer founder Bill Simmons in 2011 and shuttered by ESPN in 2015 — was known for its long-form journalism, The Ringer is all-in on podcasts. Simmons jokes on nearly every episode of his own show that his “fingers stopped working” years ago and that his days writing columns are behind him.

Today, most of the links on The Ringer’s homepage will bring you somewhere else. The homepage’s function is closer to a landing page or linktree than a news website. Many links redirect to Spotify, where listeners can watch or listen to Ringer podcasts. Now, with the newsletter launches, several links whisk you off The Ringer and over to Substack.

Burned by Facebook and forever-shifting algorithmic winds, many publishers have focused on building on their own channels in recent years. The theory is that direct-to-reader news products like newsletters, apps, and events will help publishers control audience connections and insulate them from inevitable platform pivots.

But though Substack was once synonymous with independent writers, its perks are luring more and more established publications onto the platform. Some, like The Ringer, are sharing Substack-exclusive content. Others, like New York magazine and The Wall Street Journal, are redistributing work that exists elsewhere on the internet.

One major pull? Substack has morphed into a full-on social media platform, albeit one where publishers can directly monetize and capture email addresses for themselves.

In the past six months, the app has generated nearly 800,000 paid subscriptions, according to Substack, and more than half of those subscriptions came directly from its Twitter-like Notes feed. Network effects account for more than half of all subscriptions on the platform and about 30% of paid subscriptions, a spokesperson said.

Substack offers publishers another major perk: little friction when signing up or converting to a paid subscription. I subscribed to The Lowe Post with a single click. I didn’t have to fill out my credit card info or even my email address — since I’m a paying subscriber to other Substacks, it was a seamless transaction.

Media journalist Simon Owens has been tracking the rise of traditional media outlets on Substack (on Substack, naturally).

“I’d compare The Ringer’s strategy to publishers producing native content for YouTube,” Owens said. “The company recognizes that Substack has its own audience ecosystem, and it may be easier to convert users into subscribers directly on the platform than to convince them to visit The Ringer’s website.”

“What’s more, these payments are facilitated through The Ringer’s own Stripe account, so in the worst case scenario it could easily move its subscribers over to its website if it decides to abandon Substack,” he added. “So I think there’s little downside.”

Is this a bad omen for the open web?

“Open web” is an ill-defined concept. Sometimes people use it to mean the public portion of the internet that’s indexable by search engines. Others mean, basically, websites — anything you can reach on a web browser at a URL. Whatever the semantics, people have been shoveling dirt on “the open web” for years. (This New York Times obituary noting the rise of paywalls, apps, and tiers of access was published back in 2010.) But the death notices have picked up with the rise of AI.

Google Search referrals to publisher websites are down 40.2% year over year, according to Chartbeat. And AI chatbots are not sending users to news sites. Referrals from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and the like were just 0.01% of traffic to publishers and declining, Chartbeat found.

Even before it was acquired by Spotify, The Ringer’s primary business was podcasts, so it’s never been as reliant on search as text-first publishers. The Ringer can afford to deprioritize its website more than most. But all kinds of publishers are having to respond to a real shift in the way people consume news and content.

What does this mean for other publishers?

Kendall Baker, senior writer and head of newsletters for Yahoo Sports, knows a thing or two about email newsletters. He says The Ringer’s move exemplifies a news consumption trend that’s only picking up speed.

“Most people’s general way of finding information or consuming information online is that they’re opening their phone and going straight to a social media app and starting to scroll,” Baker said.

Another app that most U.S. adults open up every day? Their email.

“If I want an engaged audience on a daily basis, relying on them coming to find me versus going to them would be silly — and it’s becoming more and more silly,” he said. “I think that’s partially what’s driving this. Newsletters are an obvious solution there.”

The Ringer’s move is also a bet on the strength of individual personalities. Substack doesn’t (yet) offer bundles, so a reader who wants all of The Ringer’s paid Substack content will have to fork over something like $23/month — more than a subscription to New York magazine or Apple News and a little less than a full New York Times bundle. Even with the strong parasocial relationships The Ringer enjoys — enough to fuel many, many subreddits — the pricing was a common complaint online.

Many publishers will not want to cannibalize pricier subscriptions by selling access to a single popular writer. Offering a whole-site subscription also lets readers discover (and hopefully fall in love with!) more of your content.

“It seems in the Substack era, you’re writing for people who really like you,” Simmons said on a recent podcast about sportswriting. “And you’re getting that audience but then, how do you pull other people in? That’s going to be the big question over the next five to 10 years.”

“Obviously we have a lot of writing on The Ringer dot com that we’re very proud of,” Simmons added, pointing to a NFL Take-O-Meter piece by The Ringer’s Austin Gayle. “But will it ever be like 2011 again? I don’t know.”

“You mean, when we launched Grantland?” The Ringer’s Bryan Curtis asked.

“No, just that era. How many writers were coming up — the energy behind it, and all the different styles,” Simmons said. “I wonder if we’ll ever have that many writers again trying that many different things.”

In the AI age, publishers who understand what readers want will do best, a new report argues

Laura Hazard Owen — Thu, 22 Oct 2026 15:23:35 +0000

AI inverts the traditional journalism hierarchy: Instead of reporters gathering information, editors deciding how to present it, and newsrooms releasing the same final story to everyone, AI agents deliver what readers ask for, refining or expanding on information as requested.

It’s “an interactive process in a way the current news system isn’t,” write the authors of “The Three-Layer Cake: Public-Interest Information in an AI-Intermediated Age,” released Wednesday by the Tow-Knight Center for Journalism Futures at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY. (The cake’s three layers are “the products that identify what people want to know, the systems that synthesize answers, and the organizations that produce the underlying reporting.”)

Some interesting ideas from the report by Gina Chua and Adiel Kaplan:

This new age may be better for some readers. The authors write:

There are people the old system never reached, or never reached well. A parent who hears of school budget cuts may want to know if their child’s elementary school art class will survive. No newsroom would assign that story. It matters to a handful of families whose children attend a single school, and the exact answer is uncertain. A well-designed AI system could pull together what is known from reporting and context and offer a nuanced response — fulfilling an information need that previously did not have enough economic power to be met directly.

Similarly, minority communities whose concerns didn’t rise to the level of interest of a city newspaper might have rarely seen their perspectives reflected in coverage in the past. Coverage in the mainstream media of the AIDS epidemic in the early 1980s was often focused on the risk to the heterosexual population rather than on the gay community it ravaged. An AI system that can access information from and about underserved communities could rectify that.

Publishers opting out could make the information environment worse. If news organizations seek to prevent AI from using their content, they may contribute to a poorer “information commons,” the authors argue. It “works as a strategy for individual organizations, but cedes the broader mission of providing information to the vast majority of the public to others who may not have the public’s interests at heart.”

Scoops and exclusives are a “luxury” — and they’re losing value fast.

Even a pivot to investigative reporting, as important a public good as that is, is not necessarily a solution. Much of investigative journalism is summarizable once it is published, even if the original story breaks important news and is a delight to read. As Francesco Marconi noted, a multi-month investigation could cost a newsroom $200,000 in resources, then drop in economic value to close to zero within minutes of publication. Both investigations and scoops can have huge social value and help build a brand, but economically, they provide little lasting value to their newsrooms — and even less so in an AI-intermediated landscape.

“Commoditized news” isn’t saving anyone. Publishers have to make “hard choices” about what they’ll cover, the authors write:

In an AI-intermediated world, commoditized news carries little value, especially if it’s already available in some other form. That’s not to say that day-to-day coverage of municipal government, a core task of many local newsrooms, should go away; only that its coverage needs to be differentiated from what could be found elsewhere or summarized from a meeting transcript, for it to hold value. Differentiation might involve adding context to the coverage through original reporting, or asking questions that wouldn’t otherwise be asked at a press conference.

The deeper and more specialized a newsroom’s area of coverage and expertise is, the less likely it is to be duplicated by other organizations — and that provides both pricing power and closer links to the communities that value such information.

The report is here. Read excerpts from a talk that coauthor Chua gave to Nieman Fellows here.

U.K. politicians and German publishers call on regulators to pause Meta’s new terms before October 30 deadline

Andrew Deck — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 20:37:07 +0000

The U.K. competition and consumer protection authority sent a formal letter to Meta to discuss its new commercial terms of service.

On Tuesday, Will Hayter, the executive director for digital markets at the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), shared the update during a session of the communications and digital committee of British Parliament, after a member of the House of Lords pressed him about Meta’s new terms. Hayter said he scheduled a meeting with the tech giant today to seek clarity on the new terms, though the CMA declined to provide any further details.

Last week, Nieman Lab broke the news that the terms would permit mass scraping of websites “associated with” business accounts on Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Threads. The new terms are slated to take effect on October 30, and there is currently no option to opt out. Virtually every news organization owns at least one Meta business account.

“Are you going to pause the deadline? I mean, [it’s in] a week,” Veronica Wadley, Baroness Fleet and a former editor of the Evening Standard, said during the session of Parliament. “You know this includes almost every U.K. news publisher and it is clearly uncompetitive leverage of Meta’s strategic market position.”

In the same session, Sarah Cardell, the CEO of CMA, said the authority had limited intervention options because it has not formally designated Meta as an “entrenched market power” (something it has done in the past for Google and Apple). Cardell said other competition enforcement actions are a possibility, but the CMA is “urgently” seeking more information from Meta before making any judgment.

Over the weekend, Meta removed the word “train” from its terms and limited the use of future scraped content to “advertising and business products.” But legal experts told Nieman Lab the revised terms would still permit mass scraping.

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

Meta has not included any specific language about respecting robots.txt preferences in its revised terms of service.

“Does Meta think we can’t read?” Theo Bamber, chief executive of the U.K.’s News Media Association, wrote in a LinkedIn post on Monday. “We know you’ve taken the word ‘train’ out but changing it to ‘develop’ isn’t fooling anyone.”

News publisher associations across Europe have called on regulators to intervene before the terms take effect next week.

On Tuesday, two major German publisher associations called on the European Commission to prohibit the new terms from going into effect until a complete review had been conducted. Together, the German Association of Free Press and the Federal Association of Digital Publishers represent more than 9,000 media brands across Europe.

“Meta intends to automatically capture, copy, and store the complete websites and archives of publishers and analyze them for its own automated and non-automated commercial products,” reads a joint statement from the associations. “This makes access to Meta’s platforms contingent on the free surrender of the entire digital publishing product. This is blatant theft.”

The statement alleges that Meta’s new terms could be in violation of the E.U. Digital Markets Act, which was passed in 2022 to curb the dominance of big tech companies and create fairer competition across the region. The publishers cited a specific clause that guarantees “fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory general conditions of access for business users.”

The uproar from European publishers echoes similar opposition to the new terms from major U.S. publisher associations. Jason Kint, the CEO of Digital Content Next, has been vocal about his skepticism of the new terms since Nieman Lab’s story broke last week.

“Meta’s supposed Friday night correction to its new commercial terms is a farce,” he wrote in a statement published on Tuesday. “Exactly what you’d expect from a gatekeeper notorious for abusing its market power.”

The Wall Street Journal’s new AI tool, “Doppler,” forecasts the issues that will shape the midterm elections

Andrew Deck — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 19:05:45 +0000

More than 100 million voters are expected to cast ballots in the 2026 U.S. midterm elections.

In recent election cycles, political reporting based on voter polling has drawn criticism, prompted scrutiny, and found defenders. As the debate over the value of polling continues, The Wall Street Journal is exploring new ways to cover public opinion and break out of traditional horse race political coverage.

In late September, the Journal published its first story using Doppler News AI, a custom tool built to help expand the publication’s midterms coverage. So far, Doppler has ingested more than 25 million TikTok videos, roughly 500,000 podcast episodes, and thousands of Instagram videos and cable news segments. The Journal uses the tool to monitor trends across the internet and to identify voter priorities, concerns, and sentiments that traditional polling might miss.

“We’re not trying to predict the election, but people encounter politics through a lot of different lanes: culture, work, money, family, community. We wanted to tap into that and listen in on those conversations,” said Aja Whitaker-Moore, the deputy editor-in-chief of the Journal. “We’re taking a massive set of information…and telling you, from a statistical standpoint: ‘Here’s what people are talking about. Here are the questions they’re asking. Here are the places where those conversations are happening.'”

Other newsrooms have leaned on AI “visibility tools” in the past to support their reporting. That includes using large language models (LLMs) to transcribe and summarize “manosphere” podcasts, school board meetings, and local talk radio shows. But Doppler goes further.

Rather than using AI-generated summaries to generate leads or help beat reporters monitor online content more efficiently, the Journal uses Doppler to conduct large-scale AI analyses quickly — and publishes those insights for readers.

So far, analyses produced by Doppler have led to four major midterms stories in the Journal, with more expected to run before Election Day. For now, each story requires a custom treatment, with engineers and data journalists working alongside the D.C. politics team to refine the methodology, toggle on and off different features, and audit the results.

“The tool is only as good as the questions that you ask it,” said Whitaker-Moore. The Journal holds a weekly editorial meeting leading up to Election Day to workshop story angles and find new threads to explore.

@wallstreetjournal

A new in-house AI tool lets WSJ reporters analyze trends in online conversation to help understand the political mood of the country ahead of the midterm elections. A previous post paired a visual of TikToks from across the internet with a headline that identified them as conservative podcasters.

♬ original sound – The Wall Street Journal

A story published on October 8 analyzed over 30,000 hours of podcasts and documented how, in recent weeks, right-leaning podcasters had started discussing “affordability” as often as left-leaning podcasters, despite President Trump calling the affordability crisis a “hoax.”

Another story published on October 1 traced anti-AI sentiment, including opposition to Flock surveillance cameras, by analyzing more than four million TikTok videos and thousands of hours of podcasts. The Journal found that posters who shared anti-Flock sentiments disagreed on other political positions about 12% of the time, three times the average rate across other political topics tracked — putting the issue “at the top of the list of positions that unite creators who are otherwise at odds.”

For a story published on October 15, the Journal pulled content about 67 Democratic politicians from its Doppler database. The analysis showed that the Democratic politician currently receiving the most favorable commentary is Angie Nixon, the progressive Senate nominee in Florida. About 70% of TikTok videos posted about her in recent weeks were favorable. She was followed by Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff at 54%. Meanwhile, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer ranked the lowest in the analysis; just 3% of videos posted about him were favorable.

[img wide]Courtesy of The Wall Street Journal[/img]

Whitaker-Moore said the idea for Doppler was inspired by conversations with Washington bureau chief Damian Paletta and politics editor Christopher Matthews. They thought the coverage of the 2024 U.S. election missed important undercurrents in public opinion that never surfaced in polling. And though reporters acknowledged the power of podcasts in that election cycle, there weren’t many standardized ways to capture what was being said across those channels.

Coming out of those conversations, Whitaker-Moore posed a question to Rob Barry, who leads the Journal’s data journalism team: “Can you build something that can eat the internet and then feed it back to us?”

The Journal had already built its own podcast transcription and summarization tool, Orca. (The name refers to the tight-knit pods in which orcas travel.) Orca had collected countless hours of audio and YouTube videos, not just of political podcasts but from genres like health and wellness.

The Journal’s experience with TikTok-based investigations made the social media platform’s videos another natural source of information for Doppler. It’s nearly impossible to create a comprehensive database of TikTok videos, or even a truly random sample. Instead, Barry’s team used a monitoring tool that relies on TikTok’s own recommendation algorithms to identify the accounts it should track.

“Every day we’re adding tons of data across all the different platforms that we’re looking at,” Barry told me. “The database is growing in the background constantly.”

To make sense of that data, Doppler has a tech stack that includes different types of AI models, including LLMs. The model used depends on the specific reporting question.

Embedding models have been central to some of stories published so far. These AI models convert text or images into vectors — lists of numbers that capture the meaning of each piece of content. By vectorizing the content, Doppler can map out the ideas in a dataset and see where they naturally cluster together.

The Journal’s data journalism team has used vectorization in the past, including in its Pulitzer Prize–winning story that mapped out Elon Musk’s entire history of tweets. In Doppler, vectorization facilitates a kind of internet radar, helping reporters identify where patterns are forming across its social media and podcasting database.

For now, the Journal’s political reporters can’t just start using Doppler on their own. The exact methodology has been tailored to each story published, with the help of engineers.

“There’s a lot of human judgment in this. My team would not have aimed for a tool that seeks to just produce stuff that we then put directly on the internet,” Barry said. “You still need that human intermediary, that human to apply the judgment and to ask the question.”

The Journal is attaching a short methodology to every story assisted by Doppler. It makes clear that AI was used to produce the piece, briefly explains how the analysis came together, and notes some of the tool’s limitations.

Despite manual spot checks of data classifications and other safeguards to make sure the tool’s outputs are accurate, Barry said, “there’s almost always going to be some level of error and uncertainty and blur around the edges.” The disclosures are one way to “give readers a sense for what that level of issue is.”

Looking ahead, the Journal is considering bringing Doppler to other desks in the newsroom. The data being collected is not inherently political, and it could be used to help answer a host of other reporting questions, drawing on insights scattered across the internet.

“We definitely think that [Doppler News AI] can live beyond the midterms and live beyond elections,” Whitaker-Moore said.

Two out of five Americans regularly get their news on Facebook

Hanaa' Tameez — Tue, 20 Oct 2026 19:07:52 +0000

Despite what my Facebook feed looks like, the platform’s not just for AI fruit videos and birthday posts.

According to data from the Pew Research Center published Monday, 40% of adults in the United States regularly get their news from Facebook.

That’s up from 36% in 2020, signaling the continued stability of the platform as a news source — a trend that the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism observed in its Digital News Report this year. As we reported in June, people around the world are increasingly abandoning news websites for social media.

The Center surveyed 5,600 U.S. adults in late August as part of its American Trends Panel, and asked respondents several questions about their news and social media habits. Pew did not give respondents a definition of “news,” instead letting them use their own understanding of the term when they filled out the survey. More than half (59%) said that they get news from social media “often or sometimes,” but only 19% actually prefer social media as a place to get news.

Of Facebook news consumers, 33% are men and 49% are between the ages of 30 and 49. The platform is most popular for women (47%), Hispanic Americans (51%), Americans with a high school diploma or less (46%), and Republicans (43%).

Regular news consumption among American users has increased on nine of the 12 social media platforms that Pew studied, including YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, X (Twitter), Reddit, Nextdoor, LinkedIn, and WhatsApp. News consumption has either dropped or stayed the same on Rumble, Truth Social, and Bluesky.

The second-most regularly used platform among American adults is YouTube (34%), followed by Instagram (23%), TikTok (20%), and X (10%). YouTube news consumers are more likely to be male (41%), between ages 18 and 29 (39%), and identify as Black (47%) or Asian (53%). Republicans (35%) and Democrats (36%) are equal YouTube news consumers.

The most regularly used platform for news among young adults is Instagram (43%), followed by Facebook (40%), TikTok and YouTube (both 39%), and X and Reddit (both 18%). The Center found that 20% of U.S. adults now regularly get their news on TikTok, up from 3% in 2020. Of TikTok users, 53% reported getting news regularly on the platform. Nextdoor users are also increasingly turning to the neighborhood forum app for information. In 2026, 45% of Nextdoor users reported regularly getting news from the app, up from 23% in 2022.

Read the full report here.

When hackers become sources: Inside the new craft of reporting on hacked data

Philip Di Salvo — Tue, 20 Oct 2026 15:39:06 +0000

Some consequential reporting of recent years has emerged thanks to what is normally defined as a “hack-and-leak,” a specific kind of cyberattack that results in the release of the information obtained by hackers. When Anonymous and allied collectives breached corporations and state agencies during the hacktivist wave of the 2010s, for instance, they turned stolen data into front-page news.

Reporters covering the invasion of Ukraine have frequently worked with documents pulled from Russian institutions by hackers of different allegiances. Hacktivists have breached surveillance vendors and spyware firms, granting journalists direct and exclusive access to the internal files of companies that sell to repressive governments. Ransomware gangs, cybercriminal groups, and state-affiliated hackers deposit fresh troves of hacked data on the open internet, or route it to the public through intermediaries like Distributed Denial of Secrets.

How are journalists responding to these reporting scenarios? For my research, recently published in Journalism Practice, I interviewed 10 journalists across the U.S. and Europe who work or have worked with hacked data. Some of them specialize in the coverage of cyber issues; others mainly focus on current affairs and global conflict. These journalists work for a variety of news outlets, from investigative reporting newsrooms to general interest outlets and technology brands, and have engaged with hacker sources at various levels.

The journalists I spoke with paint a picture of an emerging craft, rather than a settled method. Here’s some of what I found.

There are no fixed guidelines or established and shared practices on how to handle and report on hacked material in news reporting. Instead, the methods are being developed by practitioners on a case by case basis. One reporter who works for an investigative newsroom told me:

On one hand, you have the traditional investigative journalists digging through large datasets from major leaks, who approach the material with the classic reporting toolkit, corroboration, interviews, contextualizing the data…On the other hand, there’s this newer, more technical niche where people work with constantly emerging, often smaller-scale data exposures, like scraping dark web dumps, pastebins, or unsecured cloud buckets, and turning those into fast-paced stories about breaches, vulnerabilities, and digital privacy. It’s less about deep-dive investigation and more about monitoring and exposing ongoing data exposures in real time.

Hackers themselves are becoming increasingly strategic about their relationships with the press. One reporter following a specific cyber beat emphasized this:

“I’d say that [hackers] of all kinds love to flex and get credit. A lot of them don’t, but many absolutely do. I’m not sure if the desire to flex has increased, but you’ve definitely seen the maturity of some hackers in how they approach the media. It’s not just about posting things to Twitter like it might have been before.

That maturity means developing awareness of how a story will be framed and disseminated and calculating which journalist to approach. Hackers now may select their outlets of choice, matching a leak to the reporter who they think is capable of understanding the story and carrying it further.

There are different kinds of hackers, wearing different and/or multiple hats. Interviewees drew distinctions between financially motivated cybercriminals, whose leaks are often equivalent to extortion by other means, and state-affiliated actors, who may also pose as independent hacktivists to launder politically motivated leaks into credible coverage.

At the same time, some hackers or hacker collectives — like Phineas Fisher, known for his activist remit against surveillance companies — may act for political and public interest–oriented reasons, reaching out to journalists to expose wrongdoing, unethical issues, or crimes. Notoriously, though, hacking is not a field in which hats are worn straightforwardly: Identities, definitions and agendas, including mere trolling, may blur into one another.

Hacked material needs to be handled with a great deal of skepticism. When working with hacked sources, one journalist said, it’s a matter of “treating every dataset as if it has chlamydia.” But the verification techniques the journalists said they use — such as confirming that an email address exists in a company’s records, cross-referencing with known facts, or examining a file for signs of tampering — are fairly conventional. This type of reporting requires more disclosures, especially when a source’s identity can’t be established. One journalist working in this area said:

I think you should be very transparent about that in your reporting. You should say something like, “We don’t know who the source is; it could be the GRU [Russian Federation] or whoever, but we have confirmed that this data is real and this is what it shows.”

Declared openly, the uncertainty may become a meaningful part of the story itself.

Source protection is further complicated when it comes to hackers. Some interviewees extend the full protection they would give any source to hackers, refusing to assist law enforcement even if the source is a self-declared criminal. Others prefer to know as little as possible about their sources, framing the choice as harm reduction for both parties. As one journalist in my sample put it:

The less I know about these things, the harder it’s going to be for me to burn my source or to publish something that inadvertently turns out to be harmful to my source.

Reporters working exclusively with material already circulating online in cybercrime forums or other repositories on the web treat source protection as beside the point, because the origins of the information cannot be traced and because the material is in effect “out there.”

Beneath all of this sits the finding with the widest implications: Ethical decisions in this domain resist strict codification. No general rule can be written in advance, the reporters I spoke with suggested, and judgment in the individual case is the only workable guide. Is publishing hacked material justified? It depends on the specifics of the case at hand, one reporter told me.

I kind of think it all depends on what you’re exposing. Maybe it’s generally wrong to break into people’s computers and steal data, but if you’re exposing serious crimes, then I think it can be justified.

Interviewees described practical wisdom under pressure: the ability to read a specific situation and act appropriately n it, without having the opportunity to refer to an established code or checklist.

Newsrooms, meanwhile, may need to develop verification standards suited to information of illicit origin, transparency norms that treat uncertainty as something to disclose rather than paper over, and a shared language for the ethical judgments that journalists currently make case by case on their own.

Philip Di Salvo is a senior researcher and lecturer at the Institute for Media and Communications Management at the University of St. Gallen, Switzerland.

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“Convenings” for CEOs will help Semafor reach a second profitable year

Sarah Scire — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 17:06:55 +0000

Semafor expects to have its second profitable year, thanks to a growing events, er, convening business, cofounders Justin Smith and Ben Smith announced.

The news company, which launched four years ago, had its first profitable year last year on $40 million in revenue. In a note published Sunday, Smith and Smith said they expect to close the year “substantially bigger” in “revenue and profitability and reach.”

About half of the company’s revenue comes from live events, which Semafor refers to as “convenings.” A two-day convening in November, for example, will cover “Silicon Valley & The World.” The co-chairs include names like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.

In their note, the cofounders wrote that “Semafor is starting to emerge clearly as the thing that we hoped it would become.”

“We launched with the insight that a leadership audience — CEOs and political leaders alike — was, paradoxically, the most desperate for efficient, fair, and sophisticated news,” they continued.

It’s a stretch to say CEOs and political leaders are “desperate” for news. Existing news consumers tend to be older, wealthier, more white collar, and more politically engaged than those who don’t consume news. The genuinely underserved news audiences are elsewhere. Journalism for “decision makers” is one of the most crowded markets in news. Outlets like Bloomberg, Politico Pro, Financial Times, Punchbowl News, Axios Pro, and The Information operate in a similar space.

But readers aren’t the primary financial supporters of Semafor’s business. That’d be the corporate sponsors paying for access to its audience through ads and events. Although the annual update says the company has 1.2 million subscriptions, those remain free subscriptions for now.

By building a profitable and growing news business, Semafor has done something exceedingly rare. (It now has journalists on the ground in 11 countries and plans to launch in Asia in 2027.) Editor-in-chief Ben Smith explained some of his thinking on an episode of Decoder this summer.

In my memory, we always thought at some point we’d do subscriptions, but in my experience you just cannot be ideological about revenue. It’s hard enough to build a business in news without getting all hung up on the values of the different revenue streams.

Advertising-based publishers will tell you that democracy can only survive in a world where there aren’t paywalls. Subscription publishers will tell you that advertising is corrupting. At some point you realize everyone’s just talking about their book and that sometimes they’re already in a tough business and they’re talking themselves out of incremental opportunities and really successful media companies.

It’s “impossible” for publishers to compete with Google and Meta in the scaled advertising business, Smith told Decoder. He described Semafor as “an anti-scale business.”

If you’re reaching people in a very focused way in various particular environments — in person, in email, in video — that’s a case you can really credibly make to advertisers. We’ve built a big advertising and related convening business that way, and that’s one answer. It’s not the only answer, but it is one.

The note is here.

Legal experts warn Meta’s new terms still grant broad scraping permissions, despite language changes

Andrew Deck — Sat, 17 Oct 2026 18:30:46 +0000

Meta has removed the word “train” from its upcoming terms of service for business accounts. The company revised its terms after Nieman Lab’s story on Thursday exposed that the new terms would permit broad scraping of websites “associated with” business accounts, and possibly allow Meta to use that scraped content to train its AI models.

In its revision, published Friday afternoon, Meta removed the word “train” from a list of allowed use cases and limited those uses to “advertising and business products,” rather than all Meta products. But the revised terms will still allow for broad scraping of websites, potentially superseding robots.txt files, according to legal experts.

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

Meta has not included any specific language about respecting robots.txt preferences in its revised terms of service. The new terms are slated to go into effect on October 30. There is no option for business accounts to opt out of the new terms before then.

“I think publishers should remain concerned,” said Matt Topic, a media and intellectual property attorney at Loevy & Loevy. “The revised version of the new terms still allows Meta to use that scraped content to develop any ‘business product.’ That doesn’t seem to be a defined term, and presumably Meta is developing AI business products. I think ‘develop’ is broad enough to include ‘train.'”

Meta currently lists examples of its business products as “ads, Meta Business Tools and Meta Business Suite.”

Virtually every news organization has at least one Meta business account. The accounts let companies manage Facebook pages, Threads accounts, Instagram profiles, and WhatsApp channels from one place.

As of publication time, the section reads (with changes in bold):

At least three journalism organizations have publicly raised concerns about the forthcoming terms as a result of Nieman Lab’s reporting.

Prior to the update on Friday, the European Publishers Council announced that it would formally petition the E.U.’s telecommunications regulatory authorities and its executive body, the European Commission, to “scrutinize these terms urgently, including their implications for copyright, contractual fairness and abuse of market power.”

The United Kingdom News Media Association, the trade organization representing British media, issued a statement on Friday calling for government officials to intervene.

“This shameless landgrab attempt from Meta to scrape anything and everything from news publishers and business websites to train their AI products is the worst kind of arrogant tech platform bullying,” said chief executive Theo Bamber. “We urgently need Ministers and regulators to stand up for British creators and the business community by calling out this outrageous behaviour and preventing Meta from setting this dreadful precedent.”

The News/Media Alliance — the largest news publishing trade association in the United States — denounced the terms, with president and CEO Danielle Coffey calling the update “outrageous and probably illegal.”

“The company’s decision to withhold access to its audience unless businesses allow Meta to scrape content from their websites is an appalling, bad-faith policy, and a clear abuse of the company’s market power,” Coffey said. “It cannot be allowed to be implemented on October 30.”

This story has been updated to include comments from Meta.

Are you considering changing how you use Meta-owned platforms? Let us know: staff@niemanlab.org.

Meta’s new commercial terms will allow the scraping of news sites, legal experts say

Andrew Deck — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 16:59:54 +0000

Meta can use web scrapers to crawl and collect content from websites “associated with” business accounts on its platforms, according to its new commercial terms of use.

The update, set to go into effect on October 30, will include news publishers with business accounts. These accounts allow companies or public figures to manage Facebook pages, Messenger accounts, Instagram profiles, or WhatsApp channels from one place. While journalism isn’t the only industry that will be affected by this update, virtually every news organization has at least one Meta business account, including Nieman Lab.

The new terms broadly cover business accounts that manage pages and groups, run advertisements, push marketing messages, and use the platform’s business account dashboard. As written, the new terms could be used to argue that Meta can scrape content from news sites and use that content to train the company’s AI products, according to three legal experts who reviewed the terms at Nieman Lab’s request.

“This is a remarkable provision to bury in [the] terms of service, given that this would give Meta access to material that would likely cost many millions of dollars in a licensing market,” said Matt Topic, a media and intellectual property attorney at Loevy & Loevy. “It’s not clear whether a court would enforce this, but publishers should assume that it would be enforceable.”

In early October, Meta alerted users to the update in a blog post and on the Meta Business Suite. The updated terms explicitly state that Meta can use the content it collects from associated websites to “train” Meta products. Elsewhere in its terms of service, the company defines “AI at Meta” as one of those products.

Here’s the new language about scraping in full:

You authorize us (or any entity acting on our behalf) to use automated software (such as web scrapers, bots, robots, spiders, crawlers, and user agents) and create test credentials to access, index, cache, analyze, collect, retrieve, or crawl the domains, web pages, or URLs (and any content available through them) that are associated with your products or services, or that are made available through your or users’ use of Meta Company Products and services, and to periodically pull updates from such domains, web pages, or URLs. Meta may use any content from such domains, web pages, or URLs to provide, develop, improve, research, train, and maintain the integrity of, the Meta Company Products, services, and features provided under these Commercial Terms and any other applicable supplemental terms.

“For news publishers, this clearly represents permission to Meta to train AI on any content from their sites and possibly to deploy some of that content, even in competition with the publishers themselves,” said James Grimmelmann, a professor of digital and information law at Cornell Law School. “On the broadest possible interpretation, this would be used to develop a comprehensive archive of all content that Meta would then serve as it wanted to directly or through AI.”

Currently, there is no option for business accounts to opt out of these new terms ahead of October 30. The update reads, “If you do not agree to the updated terms, please stop all access or use of our Products for business or commercial purposes.”

In short, “publishers either have to trust that Meta doesn’t mean the full extent of what these terms say, or they have to stop [using business accounts],” said Grimmelmann.

Meta declined to answer a list of questions about these updated terms. A public affairs spokesperson at the company said in an email that language around crawling was previously scattered across different terms of use, including terms about using generative AI in ads, and this update consolidates them in one place. He also said that the new terms will not change how Meta crawls publishers in the future, and that “content owners can still manage how their content is accessed by using robots.txt.”

On its developer page, Meta currently has instructions for how to block its crawlers using robots.txt, a file that tells bots which parts of a website they can and cannot access.

However, legal experts said the new language creates an opening for Meta to argue its commercial terms supersede other blocking instructions. The update also states that Meta can create “test credentials” in order to scrape websites associated with business accounts. Grimmelmann said this would technically allow Meta to “sign up as a fake user” to bypass registration walls on a publisher’s site to access content. Meta declined to answer Nieman Lab’s questions about whether the “test credentials” would bypass paywalls or other paid content.

Any attempt to train Meta’s AI products with content collected under these new terms would still hinge on unsettled legal questions about AI training and fair use, legal experts said. Several lawsuits between publishers and AI developers are currently winding their way through federal courts. That includes a class-action suit filed in May by five large book publishers, alleging Meta pirated millions of books in order to train its Llama large language models (LLMs).

Meta’s decision to tether access to its business products to broad scraping permissions echoes a concept in antitrust law called “tying,” according to Benjamin Sobel, a law professor at the University of Wisconsin. “If you want to use the Meta products that require acceptance of the commercial terms, you have to also acquiesce to the scraping and crawling permissions exacted in those terms.”

Sobel compared the move to Google’s recent policies around its AI search products. In order to appear in Google’s traditional search results, publishers previously had to consent to their content appearing in AI Overviews and AI Mode. As of August 2026, all websites now have the option to opt out.

Meta’s new commercial terms come on the heels of the company’s rollout of its paid subscription service, Meta One. The cash-for-links program restricts the number of external links that some accounts on Facebook and Instagram can post without subscribing. Put another way, Meta has begun charging users to post links to the same content that it will be permitted to crawl for free. Earlier this month, Press Gazette reported that some news publishers are currently exempt from the link limit. Meta declined to answer Nieman Lab’s question about the service.

Nieman Lab first learned about Meta’s new commercial terms through a reader tip. Stephen Beale, the founder and editor of The Steampunk Explorer, got in touch when he saw a notice of the upcoming change in his Meta Business Suite dashboard.

“Traditionally, you have this idea that Meta might be using content [posted] on Facebook or Instagram for training,” Beale told Nieman Lab. “But this was different because they’re saying that [since you are] a business user of Facebook, they have the right to go out and grab information from basically wherever you have a presence.”

Beale has long depended on Facebook as a way to connect with his audience and refer traffic to his site. Fans of steampunk — a retrofuturistic subgenre of science fiction — skew older, he said, and the community is “totally entrenched on Facebook.” For many, their only interactions with the community happen on Facebook or at in-person events that they learned about on Facebook.

Beale said he’s seriously considering shutting down his accounts before October 30.

“I know my site has been scraped to death,” he said. “But it just seems like such an arrogant, in-your-face move on [Meta’s] part… It just makes me angry and I don’t want them to get away with it.”

Are you considering changing how you use Meta-owned platforms? Let us know at staff@niemanlab.org.

Correction: This story has been updated to reflect Google’s current AI search policies.

A new report argues newsrooms need to do more experiments — like, the kind with randomization and results

Sarah Scire — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 16:47:21 +0000

Mississippi Today had a question. Did the stories around its Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporting affect the way those investigations were received?

It’s the kind of question local newsrooms can’t easily test on their own. But researchers from Local NExT Lab at Syracuse University could.

In a national survey, 1,768 adults were shown the same investigation surrounded by a different mix of stories. In one, the investigation was shown alongside positive community stories. (Think: “How a local fossil park changed science history.”) In another, the investigation was featured alongside other investigative stories.

The investigation was rated more accurate, important, and relevant when it was surrounded by community-focused stories, not other investigative stories. (Audience reaction to a third story mix, where the investigation was surrounded by stories about legislation, was not consistent.)

The result was described in the first report from the Local NExT Lab. Joshua Darr, director of the lab and associate professor at Syracuse University, believes that although dashboards and engagement analytics are “very important tools” for newsrooms, they aren’t enough.

“Engagement data can’t tell you what caused audiences to engage, settle a hunch, or isolate your contribution,” the report reads. “Randomization can.”

“The key word there is ’caused,'” Darr added in an email. “Without randomization, you can tell when engagement is up or down or if a particular story is doing well, but it’s hard to know exactly why that is happening.”

At Nieman Lab, we often hear from both sides of academic-practitioner partnerships. Researchers wonder why newsrooms don’t pay attention to their findings or fail to respond to their overtures about experiments. Publishers, editors, and journalists, meanwhile, tell me they don’t have time to read dense and jargon-filled academic papers. They can be annoyed by requests to spend time or resources they don’t have. And it’s not always fun to be someone else’s test subject.

When partnering with Local NExT Lab, Darr emphasized, the local newsrooms don’t have to commit money or manpower. They agree to two or three conversations. The researchers listen and then design, field, and analyze the experiments. In return, the newsrooms get their ideas tested and causal evidence.

In another experiment, the Local NExt Lab found that Instagram Reels including reporters’ faces drove the most interest and engagement, but when it came to clicking “follow,” profiles that looked like traditional news brands won out. Respondents chose to follow newsrooms (in this case New Orleans Public Radio) more often than reporter-named accounts.

The first batch of tests was funded by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. Additional support from the American Journalism Project will allow for further tests on a larger cohort next year. The full report is here.

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Google’s News AI pilot expands to over 400 publications, including U.S. local news outlets

Andrew Deck — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 16:01:46 +0000

In December, Google launched its News AI pilot program, which licenses content from select publishers and uses it to test new AI features in Google News. On Thursday, the company announced that the program has added new partnerships, bringing the total number of publications in the pilot to more than 400 worldwide.

At launch, the program partnered with international publishers like The Guardian, El País, The Times of India, and The Washington Post. More publications are now coming on board, including CNN, The Financial Times, Axios, and Forbes.

As part of the expansion, the program has also added local news publishers across the U.S., including The Post and Courier in Charleston, South Carolina; Oil City News in Casper, Wyoming; the Illinois- and Iowa-based newspaper chain Shaw Media; and the nonprofit newsroom The Texas Tribune.

“People’s information consumption habits are changing, and we want to make sure publishers of all sizes, local newsrooms included, can navigate these shifts,” Brianna Puccini Duff, a spokesperson for Google, said in a statement to Nieman Lab.

Google declined to comment on the exact terms of the deals. However, Duff clarified that the News AI pilot does not operate on a “pay-per-value” model, meaning publishers are not compensated based on how much their content contributes to an AI-generated output. (The pay-per-value model is part of a parallel program that pays publishers for content surfaced in AI Overviews, AI Mode, and Gemini, according to a recent report by Digiday.)

With the News AI pilot, publishers are instead paid to provide content that appears in experimental AI-powered features. That includes “story previews” — in-depth, AI-generated article summaries of recent stories that may show up on a publisher’s Google News page. Here’s a Washington Post example, with a disclaimer noting the copy is AI-generated and “may include mistakes.”

An AI-generated “story preview” on the Google News page for The Washington Post

Another test feature is “audio briefing,” a customizable, AI-generated podcast in the Google News app that stitches together daily headlines. Users can select the topics they’re most interested in hearing about, including “World,” “Gaming,” or “Sports” news. The feature includes citations that link to articles mentioned in the briefing.

Two creators went to NYU’s business school, then decided to make a show about the news

Hanaa' Tameez — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 19:43:55 +0000

The data is in: News creators and influencers are a major source of news for Americans, especially people under 30. This is the latest edition of Creators of Record, an occasional series of interviews with popular creators about how they do their jobs.

On a September afternoon in Manhattan’s Union Square neighborhood, Shreyas Sinha is sitting on a toilet, wearing a blue suit. Looking into the camera, he asks, “Why is it that everything I’ve been eating this year is giving me diarrhea?”

Sinha is about to link the 2026 cyclospora outbreaks to decades of problems at the Food and Drug Administration. “I’m only allowed to make three diarrhea jokes in this video,” Sinha says. “I live in tyranny.”

The toilet video is one of the tamer stunts that Sinha and his co-creator, Gaurav Srivatchan, have pulled for their YouTube channel, A Show About The News, a weekly deep dive into major business and politics stories (tagline: “Critics are calling it the worst alternative to mainstream media, and those are just the critics I’m related to.”)

In a video about why young people can’t afford to buy homes, Sinha pops out of a cardboard box on the street and takes former New York City mayor Eric Adams to a studio apartment filled with men. Other recent videos include a 45-minute interview on the street with former White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci, an explainer on prediction market ads, and a rap music video on why retirement investments are safer than get-rich-quick schemes.

Sinha, 25, and Srivatchan, 22, met in 2023 when they were students at New York University’s Stern School of Business. They teamed up to make short vertical explainer videos, but those didn’t take off as much as they’d hoped. In 2024, Sinha quit his finance job to pursue A Show About The News full-time, and they transitioned to creating long-form deep dives with a dash of their own humor.

In 2025, Sinha and Srivatchan signed a contract to make the show as a franchise of Morning Brew. (They declined to share the specifics of the partnership.) Sinha anchors most videos, with Srivatchan directing, editing, and producing. A Show About The News has 97,000 YouTube subscribers and 84,000 Instagram followers.

I chatted with Sinha and Srivatchan about how they launched their media careers, how they use humor to explain the news, and what they think business opportunities are for creators today. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Tameez: Why did you start creating news videos?

Sinha: Gaurav and I started making videos together during the spring 2023 semester, when I was a senior at NYU and he was a freshman. I had been doing a newsletter for a while, I had been doing stand-up comedy for a few years, and I was interning at CNN. It seemed like everything was [pointing to], “Hey, you should start making short-form videos.” And then Gaurav was like, “Hey, I’m actually really good at editing videos.”

We were not really thinking of it as a YouTube channel, but as making short-form stories. At the time, we were called Fifty50 Media. We were all about trying to distill the world into bipartisan perspectives. We eventually started focusing more on deeper-dive stories. We renamed ourselves to A Show About the News.

It’s very easy to put out a political opinion that goes viral, but we really wanted to focus on good stories. Eventually, we started making videos for Morning Brew, and we joined Morning Brew full-time as a franchise in August 2025.

Srivatchan: We realized that building a loyal audience off shorts wasn’t feasible in the long-term. And we constantly [faced] the challenge of bringing in nuance. That’s one of the reasons we started working on long-form videos. We try to bring in the political economy lens from our college education and highlight the underlying principles [of] today’s headlines.

Sinha: To be honest, we weren’t successful in short-form. We had made 50 or 60 shorts…

Srivatchan: Some of them would pop off, get a million views. But the way people consume on the internet is very different from the way people consume when they go to a theater, [where] they’re paying for an experience and they’re going to watch a specific thing.

YouTube and social media are like a theater where you can leave and go watch another movie at any time. That’s the challenge of making videos on the internet.

Sinha: After our first video that got a million views, we were like, “Oh shit, this is it.” And it wasn’t. We added followers, but it wasn’t like we were going to get 100,000 people to come back in the next short. We were competing against the new Frozen movie and The Office and Mr. Beast exploding dynamite in his backyard.

Tameez: Tell me more about how the Morning Brew deal happened.

Srivatchan: I was in London, studying abroad. I slapped a bunch of logos as watermarks on our old videos [and sent them as] demo reels to news outlets.

Sinha: We literally got zero responses…then an opportunity came to make a video for [Morning Brew] and it was a great experience. We made another and another, and then they were like, “You guys should just do this for us.”

Srivatchan: Morning Brew provided us access to this office. It’s great to not meet under a lofted bed in Shreyas’ apartment.

Sinha: They’re an excellent partner [because] they believe in allowing editorial control to be with the person who makes the video. We’re not going into meetings asking, can we do this topic next week? It’s a very high-trust environment, which, from talking to other people who work at other media companies, is extremely rare.

Tameez: You guys both left careers in finance to do this full-time.

Sinha: It was an economically stupid decision, but I knew that if I failed now, I would be young enough to start again. It’s easy to have the golden handcuffs of waiting until the right time, but there is never a right time.

It was taking a bet on myself and someone who I really trusted. Still, our videos were getting 12 views at that time; it wasn’t as if something took off and it was like, “Okay, this can pay our bills.”

Srivatchan: I had the advantage of being younger. [Shreyas left] a full-time job. I did my summer internship in consulting and got my return offer, but it was a lot less of a risk for me, personally. It obviously helped that we had some backing from Morning Brew.

Tameez: Why is making A Show About the News important now? How does it fit into the larger information ecosystem?

Sinha: What we do, in the context of where we went to school, is the equivalent of becoming ballerinas. All of my friends are investment bankers in private equity or in consulting. That is the tried and true method [for NYU Stern graduates]. If you tell people, “Hey, I’m not recruiting for banking, I’m thinking of doing consulting,” they look at you like you just said you want to be an art major. When we said we were going to build a media company, it was truly mind-boggling for people.

I loved what Fareed Zakaria did, what Ezra Klein did, but my favorite people when I was a kid were Jon Stewart and John Oliver, Hasan Minhaj and Seth Meyers and Conan O’Brien and Nathan Fielder. I knew I wasn’t going to be a great stand-up comedian, I wasn’t going to be a great writer, but maybe I could combine those to make a job out of it.

It’s easy to pat ourselves on the back and say there’s a lot of garbage out there. But also, it has never been a better time to be an independent creator. If we both wanted to go into media today, we would be grabbing water for hosts who get paid $60 million a year. Instead, we actually get to put our own ideas out there.

Tameez: Tell me about your workflow, from video ideation to posting.

Sinha: We don’t do short-form clips [from longer videos]. We script our shorts. That takes a ton of time. [But] long-form is the priority. It takes much more time, but you really get to have a relationship with the audience.

Srivatchan: When it comes to shorts, either Shreyas or I will have something that really interests us for the week. We start scripting it, then we switch the scripts and each of us does a pass on the other’s. Then we revise them and film them. That takes roughly two out of five workdays. We spend the rest of the time on long-form.

We’re also doing a weekly livestream to discuss the headlines with the audience and build that audience connection. So our output is two native short-form, one long-form, and one live stream per week.

Tameez: What are the things that make a story for A Show About the News?

Srivatchan: It has to interest us personally. It really shows, in a video, if we’re doing something just for the views. Our audience is super-interested in tech, AI, and Wall Street stories, so that’s [another] major thing we consider.

Sinha: Do we actually have something new to say about it? There’s no point in making a video that someone else has already made.

A lot of people have made videos about how people aren’t having kids anymore. That doesn’t mean we wouldn’t [cover that topic], but we need to have something new to say. In our video, we talked about how governments have spent tens of billions of dollars but it hasn’t resulted in any more babies. We talked about demographic trends and got into studies. We brought in a bunch of 19- and 20-year-olds and asked them why they’re not having more sex. Then we went to a bunch of older people and were like, “So, you guys were doing it hella in the 90s. What’s the secret? Let’s give it to these kids.”

The combination of all those things is what makes it A Show About the News video.

Tameez: Why is it important for you guys to be funny?

Srivatchan: It helps us talk about darker topics in a lighter way. Comedy also helps you build more interaction with your audience. It’s the best feeling when [people in the comments] are making jokes.

Sinha: We try to be funny, maybe to a deficit. In one of our worst-performing videos, we had a guy come in on an inflatable horse. Gaurav was wearing a Will Smith mask and slapped me. But sometimes it really works. We filmed this thing where we were having a shootout with Abraham Lincoln as he smoked a vape. That did great for us.

I listen to a lot of podcasts of serious, smart people. The way they talk, I’m like, how are you not ripping your hair off right now? How are you not just slamming your head against your desk?

Our videos are what we wish we could consume more of.

Tameez: How do you gather information? Do you do any original reporting?

Srivatchan: We have all these sources that we regularly read. For a lot of politics and inside scoops on Capitol Hill, Politico is great. For more niche stories, ProPublica is great. Each source has its own strength. We send stuff to each other all the time.

Once we’re in the research phase of a video, we do everything possible to learn about what the scope of the video is and what sources and articles can fall into that.

We’d be dishonest if we didn’t mention AI. We don’t use AI at all in our scripting or production process, but Perplexity has been great for finding articles and different things on specific subjects. It’s been a huge timesaver, as well, [since] the internet is dominated by paid articles rising to the top in Google.

Tameez: Tell me about the staging and production. Since you guys often film outside, do you have any favorite spots? Have you ever been kicked out of a location?

Sinha: The staging is Gaurav and me carrying around our equipment.

Srivatchan: We don’t carry around anything too heavy. We use a Sony FX30 on a tripod.

Sinha: We’ve only been kicked out of one place ever, which was 1 Worldwide Plaza on 8th Ave. [But] 99% of people are super nice and accommodating and come up and say hi. The reason we’re outside is not only so we can have the hustle and bustle [as the background], but because for the longest time we didn’t have anywhere else to film.

Tameez: What is your fact-checking process like? Does Morning Brew lend you any fact-checkers? How do you issue a correction if you need to?

Sinha: We do a lot of our own fact-checking. Corrections often occur in the way of Gaurav coming to me and being like, “Shreyas, you moron, you said this and it’s actually this.” Then we record a voiceover, or we change it in the captions, or we just put it up as text.

We [request comment from] every company or person we talk about, so if they have something to say, we can try to incorporate it. We do [the fact-checking] ourselves.

Tameez: Who is your audience? What is your relationship with them like?

Srivatchan: The audience is very much like who we are. They tend to be a ton of college-age or young professionals working in major cities, in finance, consulting, law, or related fields. If they’re in college, they tend to be debate kids or Model UN kids.

Tameez: You guys recently started doing weekly livestreams on the street. How’s that going?

Sinha: If you go on YouTube right now, high production quality is the expectation. It’s not like when I was young and my favorite YouTubers were clearly filming in their bedrooms. There’s so much money that is being invested into it, which is awesome, but if you want to have authentic relationships with your audiences, you need to do more.

[The livestreams] have been so much fun. We talk to people, ask them where they’re from, tell a story, and they have questions. It’s taking our videos to another level. We still have to learn how to grow, bring people to it, and keep them entertained.

Srivatchan: Earlier this year, TBPN [Technology Business Programming Network] was sold to OpenAI for $100 million. Their whole thing was live-streaming. They didn’t get that many viewers concurrently on their livestreams — everything was clips, targeting a very specific niche — but we saw how they grew through clips.

We also wanted to tackle news topics we don’t have the time to cover in shorts and long-form.

Tameez: I’m curious about how you guys sustain yourselves financially.

Sinha: When we started making these videos, I was writing articles on the side and freelancing so that I could pay rent. Eventually, this was able to pay rent.

By no means are we rich. But we really believe in the business model of digital media. It’s important to incentivize people to invest in media that is fact-checked, that is telling stories that are new and not just polarizing or viral for virality’s sake. You can’t ask people to only think of [media] as a charity expenditure or as a nonprofit, because those are the first things that go away when the market goes down, and the first thing people are going to stop cutting checks to if they don’t see the ROI.

We spend most of our time thinking about content, but it’s important to be creative about our business models. We always tell ourselves not to think about ourselves as employees or YouTubers, but to keep reminding ourselves that we’re founders of a startup that is trying to do something for the world.

The prevailing narrative that news media is doing poorly is because news media for generations was run by journalists, and that was fine because they could get cable carrier fees. But the reason they were able to do that was because they had a monopoly. You could only watch CNN, CBS, and ABC News because that’s all you had.

We blame consumers all the time, saying they should subscribe to newspapers, they should support TV news. We’re losing something really important by these companies being close to bankruptcy. But it’s not the consumers’ fault. There was no innovation from those companies, no leaning into newsletters. Once Morning Brew proved that they could do it, they got into podcasts, and they’re mostly all right. The New York Times is an excellent shop. But I’m yet to see that from ABC and CNN and NBC and MSNBC.

There’s been a huge stepping back from actually doing the job of being an inventor of new business models. That’s why we’re in this crisis. We blame consumers, we blame social media, but we really should be blaming media news executives a lot more. There’s a lot of money to be made in this. I want people to know there are people out there trying to build successful business models, not just relying on the charity of investors, rich people, and consumers.

Tameez: What is your business model?

Sinha: We sell ads, but we also bring in a new audience for Morning Brew that cross-pollinates across other products. When you watch a short-form video on one of Morning Brew’s franchises, you might be more likely to buy ad space in one of their B2B newsletters, or in their podcast, or something else. That’s a really potent business model that allows the content to be not just the product, but also to be part of this larger engine where you can monetize in a bunch of very unique and creative ways.

[I asked Sinha and Srivatchan to answer a few final questions via email. Their answers are below.]

Tameez: What are your lifestyles like? Do you have families or dependents? Homeowners or renters?

Srivatchan: We live in New York City, we rent our apartments. No families or dependents. We have girlfriends who you could say are very, very early investors in us.

Tameez: What are some of the unexpected costs of being news creators?

Srivatchan: Once you know how the sausage is made, you have the lens on for everything you consume. Being so deep in the process of making news videos means when we watch other creators’ content, we’re constantly analyzing their production process and creative choices. We find ourselves rewinding because we zoned out the actual content.

Tameez: How has your relationship to social media and information consumption changed since you started making videos?

Srivatchan: One under-discussed crisis with social media is “audience capture.” Basically, a creator is limited to the topics and perspectives that they know do extremely well with their viewers. It’s a tempting force to gravitate into, the constant urge to just give your audience what you know they want and very little else.

Tameez: What lessons do you think legacy journalism can learn from news creators and vice versa?

Sinha: It’s hard to say what’s legacy and what’s new these days. Morning Brew has never had a TV broadcast or print media arm, but it’s owned by a media conglomerate, Axel Springer. Other news companies, from CNN to The Wall Street Journal, have pretty successful social media presences and journalists who’ve made a name for themselves.

The crisis for news companies that dominated in the 20th century is that they relied on fixed distribution: cable, broadband, local stations, and papers. A random Joe couldn’t get their ideas placed in those, so the competition for viewership was highly limited.

Today, competition is high. Legacy journalists who struggle often blame the changing tides of information consumption, when in reality they’re just struggling to compete for attention. Many have been successful in making the transition, so we don’t think it’s fair to paint all of legacy journalism as having something to learn from news creators. But our message overall would be that traditional news shouldn’t blame consumers for not maintaining their expensive newspaper and cable subscriptions, but instead [should] figure out how to compete and win in this new age.

In the same vein, news creators shouldn’t pat themselves on the back that they are “new media.” Most news creators — ourselves included — often package traditional news media’s breaking stories into our own voice, but we aren’t actually at the source. As news creators who have learned to compete in this new information era, it’s our job to figure out a business model that allows for long-term investigations that break real news to be profitable.

Srivatchan: For journalists who have been successful in their careers but want to transition to social media, we think they severely underestimate how well-prepared they are to make the jump. They’ve already been writing strong articles and hooks to get people to click. We think journalists underestimate how that skill can translate on a platform like YouTube, where everything is dependent on the packaging that gets someone to click on your video.

Often, when someone from traditional media starts a new Instagram or YouTube page, they make very lo-fi content, talking to their phone with their headphones mic. I think they see influencers doing that and think viewers want authenticity. That works for some people, but our view is that investing in strong production is the baseline expectation on social media.

Cleo Abram goes to Antarctica for her videos with an expensive camera crew team and equipment. That’s what you have to compete with, but also with everything else. I think journalists who are successful at making the transition are often those who forget their preconceived notions of what it means to be a social media creator and instead try to create the highest-quality product they possibly can. Max Fisher is an excellent example, as a former New York Times investigative journalist who grew his YouTube channel from 0 to 500,000 subscribers within months with simple, breathable, but heavily researched storytelling.

Instead of seizing the social media opportunity, often, legacy journalism is falling into the trap of liquidating its reputation for more attention and to better monetize its declining assets. It’s partnering with gambling apps — CNN’s partnership with Kalshi, or [Dow Jones’] with Polymarket — and inviting inflammatory internet voices rather than the trusted ones that educate.

The mainstream media should use its resources to enter the edutainment space rather than the virality/inflammatory space. That doesn’t mean avoid politics — it means tackle the underlying trends and principles of politics. Audiences don’t want to hear from viral Twitter voices on CNN panels. In reality, people want to learn.

When Slate went back to its 1996 homepage, it learned some web design lessons for 2026

Laura Hazard Owen — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 19:29:06 +0000

The fonts are Times New Roman and Arial Narrow, the colors are maroon and mustard, and the cursor is the 8-bit pixel hand. When Slate revived its original 1996 homepage to celebrate its 30th birthday this fall¹, the team found a lot to like besides nostalgia.

“I’ve read Slate since 1997, when I finally had access to my own computer at my first job,” Hillary Frey, Slate’s editor-in-chief, told me recently. At the age of 51, she said, “I’m speaking as an old. But I am a direct traffic girly and I know I’m not alone.”

Slate’s homepage has long functioned as a “fossil of what the internet was during that time,” said Ivylise Simones, Slate’s creative director. In 1996, Slate was trying to figure out what a magazine on the internet should even look like; in 2026, it’s among the last general-interest digital-native news sites, and print magazines are dying out. “Salon is one of our only lasting contemporaries,” Frey noted. “There are other sort of fellows from that era, like Feed and Nerve. They’ve been gone for awhile.”

In its 30th anniversary campaign, Slate has found its fossil-like nature to be something of a selling point. (It can also be a challenge.) Over the years, the site has published a number of posts about its history and editorial and design choices. A decade ago, then–news editor Chad Lorenz wrote “A history of Slate in nine home pages.” (At launch, Slate articles included page numbers and printing instructions.) A 1998 paywall, Lorenz wrote, was “fortunately” abandoned by 1999. But the paywall returned in 2020. (It was metered at the start, but today it’s dynamic, changing based on user behavior.) For its 30th birthday, the site is running a promotion: a year of access for $19.96.

“Going back to our roots, there are certain elements we are starting to really love,” Simones said, and she’s thinking about how to include them in the site’s ongoing redesign. She likes the spareness and simplicity of earlier versions of the site, she said, pointing to Reddit and Discord as places that are “more reminiscent of old homepages than the current, very stylized, very gridded layout” found across the internet. A less dense homepage on desktop, she said, is “refreshing.”

“Our editorial guiding light is the mix,” Frey added. Slate has verticals, but they’re not emphasized in the story selection at the top of the homepage; instead, life, politics, and advice stories are mixed together and weighted similarly. “Having an image for every story you share on the homepage is just not necessary,” Simones noted.

Some 1990s-era headline styles still work, too, Frey has found. One of her favorites is a 2002 piece by Slate founding editor Michael Kinsley: “The secret vice of power women.”

“He was writing it about his wife, who found tremendous satisfaction and relaxation in watching police procedurals,” Frey said. “That’s something I still identify with, though most of them now are from Finland and Norway. 100%, this headline would play on the Slate homepage right this second.”

Art courtesy of Slate

A wrinkle for 2026: The 1996-inspired homepage had to work on mobile, even though nobody was reading Slate on a phone 30 years ago.

From bad to worse: 2026 is shaping up to be “a super El Niño year for local news”

Sophie Culpepper — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 19:19:01 +0000

If you thought last year was bleak, Medill’s annual State of Local News Report is here to ring the alarm bell louder.

What was a “creeping erosion” has now “mushroomed into a full-blown super El Niño-like event for local news, leaving widespread and long-lasting displacement in its wake,” writes Tim Franklin, founding director of the Medill Local News Initiative, in his introduction to this year’s report, released Tuesday. The Northwestern University team’s research “paints a portrait of a local news ecosystem in a state of precarity.”

In the past year, Medill tracked 26 new news deserts, “the largest single-year rise by far since Medill began keeping records five years ago,” Franklin writes. The previous year, only six new news deserts emerged.

Medill’s team says to understand that acceleration, you have to look at where newspapers are disappearing fastest now. While about 70% of the papers that disappeared over the past 20 years were based in urban or suburban communities, in recent years a greater share of newspaper closures have happened in smaller, rural and poorer communities, according to the report.

“When the news disappears in these counties, it stays gone,” the report states.

Many of the new news deserts emerged because of small rural papers shuttering in the Midwest. In fact, the report notes that Illinois lost more newspapers than any other state: 30 newspapers shuttered in the state between July 2025 and August 2026, “all small to medium-size outlets.” That means nearly one in five of the 170 newspapers that shuttered in that year was based in Illinois. The state’s losses are especially notable because it enacted one of the first public policies to preserve and grow local journalism jobs in 2024.

“Independent owners of small to midsize newspapers especially were already operating on a knife’s edge,” Brier Dudley writes in his examination of newspaper losses in Illinois. “This past year, their slim margins were squeezed by shrinking revenues and steeply escalating prices for newsprint, fuel and other materials.”

The price of newsprint rose nearly 18% over the past year, Dudley reported, as U.S. mills closed or stopped production of newsprint. That’s about five times the national rate of inflation, he noted. As of April, the United States has just one newsprint producer left.

A few other highlights from this year’s report:

The extreme urban-rural divide: “Virtually all the new news sources are in urban areas, while rural America is increasingly arid news and information territory,” Franklin writes. “And virtually all the philanthropic support for local news is in metro regions.” The report notes that there are fewer than 50 counties in the U.S. “that lack a newspaper but feature an alternative digital or broadcast outlet.” Of the 287 news outlets to start up in the last five years, nearly 80% are in urban areas.

Traffic declines: Digital readership is in “precipitous decline” for many outlets. According to Comscore data from more than 700 local news sites, monthly traffic has dropped by an average of nearly 2 million pageviews, or almost 30%. Meanwhile, traffic to 100 of the largest local newspapers has declined by almost 50% since 2022.

Local TV news: This year, for the first time, Medill’s report included local TV newsrooms. The team identified 678 local commercial TV newsrooms across the country. The overwhelming majority are located in metro areas with existing local news outlets. (“Adding commercial television to the LNI database made little impact on which counties we identify as news deserts,” the team notes.) TV news is already highly consolidated — the five largest owners control more than half of newsrooms, and the 10 largest control 75% — and further consolidation is underway, if Nexstar’s $6.2 billion acquisition of Tegna survives an antitrust lawsuit. The deal would merge the second- and fourth-largest owners of local commercial TV newsrooms.

“We’re in their shit. They’re not in ours”: USA Today Co. execs defend Palantir deal

Andrew Deck — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 21:39:28 +0000

USA Today Co. executives are revealing new details about a controversial deal with Palantir. In a joint interview with Fast Company’s Alex Pasternack, three executives from the country’s largest newspaper chain explained why they moved ahead with the Palantir deal despite major opposition from their own employees.

Mike Reed, the chairman and CEO of USA Today Co., previously said that the deal — first reported by Nieman Lab’s Hanaa’ Tameez — is part of a larger shift the company is making to become “an intelligence organization.” At a Palantir conference last month, Reed said that the company’s services were a way for USA Today Co. capitalize on “the shift to online and the data we have on consumers,” Pasternack reported.

In this new interview, USA Today Media president Kristin Roberts detailed some of those services for the first time:

In all of our entertainment stories and our sports stories, we do affiliate links to our partners. So if you’re reading a sports story, you want to buy the jersey for that team, our reporters and editors used to have to go to a file, find a relevant link, copy that link, put it in. All of that is now automated, and that’s a Palantir project.

Lark-Marie Anton, then a communications executive at USA Today Co., chimed in, saying that Palantir’s current scope of work is focused on audience and advertising, but in the future that could extend to social media strategy and reporting tools.

What stood out about Palantir was its ability to create what it calls an ‘ontology’ layer — essentially a unified model that allows different datasets and systems to work together and be acted upon in real time….The challenge isn’t collecting more data, but making better use of the data we already have.

In August, more than 800 USA Today Co. employees from 31 unionized newsrooms called on the company to dissolve its partnership with Palantir. In a statement, staffers named ethical issues and uncertainty over how the software would be used. Throughout the Fast Company interview, Reed and Roberts heavily criticized the NewsGuild and internal efforts to oppose the deal.

Roberts leveled the strongest criticisms of USA Today Co.’s unions across the country, going as far as to say the NewsGuild was lying to its members:

Guild leadership is saying things that are factually untrue. They prey on fear. No matter that I will appear in front of any newsroom for a standup in which they ask me anything for an hour and a half at a time, and I explain to them all of the things.

She continued:

I’ll give you an example that’s incredibly real for us. Palantir doesn’t work inside of any USA Today Company system. They don’t have access to any of the notes our reporters take. They’re not in the Microsoft suite of tools. They don’t have information directly about our consumers or our staff….They don’t work in our systems. We feed them highly controlled data. We’re in their shit. They’re not in ours.

Reed doubled down on these accusations, extending them to the work the NewsGuild has done organizing around AI in the company, including its push for clauses that would protect journalists from layoffs due to AI adoption.

“I think we’re having more success in newsrooms that are not unionized, with this new world, than those that are unionized,” Reed said.

Last month, USA Today Co. made significant layoffs across the company, including at its local newspapers, and reorganized its audience team. Reed, in a memo to staff, referenced AI-related traffic declines as a reason for the layoffs.

“USA Today Co. executives’ animosity toward their workers and unions is nothing new,” said NewsGuild president Jon Schleuss in a statement to Fast Company. “[We] fully stand behind the statement workers released when this deal with Palantir was first announced.”

You can read the full interview on Fast Company.

Fox News attacks the media roughly every 15 minutes, our study finds. (CNN? Every 140 minutes.)

Philip M. Napoli — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 18:38:33 +0000

In 2025, trust in journalism reached a record low. According to Gallup, only 8% of Republicans expressed trust in the news media, compared with 51% of Democrats. New data show an uptick among Republicans, but overall trust remains near this record low, and the gap between Republicans and Democrats remains substantial.

One of the key drivers of this lopsided decline in trust in journalism may be the extent to which news outlets spend time bashing other news outlets, or bashing the news media in general — a phenomenon we call inter-journalism disparagement. Our research team at Duke University’s DeWitt Wallace Center for Media & Democracy recently completed a study of the prominence of this phenomenon on each of the “big three” cable news networks (CNN, Fox News, MSNBC/MS NOW); whether it has increased or decreased over time; and whether there are significant differences in the rate of disparagement across networks.

The results were stark. Fox News far exceeds the other networks, with inter-journalism disparagement taking place once every 14.5 minutes. In contrast, CNN engages in inter-journalism disparagement roughly every 140 minutes, and MSNBC every 61 minutes.

To conduct this analysis, we gathered 15 years of cable news transcripts (2011-2025) for each network. We gathered a random sample of one week’s worth of programming for each year.¹ With this approach, we ended up with 3,543 transcripts and almost 19 million words across the three networks, which equates to roughly 62,000 pages of text.

Given the volume of text to be analyzed, we trained OpenAI’s GPT-5.5 to identify attacks against the news media. We developed a 20-page instruction document to help the model code instances of disparagement. GPT-5.5 consistently achieved 99.5% accuracy at identifying inter-journalism disparagement and 100% accuracy for avoiding false negatives, compared to human-coded samples. (You can read more details about the entire training and analytical process here.)

We defined inter-journalism disparagement as negative statements about the conduct or content of an explicitly identified journalism target (such as a specific news organization, or the news media in general). Our definition, which is described in greater depth in the full paper, needed to be quite detailed in order for ChatGPT to produce accurate results. Examples of inter-journalism disparagement include:

CNN’s Dan Pfeiffer describing “political journalism writ large” as “bad,” “problematic” and “failing massively.”
MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow describing The Washington Post’s editorial page as “rabid” and “foaming,” and “super right-wing,” noting: “I can’t believe this is in this real newspaper.”
Fox News’ Mark Levin telling viewers that “MSNBC and CNN…have been lying and lying and lying to you for years.”

What we found when comparing the three networks tells us a lot about the dynamics of contemporary cable news and partisan journalism.

First, Figure 1 shows the rate of journalism disparagement across each of the big three networks. Because the volume of text that we analyzed varies across each network, our primary metric was the rate of disparagement per 1,000 words of transcript text. In this figure, we show not only the rate per 1,000 words, but we also convert that rate into a time-based frequency, using the industry standard of 1,000 words equaling approximately six minutes of air time.

In Figure 2, we graph the frequency of inter-journalism disparagement over time. Here, we see that the massive difference between Fox News and CNN/MSNBC persists over the 15-year time period. Still, we do see some dips in the volume of disparagement on Fox News in the two-year periods leading up to the 2016 and 2024 elections, with journalism disparagement levels on Fox News rebounding to near-peak levels in 2025. We haven’t figured out yet what to make of this pattern.

CNN and MSNBC seem to converge in their disparagement activity starting around 2017, with MSNBC’s disparagement rate decreasing somewhat, and CNN’s disparagement rate increasing somewhat. This pattern aligns with recent research that has shown, in other contexts, that CNN and MSNBC programming are converging in ways that suggest diminished differences between the more “centrist” CNN and the more left-leaning MSNBC.

A key takeaway here is that we should not think about Fox News and MSNBC as flip sides of the same partisan journalism coin. At least in relation to inter-journalism disparagement, these left- and right-leaning cable networks behave very differently. Disparaging journalism is a far more central part of Fox News programming than it is of either MSNBC or CNN programming.

In order to get a deeper understanding of these differences, we also identified the targets of the disparagement. These results are presented in Figures 3 through 5.

Figure 3 presents a breakdown of the most common targets of disparagement on Fox News. By far the most frequent target of disparagement on Fox News is “the media.” Following in a distant second is CNN, with the “mainstream media” rounding out the top three targets. Other relatively frequent targets include The New York Times, MSNBC, and The Washington Post.

As should be clear, Fox News devotes far more attention to disparaging journalism as an institution than it does to attacking individual news sources. This stands in stark contrast to what we see when we look at the results for CNN and MSNBC. Looking first at CNN, Figure 4 shows that the network’s most frequent target is Fox News (though with a frequency that wouldn’t crack the top three of the Fox News list).

Similarly, as Figure 5 shows, Fox News is also the number one target on MSNBC. Both CNN and MSNBC have the same top three, with Fox News followed by “the media” and the “right-wing media.” These instances of institutional disparagement happen far less frequently on CNN or MSNBC than they do on Fox News.

Finally, we were also able to identify which hosts or anchors were the most frequent disparagers of their fellow journalists. Those results can be seen in Figure 6. Given the lopsided amount of inter-journalism disparagement on Fox News, it is not surprising that this graph is dominated by Fox News personalities, with Sean Hannity taking the top spot, followed by Greg Gutfeld and Tucker Carlson (note: our graph for Howard Kurtz reflects his move from CNN to Fox in 2013).

This study didn’t distinguish further in terms of the nature of the disparagement across the three networks (for example, in terms of severity or legitimacy). This is something we are exploring in the next stage of this work. Nor did we examine whether viewer exposure to inter-journalism disparagement reduces trust in specific outlets or the institution of journalism. That certainly seems like a reasonable assumption, given the dramatically lower levels of trust in journalism among Republicans that we noted at the outset. We plan to investigate this relationship directly in future research.

But what we do see in this research is that disparagement of the institution of journalism, and of particular news outlets, is a much more prominent component of Fox News programming than it is of either CNN or MSNBC. Some researchers have proposed that this kind of high-volume disparagement of news sources that don’t tow the same partisan line takes us beyond traditional notions of partisan journalism and into the realm of “anti-media media.” The goal of anti-media media is to “weaponize the facade of journalism against the roles assigned to journalism” in a democracy. Based on our findings, Fox News fits this characterization.

Philip M. Napoli is the James R. Shepley Professor of Public Policy, director of the DeWitt Wallace Center for Media & Democracy, and director of undergraduate studies for the journalism and media minor in the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University. Adam Meskouri is a politics researcher at Harvard and Duke. Anjini Mani is an undergraduate at Duke. Grant Socol is a graduate research assistant at Duke. Harrison Walley is an undergraduate at Duke.

Rather than analyze the entirety of the networks’ output over this time, we created a “constructed week” for each year, which is a common practice in this kind of content analysis. This involves selecting a random Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, etc. within each year, so that the sample of programming was reasonably representative of the year as a whole. We included all programming across all dayparts in our constructed weeks. Note: MSNBC was only available through 2023; the network became MS NOW in late 2025.

Sinclair’s new Substack repackages its local TV reporting into a video podcast

Hanaa' Tameez — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 20:54:40 +0000

“How young is too young for a life in prison?”

“SpaceX debris is washing ashore. Who’s responsible?”

“Why schools get paid even when students fail.”

Those are the top headlines so far on Sinclair Broadcasting Group’s new Substack publication, The National Press, launched this week.

The National Press repackages some of the top stories from Sinclair’s 178 local news stations — which employ around 1,200 journalists — into a daily, 30-minute broadcast-style show. The program is hosted by former Newsmax and Christian Cable Network anchor Lyndsay Keith, who summarizes the stories and interviews the local journalists who first reported them. In the videos, Keith sits at a desk with a microphone; the dimly lit background is illuminated just enough to make out two American flags in a mug. (It gives off a true-crime YouTube podcast vibe.)

As Axios’s Sara Fischer noted on Tuesday, Sinclair has long been accused of conservative bias in its local news operation. The National Press is launching in partnership with New Media, the company behind Bari Weiss’s The Free Press, and the two publications look somewhat alike (in part because they both run on Substack). New Media staffers will help create the content and maintain the site and the company will take a portion of Sinclair’s revenue from Substack, Fischer reported.

The National Press is currently free to access, but has paid tiers that include ad-free viewing, community chat access, and merch. Subscriptions start at $5 per month or $50 per year. The five posts on the site so far have between seven and 14 likes each.

Wednesday’s episode focuses on a story about how Michigan is reconsidering lifetime sentences for people sentenced between the ages of 18 and 20. It also tackles AI regulation debates in Congress, drawing on reporting by Capitol Hill reporter Ahtra Elnashar. The show doesn’t appear to be filmed in one take like a true TV news broadcast (Keith is first seen in a black blazer, then a brown one, before switching back to black by the end of the video).

Another video, “Worth Noticing: School Bus Incidents,” is just two minutes long and compiles stories of school bus crashes from around the country. From the text accompanying the video:

We trust school buses to get our kids from the safety of our homes to school every day. So why are we seeing so many serious injuries and incidents? Is this simply a string of unrelated tragedies? Are staffing shortages the problem here? Training gaps? Weak safety protocols?

We’re going to be following these stories. Have you seen incidents like this in your community? Is this something that is keeping you awake at night?

Because these stories are horrific; we’re talking about every parent’s nightmare.

The National Press isn’t Sinclair’s first effort to reach a younger, video-first audience. In 2015, it launched millennial-focused news site Circa, which shuttered four years later.

“Uber agents,” undercover AI personas, and other ways newsrooms are using AI in investigations

Andrew Deck — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 19:39:59 +0000

Late last month, about 150 journalists, researchers, and technologists gathered on the 15th floor of The New York Times Building for a forum on how AI is changing investigative journalism.

Just outside the event space was a hallway commemorating the paper’s more than 140 Pulitzer Prize winners, dating back to 1918. One photograph had yet to be hung: a portrait of this year’s winners of the Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting. For one of their winning stories, a team of Times reporters conducted an audit of the SEC’s crypto lawsuits to show weakening enforcement under the second Trump administration. The reporting was assisted by large language models (LLMs).

The Times isn’t the only major newsroom using AI tools in major investigations. A record-breaking eight Pulitzer awardees this year disclosed AI use to the judges. They used LLMs to organize, summarize, analyze, and translate large document dumps.

“At the Times we’re not doing ‘robots tell the news,’ but a number of different [kinds of AI adoption] that can make the work we do more efficient, more effective, and able to do things that otherwise would be very, very hard to do,” said Juliana Castro Varón, the Times’ senior design editor of AI initiatives, in a keynote. Often, “the most useful part [of AI] is the fact that it understands images and understands text, more than creating [them].”

The Times’ AI Initiatives team, a group of nine journalists and technologists leading AI strategy and deployment in the newsroom, co-hosted the event with Hacks/Hackers, a nonprofit that brings journalists and technologists together to discuss media innovation. (Hacks/Hackers hosted a summit on AI and journalism in Baltimore for the past two years.)

The day was packed with workshops, panels, and presentations about the promise of AI for investigative journalism, led by the technology’s most vocal advocates in newsrooms. But the limitations of these tools — including persistent hallucination problems in LLMs, concerns about vibe-coding errors, and budget constraints as AI token costs pile up — were also a common theme.

“AI is very good at generating leads, but much less capable of establishing publishable evidence,” said Afrooz Mosallaei, a research associate at the Center for News, Technology & Innovation, during a talk about the nonprofit’s recent report on the topic. “A lot of tasks in an investigation — including verification, source development, textual understanding, and editorial judgment — remain fundamentally human responsibilities.”

From search tool to “uber agent”

The release of the Epstein Files was a huge moment for AI in investigative journalism. Journalists across the U.S. woke up on January 30, 2026 to a Department of Justice drop of over 3.5 million pages of documents and tens of thousands of images and videos.

Duy Nguyen, who leads AI science research at the Times, noted that the PDFs in the Epstein Files would stack as high as the Empire State Building if they were printed out, and would take 11 years for one reporter to read. (Epstein sent an average of 65 emails every day for a decade.) It would take a reporter a month to listen to and watch all the audio and video clips.

Many newsrooms decided that the early organization and research into these documents was a task primed for AI technologies. Engineers from the Associated Press, NPR, and the Times led a session on how they built tools to help reporters sift through the documents.

NPR built an internal search tool that let reporters across the newsroom find the documents relevant to their beats, said Kriti Singh, a design technologist at NPR’s AI Labs. Her team classified documents by type (email, legal filing, flight log, witness list), grouped them by location (city, county, hotel, university), and extracted entities (making sure, for instance, that a search for “Prince Andrew” also surfaced files that mentioned “the Duke of York”).

The Times AI Initiatives team built the Epstein Files Engine, an internal chatbot to help reporters comb through the files. “There are so many sorts of threads that you can pull from such a big corpus, and the chat interface really allows [reporters] to dive deep,” said Nguyen. The engine’s interface was built with LibreChat, a free, open-source, self-hosted AI chat platform.

A few real prompts from reporters:

“Look at our Epstein coverage over the past three months and cross-reference with names of people most mentioned in the documents. Give me a subset of names we haven’t covered as often.”

“Find me Kathryn Ruemmler’s email where she said she is missing her ring in Epstein’s apartment.”

“Construct a timeline of Epstein’s death, give me a table that I can copy into a spreadsheet. Be very detailed. Surface witnesses, links and quotes where available.”

Ultimately, more than 100 Times journalists posed more than 5,000 questions to the engine, and it contributed to at least 20 published stories. “This was a signifier of just how powerful an agentic chat interface could be in a newsroom,” said Nguyen. (His team recently published an academic article detailing the tool’s development.)

Since then, the team has created other agentic search tools. Ahead of the Times’ 175th anniversary series, they built “Morgue Bot,” which made it easier for reporters to dive into the Times’ archive.

Now, the team is taking chatbots to the newsroom at large. In July, they launched News Agent, which they’re calling the “front door to AI at The New York Times.” The general-purpose internal chatbot plugs into not just the Times’ archives and the Epstein Files, but other databases, internal documents like the Times’ style guide, and the web. News Agent also allows any Times reporter to build their own custom agentic search tool, tailored to a specific project.

“It’s an omnibus agent or an uber agent that basically acts as a drop-in replacement for chatbots like Gemini or ChatGPT,” said Nguyen, “but specifically geared to help reporters and editors within the Times newsroom.”

The team’s copy for the tool reads, “Ask anything.”

Automating the source spreadsheet

Any beat reporter will tell you they have a love-hate relationship with their source spreadsheet — that Google Sheet or Excel file that lists the name, title, email address, and phone number of every source they’ve spoken to over the years. Such documents are perfect for remembering the name of a researcher you spoke to five years ago without having to dig through your inbox. But they’re tedious to update.

“It can become a dead document that never gets checked,” said J.D. Capelouto, a technology reporter and the newly named AI lead at Semafor.

To try to keep his own source spreadsheet alive and up-to-date, Capelouto made a tool in Google Apps Script, a platform that lets users build small “assistants” within Google Workspace. When he emails someone for the first time, he adds an inbox tag called “New Source.” At the end of each day, the script scans his inbox for any tagged emails, then populates a Google Sheet with all the relevant information about them, including adding a category tag and generating a logline summarizing what they discussed. (There are obvious risks in handling anonymous or sensitive sourcing, but Capelouto said the tool creates minimal new security vulnerabilities since it stays within Google’s ecosystem.)

From there, Capelouto started building on top of the spreadsheet. A pop-up sidebar lets him ask who might be a good person to speak with for a story; the tool combs through the spreadsheet and suggests names.

Every morning, a script also scans the web for the news of the day on Capelouto’s beat, cross-references those headlines with the source spreadsheet, and sends him an email suggesting a topic to cover and a source to contact. Some of the suggestions aren’t useful, Capelouto admitted, but others have actually prompted him to reach out to someone he’d forgotten about.

“A lot of times in journalism, some of the source management work is just saying, ‘Hey, how’s it going?” he said. “This can begin a conversation, then you get a scoop from that.”

The Markup’s reporters decided to go undercover. They posed as users on Match-owned apps, then reported themselves from other accounts to see how easy it was to stay on the platform.

There was only one problem. “We came across this ethical dilemma: Am I gonna ask my staff or myself to take a photo and put it on the Tinder account?” recalled Sisi Wei, the chief impact officer at The Markup and CalMatters.

Even stock photos would subject real people, who had not consented to their likeness being used in the investigation, to reputational harm. Instead, The Markup turned to AI image generators. They found a company that generates visual test imagery and had developed a way to train models without relying too heavily on images of real people.

“They look like real human beings, but if you turn on a light switch, you can tell that AI is here,” said Wei. But they were still “real” enough to bypass the dating apps’ content moderation filters. With these new AI headshots and personas in hand, the reporters went back on the apps and created 50 different accounts.

Ultimately, their investigation found that even after one of these personas was reported and kicked off a Match-owned dating app, they could get back onto the platforms without changing identifying information. Earlier this year, the 18-month long investigation won a SABEW Award for best technology business reporting.

“AI became a way for us to protect our own staff from needing to be a part of the experiment,” said Wei.

Nieman Lab has a new look

Joshua Benton — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 19:37:51 +0000

You may have noticed that things look a little different around here. We’ve just launched the third major redesign in Nieman Lab history. Hope you like it!

My No. 1 goal for this design (internal codename: Roscoe) was increasing design diversity on article pages — to enable a greater degree of art direction. In our previous design, we’ve had three basic layout choices for an article — which basically came down to how large we wanted to play its art. Now we have vastly more room to tie the design to the article — multiple layouts, multiple arrangements of headlines/decks/art, multiple background colors, multiple optical sizes, and more. Here’s a sampling:

The new homepage gives more prominence to our What We’re Reading section — which we update 10 to 20 times each weekday, meaning there’ll be something fresh atop the homepage frequently through the day. It’s got modules to highlight two of our most important topics — AI and local news — and a place for older stories still worth highlighting. Search and subscribe have improved UX. Our footer now aligns with the other Nieman Foundation websites. (Plus: dark mode!)

For about a decade, we’ve divided our stories into “hubs”: Business Models, Mobile & Apps, Audience & Social, Aggregation & Discovery, and Reporting & Production. Those had started to feel a little outmoded; it’s been a while since “mobile” was anything other than the middle of the mainstream, for instance. So we’ve replaced them with six “beats” more attuned to the times: AI & Journalism, Search & Platforms, Audience & Creators, Local News, Reporting & Production, and Business & Revenue. With a little AI assistance, we’ve populated those collections with all 12,000-plus articles we’ve published since 2008.

Those 12,000-plus articles were one of the biggest challenges — making sure they all made the transition cleanly. More than 100 of those articles used custom CSS; each one had to be checked (and most of them updated) to match new layout structures and typefaces. In all, there are more than 100,000 unique URLs on niemanlab.org that now have a new look. And we now have enough history to finish off the homepage with stories we’ve published on this day over the decades.

Our new primary typefaces are TypeTogether’s Literata as the serif and Bakken & Bæck’s Schibsted Grotesk as the sans. (Schibsted Grotesk is, of course, the custom typeface designed for the European media house.) My thanks to the Freight collection (Text, Display, and Sans) for its decade-plus of typographic service.

I’ve designed and coded every iteration of niemanlab.org since founding the Lab in 2008, and it’s been a point of perverse pride for me to be a journalist with some technical ability. But it also means that, over the past 18 years, our backend has accumulated the handcoded cruft of a zillion PHP bugfixes and CSS hacks. So this time I was happy to do the vast majority of the work in Claude Code, which made some of the more ambitious ideas I had far easier to implement. The code is clean and organized in a way that should make it easier to build further.

Subscribers are up, but growth is down. Here’s what worker-owned Hell Gate is trying next.

Sarah Scire — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 18:06:53 +0000

With around $1.5 million in revenue, 2026 is on track to be a break-even year for the worker-owned local news site Hell Gate.

“We’ve spent a lot of money growing this year,” Hell Gate co-founder Nick Pinto told me, “so the fact we’re ending the year in the same place with regards to our bank account, it’s basically good. But it would be better if we were ending with more money than we started with.”

The New York City-based local news org has about 11,000 paid subscriptions — and exceeded $1 million in annual recurring revenue for the first time. That subscriber support is critical, the report notes, because “philanthropy is fickle” and “advertising just doesn’t pay the bills in 2026.” (Hell Gate made more than $20,000 in advertising so far this year, primarily on newsletter ads, compared to $660,000 in subscription revenue in the first three quarters.)

“We have said for many years that subscriptions are also more stable than other revenue sources, because, barring a national economic crisis, subscribers are unlikely to desert us all at once. That qualifier feels a bit less hypothetical and remote these days,” the report goes on, linking to a headline about how an AI crash would cause a recession and global economic stagnation, “but our philosophy is unchanged.”

Hell Gate expects a revenue boost thanks to a new tax credit from New York State. To collect the $157,000, its worker-owners have to jump through a series of hoops, including refiling their personal taxes for 2025.

Like its fellow worker-owned outlet Defector, Hell Gate offers an unusually candid look at its own finances in its annual report. Hell Gate’s openness about its business is a gift to anyone else trying to build (or grow) a news outlet. Many in the news industry, for example, are also trying to solve one of the major problems Hell Gate lays out in its annual report: turning free readers into paying subscribers.

Subscriber growth at Hell Gate slowed from 69% to 22% in the last year. Nearly 64,000 people currently get at least one of Hell Gate’s three newsletters. One conversion move that worked? Randomly withholding the free Morning Spew newsletter.

“The fact that the free subscribers have grown faster than our paying subscribers suggests to me that we need to be more aggressive about figuring out how to work them in,” Pinto said. “Gentle encouragement and inducing guilt is definitely one powerful tool. The other one is turning off the free stuff every once in awhile in a stochastic, destabilizing way, so that they’re like, ‘Oh, I actually really did want to read that newsletter today.”

Here’s the top of one newsletter that successfully nudged some “Hell-Gate-curious freeloaders” to become paying subscribers:

Hell Gate, founded by five journalists in 2022, now has 10 employees, including a couple of part-timers. Currently, only full-time editorial employees can become worker-owners, and only after a vesting period. Shares can only be owned by workers so when co-founder Esther Wang departed this summer, the rest of the owners got the shares back under a buyback policy.

“When we organized Hell Gate, in our fevered idealism, we wrote it into our operating agreement that there’s no way for anybody to make any money selling Hell Gate,” Pinto said.

“To the extent that we contemplated the possibility that we’d even still exist [four years later], I don’t think any of us thought we’d ever want to leave,” Pinto added. “The arrangement makes ownership stakes about control of the direction of the company rather than about, you know, accruing value on an investment. That means our ownership is a thing that keeps us pulling together rather than having us fight over money.”

But, even in worker-owned news organizations, money can be a source of tension. “Compensation and how to structure it has reliably been the single most difficult conversation for Hell Gate owners,” the report notes.

Hell Gate once paid journalists the same salary. Last year, it paid reporters $75,000/year and its two editors $85,000/year. Now, in 2026, Hell Gate salaries range between $83,000 and $100,000, “according to a slightly complicated formula intended to reflect both longevity with the company and the extra work and responsibility carried by editors.” The news org expects to keep tinkering with the pay structure.

“The wise words of one of Hell Gate’s advisory board members continue to be borne out: In setting compensation, the best you can hope for is to minimize the inevitable dissatisfaction,” the report reads.

You can read the full report here.

A study of nonprofit newsrooms reveals some cracks in the model’s foundation

Seth C. Lewis — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 18:00:07 +0000

With an average of 10 local newspapers closing each month, joining the thousands that have met that fate already, conditions out there are grim. Largely in response, more than 6,000 nonprofit foundations have made major investments in local news initiatives, totaling some half a billion dollars or more in direct funding for journalism.

As a result, the number of U.S. nonprofit news organizations has been growing by double-digit percentages year-over-year.

It’s fair to question whether this is sustainable. But in the meantime, at least, what’s not to like about this arrangement — this major push to subsidize local journalism at a time when the for-profit model for it is rapidly vanishing?

Behind the scenes, it seems, there are cracks in the foundation, ones that appear to call for greater scrutiny to understand how sustainable and effective this model truly is moving forward.

As described in an ethnographic study published recently in Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, Jocelyn McKinnon-Crowley of the University of Memphis spent four months in late 2023 and early 2024 embedded in a four-person nonprofit newsroom in a midsized Rust Belt city, and also interviewed news workers at seven other nonprofit outlets. She focused on the question of labor: What is the impact of this type of journalism on the work and the workers involved?

Her main finding is blunt: “The emphasis on funding, on money, and on organizational concerns has become the top priority for individuals working for nonprofit news entities.” And, as journalists “busy themselves” with these administrative chores and organizational imperatives — to keep grant money coming in, to keep funders happy, etc. — it not only comes at the expense of the journalism product but also extracts a heavy toll of unpaid labor from the news workers involved.

The situation, McKinnon-Crowley writes, “leads to a double worker exploitation where journalists feel morally obligated to do good work as journalists and to do good work for a morally just (nonprofit) organization.”

This exploitation, she says, is perpetuated by the nature of nonprofit reliance, as foundations often “take decision-making power away from journalists and the institution of journalism.” A clear example of this, she says, is the grant-making process, which can require an undue level of administrative burden and can force journalists to put the priorities and interests of funders ahead of those of the community.

The result, she contends, is a pernicious cycle:

“Human versus AI news anchors: A survey study on audience satisfaction and the emotional connection.” By Yuan Ji, in Journalism. China has been one of the world’s leading laboratories for AI news anchors. The experiment began in earnest in 2018, when the Xinhua News Agency introduced a virtual news presenter capable of delivering news around the clock. The pitch was simple: AI could provide a tireless, endlessly replicable alternative to a human anchor.

Nearly a decade into that experiment, however, audiences don’t seem ready to trade in the humans.

That’s the finding that stands out from a new study of 343 Chinese news consumers by researcher Yuan Ji. The study examined how audiences perceive AI anchors, including their engagement, emotional connection, and satisfaction compared with human anchors.

The numbers tell a fairly clear story. Only 4.96% of respondents said they found AI anchors very engaging. Another 25.07% said they were somewhat engaging. So nearly three-quarters of respondents did not describe AI anchors as engaging in either of those ways.

The satisfaction gap is even more pronounced. Just 5.25% said they were more satisfied with AI anchors than with human anchors. Another 24.78% said they were equally satisfied.

That means roughly seven in 10 respondents did not report being equally or more satisfied with AI anchors.

For news organizations, the finding raises an important question: What happens when technology solves a problem that audiences don’t necessarily think needs solving?

AI anchors offer obvious efficiencies. They can work continuously, be reproduced across broadcasts and locations, and potentially reduce the costs associated with producing and presenting routine news. But those advantages matter less if audiences don’t find the result engaging or satisfying.

That’s an important consideration for journalists as AI moves deeper into news production. The technology is getting better at mimicking the mechanics of journalism. But journalism is more than mechanics. As Yuan Ji found, audiences also respond to the people delivering the news — and to the sense of connection, credibility, and human presence those people provide.

The finding doesn’t mean AI won’t change journalism. It does suggest that news organizations should think beyond what AI can do and consider what audiences actually value. Efficiency may be one reason to use an AI anchor, but efficiency alone doesn’t guarantee engagement or satisfaction.

For now, the numbers offer some good news for human journalists in television. AI may be ready for the news desk, but audiences, at least for now, still seem to want a person sitting behind it.

“Government-funded watchdog journalism? Analyzing Canadian media workers’ self-perceptions of independence under the local journalism initiative.” By Chris Arsenault, in Journalism Practice. Government funding might seem like an obvious threat to journalistic independence. But Canadian journalists who receive public money say it hasn’t interfered with their work. Instead, many still point to advertisers as the bigger threat.

This new study explores the journalists working under Canada’s Local Journalism Initiative, a federal program that has provided more than $128 million since 2019 to support hundreds of reporting positions at news organizations across the country.

Researcher Chris Arsenault interviewed 22 journalists whose positions are supported by the program. What they said complicates the familiar concern in journalism, that accepting government money inevitably makes it harder for reporters to hold power to account.

The journalists certainly recognized the optics. Many worried that government funding could make audiences question their independence or create the appearance of a conflict. But none said the funding had actually changed what they could report. None could point to a story they had avoided or softened because of the government support. And none could identify a source who had treated them differently because their salary was publicly funded.

When journalists described actual threats to their independence, they were more likely to talk about advertisers.

Several reporters recalled situations in which advertisers had made it more difficult to scrutinize local businesses, organizations or other powerful figures. For these journalists, commercial pressure wasn’t an abstract concern about appearances — it was something they had experienced in their newsrooms.

That distinction is worth considering in an industry where the traditional business model has collapsed in many local communities. Journalists may understandably worry about accepting money from the government. But if the alternative is a newsroom with fewer reporters, fewer resources, and greater dependence on advertisers, public funding may sometimes give journalists more room to do independent reporting, not less.

The journalists weren’t convinced the funding program could fix the larger financial problems facing local news, however. Many saw it as temporary help rather than a long-term solution.

The findings suggest journalists may need to think differently about where threats to independence actually come from — whether from a dependence on government or advertising or some other source. Public funding may not eliminate the challenges facing local journalism, but it seems positioned to give reporters the resources and freedom to do work that commercial pressures have sometimes made harder.

“‘This is how journalism has always been done’: White neutrality, newsroom norms, and an AI intervention in source diversification.” By Gavin Adamson, Asmaa Malik, Shari Okeke, and Jisele Bailey-Hay, in Journalism.

Adding AI to the newsroom does not necessarily help journalists find better sources in the moment. In a new study of Canadian journalists, the technology was more useful as a mirror, helping reporters look back at their coverage and see whose voices they routinely include — and whose they don’t.

Researchers interviewed 12 journalists at a mid-sized Canadian daily and demonstrated an AI tool designed to track the types of sources appearing in news stories. The tool categorizes sources into groups such as politicians, authorities, experts, organizations, and people speaking from personal experience.

The journalists generally supported more inclusive sourcing. They saw it as important to accurate, fair and accountable journalism. But they also described why it can be difficult to put that ideal into practice.

Time pressure, unsurprisingly, was a major obstacle. Reporters working on deadline often turn to sources they know they can reach quickly, including government officials, police, academic experts, and other institutional voices. Finding people outside those established networks takes time, particularly in newsrooms that have fewer reporters and less time for relationship-building.

The result can be a heavy reliance on white and official sources, with the same voices and institutions appearing repeatedly in the news even when journalists recognize that their coverage would benefit from a broader range of perspectives.

In this study, the AI tool was found to do little to change that during the reporting process. The journalists did not envision using it to tell them whom to call for a story or to help them find a source before deadline. Instead, they saw value in using it afterward, reviewing individual stories or larger collections of coverage to identify patterns in their sourcing.

That makes the technology less of a reporting assistant and more of a feedback mechanism. It could help a reporter or editor notice, for example, how often official sources appear in their coverage or how rarely people with direct experience of an issue are quoted.

That kind of reflection could matter if newsrooms use it as part of their regular editorial conversations. The technology can make patterns visible that are otherwise easy to overlook amid the daily rush of producing the news.

But seeing a problem is not the same as fixing it. An AI system can identify who appeared in a story. It cannot build relationships with communities, earn the trust of unfamiliar sources, or give reporters more time to do the work.

Overall, AI can help newsrooms see their sourcing habits more clearly, but it cannot, at present, create the conditions necessary to change them. If source diversity is going to become a sustained part of journalism, it will require newsroom expectations and resources to support it, not simply another piece of technology.

“Stuck between democracy and a layoff: Connecting journalists’ personal disillusionment to overall normative press evaluations.” By Alexis Haskell, in Journalism Practice.

Many journalists enter the profession believing they can make a difference. They expect to inform the public, explain complicated issues, give people a voice, and contribute to democracy. This new study suggests that when those expectations collide with the realities of working in journalism, journalists can become disillusioned with more than their own jobs.

Alexis Haskell surveyed 695 U.S. journalists and found that disillusionment is a measurable experience among American journalists. The concept is different from burnout, the researcher argues. Burnout describes exhaustion and being overwhelmed by work. Disillusionment describes a deeper break between what journalists expected their careers to be and what they actually experienced.

On average, the journalists surveyed were more disillusioned than not. Haskell measured the concept through their feelings about their work, their expectations for the profession and their sense of purpose.

That disillusionment was also reflected in how journalists viewed journalism as a whole. Those who were more disillusioned were more likely to give the press lower marks for five of six democratic roles examined by the study. They were less positive about journalism’s ability to inform, analyze, provide a forum for public discussion, foster social empathy, and mobilize audiences.

The strongest relationships were found in analysis and the public forum. More disillusioned journalists were particularly likely to believe the press was failing to help people understand complicated issues or provide space for public conversation.

There was one exception: Disillusionment was not related to journalists’ evaluations of investigative journalism.

Haskell suggests that investigative work may occupy a different place in journalism’s professional culture. It is highly prestigious, frequently celebrated through major awards and often associated with individual achievement. The other roles are more directly tied to journalism’s service to audiences and communities.

That difference gets at what makes disillusionment important. Journalists who are disillusioned aren’t necessarily saying they can no longer do good journalism. They may instead be questioning whether journalism, as a profession, is accomplishing what they believed it was supposed to accomplish.

The finding connects the personal experience of working in journalism with a broader assessment of the field. When journalists encounter low wages, layoffs, shrinking staffs, and other pressures, the consequences may extend beyond their own careers.

They may begin to lose faith not just in the job, but in journalism’s ability to fulfill the public purpose that drew them to it in the first place.

A previous version of this piece stated that 550 nonprofit newsrooms operate in the U.S. This is inaccurate and it is difficult to estimate the number of nonprofit newsrooms in the country.

ChatGPT is adding real cartoonists’ signatures to fake New Yorker cartoons

Andrew Deck — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 20:01:27 +0000

At the pearly gates, Dolly Parton, in a sparkling gown, stands arm in arm with Tim Curry, dressed as Dr. Frank-N-Furter. “I knew I chose the right plus one,” Parton says to God, who is standing at heaven’s reception desk.

That’s the premise of a cartoon that went viral on Twitter in the days after the legendary entertainers’ deaths in late August. One tweet of the cartoon received 25,000 likes, while other versions of the image circulated on Facebook, Instagram, and Bluesky.

In the bottom right corner of the cartoon is the pen name “BLOPER,” the signature of New Yorker cartoonist Brendan Loper. But Loper didn’t draw the cartoon, or sign it. It was generated by ChatGPT and first posted to Facebook by a Dolly Parton fan. In the comments section of her post, she wrote she had simply asked ChatGPT to make “a New Yorker-style cartoon.”

“I had people writing to me about this cartoon, asking if it was mine,” Loper told me. First came a text from his twin brother, whose friend had seen the AI-generated image. Emails and DMs on social media from strangers followed. “It was very surreal,” he said.

These days, cartoon signatures are more than a byline. In an era where cartoons are regularly stripped from their original context and circulated on blogs and social media without proper licensing, they can also act as a watermark that ties an illustration to its original creator.

“The signature for me is the certificate of authenticity. I only put it on work that I’m putting on the internet that I feel needs to be recognized as from my hand,” Loper told me. “If I put my name on it, it’s official, it’s mine. It really is a brand. It’s the mark that I made.”

Loper isn’t the only New Yorker cartoonist whose signature has been reproduced by ChatGPT. In the same online forums are dozens of images with those of other prominent contributors, including Harry Bliss, Emily Flake, Joe Dator, Pat Byrnes, Peter Vey, and Jason Adam Katzenstein. In my own tests, ChatGPT output cartoons with signatures of some of the magazine’s most established cartoonists, past and present, including George Booth, Liza Donnelly, Ellis Rosen, and Saul Steinberg. In all, I documented more than 15 New Yorker cartoonists whose signatures have been used by OpenAI’s image generator without permission or compensation.

“We believe the future of creativity is one that is fundamentally human, and our focus is on building tools that empower human creativity and creators,” said a spokesperson for OpenAI in a statement. “We very much appreciate the community flagging bugs and unintended behavior by our models, so we can address them.”

After I notified OpenAI of the issue, ChatGPT began to output a new message when I asked it to generate New Yorker-style cartoons: “This prompt may violate our guardrails concerning similarity to third-party content.” Still, as of the publication of this story, it continues to sign some of the generic cartoons it generates with the names of real New Yorker cartoonists.

OpenAI declined to answer my questions about how its models might have ingested signatures from The New Yorker’s archives during the training process.

Even if Condé Nast did want to license cartoons to OpenAI, The New Yorker’s standard cartoonist contract leaves little room for it. The magazine’s two cartoon editors work with a roster of freelancers who submit their work on spec and only get paid if a cartoon is selected for publication. I reviewed several templatized contracts for New Yorker contributing cartoonists, none of which permit licensing for AI training purposes. While The New Yorker has the right to publish commissioned cartoons first, it is not a “work for hire” arrangement and the cartoonist retains ownership of their copyright.

So how did OpenAI’s models learn those signatures? It’s possible they were scraped from the internet. Court documents released last month in the ongoing New York Times v. OpenAI lawsuit reveal the extent to which OpenAI knowingly circumvented publishers’ paywalls while developing ChatGPT. Unredacted Microsoft memos described ChatGPT as a “product that destroys its supply chain” and the data scraped to train its underlying LLMs as “the largest theft of labor in human history.”

In another memo, Jack Clark, then the policy director of OpenAI, wrote, “[O]ur work on AI and Creativity is going to increasingly lead to us creating systems that substitute for the labor of the people that define the ‘culture’ of society.” (Clark went on to co-found Anthropic.)

Many of the cartoonists I spoke to for this story echoed Clark’s sentiment.

“It’s an uncanny simulacrum of an impression of a joke,” said Jason Adam Katzenstein, who has been publishing cartoons in The New Yorker since 2014. “But it’s not the point for it to actually be funny or good. The point is that it’s trying to deal a death blow to labor. It’s trying to render individual cartoonists obsolete because we cost money and take time.”

Katzenstein was part of the class action lawsuit filed against Anthropic in 2024 by members of the Authors Guild, the largest professional organization for published writers in the United States. Katzenstein’s cartoons had been used in an anthology published by Harper Collins, which was pirated and used by Anthropic to train its Claude models.

Last year, a judge ruled that training Claude on the authors’ work was fair use, but that Anthropic’s decision to download and maintain copies of the pirated books was a form of mass copyright infringement. In July, a federal court approved a settlement in the case, granting a $1.5 billion payout to authors and publishers — the largest in the history of U.S. copyright law.

Katzenstein considers the reproduction of his signature by ChatGPT to be more than just a violation of intellectual property; to him, it’s closer to false impersonation. “[ChatGPT] is attaching my name to work that I do not endorse or like. It’s slop, and unlike the other slop that I’ve encountered, this is slop that’s pretending to be me.”

Several cartoonists I spoke to also differentiated ChatGPT’s ability to mimic their illustration style from the reproduction of their signature.

“I’ve had people hack my credit card,” said Joe Dator, a New Yorker contributor for the past 20 years. “That feels like less of a violation than this. When they hacked my credit card, they didn’t dress up like me.”

Alternatively, Grimmelmann says New Yorker cartoonists could have grounds for a “right of publicity” case, a body of state-based law that protects individuals from the unauthorized use of their name or identity. For that, there would need to be proof that the AI-generated cartoons were used for a commercial purpose, not just as a joke or gag.

While I found no evidence that these AI-generated cartoons are being bought or sold, there are signs that image generators are already displacing the work of professional cartoonists.

Last year, The Baltimore Sun fired Kevin Kallaugher, a Pulitzer finalist who had published editorial cartoons in the paper for more than 30 years. And earlier this year, the Sun began regularly publishing AI-generated cartoons in its opinions section. A quick check with OpenAI’s watermark identification tool shows the illustrations were created with OpenAI’s products.

“[We] condemn the use of AI for its theft from artists, its misuse of our planet’s resources, and its threat to original, creative thought,” Marc Murphy, the president of The Association of American Editorial Cartoonists, wrote in an open letter published last month. “The Sun is not alone among American newspapers taking this degrading way out.”

The New Yorker hasn’t taken any such turn toward publishing AI-generated cartoons, though none of the contributors I spoke to said they could support themselves solely on their commissions from the magazine. A New Yorker cartoon is a calling card, and work for the publication opens doors to commercial work, book illustrations, and other gigs that together make up a livelihood. It is this work that is most threatened by AI, they said.

In 1998, Pat Byrnes published his first cartoon in The New Yorker under the pen name “P.Byrnes.” He went on to build a decades-long career with that name. Since he first began drawing cartoons as a teenager, he has always signed it with a period at the end.

“It was like signing a letter,” he said. “Here’s my statement — my gift to you to accept or reject.”

Across the more than a dozen ChatGPT cartoons I found signed with Byrnes’ name, every one ended with a period.

How a plan to turn the Spokane Spokesman-Review into “The People’s Paper” ended in a newsroom revolt

Wilson Criscione, InvestigateWest — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 18:44:52 +0000

This report was produced in a collaboration between InvestigateWest and RANGE.

When the Spokesman-Review announced plans to transfer Spokane’s 143-year-old, family-owned newspaper to a nonprofit founded by executive editor Rob Curley, it took over the front page.

“The People’s Paper,” read the April 16, 2025, headline, saying ownership would transfer “to you, the community.”

Key to the plan was Curley, the folksy self-proclaimed “journalism nerd” who burst into Spokane a decade ago, declaring a love for Gonzaga University basketball rivaled only by his love for Disney. The transition to Comma Community Journalism Lab was cast in media industry publications not only as a way to save Spokane’s daily newspaper, but as part of a growing movement to resurrect dying papers by making them less dependent on ads and corporate ownership and more on philanthropy and community partnerships. As proof of concept, the paper had already added several so-called “community-funded” journalists to its staff.

But in the Spokesman-Review newsroom this summer, that hopeful vision ran into persistent concerns about Curley’s leadership. More than a dozen current and former employees, along with contemporaneous records reviewed by InvestigateWest and RANGE, reveal how the newsroom had raised concerns about Curley’s management for years, culminating in his suspension from the paper on Aug. 7 and a vote of no confidence from the union, the Spokane Editorial Society. He is currently on leave as the paper conducts an internal investigation.

Employees said stories that might have angered powerful community figures or potential donors were killed or curtailed, and that they felt he retaliated against workers he viewed as disloyal. Staffers questioned his financial oversight of Comma, which hired his own son at a salary topping most reporters’ and recruited out-of-town executives to serve as top editors before Comma had met its fundraising goal. Current and former Spokesman-Review employees also described workplace complaints involving Curley and one of those editors, including allegations of inappropriate lewd and sexual comments around employees, including teenage interns.

Curley declined to comment for this article. In a brief phone interview, Curley’s attorney, Patrick Kirby, who specializes in employment and wrongful termination cases, said, “It’s all inaccurate,” in reference to a list of claims InvestigateWest and RANGE provided to Curley prior to publication. Kirby hung up the call when a reporter pressed him on which claims specifically he believed were inaccurate.

The top of Page 1 of The Spokesman-Review, April 16, 2025.

Tensions in the newsroom came to a head in the first week of August, as the paper rallied to cover the most destructive wildfires in Spokane’s history and the imminent ownership transfer approached at the end of the month.

Some staffers were alarmed at the prospect of working for an organization Curley founded, with even fewer checks on his authority.

“The terror had been building through advertising, circulation, and this newsroom each day, getting closer to the day of knowing we would have to work for Rob without the filter of human resources and the publisher,” said one employee, speaking anonymously for fear of retribution.

Reporters had grown increasingly frustrated with Comma editors meddling with stories, and Curley tried to fire a reporter who pushed back, employees say. But instead, when other Spokesman-Review editors backed the reporter, publisher William “Stacey” Cowles suspended Curley, citing “several personnel complaints” against him.

It wasn’t until after Curley’s suspension that reporters were told news that called the Comma plan into question. In a meeting days after Curley had been kicked out of the building, Spokesman-Review management shared that despite public claims by Curley that several reporters were paid for by community donors — a source of optimism for the Comma plan — none of the paper’s reporting positions were currently community-funded.

There were “audible gasps,” according to several reporters in the room. The paper had been promoting its community-funded reporters online, removing paywalls for stories written by those journalists. One reporter remembered how at fundraising events, Curley would point to a journalist’s face on a big screen and tell donors that their money paid for journalists’ salaries. Even the reporters took pride in sharing the claim with readers.

“I’ve been lying on his behalf without even knowing it,” one reporter said.

Cowles, the publisher, said he had no comment on the claims about Curley until the conclusion of the internal investigation. He said the paper is targeting Oct. 30 to close the transaction with Comma. Bill Simer, Comma Community Journalism Lab board chair, did not comment for this article.

Saving local journalism

Before joining the Spokesman-Review in 2016, Curley had been praised in some journalism circles as a leader in transitioning struggling newspapers away from print and into the digital world. In naming Curley as the Spokesman-Review’s new top editor, Cowles said Curley had “a proven record of delivering news that matters” and that his “innovative work” at previous newspapers helped them win top journalism awards “including a Pulitzer Prize,” the announcement said.

But reporters at his previous gigs viewed him differently: as a mercurial leader who hyped expensive, ineffective initiatives, sacrificing journalism ethics to keep up cozy relationships with powerful community institutions and politicians. The Orange County Register in Southern California was criticized for favorable coverage of Disney under Curley, who served as the paper’s top editor between 2014 and 2016 and proudly said he wore a Mickey Mouse garment every day. He also faced backlash when he revised an article two months after it had been published at the request of a politician, despite police reports and other records that didn’t support the change. Curley changed the story over the objections of the reporter and did not note the changes for the public with a correction or editor’s note — a decision journalism ethicists called an “unethical overreach.”

Journalists from the Las Vegas Sun in Nevada had their own problems with him. After he left the Sun in 2012, they noticed that Curley kept getting credit for the paper’s Pulitzer Prize in 2009 — credit that Cowles repeated in the 2016 hiring announcement. Sun employees clarified to the Inlander, a Spokane alt-weekly, that Curley, in fact, had nothing to do with the series that won the Pulitzer. Curley said he’d never told anyone he won a Pulitzer, blaming a series of misunderstandings for it showing up time and time again in his biography.

Curley stuck around Spokane, undaunted by the controversies from his past. And with layoffs and buyouts shrinking the newsroom in a struggling industry, Curley two years ago began testing the Comma pitch among staff by signaling that it would save their jobs. Reporters said he told them privately that they’d receive big raises once the transfer happened. If Comma didn’t move forward, he said the Cowles family would likely lay off staff or maybe sell the locally owned paper to one of the hedge fund–owned companies known for downsizing newsrooms, one current employee recalled.

Reporters felt Curley had compromised editorial independence at the Spokesman as well.

Staffers took issue with Curley altering an article in 2025 about a bond proposal from Spokane Public Schools. In the article, reporters wrote a passage explaining how the proposal could raise property taxes. The story had been cleared by the typical story editors, but late the night before the story was published, Curley had a copy editor change that passage “to be more in line with what the school district wanted us to be saying,” said Emry Dinman, one of the article’s two reporters. “My editors were all as outraged as I was.”

Staffers knew Comma was trying to partner with the school district as part of the ownership transition, though Dinman said he didn’t want to speculate on the intentions behind the late-night edit.

Current and former staffers also said Curley didn’t like articles that were critical of Gonzaga, a private university downtown most known for its basketball team that Curley frequently celebrated in his columns.

Rebecca Hansen-White, a former reporter at the Spokesman-Review from 2018 to 2020, said that during the COVID-19 pandemic she wrote a story about Gonzaga’s plans for an isolation facility, which included some light criticism from a local politician for the private university using government money to do so. But the story was never published. When Hansen-White asked what happened, she recalls an editor told her something to the effect of “that may have been one Rob didn’t want to run,” though she was never able to confirm if Curley spiked it himself.

“That was very frustrating. I worked hard on this and I’m going out to the community and I’m getting in these tough conversations with sources,” she said. “And then I come back to the newsroom and find that my work has been changed or removed without an explanation.”

Comma eventually set up shop on the Gonzaga campus in 2024.

The two editors who Curley hired for Comma in fall 2025 did little to ease reporter concerns about outside interference. Donna Wares and Ron Sylvester had both worked with Curley at the Orange County Register, and when Curley brought them into the Spokesman-Review newsroom, an email sent to the staff described their roles until the transfer as “consultants” — Sylvester for “newsroom metrics and trust initiatives,” and Wares for “enterprise story assignment, editing and Northwest Passages author recruitment.” Northwest Passages is the nonprofit’s book club and event series.

That distinction was crucial for Spokesman-Review staffers, who considered it a breach of journalistic integrity to have non-staffers weigh in on editorial decisions, even if it came from people who would one day be their editors.

“We were told through the union that Comma editors would not be able to touch our stories until the transition happened,” said Emily White, a former reporter who left the Spokesman at the end of August.

But that’s not what happened.

“They were tampering with our stories with no permission,” White said.

The union filed a grievance with the company, said Thomas Clouse, union president and longtime reporter. “Our understanding was that the publisher dealt with it,” he said.

A newsroom altercation

As Comma took longer than initially expected to reach its $2 million fundraising goal, the transition kept being delayed. The presence of Comma staff in the newsroom, meanwhile, grew louder.

Comma had also hired one of Curley’s sons. Johnathan Curley made a salary of $62,400, according to a 2025 court document, topping the pay of almost every Spokesman-Review reporter. His title at Comma is “technical director,” and he handles video and audio equipment for Comma events. Previously, the 24-year-old worked as a part-time audio-visual technician for Cirque du Soleil in Las Vegas. Johnathan Curley did not respond to requests for comment.

Staffers questioned how much Sylvester and Wares were getting paid to be Comma editors before the transition, and they were concerned that Wares spent half her time in California, flying back and forth on Comma’s dime.

Sylvester lingered in the newsroom, with staff increasingly unclear of his role. Employees described Sylvester as a disorganized and unproductive editor who often shopped online for magician supplies while in the office. He was tasked with managing the summer internship program, they said, but his involvement was so marginal that other staff had to pick up his slack.

“If you ask what his job entailed, I wouldn’t be able to give you an answer,” one staffer said. Sylvester did not respond to requests for comment.

In early August, with the planned transition to Comma just weeks away, the newsroom scrambled to cover wildfires that had caught national attention. The staff worked day and night, eventually breaking the news that one of the blazes was set by an arsonist. Courts reporter Alexandra Duggan, as it turned out, had been one of the first people to see the alleged arsonist near the flames.

The Review Building, which houses the Spokesman-Review office, in downtown Spokane, Washington on September 30, 2026. (Wilson Criscione/InvestigateWest)

On Aug. 4, Sylvester told reporters they should change how they attribute documents in stories. Instead of citing “court documents,” he said they should cite “sworn affidavits.” Despite having no clear editorial role in the Spokesman-Review newsroom, Sylvester went into Duggan’s story that night and made a change reflecting his preference — except in that instance, the record was not in fact an affidavit. It introduced an error into the paper.

Clouse, the union president, said he called a meeting with management to try to understand why Comma editors were meddling with stories again. “That never got resolved,” he said.

Two days later, Duggan, who’d worked 13 straight days, was finishing up another story about the accused arsonist. Sylvester approached her and said, in a low voice, “you’re doing it again,” several employees who witnessed or learned of the altercation told InvestigateWest and RANGE. He’d been referring to her story saying “court documents.”

Duggan walked away. But Sylvester followed, and the two shouted back and forth at each other until other editors stepped in to cool things down.

“I wanted to make sure that our stories were truthful and honest and that they were not being edited without us knowing and without any communication,” Duggan said. “And I just wanted to keep the integrity of the paper.”

Curley sided with Sylvester, telling Spokesman-Review managing editor Lindsey Treffry that night to fire Duggan.

Treffry refused.

The next morning, during a series of meetings with Cowles, Treffry and other editors shared complaints they had about Curley. Cowles decided to put Curley on administrative leave, revoking his keycard access to the paper’s offices.

A few hours later, however, Curley got in the newsroom again by asking an unsuspecting intern for their keycard. He walked around asking where he could find Treffry, who, according to several staffers there that day, was hiding from Curley in the photo room with other editors. Duggan joined them, and it was there that Duggan learned Treffry saved her job. As they hid, Duggan texted White, who was not in the newsroom at the time. White shared the texts with InvestigateWest and RANGE that described how an HR employee escorted Curley out of the building.

“They chased Rob out of the newsroom,” Duggan texted. “I can’t see because I’m hiding.”

“I’m hysterical,” Duggan wrote, crumpled into a ball and crying.

Duggan said she’d “ride or die for this paper.” She said Curley’s attempt to fire her “felt like a slap in the face — it felt like betrayal.”

In an interview for this story, she said she’ll be grateful for the rest of her life that Treffry had her back.

“She did save my job. And she protected the rest of us from something similar,” Duggan said.

“Jessica Rabbit”

Former reporter Rachel Alexander, who worked at the Spokesman-Review from October 2014 to July 2018, recalled a pattern of “cronyism and ethics violations.”

In a letter she sent to investigators after Curley’s suspension, Alexander described a departure of women on staff and in leadership roles during Curley’s first year; editors who left meetings with him looking “shaken, exhausted and at times afraid”; and how Curley didn’t keep promises to sponsor a former staff member’s work visa if he left the union.

“Despite the meaningful journalism I was able to do and the presence of many talented colleagues who I greatly admire, I could not in good conscience continue working for a man who was willing to lie to a friend and jeopardize his ability to remain in the country,” Alexander wrote. “I made the decision to leave the Spokesman in 2018 primarily because of Mr. Curley’s behavior.”

Before leaving, Alexander noticed that she was “nearly the only woman left on the desk,” according to her letter.

She also told investigators that Curley seemed to primarily “take issue with or pick fights” with women in the newsroom. Instead of talking through concerns, he made “petty” decisions, like blocking reporters on Twitter, she wrote.

In recent years, the paper has hosted high school interns as part of Curley’s effort to make Comma into a training ground for young journalists. But the behavior of Curley and Sylvester made some employees question whether they should be responsible for mentoring young journalists.

One letter shared with internal investigators described how, during a 2024 barbecue for Spokesman-Review interns at Curley’s house, two teenage interns saw sexually explicit images of women on Curley’s iPad as he scrolled through his camera roll. Curley had been giving the high school girls a tour of his home and showing off his guitar collection. He was looking for song lyrics on his iPad when the inappropriate pictures flashed on his screen, according to employees who had heard of the incident from the interns.

Several staff members also brought concerns to HR about inappropriate comments Sylvester made around interns who were in high school and college. In a conversation with another employee about the evolution of photography — and while sitting near an 18-year-old intern — Sylvester joked that if someone wanted to send a “dick pic” back in the day, they had to wait for it to develop, but today it can be done in an instant.

On a different occasion, Sylvester told another employee to wait a few seconds before downloading porn, according to several employees. It was loud enough for other employees to hear the unprompted comment, including nearby interns.

“It was very shocking to hear someone … who was supposed to be a mentor figure say that,” a staffer who witnessed the exchange said. “It’s just not appropriate for the workplace.”

Current and former staff members also described a work environment where people perceived as being against Curley or who reported issues to HR were retaliated against. They felt Curley had favorites — including Sylvester and Wares — who would not face consequences for their actions.

After an employee reported Sylvester to HR for his comment about dick pics, a letter to investigators said Curley appeared to retaliate against those he believed had made the report. Curley excluded one of the employees from important meetings and avoided another employee and gave them “distasteful looks.”

Curley needed to make sure staff was “loyal” to him, employees said. One employee, who requested anonymity for fear of retaliation, said Curley and his allies tried to get them to divulge whether certain Spokesman-Review employees were loyal or not. Staffers said Curley also dangled future “executive” positions to two young women in exchange for their loyalty.

At least one former editorial assistant filed an HR complaint against Curley. After studying creative writing at Eastern Washington University, Brooke Lauerman, now 26, was hired in December 2024 to answer newsroom calls and emails and assist with other editorial tasks. She said Curley often treated editorial assistants “like houseplants.”

“He would pretend we weren’t there. He’d have conversations leaning over our desk,” she said.

One day about a year into the job, after most employees had left for the day, Curley told Lauerman he needed to talk to her, and brought her to an empty conference room and told her to shut the door. She thought she might be getting fired. Instead, for roughly an hour, Curley “begged” her to become his personal assistant, she recalled, saying that he needed help managing his life. He told Lauerman she was “special,” that she could be an “executive lady and make a lot of money,” and that he would be her mentor.

He said he once had an assistant “like Jessica Rabbit, I could send her into a group of guys and they’d all say yes to her, and I want that again,” according to the complaint Lauerman filed.

Lauerman felt like she was being manipulated, and she didn’t understand why Curley was flattering her so much to push her into a job that had never been discussed before.

She made a report with HR, at the direction of her supervisor. Lauerman remembers the HR employee saying they’d “add it to my list” of complaints about Curley, and Lauerman requested that the complaint be kept quiet until she left the paper months later. She followed up with a letter detailing the experience in writing.

Lauerman said Curley avoided her in the months that followed. In March 2026, as her last day of work at the Spokesman approached, he asked her out to lunch, which Lauerman declined.

The Imagineer

Shortly after Curley’s suspension was announced, the union held a vote of “no confidence” in Curley. Nearly 90% of the union’s 25 members participated, and all voted in favor of the measure, other than two who abstained.

“He was threatening the jobs of [union] members, and we would strongly object if he were to come back to this newsroom,” Clouse said.

Reporters said that since Curley’s suspension, they’ve been able to focus on journalism. The newsroom “has really felt more like home than it has for a long time,” Duggan said.

Mathew Callaghan, a Comma reporter who contributes to the Spokesman-Review, echoed similar sentiments. He called the newsroom’s editors, reporters and those on the copy desk “some of the best, most hardworking people” he knows, but expressed some concerns over Curley.

“The idea of Comma is a great idea, but I don’t trust Rob Curley to execute that idea,” he said. “I don’t think that he has the best interest of the journalists that he’s supposed to uplift. … I don’t trust him and I question his ethics.”

The publisher has told newsroom employees he will not release results of the investigation. The union believes it’s important for the community to know what the investigation found, Clouse said.

An October 1, 2026 Instagram video from the Comma Community Journalism Lab account recaps a September 23 Northwest Passages event in which Spokesman-Review executive editor Rob Curley, right, interviewed former Disney Imagineer Joe Rohde, left. (Instagram)

It’s unclear what role Curley will continue to play at the Spokesman-Review or at Comma. The result of the pending investigation could decide his fate at the Spokesman-Review. But he may still remain the executive director of Comma, where employees may work for him again anyway. George Brunt, a Comma board member and in-house legal counsel, said that the board will honor the results of the investigation if it finds something indicating it is inappropriate for Curley to be in the newsroom, “with the caveat that the methodology was sound and not biased.” Brunt added that from what he’s seen so far, “I don’t think it was done in good faith.”

Last week, Curley was set to host a Comma event featuring Joe Rohde, a former Disney Imagineer. When the event started, Wares was hosting instead, but shortly into the conversation, Wares invited Curley up to the stage to conduct the interview.

“I’d like to invite the biggest Disney fan that I know, the person who is actually the chief Imagineer of Comma, to join me on stage. Please welcome Rob Curley,” she said.

The audience inside the packed theater cheered, with about a dozen people sitting near the front giving him a standing ovation, including at least one Comma employee.

Curley rushed onto the stage, with Elton John’s “I’m Still Standing” booming through the Gonzaga auditorium.

This report was produced in a collaboration between InvestigateWest and RANGE and is republished by permission.

Wilson Criscione is an investigations editor with InvestigateWest. InvestigateWest is an independent news nonprofit dedicated to investigative journalism in the Pacific Northwest. Visit investigatewest.org/newsletters to sign up for weekly updates.

Daisy Zavala Magaña is a bilingual journalist in Spokane for RANGE. RANGE is a media organization for people who love the Inland Northwest and want to make it better.

Columbia Journalism School will pause its M.A. program (and launch an online degree)

Sarah Scire — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 19:34:07 +0000

The Columbia Journalism School will pause admissions for its Master of Arts program, dean Jelani Cobb announced on Thursday. The country’s most prestigious journalism school also announced a new online, part-time degree.

In a note to alumni of the M.A. program, Cobb wrote that the administration has “initiat[ed] a critical evaluation” of the M.A. curriculum. “To give this review the focus it deserves, we are temporarily pausing admissions for the upcoming admissions cycle.”

The school’s admissions page has been updated with a similar message.

Columbia will continue to offer its Master of Science programs in Journalism and Data Journalism. Current M.A. students are not affected by the pause. The estimated cost of attendance for the nine-month M.A. for the 2026-2027 year is roughly $120,000. The M.S. costs around $130,000 and the year-long M.S. in Data Journalism costs about $180,000. According to Columbia, around 80% of students receive some sort of financial aid.

The M.A. program is a newer degree — created in 2005 — and was designed for working journalists with three or more years of professional experience “to go deeper into a specialized subject.” The M.S. degree, described as “the foundational program of the Journalism School,” is for students with “zero to three years” of experience.

The school also announced it will, for the first time in its history, offer an online degree. The new online Master of Science in Journalism program will be part-time with students earning a degree over two years.

“This new program brings an Ivy League J-School education directly to students across the United States,” reads one post from the Columbia Journalism School on X. “With guidance from CJS’s faculty of working journalists, you can develop your reporting skills while continuing to live and work in your community.”

Roughly half of enrolled M.A. candidates at Columbia Journalism School are international students, Aditya Soni and Edmund Lee reported for Reuters. Uncertainty in immigration policies and visa challenges under the Trump administration caused “a sharp drop” in international applications to Columbia, according to Reuters, and contributed to the program’s pause.

Here’s the initial note from Cobb:

Dear CJS M.A. Alumni,

I am writing to share an update about the Master of Arts program at Columbia Journalism School.

As part of our ongoing commitment to keeping our graduate education timely and innovative, the administration is initiating a critical evaluation of the M.A. curriculum. To give this review the focus it deserves, we are temporarily pausing admissions for the upcoming admissions cycle.

We want to reassure you directly: this evaluation phase reflects our commitment to continuous excellence. It does not alter the standing, prestige, or lasting value of your CJS M.A. degree.

The M.A. degree is grounded in deep domain expertise, rigorous analytical reporting, and subject-matter authority—qualities media organizations and independent journalists need now more than ever. The groundbreaking work produced by our alumni network across global newsrooms continues to define the high standards of this program and reinforce the strength of your credential.

Periodic curricular review is a standard practice at Columbia to ensure our specialized tracks advance alongside the media landscape. Current M.A. students are completing their nine-month curriculum without interruption, receiving the full scope of concentration coursework, thesis advisement, and faculty mentorship.

We remain immensely proud of your achievements and the impact of your reporting worldwide. If you have questions, please contact Dr. George Miller, associate dean for academic affairs.

Sincerely,
Jelani Cobb
Dean & Henry R. Luce Professor of Journalism

This story was updated.

Photo of Columbia University used under a Creative Commons license.

California’s big local news bill becomes law

Laura Hazard Owen — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 18:44:51 +0000

At the end of August, the state of California passed a bill to give news organizations tax credits based on the number of journalists they employ. It’s the largest local news bill in the United States — expected to generate as much as $40 million for the state’s newsrooms each year — and on Wednesday, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed it into law.

Assembly Bill 2222, known as the Community Newsroom Employment and Workforce Sustainability Act, gives newsrooms tax credits of $20,000 each for up to five journalists on staff, and $15,000 for every journalist after, as well as $7,500 credits for journalists working part-time and $15,000 new hire credits.

The nonprofit Rebuild Local News sponsored the bill. “If you hire more people, you get more money,” Matt Pearce, Rebuild Local News’s director of policy, told Nieman Lab in August. “If you lay people off, you get less money. If you don’t employ anyone, you don’t get anything.”

Newsom told reporters that he sees some downsides of the bill, including the fact that it will benefit hedge fund– and billionaire-owned newsrooms. (The guidelines about the types of newsrooms that qualify are here; the program is “designed to be broadly inclusive.”) From the L.A. Times:

While speaking with reporters on Wednesday, Newsom acknowledged some of the concerns that have been raised about those who will receive benefits from the bill’s funds, specifically hedge funds and billionaire owners and outlets that he accused of spreading propaganda.

“It does subsidize those that don’t need to be subsidized,” he said. “We have hedge funds in this space. We have billionaires in this space. We have people that are profiteering in this space by gutting the newsrooms and extracting value out of the space that also are the beneficiaries.”

Newsom said he chose not to veto the bill because he believes its benefits outweigh the liabilities. He added that he hopes the Legislature and next governor can work to narrow down who benefits most from the legislation.

“We should not be subsidizing hedge funds,” he said. “We should be focused on where the need is the greatest, in my humble opinion, and I do think when you have no cap, the limitlessness of this…to some of the most well-heeled organizations, where now they simply could pull from this bill the benefits that they didn’t even ask for or need, is self-evident.”

The law goes into effect January 1, 2027, and newsrooms should see credits beginning in 2028.

Two 23-year-olds used AI to create a daily audio briefing. It’s now the top news app in Argentina.

Hanaa' Tameez — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 18:13:12 +0000

As an engineering student, Valentín Virasoro worked part-time at a car dealership in Cordoba, Argentina. His boss at the dealership had a habit: Every day, he’d send an audio update covering the major stories in the automotive industry.

Virasoro left the job in February to pursue a career in tech. But the idea of informative audio briefs stuck with him. Sometimes, he said, he’d get another employee to forward him his ex-boss’ voice notes. By August, Virasoro and his friend and co-founder Iván Schahovskoy Hoferek created Lisa AI, an app that uses artificial intelligence to generate personalized audio news updates.

Within days of its August launch, Lisa became one of the most-downloaded news apps in the country. As of September 30, it is the No. 1 app in the News and Magazines & Newspapers categories in the Apple App Store in Argentina. It’s also one of the top 100 most downloaded apps in the country, Virasoro said. About 70% of users who have downloaded the app actively interact with it. Audio briefs have a 90% completion rate, with about 80% of users returning to the app the next day. Virasoro declined to share the total number of downloads. Journalists have told Virasoro and Schahovskoy that they’ve been using the app to keep up with news on their beats, they said.

Virasoro and Schahovskoy are both 23. Lisa — whose name is inspired by the first Apple computer — is a response to the changing news consumption habits of young people around the world, Virasoro said.

“Younger generations like [ours] are so used to consuming personalized content through an algorithm that knows my interests perfectly and is constantly recommending content,” Virasoro said. “What Iván and I saw was: There is a journalist reporting on a topic that I am super interested in, but I don’t have a tool that directly shows me the content I care about in the formats we consume, like podcasts, threads, a language model like ChatGPT or Gemini, or a scrollable feed.”

Here’s how it works: Users download the app and indicate what topics they’re interested in, and their level of interest in each topic. Lisa then continuously scans dozens of Argentinian news outlets for recent stories about those topics. The result is a 10-minute “newscast” that summarizes articles about the user’s favorite topics and attributes the facts to the corresponding news outlets or journalists. Lisa only cites free news sites and cannot access paywalled content. It can produce up to two audio briefs per day, and each one includes a chat feature that provides links to the stories cited, so users can read the original journalism themselves. Lisa’s voice is calm, and sounds AI-generated. The voice has an authentic Argentinian accent, which Virasoro and Schahovskoy developed using voice-cloning technology.

The app is free to use. There is no subscription fee or advertising on the platform. It’s available worldwide in app stores, but only uses Argentinian news sources. Lisa is run by a volunteer team of five engineers and developers, and two advisors. Virasoro said they received some funding from angel investors, which he and Schahovskoy put toward the product development. They do not take a salary.

Intellectual property law in Argentina allows for news content to be used and redistributed within reason as long as the original sources are clearly cited, but doesn’t give the public free rein to republish news articles word for word. Excerpts of up to 1,000 words may be used for educational, informational, or scientific purposes, the law says. Similar to copyright law in other countries, Argentina’s law gives the Lisa team the ability to summarize and reference news outlets’ reporting, Schahovskoy said, and it’s why Lisa generates summaries with attributions rather than republishing articles from news outlets.

According to the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, 46% of Argentine adults reported that they avoided news in 2026. Trust in news fell to 26% in 2026, down 6% from the year before. While traditional media in Argentina struggles to stay afloat amid a decline in advertising revenue, nearly one in ten people reported getting news from a chatbot. Young Argentinians are increasingly turning to creators, independent journalists, and YouTube for their news. Worldwide, about half (52%) of young adults reported that they get their news from chatbots, video platforms, and social media. Podcasts continue to be popular, with 11% of adults reporting that they have used the medium to get news.

Virasoro and Schahovskoy saw the shift in news consumers’ attention to new platforms as “a societal problem” due to the lack of editorial curation of social platforms, often surfacing fake news. Even with Lisa’s early success, Virasoro and Schahovskoy don’t have plans to monetize the app anytime soon. They said they want to keep iterating for now, but are open to helping news outlets monetize for themselves within the app down the line. So far, three news outlets have reached out asking for their websites to be included in Lisa’s reading list. They don’t see the app as a competitor to news outlets, but rather a new way to help the news industry find new audiences.

“Traditional media is losing power — even though they do super professional and deeply dedicated work to ensure the information they make available to the public is fact-checked and verified,” Schahovskoy said. “We value it immensely, and we want society to trust [media] again, and to give them a platform built around current consumption formats that reduces friction between society and verified information.”

Federal appeals court upholds Thomson Reuters’ landmark AI copyright win

Andrew Deck — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 21:04:26 +0000

On Tuesday, a U.S. federal appeals court ruled in favor of Thomson Reuters, upholding the company’s landmark win in a copyright infringement case against the now-defunct legal AI startup Ross Intelligence. The ruling marks the first federal appeals case to reject a fair use argument for using publisher content, without permission or compensation, to train a commercial AI product.

“The undisputed evidence reflects that Thomson Reuters’s materials possess a creative spark, and ROSS aspired to be a direct competitor by using them for a highly similar purpose,” wrote Judge Tamika Montgomery-Reeves, who sits on the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia, in her decision.

Notably, Montgomery-Reeves points out that the case does not concern a large-language model (LLM) or other generative AI tool. Ross’s competing AI search engine didn’t generate original text, but instead retrieved existing passages from judicial opinions. She argues that this may limit its impact on other AI copyright litigation.

“Under ROSS’s framing, this case appears to concern the future of AI legal technology. But appearances can be deceiving,” she writes. “In truth, this is no more than an ordinary copyright case.”

Thomson Reuters filed its lawsuit back in 2020, long before the release of ChatGPT and other generative AI chatbots as we know them. The first known AI copyright lawsuit in the U.S., the case echoes many more recent lawsuits between news publishers and AI companies like OpenAI and Anthropic. Thomson Reuters argued that Ross had copied thousands of “headnotes,” short summaries of the legal issues in a given case, that were published on its legal research platform Westlaw. These headnotes were then used to train Ross’s own competing AI-powered legal search engine.

In a February 2025 ruling, judge Stephanos Bibas sided with Thomson Reuters in the case. He rejected the argument that using copyrighted work to train the commercial AI model was legally permissible, as Ross had argued in court. One of the main factors in a fair use case is whether the infringing work impacts the market value of the original.

“Even taking all facts in favor of Ross, it meant to compete with Westlaw by developing a market substitute,” wrote Bibas in his original ruling. “And it does not matter whether Thomson Reuters has used the data to train its own legal search tools; the effect on a potential market for AI training data is enough.”

Legal experts have been keeping a close eye on Ross’s appeal with the 3rd U.S Circuit Court of Appeal. As the first AI copyright case to reach a federal appeals court, there was potential for it to set far-reaching legal precedent on fair use — precedent that could be taken advantage of by news publishers arguing in similar AI copyright cases.

Ultimately, Montgomery-Reeves’ ruling emphasizes that an AI tool that reproduces a copyrighted work’s text in order to compete directly with that work in the market, will likely not hold up to a fair use test. But she leaves room for generative AI tools to be considered more transformative than Ross’s AI search engine.

In the lawsuit Bartz vs. Anthropic, filed by members of the Authors Guild, a judge ruled that Anthropic’s use of published books to train its Claude LLMs was, in fact, fair use. It was only Anthropic’s decision to pirate books and store copies of them that lost them in that case. That ruling in June 2025 resulted in the largest settlement in U.S. copyright law history, granting a $1.5 billion payout to authors and publishers.

“Unlike the AI models in Bartz…ROSS’s AI platform cannot generate original expression, and the evidence here supports the opposite conclusion about transformativeness,” wrote Montgomery-Reeves, implying that her ruling does not contradict the ruling in that case.

In other words, if Ross had built a product that could output summaries of Westlaw’s headnotes with its own “original expression,” this fair use ruling could have looked very different.

Photo of Thomson Reuters headquarters by used under an Adobe Stock license.

How publishers are rethinking audience engagement: Five takeaways from the Future of Media Technology Conference

Gretel Kahn — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 19:31:50 +0000

Earlier this month, just across from the Tate Modern in central London, journalists and media managers gathered for this year’s Future of Media Technology Conference, a one-day event hosted by Press Gazette. Speakers included journalists, technologists, and media professionals like The Economist’s Andrew Palmer, Politico UK’s Katie Palisoul, The Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism’s Mitali Mukherjee, The Logic’s David Skok, and News UK’s Tom Jackson. Here are five takeaways from the event.

Publishers are rethinking audience engagement in light of Google Zero

In the age of declining traffic, publishers are grappling with how to engage and retain audiences. There’s a shift away from volume toward relationship-building, with publishers exploring new ways to measure engagement beyond pure clicks.

App downloads, frequency of visits, and newsletter signups were identified as important indicators by The Guardian’s chief support officer, Liz Wynn. “You build motivation, support, effective comprehension of our mission, our purpose, why we exist, why we should keep coming back,” she said. “[It’s a] very important emotional driver, but it’s not enough on its own. We have to focus also on the habit and the value of driving people day to day.”

To build those habits, publishers are focusing on community-building, with some even employing AI tools to achieve that goal. Predictive models, such as using AI to recommend users their next read, were cited as a common example of how AI can help drive user engagement. Anna Sbuttoni, deputy head of digital at The Times and The Sunday Times, said her team is now using AI to help with another aspect of audience engagement: comment moderation.

“[Content moderation] is still overseen by humans, but it’s just brought that work way down, and it’s freed up that team to now do much more interesting and innovative community-focused work than they were doing when they were just spending hours and hours on this moderation job,” she said.

News organizations are training their own in-house creators

Another challenge for news media is increased competition from independent journalists and news creators. This phenomenon has been well-documented in research by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism (RISJ) and was a running thread of discussion across various panels, where legacy media organizations discussed how to adopt creator-led practices while preserving institutional trust, editorial authority and sustainable revenues.

The Economist is a prime example of this. The magazine has moved away from its legacy of journalistic anonymity toward putting its journalists’ faces, names, and personalities at the forefront of its value proposition. Its executive editor, Andrew Palmer, said one of the reasons the publication has begun to showcase its journalists is a desire to highlight the humans behind the journalism as AI advances.

“It builds a connection, so we definitely have a lot of subscribers who want to see what our journalists do and understand the workings of the newsroom,” said Palmer.

Like many newsrooms, The Economist is fostering in-house talent to put in front of the camera as a way to respond to growing audience interest in creators. The team at The Times and The Sunday Times is also thinking about its talent strategy as the next step in audience engagement. Putting journalists in front of the camera is one strategy it is beginning to employ to reach people who might not otherwise engage with the papers.

“How can we make people consider getting a Times subscription? A big part of that has been just a complete change in how we approach our social video formats, and that’s really putting our journalists at the front and center of that. Getting people to know the real journalists,” explained Sbuttoni.

Earlier this year, The Guardian announced the formation of Guardian Studios — a new creative hub for video-first, personality-led journalism. Leah Green, who leads the initiative, said the team is looking to create a new slate of YouTube shows built around on-screen talent. Green agreed that legacy media has a lot to learn from creators. But news media has one thing that individual creators don’t: brand recognition.

“There can be a [certain] panic and [an] overcorrection from legacy brands. There’s so much to learn from the creator economy: personality and how to create fandom,” said Green. “But brand is one thing that an individual creator can never have. It would be a mistake to try to replicate the creator economy.”

Jasmine Dawson, senior vice president of BBC Studios, said one of the main things legacy publishers can learn from creators is a deep understanding of their audience. Creators, unlike broadcasters and publishers, “live and breathe” in their audience’s world: They understand them and know what they want.

“Obsessing about your audience means not only knowing where they are, but what they want to talk about, what they want to hear from you, what they want to see from you,” she said.

Clicks from AI search are starting to become an important metric

Over the past year, publishers have been reckoning with what many describe as a significant decline in referral traffic, as changes to Google Search reshape how audiences discover news. Google’s rollout of AI Overviews and AI Mode, which provide AI-generated answers directly within search results, has heightened concerns that fewer users will click through to publishers’ websites.

“There’s a real tension that exists in terms of what’s happening in partnerships and their relationship with audiences,” said RISJ’s director, Mitali Mukherjee. “We don’t have a clear sign of what exactly will happen.”

This uncertainty is one of the main reasons publishers are investing in strengthening direct relationships with their audiences. At the same time, they are examining their relationships with AI companies and their presence in AI search. They want to remain visible across search and AI services while protecting the value of original journalism.

The world of AI search was described as the “Wild West,” with the rules of the game still unclear. No one knows exactly what gets to the top of AI search results, for example, making it difficult to build an optimization strategy around a technology with so many unknowns.

Tom Jackson, chief technology officer at News UK, underlined the need for news publishers to adapt their content to AI-driven search and discovery, while warning that the field is changing too quickly to make major strategic decisions based on today’s patterns.

“One thing I’m finding quite interesting, given my background, is that they’re saying richer metadata may become increasingly important,” said Jackson. “It’s going to be interesting to reopen that tagging and metadata box in this new, agentic AI–focused world.”

Despite the uncertainty, publishers still want to experiment with how they can maintain a presence on these platforms. Carly Steven, director of SEO and editorial e-commerce at the Daily Mail, said that, while the publisher’s default position is to protect its IP and focus on creating original content, it has also started experimenting in the AI search space.

“We are starting to test a nuanced approach to that…to be more visible on these platforms,” said Steven. “We know our readers are looking for information on these platforms and are starting to look for brands they trust.”

Show your value to monetize your content

What is the monetary value of journalism? And how do we make audiences pay for it? Those questions were at the heart of many discussions. The overwhelming response was that, in order to persuade audiences to pay for news, organizations need to demonstrate the unique value of their journalism.

For example, Katie Palisoul from Politico UK explained that the publisher is building better audience data and conversion journeys to demonstrate the value of its paid journalism to users of its free site. By introducing registration for free content, Politico can better understand its audience, identify registered users who are likely to subscribe, and guide them toward premium content.

“We are building some foundational elements to be able to show the value of our paid-for content, which is our policy journalism,” she said.

The question of monetization extended beyond audiences to conversations around AI, particularly the tension between the short- and long-term economics of allowing AI platforms to use publishers’ content.

In the short term, publishers have an incentive to participate in AI platforms — even if the compensation or referral traffic is small — because their content can be relatively fungible. But if every publisher accepts that weaker value exchange, does it undermine the economics of journalism in the long term?

Steven from the Daily Mail said that the question of fungibility has never been particularly relevant to the organization, as it strives to create content that is exclusive, original, and not replaceable.

“We are really focused on the absolute conviction that our business is valuable, and that that value needs to be paid for,” she said. “We are experimenting, adapting to the landscape as it changes, as new technologies emerge and they become established standards, but fundamentally believe that [our content] has value.”

Jackson from News UK framed licensing and deal-making as a core monetization path when it comes to AI, with a strategy that combines partnerships with legal action. This has led the company to strike a deal with Meta while also entering licensing conversations with other AI companies.

“Ideally we want to have relationships with all of these people and get fair value back. But if they come in and steal that content, we will sue them,” said Jackson. “It’s not just the monetary value of that deal, which is material. It’s also the ability to then have that close relationship with these organizations.”

Newsletters remain valuable for publishers in the age of AI

In the midst of such a future-oriented conference, one old piece of technology stood out as a winner across the panels: newsletters. They were framed as direct, differentiated products that deepen reader relationships and reduce reliance on platform algorithms. Many of the news organizations showcased at the conference have invested in newsletters, which remain a strong way to engage directly with audiences and counter declining referral traffic.

For The Logic, a Canadian newsroom focused on tech and business, newsletters have been a core part of the organization since the beginning. David Skok, The Logic’s CEO and editor-in-chief, said the publication hasn’t seen a drop-off in open rates, while advertiser performance has continued to grow. He attributes their success to treating the newsletter as a premium, central product of the newsroom. The Logic considers its daily newsletter briefing, which is written specifically by its journalists, the front page of the newspaper.

“The way we treat newsletters is really more as their own product,” said Skok. “We were a bit ahead of the curve in that we had this direct relation with our readers, because we just decided very early on that we weren’t going to build our business on the top of some of these algorithms.”

Politico Playbook also demonstrates the enduring appeal of newsletters, having spawned numerous global iterations since its launch in 2007. Palisoul from Politico attributed its success to an “obsession with audience”: The team knows exactly who its readers are and what they want from the product.

“The Playbook is written with an exact audience in mind: a prime minister, a cabinet minister…But authors think of that person as a person. They don’t think of that person as an MP,” explained Palisoul. “It’s fun. It’s cheeky. It’s got good humor. Great puns. It tells them where they can go for a drink. It’s really focused on the daily life of that individual.”

Gretel Kahn is a journalist at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, where this story was originally published.

Photo of Chairs of different colors by Steve used under a Creative Commons license

NewsMatch will shift from a year-end campaign to a year-round model

Sophie Culpepper — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 20:19:26 +0000

Since NewsMatch launched as an experiment a decade ago, the annual end-of-year campaign has become a cornerstone in the fundraising strategy of nonprofit newsrooms across the country.

First created by the Knight Foundation in partnership with the Institute for Nonprofit News and the News Revenue Hub, NewsMatch has evolved into what many INN members think of as its flagship program. Now, INN is thinking about the next 10 years. If the first decade of NewsMatch helped newsrooms fundraise, “the next phase will focus on helping newsrooms build on that foundation with more advanced, flexible campaigns tailored to their goals and stages of growth,” according to a report INN released Tuesday. To support that evolution, NewsMatch will shift from “a single year-end campaign to a year-round model.” Next year, INN will pilot “NewsMatch catalyst campaigns” in which some INN members test new fundraising strategies, among other things.

About 600,000 first-time donors have contributed to nonprofit news via NewsMatch in the program’s lifetime, per the report. INN found that the average number of mid-level donors per newsroom (those giving between $1,000 and $5,000) more than doubled between 2021 and 2025.

In 2022, local matches surpassed national donors for the first time, a milestone for the program. The report indicates that INN’s leadership is thinking about how to keep bringing new funding to a field that has grown substantially since NewsMatch launched, even as newsrooms face funding and audience challenges. “INN fundraises annually for a program highly valued by our growing membership, but the program is not endowed,” INN executive director and CEO Karen Rundlet states in the report. “While INN has expanded support beyond the usual suspects in journalism philanthropy, cultivating these newer entrants to funding nonprofit journalism requires long lead times for donor education and buy-in.”

Read more and find the full report here.