When leadership at The Washington Post laid off more than 300 journalists last month, Post Local was among the hardest-hit sections. Successive rounds of cuts had already shrunk the section down to around 40 reporters and editors. (In the early 2000s, the metro department had around 200 journalists.) But the latest layoffs left the section with around a dozen journalists, a severe blow to an institution that had remained home to some of D.C.’s most impactful local reporting. Cuts to other sections, like arts and sports, also diminished local coverage. Executive editor Matt Murray told remaining staffers, “We’re not a paper of record; there’s no such thing anymore in today’s world,” The Wall Street Journal reported.

Almost immediately, local news upstarts in D.C. and just beyond announced expansions that will attempt to fill parts of the new coverage void, including The 51st, City Cast, Axios, and The Baltimore Banner. The journalists at these organizations also have some of the clearest perspective about the magnitude of reporting power the city has lost.

D.C. is no news desert; these expanding outlets are just a few of the orgs that have carved out local news niches in the metro area of six million and city of 700,000. The city’s Black newspaper, The Washington Informer, has published for more than 60 years; El Tiempo Latino has provided local Spanish-language news since 1991. More recent entries include Ethiopique, founded in 2022, which provides Amharic-language reporting for the DMV area’s large Ethiopian community. The alt-weekly Washington City Paper reportedly offered to buy the Post’s local and sports sections before the layoffs. Scott Brodbeck owns and operates for-profit local news websites in three Northern Virginia suburbs.

Despite all this local media activity, “the Post was always the thousand-pound gorilla in local reporting,” said Andrew Beaujon, senior editor at Washingtonian. “It’s a question of resources: Smaller outlets don’t have, typically, the kind of person power required to really dig in on reporting-intensive stories.” The Post could afford to assign reporters to take big investigative swings, even if they came to nothing; “that was something that the Post could absorb. The rest of us just really can’t — we can’t put people on a big investigation and hope it works out.”

Though the paper was best known under owner Jeff Bezos for its national ambitions, Beaujon said, “there’s nowhere in town that could cover local stuff the way the Post did.”

City Cast CEO David Plotz said that after the cuts were announced, his team sat down to try to calculate the percentage of D.C.-area stories that originated in The Washington Post and were picked up by other outlets. Six months to a year ago, “the Post was the ‘Mother Earth’ for 75% of local stories,” he estimated.

“Even people who weren’t [directly] consuming Post Local news were consuming it — they just didn’t realize it,” he said. Now “that ecosystem has to reset — there’s been a fire, and new species have to come in and build up.”

I spoke with leaders at a few of the organizations seizing this moment to expand local coverage. Their models — a nonprofit worker-led co-op born of another institution’s layoffs, a for-profit outlet that’s part of a national network, and a powerhouse regional nonprofit — reflect the patchwork range of news orgs attempting to take up the mantle of local coverage when metro dailies buckle. (That range is also on display in Los Angeles.)

On the one hand, Beaujon observed, D.C. is such a nationally oriented city that some of its residents let local engagement slide. “I had a boss who used to say that Washington had the best-educated low-information voters in the country,” he said. “There are a lot of people who don’t really particularly care about city council races.” But, he said, there’s also “a really big contingent of people who are not going anywhere here, and who need to know what’s going on in their communities.”

“I honestly don’t know if there’s any way to make money off of that [need],” he said. “We had, supposedly, the biggest business geniuses in the world trying to figure out how to pay for it, and they came up empty.”

The 51st: Ambitions to “triple” reporting capacity and an uptick in paying members

Two years ago, a different news organization’s cuts made headlines in D.C. In February 2024, WAMU executives shut down the DCist website, resulting in layoffs of 16 journalists and other staffers; that followed buyouts at the Post that had already shrunk the Metro section, and layoffs at Washington City Paper. From DCist’s ashes rose The 51st, a worker-run nonprofit co-op launched that same year by laid-off staffers.

When asked in 2024 what other D.C. local news she reads, The 51st co-founder and editor-at-large Colleen Grablick named Post Local along with daily newsletter 730DC, Washington City Paper, and Street Sense, a newspaper covering homelessness and inequality.

Abigail Higgins, The 51st’s president and CEO, told me she especially valued Post Local’s big investigations and longer-term projects, pointing to its coverage scrutinizing the city’s anti-violence interventions and a multimedia story showing the lasting impact of the surge in federal officers on a Southeast D.C. neighborhood.

“What we’re losing is very, very scary, and very sad,” Higgins said. “The resources that The Washington Post commanded, and still commands, are incomparable, and the kind of accountability reporting and investigations and daily coverage that The Washington Post is able to do, not just for D.C., but for the entire country, is irreplaceable.”

The 51st’s team lacks the resources to fill that void. But “at the same time, it’s really important to us at The 51st to think about what an alternative could look like to our current media landscape,” Higgins said, specifically one “that isn’t controlled by billionaires.”

The team believes reader support, which provides almost 70% of The 51st’s funding, is a key building block for that alternative. The organization has worked to build reader feedback into its DNA from the outset, especially through community connector events.

In the first three days following the Post layoffs, The 51st gained more than 710 new paying members; it’s since surpassed 1,100 new paid members, out of almost 4,400 paid members. (It has more than 15,500 total subscribers including its free tier.)

The co-op employs four full-time staffers and eight contractors. Even as the team is clear-eyed about the impossibility of replacing dozens of Post reporters and their associated infrastructure, the organization has a specific expansion goal: It wants to hire three more full-time staffers, which would “triple” its reporting capacity. The 51st aims to raise $375,000 by March 13 to convert a part-time editor to full-time, hire one longtime freelancer, and hire a third reporter, whom the team hopes will be a laid-off Post journalist. (The tagline: “When Bezos fires, we hire.”) At the time this article was published, they’d raised more than $257,000. The campaign accepts individual one-time and recurring donations; business sponsorships and group subscriptions also contribute.

“We have big ambitions: to be D.C.’s go-to source for local news — one where residents of all eight wards can feel seen, heard, and connected,” the campaign page states. “It’s a mission that has always felt urgent, but after the Post’s executives abandoned our city, we know we need to kick it into high gear.”

Higgins believes the future of D.C. journalism has to include large-scale public funding to be sustainable. She pointed to local legislation under consideration that would allow residents to decide which news outlets should receive public grants using “news coupons.”

Today, in a reality of “too many stories and too few journalists to tell them,” Higgins sees collaboration among local publications as a necessity. “I think D.C. deserves a vibrant local news ecosystem where there are a bunch of different thriving publications who are not having to fight over scraps,” she said. “We really want to be a part of building a future where that’s the case.”

Higgins hopes this is an opportunity to build better local news. “But also,” she added, “I wish that we weren’t having to build something better out of so much wreckage.”

City Cast: An expansion to original reporting

City Cast’s David Plotz is a D.C. local who’s read the Post since the third grade. To him, sports and local coverage are intertwined, and he sees cuts to both as losses for D.C. residents. He pointed to the Post’s All-Met feature celebrating high school athletes, saying since his own childhood, it’s been “iconic” for local kids; now, it’s gone.

D.C. is one of 13 cities where the local media company that launched as a podcast network operates. Plotz has previously told me City Cast is best positioned for success in cities that already have strong local media ecosystems — its teams spend a lot of time surfacing and discussing original reporting from other outlets, and other local journalists often appear as guests on City Cast’s podcasts. But in the wake of the Post cuts, Plotz decided City Cast D.C. had a bigger role to play in original local reporting. To do that, the team plans to hire at least four reporters (it has just hired one, Emma Uber, a laid-off Post local breaking news reporter). City Cast D.C. also just announced the hire of an executive editor, and is still hiring a managing editor.

Plotz said he envisions multi-platform journalists appearing across City Cast’s newsletters, social channels, and podcasts. (City Cast is more broadly pursuing a social-first strategy these days.) “We envision a series of newsletters around topics that we feel are urgent and important,” with one newsletter per journalist, he said, adding that the company is reconfiguring its website to feature more original reporting. The team is looking to cover local politics, elections, and government; local business and development; where to eat and things to do; and the “tabloid beat — the story everyone is talking about.” It also aims to dig into “D.C. data” for stories.

Plotz said he’s always envisioned City Cast adding reporting capacity over time. “We think this would be a next evolution for City Cast anyway,” he said. In D.C., “for reasons both historic and corporate and opportunistic, it made sense to really accelerate that.”

City Cast is owned by Graham Holdings Company — the same Grahams who stewarded the Post for generations before selling the publication to Bezos more than a decade ago. The company still owns other businesses in the D.C. area. Plotz said the parent company is supporting the expansion financially, but declined to say how much they’re investing. “It’s an important cause close to their heart, and they think it’s a great business opportunity,” he said. “They are very invested in the health of D.C. as a corporation, and they’re very invested in the health of D.C. because this family has been based there and has been…good citizens of D.C. for so long.”

Among the various local orgs expanding, Plotz said it remains to be seen how different outlets will fill new coverage gaps, and whether one will emerge as the dominant outlet. But he thinks “we’ll do a good job collectively” filling the void created by the Post Local cuts.

At its peak, the Post had historically high rates of market penetration. In the mid-80s, for instance, daily primary market household penetration was 54% while Sunday penetration was 73%, “the highest of any major market newspaper.” The same 1985 annual report claimed, “The Post’s readership in Washington and the immediately surrounding counties is the highest of any major metropolitan newspaper in its home territory.”

That reach, Plotz reflected, is almost unfathomable now. “If you told me that we could get 40% of those households, I would buy myself a yacht,” he said. “I don’t think it’s likely that any of us is going to get to 40% of households in this metro area with our coverage. But we don’t have to get to 40% for it to be an amazing opportunity, and for us to be amazing servants to that community.”

In an educated, wealthy, media-savvy and “media hungry” metro area, “there is a demand for this, and we have to find the right ways to meet that demand.”

The (Baltimore) Banner: Prince George’s County and D.C. sports

Could another multimillionaire-backed news organization step up where the Post is ceding ground?

In 2022, Maryland businessman Stewart Bainum pledged $50 million to The Baltimore Banner over four years. On the back of that investment, the nonprofit has grown into the state’s largest newsroom and won its first Pulitzer Prize. A domain change last summer from thebaltimorebanner.com to thebanner.com laid the groundwork for the outlet to expand beyond Baltimore, as it did last fall by launching a news bureau in Montgomery County, Maryland’s most populous county and part of the northern Washington suburbs.

Immediately following the Post layoffs, Banner CEO Bob Cohn announced the organization was “accelerating” a planned expansion to neighboring Prince George’s County, where it aims to have reporters covering education, local government, and community by April.

“We did that because of the opportunity and, really, obligation to us presented by the Post’s decision to disinvest in local news,” Cohn told me. He said the Banner would have been “highly likely” to proceed with this expansion anyway later this year, but the original plan had been to wait “about a year, until we had good data on our Montgomery efforts.”

The early-stage data the Banner already has from Montgomery is promising; the news org has grown the county’s paid subscribers from 2,000 when it launched in September to about 9,000 now. The Banner plans to bring short-form video to Prince George’s from day one, as it did in Montgomery. While these two expansions have been announced and framed as county-level initiatives, Cohn said the Banner has learned in Montgomery County that meeting local news needs really means organizing coverage around the city level.

“We talk about our move here in terms of going into the county, but if you’re a resident in these [two] counties…it’s more about the city, the place you live, rather than the overall county,” he said, despite the local government having a county-level structure.

The week after announcing the Prince George’s County expansion, the Banner announced it would also hire reporters to cover D.C. sports, including “beat coverage of the Nationals and Commanders as well as enterprise reporting across the region.”

Unlike the Prince George’s County expansion, this is not an acceleration of an existing plan; it’s an opportunistic move in direct response to the Post axing its sports section. The Banner didn’t receive many subscriber requests for coverage of Washington sports teams prior to those cuts. “I think that the audience interest materialized because of what happened a few weeks ago,” Cohn said.

From the Baltimore region, the Banner knows that “sports can be a real magnet for audience interest” — its coverage of the Ravens and Orioles, in particular, is “really popular and really important to our readership.” Cohn thinks about sports as “an important piece of the puzzle” of providing local news. “We are trying to increase the value proposition to our Maryland readers, and we know that many of our Maryland readers are diehard fans of the Washington sports teams,” he said. (The Banner has also seen a lot of interest in high school sports, and thinks that’s “an opportunity,” but is prioritizing the Prince George’s and D.C. sports expansions for now.)

The Banner saw “two very strong weeks of new subscriber activity” in the wake of these two expansion announcements, Cohn said.

When I asked if the Banner would consider further expanding into D.C., Cohn said “there are no plans” to do that right now. Still — Status has reported that the Banner registered the domain names dcbanner.com and thedcbanner.com.

An editing error misrepresented The 51st’s total subscriber numbers. The piece now includes the correct numbers. The 51st is also a worker-led nonprofit, not a worker-owned co-op.

Elizabeth Hansen Shapiro, with support from Arnold Ventures (disclosure: an occasional consulting client of mine), was given the opportunity to review in depth all of those proposals, and has prepared a provocative and thoughtful report, entitled “Rebuilding local journalism at scale: A field-level analysis of infrastructure needs,” which is beginning to circulate in the industry, and will be published next week by Media Impact Funders. (I’ll add a link here, and revise the wording of the previous sentence when that happens.) She generously agreed to talk with me ahead of the report’s formal publication.

Hansen Shapiro was the cofounder and CEO of the National Trust for Local News (for which I also did some consulting) from 2020 until February of last year. She has had research postings at Columbia’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism, the Shorenstein Center at the Harvard Kennedy School, and the Berkman-Klein Center at Harvard. She holds a Ph.D. in organizational behavior and sociology from Harvard Business School. Our conversation, which took place earlier this week, has been edited for length and clarity.

Listen more to audiences, less to funders

The report pulled U.S. organic traffic estimates using Ahrefs for ten major English-language tech publications, including Wired, CNET, Mashable, The Verge, and PC Mag. Growtika then compared each publication’s peak traffic month in 2024 to January 2026. The publications had a combined peak traffic of 112 million in 2024. In January, those same publications only saw 47 million organic visits, a drop of 65 million.

Across the ten publications, The Verge saw the third steepest decline, falling from over 5.3 million organic visits in February 2024 to just 790,000 visits in January 2026. That’s an 85% drop. Seven of the outlets had at least a 50% loss in traffic, with CNET and PCMag sneaking under that at 47% and 41% traffic declines, respectively. Mashable fell the least, dropping 30% from 16.1 million organic visits in May 2024 to 11.3 million in January 2026.

It’s worth noting that all the figures pulled from Ahrefs are estimates and the decision to pull peak traffic months in 2024 instead of averages likely skews the figures. That said, the report lays out a compelling case that there has been a massive loss of organic traffic across tech journalism in just the past two years.

The report’s author writes that it can’t prove causation, but does speculate the roll out of Google’s AI Overviews is contributing to the decline. For one, most of the publications began to see their traffic fall off most sharply in the second half of 2025, which corresponds with the expansion of AI Overviews, particularly for “how to” explainers and gadget and gear guides. Publications like HowToGeek, Digital Trends, and ZNET undoubtedly have suffered from these queries turning up answers in Google without the need to click through.

The report also points to Reddit’s recent jump in Google search rankings for “best X” keyword searches as a possible factor. As well as the rise of generative search chatbots, like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity that are cutting into traditional search.

Overall, the report questions how sustainable “search-dependent revenue models” are for the digital tech sites in 2026.

No discussion of tech media can get past this basic traffic fact: in the AI world, Google and social no longer refer traffic, which means that the vast majority of readers just never find you in the first place. Analysis: https://t.co/zZW6PhxhZ2 pic.twitter.com/WgBUIDWoIF

— Danny Crichton (@DannyCrichton) March 3, 2026

more viscerally: these traffic declines represent directionally aligned revenue declines https://t.co/5LN09xavHT

— Alex Heath (@alexeheath) March 4, 2026

An absolute apocalypse ongoing in the Tech space; 58% of Google Traffic to the world's biggest tech sites has disappeared since 2024. The question is, will this phenomenon come full force for gaming sites, rather than just the echoes we've already experienced?
growtika.com/blog/tech-me…

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— Alex Donaldson (@apzonerunner.com) March 4, 2026 at 4:21 AM

Obvious but confirmed:

people now read less news, more AI summaries of news.

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— Nick Tsergas (@nicktsergas.ca) March 3, 2026 at 8:57 PM

As the American public and people around the world try to understand the over 3 million pages of documents, 180,000 images, and 2,000 videos in the latest Epstein Files drop, these search limitations are a serious barrier to entry. In the vacuum created by the DOJ, journalists and engineers have stepped in to fulfill EFTA’s transparency promise. Many of them are using AI tools to create alternative databases and release them for the general public — making the files more easily searched, analyzed, and understood by the average person.

Take Jmail, an interactive archive that has transformed the dense email PDF files of Epstein’s emails into a familiar, searchable Gmail-style inbox. Last month, Riley Walz, one of Jmail’s creators, announced that the Jmail website had surpassed 450 million page views.

“They’re trying to get as many eyes on [the Epstein Files] and as much public awareness, knowledge, and understanding of this as possible,” Dan Rosenheck, the editor of The Economist’s data team, said of Jmail and the work of its volunteer engineers. “They built something that the public can use directly, rather than having it be intermediated by journalists, basically having it be in a format that so many people use in their everyday life.”

These types of AI-powered transparency projects have only become more important as trust in government institutions and the Trump administration’s handling of the files erodes. Last week, NPR reported that the DOJ intentionally withheld and removed documents in the Epstein Files that named Donald Trump, including an accusation by a woman that he had sexually abused her when she was a minor.

“In a time where people feel the government’s not being transparent, I think it’s even more important for media outlets to provide that service, to give people access, to feel empowered and feel like they can take control over the information that’s out there,” said Camaron Stevenson, a national correspondent for Courier Newsroom. (Courier’s publisher and CEO, Tara McGowan, is a former Democratic political strategist, and Courier newsrooms explicitly support Democratic candidates in battleground states.)

Stevenson built two public searchable databases using files released by the DOJ and Congress last year, before the most recent DOJ drop. He said the project has given his readers a sense of agency in a news cycle that often leaves them feeling powerless. It has also returned hundreds of tips to fuel his investigative reporting.

Building AI document search for readers

Since the first Epstein Files were released last year, newsrooms have been using machine learning and LLMs to parse documents and find story leads.

Earlier this month, New York Times AI projects editor Dylan Freedman explained how he and his colleagues built “bespoke software applications” to help reporters search photos visually, identify document duplicates, and generate video and audio transcripts. The Times has also been using a proprietary search tool developed by its Interactive News desk to break news about the files and comb through the documents for investigative leads.

“If we had 50 reporters reading 500 documents a day [it] would take us four months to get through all the documents,” said Nicholas Confessore, an investigative reporter for The New York Times in a recent episode of The Daily, talking about the January DOJ release. “And that’s just to read them.”

The Guardian and the BBC have also been using similar proprietary search tools, according to the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.

While these AI tools frequently serve reporters, the same AI technologies and techniques are increasingly being used to build reader-facing products about the files.

Last October, after Congress released 20,000 documents from Epstein’s estate, Courier’s Stevenson uploaded the files to Google Pinpoint, which is marketed as a free “AI research tool for journalists.” Pinpoint uses optical character recognition (OCR) to make text across thousands of documents machine-readable. It also leans on Google’s Gemini models to generate transcriptions of audio files.

Stevenson was able to use his Pinpoint database to do keyword searches for relevant people and organizations in the files, and search images using basic descriptions. It also helped him maintain a stable archive of files, as the Trump administration continued to redact and remove documents from the official DOJ archive in the weeks after their release. After the first DOJ drop in December 2025, Stevenson created a second database using Pinpoint.

Rather than limiting access to these Pinpoint projects to Courier staff, Stevenson published both on their site and shared them on social media. The posts included a call to action, asking Courier readers to flag any documents of interest they found using the tool. Some tips Stevenson received have directly supported his reporting, including coverage of Epstein’s ties to Jes Staley, a former J.P. Morgan executive.

“Even the ones where it’s not necessarily something I can use for a story, it’s been very helpful to build trust with the general public and restore faith in our broader institutions in a way that people feel the government is failing to do,” Stevenson said.

Pinpoint does have serious limitations. The tool can’t handle video and has limited photo-processing capabilities. There are also caps on the number of documents that users can upload.

“I can only upload 250,000 documents, which in any other case would be fine,” said Stevenson. The three million pages of documents in the most recent DOJ dump, however, blew past that cap. Stevenson says he’s been taking calls with engineers and companies who reached out to offer their services to find an alternative hosting platform or build a custom tool to continue the project. “We’re in the process of developing something we can use and the public can use because, unfortunately, a free tool from Google is not going to cut it anymore.”

“Our project was being used to go after the perpetrators”

Jmail has leaned on over a dozen volunteer engineers to tackle the new DOJ release, according to Luke Igel, one of its co-creators and the CEO of Kino AI.

At first, Igel says, he and collaborators ran the files through Cursor, a generative AI product built on top of Anthropic’s Claude models. Routine errors pushed the team to start using a more boutique PDF extraction tool. For most of the files, they have used tools built by the startup Reducto AI.

Faced with a PDF of an email from Epstein — or in many cases a PDF of a photocopy of a print-out of an email from Epstein — Reducto was able to identify and pull out the subject line, sender, and body of the email. Jmail engineers then used the corresponding JSON data to populate their Gmail imitation app. In the months since Jmail’s launch last November, the team has released several spin-off projects that mimic Google’s suite of products, including JPhotos for images in the files, JeffTube for videos, and JFlights for Epstein’s flight records and passenger lists.

While Igel does not consider himself a journalist, he does subscribe to a similar set of values. His biggest inspiration for the project, he says, is the Pentagon Papers. Before the Supreme Court ruled that The New York Times and The Washington Post could report on the leaked military documents, the Pentagon Papers circulated throughout Washington, D.C.

“Senator Mike Gravel, to get it in the Congressional Record, just had to read it out loud,” said Igel, referring to when the then-Alaskan Senator read aloud 4,100 pages of leaked government documents about the Vietnam War during a Congressional subcommittee in 1971. “Everyone was so terrified of what would happen — the legal and social consequences of just posting such insane leaked materials.”

Igel sees Jmail as, similarly, entering the Epstein Files into the public record.

Even with custom PDF extraction tools, though, errors can slip through. LLM hallucinations and more basic OCR or transcription errors are a risk with any AI-powered tool that touches the files. The risks are only compounded when these tools are released directly to the public, without a layer of verification or fact-checking.

“It’s impossible for us to make sure that every single email is correctly verified,” Igel told me, speaking to the resource constraints of the small volunteer team. He emphasized that Jmail has a button at the upper right hand corner of every email where users can click through to see the original source in the files. “That’ll immediately give you more trust in our system, because you’ll see, this is completely one-to-one. Then on the off case where it might not be good, you can click and see the original.”

To avoid any further violations of victim privacy by the DOJ, Igel also says the Jmail team has been “proactively and reactively” redacting names that should not have been released.

The Epstein Files is part of an information ecosystem that is already riddled with misinformation and speculation. Whether to maintain editorial standards or avoid liability, most major news organizations have chosen not to take on the risk of publishing inaccuracies or breaching privacy by making their internal AI search tools available to readers.

Still, Jmail has collaborated with several news organizations since its launch last fall. In February, The Economist published a story that analyzed and visualized Jmail’s underlying data. The story identified the 500 most-represented public figures in Jeffrey Epstein’s emails and organized them by industry, showing how frequently notable people like Michael Wolff, Ariane de Rothschild, and Sultan bin Sulayem were in touch with Epstein.

“As a data journalist working on a project, I wanted the giant CSV and to have it be as correct as possible,” said Rosenheck, explaining that his team worked with Jmail’s team to vet the structured data for accuracy before publication. “It was very fortunate that, when we got this idea, someone else had gotten 90% of the way there already.”

Drop Site, a Substack founded by former Intercept investigative reporters Ryan Grim, Jeremy Scahill, and Nausicaa Renner, has also collaborated with Jmail. Last fall, Drop Site obtained access to Epstein’s Yahoo email account archives via the nonprofit organization Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDoSecrets), a leaked dataset separate from the DOJ and Congressional Epstein Files releases. While many of the Yahoo emails had first been obtained and reported on by Bloomberg, they had not been released.

After connecting with Igel and his team, Drop Site published their files on Jmail’s website in December, making their cache of Yahoo emails publicly available and searchable.

Last month, Les Wexner, a retail billionaire who the FBI once labeled a co-conspirator of Epstein’s, was asked about one of those emails during a Congressional deposition. Wexner emailed Epstein right after his 2008 sex crimes conviction, writing, “You violated your own number 1 rule… always be careful.” Through the deposition, the exchange was entered into the congressional record.

“This is something that you could only find on Jmail,” said Igel. “It was very satisfying to see that the more original stuff in our project was being used to go after the perpetrators.”

Today we are revising our Creator Revenue Sharing policies to maintain authenticity of content on Timeline and prevent manipulation of the program.

During times of war, it is critical that people have access to authentic information on the ground. With today’s AI technologies,…

— Nikita Bier (@nikitabier) March 3, 2026

As Wired reported, X has been filled with disinformation since the United States and Israel first started bombing Iran. While there are AI-generated videos in the mix, that’s not all. According to Wired:

In some cases, alleged video footage of the attack shared in posts on X are actually months or years old. In several posts, video footage of apparent attacks have been attributed to incorrect locations. A number of images shared on X appear to be altered or generated with AI. Other posts attempt to pass off video game footage as scenes from the conflict.

Bier’s post, notably, doesn’t say anything about what happens if users post misleading videos, like the video game footage, without disclosing the source. It’s worth noting that X’s own AI tool, Grok, is hilariously bad at identifying AI-generated videos:

here, in response to someone asking for verification, is Grok claiming that an obviously fake video is not fake — “real civilian footage” — we are in such deep shit https://t.co/9We8rZ8UQu

— Ilya Lozovsky (@ichbinilya) March 3, 2026

Verifying information takes hard, human work. For a look behind the scenes — and to keep up to date with what is and isn’t real — BBC Verify has created a dedicated feed for updates on the war in Iran.

He’d seen enough of the new CBS. If there are still photos in the CBS hallways of Cronkite, Murrow, Rather, and Edwards, their faces must be forming into frowns. Trust is elusive to define, but it’s an all-important currency that took decades to build and nurture. It is now eroding in mere months, and all those behind-the-scenes discussions about how to be fair, factual, and fierce in storytelling are apparently no longer the company’s driving principle.

The Ellison takeover and creeping transformation of CBS have sent shivers down many spines. Now, though, we’d better open our eyes to how quickly the losses in authoritative national news are growing. These losses come at a time when the need for checks and balances in our wobbly and threatened republic has n,ever been greater.

This week, it appears Anderson’s CNN may suffer the same fate as CBS News. Many of us have followed the Warner Bros. Discovery sale saga for months. Even in the best stories, there were usually just a couple of paragraphs mentioning that CNN, a less financially valuable chip in the sales process, could be affected. After all, this has been a battle of titans over film franchises and libraries and the endless global cash flows they generate. Accurate, on-the-ground news, the real currency of democratic life, has been devalued in a world of unbridled state capitalism. Furthermore, the nearly century-old guardrails of federal regulation appear to be gone in an instant.

During Trump’s first term, the major national media outlets providing substantial accountability coverage were few, but still a semi-effective counterweight. I count The New York Times, CNN, The Washington Post, and NPR among those first-term stalwarts. Remember Glenn Kessler’s early Pinocchio count? It was retired last July as The Washington Post receded. (Is there a better example of accountability lost than the legendary fact-checker disappearing?)

Today, after less than a year of fear, recrimination, threats, and spurious lawsuits, the snapshot of where we stand is crystal clear. This transformation of national news didn’t take long. Certainly, we’ve conjectured and argued about the many cracks in the nature of national news for awhile. And those cracks play a role in what’s happening today. But make no mistake, the sweep of changes we see has one main cause: the political effort to stifle robust national journalism.

CBS News is clearly trending downward. NPR is doing its best to weather a systemwide storm of sudden defunding and clawback. The Washington Post’s reputation has been sullied, its workforce diminished, its mission in flux, and its opinion pages remade.

The L.A. Times, an on-and-off contributor to the national dialogue, continues to bleed talent, its own direction constrained by fear. In the McClatchy Company layoffs toward the end of 2025, we saw the shuttering of one of the last true Washington, D.C. news bureaus. Just two decades ago, bureaus of at least partly mission-driven chains (Knight Ridder, Gannett, Tribune, McClatchy, Scripps, Newhouse, Cox, and more) offered local newspaper readers all over the country volumes of incisive reporting from D.C. We’re still not sure what the new MS NOW, shorn of its NBC News brotherhood, will be able to do going forward, or for how long. Twitter has been captured by Elon Musk’s partisan interests. David Ellison’s dad Larry now will wield quite another level of power with his stake in TikTok, another deal midwifed by Donald Trump.

That national news landscape — fundamental to the original reporting that challenges official policy pronouncement — is shrinking at a rate that no one is calculating.

And now, CNN. Many coming out of the print business never quite considered CNN kin, and it’s had its share of identity crises since its 1980 founding by Ted Turner. His vision was visual. In 2026, we’ve seen how images — iPhone photos as well as those on 65-inch screens — can change public understanding much more effectively than thousand-word stories. At CNN, that takes a huge staff, and many skilled journalists have popped up at scenes from Minneapolis to Uvalde to Flint to Charlottesville and Gaza to Ukraine to Iraq, at a moment’s notice. Their eyes and cameras have been a major reality check on those who claim to create their own facts, news, and media.

With the future of CNN now in question, those who stood strong in Trump 1 could be down to one major one, The New York Times. Its digital transformation is almost complete; it counts almost 13 million subscribers, and only 500,000 of those still are getting print papers. We can debate the Times’ tilts — headlining, analysis sometimes supplanting news — but with about 3,000 journalists, its strength is key to our struggles. Yet its emerging singularity as a strong check on power — the evergreen and ultimate expression of newspapering — is frightening.

Approximately 32.6 million viewers watched President Trump’s 2026 State of the Union address, according to Nielsen data. The audience included major cable and broadcast networks, with Fox News leading with more than 9 million viewers, followed by ABC with five million and CNN with two million. (If you’re wondering how that compares with Biden’s 2024 SOTU, Fox led then too, but only narrowly.)

What do we make of the 2026 numbers? Certainly, many people opted out of watching at all. But I do think the numbers point to this new mainstreaming of Fox and its progeny (Newsmax, OANN, Steve Bannon’s Real America’s Voice, and a rightward-tilting NewsNation). Note, too, Sinclair’s growing roster (courtesy of a winking FCC) of stations that reinforce the official news creed of this time.

No wonder many Americans have a hard time differentiating reality from propaganda these days. Those TVs in gyms, hotels, and airports portray seeming reality. Now, with CNN under threat — with the risk that fewer reporters will be paid to simply report what they see before their eyes — which realities (on crime, the economy, immigration, and foreign affairs) will play out in the minds of 2026 voters? (And will they be able to find and use their local polling places?)

This is all an odd echo to what I’ve lived and covered for almost two decades. But the loss of trusted and trustworthy local news took years.

During that long goodbye, vulture capital that swooped in to take hold of the cash flows of declining print-dependent companies in a declining industry overall. Today, the latest national TV takeovers are fueled by tech bro riches — the Ellisons’ Skydance — so outsized that they are transforming national power as rapidly as the tech itself transformed our lives. It was also tech money, Jeff Bezos’ and Patrick Soon-Shiong’s, that “saved” their community institutions and then drove the pivots that have diminished them.

Of course, these latest buys aren’t just about power. They’re about what is coming for all of us: Artificial intelligence. One of the creeds of Silicon Valley is that you can’t make too much money. We’ll see what that means for the businesses of moviemaking and streaming, but we already know what it will mean for the news enterprises the billionaires are grabbing: Fewer journalists, more cost-saving tech. Yes, these are mainly legacy industries with challenged business models that need modernization, but the new buyers appear more intent on politicization and currying favor with power than on renewing and maintaining the journalistic foundation that make these companies truly valuable.

We’ve had almost 20 years to see the (pre-AI) digital handwriting on the wall about local news. There, we still count more loss than gain — despite the hundreds of millions of dollars of philanthropic investment and many impressive efforts to revive local news and fill the role that local newspapers used to play in their communities. I’ve devoted the last few decades, first as an analyst and now as an entrepreneur with Lookout, to trying to repair some of that damage. What a slog it’s been for the country (as well as for our friends in Canada, Latin America, and Europe). And that’s with years to try to replace what was lost.

What are we to make of this almost overnight remaking of a key sector of the U.S. news?

First, we have to get beyond being stunned. We better move through the five stages of grief at lightning speed. We can’t allow what happened to local news to play out for national news through 2046. As has been the case since media change began in earnest at the end of the last century, the big question looms: How are we going to pay journalists to report the news honestly and fairly, in all forms — text, video, and audio?

It will take money and it will take will. We’re going to need a lot of both.

It’s Sulzberger’s first-ever advertisement, the Times confirmed, and it ran for the first time on Monday. A New York Times spokesperson said the publisher wanted to “call attention” to the shrinking of the news industry.

The ad:

This is A.G. Sulzberger. I’m the publisher of The New York Times. I oversee our news operations and our business. But I’m also a former reporter who has watched with a lot of alarm as our profession has shrunk and shrunk in recent years. Normally, in these ads, we talk about the importance of subscribing to the Times. I’m here today with a different message. I’m encouraging you to support any news organization that’s dedicated to original reporting. If that’s your local newspaper, terrific — local newspapers in particular need your support. If that’s another national newspaper, that’s great too.

And if it’s the New York Times, we’ll use that money to send reporters out to find the facts and context that you’ll never get from AI. That’s it, not asking you to click on any link, just subscribe to a real news organization with real journalists doing firsthand, fact-based reporting. And if you already do, thank you.

My colleague Sophie Culpepper first heard it on The Daily but the spot “will eventually run across most Times podcasts,” according to the spokesperson. Sulzberger has spoken out about press freedom, generative AI, and the shrinking of the news industry in the past.

You don’t hear publishers using ad time to encourage their audience to subscribe to other news outlets very often. But the Times can afford to be generous. As Nieman Lab readers well know, the Times has emerged as one of the clearest winners of the digital era. Few other news publishers have been able to replicate their enviable subscription model, however, and the vast majority of Americans do not pay for or support any news sources. As Sulzberger notes, local newspapers have suffered some of the deepest cuts in coverage.

Another Nieman Lab colleague, Joshua Benton, has argued that “if the Times is going to be truly mission-driven … it should be using its position of relative financial security to work harder on the biggest and most intractable part of the problem … local news.”

The appeal from the Times publisher is a small — but welcome — step in that direction. Listen to the ad here.

“If anyone claims they know how to do it, they’re lying,” she said. “A couple of people are making money, but they’re not here.”

It was the opening session of On Air Fest, a two-day audio festival spread across a couple of trendy hotels in Williamsburg, and Martin, host of the NPR show Wild Card, was on stage with Brian Reed, the host of Question Everything. Both shows had won Ambies, a podcasting industry award, the night before, and Reed and Martin talked about how both shows had originated out of frustration with the limits of journalism. “What value is there in chasing the same story as everyone else?” Reed asked at one point. “You’re baiting me,” Martin replied.

This turned out to be one of the central themes of the festival. The last time I attended an audio event of this sort was the Third Coast festival (RIP) back in 2018; at the time, there was so much money flowing into audio that people weren’t sure what to do with all of it. The panels there focused on craft, with titles like “How to make your listener levitate.” Most of the people at Third Coast were also journalists, or at least journalist-adjacent, and spent most of their time painstakingly craftng beautiful narratives and sonic experiments that were, in the end, grounded in the norms of public radio and shows like This American Life, Radiolab, and Serial.

Eight years later, things are very different. Most of the programming consisted of live episode tapings rather than discussions of craft, and I heard the term “creator” just as often as “journalist” at On Air Fest; some of those “creators” were longtime journalists like Don Lemon, who’s now doing his own thing after leaving CNN in 2023; others explicitly said they were not journalists, even if they borrowed some tools of the journalism trade The journalists, meanwhile, are also borrowing from the creator toolkit, particularly when trying to build an audience, but don’t want to let it affect their reporting approach. Martin, for example, said she would never change her interview style to be more conducive to shortform video — she leaves that to the editors at NPR, which her podcast is part of.

The question of money came up throughout the conference, including in a panel on narrative climate podcasts. Those have been disappearing as funding for both climate journalism and narrative podcasts dries up, and the panelists, all of whom were independent journalists, pointed out that many of the questions around podcast funding come down to how the podcast would reach the biggest audience possible — an unhelpful, practically impossible question for someone producing a podcast about local climate issues. “I spend so much time on [grant] applications,” said Roxanne Scott, who hosted a season of the Queens Memory podcast dedicated to water issues in the borough. “The most common question I get is, ‘How are you going to scale this?'”

In her introduction to the climate panel, emcee Avery Trufelman, host of the podcast Articles of Interest, gave a name to the type of audio that has come to dominate podcast feeds: “chat-casts.” This was the second big theme of the festival: audio, at least the kind of audio that brings in money, is now centered around celebrity-driven “chat-casts” and video. The most famous examples of the genre are shows like The Joe Rogan Experience or Call Her Daddy (neither of which, as Martin observed, were present at On Air Fest), though a “Hyper-Local, Slightly Opinionated Study of Podcast Listening” that polled people around New York and festival attendees found that even though nobody — including audio producers — had a particularly good definition of a podcast, they still mostly said they listened to podcasts rather than watch them.

The panels that addressed that transformation tended to be packed; one panel, called “experiments in the art of video podcasting,” which promised to teach attendees “techniques to help you dream up a video version of your show that you can be excited about,” was so popular that I couldn’t even get inside. At another, on building audiences that stick, Gillian Pensavalle, co-host of the True Crime Obsessed podcast, talked about how podcasts can serve as outlets for people with obsessions their friends and families are tired of hearing about. If a podcast builds out places for its audience to gather — Discord servers, forums, in-person events — those people often end up finding friends “in a safe space where nobody [is] going to make fun of them,” she said. That sense of community makes audiences loyal, which is especially helpful for podcasts that are trying out subscription tiers — something that’s increasingly common as the podcast ad market remains unreliable.

AI, too, came up again and again, mostly through people voicing their uncertainty about how AI might affect them. “Even with AI, the hope of hope is that we are still the creative engine,” said Audie Cornish at a panel with her former All Things Considered co-host Ari Shapiro. Both left NPR in recent years, driven by a desire to stretch their creative wings; Cornish now hosts two shows at CNN. “Whatever the state of the industry is today,” said Shapiro, “it’ll be different tomorrow.”

And, as Cornish pointed out, “social media is turning into TV, but TV is turning into radio.” Netflix, for example, has responded to the rise of short-form video by tweaking the writing of its shows so that they can be listened to in the background while viewers scroll on TikTok or do their chores. But background listening has been a part of the audio experience since the earliest days of radio, and audio producers can capitalize on this moment of divided attention, even if, as Cornish said, “monetizing attention isn’t why most of us got into this business.”

But still. Audio always appealed to me for its ability to approximate the sublime, and there was still plenty of room for sonic experimentation at On Air Fest. Audio Flux held a listening session, where a roomful of people held their breath as they listened to a series of 3-minute fluxworks together. Hrishikesh Hirway, of the podcast Song Exploder, played and discussed music with Peter Silberman of The Antlers. Zak Rosen and Sharon Mashihi facilitated a “ritual for your creative destiny” that, reportedly, involved the two — who hadn’t met in person until the evening before — taking off their pants onstage and pulling underwear over their heads. And the producer TK Dutes, host of The Secret Life of TK Dutes, invited audience members to a live production meeting of her podcast, an independent project that came as a response to her burnout and doesn’t have a set production schedule. Every producer in that production meeting was a person of color, which is something I had never experienced in my time working across four different shows.

“If we can’t be free in our country and we can’t be free in our bodies,” Dutes said, “then maybe we can at least be free in our projects.”

Just before 1:00 p.m., @sentdefender, an open-source intelligence monitoring account with 1.8 million followers, tweeted a video of “passengers and staff seen fleeing from reported gunfire inside Guadalajara International Airport, as members of the CJNG Cartel attempt to storm the airport and several other nearby locations in the Mexican state of Jalisco.” It’s been viewed more than 915,000 times.

“That’s the moment when I realized this is going to be extremely complicated for us to make sense of,” Jan-Albert Hootsen, the Mexican representative for the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), said. The complication: People were running and seemed panicked in the airport of Mexico’s second-largest city, but there was no gunfire or siege, the airport’s official account tweeted.

According to a preliminary analysis from the Technological Institute of Monterrey, somewhere between 200 and 500 posts containing false or unverified claims circulated on social media in the 48 hours following Oseguera’s death. The engagement on those posts generated “three to five million potential exposures to false or unverified content,” per El País.

Open-source intelligence (OSINT) — the use of publicly available information, from social media to satellite imagery, to verify or document events — can be a powerful tool that helps journalists uncover new information or debunk false claims. But it can also be misused. In 2024, Cardiff University researchers pointed out that disinformation agents create content that looks like OSINT but is meant to confuse or mislead. Oseguera’s death underscored that “OSINT-looking” content can also contribute to misinformation when it lacks context or verification.

Many OSINT analysts are experts in their fields and take care to verify information before publishing, Gisela Pérez de Acha, a Mexican OSINT researcher and investigative journalist, told me. But even well-intentioned OSINT accounts may inject more noise than clarity into an already tense situation.

“The really wide gap we’re seeing right now makes it hard to navigate disinformation during a massive breaking news event,” Pérez said. “There’s a deluge of information. Humans are trying to figure out what to do with it. And then there’s OSINT researchers who don’t have on-the-ground experience, and most of them don’t have any journalism training, either. The journalism training is what will actually tell you: ‘Wait a second. We need to verify this. We need to fact-check this. I need to talk to people. I need to report this out.'”

Just before noon on Tuesday, Mexican professor and columnist Rafael Prieto-Curiel tweeted an image of a map made by “Aleph Risk Intelligence” that claimed to show the locations of the drug cartel roadblocks and other violent outbreaks around the country. As of today, it’s been retweeted more than 4,000 times and has over a million views.

“I saw this unusually large number of accounts dedicated to OSINT starting to post a tsunami of posts with all these geotags and photos and maps,” CPJ’s Hootsen said. “It made the whole situation incredibly complex. We got a huge number of images, but very few interpretations of these images.”

An account that misleadingly uses the name of the anonymous hackers collective Guacamaya — which leaked six terabytes of military and police documents from several Latin American countries in 2022, spurring major news investigations — also tweeted the Aleph map. But the data points hadn’t all been confirmed to be caused by cartel roadblocks. One entry was labeled as “a hazardous situation at the Guadalajara airport,” accompanied by a photo of a plane in flames. But that never actually happened.

“Citizen mapping exercises are very valuable, but they need verification filters,” Quinto Elemento data journalist Efra Tzuc said in a quote tweet of the map. “In this one you can see a debunked claim. The image was created with AI.”

Los ejercicios de mapeo ciudadano son revaliosos, pero se necesitan filtros de verificación.
En este se puede ver un hecho desmentido. La imagen fue creada con IA. https://t.co/0FhvmShYN8 pic.twitter.com/sfECx0ipWU

— efratzuc.bsky.social (@efra_tzuc) February 22, 2026

Some reporters told Hootsen they traveled to points geolocated on some of the unverified maps to see the reported roadblocks, shootings, or fires to report from the scene. The points don’t always indicate whether police have secured the area, which Hootsen urges reporters in Mexico to confirm before going to sites of potential violence.

Mexican journalists have used OSINT for investigative journalism in the past, but it isn’t yet a common tool in Mexican newsrooms, data journalist Hector Piña said.

“This type of work is happening outside of newsrooms, collaboratively between citizens and some journalists acting on their own initiative,” Piña said. “Maps and platforms have been created to understand forced disappearances in Mexico, policies against drug dealing, gentrification in the city, and…femicide and gender-based violence in the city. There are a number of very powerful projects, although they are still few and far between and not happening in [legacy] newsrooms.”

Piña and data analyst Fernanda Verduzco created their own map of road closures and fires in the Guadalajara Metropolitan Area. They only included incidents that had been surfaced by journalists reporting from the scenes, private citizens who’d witnessed an incident and had enough information to support their claims, or communications from police and other local authorities. Each point names the type of incident, where it occurred, and the source of information. They then verified the incidents’ exact locations using Google Maps and its street view function.

Por la cantidad de usuarios que está recibiendo el mapa, habilitamos 3 sitios espejo
Si alguno luce caído , intenten en cualquiera de los otros
1⃣ https://t.co/tNNYbgqaIS
2⃣ https://t.co/MQy8f6Bx3N
3⃣ https://t.co/zN3G8AiHo3

Gracias por la paciencia y por compartir

— Hector Pina (@YaNiPaper) February 22, 2026

In Mexico, OSINT can be a particularly useful tool to report on cartels from a distance when journalists might face security risks from doing so on the ground. When @Halip0n, an anonymous OSINT researcher who posts cartel geolocations on Twitter, saw a viral social media video showing armed forces moving in on a vacation rental in Tapalpa, a town two hours southwest of Guadalajara, they worked to identify the exact coordinates. Their tweet of the coordinates has more than 994,000 views.

“[The video] showed a few structures in passing which I knew would be distinctive enough to show up clearly and, more importantly, provably in satellite imagery,” @Halip0n said in an email. “I verify every geolocation through the same process, which is identifying and marking the features seen in both video and satellite imagery of a place. There’s no hard and fast rule as to what constitutes proof, but a good rule of thumb is that I won’t post if there is any doubt as to whether or not the geolocation is correct.”

Geolocation:

This morning’s military action against Mencho in the country club zone of Tapalpa. The CJNG leader died while in transit to CDMX following his capture in this operation.

Tapalpa Country Club, Tapalpa, Jalisco

19.93028, -103.79936 https://t.co/61HZMx6spI pic.twitter.com/mumh11K5hG

— halipon (@HALIP0N) February 23, 2026

@Halip0n’s tweet caught the attention of CNN open-source researcher Avery Schmitz, who verified @Halip0n’s findings on his own to pinpoint where the Mexican Army found Oseguera. CNN credited @Halip0n in its story about the operation.

“Cartel reporting is notoriously complex, but the researchers behind accounts like Halipon and Pernicious Propaganda — among others — volunteer their time to produce invaluable analysis that improves a hostile information environment,” Schmitz said.

El País reporter Micaela Varela also saw the videos and coordinates on social media. Varela, based in Mexico City, used the coordinates, details from official government statements, and shoe-leather reporting to geolocate the house. She contacted Tapalpa’s mayor and local hotels to confirm her findings, but the mayor didn’t respond and hotel representatives were too afraid to speak to the press. She later found a resident who lives in a nearby housing development who confirmed the location.

“The ideal thing would have been to go to the town to verify the information,” Varela said. But “when covering drug trafficking, you always have be extremely cautious, and in this instance, it wasn’t worth risking our lives to reveal where the operation took place.”

Okay, The New York Times does not call its big daily crossword the Maxi — but otherwise it fits. Just as Julius Caesar came, saw, and conquered, the Times continues to push the boundaries of its gaming empire with a new Midi edition of its puzzle.

Today, we are excited to introduce the Midi Crossword, the newest subscriber-only addition to the New York Times Game portfolio, designed to be your go-to mid-sized crossword puzzle. Joining our family of crossword puzzles, alongside the Mini and Daily Crossword, the Midi provides the satisfying solve builds on one’s crossword streak.

Gameplay strategy differs for all, but many solvers approach the Mini as a speed puzzle and the Daily Crossword as a longer challenge. The Midi now offers a perfect place to grow your crossword habit between the Mini and the Daily.

The standard Times daily crossword, you see, is a 15×15 grid. The Mini is 5×5. The new Midi is 9×9, snug in between. This is, it probably goes without saying, very smart.

Just the other day, Sophie was noting that the Times’ games were successful enough to raise the question of whether The New York Times Co. was now primarily a gaming company. At the risk of stating the obvious, it isn’t. The Times without games would be a much larger company than the Times without news.

But a theoretical GamesCorp would have a much higher profit margin, because the costs of operating games are so low compared to those of operating a high-end newsroom of more than 2,000 people. The Times only pays crossword constructors $500 per puzzle for a full daily grid — $750 a pop once you’ve had three published. (Sunday puzzles earn $1,500 and $2,250, respectively.) That means that, depending on the veteran/rookie mix of contributors, the Times pays out something between $234,000 and $351,000 a year for all 365 of its standard daily crosswords.

Now, the main daily crossword isn’t the only part of NYT Games, of course, and there are also puzzle editors, developers, product people, and so on who need to be paid. But considering that the Times had more than 1 million Games-only subscribers as of 2023, at around $40 a year, you’re probably talking about a ~$50 million revenue business whose most important product only costs around 5% of that. And that doesn’t count Games’ most important contribution as a reason for Times subscribers to upgrade to the all-Times bundle, the centerpiece of the company’s strategy for the past near-decade. Games build daily habits — people who open that app every day, making it part of their morning routines. In 2025, users played more than 11 billion Times games, with the Mini crossword making up 1.4 billion of them.

So now the Times has added a third daily crossword puzzle, at what I can only imagine is a small fraction of the quarter-mil or so they pay big-crossword contributors. (Indeed, three of the 7 weekly puzzles will be produced in-house by Times puzzle editor Ian Livengood.) The technical infrastructure, the payment systems, the editorial flows — those are already built. Adding one more daily puzzle will come at minimal cost — but it will nonetheless measurably increase the amount of time that Times subscribers spend with the product each day. (Note the language in the press release: “builds on one’s crossword streak,” “a perfect place to grow your crossword habit.”)

All at an annual cost I’d estimate is around the cost of a single Times reporter’s salary and benefits. While The Washington Post self-destructs down I-95, the Times continues its Caesarian march into new terrain.

You can watch more videos from the 2026 Knight Media Forum here.

“We hope this is a way that small businesses can feature themselves in the paper, keeping their services at the front of readers’ minds,” the Beat wrote in an announcement.

The Beat, launched after the city’s alt-weekly closed in 2017 and relaunched as a Black-led outlet in 2022, does not have a paywall, unlike cross-city competitors like The Baltimore Banner and Baltimore Sun. The nonprofit distributes 20,000 free print copies twice a month and relies on donations large and small, as well as advertising and other revenue.

Sites like Craigslist took a big bite out of the classified ad market two decades ago, and today big tech companies like Google and Facebook tend to dominate local ad budgets. But the Beat believes that with evidence and anecdata that Google Search is getting worse and user dissatisfaction with algorithms on the rise, local small businesses might be ready to try something different. Especially if it doesn’t cost them an arm and a leg.

“In the past, news outlets earned money through classified ads and other ads. The internet and social media made that irrelevant. Many business owners decided that they could use Facebook or Twitter or Instagram to do their own advertising,” editor-in-chief Lisa Snowden wrote on LinkedIn.

“I think now is the time to revisit [classified] ads, especially when it comes to hyper local journalism,” Snowden continued. “It’s much harder these days to use Google to find reliable information and algorithms beyond their control mean many might not even see the content being offered by small businesses. Moreover, more people want to shop locally and put their hard-earned money into businesses they can trust.”

The Beat suggests mom-and-pop shops pay $50 per ad while brick-and-mortar stores pay $150 and “big investors” pay $300.

The announcement is here.

If you’ve tried logging into a news site recently — especially if it’s a small outlet, like a news coop or an independent newsletter — there’s a good chance that instead of entering a password you’ve been asked to open your email inbox and find a passcode or “magic link” to sign in with. While some platforms, like Substack and Beehiiv, do offer users the option to stick to the good old username and password, others, like Ghost, offer only an email-based login.

It’s an extra step that we here at Nieman Lab have been lamenting in part because it makes sharing a single subscription among a small number of people (sorry, publishers!). It’s like Netflix’s password-sharing crackdown, but with less fanfare. But is it more convenient for publishers?

In a word, yes. 404 Media wrote about this back in 2024, after they received similar complaints from their users. 404 Media runs on Ghost, and as Ghost CEO John O’Nolan told them, “Passwords get hacked all the time, but they can’t be hacked if they don’t exist…this allows a small team like 404 to spend less time managing security administration, and more time investing in bringing you stories you care about.”

“This is really useful for small publishers who have no business wanting to store a whole bunch of random passwords,” Ernie Smith, editor of the newsletter Tedium, told me. Lots of people have poor password hygiene and reuse passwords across all kinds of sites; small publishers (and startup CMS providers) would have to invest significant time and resources to maintain security infrastructure so that they don’t get hacked and accidentally reveal personal information or a password that their customers might have used to access both the news and, say, their bank. Last December, for example, a hacker published the user data — including full names and physical addresses — of 2.3 million Wired subscribers and claimed to have the records of another 40 million subscribers from across Condé Nast. (The company did not respond to a request for comment in time for publication.)

But Smith and Tyler Denk, CEO of Beehiiv, made another case too: Magic links might actually be more convenient for users, not less. “I think it’s mostly due to password fatigue and people preferring a simple click versus having to create yet another account and password to keep track of,” Denk told me in an email. “I personally prefer magic link, as do I think many others. But obviously it’s not for everyone.”

The argument is that magic links make signing up for a news site easier for an average user who doesn’t rely on a password manager. Instead of making them come up with a new password, they can simply enter their email address and, ideally, their billing details, and continue on to the site.

Many publishers, like Condé Nast, are also moving toward passkeys, which have long been touted as the more secure replacement for passwords. Ricky Mondello, an engineer who works on authentication technologies like passkeys and passwords, argued last year that passkeys can help smooth over the rough edges of magic links so that users don’t have to keep opening their email to access sites and can have their password managers sign in for them with a passkey instead.

As for Nieman Lab’s particular predicament, of wanting to share a single subscription across the entire newsroom?

“I’m sure media outlets would love you to subscribe to the family plan,” Smith said. But he also pointed out that back in the days of print, a newsroom would just receive a single copy of a magazine or newspaper that would then be passed around to whomever wanted to read it.

“There probably just needs to be a more thoughtful discussion on how we handle this for newsrooms,” Smith continued. “Passwords are a real mess, but I’m willing to give more grace to small publishers that are using things like Ghost than I am to media conglomerates with giant buildings (and similarly large security teams) like The New York Times or Condé Nast.”

Starting last month, the Tampa Bay Times partnered with Book and Bottle to offer monthly “article clubs” in the St. Pete store on Sunday evenings. Peace, an enterprise equity reporter, moderates conversations about a Tampa Bay Times story among its author and community members. The idea is not just to discuss the story’s substance, but to give readers a behind-the-scenes look at the reporting process and decision-making that shape the published article.

Peace sees the club as an opportunity to demystify how reporting works and bring people together to talk about local issues, “with the hope of ultimately hooking people who are already readers” — and who already have some habit of paying for writing. She wants to figure out how to translate the “buy local” enthusiasm and loyalty people feel for the bookstore to their local newspaper. The events are free to attend, but “hopefully, we’ll convert some people [to subscribe to the Tampa Bay Times] in the process.”

Peace emphasized that this event is a low-lift experiment that she’ll refine through trial and error, and credited the Times and her editor for being willing to let her run with an idea without wrapping it in red tape. She pitched the article club last fall, after hosting a more formal panel discussion at Book and Bottle about her reporting on domestic violence. “I’m kind of making this up as I go,” she said. For instance, while she’d considered moderating discussions of both local and national news, she’s seen enough early success with the former that she’s leaning toward sticking to a local focus. And no money changes hands between the bookstore and the newspaper; the Times simply uses Book and Bottle’s space for the monthly event.

The Tampa Bay Times does plenty of events “that take a lot of time and preparation and are resource-intensive…this is not that, and not everything has to be that,” Peace said. She encouraged other newsrooms to embrace that spirit of quick-turn experimentation.

“Media organizations have already relied on their readers coming to them,” Peace said. “There’s been this idea of, like, ‘we are the beacons of information and truth and the readers will come,’ and that’s just so no longer the case.” She sees events like the article club as one way to get out in front of potential audiences and show them what journalism is, and why it matters.

“If we want to continue to exist, and to do the important work that we do every day, we have to justify our existence to the people in our communities,” she added. “We have to get better at telling our own story and breaking down the walls between ‘institution on the hill’ and who we really are.”

Photo of the Tampa Bay Times February article club at Book and Bottle courtesy of Lauren Peace. Attendees are pictured discussing opening ice breakers in small groups ahead of the broader conversation.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2026/02/the-team-behind-dark-sky-launches-a-weather-app-for-uncertain-low-trust-times/ Tue, 24 Feb 2026 13:03:12 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=248334 This seems fitting for a time when a lot of Americans aren’t sure what to trust and say it’s important to do their own research: A weather app from the folks behind the beloved app Dark Sky (sold to Apple in 2022) that embraces uncertainty.

The app is called Acme Weather. From their blog post:

Our biggest pet peeve with most weather apps is how they deal (or rather, don’t deal) with forecast uncertainty. It is a simple fact that no weather forecast will ever be 100% reliable: the weather is moody, fickle, and chaotic. Forecasts are often wrong.

Understanding this uncertainty is crucial for planning your day. Most weather apps will give you their single best guess, leaving you to wonder how sure they actually are, and what else might happen instead. Will it actually start raining at 9am, or might it end up pushed off until noon? Will there be rain or snow? How sure are you? You can’t plan your day if you don’t know how much you can trust the forecast, or know what other possibilities might arise. Rather than pretending we will always be right, Acme Weather embraces the idea that our forecast will sometimes be wrong.

The app “[supplements] the main forecast with a spread of alternate predictions. These are additional forecast lines that capture a range of alternate possible outcomes.”

(Some of this messaging echoes The New York Times’ recent interview with its weather team: “Members of the New York Times Weather team like to emphasize what they don’t know. That’s a defining feature of the team’s approach to extreme weather coverage. They capture the uncertainty in a forecast through explanations and visualizations of weather data, preparing readers for a range of possible outcomes rather than leaning into hard predictions.”)

Acme Weather is $25 a year and on iOS for now, with an Android version planned. “Most of our time has been spent on building our own forecast — our own data provider, in a way,” Adam Grossman, the cofounder of Dark Sky, told TechCrunch. “And this lets us do things like build multiple forecasts…[and] create any map we want, rather than having to rely on a third-party map provider.”

There’s also a community reports feature. “There’s nothing more reliable than when a person nearby tells you what’s happening,” Grossman notes in the blog post, “so if there are recent reports near you we’ll flag it in the app.”

Some of this language, by

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2026/02/is-the-new-york-times-a-games-company-a-familiar-debate-continues/ Mon, 23 Feb 2026 21:38:04 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=248321 “The New York Times is no longer a news company,” proclaims the caption of a chart posted on X Saturday summarizing how Times bundle subscribers have eclipsed news-only subscribers.

The New York Times is no longer a news company.$NYT pic.twitter.com/kLKfIkow8b

— Fiscal.ai (@fiscal_ai) February 21, 2026

The trends illustrated by the chart will not come as a surprise to close readers of Nieman Lab, but it still prompted a lively conversation on X over the weekend among some media observers.

“This chart shows a news company that built an attention ecosystem where Wordle gets you in the door, Cooking keeps you at breakfast, The Athletic owns your commute, and by the time you think about canceling, you’d lose four products instead of one,” wrote Aakash Gupta, the author of a product management newsletter, in one post that generated debate over how central news remains to the business of the Times.

Overrated story. The newspaper business was always a bundle! In 1960 and 1980 and even 2000, most Americans bought a newspaper for the sports page, the movie times, crosswords, maybe a weather report. That stuff underwrote news reporting. https://t.co/ft91IxV5BR

— Ross Barkan (@RossBarkan) February 22, 2026

I don’t think this is the correct read of the chart, the NYT literally stopped offering a News-only subscription for new customers — the News product is the tentpole feature of all the bundles. https://t.co/SQM4QG4QFp

— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) February 22, 2026

I would say this misses the mission part of why the @nytimes leadership did this. They see news as a sacred trust and a responsibility. I’m so grateful that all these other amazing parts of the @nyt allow us to do our jobs. https://t.co/QxhNcTOutY

— Lulu NYT (@LuluGNavarro) February 22, 2026

this is a fine breakdown, tho my one criticism would be that this is basically what newspapers always have been during the print era

i started reading the “funny pages” and doing crosswords when i was a kid and reading hard news came later on

just adapting to the digital era https://t.co/rtJiyHIOfZ

— rat king (@MikeIsaac) February 22, 2026

the other way to look at this is the times was pretty good at making money in news, got better at offering a bunch of adjacent digital products, and can now charge users more for all of them together https://t.co/IuKKQshNnV

— Max Tani (@maxwelltani) February 22, 2026

The Washington Post’s decline was the flip side of this success. Zero major acquisitions during the Bezos era. Some successful in-house developments (Arc CMS), but people want more than just a great news feed. Kay Graham said newspapers are like a supermarket. Post forgot that. https://t.co/kUyBl6Pqxw

— Paul Farhi (@farhip) February 22, 2026

The NYT figured out a long time ago that their competition is not other news outlets but “anyone who puts anything on the Internet.” https://t.co/45AukQD9AN

— Olivier Knox (@OKnox) February 22, 2026

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2026/02/bostopias-evan-george-serves-boston-daily-news-from-a-lefty-perspective/ Mon, 23 Feb 2026 19:32:36 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=248292 Lots of us took up quirky hobbies while we were shut in at home during the pandemic.

Evan George’s: Delivering Boston local news in 60 seconds or less.

As a Massachusetts native living in Boston, George had long been plugged into local politics and community organizing with the Democratic Socialists of America. He studied history in college and the sociology of education in graduate school. He wanted to help keep people updated on the city, so he started recording a daily podcast. But when George saw how young people were using TikTok to achieve political outcomes (and troll Donald Trump — more on that below), he joined the platform and posted videos summarizing Boston’s daily headlines in under a minute.

Under his handle @bostopianews, George records himself walking through Boston while talking to the camera, summarizing what he considers to be the day’s most important stories and offering his own opinion where he feels it’s necessary. He takes care to cite journalists and news organizations directly. When giving his own opinion, he adds the label “my editorial.”

In his most recent video, published on February 18, George cites a Boston Globe story about Boston police officers’ lack of compliance with the city’s civilian-run oversight agency.

“I said at the time of its creation that this agency would be pointless and only was brought into existence to placate liberals from asking for actual structural demands,” George says in the video, as the words “my editorial” appear on screen. “Like limiting the role that police play in our society and reallocating their massive budget to services and programs that actually reduce crime.”

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Evan George (@bostopianews)

Bostopia videos are easy to watch. Viewers see George walking and talking, usually sporting a Boston sports team hat (he has at least 10, he said). There are no fancy graphics or screenshots. He just uses TikTok’s native text editor and posts. He’s a renter and lives with his fiancée in Boston, and doesn’t currently make any money from Bostopia videos.

Today George has over 32,000 followers on TikTok and 17,000 on Instagram. He doesn’t identify as a journalist, but sees himself as someone amplifying the work that local journalists are already doing. He attributes part of his success to his candidness. He’s up front about his leftist politics and his experience in local political organizing, and doesn’t back down from them.

“Because I’ve been enmeshed in this world for so long, I have a good temperature check of what is actually happening or what somebody is misreading,” George told me. “And then I go off of my own knowledge about the internal politics, especially within the Boston City Council, of what is actually happening behind the scenes.”

George posts his news summaries while working three jobs. He works as a project manager during the day and bartends at two bars at night. He usually catches up on the news in the mornings before work and during free blocks throughout the day, jots down some notes on a sheet of paper, and then records his videos as he walks from one job to the next.

George regularly engages with his audience. He discusses and debates with viewers in the comments and he has local politicians and staffers in his DMs. Once, he told me, a voiceover actor reached out and asked to run lines with him because she was preparing for a role to portray someone with a Boston accent. She said his videos have been shared with dialog coaches across the country. (He clarified to me that he actually has a Merrimack Valley accent.)

George and I discussed his beginnings as a news creator, his views on local news, developing relationships in Boston’s political arena, and more. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Hanaa’ Tameez: Why did you start creating news videos?

Evan George: I’ve been doing a version of reporting on the news [with a weekly news podcast] since probably about 2014, and I pivoted out of it to do more political work, organizing, and activism. I returned to it during the pandemic where I needed something to do and I had all this time locked in my room like everyone else. I decided this could be an outlet to keep people engaged. I started doing a daily podcast where I would give you the news in about four to five minutes in the morning.

At some point during Trump’s [campaign] in the 2020 election, [campaign staff] were using TikTok as part of outreach. People on TikTok organized to register [for Trump’s rallies] as if they were going to attend, so they ballooned [registrations] to like 100,000. But then when Trump got there, there were only like 8,000. The story was about how these kids on TikTok were using it as a tool for political activism, so what if I did my local news coverage [there] but within like the strict format of TikTok, which was at the time just 60 seconds.

I just said “Boston local news in 60 seconds” and I started doing a format where at first I was locked in my room, and then sometimes I went out on my porch. Now I am very busy and normally walking in between jobs when I’m recording. That got a lot of quick success. People seem to enjoy it.

Tameez: Why is this important to you?

George: I very much view it as an extension of the political work that I do. There’s an About Me section and I’m very up front with my own biases and opinions. I think that’s one of the reasons I’m successful in this field. I think it’s important that people understand what is going on, what is affecting the material conditions, and with everyone — for one reason or another, focusing on the national level — there was just this void of local focus. I try to stay very rigid with just commenting on local stories, statewide stories, and if there is something happening at the national level, I’m tying it into how that now looks on the ground here in Boston or across Massachusetts.

Tameez: Why is this work important now?

George: I would argue it’s important to do this work always. I am almost exclusively reliant on the work of journalists from The Boston Globe, from the Boston Herald, from a number of other great outlets, but one gap here that I [fill] is to recontextualize some of their framing because I think all news reporting has inherent biases in it. If I only have 60 seconds to report on something, what I emphasize, what goes first, what goes last, what gets ignored, is going to reflect those biases. You can read just about every article that is published and that has that emotional framing of how they want the audience to feel about this.

While here in Boston, we are fortunate enough that we do have two major publications and half a dozen to a dozen other smaller ones, being able to recontextualize their stories in a way that more closely resonates with people and doesn’t necessarily serve the interests of the corporations or the hedge funds that own our current media apparatuses. [Editor’s Note: The Boston Herald is owned by Digital First Media, a company managed by hedge fund Alden Global Capital. The Boston Globe is owned by Boston Red Sox and Liverpool F.C. owner John Henry.]

Tameez: Walk me through your workflow from video ideation to posting.

George: So normally before I punch into work at 9:00 a.m., I like to go through Massachusetts Politico — it does a great job just highlighting different stories from different outlets — MASSter List also does a weekly publication, so I normally first scroll through them to see what stories they are highlighting. Then I go back and I read through that day’s edition of both The Boston Globe and the Boston Herald to see what stories didn’t make the rundowns that I think should take precedence.

TikTok used to have a much more rigid format, around 60 seconds. They’ve since lifted that, so a lot of the videos are longer than 60 seconds. They’re closer to 1:05 or 1:10. But I try to keep it somewhere between one minute to 1:30 depending on how much editorializing I feel is necessary. It has to do with my own instincts of what is probably going to be buried — even if it is being written about and published, on maybe WGBH or on page three of the Metro section — that I think is the number one thing people need to know right now, highlighting those stories.

That reflects my own bias, priorities, and what I think materially impacts people. Then I use my editorializing to help contextualize why this is important or how you should feel about this and the reason this is happening. I don’t use a script. I normally have, like, a little piece of paper that just tells me the three or four stories, like the journalists, the publication, any numbers. I very much go off the cuff as I’m walking from point A to point B.

Tameez: I love the way that you cite them by putting the reporter’s name and what publication.

George: It took me a while to figure out that format. I always felt bad about it. I want to highlight people’s work [by using screenshots], and TikTok would take it down for copyright infringement. And so I struggled: How do I cite these sources? I’ve landed on what I’m currently doing, and people seem to like it. And I get to distinguish between what is coming from the journalist and what is my own editorializing.

Tameez: How do you fact-check?

George: I very much depend on the journalists who are publishing. Fortunately, for some of the top stories, there’ll be two outlets that are reporting on the same thing. After I’ve read both articles, I make sure they have the five Ws correct. There’s a lot of great reporters, even if I disagree with their biases, either themselves or the publications, they do great on-the-ground reporting. That’s much needed. And so I can rely on them for that element. Because I’ve been enmeshed in this world for so long, I have a good temperature check of what is actually happening or what somebody is misreading. And then I go off of my own knowledge about the internal politics, especially within the Boston City Council, of what is actually happening behind the scenes.

Tameez: What do fairness and objectivity mean to you? How does that play out in your work?

George: I think it has much more to do with being ideologically consistent than it does [with] not having an ideology. When I am criticizing [Boston mayor] Michelle Wu for any number of things, it is coming from the same perspective, which is from a left perspective. I want her to do better on these issues. I think she’s hedged a lot in some of her campaign promises, and that is always my lens.

I don’t take every little thing she does or doesn’t do and try to blow it up because I think she’s a bad person and that is why I’m attacking her. I am attacking her on substantive policy things that she does because she’s not living up to what we currently need. I am ideologically consistent, and I give her credit where credit is due, and I blame her more often than not when that is also due. But I am always consistent in that critique and attack. I’m not constantly switching sides just to hit someone for the sake of doing so.

Tameez: Who is your audience?

George: I [usually] look at the TikTok breakdown of my audience. I’ve become more and more popular on Instagram. I started posting on Instagram because my mom wanted to see the videos and she doesn’t have TikTok. But Instagram seems not to be muting the political content as much as TikTok has recently. For TikTok, which is what most people associate me with, it’s about a 2:1 gender split, with women being the higher percentage than men. The age breakdown is mostly in my own demographic, people in their 30s. I get stopped on the street and recognized. Sometimes somebody is telling me about how their brother’s a big fan who’s 16, but also sometimes it’s people in their 60s and 70s.

I would say my average listener would be a woman in her early 30s who is very pro-choice and more progressive. Probably a fan of Michelle Wu.

Tameez: What issues and topics most resonate with your viewers?

George: Mostly the current failures of the Massachusetts Democratic Party in terms of why is it that we live [like this]. Most people, especially since 2015, view politics as a national spectacle between these two entities, the Republicans and the Democrats. Why is it that Massachusetts has super majorities of Democrats in both chambers? They have the governorship. Every Boston city councilor has to register as a Democrat or pretend to be such. Why are things so unaffordable that families can’t afford to live here? That I myself have to work 3 or 4 jobs to pay rent and to have a standard of living that seemed a lot more accessible?

Whenever I can [explain the contradiction of the fact that] though we have a Democratic Party, it is the least active legislative chamber in the country. They don’t go to work. They are the most apathetic people. We have the least competitive elections in the country. You are basically guaranteed [this representation] for life and here are all the ways that they are failing us. We had to pull the Fair Share Amendment kicking and screaming. It was a 20-year effort to tax millionaires, something that should have been very easy to do if you have super majorities of Democrats, supposedly. And then almost immediately, they rolled that back by giving a massive tax cut of $1 billion the following year.

That’s probably the biggest issue, as in terms of a larger narrative, when I talk about giving context and I’m explaining how things are going. Massachusetts is not currently having fiscal problems, necessarily, but we have a tight budget. Don’t forget, we gave away $1 billion two years ago pretty unnecessarily. The majority of that went to corporations and day traders and people who were inheriting large inheritances.

Tameez: How do you engage with your audience?

George: I try to hop in the comments. I’ve been bad about that the last few months. Some of that just has to do with how many comments I get. If I make an error, I will [correct] it in the comments and then pin that to the top. I have once or twice clarified something in the next day’s video if I think it’s important enough. Otherwise, if the captions pick up on the wrong number or wrong syllable, I just trust the audience to figure that out themselves. [In the comments] I’m very combative, mostly for fun, to provoke people. Unless you make a good point. And then I will say “fair point,” which is the highest praise I can give someone.

Tameez: How has the sale of TikTok changed how you operate?

George: It hasn’t changed how I operate in the slightest. The format that I do is very different from other TikToks. I don’t do the quick edits. I don’t really put quick images up. I try to speak in the same tone and inflection throughout every single story. I think that’s part of the reason why people trust me. I don’t talk like I’m trying to keep your attention. I’m just telling you something, and if you find it worth listening to, do so.

Every time there’s one of these big sales or the threats of TikTok going down, I see fluctuations in my numbers. My views are probably down like 50% over the past year. If an average video would get 5,000 to 6,000 views, now an average video is closer to 2,000 to 3,000. Every now and then, for one reason or another, one will blow up and we’ll get like 50,000 or 100,000. That happens maybe twice a month.

Tameez: Do you remember the first time a video went viral and what that felt like?

George: I remember being very happy when I got, like, 200 views. I’m older. I don’t really have a frame of reference for this. I know how few people engage with local media. More people will get exposure to a journalist’s work through my videos and they will actually click the link and read it. Some of the stories that I pull get more exposure from me summarizing what they’re saying in two sentences than they will people reading it. I remember getting 2,000 followers, and I was like, “I’ll do this forever If I have 2,000 people that find this interesting enough to engage with.”

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

George: In terms of news consumption, not much. There’s a little bit more of a labor element where I have to write down certain elements. But it never really feels like a job, because I’ve always stayed engaged. Most of that is because of the political work that I was doing, but also because I just wanted to know what was happening. And it’s why I don’t use a script. It’s just very easy for me to quickly talk about the two most important things from that story. And if I need to recontextualize it for you, here’s my one sentence editorial of what you need to take away from this.

Tameez: Do you pay for any news subscriptions?

George: I pay for The Boston Globe, the Boston Herald, The New York Times, in terms of national outlets. And then I also was subscribing to the Dorchester Reporter. I lived in Dorchester for most of my time here in Boston, but recently moved [in] with my fiancée. I’m having a hard time subscribing to [the Dorchester Reporter]. I don’t know if they do door-to-door anymore. I know they used to. There’s also about half a dozen or more nationally focused podcasts that I subscribe to.

Tameez: Who are your favorite news creators?

George: At the local level, I haven’t really been able to find somebody who does what I do in terms of video. Yawu Miller is a great journalist from Boston who created an outlet called The Flip Side. I think the Dorchester Reporter does the best electoral coverage in the city. So I’ve always been a fan of theirs as well.

Tameez: How do you sustain yourself financially while doing this work?

George: I am — it’s hard to say “fortunate,” because of how much I work — but I get my money elsewhere. I think that helps immensely. I don’t know if I could do what I do if I had any restrictions or limitations editorially because of financial reasons. In the past, people would Venmo me as a thank you. For the two years that I wanted to commit to doing the podcast weekly — mostly focused around the mayoral election — I started a Patreon and said, “If you want to support me in this way, you can. Everything I do is free regardless.” That $200 to $300 per month gave me enough of an incentive that I would feel bad if I wasn’t going to publish an episode, because enough people would give me a couple bucks.

Before the changeover of TikTok, I think the most I ever made was $70 a month. That has completely gone away. I don’t think I’ve received any money from TikTok over the past six months or so. I deactivated my Patreon once I was no longer going to do weekly episodes. I don’t think I’m getting anything from anyone right now.

Since I make my money elsewhere, that gives me the freedom to speak what I believe, but it also limits the amount of time and attention I can give to it, which is why I try to highlight the journalists that do this work. Without them, it would be much harder for me to understand what’s happening.

I also don’t rely on access at all. Politicians and staffers reach out to me. I don’t ask them for information or background because I know I’m going to criticize one of their votes, but I might pull my punches more if I need them to give me information.

Tameez: There are a lot of things that we as journalists do that we see as normal, like talking to politicians and elected officials, and the public doesn’t necessarily have that experience with them. You’re sort of in this cross position. What is that balance like of being a news creator and trying to have these relationships?

George: A lot of the relationships were first built because we just ran in the same political circles. It’s a lot more about coordinating together to achieve a political outcome. As I became more and more popular, how do we use that in a way that helps serve that political outcome? Now, because of how critical I am, especially of the people that are most closely associated with my politics, it is very common that I will criticize a politician and then they won’t contact me for a year or until they’ve gotten over that.

Also, I’m a bartender. There’s nothing that these people are going to say that is nearly as creative as half the drunks I have to kick out. I don’t go to [politicians’] parties, I don’t hang out. I’m not trying to climb a political ladder. They don’t have anything to offer or give me, unless we are connected in trying to achieve the same [political] objective for people.

Tameez: Do you ever want to do this full time?

George: I would love to have a daily news show from like one to four hours. Radio. YouTube. Could be whatever. But I’m at the stage in my life where I think I would need to hop on something that already exists, versus me creating another thing from scratch. I’m 38. I’m insanely busy. If anyone out there can figure that one out, I’ll do a daily political show. The only restrictions would be around editorial [policies]. What would I be allowed to say?

A lot of my politics don’t have the money or the infrastructure behind it. There are outlets that exist that do a fantastic job — like Dropsite News, Jacobin Magazine, The Intercept — but niche local news like that just doesn’t exist anywhere. There isn’t a whole lot of money in lefty radio. It heavily relies on sponsorship, which in some format I would be fine with. But if you start running ICE recruitment [ads], I can’t do that type of stuff.

Tameez: How has your view about legacy/mainstream journalism changed since you started this work?

George: Between my own political developments and my own reading, it’s really just how much it matters where these publications’ funding comes from, more than their ideas. The more I start to look at, like, who owns the Boston Herald? Well, they declared bankruptcy almost 10 years ago. They were bought up by Digital First Media. It’s owned by a corporate hedge fund. They might actually be down to like 10% of their preexisting staff.

Understanding the business behind the news and how that influences what we’re seeing, and that is why I think a lot of news outlets and publications have gravitated towards more commentary of the horse race than on-the-ground reporting. I’m a lot more lenient toward a lot of the local journalists because…I know the context that [they’re] operating under. I think understanding the biases of the publications helps a lot because I know who’s calling these reporters and helping to influence the emotional resonances of the pieces.

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

George: I think the biggest thing is the connection that we have with our audience. Everyone holds up Walter Cronkite or a certain person as their perception of the news. You trusted that person or that voice. For a lot of different reasons, that trust no longer exists. A lot of that has to do with the news media themselves, but it also has to do with the structures in which they operate. They need corporate funding and all these things, and it filters out different types of people.

A lot of people view [news creators] more as entertainment than as a news source or for learning about the world. The biggest thing they could take from small, independent creators like myself is that we don’t generally hide our biases, and we’re consistent in those viewpoints. That helps build us a much more organic trust, whereas in more corporate media they’re like, “no, no, we have to try to maintain objectivity.”

No one believes you’re objective anymore. To whatever extent they did, that’s all gone. You don’t need to pretend to [to be neutral] or be worried about [what people think]. Because now it just sounds like you’re hiding things and nobody trusts or believes that anymore.

Tameez: What challenges lie ahead in 2026 for news creators?

George: I think it’s only going to get worse in terms of the corporate consolidation. If we don’t have people on the ground, even with all the limitations they face, to actually do the reporting, to go to city council meetings, to do the interviews with people on the street, we’re not going to get a temperature check or understanding of what’s happening. People will just do what’s easier, which is what a lot of the news is heading toward: basic commentary on national issues of debate. That’s not journalism, really, in any definition. And of course, now you’re adding predictive betting markets to CNN coverage. For all of the faults that the news media had in the 80s, the 90s, and the 2000s, it’s just getting so much worse in terms of actual reporting.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2026/02/polymarket-says-journalism-is-better-when-its-backed-by-live-markets-does-anyone-know-what-that-means/ Thu, 19 Feb 2026 20:50:49 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=248242 Predictions market Polymarket and Substack are now “exclusive,” the companies announced. And the relationship getting serious is raising a few eyebrows.

On Wednesday, Substack announced the new features that allow writers to embed prediction markets data directly into their newsletters and in Notes. (Instead of pasting in a link from Polymarket, writers can now search for and add data through the Substack Editor.) The features build on the partnership first announced in 2024 and seem to be aimed at encouraging more Substack writers to use prediction markets data.

Polymarket has also joined Substack’s sponsorship pilot program, “supporting a cohort of creators who integrate these tools into their work,” Substack cofounder and CEO Chris Best wrote in a post. According to Best, 20% of its top 250 “highest-revenue publications” have already used the features first introduced two years ago.

“Journalism is better when it’s backed by live markets,” Polymarket tweeted as part of Wednesday’s announcement. (I emailed the press teams at both companies to clarify what they meant. I’ll update this story if I receive a response.)

Polymarket Substack

We are excited to announce our exclusive partnership with Substack.

Starting today Substack authors can natively integrate data from the world’s largest prediction market.

Journalism is better when it’s backed by live markets. pic.twitter.com/kxosFe8Zqt

— Polymarket (@Polymarket) February 18, 2026

Prediction markets — also known as betting markets — have been likened to sports gambling. They’ve made their way into journalism in various ways in recent years. In 2025, Sports Illustrated launched its own prediction platform called SI Predict. In December, CNN made Kalshi — another predictions market platform — its “official partner.” Last month, Dow Jones inked a deal with Polymarket to display prediction data, including in The Wall Street Journal. In recent weeks, at least two news outlets (NBC News and Wired) have reassigned reporters to new beats to cover the growing phenomenon.

Best tweeted his excitement about deepening the collaboration with Polymarket.

I’m hyped for this.

A lot of people focus on the trading part of prediction markets, but the transformative change is having clear, public odds on the future events that people care about.

Now it’s easy to display, discuss, and debate these markets on Substack. https://t.co/RvRTvtNOwu

— Chris Best (@chrisbest) February 18, 2026

But journalists and other folks online seem to be less thrilled and more confused. (Defector has already turned the line “journalism is better when it’s backed by live markets” into a subscription campaign.)

I’m curious about the economics of this deal.

It’s being framed as a service that Substack writers should be glad to get for free.

But if it’s like other exclusive partnerships (Kalshi and CNBC etc.), Polymarket is probably paying Substack… and not the writers themselves. https://t.co/tR1xWQJOik

— Alex Konrad (@alexrkonrad) February 19, 2026

This is disappointing. Either (1) Substack got paid for a gambling partnership, which is a massive sellout for a company that preaches creator-friendly business models, or (2) they genuinely believe that more gambling in journalism is good, which is just dumb. https://t.co/aF5SgSAXje

— jihad (@jaesmail) February 19, 2026

“Journalism is better when it’s backed by live markets.” ???? https://t.co/UXypzMB3CF

— hunter harris (@hunteryharris) February 19, 2026

Gambling produces better journalism certainly is a take. https://t.co/sm9sTpGbTY

— Björn Jeffery (@bjornjeffery) February 18, 2026

What does “Journalism is better when it’s backed by live markets” even mean? https://t.co/HqOCqYVquK

— Zito (@_Zeets) February 19, 2026

“Journalism is better when it’s integrated with gambling”

Excellent news can’t see this going poorly at all https://t.co/SUbesAgZ2m

— bubba atkinson (@BubbaAtkinson) February 19, 2026

never learned that journalism is better when backed by live markets in my journalism ethics class at syracuse that must be in the new curriculum https://t.co/EivK2QsqBK

— peach (@peachquintana) February 19, 2026

The world will not rest until every fractional second of my life is up for sale. It’s infuriating. https://t.co/LQqBMIyQZ9

— Tony East (@TonyREast) February 19, 2026

Read Substack’s full announcement here and Polymarket’s here.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2026/02/is-it-hypocritical-for-news-publishers-to-complain-about-tech-companies-platforms-but-still-be-on-them/ Thu, 19 Feb 2026 20:10:10 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=248246 There is nothing publishers like more than to complain about platforms. Specifically, the tech giants whose apps are on your phone — right where they’d rather you had The Daily Gazette’s app installed.

Sometimes the complaints are couched in terms of theft — theft of ad dollars, theft of audience, theft of content. Sometimes it’s about power — the unparalleled reach they have into the minds of humanity. They’re like tollbooths plopped down onto the open internet, so deeply ingrained in modern life that they’re nigh unavoidable. (Go ahead, try to go a week without somehow engaging with a Google product. Heck, even a day.) There are few problems in contemporary journalism that a motivated publisher couldn’t somehow blame on Facebook.

But despite all those complaints, you don’t see a massive publisher exodus from these platforms. Sure, pulling your site from Google search isn’t a feasible option for a media company in 2026. But publishers still, for the most part, dedicate precious resources to filling up Facebook, Twitter, and the rest with #content. Despite the profound asymmetry in the relationships, news companies still feed those beasts.

Does that make them hypocrites? Or is it that their disdain for the platforms, while potent, is still weaker than other interests they think the platforms can help them achieve? That’s the question raised by a new comment paper, just published in Digital Journalism, by our old friend (and frequent predictor) Rasmus Kleis Nielsen. Its title is “Do News Media Want to Disentangle from Platforms?” and here’s part of the abstract:

Publishers have both principled and practical reasons to want to disentangle themselves from platforms and the companies behind them, but in most cases do not prioritize this, because there are other things they want more, in particular audience reach and incremental revenue. That is the hypothesis I offer here, where I briefly outline why the fraught entanglements that publishers and journalists often express their frustration with are often in practice reproduced, reinforced, and replicated…

I suggest such continued engagement is not hypocrisy, but an example of how publishers navigate complex tradeoffs, choosing “freedom to” leverage platform opportunities for audience reach and revenue over “freedom from” platform dependencies and the accompanying contingency.

My hypothesis is that most publishers, their principled objections notwithstanding, in practice continue to work with platforms because they have other priorities they value more than disentanglement, and suggest the balance between entanglement and disentanglement is an important area for further empirical work.

Now, whenever I hear people call news orgs hypocritical for still being on platforms, my first thought goes to the Matt Bors comic featuring “Mister Gotcha,” a highly annoying young man who likes nothing better than to point out people complaining while also existing in the real world.

I mean, expecting publishers to turn into pure techno-ascetics because they don’t like Mark Zuckerberg’s ad model is a bit much. They live in a digital reality that doesn’t reward abstinence. But Nielsen notes that publishers don’t just exist on the platforms — they often shape their content for them. They write keyword-dense headlines for Google’s algorithm and curate cute photos for Facebook’s. They buy ads on the very platforms they hate to promote their own work. They create special customized content just for TikTok or Snapchat or Instagram or YouTube. (Some are even on Mastodon, for crying out loud.)

“Despite decades of concern over the lack of a direct link between off-site distribution and revenue, they generally post this content for free, with no licensing fees or other forms of direct payment,” Nielsen writes. “They actively engage with these platforms on precisely the terms of trade — content in return for reach — that many of them have for so long and so often labeled as unacceptable.”

And the return on much of publishers’ investment has been strikingly limited. Twitter never drove much traffic, even before whatever Elon Musk has done to it. It’s one thing to sell out your editorial strategy for 2015-era Facebook traffic. But today, only about 4% of publishers’ traffic comes from Facebook, according to Chartbeat data. And as Meta has shown in Australia and Canada, Facebook would be happy to be rid of news.

If we focus on what they do, rather than what they sometimes say, [news publishers] are generally not seeking to disentangle themselves from platform power. This is not because they would not, in principle, like to. It is because they, in practice, value the opportunities for reach and revenue that platforms offer more.

Nielsen looks specifically at two outlets that have as much institutional power as any, the BBC and The New York Times. If anyone can disentangle, surely it’s these relative titans. But the BBC “has been very explicit” about its intent to invest more in platforms, not less, with director-general Tim Davie pledging last year to continue “dramatically increasing our News presence on platforms like YouTube and TikTok” and seeking “new, major partnerships with the world-leading big tech companies.” And the Times jumps on every new social media platform that gains even a little oxygen.

He frames this apparent tension as a conflict between “freedom from” and “freedom to.” Disentanglement implies freedom from the many tentacles of platforms; publishers are more interested in the freedom to use them, only with more agency than they enjoy today. The twin goals of nearly every media company — bigger audiences, higher revenues — can happily align with the interests of tech companies sometimes. But only sometimes. They pull out their rhetorical bullhorn when attacking big tech makes sense, and they partner with them when that makes sense.

Nielsen makes a strong argument, as he always does, but if I might offer a couple notes:

— There are many more ways to disentangle from platforms than to stop posting on Bluesky, and I’d argue we’ve seen more aggressive attempts at disentanglement in recent years than he acknowledges.

After all, the industry’s overarching shift in revenue models away from advertising and toward subscriptions over the past decade is a clear attempt to become less reliant on a digital ad business overwhelmingly dominated by Google, Meta, and a few other tech giants. Publishers increasingly see their social media presence as lead generation, a top-of-the-funnel strategy for a subscription model.

Publishers’ investments in newsletters and podcasts are strategies that aim to get the benefits of social media-style distribution while retaining a direct relationship to the audience — which is what the platforms won’t provide. On the business side, every push for first-party data is an attempt to route around the damage of ad tech companies. Disentanglement isn’t just about protesting a platform’s rapaciousness — it’s also a way to build sustainability.

— The BBC and the Times may be on every social platform, but I don’t see that in conflict with their editorial or business strategies. As a public service broadcaster, the BBC has a mission of ubiquity baked in; they want to be everywhere. When Tim Davie spoke of “dramatically increasing our News presence on platforms like YouTube and TikTok,” the next words out of his mouth were “to ensure we have a stronger position amidst the noise.” (When news leaves a platform, it’s rarely something better that takes its place.) And the Times was willing to remove all its content from Apple News, the English-speaking world’s most popular news app, when they saw it as a risk to their own subscriptions’ premium positioning.

— He only mentions AI in passing, but it’s by far the most important publishers-vs.-platforms battle happening right now. And publishers have been notably more aggressive in denying ChatGPT et al. access to their content than they’ve ever been with Google or Facebook. Every day, it seems, there’s a new report of publisher lawsuits or blocking AI crawlers. It’s not the strategy I would have chosen, but there’s every indication that publishers are serious about being willing — anxious, even — to sit out Silicon Valley’s latest generation of content vacuums. I think publishers see the major AI labs as a chance at a do-over, and it’s more of a break from past platform relations than a continuity.

Overhead photo of tollbooths via Adobe Stock.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2026/02/how-ai-is-transforming-freelance-journalism/ Wed, 18 Feb 2026 18:32:41 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=248209

This story was originally published by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.

A spate of articles by a freelance journalist named Margaux Blanchard appeared in major English-language publications in 2025. But the pieces, including first-person essays for Business Insider and a Wired feature on couples getting married in the Minecraft game, were not what they appeared to be. Margaux Blanchard didn’t exist.

After an editor grew suspicious of a strange-sounding pitch and challenged Blanchard, it became clear that the work published under that name was most likely AI-generated. One by one, the outlets which had published the pieces took them down.

A few months after the “Margaux Blanchard” story, another would-be freelance journalist was caught using AI to generate pitches and pieces, which again were published in major news outlets. This time, the articles were under the name “Victoria Goldiee.”

These cases are the most extreme scenarios. However, they still pose serious questions about the way the freelancing system has worked until now. Calls for pitches rely on trust: that the journalist is who they say they are, that they’re doing the work themselves.

How are commissioning editors navigating an environment where anybody can generate an AI alter ego and produce articles at the push of a prompt? On the other hand, how is the ease with which text and images can be created affecting freelancers themselves?

With these questions in mind, I put out an open call to our audience in the hope of hearing from freelancers and commissioning editors on how their day-to-day is changing because of generative AI.

A total of 45 freelance journalists and commissioning editors responded.

The responses surprised me, with many more freelancers than I expected writing in to say that generative AI has helped make them more organized and efficient. There were still some skeptics. But the overall picture was one of an industry slowly adopting generative AI, albeit with caution and caveats.

Freelance work is mutating, not disappearing

There was no consensus over whether commissions had increased or decreased since the popularization of generative AI.

Some of the freelancers I heard from attribute a decline in work to AI, while others say they receive more commissions precisely due to the rise of AI. Still others don’t believe the decline they’re experiencing is due to AI, and some note that there has been no change at all.

Many freelancers use AI to organize and speed up their workflows, citing help in research, planning, transcription and, in some cases, drafting articles. Some were enthusiastic about the new opportunities generative AI affords them.

“The arrival of tools like ChatGPT has drastically reduced the waiting time between one story and the next. In my position, I’m responsible for writing stories during the morning press conference of Mexico’s president, Claudia Sheinbaum, and being able to handle the process in real time is incredible with support like AI,” said Jesús García Rodríguez, a freelance digital editor who writes for Mexican outlet El Mañana.

“For me, it’s opened up a whole world of opportunities,” wrote media innovation journalist Ulrike Langer. These include writing about generative AI, using it to venture into new fields such as coding, and employing it as a personal research and editing assistant to enhance efficiency and productivity.

Efficiency was cited by many journalists as a key benefit to their work.

“The speed at which I do my pitches has increased, and they are more tight and catchy. This makes editors pick them faster,” said Robert Amalemba, a freelance writer based in Kenya.

In several cases, the freelancers who reported using generative AI said automating some of the grunt work allowed them to focus more on editorial decisions and big-picture thinking.

“It is now part of my daily workflow for research, structuring ideas and early drafts, allowing me to focus more on analysis, editorial judgment, and narrative decisions. Productivity has increased, along with expectations around speed,” said Alvaro Liuzzi, an Argentinian freelance journalist, media consultant, and trainer.

A survey of U.K. journalists, both freelance and not, found that more journalists use AI for initial newsgathering than for other stages of the news production process. In terms of individual tasks, the ones in which journalists are most likely to use AI are transcription and captioning, translation and grammar checking, all of which are not new areas for automation.

However, as this survey was conducted between August and November 2024, and AI has kept evolving at a fast pace since then, the overall picture might be different today.

This increase in speed has also led to the expectation that work be completed more quickly, with several freelancers noting that tighter turnarounds are requested of them as well.

In some cases, this has also led to lower budgets for freelance work, according to Arif Ullah Sheikh, a current affairs producer at Pakistan Television Corporation and freelance SEO content writer and editor. This is because some work is partially automated instead of being assigned to a freelancer, and also because of lower freelance rates due to an expectation that, since freelancers will use generative AI they will take less time on the job, Sheikh said.

“The number of thought leadership pieces I am commissioned to write on behalf of brands and C-suite execs has collapsed. My suspicion is that these pieces are simply farmed out to generative AI tools,” said Chris Sutcliffe, a U.K.-based freelance tech and media journalist.

Verification becomes more important

Widespread use of generative AI has also amplified the importance of verification to check for hallucinations and other errors in output. But having to comb through AI-generated work for possible mistakes can sometimes neutralize the time savings of automating that work in the first place.

Freelance journalist Sophie Mangado, based in Canada, wrote that she occasionally uses AI to save time in research. “The counterpart to this is I have to double-check any result from GenAI, and this takes time,” she said.

“I use them only for topics I know perfectly, and even in those cases I double-check,” wrote Elisa Gestri, freelance journalist and photoreporter, who worries about the trustworthiness of AI outputs after noticing some mistakes.

For a profession that relies on accuracy and in which retaining audience trust is already a struggle, some freelancers voiced concern that overreliance on AI may lead to damaging shortcuts.

“This technology is reshaping research processes that require care. Some outlets and clients assume that ‘everything is faster’ and push for short deadlines or lower fees, without distinguishing between mechanical tasks and deep intellectual work. That devalues the profession and risks leading to inaccuracies. The most dangerous thing is the temptation to produce ‘cheap’ content without reporting or solid verification. That’s what worries me most,” wrote Hassel Fallas, a freelance journalist and editor based in Costa Rica.

How to catch an impostor

One of the risks faced by commissioning editors is the possibility of a flood of AI-generated pitches clogging up their inboxes, making it difficult to sift through and find good stories.

The worst-case scenario is falling for an AI scammer.

Nicholas Hune-Brown, executive editor at nonprofit publication The Local, based in Toronto, was the one who discovered that Victoria Goldiee was lying about her work.

He became suspicious after her pitch to him seemed a bit too polished. She also claimed to have already done a lot of the groundwork for the piece she was pitching, which struck Hune-Brown as strange.

He Googled her and found a wide variety of recent articles she had authored for disparate publications, including Architectural Digest and the Journal of the Law Society of Scotland. Her work seemed to suggest she lived in the U.S. or the U.K., but The Local is a Toronto publication.

Hune-Brown dug deeper, getting in touch with people Goldiee claimed to have interviewed, and found her articles featured quotes from real experts who didn’t remember speaking with her, or experts who didn’t appear to exist.

When he put this to Goldiee on a phone call, the voice on the other end hung up. Goldiee stopped responding to his emails.

“This experience has totally shifted the way that we do our work,” Hune-Brown told me. The Local is now implementing a more robust fact-checking process, including asking authors for annotated drafts as evidence that they’re doing the writing.

This additional vetting step was also mentioned by one of the freelancers who got in touch to share their experience.

Chris Sutcliffe said he’s been offering editors access to his Google Docs version histories as evidence that he does the writing himself. He believes this is helping him get work. “Just offering proof of original work appears to be a selling point for freelance journalism,” he said.

Rising scepticism from editors could create additional obstacles for young journalists or those just getting into the business, as editors look beyond a pitch to a writer’s previous bylines or contacts, for example, before assigning them a job.

“I am not so worried about a totally fraudulent article making its way through onto our pages,” Hune-Brown said, pointing to his publication’s vetting process. However, he is also concerned about how to fulfill The Local’s mandate to work with new voices.

“I’m not sure the best process for doing that at a moment where you cannot assume any connection between the words of a pitch you receive and the person who sent it,” he said.

This worry about whether or not to trust the expertise signaled by well-written pitches was also mentioned by commissioning editors who wrote in with their experience. The barrier to entry is lower, as generative AI makes everyone sound like an expert.

For the moment, Hune-Brown is only working with writers he knows. “I haven’t put out another public call for pitches yet,” he said, “because I don’t want to wade through dozens and dozens of AI-generated pitches.”

Will AI replace us?

Many of the freelancers said they use generative AI to aid their work. However, there was a group that saw it as a threat to their job security or as incompatible with journalistic values.

“I notice a lot of generative text on news portals, and that makes me feel two things: sorrow for colleagues who are being pushed to be faster than Twitter (impossible) and jaded that it has become the norm. I’m not a fan of AI in humanities,” wrote freelance writer Emil Čančar, who said he only uses ChatGPT as an advanced search engine, when he does at all.

Justine, a British freelance illustrator, said she’s getting fewer job opportunities because of AI. “Progressively, I see recurring clients start to post AI-generated content rather than hiring an illustrator to do the job,” she wrote.

She’s also seeing more and more clients asking her to use AI-generated images as a reference for an illustration.

“This hinders my creative process because I have to create based on a set style, while before it would be a discussion between the client and me, often with a moodboard. A few months ago, I was commissioned by an author to design their book cover from an AI image they generated; they wanted the cover to be as close as possible to the AI style, so I found myself spending hours learning to draw like an AI,” she said.

A third of U.K. illustrators and 58% of photographers report lost commissions and cancelled projects due to generative AI, according to a report published in January.

A couple of the writers who responded to our open call also shared concerns that generative AI could replace their work.

“Publications are commissioning fewer pieces, cutting their rates, or cancelling recurring contracts due to decreasing pageviews because readers are turning to AI, rather than publications, for information. I have maintained my work so far, but at decreasing rates, more instability, the threat of future further cutbacks, and much more hustle per assignment,” wrote U.S.-based freelance science journalist Sarah Scoles.

“In my case, it has been hard to adapt; I feel it’s a betrayal of my intellect. By using [generative AI], I’m helping to normalize something that could later leave me without work,” wrote Mexico-based freelance writer Adriana Cruz Toledo.

The Reuters Institute’s report on U.K. journalists’ use of AI finds that many more journalists see AI as a large threat to journalism than as a large opportunity. However, 45% of respondents said they saw AI as an opportunity to some extent.

Although there was no overall consensus on the impact of generative AI on the number of commissions to the freelancers who got in touch, and many of them praised the tech’s impact on their efficiency, a number of them also emphasized the importance of human input.

This was mentioned particularly in relation to verification, editorial judgment, and ethics.

Argentinian freelance editor Eric Facundo Fernández said, “It’s unacceptable that human writers are not behind the work [generative AI] produces, whether as a supervisor of the final version of the article or whatever is being carried out.”

“Rather than replacing my role, generative AI has reinforced the value of human editorial responsibility,” Liuzzi said.

Marina Adami is a member of the editorial team at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, where this story was originally published.

Illustration by Yutong Liu & Digit / https://betterimagesofai.org being used under a Creative Commons license.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2026/02/the-san-francisco-standard-gets-150k-to-build-an-ai-powered-news-app/ Wed, 18 Feb 2026 18:10:49 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=248214

“The San Francisco Standard grant builds upon the foundation of all of this work, adding a focus on more fundamental changes to the user experience,” Friedlich said.

More specifically, the grant will be used to fund the Standard’s work developing a mobile news app with several AI-powered features. Among them will be an experimental content management system (CMS) based on the ideas of structured journalism.

“[This] new approach to the content management system [treats] data and chunks of reporting, not just articles, as the atomic unit,” said Kevin Delaney, the editor-in-chief of the Standard. Delaney joined the publication in June 2025 after the future-of-work publication he co-founded, Charter, was acquired by the Standard. Delaney describes the CMS experiment as a move away from traditional news stories and towards “modular fresh content.”

The app will also use algorithmic personalization to surface stories and topics in the app that readers care most about, whether that be city housing policy or the latest 49ers score. Using mobile location data, the app will also push out hyperlocal news updates, which Delaney says could include neighborhood crime reports or notices about construction on a reader’s commute. The Standard is also developing an interactive archive that will provide readers with instant background context on the news, using AI on the backend without requiring users to “prompt their way to answers.”

“Our goals are to invent an interface for AI-native news that readers love and engage with daily, prove that such products can drive direct relationships with users and subscription growth, and openly share learnings that benefit the broader local news industry,” said Delaney.

Lenfest’s grant will go towards funding the Standard’s product team working on the project, but also help the newsroom bring in outside technical expertise. The Standard is partnering with a new AI publishing startup — Bit Bit Press — to shoulder some of the mobile app development.

Delaney previously co-founded the business news site Quartz and has reunited with some of that publication’s product team at the Standard. In the years after Quartz’s launch in 2012, the publication was lauded for leading a wave of “mobile-native journalism” and for its signature mobile app, Quartz Brief. The now-defunct app had a conversational chatbot interface, a novel feature at the time that echoes many of the generative AI chatbots that have become commonplace today.

“We believe an AI-native approach can address challenges that have constrained local journalism,” said Delaney, framing the Standard’s project in terms similar to Quartz’s “mobile-native” journalism. “We expect AI to shape both how our journalists report and how readers experience the product — from contextual answers drawn from our reporting to personalized feeds and notifications.”

This story has been updated to clarify the focus of the original Lenfest Institute grants.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2026/02/washington-post-layoffs-disproportionately-affected-union-members-of-color-preliminary-guild-data-shows/ Fri, 13 Feb 2026 22:41:15 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=248185 When The Washington Post laid off more than a third of its employees on February 4, the paper’s foundation was shaken. The cuts were wide-ranging, shuttering the sports desk right before the Winter Olympics and letting go of foreign correspondents covering active wars.

Data released Friday by The Washington Post Guild shows that layoffs fell heavily on union members of color:

This shows the true scope of these layoffs — and it’s deeper than numbers on a page.

These numbers aren’t just statistics. They reflect careers, communities, and a profound shift in who gets to shape the journalism and mission of The Washington Post. pic.twitter.com/nMB3s2bayK

— Washington Post Guild (@PostGuild) February 13, 2026

I asked the Guild for the numbers behind these percentages. According to the Guild, 144 (37%) members who identify as white, 23 (50%) who identify as Hispanic or Latino, 44 (45%) who identify as Black, 33 (43%) who identify as Asian, and 14 (5%) who identify as multiracial were laid off. Twenty-two (8%) union members who were laid off didn’t disclose their races. (The Washington Post has a separate Tech Workers Guild, not included in these numbers.)

“The numbers tell a painful story. The impact on journalists of color is staggering and devastating,” the Post Guild said in its statement on Friday. “We cannot ignore what this means for equity, representation, and the future of this organization. Our newsroom and commercial departments are stronger when they reflect the communities we serve.”

The Guild had more than 700 members prior to February 4. More than 250 were sent layoff notices, but that number could eventually decrease since the Guild is still negotiating layoffs and severance packages with Post leadership.

The Washington Post did not respond to a request for comment.

We still don’t have an official number of how many people were laid off in total. Former Washington Post media reporter Paul Farhi reported this week that the company laid off somewhere between 350 and 375 journalists, cutting the size of the newsroom by nearly half. On Wednesday, Post executive editor Matt Murray said in a town hall that the Post now has around 400 journalists and a total staff of 1,300. That’s down from a reported 1,000 journalists and 2,500 staffers in total in 2022.

Last year, the Post released its workforce demographic data: That report also did not include a total staff number, but here was the makeup of all Post employees by race and ethnicity:

And of all news and opinion employees:

The Post Guild’s data is the latest example in the years-long unraveling of the news industry’s promises to improve diversity, equity, and inclusion after George Floyd’s killing and the ensuing “racial reckoning” of 2020.

In June 2020, the Post’s then-publisher, Fred Ryan, told staff the company would “build a stronger culture of diversity and equity.” That included hiring for a dozen new positions and establishing Krissah Thompson as manager of diversity and inclusion. Thompson stayed in the role for a year before becoming a general managing editor and eventually leaving the company last year. The original role no longer exists.

Last June, the Post put its “About US” newsletter (“Candid conversations about race and identity in 21st century America”) “on hiatus.” The newsletter’s author Rachel Hatzipanagos was laid off on February 4.

In 2021, the Post hired reporters Emmanuel Felton and Akilah Johnson to cover race and ethnicity. They were both laid off on February 4.

“This comes six months after hearing in a national meeting that race coverage drives subscriptions,” Felton tweeted. “This wasn’t a financial decision, it was an ideological one.”

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2026/02/the-atlantics-elizabeth-bruenig-on-her-hypothetical-heavily-reported-measles-essay/ Fri, 13 Feb 2026 19:11:07 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=248166 “The birthday-party invitation said ‘siblings welcome,’ which means you can bring your 11-month-old son while your husband is out of town,” Elizabeth Bruenig’s piece begins.

“This is how a child dies of measles” was published by The Atlantic on Thursday afternoon and is currently the most popular story on site. It’s written in the second person, from the point of view of a woman whose two unvaccinated children get measles — with ultimately horrific long-term consequences for her son.

The story is filled with details of modern everyday life (“You plant her on the couch with a blanket and put Bluey on the TV while she drifts in and out of sleep,” “While the kids are napping, you tap a list of your daughter’s symptoms into Google and find a slew of diseases that more or less match up”), juxtaposed with descriptions of a disease that was considered eliminated in the U.S. in the year 2000 — but reached its highest levels in three decades in 2025. (“Her cough wracks her whole body, rounding her delicate bird shoulders. She does not sleep well. And as you lift up her pajama top to check her rash one morning, you see that her breathing is labored, shadows pooling between her ribs when she sucks in air.”) There have been five measles outbreaks in the U.S. so far in 2026, according to the CDC.

When I initially read Bruenig’s story, I was stunned: An Atlantic staff writer’s unvaccinated child had died of measles in the 2020s, and now she was writing about it? At the end of Bruenig’s piece, though, there’s an editor’s note: “This story is based on extensive reporting and interviews with physicians, including those who have cared directly for patients with measles.” That was the point when I sent a gift link to my mom group: “as far as I can tell this piece is fiction. What do we think about this choice? I am very conflicted!!!” My conflict stemmed from my concern that, though the piece was heavily researched, it was not a true story. I wondered if the key people whose minds might be changed by it — people who don’t vaccinate their kids — would brush it off as fiction, or fake.

Update 2/19/2026: After this piece was published, I heard from two different people who received The Atlantic’s original press push email for the piece around 4:30 p.m. on Thursday afternoon. At that time, when they clicked through, there was not an editor’s note/disclaimer on the piece at all. Both of those readers, who are professional journalists, responded to the press email with confusion and asked if the story was real. An Atlantic publicist emailed one of these readers back and said, “This is based on a mother’s real account. Thanks for checking.” Sometime after that, the disclaimer was added and it was there when I read the story around 7 p.m. on Thursday night. An Atlantic spokesperson told me yesterday, “The note was added almost immediately after publication.” This information is significant to me because it suggests that within The Atlantic there was confusion about whether the piece was fictional.

Some Atlantic readers seem to share my sense of conflict — or missed the editor’s note and thought it was true. “Thank you to this mom for the incredible generosity of sharing this story — nothing could be more tragic. I’m so sorry,” one commenter wrote.

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Another reader commented: “Beautiful, powerful writing! This is not the reporter’s personal story, correct? Is it one family’s true story or a composite based on her reporting? I find it very compelling and potentially persuasive to families who question vaccines. I would love to know more about how the piece came together.”

I wanted to know that too, so I asked Bruenig some questions via email. (By the way, if you like learning about how reported stories come together in general, you should check out our sister publication Nieman Storyboard. And if you want to see another time that Nieman Lab asked a reporter questions like this, check out my colleague Sarah’s interview with Rachel Aviv or Neel’s interview with Sarah Zhang.) Our conversation, very lightly edited for clarity (and I added the links to statistics cited) is below. The piece is here.

Laura Hazard Owen: How do you describe the category for “This is how a child dies of measles”? My understanding is that it is fictional and, according to the note at the bottom, “based on extensive reporting and interviews with physicians, including those who have cared directly for patients with measles” — but at the end of the day, realistic fiction.

Elizabeth Bruenig: It is a hypothetical account of a very real phenomenon based on careful reporting. I would place it somewhere on the creative nonfiction spectrum.

Owen: That is a really fascinating choice. How did you decide on that and how did you pitch it to your editor? How did you decide to write it in the second person? How did you and your editor talk back and forth about what category it would be in on the site and where the “disclaimer” would be? Do you think it’s ultimately an opinion (or, in The Atlantic’s categorization, “Ideas”) piece?

Bruenig: I collaborated closely with my editors on this piece, and we were attracted to the idea of providing a play-by-play of the progression of measles in granular detail. It seemed like the best way to lay it all out was to spin a narrative that touches on every important aspect of a measles infection, from the biological processes inside the body, to the governmental response, to an outbreak.

Writing in the second person made sense to me because it’s a hypothetical addressed to parents weighing these decisions or facing outbreaks in their communities. I write nonfiction either in the first person or third, so this felt like a way to signal that this is a different kind of story. On the other hand, writing in the second person always feels a little bit goofy.

We included an editor’s note to remove any possibility of confusion. And yes, it does make sense to me to describe it as a story about ideas.

Owen: Tell me more about the research that you did for the piece, and who you talked to.

Bruenig: I spoke with doctors working at several universities whose specialties include pediatric infectious diseases, epidemiology, and management of highly communicable diseases. Some of them have treated measles firsthand — one doctor had actually suffered measles as a child, and we discussed that experience as well as the science behind it. The doctors I spoke with also directed me to research material used in the medical field that provided a very clear picture of how measles invades the body.

Owen: Who was the mom character you imagined in your head, and how did you write her? How were you thinking about her and the kids? (I know you’re a mom — how old are your kids?) I know you write that the piece is based on extensive interviews with doctors, but did you talk to other moms, too, including those who choose not to vaccinate, or did you have other experiences with them?

Bruenig: I based the mom on myself and my feelings about my own children, who are 9 and 6. (My children are fully vaccinated, but I wanted to try to put myself in the shoes of a mom who was very hesitant about vaccines.) She makes some mistakes that I can see myself making — specifically, confusing measles for a common cold or chicken pox, and misjudging when to call the doctor.

I also thought about the conversations I’ve seen play out in moms groups, both in person and on social media, which informed my ideas about where this mom may have encountered anti-vax views. So many parenting decisions are based on different forms of anxiety, in my experience, so I feel a lot of solidarity with parents striving to do what is best for their kids, even if I find their conclusions questionable. I didn’t want this mom to be aggressively confident or evangelical in her vaccine skepticism, because I didn’t want her to be a caricature. I did not want the piece to come off as mocking or shaming. I didn’t want to judge her, and I didn’t want to imply that she does not love her children. I wanted her to feel human.

Owen: I sent this to (mom, vaxxing) friends who were kind of stunned to realize at the end that it was fictional (or semi-fictional or whatever we’re calling that). Reactions to that really ranged. I’m conflicted about it. I had one friend who texted “it feels kinda sensationalist in a way that’s maybe damaging but I am not the American public so it’s not really aimed at me.” It seems clear that a lot of people in the comments think it’s real or aren’t sure.

How were you thinking about this? I imagine you thought about it a lot. As a very pro-vaccinating mom, I am so split on this. On the one hand it’s a new way to reach people who just wouldn’t read pro-vaccination content otherwise. On the other hand, did you worry they’ll blow it off or think it is sensationalized?

Bruenig: I completely agree that this story is dramatic, and I can see how people might construe it as sensational. But measles itself is a dramatic and damaging disease, and there’s no way to lay that out faithfully without exploring those frightening and dangerous elements. About 40% of measles infections result in complications, ranging from diarrhea to pneumonia to ear infections to encephalitis or blindness. One researcher I spoke with told me that between 50 and 60 percent of measles cases will result in pneumonia. One in 5 unvaccinated people infected with measles will require hospitalization, and children under 5 are especially vulnerable. There is no way to be sure who will become catastrophically ill with measles, though the very young and immunocompromised are at greatest risk. I wanted the story to closely examine a couple of those complications in detail.

Because the measles virus in the United States has been suppressed for so long by vaccinations, it is easy to forget that this is a serious illness. I was surprised by several things I learned in the course of this reporting. (I had no idea, for instance, that measles suppresses the immune system, providing ideal conditions for secondary infections.)

Owen: I was super shocked by the end. How did you learn about those long-term effects of measles and do you know how common this outcome is? How did you decide to end it that way?

Bruenig: I was also shocked to learn about SSPE, a degenerative brain disorder caused by measles between 7 and 10 years after initial infection. Prior to this reporting, I had no idea such a condition existed. But the first doctor I spoke to explained to me that SSPE is a rare and devastating complication of the virus, affecting about 1 in 1,000 pediatric cases. I wanted to highlight this complication specifically because I sense that there’s widespread belief among anti-vax parents that since most healthy children will survive a measles infection, there are no important long-term consequences. But that’s simply not the case. Measles can seriously damage the body, and in rare and tragic cases, can result in death many years after the symptoms pass.

Owen: Where do you expect this piece to be shared and who do you expect to read it? Do you think people who choose not to vaccinate their kids will read it, and if so, how will they come across it? Have you heard any reactions from readers so far?

Bruenig: I have heard from several readers, one of whom had a heartbreaking experience with measles involving a family friend who died of the virus. People have been generally very encouraging! I have no doubt that there are a lot of people out there who are unhappy with the story or reject its premises, and they are entitled to their interpretations. I get it.

But my job is to report the truth about the world — and I use all kinds of literary, and narrative devices to do that. I do it because telling the truth is important in its own right, whether or not anyone finds it persuasive.

I hope there’s a sliver of a chance this reaches people who are really weighing these issues and making decisions about their children’s health in real time, or people who have friends and family weighing whether to vaccinate, or people living in communities currently managing outbreaks. I’m not very confident that it could persuade people who have very firm anti-vax convictions — as you point out, it seems pretty likely they would just blow it off. That’s always a risk anytime you write with a hint of persuasion in mind. But if the story makes even a little bit of a difference in even one person’s decision making where it comes to vaccines, then it was a success.

This piece has been updated with information about the timing of when the disclaimer was added and to note that an Atlantic publicist, not a spokesperson, wrote “This is based on a mother’s real account.”

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2026/02/apple-is-the-new-target-for-nonsense-harassment-by-trumps-regulators-but-your-news-org-could-be-next/ Thu, 12 Feb 2026 20:40:24 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=248139 On Wednesday afternoon, Donald Trump’s head of the Federal Trade Commission, Andrew Ferguson, sent a ludicrous letter to Apple CEO Tim Cook, threatening to bring the hammer of the federal government down on the tech giant because he doesn’t like its morning email newsletter.

No, really — that’s what he did. He sent a three-page letter complaining that Fox News, The Gateway Pundit, and their ideological fellow travelers don’t get featured in Apple News’ morning newsletter as much as he would like, and as a result, Cook should “take corrective action swiftly.”

The evidence presented for this claim is that someone at the right-wing “think tank” Media Research Center did some counting and found that, in the month of January, the “Good Morning from Apple News” email newsletter did not link once to “notable right-leaning media sources such as Fox News, the New York Post, Daily Mail, Breitbart or The Gateway Pundit.” (Gosh, why would anyone avoid linking to The Gateway Pundit?) Instead, it linked regularly to notorious Maoist zines like the Associated Press and USA Today. This “study” got tweeted by Donald Trump on Truth Social, and the federal government kicked into gear.

“Any act or practice by Apple News to suppress or promote news articles based on the perceived ideological or political viewpoint of the article or publication, if inconsistent with Apple’s terms of service or the reasonable expectations of consumers, may violate the FTC Act,” Ferguson wrote. Ferguson’s big brother Brendan Carr, taking a break from running American late-night programming, chimed in: “FTC Chairman Ferguson is exactly right. Apple has no right to suppress conservative viewpoints in violation of the FTC Act.”

This is absurd, of course. The First Amendment exists. Whatever one thinks of Apple, or of “Big Tech” more broadly, it is acting as a publisher here, and publishers do not have to submit their milquetoast morning newsletters to the feds for preapproval. Do other giant corporations have the same obligation not to “suppress” viewpoints? Is Fox News required to air “Jacobin Tonight” after Hannity? Is David Ellison going to get a threat from the federal government to ensure Bari Weiss puts enough Democrats on the CBS Evening News? There is no evidence that Apple News is engaged in some ideologically motivated quest to silence conservatives — there are plenty of other reasons not to put Breitbart in your mass-market morning newsletter — but even if it was, it’d be completely within their rights. There is no constitutional requirement to link to Fox News. And there’s nothing in Ferguson’s legal “arguments” against Apple here that he couldn’t apply to your local newspaper, TV station, or news site.

Just before I finished typing this, I launched the Apple News app on my Mac to see what their top trending stories were. You’ll never guess who’s at No. 1!

Here’s Ferguson’s letter:

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2026/02/in-the-video-game-news-tower-as-in-real-life-running-a-newspaper-isnt-easy/ Thu, 12 Feb 2026 19:44:22 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=248119 My newspaper had a bat problem, in that bats — of the baseball variety — were the preferred weapon of the mobsters intimidating my employees and smashing up my office.

These are the kinds of problems you deal with in News Tower, a management-simulation game for PC and Mac from Dutch developer Sparrow Night that launched last November and has players stepping into the shoes of a New York City newspaper publisher in the 1930s. (Andrew recommended News Tower in our gift guide last year.)

Management sims are all about decisions; in News Tower, my first decision was the name of my newspaper. This being Nieman Lab, I decided to call my newspaper The Experiment. Some things about the game are all too familiar to anyone who’s paid any attention to the state of journalism lately. When you first start the game, the paper is struggling:

Evergreen.

You have a few options for getting out of the hole. You can take out a loan, for instance. Or you can turn to the same mobsters who smashed up your office for help, just as your father and uncle (who cofounded the paper) did. But to get their help, you have to print stories that are friendly to them — or avoid stories that might make them look bad, like coverage of a gruesome murder.

The news business of the 1930s, it turns out, is the business of influence, and everyone — the mafia, the mayor, wealthy socialites, the military — had thoughts on what I should and shouldn’t print. Success, or at the very least survival, requires balancing those interests, choosing which factions to cozy up to and whose wrath to risk in return. The more favors you perform for a faction, the better the rewards: cozying up to the military, for example, would reduce the cost of the steel required to expand my eponymous tower ever-upwards.

At first, I tried to avoid the factions entirely, which I quickly found was a losing strategy. Instead, I only accepted missions that, if not living up to the journalistic standards of 2026, at least didn’t entirely betray my ideals. I wouldn’t, for example, help the mayor sweep a scandal under the rug, but I also generally avoided gaining standing with his enemies in the mafia because doing so would weaken my employees’ union — something that I, a member of multiple journalism unions over the years, couldn’t abide.

The Experiment prints on Sundays — no daily news cycle here — and I’d spend the intervening days sending my reporters around the country (and occasionally across the pond to Europe) to chase down scoops that would help me push in on the territory of competing newspapers. Many of the headlines in the game are drawn from, or inspired by, real-life news from the era; my reporters brought back stories about Al Capone being sent to prison, the looming economic crisis, and the premiere of the first-ever animated film.

Also evergreen.

I also had to balance all the needs of my employees. Reporters and editors were only a part of my staff: I also employed typesetters and assemblers who quite literally put my paper together each week, telegraph operators who kept a finger on the pulse of the world, lawyers who dealt with lawsuits, and janitors, security guards, assorted maintenance workers who kept the building running. Each of them had their own needs, and making sure I paid attention to all of them was essential to getting my paper filled with stories and out in time each week.

As my paper grew, the perception of my paper became more and more important. In a slight twist from the left-right politics of the real world,I could choose to chase stories that would make readers think of it as informational (the game’s “left”), sensational (“right”), or a moderate middle. A story about a new scientific discovery for example, nudged the perception left, while a story about a spate of murders moved it to the right. This became increasingly important as I inched into the territory of my competitors, each of which had their own editorial bent; the New York of News Tower has no room for a robust information ecosystem with multiple papers, and I had to swing my paper’s editorial slant wildly to steal more and more subscribers away — which, as anyone in 2026 might be able to tell you, is perhaps not the most well-informed strategy.

What is this, a Christmas tree farm?

I played News Tower for about ten hours, and I can’t wait to go back; I could tell I was only scratching the surface. Playing it was surprisingly cathartic — a reminder that good journalism, while always hard to produce, was at one point rewarded richly — and sobering. It even, slightly, made me feel a little bit sympathetic toward the people in charge of The Washington Post. But only a little: no matter what the mayor threatened, I still printed stories about his scandals.

News Tower ($24.99) is available now for Mac and PC.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2026/02/how-the-new-york-times-uses-a-custom-ai-tool-to-track-the-manosphere/ Wed, 11 Feb 2026 18:57:27 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=248034 In July 2025, the Justice Department announced it would not make any additional files public from its investigation into child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. The backlash against the decision was swift — and came from some unexpected corners of the internet.

A chorus of right-wing commentators and influencers openly criticized President Donald Trump and his administration for failing to follow through on their campaign promise to release the federal documents. Political podcasters who had embraced Trump during his reelection campaign were up in arms, with social media figures like Joe Rogan and Andrew Schulz publicly pressuring the administration to reverse course.

The New York Times tracked this growing discontent across the GOP base closely for months, culminating with the near-unanimous passage of the Epstein Files Transparency Act by Congress last November. An AI-generated report, delivered directly to the email inboxes of journalists, was an essential tool in the Times’ coverage. It was also one of the first signals that conservative media was turning against the administration, according to Zach Seward, editorial director for AI initiatives at the Times. (Seward was once an associate editor at Nieman Lab.)

Built in-house and known internally as the “Manosphere Report,” the tool uses large language models (LLMs) to transcribe and summarize new episodes of dozens of podcasts.

“The Manosphere Report gave us a really fast and clear signal that this was not going over well with that segment of the President’s base,” said Seward. “There was a direct link between seeing that and then diving in to actually cover it.”

Broadly speaking, the “manosphere” includes online communities that promote narrow and patriarchal definitions of masculinity, as well as misogynistic and anti-feminist views. Frequently, it overlaps with MAGA and far-right social media ecosystems. After the reelection of Donald Trump, more concerted coverage of the manosphere became a priority across the Times.

“In order to adequately cover this administration — among many other sources — it seemed crucial to have an eye on influencers, largely conservative young male influencers,” Seward told me. “It turned out there were enough specific requests and enough broad interest [in the newsroom] that it made sense to automate sending that out.”

Launched a year ago, the Manosphere Report now follows about 80 podcasts hand-selected by reporters at the Times on desks covering politics, public health, and internet culture. That includes right-wing podcasts like The Ben Shapiro Show, Red Scare with “Dimes Square” shock jocks Dasha Nekrasova and Anna Khachiyan, and The Clay Travis & Buck Sexton Show, a successor to Rush Limbaugh’s talk radio show. It also keeps tabs on Huberman Lab, a podcast hosted by Stanford neuroscientist Andrew Huberman that has been criticized for spreading health misinformation. Seward notes the report also includes some liberal-leaning shows, like MeidasTouch, an anti-Trump podcast with a largely male audience.

When one of the shows publishes a new episode, the tool automatically downloads it, transcribes it, and summarizes the transcript. Every 24 hours the tool collates those summaries and generates a meta-summary with shared talking points and other notable daily trends. The final report is automatically emailed to journalists each morning at 8 a.m. ET. Currently, the tool is used by nearly 40 reporters across the newsroom. The Times is also exploring how to use this workflow to launch similar AI-generated summary reports for other beats.

Seward says the emails signal when there is a growing sentiment or shift in rhetoric across the manosphere. Ultimately, it falls on Times journalists to deliver stories by chasing leads they find in the reports.

“We would never rely [solely] on the AI-generated summaries,” said Seward. “Reporters are going back and listening to the real [podcasts] but using the report basically as a kind of tip line, or as a nudge to look at something more closely.”

For example, when actress Sydney Sweeney’s American Eagle ad became a culture war flashpoint last summer, Times journalists noticed, in part through the reports, that right-wing podcast figures were shaping the backlash. Further analysis demonstrated that these commentators had helped to make it a controversy in the first place. Podcasters had been talking about a supposed progressive uproar against Sweeney when there were still only a few thousands posts about the ad on X, the reporters found.

The Times is not the first newsroom to turn to LLMs to parse through the mountains of audio and video material on the internet that journalists are expected to consume to keep on top of their beats. Local news outlets across the country have been using LLMs to keep tabs on school board and town hall meeting livestreams through email summaries. Last year, my colleague Neel covered “Roganbot,” a tool created by AI consulting lab Verso to generate searchable transcripts of The Joe Rogan Experience podcast. Among several features, the tool suggests potentially controversial or false statements to fact-check.

The Manosphere Report was built by the Times’ AI Initiatives Team, a small newsroom unit launched in 2024. While other major newsrooms in the U.S. have explored using AI to build reader-facing chatbots or to assist with drafting or editing articles, the AI Initiatives Team has largely emphasized using generative AI for data analysis and investigative reporting in the newsroom. The team has also built other tools to scale up and operationalize more basic use cases for LLMs, like transcription and summarization.

Seward said that the Manosphere Report was an outgrowth of one of those existing tools, called Cheatsheet.

That tool started as a line of script on the laptop of Dylan Freedman, a machine learning engineer and AI project manager. An investigative reporter at the Times, Jesse Drucker, had approached Freedman with a list of 10,000 people who had registered for a tax break available to residents of Puerto Rico.

“He said, I just can’t Google 10,000 people — but of course, a machine can,” said Seward.

Freedman was able to use LLMs to automatically Google the names, inspect the results, and identify people whose financial history would be worth digging into further. The tool could rate the likelihood that someone had a job in crypto or that they had been involved in litigation, among other signals that they were a person of interest. The resulting investigation, published in May 2024, uncovered widespread abuse of the tax breaks.

“That was the first light bulb,” said Seward. From there, the Initiatives Team started trialing other applications of LLMs to process large, messy datasets and file dumps on a case-by-case basis. Today, many of those live in a single spreadsheet-based tool. Reporters can drop datasets into Cheatsheet and then run different preset scripts and prompts. Each capability in the menu is known as a “recipe.” Some of those recipes, like transcribing thousands of hours of video footage and summarizing transcriptions, are foundational to the Manosphere Report.

Still in its beta, Cheatsheet has already been tested on about 300 users in the newsroom, with 50 of those being “really active users,” according to Seward. Right now, at least one new project is created in Cheatsheet every day. The tool has been used to investigate an election-interference group, to transcribe and translate Syrian prison records, and to find recent instances of Trump talking about Jan. 6. At times, Cheatsheet has even been used to take on more thorough historical analysis of podcasts.

Last spring, the Times ran an investigation looking at the medical claims Dr. Mehmet Oz had made throughout his career as a TV and social media personality, after he was tapped by the Trump administration to lead the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Using Cheatsheet, the reporters were able to analyze statements made by Oz across 2,500 media  appearances, clips from “The Dr. Oz Show,” and social media posts. The investigation showed that Oz had financial ties to some products he’d promoted on air, including those that have little scientific evidence of health benefits.

In February, Cheatsheet will be rolled out to every journalist in the Times newsroom, Seward confirmed to Nieman Lab. Staffers will learn to use it during optional training sessions the Initiatives Team is offering this year.

In a statement to Nieman Lab after publication, a Times spokesperson clarified that both Cheatsheet and the Manosphere Report are “governed by legal guidance” and that “the newsroom collaborates with legal during these projects to ensure third party copyrights are being respected.”

As with the Manosphere Report, Cheatsheet is rooted in a philosophy that creating new text and images for publication is not the most effective use case for generative AI in a newsroom like the Times. Rather, Seward sees the technology as a way to amplify the newsroom’s existing investigative power.

“Cheatsheet is replicable and I hope we can open source it one day. Its tech is not going to be our differentiator or competitive advantage,” said Seward, who posited instead that the tool is a force multiplier for the Times’ beat reporting. “The reason to build it is because it helps us double down on an existing competitive advantage, which is, we’re more likely to have 500 hours of leaked recorded video in the first place.”

This story has been updated to include new numbers on the Manosphere Report user base and a statement from the Times on copyright compliance.

Photo of The New York Times building entrance in Manhattan, NY used via Adobe Stock license.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2026/02/most-americans-dont-pay-for-news-and-dont-think-they-need-to/ Wed, 11 Feb 2026 18:54:54 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=248056 For a new report released Wednesday, the Pew Research Center surveyed 3,560 U.S. adults in December 2025 about their relationship to the news and how they perceive its value in everyday life. The study found “no consensus about the importance of following the news,” but there was one thing Americans seemed to agree on: they don’t pay for news.

Eighty-three percent of respondents said they did not pay for any news sources (by subscribing, donating, or becoming members) in the last 12 months. Many cited free news options as a reason not to pay.

Pew also held nine 90-minute online focus groups with 45 U.S. adults in June 2025. “I feel like it’s a luxury to pay for news,” a man in his 20s said in one of those focus groups. “I think there’s still news accessible via free outlets, like just Googling something.”

The people most likely to pay for news were upper-income Americans (30%), adults with postgraduate degrees (35%), and liberal Democrats (29%).

Only 8% of respondents believe individual Americans have a responsibility to pay for news. The people least likely to call it a responsibility were those who identified as lower-income, Republican or Republican-leaning, adults under 30, or adults with a high school diploma or less education.

“I don’t think that information should be a privilege,” one woman in her 20s said in a focus group.

A woman in her 50s said, “I don’t pay to go to church, to get a spiritual message, you know? And if you’re true, and your mission is to relay facts that are fundamentally important for people’s well-being, do I need to pay you for that?”

The majority of respondents also believe that news outlets are either doing extremely well (11%), very well (23%), or somewhat well (37%) financially. When asked how they think news organizations should make money, 11% of respondents said charging subscription or membership fees should be the main revenue stream, while 45% said the same about advertising and sponsorship. Just 10% said government funding should be the main source of revenue, but the idea unraveled in focus group discussions:

Participant 1: I’m thinking. My first thought was the government, but then I’m like, I don’t know if state-sanctioned journalism is a good idea.

Participant 2: Dangerous tightrope.

Participant 1: Yeah, because I’m like, well, it’s a public service, but then there’s a high risk there.

Moderator: [Participant], how do you feel about that? Who should do it?

Participant 3: I don’t know….The only channel I trust is PBS. So I don’t know if there’s — we should never…

Participant 2: Isn’t that publicly funded?

Participant 3: Yeah. If Elmo could do it, sure. But I don’t think there is one person we can give the job. Because there’s always going to be someone that’s power hungry and trying to influence one idea.

Other interesting tidbits from the report:

There’s an age divide in news discovery. U.S. adults are split on how they get informed. About 50% said they get news because they’re looking for it, while 49% said the news finds them. Adults 50 and over are more likely to seek out news while those under 50 mostly gets news because they happen upon it.

What it means to “do your own research” varies: Two-thirds of respondents said it’s extremely or very important for people to check the accuracy of the news they get by doing their own research. A little over a third said they do this extremely often. But that could mean a lot of things, from comparing information from various sources to Googling to questioning what news outlets and government sources are putting out.

Participants are divided on who should teach news literacy. Just under half (44%) of respondents believe individual Americans should be the most responsible for knowing how to check news accuracy. A little over half (52%) of Republican-leaning respondents said the same compared to 37% of those who are Democrat-leaning. One-fifth (20%) of Americans believe news organizations are the most responsible for this, followed by schools (9%), the government (9%), parents and family (5%), and technology and social media companies (4%).

Read the full report here.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2026/02/terribly-frustrating-after-usps-changes-more-newspapers-arent-reaching-subscribers-on-time/ Tue, 10 Feb 2026 21:17:08 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=247854 Many publishers first noticed the complaints spike last summer.

The subscriber whose weekly newspaper arrived five days late. The subscriber who received no issues for three weeks in a row, then three issues on the same day a month later. The subscriber not receiving newspapers at all.

These are examples of the frustrations local publishers in Maine, Michigan, South Dakota, and Virginia told me they’re hearing from subscribers and peer publishers. They, like many community publishers, rely on the United States Postal Service for timely delivery. The issues they’re seeing are representative of delays stymieing publishers across the country — subscribers have reported delays as long as two months, Columbia Journalism Review reported in October.

Especially for weekly publishers in smaller, rural markets, USPS delivery has long been the cheaper, lower-lift alternative to the carriers many metro dailies still pay to perform the classic morning ritual of tossing newspapers onto porches and lawns. Some newspapers have been delivered by mail for decades, some for centuries, and some have only switched from carrier to USPS in the last few years, looking to cut costs at the margins, reduce print days, and sidestep the challenges (and management headaches) of the changing carrier labor market.

USPS delivery may save most rural publishers money compared to carriers, but it isn’t cheap. The Postal Service — a system as old as the country — is losing billions of dollars per year, and as part of its efforts to break even, it has significantly hiked its rates. President Trump has insulted the system and mused about privatization, though the current postmaster has committed to preserving the agency’s independence. (Postal service challenges are not unique to the U.S.: The Danish postal service stopped delivering letters last year in the face of “increasing digitalization,” and newspapers are carrier-delivered.)

Other recent USPS cuts and policy changes have contributed to more publishers seeing widespread, sometimes extreme delivery delays. By the USPS’ own measurement, about 20% of periodicals were delivered late nationally between July 1 and Sept. 30, 2025, up from around 15% delivered late during the same period in 2024. And that’s true even as the USPS has changed the goalposts on its own service standards over the years; while geographic and other caveats mean those service standards vary, the general in-state service standard for periodical delivery is 3-6 days within the contiguous U.S. (The USPS website also states it “does NOT guarantee delivery of Periodicals within a specified time.”)

In Maine, the Midcoast Villager is among the newspapers struggling with those delays. The USPS is “a service, and not a business that has historically had or needs a profit motive,” editor-in-chief Willy Blackmore wrote in an editorial last November. “But it is a service that the Villager spends over $49,000 on annually, and we decidedly are not getting what we pay for.”

Recent USPS service problems aren’t exclusive to newspapers. But for a business where timeliness is baked into the value proposition, they can be uniquely damaging, leading subscribers to cancel and even, in some cases, threatening advertising revenue. Small local publishers can’t afford those losses, and they have little visibility into — or control over — the delays hurting their bottom lines.

“We’re fighting against something that we really have no control over”

The Midcoast Villager, created when four publications merged in 2024, prints weekly. It’s the primary or only local news source for most of the 80,000 residents of Maine’s Knox and Waldo Counties.

Waldo County, which includes the city of Belfast (pop. 7,000) comprises half of the Midcoast Villager’s coverage area. The Villager has had more delivery problems in Waldo County than in Knox County, Blackmore told me. (He referred to one Belfast subscriber as his “bellwether” for delivery issues because she always emails when the paper doesn’t arrive on time.) Knox County has its own delivery problems, but they’re concentrated in just two ZIP codes — which “makes them kind of a different postal universe,” Blackmore said.

As the group circulation manager for MaineStay Media, Cathy Marshall is on the front lines of delivery delay complaints not only for the Villager, but also The Ellsworth American and Mount Desert Islander. “We get calls every day, all day long,” she said, along with angry emails. “It’s such a bummer…it’s disheartening.”

In Michigan, Eric Hamp is the third generation of his family to serve as publisher and editor of the Houghton Lake Resorter (fifth-generation, counting other newspapers the family has owned), which covers Roscommon County. Eric and his brother, Bryan, the Resorter’s production manager and part-owner, exemplify the ever-rarer tradition of family newspaper succession and ownership. The Hamps also own and publish the Crawford County Avalanche, and they still operate their own printing press. “We have people that come in the office right when the paper’s coming off the press because they want it,” Eric Hamp told me. “If we’re late, we know, because they’re waiting here.”

The complaints about major delays and missed deliveries started last August, Hamp said. The Resorter received more than 60 complaints, but it’s difficult to know the actual number of subscribers having problems because he doesn’t know how many people aren’t complaining. “Let’s say we’re sending 10 papers to a ZIP code and two people complain — well, that means that 10 people probably experienced the same issue,” he said.

After slowing down for a while, complaints picked up again in mid-December. “When we’re fighting against something that we really have no control over, that’s terribly frustrating,” Hamp said, “because I can’t afford to lose a subscriber,” let alone many.

Most of the delivery issues are for out-of-county subscribers, including in the Detroit metro area, which hurts the Resorter because many of its subscribers own second homes in Roscommon County. “If the township is going to change their zoning, they want to know about that before they get up to their place on the weekends,” Hamp said. “When they can’t get their newspaper, it’s upsetting to them.” (In the rarer event of local, one-off delivery issues, Hamp has sometimes gone so far as to deliver issues to homes himself.)

David Bordewyk, executive director of the South Dakota NewsMedia Association (SDNA), told me he started hearing from members about worsening delivery problems last spring. Publishers had long struggled with out-of-state delivery, he said, but problems delivering newspapers “to the community down the road 20 miles or in the next county” were new.

To get more context on these delays, in July, the SDNA surveyed its members. It received responses from around 50 publishers documenting around 150 examples of delivery problems. In a follow-up survey in November, members said the problems were either the same or had gotten worse.

“I’m confident in telling you…100% of our newspapers are having problems with delivery,” Bordewyk said. “It’s across the board, across the state…It’s a grass fire.” Because so much local advertising is time-sensitive (think auctions, open houses, legal notices, and invitations for project bids), the delays have threatened subscription and advertising revenue. “It’s a double whammy.”

“Regional Transportation Optimization”

Matt Paxton wears many hats. He’s the fourth-generation publisher of The News-Gazette, a weekly newspaper in Lexington, Va., that serves that city, nearby Buena Vista, and surrounding Rockbridge County. And as “postal chair” for the National Newspaper Association and the successor of its “longtime postal guru,” he’s also well-situated to explain the delays frustrating publishers across the country.

The delays are grounded in USPS’s continuing quest to break even. In 2021, Trump-appointed Postmaster General Louis DeJoy rolled out the 10-year Delivering for America plan, which was supposed to help USPS break even by 2023. Instead, it has continued to lose billions of dollars annually, even as double-digit rate increases have “driven all kinds of mail volume out of the system,” Paxton said. He called it “an absolute disaster.”

Paxton acknowledges that some of the changes USPS is making are necessary. “They’re trying to make it more efficient, and that’s certainly needed,” he said, “but they’re doing it on the back of all the rate payers and they haven’t cut costs [enough].” The rate increases alone have “been a real problem for newspapers that are already on the edge” — including his own News-Gazette.

Paxton traced many of the recent delays — specifically, the longer delivery times publishers are seeing for subscribers outside their local areas — to a practice called Regional Transportation Optimization (RTO), which was adopted last year. RTO added at least one day to delivery times for mail originating from or going to post offices more than 50 miles away from regional sortation facilities. Two trucks a day used to transport mail between processing facilities and post offices; now, for the post offices outside the 50-mile mark, it’s one truck a day. The RTO changes, Paxton explained, have increased delivery times for “community newspapers delivering to their more distant subscribers, particularly in rural areas.”

“What they’ve in essence done,” Paxton said, “is create a two-tier delivery system: One for urban and suburban areas, and one for rural areas. And us people in the rural areas are now the second-class citizens of the Postal Service.”

The USPS denies this. “The Postal Service has a close working relationship with the newspaper industry and meets frequently with newspaper organization representatives,” USPS spokesperson Tara Jarrett told me in an email. Regional Transportation Optimization “is one part of the nationwide service standards refinements which were fully implemented in July 2025.” It “does not change delivery,” she said, but instead focuses on “more efficient collection, transportation, and processing of mail and packages.”

“RTO is based upon a standard rule that applies equally to customers throughout all delivery areas — urban and rural,” Jarrett added. “The majority of mail and package volume, including those destined to rural communities, originate and are pre-sorted in ZIP Codes within 50 miles of a regional hub.”

“Exceptional Dispatch” and other (partial) solutions

USPS advises newspapers with fewer than 25,000 annual subscribers to apply for a program called “Exceptional Dispatch,” which helps publishers get better local delivery service by letting them deliver newspapers directly to post offices. Many NNA members pay to participate in this program, Paxton said, and they have “seen little degradation in service in areas where we take advantage of Exceptional Dispatch.”

An example: In Paxton’s Rockbridge County, there are 11 post offices. Instead of all the News-Gazette’s mail going to the Lexington post office, getting bounced to Richmond, and returning to the outlying post offices perhaps a week later, Exceptional Dispatch means The News-Gazette trucks those papers straight to all other county post offices at its own expense. Newspapers take on that extra expense “in the interest of service,” Paxton said.

In Michigan, Hamp told me the Resorter takes advantage of Exceptional Dispatch locally. The majority of its delivery problems are out-of-county, though, and Exceptional Dispatch doesn’t help with those.

Similarly, Bordewyk told me that some South Dakota newspapers use Exceptional Dispatch for nearby destinations. It can be a good tool, he said, but doesn’t solve “the scale and scope of delivery problems South Dakota newspapers have been facing this past year.”

Through South Dakota’s congressional delegation, Bordewyk has learned about USPS delays affecting delivery of other kinds of mail. Part of the problem, he said, is that some mail processing and sortation that was previously handled in-state is now handled by plants in North Dakota and Nebraska — an example of Postal Service consolidation in the face of shrinking mail volume. Delays are especially acute for newspapers, he said, because they’re usually sorted and processed manually. “Oftentimes, that stuff stacks up in a corner, and it’ll sit there until they have time to deal with it,” he said. (The USPS’s Jarrett confirmed that newspapers “are typically treated as non-machinable” because they “tear/shred if attempted to run on a machine.”)

MaineStay Media’s Marshall told me the uptick in phone calls about delivery began around summer 2024, well before the RTO implementation, because of other changes and cuts to USPS service. Since last fall, truck route changes affecting both The Ellsworth American and Mount Desert Islander have led to even more complaints. Changes to where newspapers are printed, with presses closing and consolidating under their own set of financial pressures, have also complicated matters — now that these Maine papers are printed further away, in Portland, publishers have less control over local deliveries, Marshall added.

Marshall described an ad-hoc solution for the Villager’s Waldo County newspapers. Instead of getting bounced from a local post office to a distribution center, they’re now sent straight from the printer to the distribution center, streamlining delivery and reducing delays. “Changing how we enter the system and limiting the number of jumps that are often, to the lay eye, highly illogical…has made it a lot better,” Blackmore said.

Trying to get to the bottom of the cause of delays in an opaque system, Blackmore added, has required good old-fashioned relationship building and phone calls. “A lot of untangling [the problems] has just been calling the postal masters,” he said. “The only way we can tease apart [where the papers are] is to talk to the people that touch them.”

Like others I spoke with, Hamp emphasized that local postmasters are not the issue. “Our local post offices are wonderful,” he said. “I have nothing bad to say about them.” But the degraded USPS system means that a phone call that would have fixed an issue a decade ago now leads to a local postmasters as helpless as Hamp is in a broken system.

“When there was a problem, we could go to our postmaster and they could tell us, ‘hey, let me make a call,'” Hamp said. Today, that “downstream stuff…is not necessarily there anymore.”

Bordewyk’s fear, he said, is, “it won’t get better.”

“I just don’t think they can fix it anymore,” he said. “They’re so far down the path of what they’ve done within their own network…I don’t think the pieces can be put back together.”

“Like turning the Queen Mary”

In December, Paxton was part of an NNA delegation to meet with Postmaster General David Steiner. (DeJoy stepped down last March.) In an update to NNA members describing the meeting, Paxton wrote that “the NNA team emphasized our reliance on the Postal Service and our entwined history in promoting an informed citizenry,” and also “expressed our concerns about increasingly erratic delivery times in general and the dramatic increase in mail rates over the past five years.” The delegation’s asks included new steps to get newspapers into the Postal Service’s “delivery measurement system”; “individual piece scans, like those done on packages and other barcoded mail, would give us complete visibility of newspaper mail from acceptance to delivery,” helping resolve the mystery of where newspapers are in the delivery black hole. (“Newspapers are not eligible for special services such as tracking,” Jarrett said.)

“Postmaster General Steiner was attentive,” Paxton wrote, “but didn’t indicate that he plans to deviate at this time from the USPS’s Delivering for America Plan.” Still, the cordial meeting left the delegation hopeful that this postal administration will be receptive to its concerns. (It turns out Steiner was once a paper boy.)

The NNA is continuing to work with USPS on systemic issues raised by members, Paxton said, including problems isolated to specific “three-digit prefix” ZIP codes. These appear to be separate from the RTO changes, and more rooted in “processing and routing issues.” He feels that USPS has been responsive and helpful in working through those area-specific problems.

The USPS’ troubles do not have easy fixes. “It’s like turning the Queen Mary,” Paxton said. “It’s not easily done.”

Newspapers may be a tiny part of the mailing industry, he added, “but we have a saying that newspapers and periodicals are the anchor in the mailbox. We’re the reason that people want to go to their mailbox.”

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]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2026/02/many-people-who-live-in-local-news-deserts-dont-feel-deprived-of-local-news-study-finds/ Tue, 10 Feb 2026 18:49:46 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=248011 Back in 2019, Pew found that most Americans think local news is doing just fine. In Pew’s survey of 35,000 U.S. adults, 71% said they believe “their local news outlets are doing very or somewhat well financially.”

The industry’s attempts to educate consumers “[seem] to largely have gone unheard,” Amy Mitchell, then Pew’s director of journalism research (she now heads the Center for News, Technology, and Innovation) said in a briefing at the time. “There’s really a disconnect there between the public’s knowledge and understanding about the industry and how it’s functioning, compared with what we see in headlines day in and day out about budget cuts and revenue declines.”

I was reminded of that study as I read the results of another study, this one from the Medill Local News Initiative at Northwestern University. Medill worked with Qualtrics last summer to survey 500 U.S. adults from 206 counties that fit Medill’s definition of news deserts (“counties with no professional source of local news, such as a print or online newspaper, based within that county”), and another 500 adults from counties you might call news oases (those with 30 or more professional news outlets).

One key finding: Many people who live in “news deserts” don’t seem to care much (or, as Medill puts it, they “don’t know what they’re missing”):

The poll showed that people living in news desert counties, defined as those with no professional news outlet based in their county, generally consume news at nearly the same rate as people living in areas served by local newspapers. Moreover, they don’t think of themselves as being deprived of local news sources. They appear satisfied to have social media, TV news and other options to fill the gap.

And:

In general, people in both news deserts and news-rich communities follow similar routines. In news deserts, 49% of respondents reported looking at news about their communities at least once a day, compared with 53% in areas with abundant news sources.

Despite being deprived of local news sources, people in news deserts don’t seem frustrated with their ability to stay informed. Consumers in news deserts and news-abundant areas both report that accessing reliable local news is relatively easy to do, with 90 percent and 94 percent of respondents saying that news is somewhat or very easy to access, respectively.

Importantly, the survey left it to answerers to define the term “news” — meaning when respondents reported consuming news daily about their local community, they were including sources beyond traditional journalism, such as social media influencers or friends and family.

Other studies have also suggested that most Americans think they get plenty of news.

Medill posits that folks living in news deserts are happy enough because “residents get so used to feeling thirsty that they no longer realize there is a different way to live.” There are other potential explanations too. A big one: Normal people simply may not value professionally run local news organizations as much as journalists wish they did.

You can read the full study (conducted with support from the MacArthur Foundation) here.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2026/02/new-york-magazine-revives-classified-ads-with-a-modern-twist/ Tue, 10 Feb 2026 17:22:56 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=247964 My favorite black hole on the internet is Facebook Marketplace. As a lover of Stuff, I browse almost daily to see the things people in the greater Boston area want to part with. I love to look at the photos, analyze how they’re taken, zoom in on interesting tidbits in the background, all to send the “hi, is this available?” message and then forget about the item and not respond to the seller.

There are many people like me out there who like to know what stuff other people have and plenty of others who are actually willing to buy. New York Magazine is tapping into that with the revival of its classifieds section, but with a few modern updates. Paid New York subscribers who live in New York City can submit items they want to sell to other New Yorkers. Each month, editors curate a list of submissions to be featured. When an item is listed, the editors create an alias email address that forwards inquiries to the seller. From there, potential buyers can contact the sellers to coordinate the sale, pickup, and more.

The feature lives on The Strategist, New York Magazine’s shopping vertical. The idea was inspired by New York Magazine’s archives and previous classifieds sections, deputy editor Alexis Swerdloff said, and pairs well with The Strategist’s shopping focus.

“We have been thinking a lot in the past year about ways in which we can make being a New York Magazine subscriber even better,” Swerdloff said. Editor-in-Chief David Haskell had the idea of bringing back the classifieds. “We thought, ‘What if there was a place where New York Magazine readers could sell stuff to one another? Wouldn’t that be fun?'”

The first classified ad in North America reportedly appeared in the Boston News-Letter in 1704. For the next three centuries, the news business came to rely on classified ads as part of its revenue stream. But the rise of the internet and e-commerce sites eliminated the need to pay for ad space in print when they could do it online for cheaper or free. Classified newspaper advertising dropped by 70% from $19.6 billion in 2000 to $6 billion in 2009 and is likely a fraction of that in 2026.

New York’s first installment of the new classifieds had the theme “I Love It, But It’s Just Not ‘Me'” and included things like a $150 Prada men’s dress shirt (sold), a $300 Gucci black bamboo handbag (sold), a $30 slime green glass vase (sold), and a $399 vintage original NYC Village Voice newsstand cast-iron paperweight (still available!). The next drop will be all about lamps.

New York’s classfieds are still in beta, Swerdloff said, but the major metrics for success are simple: Are people selling, and are people buying? The team has received more than 100 submissions since launch last month, with 60 items listed and 16 sold so far. Swerdloff said she’s noticed readers becoming subscribers to view the listings page. A spokesperson for the magazine declined to share subscriber numbers but said that New York City is its largest market.

“In the old classifieds of New York Magazine, there were just as many items for sale as there were services and apartments for rent,” Swerdloff said. “[We’re interested in] trying out what looking for a roommate might look like. I imagine there are so many of our readers who are bookshelf makers or ceramicists or would write a poem. There’s a lot of [themes] that we could experiment with because classifieds encompass so much. We’re excited to see what that might look like.”

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