Their study, based on surveys the team conducted between July and December 2025, looks at those behaviors holistically instead to capture a fuller picture of the different profiles and patterns in how Americans do, and don’t, engage civically.

Researchers Elisa Shearer, Luxuan Wang, Katerina Eva Matsa, Michael Lipka, Benjamin Toff, and Kirsten Eddy found that “rather than falling along a single spectrum, U.S. adults sort into four distinct groups that reflect different patterns of participation.” They call those groups Mobilizers, Connectors, Spectators, and Outsiders.

About one in 10 Americans are Mobilizers, the most active group across all different types of participation. They’re by far the most likely group to engage politically, taking actions like volunteering for campaigns and contacting elected officials.

A larger chunk of Americans, 28%, are Connectors. They’re highly engaged in actions like volunteering and making donations, but much less likely to be heavily engaged in politics.

Spectators account for nearly a third (31%) of Americans. They’re less likely to participate in either civic or political activities, but are distinguished by following the news at similarly high rates to those first two groups.

Finally, Outsiders (also 31% of Americans) are the least engaged Americans on all fronts. That is not to say they’re entirely disengaged; for instance, 41% of this group reported voting in 2024.

A few other takeaways from the study:

Younger Americans are more likely to be Spectators, while older Americans are more likely to be Connectors. Meanwhile, “similar shares of younger and older adults fall into the most and least engaged groups.” Younger Americans are also more likely than older Americans to privately share or discuss news on social media or a messaging app, while a similar proportion of Americans across age groups report taking those actions publicly.

There are similar patterns of engagement across party lines. But Mobilizers are slightly more likely to be or lean Democrat, and Connectors are slightly more likely to lean Republican. Outsiders and Spectators are more likely to identify as politically moderate.

The most engaged adults are the most likely to have negative feelings about the state of the country — but more engaged groups are also more likely to report positive feelings about the state of their local community. Connectors are less likely than Mobilizers to say they feel angry or fearful about the state of their community and the country.

The least engaged Americans are the least likely to trust the news — but everybody doubts the fairness of news organizations. “Most Americans, regardless of how much they take part in civic life, say news organizations tend to favor one side when covering political and social issues,” the researchers write. Also of note: Connectors and Outsiders are less likely to report trusting the information they get from social media than Mobilizers and Spectators.

Read more in the full report here.

Presenters from five nonprofit newsrooms described event experiments with different scales, scopes, and challenges. But some common advice emerged from their experiences: Don’t do it alone. Tap your partners to help with publicity. And lean into the thing your newsroom can offer your community that no other organization can.

“What is the thing that only you can offer to your audience?” Jewish Currents deputy editor Naomi Gordon-Loebl said. “That’s the thing to build your event around.”

The Swampscott Tides’ Moth-style storytelling evening

Years before co-founding the Swampscott Tides, Anne Driscoll was a storyteller for one of The Moth’s live events in Dublin. As board president of the small nonprofit newsroom in Massachusetts, she realized a local version of the storytelling event could serve the outlet’s mission, bring the community together, and attract local sponsors.

In 2025, the Tides hosted the first installment of what has become an annual event, “Fish Tales,” at the local high school. Six community storytellers — from students to “local celebrities” like the official magician of Salem to residents whose ancestors helped found the town — share a story at each event; each prepares by working with a storytelling coach (Driscoll and another Moth storyteller). Driscoll recommended giving a storytelling event some structure by selecting a locally resonant theme (for Swampscott, themes reflect “our coastal vibe,” she said, starting with “Changing Tides” in 2025, then “A Fish Out of Water” this year, and, in 2027, “Off the Hook.”) The event feels like “a celebration of Swampscott.”

“We saw this as an opportunity to build our audience engagement, but also to diversify our sources of support,” Driscoll said. The event generates revenue from ticket sales and sponsorships (including “Gold Fish” and “Swedish Fish” supporters). Swampscott is “three square miles; it doesn’t have a huge business base — but it does have a lot of banks,” and many of those have grant programs to support community events. The Tides applied to almost a dozen different banks for support, and several became sponsors. The nonprofit also secured a local cultural arts grant.

Per-event expenses totaled between $1,000 and $2,000. Profits were $26,000 in year 1 ($12,000 of that from sponsorships) and $30,000 in year 2. A volunteer sub-committee helps organize.

“All of it made for a low-investment, high-yield event,” Driscoll said. “Expenses were low, rewards were very high.”

The 51st’s D.C. trivia “game show”

How does a local news organization serve a transient city? Shortly after launching, The 51st introduced the column “Ask a D.C. Native,” inspired by Gothamist’s “Ask a Native New Yorker,” in which locals help transplants get to know the city.

“I wanted to turn it into a live event,” said Christina Sturdivant Sani, executive editor at the worker-led nonprofit and the column’s creator. “And I was thinking about a panel, and I was thinking about how boring a panel would be…” (Lots of knowing laughs from this panel’s audience.)

What would be more fun than a panel, she decided, was a game show. Drawing inspiration from local events she’d attended and heard about like Culture Tags (a gathering built around the party card game), Historically Black Phrases (a live adaptation of a book by that name), and the long-running D.C. high school quiz show “It’s Academic,” she envisioned “Ask a D.C. Native, Live!” as an evening of local D.C. trivia with D.C. natives competing.

First, Sturdivant Sani recruited an MC she had in mind, D.C. native and poet/artist/youth advocate Dwayne Lawson-Brown, to host for free. An artist residency she was doing at a local hotel and coworking space required her to host three events, so that gave her the venue. She and Lawson-Brown developed the categories and questions, which the hotel required a “trivia consultant” to review (“I thought it was unnecessary, but it actually helped,” Sturdivant Sani said).

The 51st has hosted five trivia events throughout the city since last May and has three more planned for this year. Next year, Sturdivant Sani is hoping to hold the event monthly. The best turnout they’ve seen is around 65 people, and their email list includes 300 people who have registered. The event is structured as four rounds of trivia, eight questions each — a photo round, a music round, and two audience rounds — in which two teams of three D.C. natives compete. The 51st sources prizes from local businesses, theatres, and restaurants. Recruiting contestants is consistently the biggest challenge, Sturdivant Sani said. Over time, The 51st has found ways to promote its stories through the event; the team has attendees complete information needs surveys, and some have signed up for The 51st’s newsletter.

The 51st hosted the event at the hotel twice before branching out to other locations. Venues now ask to host the event; The 51st has developed a relationship with a new restaurant in a local food desert, The Strand, and helped bring more people to it through the event. Finding the right location, Sturdivant Sani explained, has been key to connecting The 51st with the people it is trying to reach. The young newsroom started out with a built-in audience from previous publications that skewed white and transplant-heavy. “I’m a D.C. native, and I’m Black, and I remember Chocolate City, so I’m like, ‘No, we gotta get some Black subscribers and D.C. natives,'” Sturdivant Sani said. That’s one of the reasons she wanted to start this event series.

The first couple events were “a mixed crowd and multigenerational, which was really cool,” she said. “But then once we started hosting it on the Black side of town, you could tell we were really reaching the audience that we wanted to.”

El Paso Matters’ community run with a local twist

5K? 10K?

Not in El Paso, thanks to the news nonprofit El Paso Matters, which organized a 9.15K, a distance inspired by the local area code, 915. The run, development and events director Alyshea D. Johnson said, was an experiment that’s become the newsroom’s “signature fundraising event” and raises money through a mix of registrations, sponsorships, and donations.

The event’s theme is “One Run. Countless Stories.,” and it includes a street-festival style celebration following the run. The newsroom team had noticed an uptick in free runs and run club participation locally, and “we felt this run, although unconventional for a newsroom, really aligned with our mission of being community-first and community-driven journalism,” Johnson said.

In 2025, the event’s first year, the newsroom set a goal of 500 signups, and got well over 600. Pricing started out at $40 and went up closer to race day (“El Paso is a last-minute city, so that worked to our benefit,” Johnson said). Race registrants could donate when they signed up; of the 65 who did donate, 60 were first-timers, she said.

Social media was a major registration driver. El Paso Matters relied on local influencers to spread the word and “give us some legitimacy with their audience,” while also leaning into trends and “authentic” posts to attract engagement and break through. The social media emphasis might explain why many race registrants skewed younger than the newsroom’s typical audience demographic, giving El Paso Matters the chance to “connect with people that we hadn’t before.” The nonprofit followed up to give race registrants the opportunity to subscribe.

“Everybody got to run and have fun, but now they get to know El Paso Matters,” Johnson said. “We get to build trust, and in turn, that hopefully turns into support, whether that’s a subscribe from people that are meeting us for the first time or a donation, because they see what we’re doing for the community.”

Jewish Currents’ “Day of Politics & Culture”

“Jewish Currents Live: A Day of Politics & Culture” was always going to be an ambitious undertaking for a magazine run by a small team. In September 2024, Jewish Currents hosted over a thousand people in person on New York City’s Lower East Side, and hundreds more online, for an all-day event comprising a dozen sessions spanning “performance, learning, and discussion of the most urgent issues facing the Jewish left in 2024.” The sessions, which included a live podcast taping, dance, theater, a workshop, and panel discussions, featured 60 presenters (plus a comedy show and afterparty). By hard and soft metrics, the event was a success; Jewish Currents Live brought the newsroom hundreds of new members and subscribers, raised tens of thousands of dollars, and strengthened relationships with readers, speakers, partners, and funders.

That success is all the more notable because one of the biggest challenges of an event of this scale is finding a venue with space for a thousand people, “and ours canceled 10 days before for political reasons,” said deputy editor Naomi Gordon-Loebl.

In a last-minute, all-hands-on-deck troubleshooting effort, Jewish Currents pivoted to hosting the event across two venues half a mile apart. The cancellation ended up being “incredible publicity” that Gordon-Loebl thinks helped galvanize more people to show up in support. Jewish Currents was intentional in how it messaged to the public and to partners, and “in some ways, because [the venue] pulled out for political reasons, it emphasized the importance of the event,” they said.

Even without the venue curveball, “events like this are an enormous logistical lift,” Gordon-Loebl said, “and this one took so much of our financial resources [and] staff time [and] labor — it was a lot.” High-profile guests, they noted, are a moving target and often cancel last minute; the organization had to anticipate “what the needs and vibes will be of the event ahead of time” in making decisions like how long sessions should be, how long to leave between sessions, and which sessions to plot against each other.

Jewish Currents’ dozen partners and more than 100 “volunteers” were critical to the event’s success. (“We call them volunteers, but we pay them, and I encourage you to do the same,” Gordon-Loebl said.) While in the first year it was a request to partners to publicize the event, “this year, part of partnering is, you have to share it with your audience,” they added.

The event was ticketed, with discounted member pricing. “Charging even a little bit ensures that more people actually come,” program coordinator Noa Azulai said, adding that it’s helpful to have a sense of how many people to expect, especially when filling a big venue. Jewish Currents has also found an “add donation” button can bring in significant additional revenue on top of the ticket price.

Jewish Currents raised over $35,000 that it donated to another organization, but the event itself “was not actually the revenue driver; it’s not a gala,” Gordon-Loebl said. What actually drove revenue were fundraising and donations both before and after the event. “A lot of our donors really want to see community, they want to see participation, they want to see things happening in real time…We also need to be able to give them something that they can experience that’s not just an article,” Gordon-Loebl said. So an event like Jewish Currents Live “is an incredibly good sell for a donor.”

That said, “a lot of what came out of JCLive was not about the numbers,” Azulai said. “We brought our community together for a day that really demonstrated our communal power, solidarity, the tensions that were coming up in our community, and gave people a sense of communal pride and a place to gather.” The magazine will host the event again this year on Oct. 11.

The organization learned some surprising lessons about the elements of a successful event. “The best sessions were the ones that ran right towards the controversies in our community rather than away from them,” Gordon-Loebl said. “I encourage you to think about…the things that actually divide your audience, and open them up at an event.”

Jewish Currents’ organizational strength is “we represent a community, the Jewish left, that really doesn’t have any other publication exactly that is a home for it,” they added. The team leaned into that strength with Jewish Currents Live, offering a unique in-person gathering opportunity for that community. For other newsrooms planning events, Gordon-Loebl recommended thinking about, “What is the thing that only you do? What is the thing that you are the only place that can offer?”

Block Club Chicago’s block party

Six years after Block Club Chicago launched as a news org serving the city’s diverse neighborhoods, it held its inaugural Block Party in 2024.

“A block party is everything that you would see at a Chicago street festival,” VP of partnerships Maple Walker Lloyd said. The event featured the block party staples you’d imagine, and then some: food trucks, local bands, local DJs, a bouncy house for kids, but also jewelry and candle-making, Wiggleworms, and Jesse White Tumblers.

Between year 1 and year 2, Block Club Chicago learned a lot about which attractions would give it the most bang for its buck. “Always expect to spend more in year one; you’re learning, you’re trying to figure it out, and you’re also building relationships, so people are taking a huge, huge risk on you,” Walker Lloyd said. She recommended paying for an event planner in the first year of an event of this scale.

In 2025, for instance, Block Club decided to cut the expense of local bands, largely because that led to significant savings on AV costs; it added magic shows and a live podcast. Partnering with a local brewery for the block party’s second iteration led to savings on multiple fronts — Block Club didn’t have to pay for porta-potties, because attendees could use the brewery’s indoor bathrooms, and didn’t have to hire outside bartenders. (The savings from cutting a garbage contractor line item: $17,000.)

The block party, like all of Block Club’s events, is free and open to the public. In its first two years, about half of its revenue came from sponsorships from local businesses and foundations. Other revenue streams include vendor fees, a silent auction (one avenue to partner with local businesses willing to do in-kind donations), donations, and merch sales. Walker Lloyd specifically recommended creating an option for QR code donations on site.

In 2024, the block party generated $94,000 in gross revenue and cost $75,000, leaving Block Club with $19,000. In 2025, gross revenue dropped to $66,000 — but through strategic savings, expenses dropped even more, to $20,000, so Block Club came out with more than double the net revenue: $46,000.

“You don’t know what you don’t know,” Walker Lloyd said. “In year one, you’re experimenting, testing, learning, and growing. Then once you’ve got your year one down to a science, the above leads to streamlined logistics, and you’re setting yourself up for what’s important and what’s essential in the future.”

It’s a Tuesday morning news meeting at Business Insider’s headquarters in New York’s Financial District. More than a dozen editors have gathered in the conference room, while several more chime in remotely on Zoom.

Heller is shouting out senior correspondent Hugh Langley, who recently ran a feature on Google employees protesting the Pentagon’s use of the company’s AI products. It was a follow-up to his exclusive on leaked internal messages showing that Google is “leaning more” into national security contracts.

“He had a scoop, he had a follow-on spot, he had a discourse piece, and then another spot. It’s an example of how the work should flow,” said Heller, who joined Business Insider in September 2024 after more than 20 years at The Wall Street Journal.

Today, editors are discussing how best to frame their coverage of AI-related layoffs. Coinbase, the crypto exchange, has just cut several hundred employees in its attempt to become “AI-native.” Editors in London have been on the news for hours, and are handing off coverage to their New York counterparts. Heller is pushing for an exclusive.

“Have we called them for an interview?” she asks.

Business Insider says that since Heller joined the organization, the amount of “original content” it publishes has more than doubled. In 2024, the company says, about 40% of its content was scoops, exclusives, and other original stories. Today, that content makes up more than 80% of its output, as the publication has made a concerted effort to move away from news aggregation and break its own news. Last year, the newsroom landed 788 scoops, the most it’s ever recorded annually, former CEO Barbara Peng wrote in a recent memo.

Business Insider is trying to overhaul its editorial strategy as the digital news industry reckons with major traffic declines. Google’s AI Overviews and chatbot products like ChatGPT are killing traditional search traffic. Social platforms like Facebook and X have deprioritized news links.

In May 2025, Business Insider laid off 21% of its staff. “We must be structured to endure extreme traffic drops outside our control,” Peng wrote in a memo to staff that month. “We’re reducing our overall company to a size where we can absorb that volatility.”

On May 14, the week after I visited Business Insider’s offices, Peng announced another layoff of about 10 employees. Business Insider has around 250 people in its newsroom and nearly 500 employees across the company.

The May 14 layoffs make 2026 the fourth year in a row that Business Insider cut newsroom positions. Days later, Peng announced her own departure from the company. She has since been replaced by interim CEO Christian Baesler, who has been a senior advisor to Business Insider parent company Axel Springer.

Despite the continued contraction of its editorial staff and the leadership shakeup, Business Insider’s turn away from aggregation has shown some early signs of success — at least when it comes to audience engagement. In the first quarter of 2026, stories marked as “exclusive” saw almost two times the subscription conversions of non-exclusive stories, the company told me.

“Business Insider picked up a lot of other people’s stuff, which, to a certain extent, is a service to readers, but I felt long term, to develop an engaged audience that loves us and is coming back, it has to be for our stuff,” Heller told me in May.

“I love traffic. I want as much of it as possible, and I’m happy to get it from platforms,” she said. “But we need to own our destiny, have our own relationships with an audience that is going to be coming back to us directly on a regular basis. That is how we’re going to succeed over time.”

“The line between original content and borderline theft gets awfully blurry,” then-Reuters reporter Ryan McCarthy wrote in a 2011 blog post titled “Business Insider, over-aggregation, and the mad grab for traffic.”

The criticism was loud enough that in 2013, Blodget wrote a public response. “We assume the knee-jerk anti-aggregation attitude at some companies stems from the era in which big media organizations were like hydrants in the desert — the only place to find news and information,” he wrote in a post titled “Thank you for aggregating us!” “Now, of course, media organizations are like hydrants in the ocean and readers are drowning in choices.”

“Business Insider sits at the sweet spot of digital content: high traffic, low cost, with a combination of sassy voices and viral content,” David Carr wrote in The New York Times in 2014, adding, “While the ambitions of the journalism may be very different, Business Insider now has traffic that rivals The Wall Street Journal.”

Today, though, the aggregated posts that once got such high traffic are swept up in a flood of AI-generated summaries. In Google Search, AI Overviews display short-form article summaries above the fold. ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity can output summaries of trending news topics in seconds. Sometimes these outputs link to the publications that broke the story, and often they link out to aggregated articles — but either way, clickthrough rates are in the single digits at best.

It’s a perilous moment for newsrooms that made aggregation a pillar of their editorial strategy. The Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism noted in a January survey of more than 280 news publishers worldwide that “the majority of surveyed news executives believe that future success lies in being more distinctive, even if that means losing some overall reach and reducing the amount of general news.”

In 2023, Mathias Döpfner, the CEO of Axel Springer, wrote in a letter to staff that AI tools would soon be better at the “aggregation of information” than journalists, reported The Guardian. “Understanding this change is essential to a publishing house’s future viability,” he wrote. “Only those who create the best original content will survive.”

Business Insider had launched a paywall, BI Prime, for its exclusive reporting in 2017. Under editor-in-chief Nicholas Carlson, it built out its bench of staff reporters and expanded its special projects and investigations work, winning a Pulitzer Prize in 2022 for an illustrated account of a Uyghur woman’s experience in a Chinese internment camp. But senior editors told me that Heller’s arrival in the fall of 2024 marked a major shift in editorial priorities away from aggregation, and a significant newsroom restructure.

“I think the first thing I remember [Jamie] changing almost immediately was, we’re not going to aggregate anymore, and if you want to match that story you got to go match it yourself,” said Cadie Thompson, deputy news chief and executive editor, who has worked at Business Insider for more than a decade.

Rewrites of other outlets’ original reporting would no longer fly. Reporters were expected to independently confirm news with their own sourcing. An analysis piece would require a new story framing that could “move it forward,” as Thompson put it. Many general assignment reporters who had historically churned out aggregations were given beats for the first time and expected to stay on top of major industry or company developments.

Heller hired the publication’s first-ever standards editor, Tracy Connor, the former editor-in-chief of The Daily Beast. The standards desk has been key to scoops and investigations, which have required more rigor around right of reply, comment-line placement, and the handling of leaked documents and anonymous sourcing.

“As told tos” — polished firsthand narratives based on reporter interviews — have long ranked among Business Insider’s most-read stories. They tend to be advice-framed stories on topics like side hustles, job searches, lifestyle, and personal finance. (Some recent headlines: “I shaved my beard because I was worried it made me look older. Perception matters even more in the age of AI,” “I maxed out a credit card, traded in my car, and still struggled to afford the World Cup. Then I found a WhatsApp group“). But Thompson said they’ve been working on bringing the format into their news coverage.

When Spirit Airlines shuttered earlier this year, Business Insider ran an “as told to” detailing a flight attendant’s experience of losing his job. Similar stories ran regularly as layoffs swept through major tech companies, including a story on a Meta employee who lost their work visa and an Amazon employee who turned down an offer to come back to the company.

“There’s a lot of ways to be original, and scoops is the most traditional, fundamental way. They’re very important, and we hustle for them. They’re not the only way,” Heller said.

Reworking a newsroom to produce more original journalism is one challenge, but it’s been another to communicate that shift to readers. Last year, Business Insider launched an “exclusive” tag, a blue ribbon that labels original scoops on the site’s homepage and article pages. It also launched a slew of new newsletters, like Tech Memo, First Trade, and CMO Insider, that regularly spotlight industry-specific exclusives.

“We’re constantly showcasing our scoops…and trying to telegraph to the reader this is something that you’re only going to be able to read here,” said Heller. “The most important thing is to show. We have to do it, but we also have to tell.”

These changes have required renegotiating the relationship between the newsroom and the companies it covers. In the past, forwarding along a press release might have been all it took for a comms team to place a story. Earlier this year, Business Insider invited around 100 PR professionals to its headquarters to share the publication’s new coverage priorities and editorial standards. It is a message that has extended into one-on-one meetings with PR contacts, according to Thompson.

“I don’t want the press release, I don’t want the thing you’re gonna give everyone else. I want an exclusive. I want to sit down with this executive,” she said. “We’ve been around for a long time, you can know us one way, but just so we’re clear, here’s what our focus is now.”

Original reporting is also converting subscribers at the story level. In the first quarter of this year, the story with the highest conversion rate (factoring in paywall exposures) was an interactive map of data centers across the U.S., part of a years-long investigation that won a George Polk award earlier this year. The story that led to the most subscriptions was a deep dive into how AI slop killed the resume.

“I’m a firm believer that people are going to pay for something that they can’t get anywhere else,” said Steve Russolillo, who joined Business Insider as chief news editor in 2025 after more than 10 years at The Wall Street Journal. “If we’re aggregating that, by definition, it is something you can get somewhere else.”

At the same time, the subscription business Business Insider launched in 2017 has struggled. In 2020, Blodget set a goal to reach 1 million paying subscribers by 2025. In 2022, the site had around 185,000 subscribers; by 2025, that was down to just 135,000. Last November, Business Insider lifted its paywall for the final weeks of the year to boost advertising impressions, Status reported.

“Subscriptions are part of our business,” Heller told me. “It’s not the only part — we have a diverse array of revenue streams.”

Reporters have been largely on board with the focus on original reporting, said James Rodriguez, a real estate correspondent at Business Insider and secretary of the Insider Union. The union, which represents around 125 newsroom employees, is currently at the bargaining table for a new contract.

“Original reporting is not possible without humans. Period. Full stop,” Rodriguez said, noting that union members want more guardrails on AI and its potential to replace their work in that contract. After the 2025 layoffs, former CEO Peng sent a memo to staff saying that the newsroom was going “all-in on AI.” One way that touched down in the newsroom was through an experiment using custom GPTs to publish “quick news stories.” But the pilot has since wound down, with no news stories published on the “AI News Desk” since February and major corrections to some of the most recent stories.

“[Our negotiation] is really trying to codify what management has already said to us,” Rodriguez said, “that original reporting is going to be our North Star moving forward.”

The union is also pushing for a moratorium on layoffs. After the most recent round of layoffs this past May, the union released a statement citing concerns about Business Insider’s “willingness to repeatedly rely on layoffs to make up for poor strategic decisions.”

The cuts in May impacted about 10 jobs, mostly on the legal affairs desk. Heller told me the decision to cut the legal affairs desk was about refocusing the newsroom on core coverage areas like careers and business, and that AI adoption was not a factor in the decision.

“Our whole team needs to be focused on how we can distinguish ourselves and build a dedicated audience that’s super excited for our coverage and coming back for it. Part of that is by making calls on where we can best stand out,” she said. “I’m looking long term on where we’re headed and where we have the right subjects to succeed. I need to make these calls.”

This story has been updated to correct the number of members in the Insider Union.

In the final days of World War II, as the German Reich collapsed, Nazi officials ordered millions of party membership cards to be destroyed. The vast card index that documented membership across Germany survived largely because a paper mill operator, Hanns Huber, chose to hand the records over to the advancing US forces rather than pulp them.

For decades, discovering whether a relative had belonged to the Nazi Party — officially the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) — required either a formal request to Germany’s Federal Archives or trudging through microfilm copies housed at the U.S. National Archives in Washington, D.C. Earlier this year, when the U.S. National Archives began releasing digitized versions of the records online, public interest was so high that the website briefly crashed.

For German newspaper Die Zeit, the archive presented an opportunity. While the records had become publicly available, navigating them remained a challenge. Millions of membership cards were scattered across thousands of PDF files, making individual searches near impossible.

A team of reporters, data journalists, and data scientists set out to change that. A few weeks after the archive’s release was reported in German media, Die Zeit had built a searchable database that transformed millions of scanned membership cards into an accessible public resource. The project has since attracted millions of searches, with users uncovering the names of grandparents, great-uncles, and other relatives whose party membership had long remained hidden within the archive.

The database is also challenging a persistent misconception about Nazi Germany. While conscription to the Wehrmacht — the German armed forces under the Nazis — was compulsory, membership in the Nazi Party itself was not. Despite some professions carrying heavy social pressure to sign up, it remained voluntary to join.

Gregor Aisch, a visual data journalist at Die Zeit, and Andreas Loos, head of the newspaper’s data science and AI desk, spoke to GIJN about how the project came together, the role artificial intelligence played in making the archive searchable, and the unexpected response that followed publication.

Using AI to build a searchable archive

The foundation of the project lay in two vast collections of membership records: the Central Card Index and the regional Gau Card Index. Political scientist Jürgen Falter, who spent decades studying the Nazi Party, estimates that only 44% of the Central Index and 77% of the Gau Index survived the war. Even so, the surviving material represents one of the largest repositories of information about party membership. Together, the surviving records cover approximately 90% of all Nazi Party memberships between 1925 and 1945, although significant gaps remain.

Transforming that archive into a searchable database required processing 5,442 PDF files, each containing roughly 3,000 pages of scanned membership cards. Many members appear in both indexes, creating duplicate records that needed to be accounted for.

“We used AI mainly to extract textual information from images,” Loos explains. “The models could cope with even difficult visual data: Each register card may contain a mix of many fonts and handwriting, including Kurrent and Sütterlin, two old German handwriting scripts. All this could be read.”

Optical character recognition (OCR) converts images into machine-readable text. For the NSDAP project, the team combined several OCR systems, relying heavily on Google’s Gemini LLM to interpret handwritten and printed information from the cards.

For Die Zeit, the technology was not introduced as an experiment. Artificial intelligence was already part of the newsroom’s reporting, the NSDAP database simply provided an opportunity to apply those tools at an unusual scale.

“AI was already a major part of our toolkit,” Loos says. “Especially in combination with powerful search applications, it will play an increasingly important role in handling and analyzing large datasets.”

Because the records were created over two decades by different offices, using different administrative systems and inconsistent formats, extracting names, dates, occupations, and places of birth in a standardized way required extensive processing before the data could be searched reliably.

“The combination of name and place of birth is indeed not enough to identify a person with certainty,” Aisch says. “But if you also know the birth date, you can be very certain that you found your relative.”

Accounting for errors and gaps

As with many newsroom projects built using AI tools, the database required balancing accessibility with accuracy.

“A limitation is that OCR data obtained by LLMs may contain hallucinations, which in fact occurred from time to time,” Loos said. “One way to deal with this was to give our readers the opportunity to report mistakes via email, which enabled us to correct hundreds of records.”

Loos adds that while the team found the OCR to be highly accurate, assessing that accuracy was not always straightforward. The large language model occasionally expanded or interpreted information rather than simply transcribing it. “With LLMs, you often do not simply get a text version of the original, but text with added comments (e.g., “D”. [Düsseldorf]” instead of simply “D.”). This can even be helpful for a search function, but it is wrong when you want to do OCR canonically.”

In addition, some of the original text proved too difficult to decipher, so the team had to decide whether the data was completely unreadable.

“We thought at first that the handwriting would become our biggest problem — but that proved to be a solved issue by LLMs. So among the biggest problems were in the end, the costs and the performance of the backend,” said Loos.

Collaboration across the newsroom

The project drew together multiple desks across Die Zeit, each contributing a different layer to the story.

The data science and AI team handled the extraction and structuring of the records, transforming millions of scanned membership cards into searchable data. The data and visualization desk built the search interface and the scrollytelling features surrounding the project. Meanwhile, the Science and History departments provided archival research and historical expertise, helping frame the records within the broader history of Nazi Party membership.

“We wanted to make these membership records searchable in a way that would get you an immediate response,” Aisch explains. “But more importantly, we also want to provide the much-needed context for the story: What does it mean if you find your relatives in these records?”

While a search result could throw out the name of a party member, understanding historical joining patterns had the potential to add much needed historical context that extended beyond just finding a family member in the search.

Contextualizing Nazi Party membership

Die Zeit treated the searchable database as only one part of the investigation. Alongside the search tool, the team conducted a broader analysis of party membership patterns, using the records to examine who joined the NSDAP, when they enrolled, and how membership evolved over two decades.

Previous researchers, including Falter, had spent years studying the party through samples of membership cards. Access to millions of records offered an opportunity to view those patterns at an unprecedented scale.

The analysis traced the growth of the party from its re-establishment in 1925 through to the end of World War II. Membership surged after Adolf Hitler became chancellor in 1933, the influx so large that party officials temporarily froze admissions before reopening enrollment in 1937.

In total, roughly 10.2 million Germans received Nazi Party membership cards between 1925 and 1945.

The data also provided insight into who joined. Drawing on a 50,000-card sample previously compiled by Falter, the team visualized how membership was particularly common among civil servants and white-collar workers, while many industrial workers remained aligned with Social Democratic and Communist political organizations.

The records revealed changes across generations as well. During the war, enrollment increasingly shifted toward younger Germans who had previously participated in organizations such as the Hitler Youth and the League of German Girls.

“We know from these records who joined the Nazi Party, but we don’t know why they did it,” Aisch said. “People joined the Nazi Party in several waves. Only a relatively small fraction joined before 1933. After the Party took power, there was a huge spike in new memberships, and they closed the Party to new members. When they reopened it in 1937, you see the second huge spike. Timing is a key factor in understanding the motives.”

At the same time, the team chose to be cautious about the conclusions they drew. While the database proved effective for finding individuals, inconsistencies within the records limited the reliability of certain large-scale analyses.

“We would have loved to do more analysis like that,” Loos says. “However, for these purposes you need highly normalized data, and the dataset is at the moment much better for finding persons by name search.”

Personal histories revisited

Since publication, users have searched for family members, former neighbors, local officials, and others whose lives intersected with the history of the Third Reich. In many cases, the searches confirmed suspicions that had lingered within families for decades. In others, they raised entirely new questions.

The experience was not limited to readers. During the reporting process, Aisch himself discovered a membership card belonging to his own great-grandfather. “I knew from family stories that he was a ‘proud’ NSDAP member who boasted about joining before the party took power. Seeing his actual member record card with his photo attached somehow made this feel a lot more tangible,” said Aisch.

By making the records searchable, the database placed information that had long remained buried in archival collections into public view. For some users, that visibility has complicated family narratives that had remained largely unquestioned for generations.

An NSDAP membership card from 1937 belonging to a Franz Herbst, found in his estate. Image: Skallaub, Wikimedia, Creative Commons.

International attention and public response

The project quickly attracted attention beyond Germany, with the team eventually publishing an English-language version of the project to accommodate non-German readers.

International coverage largely focused on the database itself rather than conducting independent analyses of the underlying records. Outlets including CNN, the BBC, The Guardian, and Le Monde reported on the project, with many stories centered on the reactions of users who had discovered relatives within the records.

“We certainly did not expect the story to be picked up internationally so widely,” Aisch said. “In hindsight, it makes a lot of sense. The story that a German newspaper used AI to create a ‘Nazi search engine’ is just too good to ignore.”

The response in Germany was equally notable. Before publication, the newsroom anticipated criticism from readers who might be reluctant to revisit difficult aspects of family history, but the team were surprised at the positive reaction from Germans.

“Many readers thanked us for making these archives more accessible,” Aisch says. “Many were touched to find their relatives, even if they already suspected them.”

Building stories beyond the search

Since publication, Die Zeit has continued reporting from the records, with many of the stories focused on providing additional context for interpreting individual search results.

“We have built many follow-up stories around this dataset,” Loos says. “Many of them addressed user reactions or provided historical context for how the data should be read and understood.”

For the newsroom, ensuring that readers understood the limits of the database became almost as important as building it. A membership card can establish that someone joined the Nazi Party. It cannot fully explain why they joined, what role they played, or how their views evolved over time. The team viewed the search tool as a starting point for investigation rather than a definitive judgment on an individual’s life.

During the country’s northern war, a devastating civil war pitting the federal government against forces from the northern Tigray region that took place from 2020 to 2022, information flow collapsed almost entirely. Internet and phone lines were cut, major roads were closed, and independent reporting was largely shut out. Even so, images of violence continued to circulate online, often stripped of context and beyond the reach of verification. Ethiopian fact-checkers had to determine whether a single image or video might trigger panic, reprisals or displacement.

Rehobot Ayalew, then the lead fact-checker at HaqCheck, an International Fact-Checking Network–verified fact-checking organization, said the work narrowed to image and video verification.

“That was all we had.”

In a country where a single lie can ignite violence, fact-checking is a high-stakes effort with real-life consequences. Ayalew recalled how one false rumor about a rebel advance emptied an entire community.

“Most people fled their homes,” she said, “and struggled for months, even though everything was actually fine.”

In a nation of over 130 million, Ayalew estimated that she was one of fewer than 10 full-time fact-checking practitioners.

The conflict began in November 2020, when fighting broke out between the federal government and forces in the northern Tigray region. It killed hundreds of thousands of people, triggered a severe humanitarian crisis, and involved reported atrocities by all sides. Although a ceasefire was agreed in November 2022, the peace is fraying. The latest reports of renewed fighting have revived concerns that the information vacuum that defined the war years could re-emerge just as quickly as the violence itself.

During the 2020–2022 war, Ayalew and her small team, working from Addis Ababa, monitored a daily flood of social media claims whenever fighting flared. Verification depended on reverse image searches, metadata analysis, and sporadic contact with sources when communication was possible.

Much of what they assessed was images and videos capable of inflaming ethnic tensions. These included recycled footage from other conflicts, fabricated territorial gains, and propaganda designed to provoke fear.

One widely cited case involved a university professor whose ethnic background was falsely portrayed on Facebook as proof of political allegiance. Hate-filled posts followed. He was later killed outside his home, and his family sued Meta for failing to act despite repeated warnings.

“Fake information has claimed the lives of many Ethiopians,” said Ermias Mulugeta, a research editor at Inform Africa, the organization behind HaqCheck, and the former editor-in-chief of the weekly newspaper Addis Maleda.

“That is why fact-checking is crucial here.”

Muthoki Mumo, the Africa program coordinator at the Committee to Protect Journalists, said Ethiopia has become “one of the most difficult places for independent journalism in Africa,” particularly for reporters covering conflict or politically sensitive issues. Independent reporting, she said, is increasingly treated “as a criminal act rather than a public service.”

Recent incidents underscore how tightly access can be controlled. In February, the Ethiopian Media Authority declined to renew the accreditation of three Reuters journalists and revoked the agency’s credentials to cover the African Union summit, a move that came days after the publication of an investigative report on Ethiopia’s alleged role in Sudan’s conflict. In a separate incident, an AFP journalist was blocked from boarding a flight to Tigray, where fresh clashes had been reported.

As independent reporting shrank between 2020 and 2022, false content flourished. Ayalew spent much of her time debunking recycled visuals — old videos falsely presented as current military operations, misattributed images claiming to show drone attacks, and years-old photos reused to exaggerate battlefield gains.

The challenge of reach

Only about 21% of Ethiopia’s population has internet access, concentrated in urban areas. Yet rumors travel far through word of mouth.

“What circulates on social media actually reaches even the rural areas that don’t have access,” Ayalew said.

In rural Ethiopia, information flows through village elders, religious leaders, and community gatherings. A false claim posted on Facebook in Addis Ababa can be repeated in a village square hundreds of miles away within days, transformed through each retelling.

This created a paradox. Those most exposed to misinformation were least likely to see a correction. HaqCheck’s online fact-checks in English and Amharic mainly reached an urban, educated, already skeptical audience.

“They were not the ones being misinformed in the first place,” Ayalew said.

In highly polarized environments, corrections do not always settle disputes. When fact-checkers challenged claims from one side of the conflict, supporters often interpreted the intervention as biased.

“I’m questioning whether fact-checking alone really minimizes harm in our context,” Ayalew said. “Sometimes it feels like we’re working in a vacuum.”

A brief window, then collapse

After Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed came to power in 2018, Ethiopia’s media experienced a brief “honeymoon time,” Mulugeta said, with improved press freedom. The change followed years of political repression under his predecessors, Meles Zenawi and Hailemariam Desalegn; their regimes were accused of suppressing civil liberties, jailing political opponents and journalists, and using anti-terrorism laws to silence dissent.

Ahmed released thousands of political prisoners and lifted press censorship, actions that the Nobel Committee said helped advance “democracy and freedom of expression” when awarding him the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize. That window collapsed with the outbreak of the Tigray war in 2020.

“The media landscape is dying and shrinking,” Mulugeta said. Before, journalists mostly feared the government. Now, attacks can come from anywhere including from online communities, political factions, armed groups, or even fellow journalists.

Sustaining work meant “walking on sharp rice.” Mulugeta cultivated relationships with regulators, checking in regularly to gauge if he had crossed invisible lines.

“If you reach out to them, make them familiar with you, they will directly come to you before they take very harsh measures,” he explained. “They will give you a heads up.”

But push too far, and journalists disappear. Mulugeta has seen colleagues “suddenly get abducted and vanish,” only to be located weeks later in informal peripheral prisons.

Imprisonment is a constant threat. CPJ’s December 2025 prison census placed Ethiopia among Africa’s worst jailers of journalists. Five journalists listed face terrorism charges and are known for critical commentary and reporting on the Amhara conflict (a separate insurgency that erupted in 2023 when the federal government moved to disarm regional Amhara militias known as Fano). Others are held without charge in camps like Awash Arba, denied access to lawyers or family.

Together, all this reflects “a clear and troubling pattern of escalation of repression since 2020,” said CPJ’s Mumo. Threats extend beyond prison. She cited a Tigray militia threatening to shoot a journalist filming a protest.

In January 2021, Dawit Kebede Araya, a reporter for the regional broadcaster Tigrai TV, was gunned down by an unidentified attacker near his home.

In a different region that same year, two unidentified attackers shot and killed Sisay Fida, a reporter and coordinator for the Oromia Broadcasting Network.

In 2022, the Dimitsi Weyane TV station in Tigray  was hit by a drone strike.

CPJ also documents a rise in forced exile, with at least 54 journalists and media workers fleeing since 2020.

“This exodus reflects the severity of the pressure journalists face and the lack of meaningful legal protection at home,” said Mumo.

Ethiopia’s information crisis is compounded by deep ethnic divisions that permeate newsrooms themselves. In a nation where ethnic identity often determines political alignment and recent history is marked by violence along ethnic lines, the idea of a neutral press is aspirational at best. Reporters bring their own motives to stories, making editorial oversight extraordinarily delicate. Those motives, Mulugeta said, are often ethnic or political allegiances, which express themselves in excitement about certain stories, or as agendas embedded in the writing.

“I usually get a story from reporters, and when I read it, I know something’s off,” Mulugeta explained. “You’d see the excitement, the motive within the story.”

No winning side

During moments of conflict, which happen frequently in Ethiopia’s ethnically divided regions, misinformation surges dramatically.

“We usually get overwhelmed at that time,” Mulugeta said. “We filter based on timeliness and the flammability of that topic.”

During the Tigray war, transparency was HaqCheck’s primary safeguard. Each verification included a detailed explanation of the methodology, outlining the sources consulted, tools used and reasoning applied so readers could retrace the process themselves. It did not shield them from backlash.

Fact-checking images attributed to government forces often prompted accusations of sympathy for rebel groups. Verifying claims linked to armed opposition movements triggered counterattacks, branding the team as state propagandists.

“There was no winning,” said Ayalew. “If you checked one side, the other side attacked you.”

Criticism came from across the political and ethnic spectrum. Some staff quit, while others stayed but disengaged to avoid drawing attention.

“Once you are labelled, you do not get a chance to explain yourself,” Mulugeta said.

The label often made journalists targets of sustained online harassment.

“If you’re not impacted,” he said, “your loved ones will be.”

For Ayalew, being attacked by both sides became a perverse badge of honor. It meant she was doing her job correctly. However, the attacks did not stop at accusations of bias. As the only woman regularly appearing as a host on HaqCheck’s YouTube fact-checking program, Ayalew found herself singled out with deeply personal attacks. While her male colleagues went largely unchallenged, the comment sections were filled with gendered abuse directed at her.

She recalled comments questioning her appearance, criticizing her for speaking about politics, and making crude sexual references.

“They didn’t attack the content,” she said. “They attacked me — my appearance, my gender.” The attacks on her work were easier to handle than the personal ones, she said. When people from opposing sides challenged her fact-checking, it actually encouraged her because it meant she had hit a nerve and exposed a falsehood that mattered.

Gendered harassment is not unique to Ethiopia. Women journalists worldwide face similar treatment, but it was amplified by the polarized, high-stakes context of wartime fact-checking. It was Ayalew’s first sustained exposure to technology-facilitated gender-based violence.

“It opened my eyes,” she said. “This is what happens when women become visible.”

The silent crisis

The mental health toll on Ethiopian fact-checkers and journalists remains largely unspoken. In Ethiopia, Ayalew said, mental health is often treated as a taboo or dismissed as a luxury.

Fact-checkers often work without psychological support, spending long hours reviewing violent imagery and enduring coordinated harassment with little institutional backing.

Wartime fact-checking compounds the pressure. With only three or four fact-checkers on HaqCheck’s staff at the height of the conflict, taking time off felt impossible, as though stepping away meant abandoning colleagues who were equally overwhelmed.

During the war, Ayalew’s health began to deteriorate. She lost 10 kilograms (about 22 pounds) and initially believed she was physically ill. Medical tests showed nothing wrong. Eventually, she sought care at a psychiatric clinic, where a doctor advised her to slow down with work. She resigned soon after. One former colleague developed alcoholism, she said, while another journalist she knows attempted suicide and spent weeks in the hospital.

Mulugeta said he has attempted several times to secure pro bono psychosocial support for his team from mental health professionals, but never succeeded.

“We know journalists anywhere in the world are the front-liners, and fact-checkers are also the front-liners,” he said.

Fear adds another layer of stress. Colleagues are arrested, detained, or harassed by authorities.

“Will I be the next?” Ayalew said. “We don’t know for sure. We don’t know who we make angry in the process of doing our job.”

Burnout has been widespread. Exhaustion once led Mulugeta to step away from journalism altogether before returning months later.

“Like a phoenix,” he said. For his own well-being, he now relies on faith. “I’m a believer, a spiritual person, and I definitely pray,” he said. “My spiritual connection with Jesus gives me support.”

Ayalew raises the issue of mental health in every training and panel discussion she leads, trying to break the silence that nearly broke her. For her, managing the crisis means preventing it for others.

When the platforms pull back

Facebook has long been the primary conduit for misinformation in Ethiopia. Telegram and YouTube are also influential, and TikTok has recently surged among younger users. These platforms often fail to moderate content effectively because they do not understand local languages or context.

“Facebook doesn’t know the local language of Ethiopia, so it allows those derogatory words to stay on the platform for a very long period of time,” Mulugeta explained.

For years, Ethiopian fact-checkers struggled to get meaningful responses from Meta. That changed briefly after the lawsuit over the murdered professor, when the company began supporting media literacy workshops and engaging more with local organizations.

But moderation remained inconsistent. When Meta later announced it was retreating from third-party fact-checking, the impact was profound.

“It felt like a betrayal,” Ayalew said. Meta had once told them their work informed moderation decisions. “That gave us hope. Now, that hope is gone.”

Without meaningful action, perpetrators feel emboldened. Reporting hate speech often yields no response.

“People don’t even bother reporting anymore. They believe nothing will happen.”

For fact-checkers in Ethiopia, the dominance of social media over traditional news creates an almost impossible task. Verified reporting struggles to compete with viral content amplified by algorithms, while platforms that spread misinformation operate with minimal accountability. Decisions made thousands of miles away have consequences in fragile democracies, where online speech can translate directly into violence.

“We’re producing a society that tends to believe social media more than the mainstream media,” Mulugeta said. “It suppresses the impact of the fact-checking that you have produced.” He added, “When these companies retreat [from fact-checking], they don’t feel the impact. We do.”

Financial barriers

Ethiopia’s restrictive financial system creates serious obstacles for fact-checkers, compounding an already precarious funding landscape. Strict currency controls, limited access to foreign accounts, and bureaucratic hurdles make subscriptions to tools like satellite imagery, verification platforms, or research databases prohibitively expensive or impossible.

Google Street View, for example, does not work properly in most of the country, and outdated satellite data further limits what can be verified remotely.

“Even when we do social media monitoring,” Ayalew said, “we do it mostly manually, because we couldn’t pay for tools.”

This scarcity of resources is mirrored in operational funding. Inform Africa, once a prominent fact-checking initiative, is currently “on hold” due to financial constraints, Mulugeta said, leaving the country with even fewer resources at a critical time.

“Fact-checking is the most overlooked department,” he added. “But it is the most crucial.”

Like many independent media organizations, these outlets rely on unpredictable grants, a model that reduces staffing and limits their ability to respond to surges in misinformation during crises.

After leaving HaqCheck, Ayalew founded Niqu Ethiopia, a consultancy focused on prevention through media literacy: training journalists, influencers, students, and community leaders to recognize manipulation early.

“Fact-checking is important,” she said. “But it is not a long-term solution.” Much misinformation, she noted, is rooted in political grievances and ethnic divisions.

“If our politics are not healed, our information ecosystem will remain toxic.”

“I love journalism,” Mulugeta said. “I love how we voice the voiceless. I love shedding light on issues. That motivates me when I want to fall back.”

He acknowledges the economic hardships: “Journalism does not pay us enough.” Still, he sees the work as a responsibility rather than a career choice.

“Against all hardships, we should be standing steadfast. We should stick with the principles of journalism. There is no other option.”

“There are people who hate me, who do not support my agenda,” he said. “But people are reading my articles, even people who are not supporting me.”

His advice for young journalists entering the field is stark.

“They should be ready for everything,” he said. “This work is full of hardship and uncertainty.”

He stresses the human side of the work. Mental health cannot be ignored.

“There is no easy road in this profession,” he said. “But the work matters.”

Three years later, Capital B is up to a staff of 25 — six dedicated to Atlanta, three to Gary, and the remainder to the network as a whole. And now its ready to open a third local newsroom — this one farther from the Rust Belt but nearer its original home. The outlet announced today that its next local operation will be in Augusta, Georgia. While Augusta may be best known as the home of The Masters golf tournament — at a famously white country club — the city’s population is about 55% African American.

“This will be our third local market, expanding our Georgia presence and starting off a multiyear growth initiative to provide more local news to Black communities in the state and across the country,” the site said in an announcement.

But before we bring Capital B to a new town, we listen. We’ve spent the first half of the year working with Augusta-native journalists and trusted messengers to gain a deep understanding of the community’s news needs.

We learned that there’s a clear gap in consistent, community-centered local news, particularly coverage that reflects the needs and concerns of Black residents. Augusta’s communities deserve a stronger information infrastructure.

The site has posted its first job opening for Augusta, a founding editor. But it’s not a job meant for outsiders: “Applicants must currently live in the Augusta area or have demonstrated ties to the community.” (One of Capital B’s key findings from those local conversations: “The city runs on relationships. Augusta is a relationship-driven city.”)

The tournament has brought hundreds of thousands of visitors to major cities in the United States, Canada, and Mexico. It’s been directing new and returning news consumers to local news outlets for vital information about how to make the most of the World Cup and the tournament’s impact on their lives.

Over the last six months, local news publications have taken several different approaches to serving their audiences during the World Cup, from newsletters and library exhibits to videos and interactive maps. I spoke to a few of them about their initiatives and how they’re making the most of the world’s biggest sporting event.

Here in Boston, the biggest World Cup story has been about how Scotland’s fanbase, the Tartan Army, filled the city’s streets with joy while drinking the bars dry.

But much of what makes the World Cup so much fun in a major city is the passion that immigrant communities share for the sport, their teams, and their cultures. The city of Chelsea — a majority-Hispanic suburb across the Mystic River from Boston — received state grants and a donated projector screen to host Fiesta Futbol, near-daily showings of World Cup matches in the city’s main square.

With hundreds of people stopping by to catch matches, El Planeta, Boston’s largest Spanish-language newspaper, partnered with radio station WBUR to help the community partake in a longtime World Cup tradition: completing the Panini FIFA World Cup sticker album.

During each World Cup, Italian collectibles company Panini prints stickers of all the players from each country participating in the tournament. In the U.S., the album costs $5, and stickers come in $2 packs of seven. Given the tournament’s expanded format with 48 teams, this year’s album requires nearly 1,000 stickers to be completed.

I can say firsthand that this is a costly hobby, but one that’s rooted in first-time excitement for children and seasoned nostalgia for adults. El Planeta has long had a distribution partnership for albums and stickers with Panini, and when WBUR’s managing editor for audience, Meagan McGinnes-Bessey, got in touch about collaborating on a World Cup initiative, El Planeta executive chairman Javier Marin pitched the idea of giving away stickers and albums.

“It’s kind of like Pokémon cards,” McGinnes-Bessey said. “It’s approachable. It’s just a good time.”

WBUR and El Planeta first teamed up on COVID-19 coverage in 2020 on a story about Chelsea’s high rate of Covid infections amid a lack of resources to combat the pandemic. More recently, the two publications have republished and translated each other’s reporting on ICE raids in the city.

On June 27, Marin, McGinnes-Bessey, and a few reporters spent the afternoon in the Chelsea Square area handing out stickers and albums, getting to know community members, and letting community members get to know their journalism. Marin estimated that hundreds of families stopped by their table, and they gave out more than 600 sticker packs and 150 albums.

They gave out another 1,300 sticker packs on July 11. They also raffled off four boxes of stickers, each containing 50 packs, and distributed another 160 albums. While the original plan was to give out stickers and albums after people signed up for a WBUR or El Planeta newsletter, Marin and McGinnes-Bessey ended up loosening that requirement. That helped foster more natural conversations and engagement with the community, they said.

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“This is an amazing opportunity to demonstrate to the community that both WBUR and El Planeta are celebrating this tradition,” Marin said. “It brings happiness in the toughest moments.”

KCUR Kansas City

KCUR’s managing producer for podcasts, Suzanne Hogan, has a special relationship with soccer.

Her grandfather, Jose Portuguez, came from Costa Rica in the 1950s to study at the University of Kansas. He was a soccer fanatic, Hogan said, and found community with other immigrant groups in the city playing pickup soccer. He helped referee games and advocate for some of the city’s first dedicated soccer fields.

Hogan played soccer herself and grew up hearing his stories. As she got older, she came to understand how the game was intertwined with the fabric of the city. Throughout her career, she wanted to tell Kansas City’s soccer story but never found the right avenue.

Until the World Cup.

Hogan pitched the idea for a podcast, How We Became a Soccer City, to explore Kansas City’s relationship to the sport. The pitch was accepted into Arizona State University’s Great Game Lab — a fellowship program to “chronicle how some of the U.S. host cities became World Cup cities.”

“It seemed like a great opportunity to do the deep dive, in-depth enterprise reporting that we get to do in our podcast all the time, but really focus it on Kansas City’s soccer story,” Hogan said, “which I knew was rich in stories of immigrant groups and lots of efforts by different people who had never been given the spotlight.”

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The podcast is a four-part mini-series within KCUR’s monthly podcast The People’s History of Kansas City.

As the episodes were released, Hogan received tips from listeners who had their own family histories and anecdotes to share. She accumulated so much research over the course of reporting that it couldn’t all be included in the final episodes. So KCUR partnered with the Kansas City Public Library to host an interactive exhibit about KC’s soccer history, based on the podcast. The exhibit is free to visit throughout the tournament.

“You create podcasts or a story digitally and [they] just so quickly get lost in the feed, or buried,” Hogan said. “With something like this, if we were going to do it so in-depth and have all this never-before-seen archival footage, it [was] really nice [that] it was something that could be shared and celebrated during the actual event.”

Kansas City Beacon

Elsewhere in Kansas City, the nonprofit Kansas City Beacon leveraged its partnership with the Documenters program to find stories about the World Cup’s impact on the smallest host city. Documenters, run by the nonprofit City Bureau, trains and pays people to attend and cover public meetings.

The Beacon has been working with Documenters since August 2025 and has trained more than 60 notetakers so far, interim editor-in-chief Chris Lester said. In their weekly meetings, staffers discuss potential story ideas from the public meetings.

During one Mid-America Regional Council meeting, for instance, a few local mayors expressed concerns about low World Cup-related hotel reservations and wondered if fans camping outdoors might cause problems. Workforce and economic impact reporter Tom White saw that in the Documenters notes and ended up reporting on it.

Extended hours for bars during the tournament have also been a topic of debate in public meetings. When Kansas City granted 16 bars the ability to stay open until 5:00 a.m., White hung out at one for 10 hours to watch the Argentina vs Algeria match and immerse readers in the experience of World Cup nightlife.

“That’s not a typical story for us, to do a first-person observational narrative,” Lester said. “That was outside our usual boundaries, and it turned out really well.”

The Beacon is also experimenting with including more notetakers in the newsroom’s work. Lester recently deployed a few alongside staff reporters to interview small business owners in neighborhoods beyond the main Fan Fest area about how the World Cup has impacted them economically.

“I am really concerned about helping develop the next generation of potential journalists,” Lester said. “While it’s not the core priority of Documenters, my hope is that by getting involved in this program, a few people may become inspired to really pursue journalism as a career.”

Atlanta Journal-Constitution

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution launched a pop-up newsletter called “Kick It” to explore soccer culture in Atlanta communities. (The city, which hosted eight World Cup matches, is no stranger to major sporting events; it hosted the Super Bowl in 2019 and is set to do so again in 2028.)

“We’ve taken a look at the residents who live here and how they are activating the pride and celebration that they have as their countries are in the World Cup,” managing editor Janel Davis said. “We’ve been able to embed with those folks and tell those stories. We’ve [also] been able to provide a vast amount of utility content for folks who are coming here for the first time… What are ticket prices looking like here in Atlanta compared to other cities? Can I still get one last minute? What do I need to know before I take your public transportation?”

AJC video producer Fraser Jones briefly played soccer as a child, but didn’t keep it up. Before the start of the World Cup, he set out to learn the rules of the game and documented the process in a vertical video series titled “Soccer 101,” in which he enlists the help of high school soccer players to teach him the basics. The three-part series was sponsored by a local car dealership and the videos were posted to Instagram and Facebook, garnering 136,000 views on the former.

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“Once the World Cup is over, we can pivot this audience to stick with us,” Davis said. “We’re already doing that work on the front end, putting out surveys to these folks, asking if they’re interested in this kind of content beyond the World Cup.”

Los Angeles Times

Los Angeles hosted eight World Cup matches in 2026, will host the 2027 Super Bowl, and will be the hub for the 2028 summer Olympics. The city is used to tourists (and traffic), but the Los Angeles Times wanted to find a way to engage and retain newer and younger audiences. One way to do that? Being useful.

The L.A. Times reimagined its local restaurant and activities guides to let locals and tourists design their own Los Angeles adventures. After creating L.A. Times accounts, users can save places from Times guides to curate their own itineraries and plan routes through the city. They can also view train routes and populate real-time transit schedules from Google Maps data.

“We are not trying to compete with Google Maps,” senior product manager Jeff Poirier said. “We don’t have the resources to compete with them on a technical front. [But] we are local experts. Our reporters actually go to and eat at these restaurants, and do these hikes, and personally vouch for these recommendations. People trust that the L.A. Times knows what’s going on in L.A. The real value of the product is the content itself and the expertise of our reporters.”

The personalized dashboard launched ahead of the World Cup and will remain available after the tournament is over. The team has seen thousands of saves of locations since its launch last month. Some of its most saved guides so far have been ideas for things to do with teenagers and an essentials dining guide for L.A.

“Our guides content has historically been really great at converting subscribers,” Poirier said. “The goal of this project is to bring new people into the fold as registered users and to introduce them in a deeper way to the content that we offer in this area. The hope is that they see the value and want to be able to take greater advantage of this feature, see more of our guides content, which would ultimately bring them down the funnel to a paid subscription.”

HyperTexting, launched on iOS on June 29, says its goal is “to make finding and following website feeds as easy as podcasting.”

This is RSS — but you won’t find HyperTexting’s parent company using that word anywhere. The app’s founder, Caleb Hailey, told TechCrunch the problem that “bothered [him] for so long about RSS” is “why don’t more people care about this?” In his view, it’s time to retire the terminology entirely.

In an email, Hailey told me:

The Facebook News Feed will turn 20 on September 5, 2026. Facebook didn’t invent the feed — open standards like RSS led the way in the late 90’s — but it did a much better job of introducing mainstream users to news feeds. And the Facebook News Feed was a seminal moment in internet culture history as it influenced everything that came after to the point that today’s internet is all feeds all the way down. So instead of leading with the underlying technologies (RSS, Atom, JSON Feed, and OPML) we’re conducting an experiment to meet people where they are and use terms like “news feed” and the “for you feed” instead of more technical terms that could alienate certain groups of people.

Hailey isn’t the only one attempting to introduce the technology formerly known as RSS to a younger generation. (Nieman Lab predictors have been saying this was coming for a few years now.) The Electronic Frontier Foundation published a guide last month to “a tool that’s been around for decades that can help wrangle many of your feeds into something manageable.”

And earlier this year, the engineer and developer Terry Godier launched Current as a “guilt-free” RSS reader that doesn’t display how many unread posts you have.

“Every RSS reader I tried made me feel bad. Not because the apps were ugly or broken (most were quite good) but because they all seemed to agree on something I didn’t. That reading the internet was a task,” Godier wrote. That articles were items to be processed. That falling behind was a failure state. I didn’t have a name for this yet. I just knew I wanted a reader that didn’t make me feel like I owed it something.”

By the way, Nieman Lab’s RSS feed is here.

On Wednesday, the Times announced it will soon launch The Local, “a new journalism initiative aimed at serving and engaging communities.” The national news behemoth will kick off the new initiative in August with a pilot newsletter for the Twin Cities, which will be sent out three times a week, “with the goal of deepening our relationships with readers in Minneapolis and St. Paul and helping them feel more connected through journalism,” managing editor Marc Lacey and editorial director of newsletters Jodi Rudoren wrote in the announcement. “Our hope,” they added, “is that The Local: Twin Cities can serve as a model for similar future efforts elsewhere around the country.”

“We want to reach people who’ve never engaged with the Times, deepen our connection with occasional visitors, and serve our most loyal subscribers,” Rudoren told me in an email. “We don’t think what those people want from a local newsletter is all that different: original reporting and analysis, smart curation, reader-focused conversation, clarity, surprise, and delight.” She emphasized that the newsletter is free to access and will not be limited to Times subscribers.

Per the announcement, “the voicey newsletter will combine from-the-ground reporting and service with insightful curation of all the Times offers through a local lens.” The sign-up landing page notes the newsletter will feature “the latest news, culture, and sports from the Twin Cities.”

This isn’t the Times’ first foray into local journalism; most notably, since 2023, its local investigations fellowship has put its formidable resources at the disposal of local reporters and newsrooms across the country in partnerships that have produced Pulitzer-winning local journalism. But the service journalism emphasis of The Local is an entirely different proposition that suggests The Times wants to step up its efforts to fill the local news void, and/or sees commercial opportunity to build an Axios-style local newsletter network. (On Wednesday, Axios Local announced its expansion to its 40th and 41st markets, Cincinnati and the area north of Cincinnati.)

Earlier this year, an in-house ad voiced by A.G. Sulzberger himself caught our attention here at Nieman Lab because, rather than ask listeners to subscribe to The New York Times, he called on them to support any news organization “dedicated to original reporting,” and noted, “local newspapers in particular need your support.” My colleague Josh Benton has argued the Times has a responsibility to do more to support local news. “If the Times is going to be truly mission-driven — if it believes in its ‘core journalistic mission of helping people understand the world’ — it should be using its position of relative financial security to work harder on the biggest and most intractable part of the problem,” he wrote in 2024.

The Twin Cities are no news desert, as the Times acknowledges. “We chose the Twin Cities because it’s a region with a vibrant media ecosystem, hunger for news and tons of creativity,” Lacey and Rudoren wrote. “We’re excited to offer a unique and high-quality newsletter to complement what’s already there.” They specify that one of The Local’s goals is to “support local news outlets, viewing them not as competitors but as partners.” Per the announcement, the Times’ newsletter will promote other news outlets’ stories and journalists and “look for innovative ways to collaborate.” As examples of the kind of collaboration it anticipates, The Times notes it will record a special episode of the Wirecutter podcast at the Minnesota Public Radio booth at the state fair next month, and will sponsor The Minnesota Star Tribune’s North Star Summit in September. (Just last month, the Star Tribune announced layoffs and said it was exploring becoming a nonprofit.)

The Twin Cities newsletter will be co-hosted by Minnesotans: Shadi Bushra, formerly of MinnPost, and Jay Gabler, who joins the project from the Duluth News Tribune. Times Newsletters deputy Hanna Ingber is leading The Local, and St. Paul native Talya Minsberg will be the team’s senior staff editor, “serving as a crucial link between The Times and [the] journalists in the field, helping make the breadth of our coverage feel urgent and relevant and using video, social media, comments, graphics, data and other storytelling tools to build community.”

Read more about The Local and the pilot newsletter in the Times’ announcement here.

“Oh, there’s some big guys in here,” he said.

We were standing in front of a Malaise trap, a tent-like structure of cloth and mesh that is in essence a funnel of doom. Flying insects — along with the occasional suicidal and/or unfortunate wingless crawler — are herded into the top of the trap and then into a bottle of ethanol, which quickly kills and preserves them. Every couple of weeks, Jones, a senior environmental correspondent at Vox who focuses on biodiversity (disclosure: Jones is my former colleague, close friend, and a 2027 Nieman Fellow), visits the trap to collect the bugs and swap in new bottles, all in service of a lofty goal: to discover a new species.

New York City may seem like a counterintuitive place to try to find a new creature; it is, after all, a heavily built-up urban environment and not, say, the rainforests of Costa Rica. But that’s kind of the point.

“It’s an inversion of my usual work, because often I’m trying to go to these remote places and take stock of the last vestiges of some species that researchers are trying to save,” Jones told me. “Here, we’re finding new things in the most ecologically disrupted place on Earth. It’s not something that Vox has ever done before. I’m not sure any newsroom has tried to discover a species like this. Which is exciting, but also makes it a little bit daunting.”

It’s also a reminder that, even in our densest cities, we remain part of an ecosystem. For an insect, New York City — and particularly Central Park and Prospect Park, where Jones set up a second trap — is full of potential habitats. The bugs were there: all Jones had to do was find them.

“It’s an indication of how unexplored our world is,” Jones said. “If you can find a new species in New York City, think how many more there must be out there.”

Back in Central Park, Jones unscrewed the cap on a bottle of fresh, clear ethanol, attached it to the trap along with an excluder — a device to keep large insects like butterflies out — and screwed the cap onto the bottle filled with bugs and brown liquid that had previously occupied its place. This was his second time resetting the traps, which he checks every two weeks.

“I must have gotten a thousand insects in my first round,” he said as he slipped the bottle into a ziplock bag and then into his backpack. “I just have these bottles of bugs sitting in my freezer now.”

Half the work of finding a new species comes down to logistics.

The idea came to Jones when he reported a story on dark taxa, or groups of organisms that are estimated to contain more species than have been discovered or described by scientists. These organisms tend to be small, like insects and crustaceans that we can barely see with the naked eye (although a few years ago I wrote about the discovery of a new hummingbird in Ecuador), and often look so similar to other species that the only way to tell them apart easily is by examining their DNA. A recent paper in PNAS estimates that there are at least 14 to 20 million insect species on our planet — two to three times higher than previous estimates, and we have discovered only a fraction of them.

Jones wanted a firsthand look at what it takes to discover a species in 2026. So he reached out to Emily Hartop, a taxonomist at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology who studies dark taxa and had conducted a similar study using Malaise traps in Los Angeles that resulted in the discovery of nearly 50 new species more than a decade ago. Hartop connected Jones to Paul Hebert, an evolutionary biologist and founder and CEO of the Center for Biodiversity Genomics at the University of Guelph, in Canada. In 2003, Hebert and his team at Guelph invented a technique called “DNA barcoding” that allows researchers to identify new species using a short sequence of DNA. Every known species on Earth is given an identification number, and if a search through the database doesn’t turn up a match, it’s possible the person running the search has found a new species.

“I know we’ll find something new,” Hebert told me when I asked him about Jones’ chances of success (Hartop agrees with his assessment). “That’s not a question. We will certainly find many new things.”

Together with Hartop and Hebert, Jones came up with a plan: He’d need to apply for a research permit with the New York City Parks Department and talk to the Central Park Conservancy and the Prospect Park Alliance, the nonprofits that manage the two parks, to get permission to set up the traps. Hebert’s team at Guelph would send Jones the supplies he needed; Jones would collect the samples on a regular schedule and ship them to Canada, where they’d be barcoded.

The most likely species to be discovered from this project are small flies and parasitoid wasps, which lay their eggs inside other insects’ bodies. That’s where the taxonomists come in: after they’re barcoded, any potential new species will be sent to Hartop, who specializes in flies, as well as another taxonomist who specializes in parasitoid wasps. Jones also wanted to get a research organization based in New York City on board, so he reached out to the American Museum of Natural History. We were joined in Central Park by Sarah Kornbluth, a field biologist who’s an expert on bees.

“As a journalist, I felt sorely unequipped to put this project together,” Jones, who dropped out of an ecology Ph.D to pursue journalism, told me. He had to learn how to submit permit requests to the Parks Department, talk to the researchers to understand the sampling protocol, and fill out forms with the US Fish and Wildlife Service so that he could send the samples to Canada. “Shipping a bunch of dead insects in bags of ethanol is not like shipping a box of chocolates. It’s much more involved.”

Jones worked with Vox’s graphics teams to design signs with the names of the involved organizations as well as QR codes that would take passersby to a landing page Vox set up for the project. Signage was an important part of making sure people wouldn’t disturb Hartop’s project in LA, and Jones knew his traps in New York, even though they were set back from the trail, would draw many curious eyes.

Jones has received multiple emails from curious New Yorkers thanks to the signs, including a few science educators. At Prospect Park, where the trap sits in a patch of sunflowers by a busy path, a group of teenagers on a nearby path yelled out to ask Jones what he was trying to find. A few minutes later, a man pushing a stroller asked the same question. He stopped to listen, nodding along.

“Can’t wait to hear more about it!” he said, before continuing on his way.

Science and journalism are driven by the same central motive: to better understand the world. But they have vastly different processes and timelines. Science is often painstakingly slow and deliberate, with processes like peer review designed to ensure any new claims have been thoroughly investigated. Breakthroughs can take years, if not decades. That doesn’t generally work with the pace of journalism, particularly in 2026.

“There’s definitely a disconnect,” Hartop told me. “If I told a journalist ‘let’s go discover a new species, I’ll have an answer for you in a decade,’ that would not be such a compelling story.”

To try to close the gap, Hebert’s team will work quickly once they receive the samples; he told me he’ll know within weeks whether the bottles contain a species without a barcode. That will allow Jones to publish an update informing readers of the potential discovery at the end of the summer. During the time he’s at Harvard for his Nieman Fellowship, the taxonomists will be able to take a closer look at the samples, make sure they haven’t been sitting in a collection somewhere or mentioned in the scientific literature before, describe the details of any truly new species, and give them a name. (Vox is currently soliciting suggestions for potential names from the public.) The results will be published both as a story in Vox and as scientific papers — which, Hebert told me, could include Jones as a co-author.

“Some scientists might shy away from collaborating with journalists, because if it’s done improperly I think that it could come across as very performative science,” Hartop said. “It’s important to me that it’s not. It’s important to me that this process is real. But if I can do my science and be able to show people the reality and the complexity of it, that’s the most powerful thing that I can probably do as a scientist.”

Jones has been clear with the scientists that Vox will retain full editorial control over the stories that come out of the project. Vox is also paying for the project materials, the shipping and handling, and the costs of processing the samples in Hebert’s lab.

“I see one of my missions as a journalist as informing people about what’s going on on our planet,” Jones told me as we walked past a couple taking their wedding photos on a bridge over the Prospect Park lake. “I think we have to find more and better ways to tell people about biodiversity loss, because that message is not breaking through right now. And I think that means that we need to get more creative in how we’re telling these stories. We’re always talking about how we can reach new audiences, and something like this provides a direct outlet to people who are just walking through New York City. That, to me, is reason enough for this to be worth it.”

And, Jones said, he hopes it opens audiences up to “the wonder of insects.” Insects are essential to life on Earth, including ours: they pollinate our plants, clean up our messes, and keep ecosystems ticking along. Flies in particular, Hartop told me, get a bad rap. They’re associated with decay and uncleanliness, but that’s because they’re essentially nature’s sanitation workers — they’re there to clean those things up. A project like this has the potential to get people to consider their place in the world, and to reassess their assumptions about insects, cities, and the limits of our knowledge.

There’s an urgency to the project, too. As climate change intensifies, insects are being threatened just as all other creatures (including humans) are. Because there are so many left undiscovered, it’s possible we will lose an important species before we even find it.

“Every piece of DNA extracted puts a title on a book of life, and every one of these books is the largest book by a very big magnitude than the longest book ever written by a human,” Hebert told me. “I’m depressed to think about burning the books of life without ever reading them.”

The New York trapping project, then, fills out some of the gaps in the library.

“This project makes the city feel so much more vibrant and full of life,” Jones told me as we picked our way through some bushes in Prospect Park, making a detour so we didn’t disturb a pristine spiderweb. “I’m now seeing stuff I didn’t know existed. I’m taking more time to observe the insects when I’m walking to the park. [Once] you think insects are cool, you can do wildlife watching even in the middle of New York.”

That doesn’t mean he now loves all bugs.

“I hate mosquitoes,” Jones said, swatting at one. “I hate all the things that bit me today.”

The research sparked debates about whether AI assistants can contribute to the atrophy of other skills, too, not just essay writing. That’s where a new study in Journalism Practice picks up. Shangyuan Wu, a researcher at the National University of Singapore, dug into the question of whether journalists are “deskilling” as a result of AI adoption. She also asks what skills journalists may be learning or developing further — in other words, “upskilling.”

The report’s authors interviewed 14 working journalists in Singapore, a hub for AI development in Asia and home to a mix of local, regional, and international newsrooms. The participants were pulled from print, broadcast, online outlets, and wire services.

One of the main concerns in these interviews was that journalists may lose foundational research skills. Given that generative AI products can quickly produce basic background reports and conduct online searches, some interviewees speculated that these tools could contribute to journalists losing the skills needed to “track down information” and check primary sources. The study also suggested that easy access to background reports on a topic could mean reporters have less motivation to conduct expert interviews or otherwise speak to people to better understand a topic.

Overall, the study surfaced concerns from working journalists that AI tools were “dumbing down the profession,” as one interviewee put it, because AI-generated research, interview questions, and story drafts could erode journalists’ ability to think for themselves.

Some interviewees in the study pushed back on these ideas, drawing parallels to past technological innovations like AI transcription tools and search engines. One interviewee said that AI just helps to “streamline research processes,” framing AI technologies as efficiency tools rather than replacements for manual research and reporting.

The study also outlines several journalistic muscles that will be flexed more due to AI adoption, suggesting there is potential for “upskilling” in these areas. For one, the authors point to the “ability to discern.” Since AI tools can regularly output hallucinated, biased, or incomplete information, journalists will need to strengthen their ability to discern “between fact and fiction, facts and opinions, good and bad journalism or writing, and biased and unbiased content.”

Journalists will also need to bolster their fact-checking and editing abilities, some interviewees suggested. If journalists are handling more AI-generated copy, they will need to make sure that copy is factually accurate and doesn’t read as generic or stilted. Some also posited that AI tools are not good at “storytelling” and that the information provided by them will still need to be tied together by a journalist in a compelling or convincing way.

Zooming out, the study points to the ability to come up with “original ideas” as an increasingly vital skill for journalists as AI-generated text, audio, and video floods our information ecosystems.

“AI can give you what is out there, but it cannot provide that innovation or creativity,” said one interviewee. “Humans are still the ones required to ‘push the boundaries.’”

The full study outlines several other potential areas for deskilling and upskilling in journalism. You can read it in Journalism Practice.

That means organizations all over the spectrum — commercial papers and nonprofits alike — are quietly renegotiating their relationship with readers right now. Many of us are arriving at similar conclusions, often from very different starting points.

At LAist, a nonprofit newsroom that’s built on a membership model used by other public radio stations nationwide, we ran two experiments over the past six months that illustrate how we need to think about our audience relationships in fundamentally different ways. To a lot of the commercial news industry, our experiments might look like table stakes. In public media, where “payment” has always been voluntary, they got a few gasps.

These experiments were critical to answering a question that more and more leaders in news media are asking out loud: As habits and news ecosystems transform yet again, how, exactly, are we going to get people to pay for our work?

It started with a wall

Last November, we put up LAist’s first free registration wall. The concept wasn’t a first for a website that’s also home to a public radio station. Others, including WBEZ.org and Gothamist.com have done similar experiments, though primarily limited to their archival content only. At LAist, we applied our wall to all of our content.

The goal was modest. We wanted to find out whether gating content would torpedo our traffic, and to establish a conversion baseline. So we were conservative about it. Readers got a number of free articles before they hit a dismissible wall, and only later a hard one. The results were better than we’d expected. Traffic held, and within the first month we’d collected more than 12,000 emails, 80% of them from people who didn’t match existing donors or newsletter subscribers — so, people we’d never known before.

By March we were up to 90,000. That’s when we got more aggressive and swapped the registration wall for a login wall. To someone visiting LAist.com, the experience was essentially the same, but there was an important change on our end. The new version used magic links to ensure we received real emails and gave readers one free article before a full stop. Again, no meaningful drop in traffic. And the people who logged in actually engaged more, with longer sessions and more pages per visit than the site overall.

That foundation was ultimately the perfect set up for a more ambitious experiment.

A premium product public media doesn’t usually try

Our Voter Game Plan, LAist’s nonpartisan election guide, reliably pulls in well over a million users each election cycle. Digital audience research we had done in early 2025 surfaced a pattern I couldn’t stop thinking about: Most of our digital readers already pay for news. They have subscriptions to The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal or similar publications both national and local. That research also found that, unlike our local listeners on LAist 89.3, these readers do not have a history of donating to nonprofits like us. They may have never heard our on-air pledge drives where listeners hear directly from LAist staff on why our work matters and why they should donate. Readers were used to hitting a paywall and subscribing. I knew we needed to test a question public media rarely asks out loud: if we offered these readers something to buy, rather than something to support, would they?

We launched Voter Game Plan+ about a month before California’s June 2 primary. The guides themselves stayed free to use, behind the login wall. What we put a price on was a set of convenience tools layered on top. Readers could save their picks across California’s maze of races, which matters when there are runoffs and it’s genuinely hard to remember in November who you backed in June. They could also take interactive quizzes to line up their views against the candidates in the LA Mayor and Governor races. One $7 fee covered the tools through both elections.

Our original plan was to charge everyone, members included, partly because we wanted to know whether even members would pay for something extra. Our membership and development colleagues made a strong case that that was too much too soon, and they were right. Getting members comfortable paying on top of their voluntary donations is a culture change, and it takes time. So we compromised. Members got a code that unlocked VGP+ for free.

All of this ran on Allegro, the open source customer data platform we’ve been building with Chicago Public Media and our development partner Alley. What started in November as a simple wall for collecting emails had grown into a full CDP and decision engine. By the time we launched VGP+, it was connected to our Salesforce CRM, could match a reader’s email against their membership record, and had a new entitlements layer that let us attach VGP+ access to an individual profile.

We set a modest stretch goal of 1,000 purchases. Against a product that draws more than a million users, that wasn’t shooting for the moon. It was simply a proof of concept.

Building it was the hard part

Getting this live was difficult. We had to make the paid pieces visually distinct from the free ones, strip the usual member and donation messaging out of the VGP package while leaving it everywhere else on the site, and stay transparent with members about why we were suddenly asking anyone to pay, after years of making the case that our core mission was providing high-quality news and information to all. None of this is new in commercial media or e-commerce where hard paywalls are an established craft. It is, however, very foreign to how public media talks to its audience. That meant we ended up flexing muscles we’d never used and making a few mistakes along the way.

To deliver the content behind the wall, we landed on a toolbar modal that showed up on every guide, whether a reader had access or not, plus bold callouts on the main Voter Game Plan landing pages where most people enter. Tapping any of it sent the reader to a marketing page that explained the program and the price, with a separate link for members to claim free access. Non-members paid the $7 through a simple Stripe form. Members entered a code that validated against our database and skipped checkout entirely.

What the numbers actually said

Four weeks in, the results were better than we’d hoped, and more interesting than we’d planned for.

We cleared the stretch goal easily, landing at 1,675 purchases. But the total was never the number that mattered to me. The one I’d put in front of another product leader is this: Of the readers who clicked through our VGP+ callouts to the marketing page, 8.4% bought, a rate I’d be happy with in commercial e-commerce, let alone public media.

It was who bought that told the real story. Two-thirds of buyers, 1,130 people, weren’t current members, and 889 had never given us a dollar or an email before. A further 34 signed up for full memberships after buying. Across the whole program, we processed exactly two refunds. More than 3,000 members also activated free access with their codes — a sign the tools had real pull on their own, not just a paywall to get past.

That is the cleanest evidence we’ve ever had for a thesis we’ve been chasing for years. A real share of our digital audience will pay LAist directly for a product they find valuable, separate from, and on top of, any membership relationship. These weren’t donations made out of goodwill. They were transactions. And the people most willing to transact were exactly the non-members we’d been trying to reach.

A small wrinkle

We did surface one unexpected but important result: About a third of buyers were current members, people who already had free access. When we looked closer, we found that some of them had simply misread the experience and assumed the whole guide was paywalled, so they paid. When we reached out to clear it up, the response was nearly unanimous and, frankly, a little touching. They didn’t mind. They were glad to chip in for work they valued.

While we’re not calling that a win — it’s a UX issue and something we’ll fix before November — it did teach us two things we wouldn’t have learned otherwise. Members will pay for added value on top of their membership when the value and the trust are there. And our messaging might not have been sharp enough to separate “the guides are free” from “the tools cost money,” which is also a solvable problem.

The bigger story wasn’t the money

The paid product wasn’t even our biggest audience result. Just by putting a free wall on the guides, we captured more than 58,000 new emails in under a month, and signed up over 48,000 people to our Make It Make Sense election newsletter. For comparison, after the 2024 presidential primary we added about 4,000 newsletter subscribers in a similar window. Every one of those 58,000 contacts is now someone we can message and warm up over time, from a return visit, to a loyal newsletter reader, to eventually a sustaining donor.

Put the two experiments side by side and you can see the rungs of a ladder we didn’t have before. An anonymous reader becomes a known email. A known email becomes a logged-in reader we can recognize and learn from. That reader becomes a one-time buyer or a newsletter subscriber. And over time, with the right messaging, that person becomes a recurring member. What used to be a traffic sieve, a million people pouring through our guides and vanishing as fast as they came, is finally starting to work like an acquisition machine. That matters more every year, as broadcast audiences age and people increasingly get their news from social platforms, aggregators, and chatbots instead of from us directly.

We’re not alone in this

The thing that makes me confident this isn’t a one-off is that you can see the same logic playing out across the industry, often from the opposite direction.

Look at The Salt Lake Tribune. They became a nonprofit back in 2019, and this past May they did something that sounds almost reckless: They tore down their paywall entirely and made everything free. They’re betting that donations will replace the roughly $2.6 million in subscription revenue, about a fifth of their total, that now drops to zero.

What convinced them was an experiment of their own. When they told a randomized group of subscribers they’d start getting the news for free, 87% chose to keep paying anyway, as donors. Their team described the old arrangement as confusing, asking people to pay for a subscription while also asking them for tax-deductible donations, a tension that got harder to defend the more they leaned into fundraising.

If that sounds familiar, it should. It’s the mirror image of the confusion we ran into with our own members. The Salt Lake Tribune hit the dissonance of mixing a transactional ask with a donation ask going one way, and LAist hit it going the other. We’re both learning the same lesson, which is that the friction isn’t the price. It’s the muddle of asking for two different things at once.

Or look at The Minnesota Star Tribune, a for-profit paper considering moving to nonprofit, and their Strib Varsity product. They took 17 scattered high school sports sites and folded them into a single destination, kept the scores and stats and schedules free, and charged for the livestreams and the feature journalism. That effort is converting readers to subscribers at about three times the rate of the Star Tribune’s main paywall. Within the first few months, Strib Varsity accounted for roughly 10% of all new subscriptions to the paper.

That is the same shape as VGP+ (on a larger scale). Free utility, a paid layer of real value on top, aimed at a specific, high-intent audience. The motions are different. Theirs feeds a recurring subscription, ours was a one-time fee inside a donation-first organization, and the Tribune’s was subscribers choosing to become donors. But three different organizations are pointing at the same insight. People will pay for a relationship and for value they can feel. The mechanics driving the action, subscription or donation or one-time purchase, matters less than we’ve all assumed.

Why I’m not going to caveat this

I could tell you that LAist is a special case, that we’re public media and a little different. And there is a real wrinkle in our setup. Unlike many other public media stations, the vast majority of our LAist.com readers don’t overlap with our radio audience, the listeners who’ve traditionally provided most of our member revenue. That’s a result of the legacy of how we came together. LAist.com was a well-loved local site for years before we acquired it in 2018, and our web and broadcast audiences have stayed fairly separate, even as that gap slowly closes.

But I want to be clear about which way that cuts. It means the majority of the audience we converted had no prior relationship with us and had never given us a thing. They were about as cold as any commercial paper’s readers. And they paid anyway. So I don’t think of this as a public media story with an asterisk. If anything, we ran it on hard mode.

What this looks like for you

If you take one thing from this, take the ladder, because the specifics will look different depending on where you sit.

If you’re a small nonprofit newsroom, the registration wall is the cheapest, highest-leverage move on this list. You don’t need a premium product to start. You need a reason for an anonymous reader to give you an email. (Having a big news moment to do it around can only help, but it’s not essential.)

If you’re a commercial paper experimenting with donations or a nonprofit conversion, The Salt Lake Tribune’s 87% is the number to sit with. Most of your subscribers may already be paying you for civic reasons rather than transactional ones, which means the relationship is more durable than the paywall that’s been mediating it.

And if you have a high-intent vertical that draws a loyal, recurring audience, whether that’s elections, high school sports, food, or local politics, that’s your VGP+ or your Strib Varsity. Keep the utility free, charge for the value on top, and watch it convert at a rate that’s multiple of your general traffic.

For our part, we’re already pushing these insights into what’s next. We’ll use the behavioral data Allegro is collecting to build more personalized experiences across LAist.com and the LAist app and to make our membership asks more targeted and contextual. We’re expanding the ways people can support us, and building better paths from a one-time gift to a sustaining membership. And we’re starting to design new products and utilities, like a local government hub, that meet our audience’s needs and that they can pay for directly.

A start, but a real one

Through all of this we’ve pried open a few doors public radio has mostly kept shut, and broadened what it can mean to support public media and to put a real, human value on the work. Building these muscles isn’t optional anymore. If we want a business that lasts, and a newsroom that reaches people wherever and however they choose to show up, this is the work.

It’s just a start. But for an industry and an organization where change historically has tended to come slowly and unevenly, it has felt like a genuine leap forward.

At least 21 states and territories have proposed legislation intended to financially support local news — including government advertising set-asides, employment tax credits, newsroom fellowships, and small business advertising tax credits, among other models. Newsrooms are starting to see the money some enacted policies have unlocked. Organizations like Press Forward, INN, and LION are all dedicating more funding and resources toward the public policy frontier. And the nonprofit Rebuild Local News is hiring coordinators to coalition-build and advance policies in states with lots of activity like Pennsylvania and California.

All of this means many people who care about local journalism have inched, or swung, from considering lobbying antithetical to the duties of reporting to realizing they have a role to play in advocating for policies that could bring local newsrooms the dollars they need to survive.

“In the local journalism world, we are not super-duper experts at the political process,” Rebuild’s director of policy Matt Pearce told me. “The political arena is a different world from the one that we share with each other at conferences, in our trade publications.”

Pearce, who joined Rebuild last year after many years as a reporter and labor organizer at the Los Angeles Times, has experienced the steep learning curve of the political arena firsthand. Suspecting some busy Nieman Lab readers might value a crash course, I called Pearce in June to get his 10,000-foot view on some of the most important recent developments in local news policy and what he’s learned from his work with Rebuild. Our conversation, below, has been edited for length and clarity.

They have [also] seen that other states, like New Jersey and Illinois, have made early efforts to do positive interventions in local news. [That makes legislators feel like] they’re not doing something super exotic or controversial. I think that’s part of what you’re seeing in this snowballing of political interest to do something. There are [now] proofs of concept out there that help make the case for them conceptually.

I think that’s very important, just raising expectations for what’s possible politically for the local news world — because our expectations are really very low after many decades of inertia. The sector broadly was so profitable for so long that the nature of the crisis was different in previous eras.

We got some really interesting data points in the early data back from Illinois and its Journalist Employment Tax Credit: [More than] half the dollars went downstate, outside of Chicago, and [the funding] was sent out with very little administrative overhead. It’s a very “efficient” public policy to have a big broad geographic distribution, compared to something like philanthropy, [which] sometimes can be more urban focused.

The other data point in that distribution was that most of the benefiting newsrooms were small. Two-thirds of them had six or fewer local journalists. So effectively it was a very efficient way to shoot dollars to a lot of different types of local news outlets, and to achieve a kind of minimum viable political coalition of all the diverse interests that can gain from this type of policy.

That said, we’ve made some improvements off of the first versions of the journalist employment subsidy. We now recommend, based on what we learned out of Illinois, that benefits be supercharged for the first five journalists employed at a local news outlet, which will end up shifting even more resources toward smaller publications. We also think it’s really important to include a new hire incentive.

I think those [changes to the journalist employment subsidy] signal something that policymakers find attractive when they’re trying to balance interests, because they are hearing from every direction, and all these different media stakeholders, about how well or not well policy works for them. The biggest friction point for this type of policy is that a lot of the very smallest micro producers — like a sole proprietor who uses a lot of freelance — are not fully covered.

It’ll take a whole suite of different interventions to try to cover the different corners of this space and create a balanced portfolio of public support….[At Rebuild], in developing our next round of model policies, we’re talking internally about [ways to] provide some targeted support for the very, very smallest micro publishers to balance out these other types of policies that are getting some political traction, but may be harder to access for [that group].

We don’t have a policy framework right now in the field as an active bill that directly addresses AI scraping across the gamut. There are conversations about [ideas like] organizing into licensing groups, collective rights management kind of like the music industry, copyright…So that is all very rich territory for a public policy conversation. The AI scraping conversation is very much an international conversation, too.

A “Patriot Starting Lineup” of John Hancock, Samuel Adams, and John Adams.

Transit woes, in the style of the 18th century:

How is traversing Boston, not much larger than one mile square, still so maddening? To leave this peninsula by carriage requires crossing Boston Neck, that narrow, swampy strip of land beset by wind and waves. In spring, the water reaches a horse’s knees. The crowded ferry to Charlestown is not a pleasant alternative. But at least the ferrymaster has restored late-night service to 9 p.m. now that British curfews are ended.

A weather report of two days of “fine weather” followed by “lightning very hard.”

A prescient “comment” from “TartanArmyColonel”: “Think you Bostonians enjoy your ale? Wait until you meet a thirsty Scotsman.”

War reporting from the far reaches of…Staten Island.

A remembrance for Crispus Attucks, the man of African and Wampanoag descent who was the first person killed in the Boston Massacre.

An essential public health report on the end of a smallpox inoculation ban, with some details that sound eerily familiar: “Today, some skeptics believe inoculation is as dangerous as the disease itself, despite evidence to the contrary…The treated may freely travel through Boston. But those who resist inoculation must stay locked inside at home, by order of town selectmen.”

One headline that will remain forever relevant: “Concord reliev’d to be free of Harvard students.”

And, finally, a correction — easier to fix in 2026 than in 1776:

We must correct a most unfortunate error: An earlier version of this story said a British official described John Adams as “incendiary.” In fact, the official maligned Samuel Adams. We apologize, with reddened faces.

According to a press release from the Boston Globe, the 1776 series — which included a four-page spread “styled after an 18th-century newspaper” in the July 3 print issue — runs through the end of the month.

Despite facing major financial challenges, local news seemed to operate in a different universe than national news — closer to home, less partisan and trusted by a large majority. But new data from the Pew-Knight Initiative shows that may be starting to change.

Whereas 82% of U.S. adults said they trusted information from local news organizations when we first asked this question in 2016, 70% now say the same. The gap in Republicans’ and Democrats’ trust in local news has also widened slightly, from 6 percentage points in 2016 to 14 points today (figures include those who “lean” toward each party). This is still not nearly as big as the partisan gap in views toward national news. But a space once seemingly insulated from political polarization may be going down a similar path.

Recent data also points to shifts in how Americans view the value of local news in society. The share of Americans who say local news outlets are extremely or very important to the well-being of their community has dropped 10 points in the past year — from 44% to 34% — with an especially steep decline among Republicans.

Taken together, these changes suggest a possible erosion of what seemed to make local news exceptional: its relative immunity to the forces that fractured trust in the national news media. Our data doesn’t offer one single explanation for these trends. But there are several questions worth contemplating.

One is whether changes in Americans’ news consumption habits are impacting their relationship with local news outlets. The modern information environment is highly saturated, with people bombarded through their smartphones at any given moment. About half of Americans, and a large majority of young adults, now say they mostly get news because they happen to come across it, not because they are intentionally seeking it out. And when people are looking for breaking news, a declining share — including just 14% of adults under 30 — say they go first to a preferred news organization to find out more.

Indeed, Americans’ ties to specific local outlets appear to be weakening. Fewer Americans are getting local news from traditional outlets like newspapers and TV stations. More are getting it from online forums like Facebook groups or Nextdoor, or directly from local government officials. And 36% get local news from news influencers — the same portion who get local news from daily newspapers.

This shift is especially pronounced among young adults: The most common way adults under 30 prefer to get local news is through social media (41%), beating out news websites and television. And younger adults are less likely than their elders to trust local news, or to follow local news at all. For local news outlets, there is clearly work to be done to gain the attention and trust of the next generation of news consumers.

Another question worth considering is whether the revenue losses that have devastated local newsrooms are starting to impact the public’s experiences with local news. Although more than half of Americans still say their local news outlets are doing well financially, a growing share recognize the struggles: 39% say their local news outlets are not doing well, up from 24% in 2018.

The local news industry has also faced declines in employment and a loss of full-time statehouse reporters. This may be impacting the quality of the local news the industry provides. For example, fewer than half of Americans say it’s easy to find the information they need to make voting decisions about local elections.

Americans still tend to regard local news more favorably than they do national news organizations. But that gap appears to be quietly narrowing. The challenge now for local news organizations is to convince the public of their value to their communities — despite daunting financial woes, technological upheaval and growing political divisions.

Wow, it finally happened. The New York Times cracked down on login sharing and now I can't use my old coworker's mom's account that I've been using for the last decade…. damn pic.twitter.com/duID3kWPsB

— Katie Notopoulos (@katienotopoulos) June 29, 2026

The Times launched Family subscriptions last fall (here). In an earnings call earlier this year, Times CEO Meredith Kopit Levien described the family plans as “the carrot version of password sharing” — a method of inducing people to subscribe. (Home delivery subscribers also get bonus subscriptions to share.)

Now, though, it seems to be stick time: Use the same login on too many devices and you may need to verify with a code sent to email.

“We are always monitoring and testing new approaches with our audience, as many digital subscription businesses do,” Elizabeth Young, senior manager of communications at The New York Times, told me when I asked about the change. (She also pointed to the Times’ Terms of Service, which are unchanged and state that “you are not allowed to share your registration login credentials or give your login credentials to anyone else.”)

While the idea of being in crisis is a common theme of U.S. journalism conferences, this was not a traditional journalism conference. News Futures, fiscally sponsored by the nonprofit civic media organization City Bureau, describes itself as “a community of practice dedicated to reimagining how communities access and use the information they need to thrive,” and the 70 or so participants at its convention were there as stewards, funders, or active contributors to News Futures working groups. Many of them have the words “founder” or “co-founder” in their biographies and have played key roles at civic media organizations like Bureau Local, City Bureau, Conecta Arizona, Documented, El Tímpano, the Listening Post Collective, Outlier Media, and Resolve Philly.

In the lead-up to the convention, News Futures working groups had been grappling with questions like how to work with civic allies beyond journalism, how to support Spanish-language media ecosystems, and how to develop economic models for civic information. At the convention, the mandate was to collaboratively develop and vote on campaigns to guide the next round of News Futures initiatives and working groups. While participants acknowledged the direness of the moment, it was almost always referenced as a jumping-off point for action. As journalist and educator Vanessa Maria Graber noted, “It feels really good to be in community and to have a collective freak-out with our peers, but also figure out the ways that we can support each other and be there for one another.”

Holliday noted that News Futures has intentionally avoided getting much bigger, so it can remain nimble and avoid competing for funding with members of its network. The small staff, including him, are all part-time contractors. Efforts to scale up are directed toward the growth of signatories to the News Futures Charter — a statement of goals nested under heading such as “news must evolve,” “everyone has a role to play,” “storytelling should unite,” “collaboration is required,” and “a vibrant civic life is our goal.” At the time of the convention, the charter had more than 700 signatories.

Holliday also wants to grow a broader civic media field that includes participants from a variety of sectors that are “siblings in this work” — people working in civic engagement, education, libraries, relational tech, and so on. “We cannot be in this journalism silo,” he said.

At the convention, breakout groups developed News Futures “campaign” proposals:

• Presenters from the shared identity group talked about engaging News Futures signatories to encourage them to use the charter as a guide for their work.
• The standards of practice group advocated for developing curriculum, assessments and best practices.
• The shared knowledge group focused on making research on civic media and its impact more accessible — proposing a possible tool to surface research that already exists (something that the recently launched Local News Research Hub may accomplish at least in part), and supporting research that fills knowledge gaps.
• The leadership and grassroots support group talked about supporting, mapping, and networking information stewards and community builders, and funding local fellows to organize dinners and convene people. The presenters argued that this could be an opportunity to translate the News Futures charter for non-journalists playing critical roles informing their communities.
• Finally, the group focusing on funding and policy raised the issue of being “boxed in” by available revenue sources as defined by the current policy and funding environment. They discussed how they might use people power to swarm policy windows, prototype private capital experiments, and organize allied funders.

Participants voted on the proposals they’d like to see prioritized. The proposal that got the most votes was the one aiming to connect News Futures to informal community networks outside of journalism. In addition to signaling the declining salience of the journalism industry in many people’s media and information diets, this may also reflect a growing awareness of how community members are helping to inform, organize, and connect their communities. Attendees noted neighborhood efforts like ICE watch signal chats and other community-building and mutual aid efforts. Many were curious about whether and how the civic media field could support or collaborate with community-led information sharing efforts.

“It would be cool to see some big power moves come out of News Futures in one way or another,” journalism educator Carrie Brown said. That might include initiatives around media policy, or “standard setting” so journalism educators can offer “a new way of viewing things.”

Other participants talked about setting standards for information ecoysystems research, and influencing the philanthropic sector. “My hope is that this group becomes so undeniably interesting to funders that they are seeking the input of members and the group at large,” Jennifer Brandel said, “and taking cues from this group.”

Brown also hopes News Futures can help facilitate local grassroots actions at larger scale — “not that the change happens at a bigger national level, but that there’s a driving conversation at that level.” Brown explained that she wanted to see national initiatives help “people feel empowered to be like, ‘Hell, yeah, I want to start this in my community.”

Community media advocate Matt Schuster suggested the time may have come “to stop iterating” and trying “a little thing here and here.” Schuster hopes News Futures can move toward a “big vision goal” that “comes out to say this is what a really healthy civic media ecosystem looks like.” He argued that offering a model for a newly built civic media ecosystem will let the organization chart who will be involved and “what we can let go of in order to get there.”

Checking in after the convention, Holliday said he received positive feedback on efforts to expand who’s included in the civic media field, but acknowledged that “the walls are high” between sectors because so many nonprofits are competing for philanthropic resources: “By bringing in people from different sectors, and bringing in funders who really get this, and bring in practitioners from the local civic media, local news and information spaces, to just throw down together,” he said, “that’s, I think, a good part of the work in breaking the silos down.”

Circling back to his reflection on the polycrisis, Holliday offered a more optimistic vision for how work to build an expanded civic media may support a reimagined public media in coming years: “I think all the ingredients are there for a sea change, for the growth of a new thing that should pull from what came before.”

News Futures has announced its new slate of working groups following up on the convention. Signatories can

Andrea Wenzel is an associate professor of journalism and a faculty advisor for the Center for Community-Engaged Media at Temple University’s Klein College.

On June 17, hundreds of fact-checkers assembled in Vilnius for the annual conference of the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN), part of the Poynter Institute. Roughly 180 fact-checking organizations in more than 55 countries are signed onto IFCN’s Code of Principles, and many of them made the journey to Vilnius for the three-day event.

The historic capital of Lithuania was a fitting gathering place. Speakers throughout the program echoed Kaunas, detailing the barrage of Russian information manipulation and interference campaigns faced by countries across the Baltic region. (Lithuania shares more than 170 miles of its border with Russia.)

“Let me be clear about the role of the media today. You are democratic infrastructure as important as an air defense system or artillery,” said Kaunas in his speech. “No country can defend its information space alone.”

The Lithuanian government’s vocal support for fact-checkers received applause. It was a far cry from the recent rhetoric coming out of the U.S. government, and from many of the global social media companies that distribute the disinformation that fact-checkers fight daily.

In 2024, the Trump administration shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), which had given grants to fact-checking organizations around the world. Last year, Meta ended its third-party fact-checking program in the U.S. — another significant revenue stream for IFCN signatories — claiming it was an effort to reduce “censorship.”

While Meta has yet to shutter its international third-party fact-checking program entirely, it has made clear its intentions to follow in the footsteps of X and disinvest in professional fact-checks in favor of crowdsourced “Community Notes.”

One signal of big tech’s waning support for fact-checkers was how few major tech companies were in the room at GlobalFact. While Meta and Google have historically sent representatives annually, only TikTok dispatched a proper delegation this year.

“The political wind shifted, and their support shifted with it. To the technology platforms not in this room today, rejoin us in the work of making high-quality, accurate information accessible to everyone,” Angie Drobnic Holan, director of IFCN and a 2023 Nieman Fellow, said in her own opening remarks. “Fact-checking is not censorship. It is not partisan. It never was.”

The grant model is unsustainable. What comes next?

The one-two punch of funding cuts from the U.S. government and big tech platforms has left fact-checking organizations at a crossroads. They can either compete for grants from a dwindling pool of philanthropic support, or they can explore new ways of making money.

“I’m not super at math, but I’m good enough to know you need more funds coming in than going out,” Holan said in a panel about alternative funding models. “Philanthropy has told me there is not enough philanthropic money to support your entire sector. There’s just not. But there’s also evidence to show that there’s a substantial pool of audience revenue.”

In April, IFCN’s annual State of Fact-Checkers report found that 62% of the 141 organizations surveyed had grown their audiences in 2025, but just 22% described their financial position as “sustainable.”

Peter Erdelyi, the founding director of the Center for Sustainable Media, made a clear-eyed pitch for revenue diversification during his mainstage talk. He argued that fact-checkers fall into the “public good trap”: because the benefits of their work are broad and diffuse, they are hard to monetize. He encouraged fact-checking organizations that can no longer sustain themselves on grant funding to build paid editorial products that serve targeted audiences, or even businesses.

On the consumer side, he suggested they could explore partial subscriber paywalls, or paid newsletters for professional audiences like lawyers. This revenue from paying readers could buttress the organization’s core, free fact-checks. On the business side, he threw out theoretical examples, like drug fact-checks for pharmacies, disinformation training for doctors’ offices, or monitoring products for health insurance companies.

“I need to tell you honestly that the market shows us that you need a mechanism to get people to pay,” said Erdelyi. “You need to push people, because a lot of people are meaning to support you, but they don’t. You need to give them an excuse.”

Across the conference, fact-checking organizations shared their own experiments in balancing serving the public with money-making endeavors.

Franco Piccato, the executive director of Chequeado, an Argentine nonprofit fact-checking organization, said his team custom-built an AI transcription tool optimized for Spanish that can be used by students for note-taking, journalists for event coverage, or academics for interview research. Chequeado is now selling the transcription software, called Desgrabador, as a service, with the goal of covering roughly 10% of its annual budget through tech product revenue by the end of this year.

Africa Uncensored, a Kenya-based outlet known for its investigative documentaries, has found its own balance. Roughly 80% of its revenue comes from philanthropic sources, while another 20% comes from commercial partnerships, according to Eric Mugendi, an editor-at-large for partnership and initiatives. That includes production deals with broadcast media and licensing archival footage. While this commercial revenue is limited, it allows Africa Uncensored to keep its dedicated fact-checking site, Piga Firimbi, free.

“LLM poisoning” and how to test for it

With a record number of people globally turning to social media for news, the work of fact-checking disinformation on social platforms is as important as ever. Still, several speakers called attention to an emerging vector for disinformation that some have coined “LLM poisoning.”

Bad actors are flooding the web with articles containing false or misleading narratives in the hope that commercial generative AI products will reflect them in their responses. A Russian network of over 180 sites — dubbed the Pravda network — found early success with the strategy by publishing false articles in Nordic languages.

“If you ask ChatGPT who was the aggressor in the Russia-Ukrainian war, who gets to decide the answer? Or is it neutral? Or is there a bias?” said Pekka Kallioniemi, a Finnish researcher and content creator who runs the Twitter account Vatnik Soup, which documents Russian disinformation campaigns. “ChatGPT, Claude — that’s the next battlefield. That’s where we see the battle of narratives.”

“Poisoning” can occur at several different stages in the LLM life cycle. It can happen when large swaths of the internet are scraped for data to train a model, or when a product uses real-time web search to answer a specific user query. Kallioniemi argued these attempts at narrative control have been aided by the rollout of generative AI tools.

“If you look at 2013, there were these infamous troll farms where people were working in shifts, like a factory producing commentary online,” said Kallioniemi, talking about the old Russian disinformation playbook. “Now most of that is being automated.”

Another session took on the natural follow-up question: How do you even begin to track bias in AI models? The research lab Gazzetta previewed a beta tool to monitor, document, and compare bias in LLMs. AIdas allows users to plug in the same prompt into up to four of the latest commercial models, including OpenAI’s GPT, Anthropic’s Claude Opus, xAI’s Grok, and Deepseek. Users code the responses on criteria like source diversity or whether the response is “neutral” or leans toward one perspective. The coded data can then be copied into a spreadsheet or exported as a CSV file.

Factnameh, a fact-checking organization for Persian news and social media, has already published some early research using the tool. Its team audited narratives about the U.S.-Iran War in popular models and sketched out some helpful frameworks for talking about model bias.

That includes the idea of “political cueing” — whether a model takes on the ideological premise of a user’s prompt. Factnameh found that Gemini was the most likely to mirror a prompt, labeling it an “echo” that “turns up the volume” on bias embedded in a user’s query. Meanwhile, the researchers labeled Claude as the “prosecutor” for pushing back on ideologically loaded prompts and citing the most diverse sources.

Borderless disinformation requires a cross-border response

Fact-checking organizations from across Central and Eastern Europe took center stage throughout the conference. One message was repeated by several speakers, including journalists from Hungary, Lithuania, Poland and Estonia: Disinformation campaigns cross borders, and so should fact-checking initiatives.

“We need to remember that Russia doesn’t treat Estonia as one specific target. It doesn’t take it country by country. It takes us as part of a much larger theater,” said Holger Roonemaa, the head of investigations and fact-checking at Delfi Estonia. Roonemaa said that in recent years, the coordinated campaigns Delfi tracks have spread beyond the Baltic region. “What’s important in Estonia can be equally important in Norway, Sweden, Germany, or France.”

Cross-border investigations, co-publishing, knowledge sharing, and centralized resources were all named as strategies essential to countering Russian disinformation across Europe.

New models for cross-border collaboration were also at the core of a panel I moderated about deepfakes and the challenges newsrooms in Global Majority countries face in accessing quality AI detection tools. (I did not receive compensation or travel support from IFCN.)

On the panel was Pamposh Raina, the head of the Deepfakes Analysis Unit (DAU), an India-based initiative that investigates suspected AI-generated audio and video material. IFCN-certified fact-checking organizations can submit potential deepfakes directly to the DAU, an offshoot of the Trusted Information Alliance, and the general public can submit them via a WhatsApp tipline. The nonprofit project has centralized verification expertise and access to detection tools for newsrooms across India, including partners like Factly, The Quint, and BOOM. When the DAU identifies a deepfake or AI-manipulated media, it publishes a report and full methodology of its analysis on its site for anyone to read or cite.

Last year, the DAU opened its escalation channels to any IFCN-certified organization around the world. Two journalists from Southeast Asia on our panel have already collaborated with the DAU — Celine Samson from VeraFiles in the Philippines, and Ika Ningtyas from Tempo in Indonesia. Both newsrooms leaned on the DAU in the process of reporting high-profile fact-checks. Raina said that since opening up its channels, the DAU has also supported newsrooms as far away as Japan and Georgia.

On another panel, Szabolcs Panyi, an investigative editor for VSquare in Hungary, summed up the sentiment from speakers across the conference: “These bad guys are cooperating. We should be cooperating, too.”

I was swiping through Instagram Stories during halftime of the Canada vs. Qatar World Cup match when I saw a post about a study about the political indicators of a person’s preference of soccer stars Lionel Messi, the Argentine forward, or Cristiano Ronaldo, the Portuguese striker.

One of the major indicators was the consumption of short-form news video.

Click.

The preprint paper, posted at the end of May, is titled “Political identity beyond politics: The Messi-Ronaldo preference across 26 countries.” Researchers surveyed more than 10,000 adults in 26 countries and found that people who identified as more liberal tended to prefer Messi, while people who considered themselves more conservative prefer Ronaldo.

Another differentiator? People who frequently consumed short-form video news preferred Ronaldo. The consumption of traditional news media, however, wasn’t a significant predictor of either preference.

The finding about short-form video consumption is broader than just “a finding about Messi and Ronaldo,” said Saifuddin Ahmed, the paper’s lead author. (The other authors are Kokil Jaidka and Muhammad Ehab Rasul from the National University of Singapore, and Teresa Gil-López from Universidad Carlos III de Madrid). “It’s a finding about what different distribution environments do to audiences over time, independent of what any individual piece of content says.”

I wasn’t the only person to click on the post; it got millions of views on Instagram Reels and TikToks: “The platform that our data suggest is most associated with Ronaldo preference…became the primary vehicle for disseminating a finding about exactly that,” Ahmed said, continuing, “The algorithm apparently found our research about the algorithm quite shareable.”

I asked Ahmed about what these findings might mean for journalists and the news industry as a whole. Our conversation, lightly edited for length and clarity, is below.

Over the years, the Capital Weather Gang weathered storms both literal and metaphorical; when the Washington Post laid off more than 300 employees, every member of the Gang kept their jobs. But Jason Samenow, who founded the blog in 2004 before it became a part of the Post in 2008, posted a message in the Washington, D.C. subreddit: “We’re still here providing around-the-clock D.C.-area weather coverage across the same platforms many of you already follow. But we’re always thinking about how to better serve and connect with our audience. More to come…”

On the last day of May, it became clear what Samenow had been hinting at. The Capital Weather Gang published a post titled “A new chapter for the Capital Weather Gang,” which announced the blog was returning to its roots and going independent. It was also dropping the “Gang” from its name to become, simply, Capital Weather.

“We wanted to expand beyond just being sort of a local weather desk,” Samenow told me. “We had this idea of having a media ecosphere, which would include a website, newsletter, app, and maybe eventually consulting services to provide the best available information for people interested in weather in D.C.”

Capital Weather is going independent at a time when both audiences and the weather look incredibly different from when it was first founded. Smartphones have given people access to weather data in the palms of their hands, and climate change is upending weather patterns around the world. To address the first, Capital Weather launched its own app alongside its website on the same day the departure announcement went live on the Washington Post website.

“Apps from the big companies may have more bells and whistles than us,” Samenow told me, “but what they don’t have is access to the people who live D.C. weather and have 20 years of experience forecasting in D.C.”

The Post let Samenow and his colleagues — the core, full-time team also includes fellow meteorologists Dan Stillman, Ian Livingston, and Camden Walker — keep the social media accounts they’d built up at the Post, like the X account with a million followers, but they had to rebuild their email list (which is “in the tens of thousands”) from scratch.

So far, Samenow told me, that has been going well. Capital Weather is entirely self-funded by Samenow and his colleagues and will generate revenue through advertising and subscriptions while it builds up a consulting business (which will be primarily aimed at people who do weather-sensitive work, like snowplow operators). While DC area forecasts and updates will not be paywalled, a $75/year “Friend” tier subscription unlocks an in-depth suite of weather and climate tools, as well as an insider newsletter and weekly chats with the team. A subscription at the $150/year “Founder” tier, meanwhile, also removes ads, provides access to quarterly video briefings, and promises a free tumbler as well as an invite to a “Founders gathering.”

“We’ve been surprised by the number of people that have signed up for the higher tier,” Samenow said, saying a “significant percentage” of the “thousands” of people who had subscribed in Capital Weather’s first few weeks were paying for that higher tier, and that “nearly 10,000” people had signed up for both the paid and free tiers in less than a month. “People really want to support us,” he continued. “I think we’ve exceeded our expectations in terms of the revenue we’ve been able to generate in the first couple of weeks.”

A glimpse at the comments on the page announcing Capital Weather’s departure from the Post hints at where some of those subscribers are coming from: According to the Post’s own AI-generated summary, “The comments express widespread disappointment and frustration over the departure of the Capital Weather Gang (CWG) from The Washington Post, with many readers citing it as their primary reason for subscribing…Many express intentions to cancel their subscriptions and follow CWG to their new independent platform.”

Which isn’t to say that Capital Weather’s contributors will be disappearing from the Post entirely. While “pretty much” everyone who was part of the Capital Weather team came over from the Post, the majority of them are freelance contributors who may continue to write for the Post, especially about national and international weather. Capital Weather is also in discussions with the Post about what an ongoing relationship might look like.

“People like to get weather from people,” Samenow told me, and the thing that has always made Capital Weather’s reporting stand out, “comes down to the human connection.” Capital Weather is placing a deep emphasis on dialogue with its audience: meteorologists answer questions and make forecasts, while the audience delivers reports of what they’re seeing, or what meteorologists call ground truth. “It’s a mutually beneficial relationship, because their observations help us tell the weather story,” Samenow said. “I think especially now, when AI and bots are taking over the world, that’s a breath of fresh air for people, and so we’re trying to lean into that as much as we can.”

Capital Weather is still using AI for some things, though. “What I will say about AI is that it does make operating a startup a lot easier,” Samenow told me. It has helped with data analysis, crunching through large data sets that saved the meteorologists hours in Excel, and has also been used to code some features on the website and app, like a tool to look up D.C. weather history for every day of the year, which can help readers understand just how much things have changed over the years. Samenow had spent years collecting the data to inform that tool, and the AI helped turn the data into an interactive webpage. “By using and leveraging AI we were able to design to specification and develop much, much faster than we would have been able to just a few years ago,” Samenow said.

Climate change is top of mind for Samenow and his team, particularly in the context of extreme weather. The Capital Weather website has a dedicated Climate Room page, which collects data like historical trends, drought conditions, and carbon dioxide concentrations. That data helps people see how changing weather is a matter of not just seasons but decades.

“If you’re writing about weather in 2026, climate change is part of the story, and it’s your responsibility to provide that context,” Samenow said. “There’s obviously also a public safety mission that we have as a weather reporting team, and we take that seriously.”

In the future, Samenow said, it’s possible Capital Weather will expand beyond the D.C. area, perhaps by building out a network or franchising operation. More and more meteorologists — primarily those who used to work on TV — are branching out on their own, Samenow told me: in Alabama, for example, local legend James Spann spun up the Alabama Weather Network, and Samenow has heard from meteorologists around the country who are interested in the Capital Weather model.

But while many of those meteorologists come from the TV world and are naturally inclined to go video-first, the Capital Weather audience, Samenow told me, prefers text to video, at least for quick information. “There’s certain moments where video makes sense,” Samenow said. “Maybe it’s a quick explainer of something cool in the sky that you just saw, or a short video update on an important forecast. And then when the weather is really high impact, if you can get on camera and sort of walk people through kind of in a livestream, that experience can be really powerful.”

It’s possible those appetites are a reflection of the audience Capital Weather has built over the years: most readers are in their thirties, forties, or fifties.

“We’re going to have to think about how to attract some of the younger audiences,” Samenow said. “That’s going to be a challenge, I think. But we did just form a TikTok account.”

That is changing with a new partnership announced on Tuesday between Beehiiv and Cloudflare, the internet infrastructure company that handles roughly 20% of all web traffic. Now, all Beehiiv creators will have beta access to Cloudflare’s AI Crawl Control services through their dashboards. These tools allow creators to opt in or out of AI agents crawling their work.

Each creator on Beehiiv will see granular information about which AI agents are accessing their newsletters, which ones are being blocked, and how much referral traffic is being sent back to them by associated AI products. Creators will also be able to allow or block access for each of those agents. Cloudflare will automatically update these settings to reflect any new agents that hit the web from the same companies.

Among newsletter publishing platforms, this gives Beehiiv creators some of the most on-platform control over how their content is being used by AI products. Substack offers a setting that disallows scraping via robots.txt files. This signals to AI crawlers that they’re not wanted, but effectively operates on an honor-code system and doesn’t actually block those crawlers. Creators on Ghost have used similar robots.txt file customizations to minimize scraping, according to user forums.

The Beehiiv partnership is the latest move in Cloudflare’s campaign to give publishers more control over how their work is being ingested by AI models — and to build new business around those controls. Last year, Cloudflare made blocking AI crawlers the default for all of its customers and launched a “pay-per-crawl” marketplace, which allows Cloudflare customers to charge an AI crawler a small fee each time it accesses its content. Cloudflare is estimated to be taking a 30% cut of publisher earnings from the marketplace. (There’s no indication that Beehiiv creators will have direct access to the pay-per-crawl marketplace through the new partnership.)

“As AI changes how people find and consume content, publishers need real leverage,” Tyler Denk, the co-founder and CEO of Beehiiv, said in a statement. “Our partnership with Cloudflare gives creators the data and controls they need to either maximize discovery and distribution, or protect their writing and dictate their own terms.”

Publishers who remember the “pivot to video” from a decade ago might wince at the thought, remembering how misleading metrics led many publishers to invest in video content. But evidence from our newly published Digital News Report suggests the demand for news video is growing. A decade on, with growth driven by platforms like TikTok, audiences have an appetite for news video — and it’s not all short-form.

To understand this story, it’s helpful to look outside of Europe and North America, where demand for online news video on social media platforms is lowest. Instead, if we turn to Asia and Latin America, we find significantly higher rates of weekly consumption. In Asia, almost half (47%) of people surveyed say they watch news videos on YouTube weekly, compared to just a quarter (24%) of people in Europe. In Latin America, the same proportion (47%) say they are regularly watching news videos on Facebook, compared to just 28% in North America.

What explains these differences? There are many contributing factors, such as high mobile phone and social media use across Global South markets. But perhaps one of the biggest factors is age. Countries with younger populations may offer clues about emerging patterns of news consumption.

In this year’s Digital News Report, we found for the first time that social media is now the primary way people access news globally, with access via social media now outpacing television and news websites themselves. The following chart shows this trend, with the decline in TV and news website usage now meaning that social media and video networks are ahead as the primary access point for news.

In many ways, this trend has been and continues to be driven by the behavior of young people. They are the 18- to 24-year-olds in our survey who have grown up in a world entirely shaped by laptops, smartphones, the internet, and social media. In our report this year, we find that more than half (56%) of young people aged 18–24 globally say they have never read a physical newspaper weekly. A fifth (21%) have never regularly watched broadcast TV news. If they are going to watch news videos, it is probably going to be via the internet — and most likely on a social media platform.

This trend may not be surprising to many, but the ever-increasing “platformization” of news consumption (i.e. consumption happening via a third-party platform like Facebook or YouTube, rather than on news websites) is of concern to an industry in need to stable revenue sources. But the popularity of news videos on third-party social media platforms doesn’t have to be a “doom and gloom” story for the news industry. Rather, it can be an opportunity to reflect and spot opportunities.

Take the comparison between YouTube, on one hand, to TikTok and Instagram on the other. In our data, we find that there is an appetite for longer-form video on YouTube, and that the appeal is actually higher among younger demographics.

The following chart shows the proportion of people who use each platform for news videos who say they watch videos of each length. Almost a quarter (23%) of people who watch news videos on YouTube say they are watching videos that are over 20 minutes long. This compares to just 12% of Instagram and TikTok news video watchers, where short-form video tends to be more popular.

The next chart shows the split in reported watching on YouTube by age. Contrary to what many people might think, it is younger YouTube watchers who are more likely to report viewing long news videos than those in the oldest age group. For the demographic aged 55+, there is still a preference for broadcast TV news — a medium that they grew up with.

People will gravitate to mediums and formats they are familiar with and are used to using. Among many of those born after the year 2000, the habit of watching broadcast TV news has never materialized because that is not a format they grew up with, and therefor seems unlikely to materialize in the future.

A great example of how habits can fundamentally shift is by looking at how people interact with their televisions. A main way many young people interact with their TV now is via internet-connected apps. Smart TVs and on-demand media have further eroded linear broadcast TV audiences that have long been in decline. In our survey, we found that across all age groups, 27% of people say they now watch news videos on their smart TVs via apps like YouTube, with this behavior being much more common among younger people. (What this also says, again, is that audience attention is being captured by third party platforms.)

What does this mean for news publishers? It’s hard to say, as there are no easy answers. But there are important takeaways like the fact that appetite for news video is there and that it isn’t all about shortform — young people will watch longer content, perhaps on their smart TV, on platforms like YouTube. Traditional formats and mediums are in decline, but that doesn’t have to be a bad thing. There are opportunities to reach audiences and cut through. As a first step, knowing what the world of online video looks like helps. That’s what we tried to do this year in our Digital News Report research.

The only problem? The scenes shown in the video weren’t real. They were AI-generated, and shared and labeled as “illustrative” by an independent candidate standing in Glasgow in the Scottish parliamentary elections which took place last month. The video, along with another similar clip also shared on Facebook, “represent my goals — things I aspire to do — rather than past events,” the candidate told us.

Welcome to the world of fact checking in 2026, where increasing use of AI in lots of different contexts is throwing up fresh challenges and questions for journalists and fact checkers alike.

This has been most keenly felt at Full Fact, the U.K.’s independent fact-checking nonprofit, as we’ve covered recent elections in England, Scotland, and Wales. We’ve found that AI imagery is no longer a hypothetical factor: It’s being used, and in increasingly complicated, sometimes surprising ways. But at the same time, we’ve been able to use AI in new ways ourselves to confront the challenge, to scale our monitoring and find new ways to target our work.

Full Fact, an organization of 34 people, includes a dedicated AI team — a group of data scientists and software engineers who work alongside the eight journalists on our editorial team. We’ve been doing this for years, using machine learning to improve and scale our fact-checking since 2016.

In recent years we’ve developed Full Fact AI, a suite of tools that help monitor claims from a wide range of sources — including online news sites, social media and video platforms. The tools can help identify new claims that might be important to verify and find repeats of claims that have already been fact-checked. On a typical weekday, our tools now process about a third of a million sentences in total — and have been used by over 40 fact-checking organizations working in three languages across 30 countries. (You can find out more here.)

At Full Fact, these tools are already fully integrated into our newsroom’s workflow. For instance, each week we use a live transcript of Prime Minister’s Questions to alert us to repeat claims as we fact-check it in real time.

But going into a busy election period, we stepped this up. Based on data collected by the digital democracy organization Democracy Club, we started monitoring more than a thousand Facebook, TikTok, X, YouTube, and Instagram accounts linked to candidates in the Scottish and Welsh parliamentary elections (plus a few mayoral contests in England).

Claims made via these channels — including in videos, for which our AI tools provided transcripts — were then matched against previously published fact-checks. Our journalists were able to search the claims, and we also created a feed posting claim matches directly into an internal Slack channel to minimize friction and maximize our use of the data.

Collating posts in this way helped us identify some fact-checkable posts we might otherwise have missed — for example, we spotted an incorrect claim about youth unemployment from a candidate in Wales.

But crucially, we were also able to scan the posts for evidence of SynthID, the invisible digital watermark that indicates an image may have been created or edited with Google’s AI tools. Over the course of the May elections we scanned 16,514 images or videos attached to candidates’ social media posts, and identified 136 that appeared to have watermarks.

Most of these were obviously and non-controversially AI-generated — such as AI images of yet-to-be-built construction projects, or infographics. But some were worthy of further investigation — such as the Glasgow candidate’s “illustrative” video, which we spotted this way and would otherwise likely never have seen.

While our AI monitoring led directly to us writing some fact-checks, it also gave our small editorial team much greater visibility over what was being talked about online, by surfacing a range of different claims and posts that might otherwise not have been picked up. (And after the election, we were able to use generative AI tools to quickly analyze over 33,000 posts from Scottish and Welsh parliamentary candidates, giving us a unique snapshot of the topics they spoke to voters about in the campaign’s final days — the economy dominated, while independence was a much bigger issue in Scotland than Wales.)

For other newsrooms grappling with similar problems — particularly as U.S. journalists brace for the midterm elections later this year — the principle of integrating AI monitoring into editorial workflows to enable small teams to cover much more (online) ground may be a useful one. Reducing friction in the process wherever possible but still having humans very much in the loop to decide what is worthy of attention was key, we found.

According to the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, more and more people are turning to creators for news. About 27% of adults in 48 countries get news from online creators on a weekly basis, though only 13% said news creators meet most or all of their information needs.

But a new creator-focused app aims to compete with big tech platforms. SaySo, which launched in April, is a video news app that aims to provide “vetted creators, real stories, zero doom scroll.”

SaySo’s head of product Cydney Adams said she and her team wanted to create a space where users could trust the information they were consuming while creators could serve an engaged audience.

“The thing that we kept seeing in the [survey] data was that people are really overwhelmed and that most people in our target audience are getting their information online,” Adams said. “How can we meet them where they are and give them a place that makes them feel less overwhelmed, and that takes the guesswork out of ‘who are these people? Can I trust them?'”

The app is the latest product from Caliber, the holding company behind the social-first news outlets The News Movement, The Recount, and Capsule. (The News Movement was founded by Will Lewis, who went on to become the publisher of The Washington Post but stepped down earlier this year after mass layoffs, and former BBC News editorial director Kamal Ahmed. It has a million followers on TikTok.) SaySo is “an evolution and a natural growth of the type of content we’re already making,” Adams said.

SaySo launched with 30 news creators who have built audiences on other platforms and cross-post their content to the app. Some include climate-focused Lia Newman, former TV reporter and host of the Make It Make Sense podcast Grant Hermes, daily news explainer David Arthur, global politics–focused Leo Explains, and Isabel Ravenna. Content from Caliber’s other outlets is also cross-published on SaySo.

When users join SaySo, they’re prompted to follow the topics they’re most interested in, including current events, pop culture, education, technology, and sports. The app’s Digest tab is a curated feed intended to catch viewers up on the day’s news.

“Other platforms are built to keep you as long as possible, and we don’t want that to be the case,” Adams said. “We want it to be news on your terms.” Still, there’s an Explore tab with more videos and SaySo’s algorithm surfaces content based on what users have already viewed. All creator videos are reviewed by content moderators before they become publicly available, and creators and users are expected to follow SaySo’s community guidelines, which prohibit hate speech.

Creators were vetted and chosen based on in-house criteria that prioritizes journalistic standards and fact-based content. The founding creators all receive stipends through their contracts with SaySo (Adams didn’t disclose the amounts).

Adams’ goal is to onboard at least 70 more creators by the end of the year. “We want this to be a platform where all perspectives are welcomed,” she said. “I don’t believe it’s possible to be entirely unbiased, but it is possible to be fair by being honest with your audience about where you stand…what we want is for people to be upfront about it, and also share their sources of where they’re getting their information, so the user can make their own decision about how they want to move forward with forming their own opinion.”

The app is currently free, though Adams said she and the team are looking to run monetization experiments in coming months. While advertising isn’t planned, creator-made sponsored content will be allowed if it’s disclosed. SaySo is looking into revenue share with creators, options for users to directly compensate creators, and paywalled premium features like personalization.

SaySo isn’t the first alternative news app. Last year, journalist Jane Ferguson launched Noosphere, a subscription-based app for independent multimedia journalists. In November, former NewsGuard editor Jack Brewster launched the app Newsreel, which features “journalist-written stories every day in a swipeable stack.” Legacy news outlets are also pushing vertical video starring their own journalists.

“Both [Noosphere and Newsreel] are fantastic ideas,” Adams said. “[SaySo] is somewhere in the middle, where we’re bringing together creators from all across different platforms — people who are not just journalists, but subject matter experts and people who have on-the-ground experience. We’re targeting that middle-ground audience of people who want to be better-informed without being so overwhelmed.”

That’s the main takeaway from a new report issued Tuesday on a host of issues relating to digital media and platforms.

“It is vital that we make sure that people have better access to trusted and accurate news and that our regulated public service media is seen and heard in the fierce battle against mis and disinformation,” culture secretary Lisa Nandy said in a release. She said TV “remains at the heart of our society” and is “key to supporting social cohesion,” so Auntie Beeb must be “protected for generations to come.”

It’s the U.K.’s latest attempt to shape the internet its residents use. Last year, it required porn sites to verify the ages of all visitors, which has prompted criticism over privacy concerns. And just last week, Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced the government would ban children under age 16 from accessing social media, following Australia’s lead. When implemented early next year, 15-year-olds will be blocked from YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, and Twitter.

In a sense, the BBC (and other established public-service broadcasters like ITV and Channel 4) faces a version of the same fundamental question that’s bedeviled every other 20th-century media institution: How does an incumbent protect its privileged position on a platform where everyone’s a publisher? (I’m sure that if American newspapers had had “pass a law requiring it” as an option, they’ve have pursued it too.) The report doesn’t explicitly list which platforms would be covered by the new policy, but one can assume it’s a similar group to the social media ban list above.

The report cites past instances of social media platforms pushing misinformation during riots or other public disorder. (One needs only to look back a couple weeks to find the latest instance.)

The government will therefore explore legislative options to establish a prominence regime specifically for trustworthy news content on social media…This would require social media platforms, as well as potentially video sharing platforms, to ensure news content is prominent and discoverable within user interfaces. This would look to ensure people can access factual, accurate and trustworthy news when online. These measures could include other news publishers at national and local level, recognising the importance of citizens’ access to a plural range of voices and ensuring we capture local news and voice. The government will take forward work in the coming months, alongside industry engagement and assessing consultation responses, to explore what a news-specific prominence regime could look like in practice.

Ah, but what counts as “trustworthy news content”? Well, there’s the BBC and other public service broadcasters. As mentioned, “other news publishers at national and local level” could be included, though there’s no guarantee. That raises the hairy question of Britain’s national newspapers, most of which have an explicit position on the left-right political spectrum, as well as smaller independent operations. The report says the criteria for being “trustworthy news provider” are TBD, but notes as a potential starting point the “Recognised News Publisher” definition in the Online Safety Act 2023, which includes elements like having an established code of standards, a primary purpose to publish news, and a method for dealing with audience complaints. But it also notes that the government-enforced prominence could be “explicitly linked to further responsibilities for news providers…to ensure that only the most trustworthy news sources benefit from prominence.” (One idea it raises: Maybe there are limits on how AI is used by these “prominent” news operations.)

Reaction has been about what you’d expect. Existing public service broadcasters love it. (ITV: “It’s the PSBs that also underpin the wider creative economy, commissioning original British content right across the UK. But the way people watch content has changed radically in recent years and brought challenges to sustaining these investments. We therefore welcome a Green Paper that will help enable PSBs to continue to effectively serve the UK public interest through trusted, high quality, easily accessible content delivered on the platforms and services that people use both now and in future.”)

Publishers think it’s a great idea — so long as their outlets make the cut. (News Media Association: “Trusted journalism is the antidote to the growing problem of misinformation on social platforms, but any prominence regime must support the diverse media environment that we have in the UK — a key part of our democratic framework. So, while we support the government’s intentions in wanting to get people to access trusted news, the method they are proposing here risks obscuring the high-quality, agenda-setting journalism produced everyday by the UK’s independent news publishers and narrowing the range of trusted voices available to people across the country.”)

And platform companies say it’s unfair to force their algorithms to favor some outlets over others. (YouTube: “The UK’s creator economy is a global success story because of one simple idea: on YouTube, viewers decide what they want to watch. Prominence rules seek to distort that — forcing YouTube to prioritise government-picked channels over whatever viewers actually came to watch.”)

The proposal is open to public comment through August. That said, you may have heard that the U.K. will be getting a new prime minister soon, with Starmer announcing his resignation Monday and Andy Burnham expected to replace him shortly. Whether the new PM considers the TikTok algorithm a top priority remains to be seen. (Burnham spent 16 months as U.K. culture secretary under Gordon Brown back in 2008-09, so he may have thoughts.)

As audiences continue to migrate toward digital intermediaries for news, AI chatbots are emerging as the next platform to watch. Findings from our 2026 survey show that one in 10 people are now using AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Google Gemini for news weekly, up 3 percentage points from last year. (The question asks only about standalone chatbots and not about AI within other platforms, such as AI overviews in search.)

But this uptick is not universal. When comparing across the 48 markets covered, we find that growth tends to be concentrated in parts of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, as well as Southern and Eastern Europe. For example, weekly use doubled from 7% to 14% in South Korea, from 6% to 11% in Peru, and from 4% to 8% in Spain. Meanwhile, in the U.S., use remained stable at 6%. Usage also remained at similar levels to last year in Northern and Western European countries like the U.K. (4%), Germany (5%), and Denmark (5%), where use was already below the global average.

When it comes to news, the geography of chatbot use looks strikingly similar to the geography of platform use more generally: Countries where people already rely more heavily on search engines, social and video networks, and aggregators for news also tend to have higher levels of AI chatbot use for news. This suggests chatbot uptake may be building on existing predispositions to using platforms for news.

Trust may be another reason that adoption differs so widely from one place to another. Markets with higher trust in AI chatbots for news also tend to report higher levels of use. What’s more, the relationship between trust and use is notably stronger for AI than what we observe for social media, perhaps because using a chatbot requires a more active choice. Unlike social media and video networks, where people often stumble across news inadvertently while doing other things, on chatbots, users must intentionally provide a prompt or ask a question, making trust a more significant consideration.

We see a similar pattern at the individual level. Whereas trust in news from AI chatbots tends to be low among the general population (just 20% of people surveyed say they trust in news in outputs from AI chatbots most of the time, compared to 37% who trust news in general), when we zoom in on people who actually use AI chatbots for news, the figure more than doubles, to 44%. This gap show illustrates the extent to which low trust is driven by people who aren’t using the technology for news. However, it also shows how much users seem to think it performs reasonably well.

Age remains one of the strongest dividing lines in chatbot use for news, reflecting the faster uptake of AI among young people more generally. Seventeen percent of people ages 18–24 use AI chatbots for news each week, compared with just 5% of those aged 55 and over. That said, growth over the last year came largely from adults between 25 and 54 years of age. This indicates that AI news use is expanding beyond the earliest adopters. Use is also higher among those who are already engaged with news: 18% among the most intensive news consumers compared to 7% among those who get news only once a day.

However, adoption rates only tell us part of the story. To understand how AI chatbots fit into people’s news habits, we also asked users what they do with them.

Across 45 markets, the most common use was asking a follow-up question about a news story, cited by 42% of chatbot news users. But people are using these tools for a range of other news-related tasks, too. Around a third said they simply ask chatbots for the latest news (35%). Similar numbers use them to summarize a story (34%) or help them evaluate whether a source is trustworthy (33%). And three in ten (30%) use chatbots to make stories easier to understand. Taken together, the findings suggest that people are not just using chatbots to receive news, but also to navigate, interpret, assess, and simplify it.

Preferred uses of chatbots for news also vary from country to country. For example, in Taiwan and South Korea, where news consumption is already heavily mediated by platforms and aggregators, getting the latest news is the most commonly cited use. In Canada and the U.K., summarization ranks highest, while in Austria, Germany, and Japan, users are more likely to say they turn to chatbots to help make sense of complex stories.

Elsewhere, considerations about trust appear to be shaping uses. In Hong Kong and Turkey, where perceptions of press freedom are relatively low, as well as in lower-trust markets such as Hungary and Romania, using AI to evaluate news sources is among the most frequently reported uses. These differences highlight that, much like news consumption itself, the role AI chatbots play depends heavily on the information environments in which they are used.

The emerging uses of AI chatbots point to both challenges and opportunities for publishers. Some of the popular applications highlight audience needs that journalism is well placed to serve. But part of the appeal of chatbots lies in their ability to provide personalized, low-effort responses at scale, a capability that individual publishers may struggle to match. As AI becomes more embedded in people’s habits, as well as within search and other platforms, the path forward may be less about replicating chatbot features and more about reinforcing what makes journalism distinctive and valuable in an increasingly platform-driven information environment.

For now, AI chatbots remain a secondary source of news for most users, with only 1% globally naming them as their primary source of news. But growth has been rapid, particularly among younger people, suggesting that their influence on news consumption is likely to continue expanding, even if that growth looks different across markets.

The Tartan Army took Boston by storm in the best possible way last week during Scotland’s run of games in Foxborough, and The Boston Globe has chronicled the happy chaos with zeal. “As they swept through the city with giddy abandon, all the logistical concerns fell aside, forgotten in a swirl of song and drink and shared devotion,” assistant news editor Peter Schworm wrote. “Boston quickly forgot itself, shedding its skeptical reserve and embracing the joy of the event in full measure, cast under the Scottish spell.”

On Saturday, the newspaper went so far as to publish a full-page ad thanking Scottish fans for “the joy you brought to our city.”

In today’s @BostonGlobe pic.twitter.com/AVejWDgIsO

— Ben Volin (@BenVolin) June 20, 2026

“The idea to do an ad just emerged organically from conversations among our executive leadership team,” Michelle Micone, the Globe’s chief marketing and strategic initiatives officer, told me in an email. “As a storyteller of the city, we felt the brand was in a unique position to recognize this once-in-a-lifetime moment. We felt strongly it needed to be a statement from the institution itself.” She called it “more of a civic gesture than a commemorative message,” and credited the marketing and production teams with bringing the idea to life on short notice ahead of a holiday weekend.

Other community institutions have expressed their gratitude publicly, too: After the Tartan Army’s viral musical takeover of Fenway Park, The Boston Red Sox sent a letter to the Scottish FA thanking and celebrating the team’s fans for showing “a spirit that has no equivalent in American sport.”

“They treated our home like their own,” Red Sox President Sam Kennedy wrote, “and we are better for it.”

The Globe ad was picked up by some national and international media. “For us at the Globe, it’s been a reminder that we are a media organization, but we’re also part of the fabric of this region,” Micone said. “And it’s important that we demonstrate leadership during iconic moments of community pride and reflect the sense of connection people are feeling.”

The AP stopped publishing book reviews last fall. Metro dailies like the San Francisco Chronicle whittled down or eliminated standalone book sections a quarter century ago, leaving The New York Times Book Review “the last discrete newspaper books section standing,” former Washington Post nonfiction book critic Becca Rothfeld wrote in The New Yorker. (After the Post layoffs, The New Yorker hired her as a staff writer.)

Bookseller Josh Cook has taken note of the black hole swallowing newspaper-published book reviews. In the past, “you could just encounter [book reviews] in your world” via the physical presence of local newspapers, he told me in the back office of Porter Square Books in Cambridge, Mass., on a recent Friday afternoon. (He pointed to now-shuttered alt weeklies The Boston Phoenix and DigBoston as another extinct source of book reviews.)

So Cook, a co-owner of PSB, decided to do something to bring newspaper-style book reviews back. The Porter Square Review of Books launched this month. The store’s booksellers and writers-in-residence have begun publishing weekly(ish) book reviews on its website, on Thursdays; at about 500 words, these are deeper looks at books than the couple of sentences you’ll find describing “staff picks” in-store (or on your Goodreads or StoryGraph). The team shares them on Bluesky and will round them up in a monthly newsletter.

“A lot of bookselling is the first couple steps of writing a book review anyway,” Cook told me. “You assess it to see if you like it, you figure out how you’re going to describe it to other people, you decide whether you’re going to finish it…We already are part of the way there. Why not just see if we could do it?”

Readers of #BookSky Announcing The Porter Square Review of Books! Starting RIGHT NOW, the PSRB will publish one review, written by a PSB libromancer or a Writer in Residence every week or so…

[image or embed]

— Porter Square Books in Cambridge & Boston (@portersqbooks.bsky.social) June 4, 2026 at 3:48 PM

We’ve covered some examples of indie bookstores and local media joining forces. But watching the broader erosion of local media, Cook has argued that publishers — with their writers and editors, printers and distribution networks and warehouses — have the infrastructure to help rebuild American journalism. Last year, he described a “swing for the fences” vision in the third of a series of essays for Literary Hub on what the publishing industry should do in the face of a second Trump administration. “Imagine major publishers collaborating on a weekly newspaper based on the Lit Hub model,” he wrote, “filled with long form and narrative journalism written by authors with forthcoming or recently released books, distributed to bookstores and libraries to give away for free.”

Cook reupped that essay after the Post layoffs, writing on Bluesky that big publishers “have the resources to rebuild the media wasteland” and “if they want people to discover books at all, it kinda looks like they need to.”

While publishers have yet to rally to that call to arms, it got Cook thinking about what Porter Square Books could feasibly do in this spirit. Book reviews seemed like the obvious starting point.

A lack of books coverage, including book reviews, “hurts everyone in the books ecosystem: readers, writers, publishers, and, of course, bookstores,” Porter Square Books said in its Book Review announcement. “Putting that in the context of contemporary attacks on the rewards and pleasures of deep thinking and imaginative creating only makes things more dire. Well, we’re not just going to complain about it!”

Cook has written book reviews for sites like The Millions, The Rumpus, and Bookslut. The first level of a good book review, he said, is to “give readers enough to know if they want to read it.” That doesn’t just mean a summary; it should give a sense of style and tone. “After that, I like reviews that put the book in its various contexts,” he added, whether its genre, that genre’s history, or “the broader scope of books.” Finally, he thinks a good book review should “give prospective readers some tools to read the book if they decide to — some perspectives, some things to be aware about” that will likely enhance the reading experience.

Cook wrote the first PSRB review, of Violet Allen’s Plastic, Prism, Void: Part One, himself. He also edits the Review. It will mostly cover new releases, and the store tries to “throw our support behind smaller presses and less well-known authors, so you’ll probably see a bit more debuts, a bit more lesser-known books,” Cook said.

 

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Reviews will span genres and authors — a middle-grade review is in the works now — but what gets reviewed will mostly depend on booksellers’ personal tastes and appetites. Last week, PSB events & marketing assistant Isabel Miranda Kidwell reviewed Chloe Caldwell’s 2014 novella Women, which she discovered on the store’s “damages” shelf. “This little book, simple cream-colored and bent at its left corner (more so now, actually, from my grip) is one I will never let off my bookshelf,” she wrote, “and this review is my small attempt at getting others who, like me, had previously never heard of it — too bombarded by the ‘canon’ classics or today’s NYT bestsellers — to pick it up and read it.”

Because many PSB booksellers are horror aficionados, Cook expects that genre to be well represented. Jacob Orlando, a bookseller at the Boston location of Porter Square Books, recently reviewed The Caretaker by Marcus Kliewer. He called it “a tense and terrifying trip perfect for a cabin weekend, a long drive or just a few late nights hoping your lights don’t flicker” while calling out some sections that “drag” and “loose threads.”

I was curious whether Cook expects to publish wholly negative reviews. “There is a place for negative reviews in the world of books, but I’m not really sure it’s in the 500-plus word stuff that we are doing,” he said. For one thing, “We are paying our booksellers [for the reviews], but not enough to read a book they don’t like.” In his view, negative reviews tend to have value as part of broader conversations about well-known books or authors. When done well, though, he thinks a negative review “can recommend the book to a different type of reader.” (He pointed to former New York Times reviewer Michiko Kakutani; when she panned a book, “I’d be like, ‘Oh, I’m interested in this book,’ because she could describe it in such a way that I would see what would appeal to me, even though she didn’t like it.”)

While Cook will post reviews on Bluesky and Instagram, he expects them to reach readers primarily through the newsletter, based on success PSB has seen with its other email newsletters (its events newsletter, built up over two decades, has around 20,000 subscribers) and the more deliberate reading experience email offers to stumbling across a link in a feed. PSB staff are discussing ways to highlight reviewed books in the store (I noticed Plastic, Prism, Void on display as a staff pick in Cambridge), and will consider the possibility of rounding up reviews in print annually. But for now, success to Cook would mean, simply, “handfuls of sales of reviewed books,” he said.

That’s all they’d need to cover the cost; “Each additional handful we add, we can think about other things,” Cook said. “And if the Review got 5,000 subscribers, which I think is ambitious, that would tell us something else.”

But as local news declines, there are a few negative consequences that you might not have heard about, too. (Sorry.) One of them: The loss of local news appears to make people lonelier. From the report:

A remarkable recent working paper by Danny Hayes and Anusha Trivedi extends the evidence on local news’ decline into less-charted territory. Using state-level data and a nationally representative survey, the authors found that loneliness is higher in states with weaker local news environments, even after factoring in how rural those states were. (Rural communities tend to have higher loneliness, so the authors tried to make sure the higher levels of loneliness resulted from the news shortage rather than just from low population density.) In addition, they found that people who rarely consume local journalism report greater loneliness than those who regularly do. The authors suggest that local news fosters attachment to community and a sense of belonging that acts as a buffer against social isolation.

The Local Journalist Index data reinforces their conclusion. Using the same data used by Hayes and Trivedi from the U.S. Census 2024 Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey and the 2026 LJE measure, we identified pairs of states with similar rural population shares but sharply different concentrations of local journalists. In each pair, the state with a higher concentration of local journalists had a lower level of loneliness — 3 to 8 percentage points lower.

Writing in Washington Monthly, Steven Waldman, the founder of Rebuild Local News, offers a few ideas on why this might be:

The mechanism may be the same as why we have more polarization: With less local news, people are more likely to turn to social media and their phones, which has, by itself, been shown to increase loneliness.

But Hayes and Trivedi suggest two other possibilities.

First, local news, when done well, provides information about events and places that draw people together. If you don’t know about the crafts fair or the community theater’s latest production of The Crucible, you’re more likely to stay home.

Though not as romantic, even information about political or civic conflicts can help. You go out to protest the new prison, you’re bonding with fellow NIMBYs.

Second, on a more psychological level, local news “may also encourage people to identify as a member of their community and feel connected to the people in it,” as Hayes and Trivedi put it.

So, while fancy journalists used to disparage the mere “human interest stories” they had to write when they first started, it turns out that those may be among the most important. Stories about other people — whether a puff piece or an obituary — help create more nuanced bonds.

You can see the full 2026 Local News Index here and get a spreadsheet of all the data here.