Chatbots have arrived on major ecommerce platforms, but they’re not just useful for consumers looking for sales or products.

For reporters, these chatbots represent a potential wealth of information about major online retailers, according to the authors of “Made in America, Hidden by AI,” a recent investigative report from the Center for Law and Economy at Columbia Law School.

“Our investigation found that both Walmart and Amazon’s artificial intelligence shopping chatbots can detect obvious ‘Made in U.S.A.’ claims and country of origin mismatches and can go further to research the legitimacy of origin claims based on manufacturing details of the firms and products in question,” write authors Erie Meyer and Zachary Harris. “Despite having such capabilities, however, the companies choose not to police this fraud — and in many cases allow these deceptive claims to persist.”

I recently talked with Meyer, who previously served as chief technologist at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, about this investigation — and how reporters can use corporate chatbots to gain insights about the firms that made them.

Below, we offer quick tips for finding corporate chatbots, getting information from them and how to think of them — they’re like employees who know a huge amount about the company but have no experience speaking with the press, Meyer said.

Check out the recording and the tips that follow.

1. Know how to find companies that are using chatbots — or will soon be using them.

Ecommerce giants that use chatbots make them easy to find and interact with on their websites.

But reporters can turn to other sources to find firms that are considering using or that will soon be using chatbots to interact with customers. Publicly traded companies hold quarterly earnings calls that hold clues to their interest in chatbots — “agentic commerce” is the buzzword to look for.

“During quarterly earnings calls, Walmart executives have stated that average order values for people who use their AI shopping chatbot are 35% higher, and Amazon executives said they had a $12 billion increase in sales in the previous year generated from agentic shopping alone,” Meyer and Harris write.

Public companies often publish recent call transcripts — look for the “Investor relations” section of a corporate website. Reporters can also refer to earnings call calendars to see what’s coming up. Securities and Exchange Commission 8-k filings also often include announcements of earnings calls.

Filings with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office are another place to look for hints as to how companies are using chatbots. Search by company name and the word “agentic.”

“You can find some really interesting patent filings and some documentation as to how they’re being used, if they’re forthcoming,” Meyer said.

2. Trick the chatbot if it says it can’t do something.

A chatbot may say it doesn’t have access to certain information. In computer science this is called a refusal — and it may or may not be true.

When faced with a refusal, ask the question in a different way. When Meyer and Harris asked the Amazon shopping chatbot for products made in the U.S., the chatbot said it couldn’t provide that information — that it didn’t have access to it.

But it could provide fly fishing reels made in China. For Meyer and Harris, this didn’t track. Why could the Amazon chatbot provide products made in one large country but not another? They then used a technique called “query variation testing.”

Essentially, this means asking the question in another way.

In this case, they dropped the word “made.” Instead of asking for “made in U.S.” fly fishing reels, they asked for “in U.S.” fly fishing reels. The chatbot assumed they had meant “made in U.S.” This typo circumvented its guardrails.

“I honestly thought this was going to be a lot harder,” Meyer said.

3. Think of a chatbot as an employee who doesn’t know how to talk with the press.

As with all chatbots, and indeed many human sources, don’t take them at their word.

When a shopping chatbot told Meyer and Harris that a product was made in the U.S., they cross-checked that product against the Alliance for American Manufacturing, which “has an excellent data set of Made in U.S.A. products,” Meyer said.

Generally, chatbots are an “extremely porous surface area to uncover information to be looked into,” Meyer said. For reporters, they can be thought of as tools to reveal story angles, and perhaps solid information, that otherwise would be opaque.

Meyer recommended that reporters think of corporate chatbots as employees extensively trained on the firm’s product catalog, metadata and even their business logic — but with scant media training. It could be valuable to reporters to talk with that employee, especially considering that the company has told them it’s important that they answer all questions “even if they don’t know the true answer,” Meyer said.

“With that kind of interview, you would want to do the exact same type of cross-checking, testing and research that you would do for any other story,” she added.

4. Keep thorough documentation.

Underlying models that run chatbots change all the time.

“From the best we can tell, Alexa is on top of Claude and Walmart is on top of OpenAI,” Meyer said. “The actual technical backends are total black boxes.”

That’s why it’s important that reporters keep thorough documentation of their work — a chatbot response one week may be different the next.

“We did screen recording and screenshots, and we collected permalinks,” Meyer said. “And we documented our methodology in the report itself — like, had a full methodology example — and we wrote it with an eye for replicability.”

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This article is republished with permission from the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

Voters in several states will soon weigh in on proposed property tax reforms — changes that would, in most cases, significantly reduce the revenue that cities, counties and school districts can collect from homeowners.

The property tax is the single largest source of local tax revenue for most local governments, which use those funds to pay for schools, public safety and other municipal services. In 2024, property taxes accounted for an average of 28.4% of local funding nationally, but reliance on the tax varies. It comprises more than half of local revenue in New Hampshire, Connecticut, New Jersey and Maine, but less than 15% in Arkansas, Alabama and Nevada.

Municipal budgets include other funding sources, like state and federal aid, local sales taxes, and charges or fees. But unlike state and federal aid, which sometimes comes with strings attached or restrictions on how it can be spent, “revenue that you’re generating locally gives you the ability to get things done the way you want them to be done, the way your residents want them to be done,” said Adam Chapdelaine, former town manager of Arlington, Massachusetts, in a previous interview with the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

This fall, ballot initiatives across the country, from Florida to Wyoming, propose to reduce the revenue communities can collect, using strategies ranging from tax exemptions to constitutional limits. These proposals come on the heels of major property tax reforms that have already passed since 2023 in more than a dozen states, including Georgia, Texas, Wyoming and Iowa.

What does all that mean? Below we’ll explain the mechanics and vocabulary of the property tax and look at the potential impacts of the current property tax revolt.

Property Tax Basics

The mechanics of the property tax differ from place to place, but here’s how the property tax generally works in simple terms.

All properties in a community are appraised and assigned an assessed value, based on the estimated market value of both the land itself and any buildings (“improvements”) on the lot.

The community taxes its properties according to a millage rate, or mill rate — so called because it’s billed per $1,000 of assessed value. The millage rate can, and should, fluctuate annually in response to changes in home values and the community’s budget needs.

So if a town’s millage rate is $10, for example, a homeowner will owe $10 for every $1,000 of their home’s assessed value. For a property assessed at $300,000, that comes out to $10 x 300, or $3,000, in annual property taxes. The owner of a $750,000 home taxed at that rate would owe $10 x 750, or $7,500.

Mill rates and assessment practices vary greatly across the country, and communities often make further adjustments to this basic model by assigning different assessment ratios or tax rates to different classes of property, or by offering tax relief to certain property owners, such as primary homeowners or seniors.

Many communities impose a higher effective tax rate on commercial properties than residences and offer a partial exemption for a homeowner’s primary residence. This shifts some of the tax burden away from owner-occupants — who are more likely to vote in local elections — and onto business owners, second-home owners and renters.

The property tax is a unique source of local revenue, for several reasons:

It’s stable and stationary. Compared to revenues raised by income and sales taxes, which fluctuate based on economic conditions (falling drastically during recessions, along with incomes and consumer spending), property taxes remain more consistent through downturns. And since the property tax is based on a physical, immovable plot of land, it’s less impacted by competition from neighboring communities — a shopper may drive across the county or state line to pay lower sales taxes, but you can’t relocate your house quite so easily.

It’s economically efficient. A well-designed tax system raises revenue while minimizing impacts on economic activity. While other types of taxes influence consumer decisions — sometimes this is even the intent, as with taxing tobacco products to dissuade smoking — the supply of land can’t be increased or reduced in response to a tax. That means the property tax, at least the part levied on unimproved land, doesn’t distort behavior. Taxing buildings is less efficient than taxing land alone, but a combined property tax on land and buildings is still more efficient than the sales or income tax.

It’s highly visible to homeowners. Unlike a sales tax, which is obscured in countless small transactions over the course of a year, or income tax, which is often withheld from the paycheck an employee sees, property taxes are billed in large installments that are hard for homeowners to ignore. And the services the property tax pays for — from schools to parks to public safety — touch people’s everyday lives. That awareness and engagement help create accountability and transparency in local governance: When voters are aware of the taxes they pay and the services they receive, governments tend to respond with better fiscal decisions.

That enhanced visibility, though, also means the property tax often faces scrutiny. Which leads to moments of reconsideration like the one we’re in now.

The new property tax revolt

The 1970s and 1980s saw a major tax revolt that spawned significant and lasting tax reforms in several states. Successful ballot initiatives during that era included California’s Proposition 13 and Massachusetts’ Proposition 2½, which enacted limits on property taxation that remain in place today. Like that earlier wave of property tax reform, the current widespread inclination to rethink the property tax is at least partly rooted in concern among homeowners over fast-rising property values.

Home prices have skyrocketed more than 50% since January 2020, far higher than the rate of inflation. While property taxes don’t increase at the same rate as property values, homeowners often think they do, so surges in the market create surges in concern.

In fact, property taxes nationwide have increased only slightly more than overall inflation since 2020.

Ideally, a well-functioning government adjusts its property tax rate yearly. This allows it to make changes in response to rising or falling home values and in consideration of current budget needs, and it should mean that tax bills don’t rise too much or too quickly.

If a county’s home values rise an average of 10% in a year, for example, but the municipal budget increases by only 1%, the town should lower its millage rate accordingly so it is collecting only the revenue it needs. If it fails to do so, simply leaving rates where they are, the result is a silent tax increase.

Proposed Property Tax Changes

In Florida, Amendment 3 would increase the exemption for non-school property taxes for primary residences (“homesteads”) to $250,000 by 2028. That means the owner-occupant of a $275,000 home, for example, would owe city or county property tax on only $25,000 of the home’s value. (Their school district property tax would be unaffected.) Amendment 3 would also lower the current cap on assessment increases for nonhomestead properties from 10% to 5%, and restrict how counties and municipalities can spend their property tax revenue.

Amendment 3 also tasks the legislature with increasing the homestead exemption to full assessed value, and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has proposed eliminating property taxes altogether. Jared Walczak, senior fellow at the Tax Foundation, estimated that replacing more than $42 billion in lost property tax revenue under such a scenario would require more than doubling state and local sales taxes, from the current average of 7.02% to 15.34%. (And that’s before accounting for a drop in sales activity as consumers respond to the higher tax rates.)

In Ohio, a proposed constitutional amendment to abolish the property tax fell short of making the ballot this November, though its proponents intend to try again next year. In a recent Lincoln Institute working paper, Walczak estimated that, to make up for the $21 billion in lost property tax revenues after such an amendment, Ohio would have to more than double its state sales tax, from 5.75% to 13.36%, or triple its flat-rate income tax, from 2.75% to 8.24%, on top of existing local sales and income taxes. 

In North Carolina, a proposed constitutional amendment requires state lawmakers to “enact general laws limiting the amount by which the levy of taxes on property may increase, which may include exceptions.”

Many states have such levy limits, which cap the growth in total property taxes a community can collect from year to year. For example, Massachusetts limits tax levy increases to no more than 2.5% annually but allows communities to vote for an override if voters wish to raise more revenue. The North Carolina amendment includes no specifics, however, leaving details to be negotiated by legislators. 

Wyoming’s Initiative 1 would exempt half of a homestead’s assessed value from property taxes statewide. In contrast to Florida, where the governor has been a vocal proponent of efforts to reform or abolish the property tax, Wyoming’s outgoing governor — a Republican and former state treasurer — took to the op-ed circuit to warn that the initiative would have an “immediate and devastating effect” on local public services and represents “the first step in what could be a further call to completely dismantle a system of taxation Wyoming has relied upon since before statehood.”

The distortionary effect of assessment limits

Of the various methods used to curb property tax increases, one of the most problematic is an assessment limit. Florida has capped assessment increases on homestead properties to the lesser of 3% or inflation since 1995. This means that if a primary residence was assessed at $100,000 one year, it could not be assessed for more than $103,000 the following year if its owner still lived there, even if its market value had increased to $120,000 or more. Amendment 3 would lower the assessment limit on all other properties from 10% to 5%. 

The most infamous example of an assessment limit is California’s Proposition 13, which since the 1970s has capped how much a home’s assessed value can increase per year at the lesser of 2% or the rate of inflation, until the home changes hands. (About a dozen other states also limit how much a property’s assessed value can increase each year.)

Assessment limits create conditions where two identical homes can have wildly different tax bills, depending on when each home was purchased.

For example, picture two homes on a Los Angeles street, each one valued at the 2025 median sale price of $947,000. One family, who moved in 14 years ago, pays $5,212 a year in property taxes, while their new neighbors, who just purchased their home, will pay more than double that, $11,172. In Miami, a new homebuyer’s tax bill is more than three times that of a longtime resident’s bill. 

Assessment limits can also discourage longtime homeowners from moving or downsizing, further locking up an already constrained housing market, because they don’t want to lose their favorable tax treatment. 

More effective ways to offer property tax relief

There are many ways to offer residents property tax relief, targeted or broad, that don’t sacrifice a local government’s autonomy or ability to raise revenues. Many states already use these policies and could consider expanding them instead of taking more drastic measures.

More than a dozen states offer some form of property tax circuit breaker, a type of tax relief extended to homeowners paying a high proportion of their income in property taxes. This might include seniors, low-income homeowners in high-value or gentrifying neighborhoods, or homeowners facing sudden job loss or disability.

A circuit breaker creates a tax-to-income threshold above which a homeowner owes less or even no property tax. For example, at a 5% threshold, a qualifying household would pay no more than 5% of their income in property taxes in any given year. So a homeowner with $10,000 in income and a property tax bill of $2,000 would pay $500 in property taxes (5% of income) and receive a credit for the remaining $1,500.

Some states offer circuit breakers only to seniors, while others make them available to all low-income homeowners, or at graduated income thresholds. Experts recommend requiring some kind of copayment, even a modest one, to encourage homeowners to remain engaged in local spending decisions.

Many states also offer property tax deferrals, which allow income-poor but housing-rich homeowners (most commonly seniors) to delay paying their property taxes until the property is sold or inherited, at which point the municipality recovers the unpaid balance plus interest. This can help seniors who have built up home equity stay in their homes even when their fixed incomes don’t keep pace with higher property taxes, and ultimately does not put a cost burden on other taxpayers in the community.   

Homestead exemptions are the broadest and most common type of property tax relief. More than 30 states nationwide have some form of broad-based homestead exemption — albeit in smaller doses than what’s proposed in Florida’s Amendment 3. (The Sunshine State’s current homestead exemption tops out at $50,000.)

A homestead exemption generally applies to owner-occupants of primary residences, and provides either a partial exemption from the property tax or a partial credit against the bill.

In this way, it shifts more of the tax burden onto businesses, renters and owners of second homes, but a flat-dollar homestead exemption can also help make the property tax more progressive for homeowners. For example, imagine three homes in a fictional community: the owner-occupants of a $100,000 home, the owner-occupants of a $500,000 home, and the owner of a $500,000 vacation home. A flat $50,000 homestead exemption will cut the first family’s property tax bill in half, while reducing the second family’s bill by a more modest 10%. The vacation homeowner, meanwhile, receives no discount at all.

Homestead exemptions can have very different impacts on different types of communities based on property values and the share of nonhomestead properties. As a result, experts recommend that generous homestead exemptions should either be state-funded — where the state reimburses localities for their revenue loss from the exemption — or available as a local option that communities can choose to adopt or not. Absent state funding, “It’s best to keep statewide homestead exemptions to more modest levels,” says Adam Langley, associate director of tax policy at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. “The $20,000 to $40,000 range is about right.”

The amendment proposed in Florida is unique in mandating a very high exemption statewide without any state reimbursement. In Miami, where the median home price is $650,000, a $250,000 homestead exemption would offer tax relief to residents in lower-value homes while still allowing the city to generate tax revenue from owners of average-priced homes and pricey beachfront condos, not to mention vacation homes, office buildings and shopping centers. But in smaller cities and agricultural towns, with lower-value homes and few commercial properties, such a mandate would leave communities almost no way to generate property tax revenue.

Finally, “truth in taxation” laws, which have been implemented in 20 states, require local governments to disclose any increase in projected tax revenues — whether due to higher millage rates or just rising property values. Truth in taxation measures prevent “silent” tax increases and can help keep a check on property taxes by improving transparency and accountability — without jeopardizing a community’s fiscal health. 

The post Understanding property tax revolts appeared first on The Journalist's Resource.

This reporting guide was republished with permission from SciLine, where it first appeared.

Nearly 50 million adults aged 18 to 29 will be eligible to vote in the 2026 midterm elections, making Generation Z potentially one of the nation’s most powerful and influential voting blocs.

The reality is that many Americans in this age group do not vote, a problem that researchers have studied for decades. Meanwhile, a number of new laws and policy proposals across the U.S. may make it even harder for young people to register to vote and cast their ballots on time.

We created this guide to encourage journalists to examine independent, nonpartisan research about youth voting patterns and obstacles — and to use that knowledge to ground their coverage of the 2026 midterm elections.

Historically, young adults have voted at lower rates than older adults. Less than a third of U.S. citizens aged 18 to 29 voted during the 2022 midterm elections, compared with 47% of voters aged 30 to 44,  58% of voters aged 45 to 64, and 67% of voters aged 65 and older, the U.S. Census Bureau estimates.

Even so, social scientists warn journalists not to equate a lack of voting with political apathy.

“A lot of our research shows young people deeply value democracy,” says Sara Suzuki, a senior researcher at the Tufts University Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement. Commonly known as CIRCLE, the center is a leading, nonpartisan source of data and analysis on the country’s youngest voters.

These voters, whom scholars refer to as youth voters, must overcome a series of structural and logistical hurdles to participate in elections, Suzuki says. Election laws in some states make voting more difficult for college students in particular, especially students who have a permanent residence in one state but live in a different state during the academic year.

Jonathan Becker, a voting rights scholar and acting president of Bard College in New York, has spoken out about election laws that he believes were meant to make it tougher for young adults to influence election results.

“Some of the systems used to exclude African Americans [from voting] have been used on young people,” Becker told a crowd of college students who gathered at Emerson College in Boston on Sept. 17 in recognition of Constitution Day.

In recent years, some conservative lawmakers and political candidates have voiced support for adding more barriers to young adults’ access to the ballot box. In extreme cases, they have suggested taking away their right to vote entirely. For example, while campaigning for the U.S. presidency in 2023, biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy — currently the Republican nominee for governor in Ohio — proposed raising the voting age to 25.

State laws and policies that researchers say discourage young people from voting include:

Banning student IDs and out-of-state driver’s licenses as forms of voter identification.

Earlier this year, New Hampshire and Florida became the latest states to adopt laws prohibiting voters from using a student ID to verify their identity. Of the states that allow student IDs, some only allow them under certain conditions. For example, Georgia allows college student IDs only if they have been issued by one of the state’s public colleges or universities.

Voters in 36 states must present identification before they can vote at the polls on Election Day, according to Ballotpedia, a reliable resource for election-related information. The 24 states that require a photo ID generally do not accept driver’s licenses from other states. This can make voting difficult for out-of-state college students who prefer to vote in the state where they go to college, or who may not be able to vote by mail or travel to their home state to vote.

Requiring proof of national citizenship.

Some states require adults to provide documents such as a U.S. birth certificate or passport to demonstrate they are U.S. citizens before they can register to vote. Many young adults do not have passports and, researchers assert, many also do not have ready access to their birth certificates.

Closing or rejecting requests to open polling locations on college campuses.

In January, the North Carolina State Board of Elections removed an early voting site at Western Carolina University and rejected plans to open early voting sites at three other universities, reports the nonprofit news outlet NC Local. On Sept. 1, county commissioners in Tarrant County, Texas, decided against restoring polling places at the University of Texas at Arlington and two Tarrant County College campuses, according to the digital news platform Democracy Docket.

Restricting voting rules related to state residency.

State laws that limit voters to one legal address can make registering to vote complicated for young adults who live with their parents but also reside in a different state during the academic year to attend college.

Limiting mail voting.

Election officials in 13 states only allow certain voters to use mail ballots, reports the National Conference of State Legislatures, which tracks state election laws. In those states, requests for mail ballots are granted based on the excuse the voter gives for not being able to vote in person at a polling location. In the other states, voters can submit mail ballots without needing to provide a reason or excuse.

Mandating that residents register to vote weeks before an election.

Voter registration deadlines vary across the U.S. As of May 2026, 15 states required their residents to register to vote at least 28 to 30 days prior to an election, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. In nine states, the deadline is 20 to 27 days before an election. Seven states have a deadline of one to 19 days before an election.

An analysis from CIRCLE finds that youth voter turnout during the 2022 midterm elections often was highest in states where residents could register to vote on the same day they cast their ballots and in states with automatic voter registration. California and Oregon were the first to introduce automatic voter registration systems, which use data collected by certain government agencies, such as a state department of motor vehicles, to register eligible adults to vote.

Courtney Juelich, an associate professor of political science​ at the University of Wisconsin-Stout Polytechnic, points out that legal battles over mail voting this year will likely affect turnout, too. She says President Donald Trump’s push to restrict mail voting, partly by changing the way the Postal Service processes mail-in ballots, has created confusion among voters.

“Even though the Supreme Court decided the Postal Service isn’t going to be doing that, it’s still in this crucial period of time close to the election,” Juelich says, adding that voters who do not follow election issues closely and adults who are not familiar with the voting process might decide not to vote. “This will be discordant for low-information voters, who are typically young.”

What research tells us about youth voters

Young adults gained the right to vote beginning at age 18 after Congress passed and the states ratified the 26th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in July 1971. Although researchers have now spent decades studying youth voters and how various laws, policies, and programs affect them, it can be difficult to make broad generalizations about the people in this group.

That is because the rules around elections vary from state to state, and youth voters themselves are a racially, socially and economically diverse group. Also, the habits and attitudes of 18- and 19-year-olds often differ considerably from the habits and attitudes of 28- and 29-year-olds.

That said, the research to date indicates:

A substantial proportion of young adults do not identify with either of the major political parties.

A national survey the Pew Research Center conducted in late 2023 finds that the youngest voters aligned more closely with the Democratic Party than older voters did. But about half of voters under age 25 identified as independent or something other than a Democrat or Republican, Pew reported in 2024. A nationwide survey conducted this year by CIRCLE and the nonpartisan, nonprofit organization When We All Vote got similar results. They found that 43% of the 5,549 adults aged 18 to 29 who completed the survey did not identify as Republican or Democrat.

In some states, young adults’ ballots are more likely to be challenged and rejected than those of older adults.

For example, from 2020 to 2025, election officials in Washington challenged 5.3% of all mail ballots submitted by adults aged 18 to 25 because of signature-related problems — more than any other age group, according to a new analysis by researchers from the University of Washington and the University of California, Berkeley. Election officials ended up rejecting 3.4% of their mail ballots, a higher rate than for voters from other age groups. As a comparison, election officials challenged 1.1% of mail ballots submitted by voters aged 46 to 65 because of signature issues. They rejected 0.7% of those voters’ ballots during the five-year period.

A Rutgers University Law Review article examines rejection rates for provisional ballots in North Carolina during elections in 2008, 2012, 2016, and 2020. It reveals that rejection rates rose over time for voters in most age groups but increased most for adults aged 18 to 25. In 2020, election officials rejected 80% of the provisional ballots completed by the state’s youngest voters, up from 68% in 2008. The rejection rate rose from 58% to 67% over the same period for voters aged 26 to 40 and from 53% to 58% for voters aged 41 to 65. The rate fell slightly for voters aged 66 and older.

Political campaigns often overlook or ignore youth voters.

A 2022 report from CIRCLE underscores the key role political campaigns play in educating 18- to 29-year-olds about political candidates, policy issues, and the voting process. CIRCLE surveyed 2,018 youth voters after the 2022 midterm election and learned that those contacted by campaigns were much more likely to vote.

“Our research has consistently shown that outreach correlates with higher youth voting, and this new survey suggests that was the case once again in the 2022 midterms,” CIRCLE researchers write. Almost half of the young adults who participated in the survey said they had not been contacted by any organization, candidate, or party about elections that year.

“Young people who said they were contacted were 29 [percentage] points more likely to report that they voted than those who were not contacted,” the researchers write.

Financial hardship is linked to lower levels of civic engagement.

Suzuki says CIRCLE researchers have consistently found that young people’s financial struggles tend to influence their attitudes about voting and their civic engagement. A key takeaway of one recent analysis: Young adults who missed voter registration deadlines or ran out of time to register were twice as likely to have money troubles.

“Being too busy or having a conflicting work schedule are commonly cited barriers to voting, a challenge that is likely heightened for young people struggling to make ends meet,” CIRCLE researchers write.

Political scientist Nathan Micatka studies the voting habits of young adults who participated in government assistance programs as children. A paper he wrote that appeared last year in the Policy Studies Journal estimates that white, non-Hispanic young adults who participated in these programs as adolescents were 6 to 17 percentage points less likely to vote in their first election as adults, compared with white, non-Hispanic young adults who did not participate in those programs. Micatka, an assistant professor at the University of South Alabama, looked at election turnout in 2004, 2006, 2008, and 2010.

He says the stigma associated with welfare programs and having negative experiences with government employees could help explain why the individuals he studied had lower odds of voting. Another possible reason: While these young adults were growing up, they might not have seen their parents or other role models vote or engage with the political process. Micatka did not find a relationship between voting and receiving government assistance for Hispanic young adults or Black, non-Hispanic young adults. In his paper, he writes that “the null results among non-white respondents may be rooted in historical political exclusion and racialization of politics that are more impactful for voting than welfare participation.”

Improving news coverage

We consulted three researchers with deep expertise in U.S. elections and young voters to create this reporting guide. Suzuki, Micatka, and Juelich shared a wealth of tips and insights to help journalists report on youth voters. Here are three of their recommendations:

1) Feature the views and experiences of young adults prominently in news stories about youth voting.

Suzuki says a lot of the news coverage on youth voting focuses on experts and decision-makers such as researchers, legislators, election officials, and higher education administrators. What often is missing, she adds, are young adults’ personal stories and observations.

“Young people can speak for themselves,” she says. “They have a voice.”

A good place to find these voters: youth-led organizations such as New Voters and TurnUp.

Jeulich urges journalists to find out what young voters care about and to ask a range of questions aimed at gaining a better understanding of how the values, attitudes, and opinions of young Americans vary.

Scholars have limited information about these topics because they rely heavily on telephone and online surveys to gather information from young adults. To encourage youth voters to take the surveys, researchers keep them short and ask mostly multiple-choice questions.

“Ask open-ended questions and publish [the answers],” Juelich suggests. “People will read it. It would be of interest to social scientists broadly. I think there is a feedback loop we could have that is normatively better for society.”

2) Don’t present youth voters only as college students.

Suzuki urges journalists to ask themselves this question: Who comes to mind when you think about youth voters? She says news stories and images frequently present them as college students, even though most 18- to 29-year-olds in the U.S. are not college students. Many never attended college.

“If young people equals college students, you’re missing large, large segments of young people,” Suzuki notes.

The National Center for Education Statistics reports that fewer than 40% of adults aged 18 to 24 — the primary age range for going to college — were college students in 2022, the most recent year for which the federal agency has complete data.

Micatka encourages journalists to interview young adults of different ages, education levels and backgrounds so news stories make clear that youth voters are a very diverse group.

He adds: “College campuses are easy [to access], and there are a lot of young people there. But we need to shift the focus away from college campuses.”

3) Don’t report or imply that low voter turnout indicates political apathy.

Juelich, Micatka, and Suzuki all stress the need for journalists to understand the various hurdles young people must overcome to vote. A report that CIRCLE released in January, “25 Things We Learned About Young Voters in 2025,” explains some of the most common challenges.

“A lot of times journalists, researchers, and average citizens, we tend to think low turnout means people don’t care,” Micatka says. “We need to be careful not to equate low turnout with political apathy.”

Juelich says many young people lack basic information about voting. During a recent classroom discussion, she corrected a misunderstanding that some of her students had about whether they could vote in the state where their college is located.

“I’m talking to my students and my out-of-state students are saying, ‘I can’t vote here,’” Juelich says. “And I say, ‘Yes, you can.’”

There are psychological barriers, too, researchers at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania write in a December 2025 commentary in the journal Social and Personality Psychology Compass.

“Emerging adults are still developing self‐regulatory skills, such as goal setting, planning, and organization, that are important for voting,” they write. “Even those who have strong intentions to vote may not effectively act on their intentions due to poor planning, missed deadlines, or unforeseen circumstances.”

Story ideas

Here are three story ideas that journalists can localize for their audiences:

1) Getting young adults to vote: What works?

Researchers have identified programs and policies that encourage voting and prepare young people to participate in civic activities. For example, CIRCLE released a report on the topic in 2022 that includes recommendations for how political campaigns, nonprofit organizations, news outlets, educators, parents, and others can pitch in to help.

In a paper published in The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science in 2023, researchers at Duke University and the University of Virginia explain the various ways K-12 teachers can prepare young people to vote in the future.

“Schools should be laboratories of democracy, where young people’s civic intentions are converted into civic behaviors,” the researchers write.

Encouraging teenagers to preregister, or register to vote before they turn 18, also helps, another group of researchers writes in a 2020 paper in the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy. That paper finds that pre-registering is associated with higher voter turnout and increased state funding for higher education. As of September 2025, all states except North Dakota allowed pre-registration, according to Ballotpedia. North Dakota does not require its residents to register in order to vote.

2) Colleges’ efforts to motivate students to vote

Colleges and universities play a key role in mobilizing voters. In fact, the federal Higher Education Act of 1965 mandates that higher education institutions distribute voter registration forms to their students. Campus administrators and student and nonprofit organizations are continuously seeking new ways to better inform and engage students.

Examples:

• Organizations have used pets and petting zoos to draw young people to polling sites and voter education programs. Earlier this month, the University of Alabama held a “Puppies & Polls” event, offering students an opportunity to snuggle a pup while learning about “all things Election Day.“
• The renowned Trojan Explosion Marching Band at Virginia State University choreographed and recorded a short performance to encourage voting.
• To help college students follow through on their plans to vote, some institutions guide them through the process of making a formal voting plan. Scientific studies have demonstrated “that thinking through the steps necessary to achieve a goal and identifying potential obstacles and solutions promote goal pursuit across a range of behaviors,” researchers write in “Motivating and Supporting Youth to Vote Using Theory-Driven Approaches,” published in December 2025.
• In even-numbered years, California colleges and universities compete to get students to register to vote and submit their voting plans. The University of California, Santa Barbara won the 2024 California University and College Ballot Bowl.
• Many higher education institutions have worked with local election officials to introduce on-campus voting sites. Evidence from the Student Turnout and Engagement Project in Florida suggests that adding on-campus voting locations can boost turnout among college students as well as residents in surrounding communities.

3) Civic engagement among young adults

Micatka says his research indicates that some young adults who received public assistance as kids do not vote, but do participate in other civic activities such as volunteering for political campaigns, writing letters to lawmakers, and donating money to a cause they support.

“Remember voting is not the only way to engage with the political process,” he says.

Suzuki recommends journalists ask young adults about their civic engagement and then report on it. She says the general public might not realize that many young adults are deeply committed to their families, communities and the causes they support.

“Talk to young people running for office, young people running civic organizations, young people who are running voter registration drives at their schools and in their communities,” Suzuki says.

Key resources for journalists

These are some of the organizations and research projects that provide reliable information about youth voters or young adults more broadly.

Ballotpedia: A frequently-updated digital encyclopedia of U.S. politics. It provides information on local,  state, and federal elections and election laws.

Berkeley Initiative for Young Americans: A research center at the University of California, Berkeley that studies various issues affecting young adults, including their personal values and politics.

Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, also known as CIRCLE: A Tufts University research center that studies civic engagement among young people in the U.S.

Harvard Youth Poll: A widely cited national survey the Harvard Kennedy School of Government conducts each spring and fall to ask 18- to 29-year-olds for their views on a range of issues.

National Center for Education Statistics: The federal government agency responsible for collecting and sharing data on K-12 education and higher education in the U.S.

National Conference of State Legislatures: A bipartisan, nonprofit organization that tracks and reports on various state policies.

Pew Research Center: A private, nonpartisan think tank known for its survey research on a wide range of policy topics and social issues.

Student Vote Research Network: A joint project of Menlo College, the Students Learn Students Vote Coalition and the ALL IN Campus Democracy Challenge that brings scholars and practitioners together to study youth voting and find ways to mobilize youth voters.

Student Voting Rights Lab: A research and advocacy organization run by Duke University and North Carolina Central University focused on the voting rights of young adults in the U.S.

Students Learn Students Vote Coalition: A broad network of higher education institutions, student groups, and nonpartisan, nonprofit organizations that are working to increase voting among young adults.

Voting Information Trends Interactive Dashboard: A digital tool created recently by the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School that looks at where adults go online to get information about the 2026 midterm elections. Journalists can view data for adults of different age groups.

The post The many barriers young adults must overcome to vote: A research-based reporting guide appeared first on The Journalist's Resource.

With the U.S. midterm elections fast approaching and the balance of power in Congress at stake, journalists are playing a critical role in ensuring that voters have basic information about how to vote, as well as which issues and candidates are on the ballot.

The Journalist’s Resource and SciLine recently convened an hourlong webinar where we answered your questions about what’s top of mind for voters and election officials this fall.

I moderated the discussion, which featured:

• Jen Fifield, a reporter at ProPublica who covers election issues, voting rights and threats to democracy.

• Thessalia Merivaki, the Thomas S. Foley Distinguished Professor of Government and Director of Thomas S. Foley Institute of Public Service and Public Policy at Washington State University.

• Tammy Patrick, chief programs officer at the Election Center, which provides technical resources and support for election administrators around the country.

There are a few things journalists can add to their coverage to help audiences better understand the U.S. electoral system. First, remind audiences that elections in the U.S. are markedly and uniquely decentralized. They are, by and large, run by local officials.

“Most countries don’t do it this way,” Patrick said during the webinar. “They have a centralized system — it’s all run at the federal level. That is not the way we’ve been doing it for 250 years.”

Next, explain that it is normal for election administrators to take days, or longer, to count votes and publish results. There are no long counts or delayed counts, Patrick said — it simply takes time to count votes.

She recalled working for the Maricopa County Elections Department in Arizona and calling voters who didn’t sign their ballots or whose signatures didn’t match registration records.

“I never once had a voter say, ‘I didn’t vote, I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ Instead, they said, ‘My arm was in a cast,’ or, ‘I suffered a stroke — I can’t believe you’re calling me,” she said.

Finally, get to know — and report on — election administrators and poll watchers well before Election Day.

“Just get completely sourced up and understand who is running the poll watching for the local parties or the state parties,” Fifield said. “Who are the political party observers that will be watching ballots tabulated on election night?”

To get a sense for how other reporters are covering the nuts and bolts of election administration, sign up for Election Line, a repository of non-partisan local election coverage curated by the Election Center.

Watch the full webinar below and keep reading for takeaways from our discussion.

Cover this dynamic: Federal intervention in locally run elections

Ask election officials what they’re concerned about prior to the midterms.

For many officials, it could be the prospect of the federal government interfering with locally run elections.

“For Election Center members, their number one concern — when I ask them at our events of what’s keeping them up at night — their number one concern is federal intervention in [the] election cycle,” Patrick said. “I’ve been doing this more than 20 years, and that’s a new thing in the last couple of years.”

In particular, reporters can track claims from federal officials about non-citizens voting, efforts to change mail-in voting rules, requests for voter information and ballot seizures.

“That’s one thing that prior to Election Day I think every local reporter should try to get their feet wet on, is just understanding how the federal government has been in their community — if they have — on voting,” Fifield said.

Records requests are another way to find out what’s going on, Fifield said.

Are there records of communications showing the federal government has reached out to your local election officials? Or have election officials reached out to state or federal officials for any reason? How are election officials planning for potential federal interference?

Link underserved voters to under-resourced administrators

Underserved voters are those who face especially high barriers to voting. Many times this is because they lack resources to vote on Election Day, Merivaki said. Underserved voters are also more likely than consistent voters to live in areas with fewer resources and worse infrastructure, she added.

Every group of underserved voters will have distinct reasons for not being able to vote, even if they want to. Reporters can explore those reasons, and how election officials can reach underserved voters. One big reason it can be difficult to reach them is because election administrators often operate with limited budgets.

“We want to ensure voters are informed about how to participate,” Merivaki said. “We also want to ensure that voters know who to trust for information about elections and voting. We want to ensure that voters know what their rights are.”

Warn audiences that AI can accelerate bad information about elections

Election officials are often active on social media where they share valuable information about when, where and how to vote, but they usually don’t have many followers, Merivaki said.

Meanwhile, a large portion of the public is increasingly getting information, some of it inaccurate, from what Merivaki calls “AI-mediated systems,” such as chatbots or AI summaries via search engines.  

Those systems are “highly error-prone,” Merivaki said, which can amplify the problem of disinformation, “and it adds to confusion — it also adds to distrust — and it makes the work of those trusted sources of information harder to penetrate.”

By getting to know and reporting on the people running elections, journalists can act as conduits for trustworthy information, and reach larger swaths of the public than election officials can on their own.

Profile the village it takes to run elections

Elections are a community effort.

Patrick recommended that journalists profile the people who make voting happen.

These could be profiles of poll workers, election officials, members of law enforcement and volunteers.

“Elections are not one or two election officials, it’s the entire community that’s turning out to make this happen,” Patrick said. “So telling that story is a really, really important piece of it.”

Uncover the voter experience

At polling places, ask voters about their motivations for voting and what it was like.

Did they wait on a line or get in quickly? Were ballots confusing or easy to understand? Were there particular issues or candidates that brought them out to vote?

“Some people consider it a really patriotic process, which is always great to put in, to remind people about the power of voting,” Fifield said.

Approach people after they’ve voted, not before. If there is a line they may be anxious and want to get it over with — but after they vote, some people are excited and are open to talking to reporters, Fifield said.

The post What’s normal and what isn’t on Election Day and beyond appeared first on The Journalist's Resource.

As artificial intelligence systems grow in their capabilities and reach, governments in the U.S. and abroad are considering a variety of AI regulatory proposals.

While there is no national AI regulation in the U.S., several states have passed laws aimed at protecting workers, consumers and others who may use or interact with AI systems, including in Colorado, California, Texas, Utah and other states. Some AI firms and individual employees of AI firms have openly called for government regulation of their industry.

But blurred technical distinctions about what constitutes AI, as well as potentially overlapping jurisdictions, make it difficult to evaluate governance proposals. Those initiatives also connect to different organizations, technologies and decisions, so evaluating them requires tracing how requirements are expected to change behavior and reduce risks.

Journalists should take note when proposals lack precision about implementation or legal authority. This lack of precision makes their effects harder to assess.

Ask: Who, with what power, compels whom, to do what? Those questions are central to assessing a proposal — and there must be a clear path from harm to action. Three questions give reporters a foothold:

• What harms do a regulatory proposal target?
• Who has the power to require what — and of whom?
• Why should it work?

As AI agents take wider-ranging action into businesses and institutions, new regulatory mechanisms will need to be designed to align changing incentives, with new standards to better monitor behavior. The range of proposals should be seen as a stack of overlapping coverage across the economy and society.

If you cover technology news then you almost certainly cover what’s happening with AI, and AI regulation.

Keep reading to inform your reporting.

• What is an AI system — and what are the potential harms?
• Who can require what of whom?
• How to assess proposed regulations
• Understanding the different types of harm
• Rogue, reckless or reasonable actors
• Will regulation work?

What is an AI system — and what are the potential harms?

The term ‘AI’ captures a range of methods, tools and systems that people use every day.

Alongside powerful but narrow algorithms and generative tools, recent AI systems include complex multi-agent systems that can coordinate work across tasks. Each of these comes with its own potential harms and associated regulatory proposals and interventions.

Classic consumer-facing artificial intelligence applications include social media algorithms, facial recognition on smartphones, navigation apps, product recommendations, and spam classifiers that sort junk email. These applications use algorithms trained on data to perform particular tasks, and they learn patterns in user behavior. Harms can include errors, racial or ethnic discrimination, and privacy violations affecting users and other firms.

AI agents are large language models placed in “harnesses” that allow them to take actions in real environments — digital or physical — on behalf of people or organizations. The shift from chatbots that answer questions to software that takes action has opened new regulatory areas.

A major strand of AI governance has focused on algorithms involved in making decisions that can change lives — things like insurance eligibility, bail decisions, allocation of government assistance and hiring.

Decision-making algorithms could cause harm at scale, with opacity making some harms harder to detect or contest. A 2019 study in Science, for example, found racial bias in a widely used health-care algorithm because it used health spending as a proxy for health needs.

Some state-level legislation, along with international regulations, such as the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation, has sought to protect people affected by certain automated decisions.

AI capabilities depend on hardware and software — including firmware that controls hardware. Technical advances can lead to more competent systems, but systems of the same competence can also be given more access, or a longer leash.

For example, an operator could give a model access to tools controlling critical infrastructure, subject to required integration and authorization. Such changes in access can increase a system’s potential impact without improving the underlying model’s performance.

Who can require what of whom?

This question is central to the nature of policymaking.

When is a government justified in intervening? Do we need to weigh costs against benefits? What level of risk is acceptable or unacceptable? Do potential indirect effects, such as some firms losing ground to competitors, count as harms?

Suppose an AI system is used to screen applicants for a job. A governance proposal might require an employer to examine its hiring practices, a developer to disclose the algorithms deployed, and the model provider to test systems for certain biases.

Audits and mandatory disclosures may support enforcement of standards. For example, a New York City law passed in 2021 mandates that automated employment decision tools pass a bias audit. Each regulatory approach raises different questions about access to evidence and responsibility for correcting problems.

Who can impose AI governance?

Governance includes a wide range of activities, including laws, organizational policies and private or industry standards. Regulation often refers to action undertaken by governments, but many actors can play a role in governance. Individual firms can impose internal or contractual requirements, and industry bodies can develop standards whose force depends on adoption, contracts or law.

Many proposals exist under the banner of ‘governance.’ For reporters communicating with the public, it is important to ask what kind of commitment is being proposed.

Research agendas and endorsements are not company commitments or industry standards. Domestic law and international agreements also have varied consequences.

Pacing the Frontier, an open letter published in July 2026 and signed by over 1,300 employees of AI companies, requested U.S. government support for an international effort to develop tools to pace, or moderate, automated AI development. This is an example of support for coordination, but it is not an agreement to a governance regime.

National and sub-national governments can mandate actions. In the U.S., Congress enacts statutes, courts can issue judgments and orders, and the president can issue executive orders.

Federal agencies issue regulations under delegated authority. Executive orders and agency interpretations differ in legal effect and are not a substitute for legislation.

Individual firms can also set internal standards through governance practices to limit their risks based on the firm’s incentives. Groups of firms may come together to try and set industry standards.

In the U.S., regulatory action is subject to constitutional and statutory limits, procedural requirements and judicial review. Regulating internet-based technologies can also be contentious due to overlapping regulatory authorities and the global nature of the internet.

Who is being governed?

Any proposed governance should specify whose action is changing — this is the entity being governed. There is also a distinction between the source of risk and the industry or individuals subject to regulation.

For example, proposals that aim to reduce misuse by an end user might impose requirements on a technology developer or operator. Similarly, a proposal aimed at curtailing the growth of AI capabilities might try to constrain AI training, or computing infrastructure.

Firms are limited in their ability to mandate anything about competitor behavior, but a government may have the authority to impose an obligation, control a resource or induce an industry to change conduct.

Authority and control are not the same thing. A government can have the legal power to impose a rule without the practical means to observe compliance or enforce it.

Reporters should investigate both.

What is being governed?

Laws and regulations can target the development, deployment or spread of a technology.

A governance intervention can target the computing resources and software used to develop or operate a model. For example, the administration of former President Joe Biden imposed export controls on some advanced computing chips and certain high-bandwidth memory. Energy supply and data-center operations are other potential points of intervention.

Software and firmware can be subject to regulation. The model powering an agent can be subject to requirements concerning, for example, training methods. A government can restrict access to certain tools, or say that their use must comply with data-protection rules. For example, health privacy laws may apply when firms or governmental organizations use AI systems that handle protected health information.

Monitoring and verification regimes are important because they can provide evidence about whether specified thresholds or requirements are met, even if the technologies and actors being regulated are wide-ranging. Verification can provide evidence that someone has complied with a check, but not what they should be complying with.

How to assess proposed regulations

Regulatory proposals can be assessed by the harm they are trying to solve. Some proposals use “dangerous capabilities” as a trigger for intervention — a capability is not itself a harmful outcome.

Research presented with the July 2026 Pacing the Frontier letter discusses the risks of AI being used to create biological weapons or to commit cybercrime, such as ransomware deployed in healthcare systems.

The Pacing the Frontier research also considers AI-assisted research and development accelerating beyond the capacity of human oversight. Translating that potential outcome into specific regulation raises questions: Who could lose control? Over what system? And with what consequences?

Illustrating risks is important, but governance regimes need concrete proposals. Such proposals might examine growth in AI capabilities, or misuse of existing capabilities. Or they might focus on overreliance on AI within organizations, or AI contributing to a concentration of economic or political power.

An intervention should be assessed by looking at the outcome it’s trying to prevent and the pathway that might produce it. But it is impossible to eradicate all risk. Where possible, governments should set standards for acceptable levels of risk. Journalists, for their part, should interrogate whether governments are meeting or falling short of those standards.

Understanding the different types of harm

There are several broad types of harm that most governance proposals aim to address.

Sometimes a regulation will address several types of harm.

But it can be helpful for reporters to categorize a proposal, law or regulation by the primary or overarching type of harm it aims to mitigate. Doing this can help reporters identify the core problem legislators or regulators hope to solve, and can also help the public better understand these efforts.

The broad types of AI harm include:

Loss of rights. This is one focus of the European Union Artificial Intelligence Act, alongside other objectives, such as public health and safety. The EU AI Act also addresses discrimination, privacy and due process. A system can pass a statistical fairness test and still produce decisions that violate someone’s rights, or that the people affected have no way to contest. Fairness metrics are not a guarantee that fairness is met.

Catastrophic and existential risk. Some proposals are concerned with severe misuse or loss of control that may happen when AI systems rapidly gain new capabilities. These concerns feature in parts of proposed regulations centered on AI safety and security, aimed at frontier AI firms at the cutting edge. Reporters should know that an AI system may be able to pass tests showing it does not pose catastrophic risks, but this does not mean it is safe for every deployment context.

National security. AI governance is seen as a key axis of U.S. competition with China, where strategic advantage can be won or lost. President Donald Trump’s administration in July 2025 released its AI Action Plan, which emphasizes U.S. leadership and competition. An influential preprint paper, “Superintelligence Strategy: Expert Version,” by Dan Hendrycks, Eric Schmidt and Alexandr Wang, proposes deterrence, competitiveness and nonproliferation in response to strategic competition.

Concentration of economic power. Many people are worried about a relatively small number of private firms wielding tremendous economic power. There are issues with dependence, restricted research and limited market entry for competitors. Open models and interoperability are among the approaches proposed to broaden access and competition. According to the AI 2040 governance scenario from the AI Futures Project, proposals can target several harms simultaneously. Its authors propose coordinated limits on superintelligence development alongside public research and broader participation across companies and countries, with transparency arrangements intended to support oversight.

Unequal access. Global and regional governmental bodies are concerned about unequal access to computational power, capacities to use and develop AI within firms and governments, and expertise on AI systems. The UN’s AI advisory body and the African Union have proposed measures to strengthen local capacity and broaden access, alongside regulation and accountability.

Rogue, reckless or reasonable actors

Harms from AI can emerge from actors behaving wholly reasonably. Other harms come from hostile actors.

Reporters who want to improve public understanding of proposed AI regulations can group and present those regulations by whether they target rogue, reckless or reasonable actors. The point of the grouping is to ask who a proposal is targeted at, and if its mechanism can reach that actor.

Rogue actors are not meaningfully disciplined by ordinary compliance and liability. They are outside governmental authority, or are insulated from reciprocal sanctions. Depending on the jurisdiction and circumstances, this group could include terrorists, adversarial states or rogue AI systems. Depending on the actor and leverage available to the government, responses may include domain-specific deterrence, denial and enforcement.

Reckless actors are within a governable regime but show little care for public welfare and safety. This might be because costs are small or externalized, expected enforcement is low, information is asymmetric, or the private payoff to speed or scale dominates the private payoff to caution. This is an incentives problem for policymakers. Standards, audits, and liability regimes can be designed to increase the expected costs of harmful conduct, but their effect depends on detection, enforceability and sanctions.

Reasonable actors follow laws, rules and norms. Harms can arise from interactions among actors even when individuals are compliant and non-negligent. For example, mass layoffs may cause social or political harm after an industry or large firm implements cost-saving technologies. Such harms raise coordination and distributional questions addressed by policies around competition, labor, economic policymaking and systemic risk, and no single AI-specific rule is likely to resolve them.

Existing governance frameworks can apply to people and organizations deploying AI, although autonomous systems can complicate issues like attribution, proof and allocation of responsibility. AI systems are being empowered with autonomous planning, operations and resource allocation abilities.

Regulations — and reporting about those regulations — need to explore the boundary of autonomy:

When is a human employee legally responsible for actions delegated to an agent? When is the firm responsible? Does the developer of an AI model, harness or tool bear responsibility?

Will regulation work?

For any proposed AI governance to work it must have a strong causal logic, where a requirement leads to reduced harm through changed conduct. That logic can fail even when everyone complies. Companies may substitute, move, or restructure their activity to avoid costs while technically complying.

Reporters should ask what a rule would change in practice and how firms would adapt to it, not only what it requires on paper.

For issues like pacing, which refers to moderating the growth of AI capabilities, it’s important that journalists ask regulators what slowing or pausing technological advancement would accomplish, and what progress might look like.

Reporters should also dig into how regulations may affect costs, opportunities and competitive positions differently across companies. Commercial technology firms generally face incentives to earn returns on investment. Depending on their position, they may benefit from expanding the industry, gaining market share or both. Competition and collaboration can serve these aims, but may also create tradeoffs.

A firm that publicly supports regulation may be supporting the version that raises its competitors’ costs more than its own.

A range of economists and lawyers are interested in publicly supervised but privately assured provisions for regulation. The 2023 “regulatory markets” proposal from Gillian Hadfield and Jack Clark would have governments set outcomes and oversee private regulators, with regulated firms required to buy services from approved regulators. The proposal would build a market for private AI regulators.

The public looks to regulation to correct market failures. Measures should address specific problems and should be supported with evidence.

But government regulation is not always productive, and the evidence on benefits and costs varies by application and intervention. Established harms can have substantial empirical evidence, while estimates concerning frontier capabilities and extreme outcomes depend more heavily on uncertain assumptions.

Many of today’s harms can be handled with regulatory tools that already exist. Some, though, are fundamentally different to the policy problems our institutions were built to handle. Proposals will need to treat AI systems both as instruments that people use and as agents that act on their behalf.

The scale of the regulatory challenge means that it will require the work of many agencies and legislators, and an omnibus bill is unlikely to adequately tackle all the challenges outlined here.

Reporters have a critical role to play in ensuring that the public understands, in plain language, the benefits and drawbacks of proposed regulatory efforts.

The post How to interrogate AI regulations appeared first on The Journalist's Resource.

Demographic changes in the U.S. are reshaping state budgets, housing policy and how we care for older Americans — and volatility has been the defining feature of population growth in the U.S. since the COVID pandemic.

Those are just a few of the big takeaways from our recent webinar, co-hosted with The Pew Charitable Trusts, on demographic changes and migration patterns.

I moderated the discussion, which featured three panelists:

• Alexandre Fall, principal associate with Pew’s Fiscal 50 project. His research helps policymakers understand fiscal, economic and demographic trends affecting their states by tracking tax revenue, reserves, employment rates, Medicaid spending and other issues important to long-term fiscal health.

• Sol Baik, senior researcher and project lead on aging and rehabilitative services research for the Demographics Research Group at the University of Virginia. She is responsible for building demographic data delivery for the Virginia Department of Aging and Rehabilitative Services.

• Riordan Frost, senior research analyst at the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies, who works on projects related to demographics, residential mobility, utilities, wealth inequality and homelessness.

It was a lively discussion that will help reporters covering demographics and migration understand population projections and other data, and find the stories beneath the topline numbers.

Watch the full hour below — and read on for five highlights.

1. Know that population change is increasingly driven by international migration, which can change quickly.

“Since the pandemic, volatility has been a defining feature of population growth,” Fall said.

There are two key reasons that populations change, he explained.

The first is called natural change. This is the difference between births and deaths.

The second is migration, which is simply people moving into or out of an area. At the national level, state-to-state migration doesn’t change overall population numbers.

Nationally, the population changes when people from overseas relocate to the U.S., or people from the U.S. relocate elsewhere.

“And in the last five years, population growth has swung down and up — and that has had a lot to do with international migration trends,” Fall said.

During the COVID pandemic in 2021, international migration plummeted.

In 2023 and 2024, it spiked.

Since last year, it has fallen again.

“The impacts of international migration have been felt all across the country,” Fall said. “For example, in 2025, 48 states saw a slowdown in their population growth, showing how this broad-level trend is affecting the nation as a whole in a synchronous way.”

2. Look at rates and raw numbers — they may tell different stories.

Many researchers and reporters focus on where high-income earners are moving to and where they’re leaving. Fall gave the example of Tennessee, which from 2018 to 2022 saw its high-income population grow more quickly than its low-income population.

“Given the amount of attention this group receives, you might naturally assume that they make up the largest share of people moving between states,” Fall said.

But in Tennessee, more lower-income earners settled in the state, even though the rate of growth was lower than high-income earners. This is because there are more lower-income earners to begin with, Fall explained — meaning that even a small percentage shift can represent a large number of people.

“Depending on the story you’re trying to tell, the topline number can obscure an important part of what’s happening underneath,” Fall said.

3. Understand what population projections mean and don’t mean.

Population projections at the world, national, state or more granular levels are based on assumptions. The University of Virgina’s Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service, where Baik works, produces population projections for every U.S. state based on past demographic trends.

When journalists cite population projections in news articles, or use projections to develop story ideas, Baik urges them to look at the methodologies and assumptions underlying the projections. Understanding the goals of the organization producing the projections can also provide helpful context to reporters.

For example, the U.S. Census Bureau and other federal agencies produce population projections that vary because of methodological assumptions. Reporters who understand methodologies and motivations will have a good sense of what projections can and can’t tell them.

Baik said she fields questions about the Cooper Center projections — What would happen if births dramatically decline? Or if international migration surges or drops?

“Our set of products did not make that specific assumption, so we cannot answer those questions,” she said. “However our data can actually serve you better for state-to-state comparisons, and if you are a journalist for a specific state you could compare your state’s projected growth compared to other nearby states.”

4. Know that when reporting on older Americans, some demographic categories may be broad.

Any reporter who has written about demographics will have used population data that is divided into age categories. Some categories, such as 65-plus, can include people with a huge range of abilities and needs related to their age and health.

This is also a fast-growing demographic category, from 43 million people over age 65 in 2012 to 58 million people over 65 in 2022, according to the most recent Housing America’s Older Adults report from the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies.

The broadness of this category is a data limitation that often comes down to sample sizes being too small when organizations or governments count or survey older Americans, Frost said.

A new edition of Housing America’s Older Adults is coming in January, he added. This report will dis-aggregate older Americans into two age categories: 65-79 and 80-plus.

5. Dig into these key data sources when reporting on demographics.

Frost pointed to three sources he uses for migration and demographic change research: the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, Current Population Survey and data from the Population Estimates Program.

“The ACS and CPS are both surveys, available from the Census,” Frost said. “I find that if you get them from IPUMS, which is out of the University of Minnesota, that makes it much more user-friendly, harmonized across years, easier to kind of understand variables as well — and both data sets are available from IPUMS.”

The ACS is Frost’s gold standard for demographic detail.

But, it is less recent than the CPS data, which is monthly and comes with an annual supplement in March “that has a lot of great migration and other details,” he said.

The PEP data is useful for reporters and researchers looking for information on net population change, net internal migration and net international migration, Frost said.

The post 5 takeaways from our webinar on demographic changes and migration appeared first on The Journalist's Resource.

The popular press is full of stories on the bleak economic outlook of recent college graduates. Journalists are tapping into real fears among students, parents, educators and policymakers about the value of college and the uncertainty of careers.

However, there is a tendency among reporters and commentators to focus on the educational and economic disruptions wrought by artificial intelligence.

This may be intuitive, but evidence suggests it is largely incorrect. Three findings from recent research run counter to this narrative:

• Difficulties facing young college graduates in the labor market predate the widespread adoption of generative AI.
• Remote work appears to be a major factor behind the deterioration in employment prospects for young college graduates.
• Earning a degree pays off, research shows, despite the rise in stories about the trades, blue-collar work and the supposed irrelevance of a college education.

AI is not the problem

It’s true that college graduates are facing an increasingly tight labor market. Recent data suggests job postings are down and well below pre-pandemic levels.

That last point is key.

The weakness in the early-career labor market did not begin with the recent explosion in generative AI. This trend can be traced back to the Great Recession, which ended in mid-2009.

There was some evidence of a slow post-recession recovery, but much of that progress was undone by COVID-19. The timeline matters: Employment difficulties facing young college graduates were already evident before generative AI became a major part of the workplace.

What, then, is the impact of AI on entry-level hiring? Two recent reports give us reason to be skeptical of claims that AI is driving the decline in entry-level opportunities.

First, a 2026 report from career networking firm Handshake shows employers increasingly want AI skills. As of March 2026, more than 10% of active internship postings mentioned AI-related keywords. Meanwhile, the share of full-time postings mentioning AI had nearly doubled year-over-year, reaching 4.2%.

Second, and even more encouraging, a report from the Strada Institute for the Future of Work suggests that AI may increase rather than decrease entry-level hiring. Strada surveyed nearly 1,500 executives and senior talent leaders and found that employers were 2.7 times more likely to expect AI to increase entry-level hiring this year as to decrease hiring.

This does not mean AI has no effect on entry-level work. It clearly does. Strada found that AI is changing the mix of tasks assigned to entry-level employees, reducing some routine and administrative work while increasing analytical and judgment-based responsibilities.

But there is a distinction between AI changing entry-level jobs and AI causing the collapse of entry-level hiring. The available evidence points strongly toward the former.

So if AI isn’t the primary cause of the recent downturn in entry-level employment, what else might be driving it? Remote work may be one of the most important factors.

Remote work as a barrier to entry-level employment

A June 2026 analysis from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York comparing pre-pandemic to post-pandemic unemployment rates shows that the unemployment rate of young graduates has increased relative to older workers in jobs that economists define as “remotable.”

Given the timing of the increase in remote work and unemployment among recent graduates, the New York Fed researchers conclude that remote work, rather than generative AI, explains much of the recent rise in young people’s unemployment rates.

Why would remote work have such a large effect on young workers?

The researchers argue that the four-fold increase in remote work since the pandemic has made it more difficult for employers to train and mentor inexperienced workers. They suggest this may limit the human capital young workers can build. The New York Fed researchers find that workers who were physically closer to colleagues received more feedback and mentorship, and that the loss of feedback was particularly pronounced for younger workers.

While economists might be inclined to focus on human capital, socialization may be equally important. The risks of hiring entry-level remote workers are obvious — employers cannot be certain these new employees will know the proper etiquette for communicating with managers, collaborating with colleagues, solving problems or understanding workplace norms. Teaching workplace etiquette remotely poses logistical and cultural challenges.

Socialization, rather than strict human capital accumulation, would explain why older employees may generally have an easier time finding remote jobs than younger employees. In-person work is known to have the opposite problem: age discrimination against older workers.

The way forward

With remote work and AI reshaping entry-level employment, many commentators argue that the answer is to skip college altogether — that higher education can no longer justify its high sticker price and uncertain labor-market prospects. That would be a mistake.

The relevant question is whether earning a degree improves students’ economic prospects. The research overwhelmingly suggests it does.

Still, college completion remains a major challenge. Financial returns vary substantially by institution, field of study and student. But abandoning college as a response to the difficulties of today’s entry-level labor market would discard this important source of economic mobility.

The better response is to change what students do while they are in college, and the Strada report offers a useful guide. When employers rate the skills they want from entry-level college graduates, critical thinking, communication and collaboration rank among the most important. These are all liberal arts competencies that most college graduates should develop.

In my recent work, I show that despite popular narratives exalting technical and applied degrees such as business and engineering, most college graduates draw on liberal arts competencies in their entry-level work, aligning with Strada’s survey of employers.

A liberal arts education can help students develop the capabilities needed to be effective in the contemporary workplace. These include AI competencies, which are less about coding and more about knowing what kind of prompts to feed AI, how to tweak the output, and how to combine personal expertise with machine-learning.

Another important piece for college graduates is accumulating work experience.

Strada found that work experience was the strongest indicator of career readiness among the factors it examined. This finding has important implications for colleges and students. Journalists covering higher education should know this too: If employers are reluctant to hire inexperienced workers into remote positions, students need opportunities to acquire meaningful workplace experience before graduation.

Internships, co-ops, project-based learning and other forms of work-based learning can provide that experience. These also give students opportunities to develop the communication, collaboration and workplace skills that employers say they value.

Students who graduate with a liberal arts education and meaningful work experience are better positioned to demonstrate that they can contribute in a modern workplace — whether that workplace is remote, hybrid or fully in person.

The entry-level labor market is at a crossroads. But evidence suggests that the problem is not simply that AI is eliminating jobs for recent college graduates.

The more complicated story is that the nature of entry-level work is changing. AI is altering the tasks workers perform, while remote work is making it harder for employers to train and mentor inexperienced employees.

And employers continue to value early-career candidates with foundational skills such as critical thinking and communication, as well as those who have spent time in a workplace.

That points toward a relatively straightforward response. Higher education institutions should give students opportunities to develop liberal arts skills and practical workplace experience.

Doing so would not eliminate the uncertainty that today’s graduates face. But it would address some of the underlying tensions that have made the transition from college to work increasingly difficult. News reporters, for their part, should ask university officials whether they are preparing students for the workforce in a way that is informed by this recent evidence.

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About 20% of Americans — and 37% of adults under 30 years old — rely on social media content creators for news and political updates, according to the Pew Research Center.

But there’s no verification badge or way of proving that information shared and reshared across social media is trustworthy or accurate. It’s easy for misinformation to spread rapidly, which can have dangerous repercussions for our democracy — especially when it comes to elections.

Content creators can play an important role during election cycles. They can point people to trustworthy resources — ideally straight to election officials. Many state and local election officials have social media pages where they post voter registration reminders, upcoming election dates and other timely updates.

By directing voters to election officials’ social media pages, as well as their websites and other materials, content creators can help voters quickly and easily find critical information, which they can then share with their followers. 

You don’t need to be a political content creator to share voting information. Over 60% of adult citizens have never been asked to register to vote, according to another Pew study. That means your voice could be the first they hear, even if you don’t usually discuss politics or elections.

Even basic information on how and when to register can be helpful, as many people struggle to get dates and deadlines on their calendars in time, or don’t realize they need to update their registration if they’ve recently moved. This can make the difference between someone voting or not voting. And in tight races, small margins make a meaningful difference.

Here are 10 tips for content creators covering election season.

1. Follow your state election offices on social media, and reshare their content with your audience.

Many state and county election offices are on social media, especially Instagram and Facebook. Follow them for up-to-date voting information and re-share it with your audience. With the dangerous spread of election misinformation and disinformation, it’s critical to share accurate information from trustworthy sources.

Your followers may not know they can follow their election officials on social media — you can help establish them as a trusted resource. 

2. It’s hard to keep track of election dates. Share short reminders about upcoming key dates. 

Primary elections are happening across states — in many states, they’ve already happened. In some states, special elections are happening too. It’s hard for voters to keep track of all these dates, so a short reminder can help get them on their calendars.

The U.S. Vote Foundation is a helpful resource for checking election dates by state. 

3. Remind voters they need to update their information if they’ve moved since the last election. 

Whenever you move, even within a state, you must update your voter registration — it won’t be automatically updated for you. Many voters don’t realize this until they show up to vote, and by then it can be too late.

Remind voters to double check their registration in advance. Each state has its own deadline — there’s no national deadline. In some states voters must update their registration well in advance, up to 30 days before Election Day. 

4. Election Day isn’t usually results day. Prepare your followers for delayed results. 

Many voters expect to find out who won on Election Day. This can be true for some races, but isn’t always the case. Content creators can prepare voters to wait for results by explaining that waiting is part of a secure voting process.

Election officials follow required procedures to count every ballot, including mailed ballots that are postmarked by Election Day but arrive days later. Your followers probably don’t realize all the steps that go into this process — you can share more to help them better understand that delayed results don’t mean anything has gone wrong.

In fact, it means the country’s election systems are working. 

5. Ask for a behind-the-scenes tour at your state or local election office, or set up an ask-me-anything with an election official.  

Some election offices offer tours so the media can photograph and get video footage as they perform required tests of voting machines to make sure they’re operating correctly.

Take advantage of these opportunities.

You can also request an ask-me-anything interview with an election official and pose questions straight from your followers. Some states will allow cameras inside polling locations when voters aren’t present.

6. Remind voters of their rights. 

Many voters don’t realize they have certain rights and access to accommodations to help them vote. 

Voters can:

• Bring someone to a polling location for support, including a service animal. 
• Request large-print ballots and wheelchair-accessible voting locations, in addition to other accessibility accommodations. 
• Ask for translation support if they don’t speak English as a first language.

7. Voting by mail and early voting are becoming more popular, and are both safe options. 

Early voting has become increasingly popular. It’s often faster than waiting in lines on Election Day. Remind your followers to check early voting dates in their state.

Voting by mail is another safe option if voters don’t want to go in person. It’s also not new.

Did you know that 150,000 soldiers voted by mail during the Civil War, and the military continues to vote by mail today?

Election officials make sure mail votes are counted accurately by issuing bar codes on ballots and return envelopes, verifying signatures through online databases, and other required steps. 

8. Encourage members of your audience to serve as poll workers — these are our neighbors, coworkers and friends. 

Millions of people are poll workers — your followers can be part of that number.

Serving as a poll worker is a great way to feel connected with your community and make sure your local elections run smoothly and securely. Plus, poll workers get paid for their time.

Learn more about how to become a poll worker.

9. Share your own voting experience.

Your followers trust you, so hearing about your voting experience — how you researched the candidates, how long it took to vote, how you felt after you voted— can inspire them to feel empowered to vote too.

10. Point people to trustworthy, nonpartisan sources.

Voting misinformation and disinformation has disastrous impacts on our democracy. Stick to nonpartisan sources that your followers can trust. Many of these sources have helpful tools and other materials to guide your voters through the voting process: 

• Vote.gov
• U.S. Election Assistance Commission
• National Association of Secretaries of State
• National Association of State Election Directors
• U.S. Vote Foundation
• Ballotpedia
• Howelectionswork.org
• Voter help hotline: Call or text 866-OUR-VOTE

The post 10 tips for content creators covering U.S. elections appeared first on The Journalist's Resource.

Headlines and news commentary routinely criticize college athletes and, more pointedly, their decisions to transfer to new schools and sign name, image and likeness deals.

Perhaps some of that scrutiny stems from fandom — the intensely personal connections we have with college sports — combined with the insulated, protective structure of collegiate athletics.

But the result is a profound misunderstanding and contextual mischaracterization of college athletes and college sports more broadly. College athletes, after all, did not create the increasingly commercial structure of college sports.

A recent peer-reviewed study I wrote with several colleagues illustrates how geography can shape the tone of news coverage of athlete transfers and NIL compensation. When an athlete transfers out of an institution within a news outlet’s coverage area, local reporting tends to be more critical. Across local and national outlets, criticism intensifies when financial compensation is believed to have influenced the transfer.

In this context, reporters often treat NIL deals — and financial incentives more broadly — as suspect in ways that would be unusual in most other U.S. labor markets.

A paradigm shift could improve both media coverage and public understanding of college athletics, particularly now that direct financial compensation is increasingly important for athletes in major Division I football and basketball programs.

The transfer portal often reflects rational labor market decisions.

The annual transfer rate among traditional college students at four-year universities hovers around 13%.

Among NCAA athletes, the transfer rate was 7.7% in 2025, up slightly from 7.3% in 2024. Simply put, NCAA athletes transfer at a lower rate than their non-athlete peers.

When athletes do transfer, their reasons are often both rational and familiar.

NCAA data on Division I and Division II transfers show athletes making decisions that resemble those of workers considering new employment: They weigh opportunity, fit, status, future prospects and, increasingly, compensation.

Over the past four years, 30.9% of Division II transfer athletes moved to a Division I institution. In the overall labor market, this would resemble an employee at a regional company accepting a position at a national one in pursuit of greater status, exposure or opportunity.

Meanwhile, 96.4% of Division I transfer athletes from 2022 to 2025 moved either to another Division I institution or to a Division II program. That movement can also be rational as research indicates athletes seek playing time and institutional settings better aligned with their abilities and goals. A marginal Division I athlete moving to Division II, for example, may be making the equivalent decision of a mid-level manager accepting a more senior role at a smaller company.

On the whole, the transfer portal reflects labor movement that would be considered ordinary in many other settings — and even in collegiate athletics.

Among NCAA Division I athletic departments, the average employee turnover rate is 48% every two years, according to one analysis. Division II and Division III athletic departments have average turnover rates of 58% and 44%, respectively. Those figures are comparable to turnover rates in sectors such as food service, general retail, and construction — industries defined by part-time status and consistent labor mobility.

An assistant basketball coach at a major program that accepts a position as head coach at a mid-major program is celebrated as taking the next step in their career.

A head football coach at a Group of 6 program that accepts a coordinator position at a Power 4 program is similarly praised.

However, the labor decisions that college athletes make are often viewed and treated differently. This is the case even though they exist within the same setting as coaches and athletic administrators.

Collegiate athletics increasingly resembles a textbook labor market.

College sports have never been wholly detached from compensation.

Long before NIL, revenue sharing and the transfer portal, top athletes could receive benefits beyond an athletic scholarship through informal or prohibited channels. Although what once happened largely “under the table” is now increasingly happening above it, the formal status of college athletes is largely unchanged.

I encourage reporters to consider the basic relationship: A university recruits an athlete for a specialized skill, trains that athlete, outfits the athlete in its uniform, and benefits financially and reputationally from the athlete’s performance.

Today, at institutions that have opted into revenue sharing, athletes can also receive direct compensation from their schools. Yet they are not treated as employees by their universities or, typically, in news coverage.

Among institutions participating in revenue sharing, athletes receive 1099 tax forms, which are for freelance or self-employed workers, rather than W-2s, which go to regular employees.

Payments directly from colleges and universities are characterized as royalties tied to conference multimedia rights agreements — agreements negotiated independently of an individual athlete’s enrollment or participation on a team.

Calling these payments royalties may have practical advantages. In particular, classifying revenue-sharing payments as passive income can allow international athletes studying in the U.S. on F-1 visas to receive compensation from their institutions, while traditional NIL compensation is generally treated as active income and can raise immigration restrictions.

But the arrangement also exposes the conceptual tension in the system. Athletes receive money from the institutions they compete for, based in substantial part on the value they provide to those programs, while the institutions deny an employer-employee relationship.

This same ambiguity surrounds NIL.

When an athlete signs a genuine third-party endorsement deal, independent-contractor status makes intuitive sense. Nike, for example, does not employ an athlete who appears in an advertisement. Rather, it contracts with that athlete to license their name, image or likeness.

Many NIL opportunities for college athletes, however, are much smaller and more local. For example, they may be endorsement deals with a restaurant, apparel company or other business partnering with a recognizable athlete to reach consumers in a college market. Those arrangements are essentially influencer-marketing tactics applied to college athletes.

The more complicated category of NIL compensation involves booster-backed NIL collectives.

After the Supreme Court’s 2021 decision in NCAA v. Alston, NIL collectives proliferated around major athletic programs. Formally separate from universities, they solicited money from boosters and used those funds to compensate athletes for promotional appearances, autographs, youth camp instruction, and other NIL-related activities.

Following the House v. NCAA settlement in 2024, and the introduction of direct institutional revenue sharing, the distinction between institutional and NIL compensation has become even more ambiguous.

At some schools, payments from athletic department revenue-sharing budgets and affiliated NIL entities can reach athletes through the same payment systems, even though the money is legally characterized in different ways.

The practical result is that athletes can now receive compensation through multiple mechanisms connected to the institutions for which they compete — while still lacking employee status, benefits, or collective representation.

Regardless of one’s view of athlete compensation, this structure matters because it shapes how athlete behavior is interpreted. If collegiate athletics is understood as a labor market, then actions such as transferring, negotiating compensation, or seeking better opportunities looks less like instability and more like ordinary economic behavior.

The final takeaway: Stop blaming athletes.

College athletes did not negotiate billion-dollar media-rights agreements, expand athletic department staffs, approve escalating coaching salaries or spark the facilities arms race that for decades has defined major college athletics.

Yet athletes are frequently positioned as the source of instability when they transfer, seek greater compensation, or make decisions based on their economic interests.

That framing gets the economics backward.

Ticket prices, operating expenses and athletic department budgets were rising long before athletes could legally benefit from NIL or receive direct compensation from their institutions.

Consumer interest has hardly disappeared. Football and basketball remain enormously valuable media properties, while sports that historically drew smaller audiences have found new opportunities for exposure and growth.

Even the transfer portal — often described as evidence of chaos — can be viewed differently.

Player movement creates year-round storylines, much as free agency does in professional sports.

For media companies and athletic conferences whose business models depend heavily on consistent sports content, there is economic value in keeping college athletics in the news beyond the traditional playing season.

None of this means the current system is functioning perfectly. Really, it’s quite the opposite.

The larger problem is that collegiate athletics has embraced many characteristics of a traditional labor market without fully acknowledging the labor relationship at its center. Athletes can receive revenue-sharing payments, earn NIL compensation, be recruited according to perceived market value, and move between institutions when better opportunities emerge.

However, college athletes still lack formal and recognized employment status, benefits or collective representation that accompany comparable labor relationships elsewhere.

Such contradiction matters as financial compensation can expand opportunity while simultaneously preserving institutional control. The availability of NIL deals should not automatically be understood as liberation, nor should revenue sharing be treated as evidence that the underlying power relationship has been resolved. Compensation and autonomy are related, but they are not synonymous.

For many athletes, the transfer portal remains one of the clearest mechanisms through which they can exercise individual leverage. An athlete who lacks playing time, believes they are undervalued, wants a different academic environment, or otherwise receives a better opportunity elsewhere can choose to leave.

Those decisions may frustrate coaches and fans, but frustration does not make an athlete’s decision irrational. Such decisions look irrational when we apply a framework to college athletes that we would scarcely apply elsewhere.

An employee who changes organizations for more money may be called ambitious. A student who transfers universities in search of a better fit is making a personal choice. A professional athlete who signs with a new team is participating in free agency. When a college athlete acts on some combination of those same considerations, the choice is often presented as evidence that something has gone wrong with college sports.

I encourage journalists covering collegiate athletics to be especially attentive to that distinction.

Terms such as “chaos,” “greed,” “overpay,” “turmoil” and even “free agency” can carry assumptions about what athletes owe institutions and which motivations are considered legitimate. Coverage that emphasizes a departure without considering playing time, educational fit, professional opportunity, compensation, or institutional circumstances risks presenting ordinary economic decision making as deviant behavior.

The challenge for reporters is to apply a consistent framework when covering athletes’ decisions.

Collegiate athletics has changed dramatically, but athletes seeking opportunity is not evidence of irrationality. Indeed, in many cases it is actually evidence that they finally possess enough economic leverage to behave much like everyone else participating in an American labor market.

If we want to understand modern college sports, we could start by describing that behavior for what it is: rational decision making in a defined labor market.

The post Sports reporters rarely cover college athletes as employees — they should. appeared first on The Journalist's Resource.

In some parts of the country, college sports — especially basketball and football — are more popular and more important to local communities than professional sports.

That means athletes who also happen to be students often encounter intense scrutiny from the news media and fans. Add sports betting into a cultural landscape where every first down and every missed bucket matters, and that scrutiny becomes more intense.

It also means that college students can, in many states, bet on the games in which their classmates play.

With name, image and likeness, or NIL, deals in the mix, some athletes are paid hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars all the while opportunities to bet on sports are, seemingly, everywhere.

We recently convened an hourlong webinar with EconoFact, a nonpartisan publication out of Tufts University, to help journalists gain nuance and understanding of how the vast availability of sports betting affects athletes and non-athletes in higher education.

I moderated the discussion with Michael Klein, the William L. Clayton Professor of International Economic Affairs at Tufts and founder of EconoFact.

We were joined by Jodi Balsam, professor of clinical law and director of the Sports Law Clinic at Brooklyn Law School, and Nicole Kraft, professor of journalism practice and director of the Sports and Society Institute at The Ohio State University.

We opened the hour discussing the case of Brendan Sorsby, a former college quarterback who placed thousands of sports wagers worth at least $90,000 from 2022 to 2025, according to multiple reports.

Sorsby had committed to playing for Texas Tech in January, with an NIL deal estimated at about $5 million. After Sorsby’s wagering became public, the NCAA ruled him permanently ineligible for violating the organization’s rules on gambling.

In early June, a district court judge in Lubbock County, where Texas Tech is located, ruled that Sorsby would suffer “irreparable injury” if he were not allowed to play, effectively paving the way for the quarterback to take the field. The NCAA appealed.

“The theory of the appeal was that it would undermine the integrity of college sports, that it basically rewrites these member-adopted rules around sports integrity,” Balsam said during the webinar.

She added that the case didn’t set legal precedent, but it was a “watershed moment.”

“We have an individual who’s engaged in serial violations of NCAA anti-gambling rules, and it would incentivize a run on courthouses across the country to challenge basically any NCAA rule in the rulebook,” Balsam said.

The NCAA’s appeal was never resolved. Athletic directors at other prominent sports universities moved to boycott Texas Tech. By mid-June, Sorsby had left the school. He tried to enter professional football, but the National Football League denied him for 2026.

We covered much more during the hour and it’s well worth your time to watch the entire thing. In addition, here are a few story ideas for reporting on these topics.

Investigate how gambling affects student mental health.

One angle to explore is how student-athletes cope with stressors related to the ubiquity of sports betting, such as messages and harassment online and in person from bettors who lose wagers.

“What we’re seeing now is the vitriol that athletes experience just because people’s team that they rooted for lost — that was bad enough — but now people are losing money,” Kraft said.

Some harassment is directly related to prop bets, which are bets made on whether a specific player will hit or miss a mark — say, run for at least 100 yards in a football game, or score 20 or more points in a basketball game.

Because prop bets are linked to the performance of an athlete, rather than the team, they can fuel harassment of individual players.

Finding athletes and college students who bet on sports and are willing to talk on the record can take time, Kraft said.

“A lot of it is about relationship building, which every reporter knows is not the easiest thing to do, especially in collegiate athletics,” Kraft said. “But the more conversations you have with someone, the more likely they are to be willing to share that story.”

And some universities regularly perform surveys and outreach related to student wellness. It’s worth investigating whether those surveys are asking enough about mental health harms related to sports betting among athletes and non-athletes alike — or whether they’re asking about sports betting at all.

“Simply having journalists ask questions about that might raise the sensitivity, so that [universities] track the issue more closely,” Balsam said.

Cover legislation and regulations on the horizon, especially around prop betting.

In 2024, Ohio gaming regulators banned prop bets on college sports. Officials cited links between prop betting and player harassment, and the NCAA had pushed for the ban.

Several other states have restricted betting on college sports. Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Iowa, Maine, Massachusetts, South Dakota, Washington and Wisconsin have banned bets on college teams from their states, according to a 2024 report from the National Conference of State Legislatures.  

The Indiana Gaming Commission will meet in September to consider a ban on prop betting in college sports, according to Andrea Jimenez, a policy specialist with the NCSL. Since the 2024 report, Missouri has passed legislation allowing sports betting, but the state bans prop bets on teams representing in-state colleges and universities.

States that to varying degrees ban prop betting on college sports, according to research Jimenez has conducted, include Arizona, Florida, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Nebraska, Pennsylvania, Vermont and Virginia.

Check with your state’s gaming commission for current rules and regulations around betting on college sports. If your state doesn’t ban prop bets on college sports, pay close attention to potential legislative or regulatory action around those types of bets.

“There will be more restrictions coming, there will be guardrails put in, there will be a kind of a narrowing of the space that gambling entities can be in — and that’s going to come from a legislative body,” Kraft said.

Examine how other countries address integrity issues.

College sports has not reached a tipping point at which sports betting is seriously threatening the integrity of competition, Balsam and Kraft explained. Most student-athletes are not gambling or involved in bribery schemes, and they play honestly.

But, Balsam added, it’s worth looking at regulations and legislation in other countries to understand how U.S. authorities might address integrity-of-the-game concerns.

For example, Balsam pointed to legislative efforts in Spain and England to limit advertising from sportsbooks. Research published in the Harm Reduction Journal in 2025 suggests that the Spanish decree reduced the total money gambled, but not the average number of active accounts with online sportsbooks.

There are bipartisan efforts at the federal level to limit sportsbook advertising in the U.S. Some states, such as New York and New Jersey, have considered restricting sportsbook ads. The NCAA has hired private firms to monitor integrity concerns.

Sports reporters covering gambling on college sports should also know about the Macolin Convention, Balsam said. It’s an international treaty aimed at combating manipulation of sporting contests. Dozens of European nations have signed it, along with Australia and Morrocco. The U.S. has not.

Australia also has a regulatory agency whose mandate is to protect sports integrity.

In the U.S., finding the regulatory balance between sportsbooks and states that want to maximize revenue — while maintaining integrity and the interest of fans, sponsors and the news media — is going to be “an ongoing calibration,” Balsam said.

The post Sports betting on campus: Story ideas from our webinar appeared first on The Journalist's Resource.

This piece is republished with permission from Land Lines Magazine, a publication of the nonprofit Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

Owning property and leaving it to one’s family has long been considered fundamental to the American dream, a cornerstone of generational wealth. The U.S. has one of the world’s most established private real estate markets, and individuals and investors alike expect that their property rights will be protected.

Yet hundreds of thousands of Americans own property in a state of precariousness and vulnerability that echoes informal settlements elsewhere in the world. The homes they’ve lived in for years, often inherited from parents or ancestors without a will, confer upon them the responsibilities but not the legal protections of homeownership. Such properties can easily be subject to a forced sale with little warning.

Many owners of “heirs property” may not realize just how tenuous their claim to their home or land is, until they’re at risk of losing it.

Heirs property exists all over the country, in both rural and urban settings — though it’s most widespread across the South — and disproportionately impacts Black Americans, who for generations have experienced discrimination and exclusion from the kinds of legal and financial systems that undergird the formalized processes of homeownership.

Indeed, the exploitation of heirs property is seen as a major reason Black Americans suffered more than 11 million acres of involuntary land loss between 1910 and 1997, representing more than $325 billion in lost wealth. Developers from North Carolina to Florida have managed to pry heirs property from Gullah/Geechee descendants of enslaved West Africans, who were among the first African Americans to own substantial land holdings. In places like Hilton Head, South Carolina, such family land has been converted into valuable coastal real estate — in most cases, without the consent of the rightful owners.

In January, the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy convened more than two dozen legal experts, practitioners, and community advocates to discuss challenges associated with heirs property.

“Researchers know the problem very well, and have experience with local communities,” says Xinrui Shi, associate director of comparative law and land policy at the Lincoln Institute. “But we can help them connect the dots on the policy side — we see the connection of heirs property to the property tax, disaster management, economic development, and systemic injustices. So the objective of the conference was to bring these different types of expertise together to see how land policies can help address the challenges at a systems level.”

Fractional ownership and forced sales

Heirs property creates two big vulnerabilities “that often intersect and interact with each other,” says Heather K. Way, director of the Housing Policy Clinic at University of Texas School of Law.

The first is fractional ownership. When multiple family members inherit a property together, each heir gets an “undivided interest” in the property — meaning they own a share of the whole thing, not a specific, divisible portion of it. As generations pass, the number of co-owners can grow exponentially — from, say, four children, to 13 grandchildren, to 42 great-grandchildren. 

That fractionated ownership makes heirs property highly vulnerable to a forced sale, Way says: “Under our partition laws, any outside party can acquire any of the heirs’ interest in the property, and file a partition action.”

A partition action is simply a legal mechanism to sever co-ownership in this type of situation; it’s up to a court to decide whether a property can be physically divided in proportion to everyone’s share. While 10 acres of open land can potentially be split evenly among five heirs, there’s no fair way to divvy up a house.

“For properties in urban areas or smaller lots, that’s going to inevitably lead to a forced sale of the land,” Way says.

What that means is that a distant relative with a small interest in an inherited property can file a partition action to essentially cash out their share of the estate. But it also means a developer can seek out such heirs and purchase their shares, with the intent of filing for partition. In either case, partition can result in a forced sale of the entire property — often at auction, for pennies on the dollar — even if other descendants are actively living there and caring for the property.

Mavis Gragg, North Carolina-based attorney and co-founder of HeirShares, recalls the case of two brothers she worked with, aged 18 and 23. They were living in their grandmother’s home, where they had been raised. But when the grandmother died, the brothers ended up co-owning the house with her widower, who moved away and remarried. He filed a partition action, but the brothers couldn’t afford to buy him out.

Since the house couldn’t be physically, equitably divided, “the partition action actually triggered a possibility of homelessness for the kids,” Gragg says.

“The fact that we have inheritance laws is speaking to the American dream,” she adds. “Owning something, taking care of your family, you have so much more agency when you own real estate. But our laws fall short of actually making it successful across generations.”

Tangled titles

Heirs property usually, though not always, involves a second vulnerability: A clouded or tangled title, meaning there’s no legal paper trail showing who inherited the property.

“Heirs property owners are highly susceptible to loss,” Gragg says. “But the real challenge for most families with inherited property is that they don’t have a clear ownership history.”

Someone who’s living in an inherited family home is, in a sense, experiencing land informality. When an occupant’s name doesn’t match the property’s deed, and they can’t prove ownership, “they face tenure insecurity, lack of access to capital, and barriers to obtaining insurance or other forms of protection,” says Semida Munteanu, associate director of valuation and land markets at the Lincoln Institute.

While they’re still responsible for paying taxes and maintaining the property, it can be difficult for heirs property occupants to access assistance, such as property tax relief programs designed to help low-income homeowners stay in their homes. A homestead exemption, for example, can reduce an owner occupant’s property tax burden by thousands of dollars a year — but only if they can prove ownership.

“Tax relief programs are designed to prevent people from being forced out of their homes due to high property tax bills, but most programs have homeownership requirements for eligibility,” Munteanu says. “When you can’t prove that you’re the owner through traditional means, such as a recorded title deed, then you may not have access to the relief.”

And that, Way says, makes heirs property owners more susceptible to another form of land loss: property tax foreclosure. In studying the prevalence of heirs properties among tax foreclosures in Dallas and Fort Worth, Texas, Way found a striking connection: “In Tarrant and Dallas counties, over half of the property tax foreclosures are heirs properties, which is really stunning.” 

Lost opportunity

Even if a property is not forcibly sold through partition or through tax foreclosure, heirs property owners can lose out on wealth in other ways.

It’s difficult to get a home equity loan or home insurance with a clouded title, for example, or to sell the property at market value. (Most buyers, and their lenders, will insist upon a clear title.) Any meaningful action, like refinancing the mortgage or replacing the roof, requires the written consent of every single heir.

And it’s difficult to access home improvement loans or even most home repair assistance programs when one’s name doesn’t match the deed. That can make it harder to modernize or weatherize a property, or to keep up with necessary maintenance.  

Theoretically, a lender could extend a loan secured by heirs property, says Cassandra Johnson Gaither, research social scientist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service.

“But practically speaking, that’s not likely to happen,” she adds, when there are potentially dozens of heirs all over the country. “Because the creditor would have to get the agreement of all of the co-owners — and in many cases, that is next to impossible to do, even if the lender was willing to.”

“We know that one of the impediments heirs property owners face is being able to maintain their property and to keep it in good condition,” Way says. State and local programs provide billions of dollars in home repair assistance to low-income homeowners, “but in the vast majority of cases, those programs are off-limits to heirs property owners with tangled titles,” Way says. 

Often that’s just the result of policy inertia, she adds, with program rules rooted in the understandable caution of the city lawyers who drafted them. But Way says it’s important to consider the intersection between heirs property and other issues in our communities.

“If you’re barring the ability of heirs property homeowners to access home repair assistance, they’re not going to be able to repair or maintain their homes, and those are the homes that are eventually going to become abandoned and vacant,” Way says. “And that’s going to create all sorts of other costs and impacts for cities in the long run, in terms of tax delinquencies, code enforcement costs, demolition costs,” she adds. “So not only does that result in robbing that family of their greatest asset by not facilitating their ability to repair or maintain their home, it’s going to have all these ripple effects and direct costs to cities and to communities in the form of abandoned and vacant properties.”

Johnson Gaither stresses that many heirs property owners take very good care of their parcels. But the uncertainty of ownership status can often make heirs property owners reluctant to invest time or money in a property — which can increase risks for the broader community, and not just in urban areas.

“Broadly speaking, because of the insecurities around this kind of property ownership, owners — if they even know that they have an ownership interest in the property — are probably less likely to invest in it,” Johnson Gaither says. “If they’re not investing in the property, they’re not, say, managing for wildfire. They’re not clearing the understory if they have forest land.”

The US legal system: A fixer-upper

At the January conference, attendees discussed some of the ongoing efforts to remedy heirs property issues, and what more can be done.

One legislative effort to address some of the worst impacts of partition sales is the Uniform Partition of Heirs Property Act, now adopted by 23 states and introduced in six more. Under the UPHPA, when one heir or co-owner seeks a partition, the remaining co-owners have a right of first refusal — a chance to organize and buy out the lone petitioner.

If a buyout isn’t possible, the court must take into account sentimental value and family legacy, and give real preference to dividing the property rather than selling it. And if a sale is deemed necessary, the property must be appraised for its fair market value and sold on the open market, rather than at auction.

Some states have modified the law further — as in New York, where only heirs, not investors, can start the partition process.

Another policy states can readily adopt is to allow heirs property owners to provide alternative proof of ownership to qualify for property tax relief or other assistance. Texas, for example, now allows heirs to submit an affidavit along with other documents as proof of ownership in their application for a homestead exemption.

When it comes to disaster relief, the Federal Emergency Management Agency since 2021 has allowed heirs property owners to submit a statement of ownership to access individual assistance recovery funds. (After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, up to $165 million in relief funds went unclaimed due to title issues.) But some longer-term relief is administered through block grants from the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which has yet to make such a change — though some states, including Texas and Louisiana, now accept sworn affidavits and other documentation as proof of ownership for these funds. 

States can also make it easier for homeowners to pass on their property — more akin to designating a beneficiary for a 401(k) than drawing up a will, which involves cumbersome, costly processes for both generations. In order for a will to be effective, heirs have to file it through probate court, which can take a lot of time and money, says Francine Miller, senior staff attorney at Vermont Law and Graduate School’s Center for Agriculture and Food Systems.

“But there are tools, and they’re different in every state, to transfer real property without it having to go through a will,” she says.

More than 30 states now permit either a transfer-on-death deed or a lady bird deed (so called because President Johnson reportedly used this method to transfer property to his wife), “where you can literally sign a deed to a person, and it doesn’t take effect until you die, and then it doesn’t have to go through probate,” Miller says. “They have to file that with the land records in order to transfer the title, but that’s a whole lot easier than probate.”

Of trust and trusts

For legal reforms to work as intended, they need to consider input from impacted communities, says Josiah ‘Jazz’ Watts, community engagement director for Vulnerable Communities Initiative and justice strategist for One Hundred Miles.

“You can technically and legally do a lot of things to help people,” he says, “but if you do not understand the dynamics of families, it could all be in vain, and it may not have the positive impact that it needs to have.”

Some Gullah/Geechee residents, for example, pushed back against a loan program in the 2018 Farm Bill that accepted heirs property as collateral, concerned that it could lead to further loss of ancestral lands.

In researching cases where heirs property owners had gone through the title clearing process, Johnson Gaither heard similar sentiments.

“The supposition is that once these titles are cleared, that should enable people to move more into the economic mainstream,” Johnson Gaither says.

While people who had a cleared title were, unsurprisingly, more likely to assume loans, “a good number of them were not interested in getting loans,” she says. “They didn’t want to get into a situation where their property might be taken away from them — that was really stressed.”

Clearing a property’s title can be costly — if it’s even possible to do. Pew Charitable Trusts estimated the average cost of resolving a tangled title in Philadelphia to be $9,200. Legal aid organizations and law school clinics can offer heirs property owners free or discounted services, but their capacity and reach is limited.

“Being able to find strong legal partners, good attorneys that you can trust, in small rural towns— that can be extremely difficult,” Watts says. But in some of the communities he works with along the Georgia coast, “once a year they will have an estate planning clinic,” he says, with partners such as the Georgia Heirs Property Law Center, Georgia Legal Services, or Atlanta Legal Aid.

“Those partnerships are incredible success stories,” he adds. “We have had partnerships with private law firms, through their pro bono departments, and then also with great attorneys like Veronica McClendon, who has done work on Sapelo Island and in other places for families, where she’s helped them to secure their estates and also fight against unfounded claims on their family land.”

Such education and outreach is also crucial to preventing the creation of more heirs property. The Initiative on Land, Housing, and Property Rights at Boston College School of Law, for example, has partnered with the Massachusetts Affordable Housing Alliance to include a session on estate planning as part of the organization’s first-time homebuyer curriculum. 

While creating a will or a transfer-on-death deed is an important baseline step for homeowners, Gragg says entity-centered forms of estate planning, such as living trusts or LLCs, are better suited to ensuring property stays in a family for generations.

“If we’re thinking about multiple generations of real estate ownership, individual wills are not enough,” she says, because they only apply to a single transfer. Even if every family member makes a will — which is rarely the case — that only secures the home for a single generation.

“Think about conservation easements,” she explains. “The reason we make them perpetual is because we want to ensure that certain things happen over time. That requires very specific conditions, it’s a comprehensive strategy.” Instead of relying on a patchwork of individual wills, an entity-centered model lays out a plan for the property itself under a single, broader umbrella.

Forming a trust or family LLC is more expensive than a basic will, but Gragg says these are investments worth making. “The reality is that it can cost thousands of dollars to [set up a trust],” Gragg says. “But I think paying those thousands of dollars is a much better deal than losing hundreds of thousands of dollars in value because you lost ownership due to a partition.”

It can be difficult for families — and, for that matter, legislators — to discuss death and the uncertainty of the future. But heirs property experts say these conversations are essential.

“I always tell families, especially matriarchs and patriarchs,” Watts says, “that today, right now, you have the power to craft what the legacy will be for your family. For your name. For your land.”

The post Understanding heirs property appeared first on The Journalist's Resource.

The amount of debt held by the public is nearly equal to the size of the entire economy.

Why does this matter, and how can journalists make the national debt relevant to audiences who don’t normally follow the news on government borrowing and spending?

To answer those and other questions, we convened a webinar on July 14 with three scholars who study the national debt and fiscal issues. EconoFact, a nonpartisan website from Tufts University that covers economic policy, co-hosted the webinar.

The panelists were Daniel Bergstresser, an associate professor of finance at Brandeis University; Karen Dynan, a professor of the practice in the Department of Economics at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University; and Douglas Elmendorf, a distinguished service professor at Harvard who served as dean of the Kennedy School and previously as director of the Congressional Budget Office.

I moderated the discussion with Michael Klein of Tufts University, founder and executive editor of EconoFact.

The federal debt held by the public stands at nearly $31.5 trillion. Intragovernmental debt, the amount the federal government owes its agencies and trust funds, is about $7.6 trillion, or “money in one pocket that is owed out of another pocket,” as Bergstresser said during the webinar.

It’s the public debt, over $31 trillion, that represents how much the federal government owes to the bond market. Read our explainer on the national debt for more detail about how the federal government borrows money to make up for budget gaps.

And watch the webinar below. But, if you don’t have time, keep reading for three takeaways.

1. Explain that high debt increases the risk of a fiscal crisis, but it’s not the only factor.

The panelists discussed the potential for a fiscal crisis in which interest rates rise and a recession follows.

The higher interest rates are, the higher the cost of borrowing.

Since the federal government finances roughly one quarter of its yearly operations through borrowing, higher interest rates mean it costs more to run the government.

A fiscal crisis centering on higher interest rates would stem from a crisis of confidence among investors who buy U.S. securities, like bonds. Those securities are essentially loans. When investors lose confidence in the government’s ability to pay back its debts, they demand higher interest rates.

“Such a crisis could raise interest rates for anyone trying to borrow money,” Dynan said. “It could trigger disruptions for banks and pension funds, and it could cause a recession and widespread job loss.”

Reporters can help the public better understand the national debt by explaining that high federal debt doesn’t mean a fiscal crisis is imminent — but it does increase the risk.

“Crises do not occur when a single indicator crosses a particular threshold, nor are they typically caused by individual policy errors,” Elmendorf said. “Instead, crises tend to emerge from interactions among high debt, political dysfunction and stresses in financial institutions.”

Crises are also determined by investor expectations, Elmendorf explained.

If investors think fiscal policy will change and their interest returns will be affected, they’ll adjust how much they expect to make in return for lending to the government.

And interest rates on government debt affect the interest rates paid by businesses and everyday Americans, Dynan said. Businesses and households looking for loans, whether to hire workers or to take out a mortgage, pay more when the government pays more.

2. Offer scale and context for the size of the national debt.

The national debt held by the public is nearly equal to the nation’s gross domestic product — meaning public debt is roughly the size of the entire economy. GDP measures the value of all goods and services produced in the U.S.  

Rather than solely reporting the dollar value of the public debt, reporting the debt-to-GDP ratio allows for comparisons across time, which can provide context. Debt-to-GDP spiked from about 80% before COVID and has hovered near 100% since the pandemic.

“Federal debt at 100% of GDP is large relative to our history in the United States,” Berstresser said. “The only precedent for this in the U.S. is the end of World War II.”

The reason debt-to-GDP is a good contextual figure is that it’s a proxy for the tax base that the government could draw from to pay back the debt, Klein explained.

“You don’t want just the absolute number because the economy is much larger than it was in 1946 or 1960 or 1980,” he said. “Just looking at the number by itself doesn’t give you that much information. It’s the number relative to the potential resources available in order to pay the money that’s owed.”

Debt-to-GDP also allows for international comparisons, Bergstresser added.

Reporters can use this ratio to compare the ability of the U.S. government to pay off its debt with the relative debt situation in other countries.

3. Remind audiences that more debt means less ability to spend on other priorities.

When the national debt is relatively high the federal government is less able to respond to societal needs, whether related to climate change, a pandemic, national security or something else.

It’s a concept called fiscal space, which says that a government’s ability to spend — and its ability to borrow to spend — is limited.

“The more debt we’re carrying, the less, as a country, the less ability we have to respond to emerging needs,” Elmendorf said.

High government debt also tends to raise interest rates. As interest rates are pushed up by government borrowing, some households and businesses will forgo taking out loans because they’re too expensive. It’s an economic concept called “crowding out.”

“The cost of all this debt is that it crowds out private investment or other investment in productive capacity,” Bergstresser said. “Anytime somebody talks about a future that involves productivity growth or new technologies that will enable productivity growth, typically those are going to require a great deal of investment.”

The post The national debt: Inform your coverage with these 3 tips from our webinar appeared first on The Journalist's Resource.

Headlines warn of a college mental health crisis.

We hear statistics about high rates of depression and anxiety and the picture seems clear: Gen Z faces unprecedented challenges to their mental health and well-being. The culprits are seemingly easy to identify, from growing up during the pandemic to social media.

But what if that narrative is getting in the way of helping young adults?

As a developmental psychologist with more than 25 years of experience working with young adults, I have seen the “crisis narrative” impede our understanding of what is going on for young people. Even more troubling, this narrative can inadvertently create obstacles to supporting youth who need help.

Suicide is the second leading cause of death among Americans ages 10 to 34. We should never underestimate the struggle that young people are facing or the reality of the data about youth mental health.

Instead, the key is to develop a better understanding of what is a clinical mental health concern and what struggles are typical, expected and developmentally appropriate to this age group.

Here are three shifts journalists can make when covering college mental health.

1. Retire the “kids these days” narrative.

Growing up, coming of age and navigating the disorientation of the college experience has always been hard.

The opportunity to ask the big questions — Who am I? What do I want for my life? How am I going to get there? — has always opened the door to stress and uncertainty.

Nearly 80 years of archival research on college students reveals that this generation of young adults is struggling in ways that are familiar.

As co-director of the Transition to Adulthood Lab at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, I have studied college student experiences dating back to the 1940s. Together, developmental psychologist Nancy Hill and I have documented how the pressure to succeed, uncertainty about the future and the stress of an uncertain job market have shaped the experience of coming of age across generations.

These challenges and their emotional impact are developmental, not generational — meaning 18-to-22-year-olds in previous generations navigated extremely similar emotional terrain while dealing with typical challenges, such as moving away from home and building one’s own adult identity.

The most striking evidence of these intergenerational connections comes from a cohort of students from the Class of 1975 at Harvard and Radcliffe Colleges. When we returned to this cohort and re-interviewed them fifty years after graduation, they assumed their experiences were profoundly different from those of their children and grandchildren.

But, when they listened to their past interviews, they discovered instead how much they had in common with later generations.

When we share quotes from the 1970s interviews with college students today, they marvel at the surprising similarities around achievement pressure, anxiety and depression. While the language and cultural references change, the emotional experiences persist.

This does not mean nothing has changed. Social media, the pandemic and artificial intelligence have reshaped daily life and intensified many emotional experiences of young adulthood, including an increase in perfectionism and risk-aversion. But this is a story of intensity — a heightened emotional experience — rather than something new and unprecedented.

Given the increase in intensity, it is more important than ever that we continue to expand and fund campus mental health services so that students who do need clinical care have access.

For journalists, a “generation in crisis” might feel like a compelling narrative. But a more accurate and nuanced story would look at how common experiences that transcend generations may have intensified for young people today.

By helping audiences understand what is typical and what is not — and resisting the “kids these days” framing — caring adults will be better equipped to identify the signs that someone needs a clinical referral (like when emotional challenges persist, highs and lows are extreme, and daily life is impacted).

2. Identify hidden successes in the data.

Because the crisis narrative is focused on clinically diagnosable conditions, it is worth interrogating what those data truly capture. The numbers can be difficult to parse.

Measurement instruments change over time, new language emerges and diagnostic criteria evolve — as does our clinical understanding of mental health. Similarly, as society talks more openly about mental health, young adults may be more likely to share what they are going through with researchers.

Even more notably, rising diagnosis rates suggest that more students are seeking treatment for conditions that may have gone undiagnosed and untreated in previous generations. Read that way, the data reflect a leap forward in mental health care: Decreased stigma, increased help-seeking, a more robust network of care on college campuses, and a changing public health context in which more students are getting the care that they need.

There are also signs that the diagnosis trend line is shifting. The Healthy Minds Study, an annual survey of more than 84,000 students across 135 colleges and universities, documented three consecutive years of improvement in rates of depression, anxiety and suicidal ideation.

But those numbers are hardly cause for complacency: 37% of students report moderate-to-severe depressive symptoms and 11% report suicidal thoughts, though the decline in both rates is notable. Justin Heinze, a principal investigator of the Healthy Minds Network out of the University of Michigan, has said “sustained reductions tell me this is not a blip.” He laments that these findings are less likely to garner headlines than those supporting the crisis narrative.

Averages conceal disparities, and the encouraging trends do not hold equally across groups: Suicidal ideation among LGBTQ+ students remains substantially higher than among their peers and racial disparities can impede access to care.

And not all indicators are reassuring. Some metrics, including emergency department visits for self-harm and attempted suicide among young adults, have genuinely worsened. Those data also require serious attention. But, even here, the story needs to be more nuanced. A single statistic rarely reveals whether we are seeing more suffering, more disclosure, increased access to more lethal means of self-harm, or more willingness to seek emergency care.

For journalists: Interrogate what the statistics truly measure. Ask: Are more students struggling? Or are students who may have been untreated in the past now accessing the care they need?

The honest answer is almost certainly both — and that is worth parsing.

When the data show a positive trend, that is a worthwhile story as well.

3. Reframe inaccurate language as an opportunity for support.

The newest narrative that has emerged about college student mental health centers on misuse of “social media language” when talking about mental health.

Studies have found that the majority of mental health information on TikTok is misleading or inaccurate and that language has quickly populated youth conversations.

Terms like “panic attack” and “high cortisol” are being substituted in place of “stress” and “overwhelm.”

Similarly, young people are using terms like “PTSD” to talk about singular events and bad days, rather than accurately reflecting the diagnosis of a chronic psychological disorder.

But the key thing to remember is they are using those terms to share something important: They are struggling. This is true independent of the terminology.

Using social media to self-diagnose can create its own issues, including mislabeling what’s happening, avoiding professional support or seeking the wrong treatment. The inaccuracies are real, but the journalistic framing can be both more generous and more accurate: Students are making a bid for support.

But it’s important to clarify what kind of support is truly needed. Otherwise, we risk pathologizing the normal ups and downs of college life that students have faced for generations.

Students who experience typical homesickness or sadness after a romantic relationship ends are being referred to clinical counseling because we conflate the language they are using with clinical terminology. This can exacerbate the issue for young people, causing them to panic when their emotions are labeled as needing intervention. Meanwhile, common issues that do not require therapeutic interventions can tax university mental health systems.

Critically, imprecise language cuts both ways: A student saying “I had a panic attack” may be describing ordinary stress or an emerging clinical condition with the only vocabulary they have.

The right response to a bid for support is not dismissal; it’s asking follow-up questions.

To counter this trend, reporting must move beyond “teens are getting bad advice on TikTok” to a constructive frame for what we can do to help. Three practical tips for reporting on this issue:

• Note that terms may be colloquial and not clinical when directly quoting students.
• Define clinical language and clarify terminology when writing about mental health.
• Share the themes students are talking about broadly rather than adopting clinical terminology when the student does not have a medical diagnosis.

It is also helpful to share free and confidential resources like the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline and The Trevor Project helpline when writing about mental health. A recent poll from the University of Michigan found that information about these supports is still limited, especially among adults over age 50, who are likely to be teaching, raising and otherwise supporting college-age students.

Getting the campus mental health story right isn’t about softening the reality of the struggles young adults are facing, or dismissing the data. Some pressures young people face today are genuinely new.

But resisting the “crisis” frame lets us tell a more complex and accurate story about what we are seeing — and how we can help.

The post Rethinking the campus mental health “crisis”: 3 things journalists should know appeared first on The Journalist's Resource.

This piece was originally published by The Pew Charitable Trusts and is edited here for style.  

Over the early decades of the 21st century, soccer has moved from the margins of the U.S. sports landscape into the mainstream. Major League Soccer has expanded from 10 teams in the 1990s to 30 today, the National Women’s Soccer League launched and now has 16 teams, youth participation has exploded and international matches regularly fill large stadiums.

States and localities have been instrumental in shaping this expansion through stadium deals, land acquisitions, infrastructure investments and community partnerships of varying size and scope.

These efforts have helped grow soccer’s national profile — and they have presented governments with new fiscal risks.

Soccer’s growth is now converging with a run of major events that will keep the sport in the national spotlight. The U.S. is cohosting the 2026 FIFA Men’s World Cup and will host the 2028 Summer Olympics, offering potential economic opportunities but also raising questions about costs for state and local governments amid tightening fiscal conditions.

“We’re really in the middle of a mega decade of soccer,” says Ed Foster-Simeon, president and CEO of the U.S. Soccer Foundation.

The U.S. last hosted the men’s World Cup in 1994. The 2026 tournament offers an opportunity to step back and consider the factors that have shaped the intervening three decades of growth as well as their implications for state and local budgets.

Soccer’s public footprint grows

Before the 1990s, large-scale, soccer-specific public investments were uncommon in the U.S.

That began to change when the men’s World Cup arrived in 1994. Although the country had no top-tier professional leagues and no purpose-built professional soccer stadiums, it did have large public and quasi-public venues that could be adapted for the tournament.

The event went on to set global FIFA attendance records that still stand today, proving that the U.S. did have a substantial audience for soccer — a fact underscored five years later when the 1999 women’s World Cup produced one of the country’s biggest cultural soccer moments.

Two years after the 1994 men’s World Cup, Major League Soccer debuted, but the league’s early growth was fragile. Teams played in borrowed NFL and college football venues, oversized settings that made soccer feel secondary and limited MLS’ control over scheduling and operations, constraining its ability to grow, according to soccer journalist Steven Goff, whose long career was recently honored by the National Soccer Hall of Fame.

“To have a place of your own, to be able to create the environment to mimic the passion that you see in so many other countries,” Goff says, “was so important for the development of the game in this country.”

Then in 1999, the Columbus Crew in Ohio opened the country’s first modern, professional soccer stadium: Columbus Crew Stadium, later renamed Historic Crew Stadium. Although the venue was constructed without public funding, the sold-out games and intimate fan experience helped establish a proof of concept that influenced a broader push by MLS for building soccer-specific venues —often with public support such as direct financing, tax-backed tools, land deals or infrastructure spending.

That assistance not only gave teams permanent homes and improved their revenue potential, they also exposed governments to fiscal risk. In cases when attendance, surrounding development or projected tax revenue have fallen short of expectations, the public — not the teams — have generally been left to cover the gap.

For example, in 2005, Bridgeview, Illinois, used bonds to finance Toyota Park for the Chicago Fire.

When the expected surrounding development and revenue failed to materialize, the village was forced to absorb a large debt burden that it is still paying off today, years after the team left the stadium. That same year, in Harrison, New Jersey, public entities took on debt for land, infrastructure and redevelopment around the then-Red Bull Arena, which contributed to credit pressure for the town after early revenue was lower than anticipated.

These and other projects throughout the country have often been framed as engines of redevelopment, but experts are generally critical of the ability of stadium subsidies to deliver on those expectations.

“The typical argument is job creation, income growth, maybe tax revenue increases,” says Dennis Coates, an economist at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. “There’s very little evidence in any systematic way across any sport, soccer included, that those things are true.”

Coates adds that a key challenge in evaluating these investments is comparing actual spending related to a stadium with what might have happened otherwise, such as alternative public uses of the land, infrastructure or tax revenue committed to the project.

A shift in approach for public support

By the 2010s, the structure of public support for stadium projects had begun to change, precipitated by constrained finances after the Great Recession and growing skepticism toward direct stadium subsidies. Rather than financing stadium construction itself, some cities were opting for less direct investments, such as land purchases, environmental cleanup and tax preferences. Cities also increasingly pursued agreements requiring teams or developers to provide benefits, such as local hiring, youth programs or public access to facilities alongside public commitments.

However, this support can still involve substantial public resources or forgone revenue. As former Kansas City, Missouri, Mayor Mark Funkhouser explains, the question for policymakers was no longer simply whether a stadium is a good investment, and local leaders often weigh basic but consequential questions: “Can I afford this? Can my residents support this? Do my residents want this? What sort of long-term exposure comes with the deal?

For example, in 2014, Washington, D.C., reached a deal with D.C. United for the construction of a new stadium. The city agreed to provide up to $150 million for land acquisition and site preparation, including infrastructure work and environmental cleanup, while the team financed the stadium itself.

The deal also included a community benefits agreement that addressed local hiring, youth employment and programming, and community use of stadium facilities.

D.C. Council Budget Director Jennifer Budoff says city officials viewed the project as a way to quickly broaden the city’s tax base. “Audi Field was built on a former scrap metal yard,” she says. “Putting these sports facilities into these underutilized areas hastens the pace of development.”

Similarly, in Columbus, when the Crew moved into a new stadium in 2021, public support —provided as part of a broader public-private riverfront redevelopment effort and amounting to about $140 million in city, county, and state funds — focused on the surrounding infrastructure and district improvements, such as parking, a riverfront park and a community sports center.

And in 2010, Sporting Kansas City’s stadium, currently called Sporting Park, received $150 million in funding through Kansas STAR bonds, which were to be repaid through sales tax revenue generated within a defined development district surrounding the stadium. State reports show the debt was paid off early.

This trend has not been perfectly linear. Some projects undertaken in 2010s, such as those in D.C. and Kansas City, used public-private models, and some more recent deals have still involved substantial direct public contributions. But over time, public support has generally shifted in form — with fewer stadium construction subsidies and more land, site preparation, surrounding infrastructure and limited tax-backed financing.

Public assets and the soccer pipeline

Stadium deals often draw the most public and media attention, but local governments also shape soccer’s growth through lower-profile fiscal and policy choices involving publicly funded or managed fields, gyms and recreation spaces.

Jon Solomon, research director of the Aspen Institute’s Sports and Society Program, points to Seattle and King County, Washington, which employ permitting and shared-use agreements with youth sports programs, including soccer, to expand access to those public facilities, especially for families and communities with fewer resources. These agreements help maximize public resources, prioritize youth leagues, establish basic coaching or safety standards and preserve lower-cost access.

Such state and local initiatives are generally smaller and less visible than stadium financing decisions.

However, they still involve public assets — land, facilities, staff time and maintenance dollars.

State and local World Cup 2026 investments center on systems

For the men’s 2026 World Cup, U.S. host cities are not building a new generation of soccer-specific stadiums. Matches will be played in existing American football stadiums, which have far more seating capacity than most MLS arenas. With appropriate venues already in place, much of the state and local role has focused not on stadium construction but instead on public systems, including security, transportation, staffing, health and safety, fan movement, and targeted stadium and infrastructure improvements.

In some cities, that has meant fast-tracking projects that were already planned or under consideration: For example, Massachusetts officials have accelerated transportation planning around Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, including commuter rail improvements timed to the tournament.

In Atlanta, tournament preparations have helped push forward work on the BeltLine, a planned 22-mile loop of trails, parks, transit and redevelopment around the city. Atlanta BeltLine Inc. approved a $242 million fiscal year 2026 budget that includes funding aimed at delivering nearly 18 miles of continuous paved trail before the tournament.

In Philadelphia, World Cup planning intersected with a long-term effort to restore FDR Park — a major park near the city’s professional sports complex — that includes the addition of multipurpose athletic fields, playgrounds and other amenities. City officials described the tournament as an opportunity to support planned athletic fields for local soccer and football leagues beyond 2026.

Even places that are not hosting matches are preparing for the tournament’s spillover effects. Rhode Island, for instance, expects to accommodate visitors attending games in Massachusetts, and Ocean State 2026 Executive Director Liz Tanner says the public role has centered on the systems around the tournament — transportation, staffing, health coordination, and what she describes as FIFA’s “safe fan journey” from arrival to match venues to lodging and back home.

Over the past three decades, governments have shaped soccer’s growth — through stadium financing, land use decisions, infrastructure investments and community programming.

But the fiscal impact of these investments has been as varied as the deals that structured them. Some have come in the form of visible public benefits, particularly redevelopment or expanded access to recreation. Others have carried significant costs and produced more limited or uncertain returns.

For state and local leaders — and journalists — the questions are not whether Americans’ interest in soccer will continue to grow in the coming decades, but instead which fiscal commitments to the sport are worth making, whether the projected benefits will materialize and what residents stand to gain or lose.

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This week the Supreme Court upheld Mississippi’s right to count ballots that were cast and postmarked by Election Day but received up to five business days after the election.

Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote for a 5-4 majority of the court. In her majority opinion, Barrett holds that federal election laws do not preempt the Mississippi grace period.

Justice Samuel Alito wrote a dissent joined in whole or part by Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh.

About the case

In 2020, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Mississippi passed emergency legislation allowing the state to accept and count absentee ballots postmarked on or before Election Day and received by the county registrar no more than five business days after the election.

Following the pandemic, Mississippi made this ballot-receipt deadline permanent. Four years later, the Republican National Committee, the Mississippi Republican Party, a Mississippi voter and a county election commissioner sued to challenge the constitutionality of the ballot-receipt deadline. They argued that federal election law preempts the Mississippi law, pointing to Congressional statutes from 1845 and 1872 that establish Election Day as “the Tuesday next after the first Monday in November.”

The Libertarian Party of Mississippi filed a similar lawsuit against the same defendants.

The U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Mississippi consolidated the cases and ruled in favor of the defendants, finding that the Mississippi law did not conflict with federal election law.

The challengers appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. In October 2024, a three-judge panel of the Fifth Circuit agreed with the challengers, holding that the Mississippi law was preempted by federal election law, which requires ballots to be cast by voters and received by election officials on Election Day — not afterward.

In March 2025, the full court of appeals denied Mississippi’s petition for rehearing over the dissent of five judges. The Supreme Court then granted certiorari — meaning the high court agreed to hear the case — with oral arguments occurring in March 2026.

About the ruling

Barrett described the question at issue as a narrow one about ballot-receipt timing, declining to discuss other election processes in Mississippi, such as the use of the U.S. Postal Service or a common carrier to transport ballots, or the general practice of absentee voting.

She cited dictionary definitions, Supreme Court precedent, and Congressional history to find that an “election,” as used in federal Election Day statutes, is marked by the voter’s act of choosing a candidate — not by the receipt of the voter’s ballot. Thus, she found, federal law simply decrees the day votes must be cast, leaving states free to decide when ballots must be received.

The Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act, in requiring states to permit absent military and overseas citizens to vote and establishing a federal system as a backup, reinforces the point that states are in charge of coordinating ballot receipt.

Barrett dismissed the plaintiffs’ argument that requiring ballots to be received by Election Day would promote election integrity. First, she found this to be a policy matter better addressed by legislatures. Second, she found that striking down the Mississippi law would not mitigate plaintiffs’ concerns about party bosses or rideshare drivers handling ballots.

She took seriously plaintiffs’ argument that the Mississippi law could create the appearance of election fraud in circumstances where ballots received after Election Day change the results of an election. But she deferred to Congress to address this issue, should it arise.

Looking ahead to other voting cases

Barrett’s opinion is a demonstration of restrained statutory interpretation, with the decision turning primarily on a limited definition of the word “election” as used in federal law. She declined to give significant airtime to concerns about actual voter fraud or the appearance thereof.

The narrow scope of the decision preserves the court’s ability to come to different conclusions on different state laws in future terms. As Rick Hasen wrote in Slate, the court on Monday also agreed to hear Republican National Committee v. Mi Familia Vota, a case about whether Arizona can reject voter registration applications that do not provide documentary proof of citizenship. The court’s decision in Watson may do little to prevent it from upholding the Arizona law next term.

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