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

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

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

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

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

But Hayes and Trivedi suggest two other possibilities.

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

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

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

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

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

As we’ve reported previously, AI-generated journalism provokes distrust from readers, with audiences favoring a human touch. That might seem obvious, but a lot of questions lie buried in that broad statement. First, with so many ways to use AI, what does “AI-generated” mean, and how do audiences respond to different types and levels of AI use by journalists? Second, if readers want news outlets to be transparent about their AI use (as previous research has found), but if knowing about AI actually use lowers their trust and perceived accuracy, how should publishers proceed?

A pair of studies from the journal Digital Journalism addresses these questions. The first, “The effects of generative AI in news on media credibility and selectivity: Evidence from a conjoint experiment in Chile,” took an experimental approach. Participants were asked to compare media outlet AI policies, two at a time. The policies varied on seven different dimensions related to AI use and disclosure, and participants had to say which policy they found more credible and which outlet they would choose for news.

The authors — Sebastián Valenzuela, Ingrid Bachmann, Porismita Borah, and Natalia Solís Valdés — found that human oversight was the most influential factor considered. Media outlets that require human review of all AI content were seen as more credible, and were chosen as news sources more often, compared to outlets without such oversight. Participants also thought disclosure of generative AI use was important for credibility and news use. And they were less likely to use an outlet or find it credible when AI automated both objective news stories as well as content requiring nuance and interpretation, compared with outlets that prohibit all AI-automated news writing.

But people didn’t show any preferences for whether news outlets should use AI for menial tasks — this, apparently, doesn’t influence credibility. Neither did they show preferences about AI for use personalizing news formats, or for creating visual content.

The second study, “Beyond the byline: Audience expectations for AI disclosure in news media” by Jessica Zier and Nicholas Diakopoulos, digs more specifically into the conundrum of AI labeling, using interviews. Participants outlined a number of reasons why they want AI labeling, including keeping journalists accountable, avoiding fraud, increasing trust, and acting as a cue that readers may want to verify the information. Interviewees said there’s a vital difference between an article written entirely by AI (which is the origin they assume when labels say “generated” or “made by,”) and one just aided by AI (indicated by labels like “assisted” or “in conjunction”). They were concerned about AI’s capacity for hallucination and bias, so they saw human review as essential, and wanted labeling to address that need. Unlike in the qualitative study, participants had particular concerns about visual content, saying labels were especially needed here.

But participants also explained how labels can backfire. One said, when seeing an AI label, they are likely to think, “I probably need to fact-check this and try and find another article.” Audiences also see journalism as a profession that requires specialized training and ethical integrity, making AI seem to some like a “cop out.” One said about the use of AI: “You can do that as an 11-year-old. You don’t need the training for that if you’re going to use AI to generate your entire article.”

Some of the practical upshots the study’s authors spell out, in a table of recommendations (a nice touch we’d love to see more often):

• Labels can’t be overly technical, but they must be precise.
• An interactive icon that provides information when hovered on could help avoid overwhelming readers.
• Labels should be at the top, not end of the article, so as not to be deceptive.
• At the same time, the industry needs to move towards label standardization to avoid confusing readers.

Together, these studies help build a clearer picture of how and when news outlets need to preserve the “human touch,” and how they should talk about AI. It’s becoming clearer that human involvement is considered a sign of professional responsibility and accountability — essential currency in an age of media distrust. Publishers would also do well to step carefully around AI where subjective or value-based judgments are concerned. And they should think hard about how labels are presented, especially as those labels talk about the human touch and oversight that is so important to audiences.

Research roundup

“Navigating credibility on TikTok: How young adults evaluate and verify information on the platform.” By Luise Anter and Anna Sophie Kümpel, in International Journal of Communication.

It’s easy to dismiss a news diet that’s light on news and heavy on visual social media as simply “believing whatever you happen to see on TikTok.” But of course, TikTok users are making constant credibility judgments about the information they find there, video by video, just as other news consumers are doing it with traditional news articles or broadcast news packages.

The speed of TikTok might make many of the criteria for those judgments minimal, as people use heuristics, rather than systematically processing the information they find there. But what are those quick-and-dirty strategies for assessing credibility on TikTok, and how are they shaped by TikTok’s distinct characteristics — no links, no public sharing, and often extremely short videos?

Anter and Kümpel studied German university students’ strategies by having the students message them links to health- or politics-related TikTok videos, then interviewing them about how they evaluated some of those videos. For these students, evaluating the credibility of the account posting the video was the central strategy for determining a video’s credibility. This evaluation, Anter and Kümpel said, served as “an efficient shortcut”: TikTok as a platform was generally seen as unreliable, and with little room for nuanced argument or documenting supporting evidence, it was difficult to evaluate the credibility based on the message of the video itself.

Still, the criteria by which the students considered sources credible could be heartening for news organizations. Legacy media outlets, professional experts, companies, and political actors were all seen as more credible than “random creators.” Even absent message characteristics that could signal credibility, like a more formal aesthetic style or documented evidence, these source evaluations tended to signal credibility by themselves.

Because they view TikTok’s overall credibility as low, students were loath to verify videos by searching for other videos on the same subject. But verification by leaving the app required more intentional effort than they were inclined to make. So one of the students’ primary verification methods was through the comments, which seemed to enjoy a higher perception of credibility than the actual videos on the platform.

There were elements of the videos themselves that helped support a credibility judgment — whether the videos are largely fact-based, rather than opinion-based, whether they have more formal aesthetics, and whether they’re on topics that are being covered widely all played a role in a video being perceived as credible. As the researchers noted, this presents a conundrum for journalists on TikTok: The algorithm rewards videos with “platform-typical features, such as trending music, fast cuts, or participation in challenges,” but those are the same characteristics that raise skepticism from young audiences. The solution, they conclude, may lie in a “sweet spot” between the two.

“Expressive news preferences: Identity-signaling in news selection.” By Seonhye Noh, in Journalism Studies. One of the trickier problems plaguing political pollsters in recent years has been that of expressive responding — when people say they believe something they don’t in order to express affinity for one’s tribe or hostility toward someone else’s. (For example, Trump voters deliberately giving the wrong answer to a pollster’s question about whether he or Barack Obama had a larger inauguration crowd size.) It makes survey responses more an expression of identity than actual beliefs, and makes political researchers’ job of determining what the public actually thinks even more difficult.

There’s some evidence that this applies to studies of news consumption as well: That people may say they consume news that more closely matches their partisan beliefs than they actually do, as a way to express their political identity and their support for organizations that align with it. That makes it more difficult to determine people’s actual news habits from surveys, but it may also mean that partisan news consumption might be less prevalent than we think.

Noh, a scholar at UCLA, provided the most direct test of this idea yet, creating an experiment in which people selected headlines coming from pro-gun control and anti-gun control perspectives. Some were told they would only be selecting the articles, not reading them, while others were told they would be reading all the articles they selected. They were also given hypothetical scenarios in which their choices would be public or private.

The expressive responding effect (what Noh called “expressive news preferences”) was present: Participants who didn’t have to read the news they selected chose 10% more stories consistent with their partisan beliefs than those who did have to read them. In other words, they were more likely to pick news that matched their views when they were only signaling to a researcher what they would pick, not when they actually had to consume the news. The public/private scenarios didn’t make a difference in the results, perhaps because they were only hypothetical.

But Noh wasn’t expecting whom the effect would be strongest for. She predicted that the strongest partisans would show the most expressive news preferences, matching political science research on expressive responding. But it was the moderate partisans who showed the biggest difference between selections when they did and didn’t have to read the articles. In retrospect, it made sense: Strong partisans actually do primarily want to read news that matches their partisan perspective, not just to signal to a researcher. But weaker partisans’ expressive motives may be more influential in their responses when “political identities are present but not firmly anchored,” Noh wrote. She concluded that we need to be mindful of the strength with which identity influences not just survey responses, but news engagement of various kinds.

“The growing non-commercial basis of U.S. journalism employment: Evidence from one city, 2015–2025.” By Matthew Powers, in Critical Studies in Media Communication. We’re closing in on two decades since calls to reorient American journalism around a more nonprofit and publicly based funding model started to become widespread. And a shift has certainly taken place since then, as a glance at the hundreds of nonprofit news organizations that have sprung up would indicate. But has that funding shift been able to do much to offset the hemorrhage of jobs from commercial news organizations during that time? And have they actually produced a meaningful change in the historic commercial orientation of journalism in the U.S.?

Powers’ new study suggests that the answers to those questions may actually be yes. Powers, a professor at the University of Washington, examined the makeup of newsroom employment in one U.S. city, Seattle. He built a comprehensive database of all full-time local journalists in the city in 2015, then updated it 10 years later. He classified those journalists in two related ways. The first was by ownership — public, nonprofit, private (owned by individuals, families, or small groups of investors), and market (publicly traded, or owned by private equity or hedge funds). The second was by funding — market, philanthropic, or government.

Overall employment declined by surprisingly little — 431 journalists in 2015 to 411 in 2025, or 4.6%. Of the 85 positions lost, more than 80% of them were in privately or market-owned organizations. And every one of the 65 positions gained were in public media. (Without those 65 new jobs, the employment decline would have been 20%.)

That shift meant that the share of Seattle journalists employed via public ownership more than doubled, from 10.2% to 26.5%, passing up market-based ownership as the second-ranked form of ownership in the city. The broadest share by far is private ownership, though that percentage dropped from 58.7% to 52.3%. Several privately owned news organizations ( The Post-Intelligencer, Seattle Weekly, The Stranger) have been gutted (or further gutted) since 2015, but the reason private ownership’s share of employment remained relatively steady was the Seattle Times’ use of philanthropic funding to pay for 30 staff positions.

In fact, the share of philanthropically funded journalism positions across the city doubled from 17.2% in 2015 to 35.3% in 2025. Taken together, Powers concluded that the expansion of public media and the increased philanthropic funding of newsroom positions “have sharply reduced the number of newsroom jobs that would have otherwise been lost during the past decade. They have also made segments of the journalism job market increasingly reliant on non-commercial support.” Powers acknowledged that these changes aren’t a panacea, and the local job market for journalists is still in structural decline. “These actions do, however, suggest that the rate and nature of this change is not inevitable,” he noted. “If politicians, philanthropists, and citizens wish to act to address the situation further, options exist for doing so.”

“Going with the mainstream: Exploring GPT representation of journalistic culture.” By Taewoo Kang, Tim Vos, Thomas Hanitzsch, Neil Thurman, Imke Henkel, Sina Thäsler-Kordonouri, and Wiebke Loosen, in The International Journal of Press/Politics. What kind of a journalist is ChatGPT? Journalists around the world embody a range of values and conceive themselves as taking on a variety of roles that are not only divergent from one another, but sometimes directly at odds. And we know that large language models absorb the biases of what’s been fed into them and how they’ve been engineered, which would include some of these wide array of values. So if journalists are asking ChatGPT to play journalistic roles for them, what kind of values and roles are they getting?

Kang and colleagues answered that question in a pretty elegantly simple way: They took 39 survey questions that were asked of journalists in the widely used Worlds of Journalism study and asked them of ChatGPT. They adapted them for LLM prompts and asked the questions repeatedly, slightly altering the wording of the prompts and including specific national contexts of the U.S., U.K., and Germany to ensure ChatGPT answered them reliably and that results weren’t being influenced by details in wording. They then compared the results to survey results of journalists from those three countries.

The type of journalist whose answers most closely matched ChatGPT was a centrist, full-time contract worker with a TV journalism background and a bachelor’s degree. ChatGPT least resembled right-leaning journalists, part-time journalists, journalists working for news agencies, and those without a formal degree. It didn’t align any differently across men or women.

ChatGPT’s alignment shifted a bit as questions drilled down into particularly areas. In its epistemological beliefs (about the nature of reality and knowledge), ChatGPT aligned with journalists identifying as left-leaning and female, and those working at online-native employers. But on ethical questions, ChatGPT became more centrist.

There were some variances by country as well: In the German sample, ChatGPT was the most centrist, and in the U.K. it was the most left-leaning and had the strongest resemblance to TV journalists. In the U.S. it was the most closely aligned with male journalists. Overall, ChatGPT more closely resembled German journalists’ values than those in the U.K. or U.S.

All together, the findings provide some empirical evidence pinning down what precisely are the journalistic values and biases of ChatGPT as a system. Specifically, the authors note that the model’s alignment with majority groups is cause for concern, as it “points to the need for continued vigilance among human journalists regarding the potential systematic omission of minority perspectives in LLM outputs.”

In his announcement post, Substack cofounder and CEO Chris Best writes that the native sponsorship program has launch partnerships with Yahoo Scout, Whatnot, Granola, Balenciaga, T-Mobile, Polymarket, and Uber. It won’t be the first time a Substack writer gets a sponsorship — Best points to an essay sponsored by Hinge that Emily Sundberg wrote for her Feed Me newsletter — but it vastly simplifies the process.

“Creators choose who they work with,” Best writes. “They set the creative direction. They keep full editorial independence. Our job is to take care of what they shouldn’t have to — the matchmaking, the infrastructure, the logistics — so they can stay focused on the work.”

To begin, the Creator Kits are only available to “bestsellers,” or Substacks that have at least 100 paid subscribers. One of those “bestsellers,” Simon Owens, who writes a media newsletter, shared his thoughts, and I’ll let him close us out:

Why do I think this is smart? Because it ensures that Substack’s north star continues to be subscriptions. It’s actually not easy to get 100 people to simultaneously pay for a subscription, and reaching that threshold ensures a basic level of quality. It also reduces the incentives that could attract get-rich-quick scammers looking to churn out AI slop…

There are still a lot of unanswered questions. How will sponsorship purchases actually work? Will a brand simply upload its creative and wait for me to approve it, or will I be expected to have a back-and-forth conversation? What cut will Substack take? How will pricing be determined? Will there be a cost-per-click option, or only flat-fee sponsorships? Will brands be able to make large buys across multiple Substacks, or will they need to negotiate a bunch of individual deals?

My guess is that Substack doesn’t yet know the answers to many of these questions. It first needs to get a large number of Bestsellers into the system so it can start testing different ad products and see how both creators and readers respond.

Either way, I can virtually guarantee it’ll deliver a better experience than what you’ll find on publisher websites monetized through programmatic ad tech — for both the users AND the advertisers.

Worldwide, people in all age groups are ditching news sites and publishers’ apps in favor of social media and video networks. In fact, 18- to 34-year-olds are abandoning content on publishers’ platforms even more quickly than they’re dropping TV news.

The 2026 Digital News Report from Oxford’s Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism (RISJ) makes it clear: Almost all online news growth is coming from third-party sources, and publishers’ own sites and apps are being left behind. “Social media and video networks are now more popular as a source of news than owned and operated online news websites and apps in 30 of our 48 markets,” the authors write in the report, released Monday evening.

As for the video that publishers have spent all that time and money creating for their own sites…well. “On average, news organizations have seen video consumption on their own sites and apps fall by five percentage points from 2025,” the report’s authors write, “and by 10 points since 2021.” That decline is happening at a time when more than three quarters (77%) of RISJ’s global respondents consume online news video every week — but it’s the third-party platforms that are winning their views.

This doesn’t mean that people who get most of their news from social media are satisfied with it. Globally, “people who use social media and video networks as their main source of news are more negative about coverage of [the Ukraine conflict, inflation, Trump, Middle East conflict, climate change, and immigration],” the report’s authors note. As an example, here’s some data showing that Spanish audiences are most satisfied with news from TV:

RISJ has released a digital news report every year since 2012. This year it surveyed nearly 100,000 people in 48 countries about their news consumption, via a YouGov survey. Below, Nieman Lab’s team breaks out a few of the main findings. And stay tuned because we’ll be running two more pieces by RISJ researchers next week.

Nieman Lab has previously reported on preliminary interview research that shows people feel a greater sense of agency or autonomy when they use products like ChatGPT and Gemini for news. The ability to ask follow-up and clarifying questions, and overall dictate what additional information they want to see, is a big draw for regular users of these products. RISJ’s survey research largely supports these findings.

Across markets, the feature most cited as a motivation for using chatbots was asking follow-up questions. In total, 42% of users mentioned this. Other interactive features also ranked high, including using AI to summarize “complicated stories” (36%) and using it to translate news from other languages (33%).

Arguedas concludes that these use cases, alongside other popular features like using chatbots to evaluate the reliability of a news source or to simplify information, indicate that audiences aren’t turning to AI for headline roundups. Instead, the draw for early and engaged users is the ability of AI products to “interrogate, summarize, and evaluate information” — in other words, “a more expansive role that combines access with interpretation.”

— Andrew Deck

Meta is (still) winning news

Since 2014, when RISJ asked people which social networks they’d used for news in the past week, Facebook came out on top. Until 2024, though, its use was in decline. In 2026, it’s seeing a “resurgence,” the report’s authors write, with 43% of respondents saying they use it for news overall and 31% saying they used it in the last week. (We’ve seen this in other studies, too.)

Instagram, meanwhile, has become the biggest social platform for news for 18- to 24-year-olds; 42% of them said they used it for news in the past week.

— Laura Hazard Owen

YouTube is the platform of choice for people seeking news

Around the world, traditional broadcasters continue to lose ground to social media, and attempts by news organizations to spin up video on their own websites and apps aren’t really helping. As the chart below shows, every platform other than news websites and apps saw user growth between 2023 and 2026, while the news websites and apps saw a 5% decline in users.

YouTube is particularly interesting here. RISJ research fellow Craig T. Robertson notes that while people tend to see news videos on YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok, YouTube is the only platform where the majority of users intentionally seek out the news. For the majority of Instagram and TikTok users, news just happens to come up in the feed. And while Instagram and TikTok both emphasize short videos, YouTube users still have quite a healthy appetite for longform:

Interestingly, longer news videos are relatively more popular among younger people than older people. Just over half (52%) of 18–24s watching news videos on YouTube say they watch longer news videos (over 5 minutes) weekly, compared to 41% of over 55s. Older people on YouTube are actually more likely than younger people to be watching short news videos (69% of over-55 YouTube users, compared to 60% of 18–24s, watching news videos under 6 minutes). This may be driven, in part, by younger people’s greater preference for watching news videos (compared to reading or listening to news).

There are, as always, regional differences in how people consume news videos. While video is big around the world, the countries with the highest rates of news video consumption tend to be social-first, young markets with high mobile phone usage — the study authors highlight Thailand and Peru in particular, where more than 80% of people watch some form of social news video every week — while countries with historically strong upmarket newspaper and public media brands, like the U.K. (50% weekly, up from 40% in 2021), tend to have lower social news video consumption.

Finally, the study authors asked how smart TVs play a role in news video consumption, and found significant generational gaps. While younger audiences (18-44) watch news video using smart TV apps like YouTube, older audiences (45 and up) tend to still use their TVs to watch linear broadcast TV news.

— Neel Dhanesha

The willingness to pay for news may have hit its ceiling

Across the countries that RISJ surveys, 17% of respondents say they paid for online news in the last year, compared with 18% who said the same in 2025. The number of people in the U.S. who pay for news has actually declined by 4 percentage points, though the report’s authors suggest interpreting that change with caution “as it may be the result of the uncertainty and error associated with survey sampling.”

— Laura Hazard Owen

Creators aren’t replacing traditional news

News creators around the world continue to find their place in the news ecosystem amid the “increasingly blurred lines between journalism and political activism,” RISJ senior research associate Nic Newman writes.

According to this year’s report, 27% of survey respondents in 48 countries now get news from news creators on a weekly basis, but only 13% said these creators meet most or all of their news needs.

These figures vary by country, depending on youth population differences, levels of political polarization, trust in mainstream media, and other factors. In Kenya, for example, 58% of respondents said they access content from news creators weekly and 33% said that content meets “all or most” of their news needs; in the Netherlands, the corresponding figures are 9% and 2%.

One consistent finding is that creators are rarely replacing traditional news media outright. Instead, they tend to play a more supplementary role, helping audiences to interpret, explain, critique, or react to the news rather than break stories themselves. Even in countries such as Kenya, Peru, or the United States, where reliance on creators is high, only a minority say that most or all of their news needs are met in this way.

RISJ categorizes news creators by the type of ecosystem where they are most successful:

“We are seeing the emergence of ‘hybrid journalist creator’ models where existing radio and TV stars (and others) lean into creator approaches while remaining part of the traditional media ecosystem, offering a different potential future for the industry,” Newman writes.

— Hanaa’ Tameez

TV news is losing young audiences, while radio and newspapers “have lost most of their living user base”

By 2026, we all know to expect depressing trendlines across the board when it comes to the shrinking audiences of newspapers, radio, and even TV news. This year’s RISJ report takes a closer look at what’s primarily responsible for driving the downward audience spirals in each of those three mediums. Specifically: Is the problem that “certain sources struggle to attract users in the first place? Or is it perhaps that they are more vulnerable to existing users turning away from them?”

To answer that question, the report looks at whether respondents are “current,” “lapsed,” or “never” weekly consumers of each medium, and uses that data to calculate “adoption” and “retention” rates by news source.

The data suggests that for TV news, retention is the biggest problem. With 52% of respondents currently using TV news weekly and 27% lapsed users, TV news has a high rate of adoption — 79% — while its retention rate is 66%.

That’s relatively rosy compared to radio and, especially, newspapers. Both have lower adoption rates (53% and 49% respectively) and have been “less sticky” — radio has retained 39% of listeners, and newspapers have retained just 27% of readers.

“Put differently, they have lost most of their living user base,” Richard Fletcher, RISJ’s director of research, writes. “Television news has faded out of use for many people, whereas newspapers and radio news may never have been part of the picture in the first place.”

For TV news, the biggest red flag might be the age gap in retention. “While TV news has been relatively good at retaining users who are currently aged 35 or over (71%),” Fletcher notes, “it has only retained about half of those aged 18-34 (51%).” Given the smaller age gap for adoption, the data suggest that “declines in television news use are being driven more by its failure to hold on to younger users than its ability to attract them in the first place,” a challenge that is also highly apparent in other research.

Meanwhile, for newspapers and radio, the data show that “relatively few young people have been socialized into those consumption habits in the first place.” That is, “the social reproduction of newspaper and radio news audiences may have broken down altogether.”

Apps and websites don’t appear positioned to pick up the slack; they have similar adoption and retention rates to TV news, meaning “high levels of adoption (71%) and declines primarily driven by a failure to retain audiences.” While adoption rates are “identical” across age, retention rates are 10 percentage points lower among younger people; as with TV news, “declines in the use of news websites and apps are being driven by the loss of younger former users.”

These findings, Fletcher writes, should inform news publishers because “as many devote time and energy to developing their ‘young audiences strategy,’ they may encounter a tension between focus on retention and a focus on adoption.”

He closes with a bleak reminder: The audiences abandoning these mediums, or failing to engage with them in the first place, may leave news behind entirely. “People may be content to simply carry on with a smaller news repertoire and, for a smaller minority, stepping away from a source may mean that they opt out of news altogether,” Fletcher writes. Among lapsed TV news watchers, for instance, 9% report no longer using any of the news sources RISJ asked about — including “print, radio, podcasts, social media, AI chatbots, and the websites or apps of a variety of different types of news publisher.”

That finding, he adds, is part of a trend RISJ has tracked over the years — “the structural decline of news use in general, and not just the rise and fall of specific sources.”

— Sophie Culpepper

Impartial news isn’t dead

Does the market still value impartial news? For 20th-century American newspapers and network TV news, playing it down the middle wasn’t just a journalistic ideal — it was also a heck of a business strategy. Distribution and advertising monopolies encouraged newsrooms to emphasize the “mass” in mass media rather than picking an ideological niche. But whenever new formats bloomed — talk radio in the 1980s, cable news in the 1990s, and the internet in the 2000s — the profits often went to explicitly partisan players.

This year’s DNR asked people whether they preferred getting their news from “sources that don’t have a particular point of view,” “sources that share your point of view,” or “sources that challenge your point of view.” Despite a global rise in political polarization, the most popular answer remains news without an explicit POV — though it earned only a plurality (45%) rather than a majority of responses.

(Note that this is all based on survey responses, not observational data. People are notoriously bad at describing the news they consume, overemphasizing the types of news they think sound worthy. Also, people bring their own baggage to what constitutes a news source without “a particular point of view.” To a conservative Fox News viewer, the network may well meet its former stated standard of “fair and balanced“; a liberal Guardian reader may view its editorial stance as simple common sense.)

Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, who wrote this section of the report, notes that people’s stated opinions on impartial news have remained strikingly consistent over time. They’re even consistent whether people are asked about their own news consumption or the general public’s. The share of people who want news aligned with their preexisting opinions is relatively small — but it’s an unusually influential share, more engaged with politics, more likely to share stories on social media, and more likely to consume a lot of news:

The people who prefer news that aligns with their own views are a minority. But they tend to be more vocal, more highly engaged, more partisan, and more commercially important for many news publishers than the public at large.

Most striking — as is often the case in the DNR — is the variation between countries. In Germany, “news with no particular point of view” beats out “news that agrees with me” 64% to 10%. But in many countries in the Global South, the poles are flipped; in Nigeria, for instance, those numbers are 22% and 46%, respectively.

Running regressions on the country-level data, Nielsen finds that countries with higher levels of social media use for news are significantly more likely to also have higher levels of people preferring news that agrees with them. There’s also a relationship with levels of political partisanship, though the connection there is weaker.

— Joshua Benton

Perceptions of public media vary widely

In 26 countries, RISJ asked respondents a very specific question: What sort of impact do you think public service media (what we in the U.S. call public media) has on life in your country?

For the most part, people either had a positive perception (37% of respondents) or felt neutral (35%); only 22% of respondents viewed public media’s impact negatively. The two main drivers of these feelings tended to be trust in media overall and political polarization; as one might expect, respondents who identified as politically left-leaning in most countries tended to view public media positively, while those on the right viewed it negatively.

There are a few notable exceptions: In Finland, where trust in media is generally very high, people on all sides of the political spectrum viewed public media positively. In Italy, where critics accuse the right-wing government of eroding the editorial independence of the public broadcaster, people on the left tend to view public media negatively, while people on the right view it positively.

Concerns about editorial independence tend to shape people’s perceptions of public media around the world. Jim Egan, the 2026 Digital News Report’s lead author and senior research associate at RISJ, writes:

In Slovakia, recent changes have been especially controversial. The government abolished the existing public broadcaster (RTVS) and replaced it with a new entity (STVR) under a governance model that critics argue increases political control. This institutional redesign prompted protests domestically as well as international concern. While in Serbia, public broadcasting has been caught up in and shaped by ongoing political crisis and public protest. Demonstrations in 2025 directly targeted RTS, accusing it of pro-government bias and inadequate coverage. The organisation has become a focal point for wider tensions over press freedom, with declining trust, internal pressures, and ongoing disputes over editorial independence.

Interestingly, not even the critics of public media seem to be concerned that it’s muscling in on the territory of commercial news outlets, which Nielsen notes is an issue of “intense industry debate.” In general, people who use public media tend to like public media.

“Strengthening the position of public service media is less about any single intervention and more about a combination of approaches,” Nielsen writes. That includes “demonstrating independence clearly, lowering the barriers to engagement, embedding news in everyday consumption patterns, and helping audiences navigate difference in a way that supports shared understanding.”

— Neel Dhanesha

The full 2026 Digital News Report from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism is here.

The news consumption experience, for most people, hasn’t looked like that for a long time. But a new publication wants to update the news-and-coffee experience for the modern era.

Enter: The Newsground, an investigative news outlet that is focused on accountability and corruption — and is funded via coffee subscriptions. The publication, which launched in March, is free to read. Readers can pay $5 a month for an ad-free news-only membership or $25 per shipment if they also want coffee.

Founder Scott Stedman drinks two cups of coffee a day and said he wanted to produce longform investigative journalism while also providing readers with a product they could hold in their hands.

“I hate paywalls and I wanted to come up with a creative way to marry the journalism from 30 years ago in the Sunday paper — the intentional, adversarial, investigative journalism that was pretty prominent back in the day — with the caffeine boost from coffee,” Stedman said.

Stedman reports and writes his stories himself, and works with a freelance editor and a video editor for multimedia pieces. The Newsground’s first story was about a Jeffrey Epstein associate who had previously worked for the Russian government. More recent stories include investigations into Trump Tower developers operating online gambling companies in the country of Georgia, a Russian model who recruited young women for Epstein, and the El Salvador government’s use of spyware.

The Newsground isn’t Stedman’s first independent outlet. In 2019, he founded Forensic News, a publication covering national security and espionage. He shuttered the publication in 2023 after settling a defamation lawsuit over a series of stories about a British-Israeli security consultant. (The lawsuit was brought in the U.K. even though Forensic News was based in the U.S., and a number of international organizations, including Reporters Without Borders and PEN International, criticized it as a SLAPP lawsuit intended to stifle critical coverage.)

For The Newsground, Stedman, who is based in Los Angeles, was inspired by the Midcoast Villager in Camden, Maine, whose business model includes a coffee shop called the Villager Café. He works with a Chicago roaster to supply the coffee beans. A 10-ounce bag of Newsground coffee costs $25 — $13 of which covers roasting and processing, with the remaining $12 funding the journalism. So far, The Newsground has four dozen paying coffee subscribers and has received $1,500 in one-time donations.

“I think showing the actual cost and being super-transparent about how much I’m making off each sale lessens the sticker shock a little bit,” Stedman said. “You’re supporting a good cause by buying this coffee and…funding reporting that punches really high.”

Stedman hopes to build on readers’ growing trust by hosting in-person events to serve the coffee, discuss his reporting, and show how the former supports the latter.

“In the digital media space, the community is everything,” Stedman said. “What I’m seeing so far in my initial hypothesis here was that coffee is a great conversation starter and it’s a great way for people to bond in increasingly disparate online worlds.”

After only 14 months, the Sentinel won the New LION Business of the Year Award from LION Publishers, the trade group for local independent online news outlets. A judge described the Sentinel as “one of the most complete early-stage news businesses I’ve seen. They built an infrastructure: thoughtful growth planning well in advance of launch, a diversified funding base, award-winning journalism, and clear systems that show they’re setting this up to last. They’ve made smart, strategic use of training programs and partner tools, and it’s clear they’re applying what they learn — whether that’s Facebook lead gen, donation flows, or operational efficiency.”

Fast-forward nine more months, and the Sentinel did something even more remarkable: It bought that nearly-80-year-old incumbent paper, the Frontiersman, returning it to local ownership.

Buying the local daily is the sort of thing many local news entrepreneurs daydream about. So how did Bushatz pull it off? LION’s Hayley Milloy asked for details, and their interview is worth reading in full. A few highlights:

Rather than viewing the Frontiersman as a competitor, I saw it as an important community asset. The question became: could we bring that legacy into a sustainable local nonprofit model and create something stronger than either organization could be on its own? We worked to find funding, sent in an offer, and the rest is history.

We put an initial offer last year, but the company was not ready to sell to us at the time, and those conversations were put on hold. The actual acquisition moved very, very quickly. From our most recent offer to closing was just over three weeks.

Yes, it was as exhausting as it sounds.

What has been especially meaningful is hearing from longtime readers who care deeply about the Frontiersman’s history and are excited to see that history remain rooted in Mat-Su. They’re also very worried about the archives and history of our region held by the Frontiersman, and I am proud to tell them that saving that and making it accessible to everyone is really, really important to me.

As part of the acquisition, the Frontiersman will no longer appear in print and has become part of the Sentinel’s online operation.

That success inspired GBH to keep the podcast going, allowing Coss and his producer Isabel Hibbard to do “big digs” into the Massachusetts Lottery and “the Codfather” in the podcast’s second and third seasons. But now the Big Dig is returning to its roots with what Coss calls the “Highway Teardown Tour” of eleven cities around the country: Seattle, Portland, Austin, Louisville, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Rochester, Syracuse, Providence, Boston, and New York City. It’s less a new season than an extension of the first one — the new episodes appear under the first season in Apple Podcasts — but using a completely different format. Instead of documentary-style deep-dives, each episode is a recording of a live event hosted by a public radio station in each city, where Coss and a local reporter who has been covering the topic talk through that city’s highway problems and bring on guests to help illustrate some of the paths forward.

There’s also an unusual incentive structure: While the stations hosting events get to keep the revenue from ticket sales and GBH will keep the revenue from the podcast episodes, host stations got the opportunity to put out the event recordings on their own feeds and social channels before the podcast episodes dropped in the Big Dig feed. That way they could make sponsorship revenue of their own off the same tape.

It was, Coss told me, a reminder that public radio stations are “part of a network” (i.e., NPR), and it provided a sense of connection — and a potential revenue source — at a time when public radio is particularly vulnerable. I called up Coss to learn more about the tour, the future of the show, and the importance of archives in his work; our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

But to your question about the larger direction for the feed, this is something I’ve been thinking about a lot. My goal is to keep the focus local, but not necessarily to be parochial and just for people in Massachusetts. Most of our listeners are not in Massachusetts, so for every season we’ve done, the goal is to find a local story that we can tell with a kind of intimacy and granularity that is unique to our team and our archive but can speak to a national audience.

In a funny way, the Big Dig podcast feed has almost been defined by the GBH archives, because what happened is we made this one story about a highway project, and in making it I realized just how much incredible material resides within WGBH. The station turned 75 this year, and it has been recording and archiving audio and video for all of those 75 years. It’s local news, but it’s also Frontline, and Julia Child, and American Experience, and Arthur, and Antiques Roadshow.

There’s so much material in that building; I recently learned the station archive is five and a half petabytes. A petabyte is 1000 terabytes, and a terabyte is 1000 gigabytes.

We did this story about the highway project, which I had at the time thought of as just a one-off, and it did better than any of us who made it had dreamed that it would. And we realized that there was an opportunity to keep going and keep making more of these stories. So my first instinct when the folks at GBH came back to me and said, “Hey, do you have any ideas for other stories?” was to go back to the archives and see what other kinds of stories there might be.

There’s a lot of good material from those years, and I’ve come to appreciate that it’s a time period in which there was a lot of change in American life and politics. It’s the post-Watergate era, the end of the New Deal order, the rise of neoliberalism, the fall of the Berlin Wall, deindustrialization, big changes in demographics and immigration, the end of the old urban ethnic political machines that ran democratic cities like Boston, and the rise of a more kind of cosmopolitan, technocratic democratic politics. There are all these cross-currents and trends in policy and the economy and demographics that were in play at that time that to me are the antecedents to everything that we’re living through today.

Whatever big topic you’re interested in, there’s some kind of thread you can trace through the 80s, 90s, and 2000s. And at first, when we started doing season two and then season three, I was a little worried that if we keep doing more and more of these in the same geography, it’ll just feel more and more provincial, but I’ve actually come to feel that it just becomes more rich and weird because you get these characters that crop up in one season and then return in another, and you have these storylines that talk to each other. The comparison that I will sometimes make is The Wire. I’ve never lived in Baltimore, I have no reason to care about the city of Baltimore, but by the end of those five seasons I care.

McClatchy, the Centre Daily Times’ parent company, had chosen the paper as an early test market for its Content Scaling Agent (CSA). The tool repackages existing articles on McClatchy sites, essentially drafting short-form AI-generated summaries of them to publish as new articles or to use as video scripts. The tool drew the ire of reporters across McClatchy’s network of 30 local newspapers, due to factual errors output by the tool and disagreements over how to label the published content.

Moyer was reading a story published by The Wrap in April about the controversy, including the decision of unionized newspapers like The Sacramento Bee to withhold their bylines from CSA-produced stories in protest. During a March 17 internal staff meeting, Kathy Vetter, McClatchy’s chief of staff for local news, said, “If they don’t have the ability in their contract to remove their byline, we’re going to use their name,” according to The Wrap’s reporting.

To Moyer, that statement was a call to action.

“It was essentially like, if you’re not in a union, your byline gets used; if you are in a union, we’ll follow what the union says,” said Moyer. “If we want to control what happens to our byline, that’s the company telling us that we need to form a union. So, hey, let’s do it.”

Last month, all seven of the Centre Daily Times’ eligible editorial staff signed union authorization cards and submitted them to McClatchy management. On Friday, the union was voluntarily recognized by McClatchy as a bargaining unit of The NewsGuild of Greater Philadelphia, a local of The NewsGuild-CWA.

The Centre Daily Times is the first newsroom under The NewsGuild-CWA that has cited concerns about AI adoption as a top reason for unionizing, according to Jon Schleuss, the Guild’s president.

Across the U.S., unions have been on the frontline of debates over the ethics and standards of AI adoption in journalism. Currently, 74 established newsroom units represented by The NewsGuild-CWA, the largest news worker union in the country, include some AI language in their union contracts. In a statement, Schleuss said that McClatchy’s unionized newsrooms, especially those with ratified contracts, have had greater leverage and control over how the CSA tool is used.

“Unionized newsrooms are the ones where McClatchy’s AI slop gets a clear label. In non-union newsrooms, the AI slop may be carrying a real human reporter’s byline,” he said.

Byline strikes have already taken place at more than a half-dozen McClatchy publications, including The Miami Herald, The Modesto Bee, and The Tacoma News Tribune. Last month, The Idaho Statesman, a McClatchy-owned paper in Boise, launched a day-long work strike to protest low wages and mandated use of the CSA tool. The Centre Daily Times formed its union to earn new negotiating power and worker protections, and potentially gain access to these types of labor actions for the first time.

Beyond control over how reporter bylines are used on AI-generated content, the Centre Daily Times staffers told me their union drive also reflects concerns about inflation-related wage increases and the more general threat of AI-related layoffs.

“Some of us use AI a lot more, and are okay with it. Others try to use it as little as possible, but there is an overall understanding that we need to be able to have a say in this, and that unionizing at least gives us a seat at the table,” said Trebor Maitin, a service reporter at the Centre Daily Times. “McClatchy is going through a rough time —  the whole industry is. We don’t want to be the ones first on the chopping block, because we’re a non-union newsroom, and they can just replace us with AI if they so chose.”

McClatchy did not respond to requests for comment.

“She said this change was announced literally an hour ago in the channel for supervisors and [the reason] was we want reporters to feel confident about the accuracy of each version before publication,” Maitin told me. “Thus, everyone publishing should follow this format in the credit line: ‘reporting by name of reporter, produced with AI assistance.’”

Maitin thought the reason given at the time, that reporters would work harder to address error and accuracy issues if their name appeared in the byline, was disingenuous.

“The most important thing to me is the audience. We serve our readers. When our names go on a thing, it says that this article or video, whatever you’re about to consume, is from that person, but that is just not true in this case,” said Maitin, who called the byline format “almost misleading.” “We know that means that we didn’t actually write the thing, but I’m not certain that the average reader would.”

Concerns about the CSA bylines escalated further in April. That month the McClatchy-owned Wichita Eagle began publishing CSA-produced stories with only reporters’ names, and no language indicating they had been drafted with AI assistance. The move showed that McClatchy’s threshold for AI disclosure might continue to shift.

Despite concerns raised by reporters during editorial meetings and town halls, no changes were made to the byline policy, and reporters’ names continued to run without their consent. That was when unionized newsrooms in McClatchy’s network began flexing the “byline strike” clauses in their contracts. These labor protests have a long history in the news industry, with The Baltimore Sun most recently launching a byline strike in 2024 to protest “sliding journalistic standards.” With the rise of fully AI-generated news articles, though, this lever has new power to it.

“Over decades, reporters have engaged in byline strikes protesting many issues at several companies. [What] has felt antiquated in the digital era, however, has taken on new importance in a time when a company is attempting to put real reporters’ names on AI-generated slop,” said Schleuss, The NewsGuild-CWA president.

For Maitin’s part, he will not be around to see a contract at the Centre Daily Times ratified. He is leaving this month for a new role with Report for America. He does not shy away from saying that his decision was influenced by concerns that his name would be associated with stories produced by the CSA tool.

“I put my name on things that I ostensibly believe in and stand by,” he told me. “I’m not going to be working on this paper, but in the future, a prospective employer might look at my staff page and see all this AI-generated content. I don’t think that makes me look very good, and I don’t think that makes our paper look good.”

“The 2026 Index points to an increasingly local field that is, as a whole, continuing to grow (albeit at a slower pace),” authors Jesse Holcomb, Michele McLellan, and Ha Ta write in the executive summary. “But headwinds on funding and audience fronts persist at the individual newsroom level.”

A few key takeaways from the report:

AI use is way up. Use of AI-based tools is now widespread among nonprofit newsrooms; 81% of INN members reported using AI in 2025, up from 63% in 2024 and 34% in 2023. Most aren’t using AI for editorial work like writing or editing stories — more common uses include summarizing or transcribing meetings (60%) and data analysis (36%). Some outlets are also using AI as a fundraising tool; 22% reported using AI to personalize emails to funders, 18% reported using it to draft grant applications, and 11% reported using it to identify potential funders. Meanwhile, 26% reported using AI for outreach, including drafting social media copy or personalizing emails to audience members.

Thirteen percent of INN members reported using AI to scrape data from websites, while 19% block scraping of their own websites.

The nonprofit news field’s revenue is growing, but individual growth is plateauing. INN estimates its members (excluding startups that began publishing in 2025 and public media members) took in more than $750 million in combined revenue in 2025. That’s a 14% increase from 2024 and the highest number since the Index started collecting this data. On the other hand, median revenue per outlet was $525,000, down from $532,000 in 2024, while median expenses rose to $449,000 from $434,000. “INN members had to stretch their dollars a little further last year,” Holcomb writes in the Index revenue section.

• Just nine new INN member outlets began publishing in 2025, compared to 20 launches per year in 2019 and 2020. “Growth in the number of new nonprofit news organizations within INN membership has slowed considerably amid funding cuts and growing uncertainty in a polarized political environment,” McLellan writes in the network composition section.

Local newsrooms continue to make up the majority of INN’s membership. Local outlets account for 54% of INN members (up from 51% in 2024), and all nine outlets that became members and began publishing in 2025 cover local beats.

The smallest and largest outlets grew web traffic, but the middle is getting squeezed. INN members with revenues between $2 million and $5 million (which describes 13% of INN members) averaged a loss of over 41,000 unique monthly visitors. Meanwhile, outlets with revenue under $2 million (78% of INN membership) gained an average of 9,500 visitors, and outlets with over $5 million in revenue gained an average of 40,800 new visitors. In the audience & distribution Index section, Ta hypothesizes that mid-sized outlets were “potentially squeezed between the loyalty that sustains smaller outlets and the brand recognition and SEO dominance that drives traffic to the largest ones” as declining social media referrals and AI integration drive search traffic down.

INN found a similar pattern when dividing outlets by geographic scope. National/global outlets averaged a loss of about 37,300 unique monthly visitors, whereas local and state/regional outlets gained averages of 14,600 and 25,500 visitors respectively. Overall, 57% of the 345 news outlets that shared web visitor data for 2024 and 2025 saw traffic increase, 24% saw it decline, and for 18% it stayed flat. (The report defines an increase as growth of 10% or more, a decline as a decrease of 10% or more, and flat as less than 10% change in either direction.)

Newsletter subscribers are “more resilient” than web traffic. When it comes to newsletters, large outlets fared the worst. Outlets with more than $5 million in revenue lost an average of 2,800 subscribers, while medium outlets gained an average of 1,500 subscribers, and smaller outlets gained an average of 730 subscribers. “This suggests that small and mid-sized outlets are growing their subscriber lists while larger national outlets face greater challenges in maintaining theirs,” Ta writes. On the whole, “Newsletter subscribers proved more resilient than web traffic,” she adds; just 16% of the 338 outlets that provided newsletter data for 2024 and 2025 reported a drop in subscribers, with the rest holding steady or growing.

Slow progress toward revenue diversification. “Between 2022 and 2025, the share of INN members drawing on four or more distinct revenue streams increased from 38% to 49%,” Holcomb writes. Outlets with at least four revenue streams are disproportionately local and statewide, cover general news topics, and are less likely to prioritize serving communities of color. Meanwhile, outlets that rely on a single revenue stream tend to have a national or global focus, emphasize explanatory content, and rely heavily on foundation funding. “More than half of outlets reliant on a single revenue stream say that serving communities of color is their primary focus,” Holcomb notes.

More spending on revenue generation, and individual giving is up. In 2019, 10% of operating expenses across INN member organizations went to revenue generation; in 2025, that number was up to 16%. (On the other hand, INN members were asked for the second year how much of their budget is devoted to marketing for audience growth — in 2024 and 2025, that number was a median of 1%, “suggesting room for growth.”) While philanthropy is still the largest source of support for nonprofit newsrooms, individual giving has grown from 29% in 2023 to 33% in 2025. Individual giving includes small, mid-level, and major donors; across INN members, 64% of individual giving comes from major donors. “At an average of $32,000 in 2025, a single major donor gift is roughly 20 times the size of a mid-level donation ($1,600) and nearly 300 times the size of a small donation ($110),” Holcomb writes.

The political climate has hurt nonprofit newsrooms. “Three-quarters (76%) of nonprofit news publishers in our survey said their organizations have experienced negative effects in the current political climate,” McLellan writes. That has most frequently taken the form of reductions in charitable giving and growth in misinformation aimed at their markets. National and global outlets were more likely to report negative effects. (INN’s 22 public media respondents separately all reported negative impacts from the political climate in 2025, including government and state funding reductions, but many saw record results from individual fundraising.)

Volunteers are (still) powering many nonprofit newsrooms, especially local ones. “Volunteers continue to play a significant ongoing role at nearly 4 in 10 nonprofit news organizations, increasing from 36% in 2023 to 40% in 2025,” McLellan writes in the staff & capacity section. More than half of volunteers (52%) help out with editorial tasks. Local outlets are twice as likely as others to rely on volunteers; 53% of local outlets report volunteer support, compared to 25% for other outlets.

Read more in the full Index here.

The bad news? Even those hard news stories don’t convert enough readers to sustain the cost of producing them.

Those findings come out of one of the most remarkable bits of journalism research I’ve ever read — a granular analysis of a newspaper’s web traffic at a scale we’ve never seen before. We’re talking more than 1.2 billion user sessions, covering more than 600 million individual article visits, all of them tied to unique user profiles, over a four-year period. Researchers were able to track each reader’s path — how often they visited, what types of articles drew their attention, and what they did each time they were confronted with a paywall and a decision: offer up a credit card or go find something else to read online.

“I think, at least among people who study communication, the conventional wisdom is that most people are interested in entertainment and sports, only incidentally exposed to politics coverage at all — they don’t really seek it out,” said Gregory J. Martin of Stanford University, the paper’s lead author. “If they get it at all, it’s by accident. That, I think, is kind of the conventional wisdom, both among scholars of journalism as well as among people who actually run newspapers.

“Our paper is making the point that that is basically true — if you look at visits. Those are the sort of articles that generate the most traffic. But willingness to pay in attention is really different than willingness to pay in dollars.”

All of that sounds like good news for those of us who would like local newspapers to protect their most civically useful beats — the “iron core” of journalism — whenever there’s another round of cuts to be had. If your newsroom still lives and dies by Chartbeat — if pageviews are all that matters to management — it’s missing out on some critical intel. The stories that get visits might be the ones you should be doing fewer of if your goal is chasing subscriptions. Smarter newsrooms have known this, at least intellectually, for a while, of course. But here’s hard data proving it.

But what about that bad news? Because Martin et al. have all this data tying reporters to stories to visits to subscriptions, they also have a go at testing whether hiring an additional journalist might even pay for itself. If more local news means more digital subscriptions, could we be at a point where a reporter’s salary might be covered by the extra subscriptions that her work generated? If that were true, it’d be an excellent case for further investment in newsroom capacity.

Unfortunately…it’s not. Even in the most optimistic scenarios, the authors find, one reporter’s digital subscriptions don’t come close to paying one reporter’s salary.

Here’s a chart showing the relative share of a marginal reporter’s salary covered by marginal digital sub revenue. (Note that the researchers don’t have access to this newspaper’s reporters’ actual salaries; they’re using market averages.) Adding a local news reporter will generate digital subscriptions all right — but only enough to cover something like 1/4 of their salary. Even during peak Covid, a health reporter’s digital subs would only cover around 60% or so of their salary.

To be fair, Martin notes that this methodology only accounts for the digital subscription revenue that an individual reporter might generate. Newspapers make money in other ways — from print (somehow!) and from online ads (theoretically!). But neither of those is going in the right direction, and the connection between an individual reporter’s work and revenue is much more abstract. “In a world where newspapers were exclusively online, for the staff, the digital subscriptions alone wouldn’t have covered the the cost, at least during this period,” Martin told me.

So that’s the paper’s central conundrum. If a newsroom wants to optimize for digital subscriptions — which for more than a decade has been the closest approximation of a sustainable business model for high-quality local news — it should lean into hard news. But no matter how hard it leans, the underlying numbers remain dangerously unstable.

1. “Editorial” is the strangest beat in the analysis; Martin told me it contained the work of only one opinion staffer who wrote a few times a month. The number of articles that “beat” covers here is so small that I think it’s best ignored as a category.

“We started talking about doing a media season probably five years ago,” said John Biewen, host of Scene on Radio. His cohost for this season is media scholar and longtime collaborator Chenjerai Kumanyika, who also co-hosted the seasons on whiteness and American democracy. “It intersects with all of these huge topics that we’ve taken on before. It’s very much related to the quality of our democracy, or perhaps the lack of quality of our democracy.”

To report out the season, Biewen drove to North Carolina’s border belt, a news desert a couple of hours away from his home in Durham, where he spoke to everyday North Carolinians — many of whom work in agriculture — about how they got their news.

“We wanted to do a fair amount of looking over the shoulders of ‘ordinary people’ as they consume media, or hearing about how they experience the news,” Biewen told me. “Three of the four counties that we went to are news deserts. It’s a diverse and economically challenged part of the country. So we could have gone to 100 different places, but it seemed like that was enough good reason, and the fact that it was a couple hours away from me by car was convenient.”

Biewen and Kumanyika also spoke with other media scholars, including Penny Muse Abernathy, who lives in the border belt herself, to try and answer a central question: is the news broken, or has it never worked at all? Kumanyika lays out his theory in the first episode:

When was the media telling people the truth about white supremacy and how pervasive it is, the truth about U.S. history and how brutal it is, or the truth about U.S. behavior around the world? Or the way America’s economic system works and why folks are struggling to get by? This idea that Americans used to agree on things — that we ever really had a consensus as a society? Nah.

Biewen and Kumanyika hope their season travels widely; Scene on Radio has a dedicated audience that is interested in structural deep-dives, but, as Kumanyika told me, the news affects peoples’ understanding of the world, which means it could potentially have broader appeal than any of the show’s past seasons. They’ll be doing some live shows to help grow that audience, including a session at the Tribeca Festival in New York in June.

“The news is a lot like the police,” Kumanyika said. “Everybody has a strong opinion about it.”

But widely staffed newsrooms and large print runs don’t automatically mean plentiful space for investigative or watchdog journalism.

It’s only gotten worse since 2012, when Shinzo Abe was elected prime minister, and new laws to limit journalist access to data and even criminalize certain forms of reporting due to national security concerns have caused Japan’s press freedom rankings to tumble. In 2016, UN Special Rapporteur on the right to freedom of opinion and expression, David Kaye, released a report raising concerns that Japan’s “independence of the press is facing serious threats” and that weaknesses in whistleblower protection and fear of punishment were harming journalism.

“Investigative journalism needs to be supported by press freedom,” said Yasuomi Sawa, a professor of journalism at Waseda University. “The role that investigative journalists play is undervalued in this country due to the lack of education about how information is crucial to maintain our democracy and how journalism is indispensable to hold those in power accountable.”

In fact, there is just one GIJN-affiliated news outlet in Japan — the nonprofit Tokyo Investigative Newsroom, or Tansa. Despite the odds, Tansa has, over a decade, worked on several longform investigations on issues ranging from gender, health, politics, and the environment.

“We feel there is a strong demand for nonprofit and independent media like Tansa, independent from political power and the economic spheres of large corporations, and I feel the public needs more exploratory, investigative media,” said Makoto Watanabe, Tansa’s founder and editor-in-chief.

After being disillusioned by the failure of editors at the Asahi Shimbun, where he previously worked, to properly cover the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster, Watanabe founded Tansa in 2016. While the site remains much, much smaller than the Yomiuri or the Asahi Shinbun’s thousands of staff, Tansa has slowly grown to seven people — Watanabe, three reporters, and several support staff.

A new model for Japan

While independent investigative media are common in the United States, Europe, and even in nearby South Korea and Taiwan, in Japan, establishing a nonprofit newsroom hadn’t been done before. That historical hurdle has been, and remains, a struggle for Tansa.

“Most of our donations from major foundations and institutions are from overseas,” noted Nanami Nakagawa, a reporter at Tansa since 2020. “Donations from individuals in Japan are difficult to obtain.”

At the same time, the need for what Tansa is doing has grown. With mainstream media like Asahi Shimbun abandoning or cutting their investigative units and other large media preferring to maintain cozy relationships with the government and large Japanese companies for their ad money, Tansa often finds itself the only one willing to dig into complicated topics that expose wrongdoing at some of Japan’s most powerful companies.

Investigations that Tansa has published over the past decade include an exposé on student suicide at a school in Nagasaki, a report linking illegal PFOA toxic pollution to the Japanese conglomerate, and a deep dive into Japan’s post-war era forced sterilization campaign.

While Tansa has gained a reputation for exploring topics that mainstream media mostly ignores, it has more recently found ways to collaborate. One recent investigation uncovered a vast network selling sexual images and videos of girls and women taken without their consent. Japan’s national broadcaster, NHK, aired a documentary series made in collaboration with Tansa, bringing the story to its millions of viewers around the country.

“It was very important, as Tansa has investigative skills, and NHK is such a huge media organization with a big TV viewership,” said Sawa.

Impact: The Mother Files investigation

Early this year, Tansa published their latest investigation, a collaboration with the South Korean award-winning nonprofit Korean Center for Investigative Journalism (KCIJ), digging into a massive tranche of files that implicated many of Japan’s top political leaders in a shady network of foreign funding and influence. Called the True Mother Files, the series, released over several weeks, highlighted links between numerous leaders in Japan’s longtime ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and conservative funders, the Unification Church, and religious leaders in South Korea and the United States.

“We read the entire 3,000-page document thoroughly and reported on how the collusion between LDP politicians and the Unification Church came to be, including the process and historical background, not just the content of the documents,” explained Mariko Tsuji, a reporter at Tansa since 2016.

The timing was ideal, coinciding with a general election, where an Abe protégé, Sanae Takaichi, was running for prime minister on a nationalist platform. It also was released just as a sentencing decision was being made in the trial of Tetsuya Yamagami, who assassinated Abe due to anger about the ruling party’s links to the Unification Church, which he blamed for his family’s impoverishment. The series resonated with readers.

“During an election, the Japanese media usually avoids publishing criticisms of specific politicians. Tansa, however, considered the relationship between the Unification Church and LDP politicians to be vital information that could influence voting behavior,” said Tsuji. “[It] resonated strongly and gained significant reactions from the public.”

For Tansa reporter Nakagawa, all the hard work is starting to pay off, as Tansa’s standing in Japanese society is growing. “It’s only in the past couple of years that we started seeing a significant increase in donors,” she said. In fact, they’ve enjoyed a big surge in support and new donors since publishing the True Mother exposé.

For Watanabe, what’s even more important is that there is growing awareness in Japanese society of the need for independent media and investigative reporting that prioritizes the public’s interest first and foremost. “During the last 10 years, we have seen a rise in disbelief toward mass media and an awareness that we need media that reports for us,” said Watanabe.

Collaboration and building Japan’s investigative culture

As a major economy, Japan’s reach spreads far beyond its borders. As the only newsroom partner of GIJN, Tansa often receives requests to participate in global collaborations and has played a role in many, including Oceans Inc., led by the Environmental Reporting Collective; Blowing Unsmoke on the global tobacco industry with OCCRP; and Coal Crusades with several outlets in the Asia-Pacific region. But they’re limited by their size and ongoing domestic investigations.

“There are many occasions where we would have to turn down those requests, depending on the workload we have at the moment. We feel very regretful about that,” said Watanabe.

When considering joining a collaboration, Tansa takes a few things into consideration — the links to Japan, the potential for mutual benefit, and if the collaboration aligns with its mission as a media outlet. “Tansa stands with victims and those bullied by those in power,” said Watanabe. “Alignment on this stance is what we value most.”

Watanabe, Tsuji, and Nakagawa are fully aware that one small nonprofit newsroom can’t cover everything in Japan, nor take on every worthy collaboration. The sector, as a whole, needs to grow.

“We need more media outlets like Tansa to be established — competing as rivals where necessary, but collaborating to invigorate journalism,” said Watanabe.

One organization trying to expand Japan’s investigative journalism culture — and expand the space for collaboration — is the country’s Journalism Practitioners’ Forum (J-Forum), which brings together mainstream and independent media outlets along with freelancers.

“It’s great to see the very conservative and progressive journalists talking side-by-side, with respect as colleagues, and looking for the possibility of more collaboration,” said Waseda professor Sawa.

He is also hopeful about the future of Japanese independent media, as he is seeing the emergence of new outlets expanding into investigative reporting, though with different models than Tansa.

Examples of these include Voice of Nara, Frontline Press, and My News Japan, all small, independent news outlets. The challenge will be finding a way for this cohort to find ways to finance sustainable investigative reporting.

“The media landscape is changing rapidly right now, I really look forward to seeing more to come,” said Sawa. “We need more variety and diversity in Japan’s investigative journalism ecosystem, which can make the information environment richer.”

The Star Tribune has 495 employees, including a newsroom of 200 journalists. The cuts will affect every department and the newsroom will be reduced to 175 people, the Star Tribune said.

CEO Steve Grove told employees in an email that the company will also explore becoming a nonprofit owned by a foundation. The newspaper is currently owned by Minnesota billionaire Glen Taylor, who bought it in 2014.

“Grove said Taylor has ‘only ever invested money in its future and never once taken a profit from it,’ but that it was time to make a long-term plan for the organization’s future stewardship,” the Star Tribune’s reporting says.

Last year, the Star Tribune laid off 125 employees when it closed its Minnesota printing facility and moved its printing to Des Moines, Iowa.

In May, the Star Tribune won the Pulitzer Prize for breaking news reporting for its coverage of a Catholic school shooting in August 2025.

“But vital journalism is not a guarantee of profitability,” reporter Christopher Vondracek wrote.

Read the full story here.

So both the Star-Tribune and the AJC are cutting 15% of their workforces.

However, one is exploring a nonprofit structure to insulate itself from its right-wing billionaire owner, the other kept their right-wing billionaire owner but went fully digital.

Would love to see they diverge from here.

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— Alex Ip 葉清霖 (@alexip718.com) June 3, 2026 at 3:44 AM

Minnesota has unfortunately been the site had some of the most consequential news events of the last year, and the journalists at the MN Star Tribune stepped up enormously, even taking home a Pulitzer. Now they're about to go through another painful round of cuts. www.startribune.com/minnesota-st…

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— Jessica Lussenhop (@jlussenhop.bsky.social) June 3, 2026 at 9:28 AM

The senior AI engineer position is one entry in a list included in a “Future Newsrooms Study” report from FT Strategies and WAN-IFRA. The report, published this week and set to be released annually, is designed to help publishers “future-proof their newsrooms.”

The report’s authors combed through 6,687 LinkedIn job listings, classified 234 as strategy roles, and narrowed those down further to 16 “emerging strategy function roles” in four categories:

• Audience strategy: “Embedded audience editors who shape coverage, distribution, and platform choices across desks”
• AI innovation in editorial: “Editor-coders who shadow reporters, find AI-solvable pain points, and build prototypes themselves”
• Editorial-led product and design: “Designers and product directors sitting at the editorial table, reimagining the news object itself for AI-native interfaces
• Newsroom engineering: “Editorial-led engineering teams shipping AI features every few weeks, with the editor-in-charge personally reviewing pull requests.”

I looked up all the jobs to see how they’re described and what the companies say they’re looking for. (Politico, for instance, says in its posting for an editorial director of newsroom engineering: “We want to invest in a newsroom team so that we can move from quarterly experiments to shipping AI features every couple of weeks, and building Politico-specific models that competitors can’t replicate.”)

You might consider these listings inspiration for new positions in your newsroom. Or maybe you’ll find them interesting as you think about your next gig. (I tried to note below whether the job postings are still open, but I’m obviously not the hiring manager for any of them, don’t email me!)

Anyway, here are the jobs. I’ve listed them from highest salary range to lowest; the ones that don’t give a salary range at all are at the end.

Position: Editor, newsroom development and support
Publisher: The New York Times
Location: New York
Posting still up? Yes
Years of experience required: “5+ years of experience managing people whose portfolio includes media innovation”
Salary range: $200,000 to $230,000
From the description:

The New York Times is looking for a leader to reimagine and guide its Newsroom Development and Support (NDS) team, a vital department responsible for ensuring the evolution of internal tools and practices that empower our journalists to produce their best work.

You are a dynamic person who can lead the continuing transformation of those in the newsroom who create journalism and those who support its creation. You have a strong journalistic foundation to guide this department into its next chapter. And you have the flexibility required to oversee a team that includes journalists, technologists, trainers and project managers.

The NDS team comprises two distinct groups: the editorial development arm designs training programs based on updated tools and develops curricula covering topics from clear writing to effective tagging; the newsroom technology group focuses on internal and external tools, including publishing, planning, and data management, and serves as the newsroom’s liaison to product, design, and engineering teams.

Position: Audience deputy, off-platform
Publisher: New York Times
Location: New York
Posting still up? Yes
Years of experience required: “10+ years of editorial experience including managing audience teams”
Salary range: $180,000 to $210,000
From the description:

Reporting to the Newsroom Audience Director, you will be the primary architect of our strategy for reaching and engaging readers on search and social platforms, ensuring The Times’s journalism remains visible and relevant as the digital landscape is reshaped by AI and shifting platform dynamics.

The role requires a change-oriented leader who can identify emerging trends, make fast but accurate editorial decisions, and deploy resources against the highest-impact platforms, coverage and tactics. You will be careful with framing and timing, communicate with desks and across teams effectively and proactively, and serve as the key conduit for translating how platform changes, including the disruption driven by AI features, impact our audience to newsroom and business leaders.

Position: Product director, multimodal, news product
Publisher: New York Times
Location: New York
Posting still up? No
Years of experience required: “7+ years of product management experience, including ownership of product strategy and roadmap. “
Salary range: $160,000 to $190,000
From the description:

The New York Times is looking for a Product Director to lead our Multimodal product team within the News Product Mission. Our goal is to be the entry point for news for tens of millions more people around the world by being their first read, watch or listen — every day.

We’ve focused on making our journalism more accessible through format innovation for years. Over the next few years, we want to go further. We are building toward an experience where people can come to The Times and engage with the most important and interesting journalism. This experience will allow people to engage in the format that works for them every day.

The Multimodal team and the News Product Mission works on editorially-grounded initiatives with our journalists at the speed of the news cycle. We want a product leader who is passionate about the news, eager to work in a fast-paced environment, and invested in creating news product experiences that reflect the same level of excellence as our journalism.

You will report to the VP of News Product and will manage a small team of product managers. You will partner closely with newsroom leaders, journalists, engineers, designers and other partners to shape strategy and deliver high-quality multimodal experiences across our platforms.

Position: Head of product design
Publisher: The Washington Post
Location: Washington, D.C.
Posting still up? Yes
Years of experience required: N/A
Salary range: $159,100 to $265,100
From the description:

The Washington Post is looking for a design leader with exceptional taste, product intuition, and a point of view about the future of interfaces. This isn’t only a role for someone who wants to manage a design team; it’s for someone who wants to shape how journalism is experienced globally.

You will define how millions of people engage with news in a world being reshaped by AI, platform disruption, and declining trust in high-quality information and expertise. You will help transform The Post into a portfolio of products more adaptive, more human, and more essential to daily life than ever before. Few roles offer this level of influence over such an important product category that does so much for the public good at such a critical time for the industry and the world.

The Washington Post is in the middle of a fundamental reinvention. Design is a primary driver of how we grow, differentiate, and serve the public.

Position: Technical product manager — content platform
Publisher: Bloomberg
Location: New York
Posting still up? Yes
Years of experience required: “A minimum of 5+ years of product management or related experience”
Salary range: $140,000 to $295,000
From the description:

The Content Platform team owns the end-to-end platform and strategic direction for Bloomberg’s unstructured content across core domains including News, Research, Media, and other content types. The team is responsible for the canonical content model and the ingestion, storage, projection, and distribution capabilities that make content reliable, reusable, and consumable across downstream systems — particularly AI-driven use cases. Working in close partnership with Engineering, Data and other Product teams, the group ensures content is discoverable, indexable, and usable at scale across both the Bloomberg Terminal and Bloomberg’s Enterprise lines of business. In addition, the team is accountable for platform-wide metrics, measurements, and statistics, providing transparent, quantifiable insight across every stage of the content lifecycle. Its mandate is to set the strategy, standards, and roadmap for unstructured content as a shared Bloomberg platform — ensuring consistency, scalability, and long-term leverage as content and consumption models evolve.

We are seeking a Product Manager to lead Delivery & Consumption for the Content Platform. In this role, you will define how canonical content is exposed and consumed across Bloomberg systems, including the Terminal, Enterprise products, search, and AI use cases.

You will own the projection layer and the distribution interfaces that make content accessible to downstream consumers. Working closely with engineering, AI, and product teams, you will ensure content is delivered in forms that meet latency, scalability, and reproducibility requirements while maintaining a consistent canonical model.

Position: Senior product manager — AI product
Publisher: USA Today Co.
Location: Remote
Posting still up? Yes
Years of experience required:
Salary range: $120,000 to $125,000
From the description:

USA Today Co. uses AI build‑out across our newsrooms and product surfaces with journalistic standards, and this role sits at the center of that work. You will turn real newsroom workflows into working AI products like rapidly working prototyping, pressure testing what’s real, and then partnering with core product teams to ship and scale what works.

You’ll join a small, hands-on AI product group embedded in the enterprise, working directly with reporters, editors, and internal stakeholders to uncover high value problems, design and test AI‑powered solutions, and generate the evidence needed for investment decisions. Once ideas show product market fit sign, you’ll own the handoff: translating prototypes into crisp specs and collaborating with engineering and editorial to launch, iterate, and maintain them in production.

This is a builder operator role. You move quickly from idea to working demo, and you bring rigor to what sticks — defining success, measuring impact, and killing what doesn’t deliver.

Position: Senior product manager
Publisher: The Atlantic
Location: New York, NY
Posting still up? No
Years of experience required: “5+ years in product management, preferably at a media, subscription, or consumer tech company”
Salary range: $115,000 to $175,000
From the description:

We’re looking for a Senior Product Manager who’s creative, driven, and genuinely excited about journalism. Someone who sees technology as a way to get great ideas in front of more people — and who wants to help shape how The Atlantic reaches readers in a changing media landscape. You’ll work on products that matter: our Pulitzer Prize-winning journalism deserves a reading experience that lives up to it.

The right person for this role is a sharp problem solver and an opportunity finder who shows up with ideas and perspective. They move fast, try things, learn from what doesn’t work, and keep going. You’ll report to the Product Executive Director and work closely with editorial, design, engineering, and data science. It’s a collaborative team that cares deeply about the work — and we’re looking for someone who does too.

Position: Senior editor, AI innovation
Publisher: CNN
Location: New York, Atlanta, or Washington, D.C.
Posting still up? Yes
Years of experience required: “7+ years of experience in journalism, digital media, product, or a related field with hands-on work in editorial workflows”
Salary range: $87,000 to $162,500
From the description:

CNN is seeking a Senior Editor, AI Innovation to prototype, test and deploy AI-powered tools, workflows and systems that advance our distinctive reporting and newsroom efficiency. Embedded in editorial operations, this role partners closely with reporters — particularly on investigative, enterprise, and data-driven work — to develop practical, scalable AI solutions that enhance research, editing, information management, and production. The role requires strong technical fluency, editorial judgment, and expertise in prompt-driven and agentic AI systems, with a focus on ensuring all AI-assisted work meets CNN’s standards for accuracy, objectivity, fairness, and transparency.

Position: Editor, audience — news
Publisher: CNN
Location: New York, Atlanta, or Washington, D.C.
Posting still up? Yes
Years of experience required: “3+ years in digital journalism, audience or content strategy, or analytics”
Salary range: $77,000 to $143,000
From the description:

The Audience Editor is the embedded, desk‑specific partner to Audience Strategy & Insights, translating audience signals into clear editorial choices. You will supply the desk with essential performance learnings; shape framing, formats, and distribution to meet audience demand; and collaborate across Search, Social, Home, Newsletters, and Product to maximize reach, habit, and engagement (including among subscribers).

This role sits at the intersection of editorial judgment and evidence — collaborative, rigorous in approach, and focused on measurable outcomes. You will work closely within our Audience Strategy & Insights operating model and in partnership with DART (Data, Analytics, Research & Testing) to turn insights into action and build repeatable practices the desk can rely on.

Position: Podcast social video editor
Publisher: Vox
Location: New York
Posting still up? Yes
Years of experience required: “5+ years of experience creating social-first video content and motion graphic assets for media brands, preferably including podcasts”
Salary range: $76,000 to $95,000
From the description:

As a Podcast Social Video Editor you will drive the creative vision for short-form social content across the Vox Media slate and oversee the producers who make it. You’ll align workflows and standards, build the content calendar, and steward performance and quality. You will ensure each show’s social media output meets its unique audience while fitting within network-level strategy.

Position: Senior channel manager, YouTube, BBC children’s & education
Publisher: BBC
Posting still up? No
Years of experience required: N/A
Salary range: £45,000 to £58,000
From the description:

This role has responsibility for leading a portfolio of YouTube activity for BBC Children’s & Education, including line management of YouTube Channel Managers. You will oversee the strategic planning, delivery and performance of YouTube content across channels; supporting creative development, use of audience insights and effective collaboration with internal teams. You’ll also be responsible for signing off content and ensuring all output meets editorial, legal and compliance standards.

Position: Senior AI engineer, AI Lab
Publisher: The Economist
Location: London
Posting still up? No
Years of experience required: “3+ years experience building with LLMs or NLP pipelines (ideally hands-on with OpenAI, Claude, Cohere, Gemini, Mistral, HuggingFace)”
Salary range: N/A
From the description:

This is a full-time role at the centre of our new AI Lab, a small team exploring how generative AI might shape the future of Economist journalism. This role will focus on building and fine-tuning LLM-powered systems with a particular focus on editorial tone, style transfer, retrieval workflows, and multimodal generation (especially audio).

You’ll ship products from zero-to-one and see your ideas directly influence how millions of readers interact with our journalism. If you enjoy working close to design, iterating fast, and building novel interactions across text, voice, and visuals, we’d love to hear from you. You’ll be one of the first three engineers in a dedicated lab, working alongside the Tech Lead, Design Lead and Product Lead.

Position: Editorial director, newsroom engineering
Publisher: Politico
Location: Arlington, Va.
Posting still up? No
Years of experience required: N/A
Salary range: N/A
From the description:

We’re at an inflection point: AI is reshaping how audiences find, consume, and interact with news. Politico’s advantage remains our original reporting, our judgment, and our distinct voice. But to protect and extend that advantage we need the newsroom at the center of innovation — moving faster, experimenting more boldly, and turning pilots into reliable infrastructure rather than one-off demos.

We want to invest in a newsroom team so that we can move from quarterly experiments to shipping AI features every couple of weeks, and building Politico-specific models that competitors can’t replicate. We also want to invest knowledge and technical thinking in our newsroom to more closely connect our journalism with our innovative product building.

Politico is seeking an editorial-minded technical leader to lead this team and serve as our Editorial Director, Newsroom Engineering. This role will be a player-coach who turns newsroom priorities into tools, workflows, and platforms that help our reporters and editors move faster without sacrificing accuracy or voice.

You’ll run team’s agile rituals; personally review high-risk pull requests; evaluate outcomes; and contribute code. In 2026, the team’s mandate is to help every desk leverage AI and other new technologies in practical, novel ways. Adoption and impact are the bar for success with KPIs measured by minutes saved, time-to-publish, quality preserved, and active usage. You’ll also be responsible for translating editorial priorities into a living roadmap. You’ll identify use cases and opportunities for workflow improvements by staying connected to newsroom priorities and fostering relationships with editors and reporters.

Position: Manager, product design
Publisher: Philadelphia Inquirer
Location: Philadelphia
Posting still up? Yes
Years of experience required: “10+ years experience in digital product design, including experience leading or coaching designers”
Salary range: N/A
From the description:

The Philadelphia Inquirer is looking for a Manager, Product Design to lead a team of designers creating thoughtful, reader-centered experiences across Inquirer.com, our mobile apps, newsletters, and emerging platforms.

This is a hands-on, coaching-focused role. You’ll help designers do their best work through clear feedback, strong project guidance, and close partnership with product and engineering. You’ll set a high bar for quality and process, and you may jump in directly on important projects when needed.

Reporting to the VP, Product, you’ll work closely with product management, user research, engineering, newsroom leadership, sales, and consumer marketing to improve subscriber growth, engagement, and retention.

Position: Assistant manager, content and AI innovation
Publisher: South China Morning Post
Location: Hong Kong
Posting still up? No
Years of experience required: N/A
Salary range: N/A
From the description:

The Assistant Manager (Content & AI Innovation) is a hybrid role dedicated to empowering the newsroom through artificial intelligence, automation, and data-driven growth strategies. You will bridge the gap between editorial needs and technical execution — designing, building, and deploying AI “agents,” automation workflows, and even non-AI skillsets to boost productivity and efficiency aligned with professional and quality journalism.

Position: Technical product manager
Publisher: The Sun
Location: London
Posting still up? No
Years of experience required: N/A
Salary range: N/A
From the description:

Working in the Sun product team, you will be responsible for our core platform and innovation initiatives. You will own the strategy and development for the foundational, shared technologies that power our entire digital estate, ensuring they are robust, scalable and enable other product teams to deliver value faster. Additionally, you will be our champion for innovation, tasked with exploring, prototyping and integrating new technologies and techniques. This includes investigating how AI can support our future plans and how our newsrooms can leverage new tools to drive efficiencies, ensuring The Sun stays at the cutting edge of digital media.

Today’s interview is worth a look. It’s with Stephen Totilo, a long-time video games journalist who is two years into running his own solo operation, Game File. (He spent nine years as editor-in-chief of Kotaku.) There’s a lot of interesting detail about the realities of running a solo Substack — both in Zierer’s write-up and the full interview on YouTube. Here are a few that stood out to me.

• Totilo has accumulated 27,000 total subscribers and — most importantly — 1,400 paying readers who spend $10/month or $100/year for access to two more full newsletters per week. (Free subscribers get one, plus teasers of the other two so they know what they’re missing.) That’s a healthy $140,000 in annual revenue — but Substack’s cut and Stripe fees eat into that.
• When Totilo gets an important exclusive interview, they usually get put behind the paywall. But he wasn’t prepared for how many free readers would use the free trial he offers to subscribe, read the article, and then cancel within an hour: “Just wait out the trial! Maybe there’s going to be other good stuff for you here!”
• One thing he misses from his pre-newsletter days: the community of readers who’d live in the comment section. Since most readers see his pieces in their inbox, there’s an extra bit of friction required to get them commenting on the website: “Everything feels a little quiet compared to the Kotaku experience.”
• Loved this excerpt from one of Totilo’s interviews, with game developer Nick Kamen, on how his company thinks about pricing and consumer price sensitivity:

  “We had this joke of, like, how much is a game really?” Kaman told me, as we chatted last month.

  “In a player’s mind, what does it mean to spend five bucks? Well, that’s five bucks. But six bucks? Well, that’s still five bucks.

  “Four bucks is also kind of five bucks,” he continued. “Three bucks is two bucks. And two bucks is basically free.

  “So we’ve got these tiers: You know, twelve bucks… that’s ten bucks. But thirteen bucks is fifteen bucks.

  “And we found that eight bucks is still five bucks. It doesn’t become ten bucks. Seven ninety nine, that’s five bucks, right?

  “So, eight bucks going to five bucks is the biggest differential we could find in pricing, so we found it very optimal.”

Check out Zierer’s write-up or watch the whole thing on YouTube or below.

The last weekend of May, Sylvia Salazar was waiting for her flight to take off when she pulled out her phone and explained why protestors were on a hunger strike outside Delaney Hall, an ICE facility in New Jersey.

As passengers found their seats and loaded their luggage into the overhead compartments behind her, Salazar, wearing a hat that said “Vote,” spoke in a low tone about how detainees in the facility had been served food with maggots and ICE officers had teargassed protesters. As of this writing, Salazar’s short explainer has more than 2,000 likes.

This is the type of political education content Salazar, 46, has been creating for nearly a decade for her brand, Tono Latino. Her videos, in English and Spanish, explain public policy, corruption, and the impact on Latinos in the U.S. Recent videos include explainers on Trump’s $350 billion slush fund and why Trump sent Jared Kushner to negotiate an Iran peace deal.

She has more than 116,000 followers on Instagram, 30,000 on TikTok, and 9,000 on YouTube. She also sends out a Substack newsletter, Latino Lens, with a paid version for $6 per month. She’s currently one of 20 cohort members of the Latinos, Media, and Democracy program at the Digital Democracy Institute of the Americas.

Salazar’s political work started when Donald Trump was elected president in 2016. An immigrant from Colombia living in Portland, Oregon, she was shocked by the result and started looking into the election’s Latino voter turnout.

“That’s what hit me like a punch in the face,” Salazar told me. “In the six presidential elections leading up to the 2016 election, the Latino voter turnout had been below 50%.”

Salazar began to understand that one reason for low Latino turnout was that political and civic engagement messaging often weren’t effective, leaving Latinos across the country underinformed about policies that affected them. The realization was personal: Salazar had been living in the United States since she was 18, but didn’t really understand how the U.S. government and political system worked.

At the time, her career in computer engineering took a turn when the company placed her in a public relations role. She studied up on her own and, in 2017, launched a newsletter covering U.S. and Latin America news in Spanish for others like her.

Salazar was more comfortable behind the keyboard than in front of the camera. But when a mentor told her that she “was never going to be as passionate and as engaging [in writing] as I am in person, and that Latinos watch more videos than anybody else,” she took on the challenge.

Salazar considers herself a political educator who relies on mainstream and independent journalism to do her work. When we chatted via Zoom in mid-May, she was wearing a blue custom sweater with the words “fueled by facts and receipts” embroidered on the front. Our conversation about her own political education, informing bilingual communities, and building audience trust has been edited for length and clarity.

Today, local investigative reporting is still the Monitor’s core mission. But a 16-town listening tour of the state last summer surfaced demand for another kind of local journalism: coverage of elections and public meetings.

“Mainers [bemoaned] the loss of hyperlocal journalism and the insights that they used to get into the civic governance of their town and their community,” said executive director Micaela Schweitzer-Bluhm. The Monitor’s team heard anecdotes about people going to vote in local elections only to leave without voting because they didn’t understand the issues on the ballot. “Particularly in western Maine, we were hearing: We just don’t have local journalism anymore,” she said. That got the newsroom’s leadership thinking: What role could the Monitor play in meeting that need?

The answer they’ve landed on is Monitor Local, a “hyperlocal civic news service focused on communities in Maine that have little to no journalism bringing attention to what’s going on in their local government” and giving readers the information to engage as local citizens. It’s the latest example of a statewide news organization expanding coverage by homing in on community-level, hyperlocal news needs (some metro dailies have done this too).

Monitor Local launched last November in four counties in downeast and western Maine, where the need seemed most acute based on the listening sessions. (The Monitor had already zeroed in on those areas a few years ago as part of its effort to better serve the state’s rural communities with its in-depth reporting.)

The outlet hired veteran local journalist and editor Judy Meyer to lead Monitor Local; in addition to reporting herself, she edits a network of freelance correspondents working out of communities in those counties. (Relying on community members as freelance correspondents has appeal for many local newsrooms, especially in rural areas.) The nonprofit Journalism New England provided $50,000 in seed funding for Monitor Local and trained a couple of Monitor Local correspondents through its 12-week “Career Lab,” a model not just for producing local journalism, but for making community residents into local journalists.

Since November, Meyer and Monitor Local correspondents have covered the runup to and outcomes of Town Meetings, a major county budget controversy, and lots of housing and zoning debates. A correspondent broke a story about a pier collision that prompted a Coast Guard investigation. Another reported on Bowdoin’s proposal for a student campsite in Kingfield, where residents then signed a petition opposing the campsite; the college just withdrew the application. Similarly, Meyer reported on the Maine Library Commission’s proposal to impose new state requirements that might have forced small, volunteer-run libraries to close — the backlash led the proposal to be postponed and dropped, and commissioners are gathering more feedback for a new proposal. Monitor Local’s budget controversy reporting inspired the Monitor to take a broader look at other county budget processes.

Monitor Local reporting is included in the Monitor’s daily newsletter and rounded up in two weekly regional newsletters on Saturdays. Since launching Monitor Local in November, the Monitor has seen 14% growth in its Downeast Local newsletter and 26% growth in its Western Local newsletter, Schweitzer-Bluhm said. Readers have also discovered Monitor Local’s reporting through word of mouth, community Facebook groups, and Reddit. Like the rest of the Monitor’s reporting, Monitor Local coverage is frequently republished in other local newspapers across the state; so far in 2026, 19 news outlets have republished Monitor Local reporting “for a total of 261 instances,” Schweitzer-Bluhm said.

Some counties where Monitor Local is active still have a local newspaper, like The Quoddy Tides in Washington County, one of the outlets that has republished the Monitor. “We’re not trying to replace other newspapers,” Schweitzer-Bluhm said. “We’re trying to provide a news service that serves readers in those communities, and that allows hyperlocal papers that do exist to use their resources in other ways that we’re not going to do.”

That generally means sticking to a civic lens, so Monitor Local doesn’t cover topics like school sports or business openings. However, a correspondent did cover the winner of the Maine State Spelling Bee, an eighth grader from Machias. That story was “an outlier,” Meyer said, “but it was such a spectacular win for a student in Washington County where students often struggle, so I saw it as a reflection of the positive learning environment in [winner] Tristan Singh’s public school, which ties directly to school district priorities and educational attainment — often driven by budgets decided by school boards and approved by voters. So, maybe a stretch, but certainly grounded in civic life.”

The nonprofit puts cohorts of community reporting fellows from local newsrooms through a 12-week journalism training program, with weekly 90-minute online classes taught by journalism educator Katina Paron. The fellows report and write stories that Paron edits, typically over multiple rounds, and the stories are published by the fellow’s nominating newsroom (similar to some student journalism partnerships with local newsrooms).

“We spend a lot of time going back and forth to make sure we can get the best story that we can, and do our best not to tell them what to do, but to ask questions and to point out things that we don’t understand or don’t make sense or where we think it could be stronger to help them make decisions,” O’Mara said. She estimated fellows put in about 10 hours of work per week on average; they’re paid a “learning stipend” of $300 a month for participation in the program. Fellows have included students, grandparents, and ages in between.

The Career Lab’s ethos is similar to the Documenters program adopted by many newsrooms. “I would not try to tell you that our 12-week program will teach somebody how to handle enterprise journalism or a big investigative piece,” O’Mara said. “I will tell you that it teaches them how to cover town council, city hall, school board, the business that closed on Main Street and the new one that’s coming in, the handicap access to beaches, the things that make a town tick and help a town have all of the great outcomes that we know [local] journalism brings” like lower borrowing costs for local government, a greater sense of connection, higher civic participation, and even better public health outcomes.

“I think [journalism] is a big club, and we should open the doors, and there’s room for different people with different skill sets,” she added.

Meyer’s concern going into the Career Lab program “was that people who were interested in doing this were bringing an agenda with them,” she said. But Schweitzer-Bluhm said the people that want to work for the Monitor have generally understood that impartiality is core to the publication’s mission.

The Career Lab’s second cohort just wrapped up; over three months, four fellows produced 31 stories for Maine newsrooms. Two of those fellows are Monitor Local correspondents. Meyer plans to recruit more fellows for a Career Lab cohort starting in September.

Melissa Razdrih told me she began reading the Monitor soon after moving to Maine in 2021. She had done some work for political blogs like FloridaPolitics, contributed a few stories to The Quoddy Tides, and considered starting her own local blog, but responded to the Monitor’s Career Lab application instead. She completed the community reporting fellowship in May.

The cohort heard from guest speakers, including a lawyer who discussed defamation and working reporters from newspapers including the Portland Press Herald. But Razdrih said she learned the most when she had to post a lengthy correction on her first story. She was reporting on solar streetlights. “I didn’t know at the time how complicated energy is in Maine, and so I kind of stepped into this really complex issue with a lot of nuance that I didn’t understand, and the context that I used in the article wasn’t as applicable as I thought it was,” she said. “That was a very humbling experience.”

Since then, Razdrih has developed a beat around Washington County agriculture; one of her stories about a proposed farm bond in the state’s congressional session was republished on the front page of the Portland Press Herald.

Razdrih estimated she spends 20 to 25 hours per week on reporting, aiming to file two stories per week. She’s paid per story by the Monitor as a freelancer, and balances that work with teaching art on Mondays at her daughter’s school.

“In Maine, we’ve got a lot of writers,” Razdrih said. Both for those with writing backgrounds and those who have other professional experience, she thinks teaching the basics of journalism to people already in the communities where local reporting is needed “makes so much sense.”

“Our profession has been too quiet, too passive, and too fragmented in the face of abuses by the companies leading the AI revolution,” Sulzberger said. The New York Times Company, he said, has spent more than $20 million suing OpenAI, Microsoft, and Perplexity, and “as AI companies are doubtless aware, most news organizations lack the resources to go to court to enforce their rights.”

Sulzberger:

Tech giants strip-mine news websites without permission or compensation. They repackage these stolen goods as their own, siphoning off the audiences and revenue that otherwise would go to the news organizations that created this work. And this happens not just once during the training process, but countless times every single day.

As a result, I fear we are careening toward a future with fewer and fewer journalists to do the expensive, difficult work of original reporting — going to places, talking to people, digging up information, covering important issues and events, providing context and analysis, investigating the powerful. A future where a crucial wellspring of a healthy society and a stable democracy — the truth, understanding and accountability provided by original journalism — continues to dry up.

Sulzberger also offered some advice on ways news organizations can make themselves more resilient to AI:

Use AI the right way. Newsrooms should create thoughtful standards for the responsible use of AI. Then they should be aggressive and creative in putting the technology to work to improve their journalism and strengthen their businesses. A.I. can bring real value to organizations that find the right ways to embrace it, and a shift of this size will lay waste to any organization that refuses to evolve. There’s nothing inherently bad about AI technology — it’s the actions of the companies behind it that need reforming.

Be a destination first. A world increasingly intermediated by AI platforms would leave news organizations even more at the mercy of tech giants to share traffic, credit, and money. The clearest path to support quality reporting will be through direct relationships with audiences. Being a destination doesn’t mean ignoring the broader internet. You still must make new relationships where people are, which is usually a tech platform. But to deepen those relationships — to make them loyal, habituated and valuable — your audience must learn it’s better to engage with you directly rather than through someone else.

Focus on original reporting. Many news organizations undermined and commoditized themselves trying to feed the constantly shifting preferences of search and social algorithms with clickbait, aggregation and hot takes. The economics of that approach will get even worse. To be a destination in a world intermediated by AI, you’ll need journalism so distinctive it has its own gravity. The heart of that is original reporting. The public has no other source for this work. Neither does AI.

Explain why journalism matters. AI companies have giant megaphones and have studiously and selectively communicated the benefits of their work while also downplaying the harms. The news industry must, in turn, make the case that original reporting is an essential ingredient in healthy societies, secure nations and strong democracies — and show how the actions of the tech giants are putting it at risk.

You can read the full keynote here.

Okay — now what about the “fake news” media? All the misinformation out there online: Is it more unfair to your side of most arguments or the other one?

Decades of communications research has found that, all else equal, people do tend to think that the news media is rooting against people like them. It’s a phenomenon known as the hostile media effect, and we know that the more politically committed someone is to a party or ideology, the more likely they are to see the news media as biased against them. (Want to know why trust in news has decreased as American politics have gotten more partisan and tribal? There’s a big part of your answer.)

But does that same phenomenon also apply to online misinformation? That’s the subject of a new paper just published in the journal Political Communication. It’s titled “The Hostile Misinformation Effect: How Ideological Congruence Drives the Assessment of Misinformation Targets,” and its authors are Patrick van Erkel, Michael Hameleers, Aqsa Farooq, Katjana Gattermann, Marina Tulin, Elske van den Hoogen, and Claes de Vreese, most of whom are attached to the Amsterdam School of Communication Research at the University of Amsterdam. Here’s the abstract:

Misinformation is increasingly seen as a key challenge to democratic societies. Our study is one of the first to shed light onto the citizen perspective when it comes to the perceived target of misinformation during election campaigns. In doing so, we extend on a classic concept in the (political) communication literature, the hostile media effect, and examine whether this applies to misinformation as well, a so-called hostile misinformation effect. Do citizens believe that their political in-group is being targeted more by misinformation than their political out-group? Our argument is based on motivated reasoning and social identity theory and extends to the role of several crucial moderating factors.

Using data from a panel study conducted during the 2024 European Parliament elections across Germany, the Netherlands, and Poland (N = 4,045), we find clear support for a hostile misinformation effect, as citizens believe their own political party was much more targeted than the political opponent. Moreover, we demonstrate that particularly political interest, party identity strength, ideological extremity, and being right-wing make people more susceptible to the phenomenon. Our findings demonstrate that the hostile media effect can be extended to the domain of misinformation perceptions. Moreover, they explain why people perceive to be surrounded by misinformation, and help contextualize literature suggesting that people associate misinformation with various other information disorders and threats.

To understand what van Erkel et al. are arguing, let’s step back and understand the original hostile media effect. The original paper (Vallone, Ross, and Lepper) gathered a group of 144 Stanford students, many of them drawn from pro-Israel and pro-Arab groups on campus. Researchers asked them a set of questions to record their views on the situation in the Middle East and their familiarity with recent events there. They then showed them six segments from the national evening newscasts (ABC, NBC, CBS) about the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacres, in which thousands of Arab civilians in Beirut-area refugee camps were killed by a militia backed by the Israeli Defense Forces.

Everyone saw the same six segments, which added up to about 36 minutes. Then they were all asked to evaluate the stories for any bias. Pro-Israeli students strongly believed that the news stories were biased against Israel. And pro-Arab students strongly believed that the stories were biased against the Palestinians and other Arabs. These were, again, the same stories.

Pro-Arab subjects saw the news programs as “applying lower standards to Israel” than to other countries (i.e., “excusing Israel when they would have blamed some other country”). They also felt that the news programs “did not focus enough on Israel’s role in the massacre [in relation] to the role of other parties.” Finally, they believed that in light of all the potential positive and potential negative information that could have been used, the editors of the news programs succeeded in making a stronger positive case for Israel than a negative case against Israel.

Pro-Israeli subjects, in contrast, saw the news programs as “applying higher standards to Israel” (i.e., “blaming Israel when they would have excused some other country”), felt that the news programs “focused too much on Israel’s role in the massacre [in relation] to the role of other parties,” and believed that in light of the potential information available on both sides of the issue, the editors of the news programs had succeeded in making a stronger negative case against Israel than a positive case for Israel.

Subjects on both sides also concluded, after watching, “that the ‘personal views’ of the editorial staffs of the news programs were opposite to their own.”

Interestingly, the study made an unusual finding about people with high levels of knowledge — news junkies, you might think of them. Remember, the students had all been asked questions to test their knowledge of the conflict. The people who’d done well on those questions, who knew the most about the conflict? Their ideology drove how their knowledge interacted with their opinions on bias. High-knowledge pro-Israelis were more likely to think the news stories were anti-Israel. High-knowledge pro-Arabs were more likely to think the stories were anti-Arab. But high-knowledge subjects who didn’t have a strong opinion one way or the other were less likely to see bias.

In other words, for partisans, more knowledge made people see more bias in the news. But for neutrals, more knowledge made people see less bias.

Further research has found other factors that contribute to increased perceptions of media bias: higher levels of interest in politics, more extreme views, right-wing ideology, increased hostility toward political opponents, distrust of institutions, and a number of psychological traits like need for closure.

It’s into that body of research that van Erkel et al. stride, asking whether or not the same phenomenon applies for misinformation.

Researchers surveyed about 4,000 people in Germany, the Netherlands, and Poland around the 2024 European parliamentary elections — both before and after the elections themselves. People were asked to identify which political party they would vote for, as well as which party they would “absolutely not vote for.” European electoral systems are, of course, filled with many more major parties than the American one, so they were able to tease out a less-binary set of data than pro-Israeli/pro-Arab, or pro-Democrat/pro-Republican.

Later, the subjects were asked to think about online misinformation surrounding the election — not necessarily misinformation they themselves had seen, but their impressions of the current universe of political misinformation at that time. They were asked, on a 1-to-7 scale, the degree to which they had “the impression that misinformation particularly targets” both their favored party and their least favorite party.

Van Erkel et al. didn’t expose them all to a common corpus of media, the way the original hostile media effect researchers did. They weren’t reacting to specific Facebook memes or TikTok videos. Those 1982 TV clips gave partisans something concrete to react to, while this open-ended conception of “misinformation” gave subjects space to apply their own notions of what the media universe looks like.

(It would be interesting, though, to ask people more specifically about misinformation they had seen. On one hand, partisans are less likely to consider a particular item as “misinformation” if it favors their party — they’re more likely to consider it good information. But on the other, social media algorithms are very good at shoveling that sort of politically congruent misinformation at people — think of your uncle’s Facebook feed.)

So what did the researchers find? As with the news media, people tend to believe that misinformation disproportionately targets their side: 49.6% said their preferred party was at least somewhat “particularly targeted” by misinformation, versus only 21.5% who said that it wasn’t. When asked about their least-favorite party, the numbers flipped: 27.3% said that party was at least somewhat particularly targeted, while 43.8% said it wasn’t. The effect was similar across all three countries — though in the Netherlands, it was less strong once the election date had passed.

Nothing too unexpected there. But how would specific factors play out? People with higher levels of political interest were more likely to see their own party as targeted. Same with people who were more attached to their political party or whose ideology was more extreme.

But there was — as in other bias-perception research — a significant difference on the left versus the right.

When comparing citizens on the political left with those on the right…we find that the hostile misinformation effect is significantly more pronounced for citizens that are more right-wing…Overall the hostile misinformation effect is 1.3 points stronger [on a seven-point scale] for those fully on the right compared to those fully on the left, holding all other variables constant….although the effect is present across the whole political spectrum, it becomes more pronounced as citizens become more right-wing.

Researchers also wanted to test if people’s perceptions of hostile misinformation were different after the election, depending on whether or not their preferred party had won or lost. The results didn’t find any statistically significant impact — but surprisingly, it was people whose party had won who seemed to view their party as particularly targeted, not the losers.

Our argument is based on motivated reasoning and social identity theory and extends to the role of several crucial moderating factors. We argue that, alongside a direct effect, the hostile misinformation effect is moderated by the extent to which voters are interested in politics, partisan identity, ideologically extreme positions, and electoral performance of the in-party…

Building on the concept of the hostile media effect, our findings suggest that similar underlying assumptions apply to voters’ assessments of misinformation targets: they are more likely to consider their own political party as victim of misinformation campaigns than opposing parties. This finding that perceptions of bias extend beyond (traditional) media coverage to perceptions of bias in misinformation campaigns is particularly relevant in the context of a new media ecosystem where there is potentially more misinformation abound, and a polarized political context where people are more inclined to process information with party considerations in mind.

If you think back to November 2016, you may remember a spree of stories attributing Donald Trump’s surprise victory, at least in part, to “fake news” — misinformation spread on Facebook, mostly. (I may have contributed to that spree.) But as a term, “fake news” became useless almost immediately as Trump made it his preferred term for news stories that were critical of him. “Fake news” is, in a polarized political environment, in the eye of the beholder. But no matter the reality, this study confirms that people’s perceptions of misinformation are driven by the same sorts of emotional identities and motivated reasoning that shape how they view the mainstream media.

But it turns out NOTUS isn’t the only rising media star in town. The Washington Star, a conservative-leaning newspaper and onetime Post rival that shut down in 1981, has started publishing again under media executive and New York Sun publisher Dovid Efune, The New York Times reported Thursday. What’s more, The Washington Star Company is suing NOTUS over the Star name; the plaintiff filed a trademark infringement lawsuit in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia on Thursday, Law360 reported.

Efune previously revived The New York Sun after it shut down in 2008, and claims it is profitable today, per the Times. The Washington Star has begun publishing on Substack, and Efune told the Times’ Katie Robertson that he aims to have a website live in the next two months and publish a weekend print newspaper by the end of this year. He said he plans to hire up to 50 full-time journalists and contributors. The launch of the new Star, he added, “accelerated our timeline to scale up.”

The Washington Star is back!

Join us today: https://t.co/iFwKDPlKJI pic.twitter.com/3ApgVSozfW

— The Washington Star (@TheWashStar) May 28, 2026

NOTUS publisher and backer Robert Allbritton has ties to the reanimated newspaper, too; his father owned The Washington Star. Allbritton recently told Columbia Journalism Review replicating that name would be too “backward looking,” but CJR described the new NOTUS name as an “homage” to The Washington Star. The plaintiff’s lawsuit explicitly expresses concern that the NOTUS rebrand, coupled with Allbritton’s family connections to The Washington Star, will confuse readers, and argues the “confusingly similar” name will violate The Washington Star’s trademark.

A NOTUS spokesperson said the publication would vigorously defend against The Washington Star Company’s suit, per the Times.

Read the full Times story here, Law360’s reporting on the lawsuit here, and an explainer from City Cast DC here, which notes, “For the record, City Cast DC will not be rebranding as City Star DC.”

Updated with information about The Washington Star Company’s trademark infringement lawsuit against NOTUS.

Based on my conversations with publishers, editors, and media analysts, the answer might be yes, but perhaps not in the ways the news industry might expect.

The logic of the small bet

Across the global news industry, subscriptions have become the dominant response to the collapse of print advertising. Those models depend on conditions that are less common across much of Africa, and the data bears that out.

Nic Newman, a senior research associate at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, said reliable data on willingness to pay for news in the region remains limited. Surveys tend to capture highly educated audiences that are difficult to compare with the broader population. Even so, he said, the overall pattern is clear. Across much of the continent, willingness to pay for general news remains low. “People expect news to be free,” Newman said.

In Europe and North America, readers typically pay with credit cards or digital wallets linked to bank accounts. In Kenya, digital payments are dominated by M-Pesa, the mobile money platform that has made the country a global case study in financial technology. Everyday transactions run through mobile money rather than cards.

Mobile data can also be expensive relative to incomes, shaping how audiences consume news. Many readers prefer formats that load quickly or can be accessed intermittently. For publishers, that combination of low willingness to pay and unfamiliar infrastructure has made Western-style subscription models a difficult import.

“Income levels, device access, and payment systems are different,” said Greg Piechota, researcher-in-residence at the International News Media Association. “These markets require adapting to local circumstances.”

At The Standard, this adaption has meant rethinking not just pricing but the entire payment experience. The paper’s micropayment experiment is not simply a commercial decision. It is a bet on infrastructure, a wager that the friction of digital payments, long a barrier to subscriptions in African media markets, can be reduced enough to create a new class of casual paying readers.

“You realize that print revenues are going down,” Vidija said. “The only hope we have is to maximize digital with the various products we can come up with.”

Here’s how Vidija described the newspaper’s journey. The Standard first tried a full paywall, locking all content. It then experimented with a metered model that allowed three free articles every month before prompting readers to subscribe, only to find many simply created new email addresses to reset their access.

The paper eventually settled on a freemium model. About 60% of its content sits behind a paywall, while the rest remains free. Micropayments are one entry point; weekly, monthly and annual subscriptions are the other ones.

The pricing is designed to guide behavior. A reader who pays for individual articles every day will spend more over time than a subscriber. “A smart audience will sit down and look at the rates and opt for monthly or annually,” Vidija said.

In this sense, micropayments are less a permanent feature than a gateway to a more valuable relationship. It is a low-commitment starting point designed to build the habit of paying and eventually nudge readers toward longer subscriptions.

Whether the strategy is working is harder to say. Vidija acknowledged that key metrics like traffic, pageviews, and registered users inevitably fall when a paywall goes up. He attributed The Standard’s relative success to consistency. Competitors tried paywalls, retreated, and tried again. The Standard held its position. “When people start trusting your brand, they start coming back,” he said.

The skeptic’s view

Not everyone in Nairobi’s media ecosystem is convinced that micropayments are transformative. Eric Mugendi, editor-at-large, partnerships and initiatives at Africa Uncensored, has watched these experiments with a mix of sympathy and frustration. His organization tried formal subscriptions through Shahara. This platform was built to distribute its work and allow audiences to pay for it directly, and was also open to other creators, integrating Stripe and M-Pesa pay-bill numbers, with limited success. Patreon worked somewhat. None generated significant revenue.

Instead, Africa Uncensored leans on voluntary contributions tied to specific investigations. At the end of its investigative documentaries, such as the ones on fake fertilizer and medical negligence, journalists appeal directly to viewers. “Our stories tend to touch on issues that are personal and important,” Mugendi said. “By giving people a way to contribute, we extend the connection they feel to the story.”

But Mugendi’s deeper critique goes beyond mechanics. He argued that Kenya’s mainstream media struggles with subscriptions not because readers are unwilling to pay, but because the product does not consistently justify payment.

Readers can find much of what mainstream outlets publish freely available elsewhere, on blogs, on social media, on Telegram channels where pirated newspaper PDFs circulate every morning. “We don’t have a good enough product that people would want to pay for,” he said. “A lot of mainstream platforms haven’t really figured out the value proposition.”

He points to structural problems. Major media groups price digital subscriptions as though they were equivalent to print, despite lower production costs. Publications within the same group often require separate subscriptions. Editorial priorities, he said, do not always reflect audience needs. Health, the economy, and education, issues central to daily life, are often subordinated to political coverage that readers can get directly from politicians’ own social media accounts.

“You still have politicians on the front page, even though people’s lives are worse than a couple of years ago,” Mugendi said. “The issues people actually care about get sidelined.” His prescription is not to abandon subscriptions or micropayments, but to build something worth paying for first.

Newman said the debate over reader revenue is often framed too narrowly as a question of payment systems. In reality, it is also a product challenge. Publishers must offer journalism worth paying for while making the act of paying effortless. “If you have to think every time you want to pay for an article, that is a real barrier,” he said.

What the global data shows

Piechota has spent years studying reader revenue strategies across multiple continents, and he placed the Kenyan experiments in a wider context, one that is both encouraging and sobering. Micropayments, he said, are a recurring idea in the media industry, resurfacing every few years as publishers search for ways to capture casual readers.

The appeal is straightforward. Subscriptions tend to attract heavy users, often more educated and affluent readers who consume news frequently. Casual readers, who visit occasionally and may value quality journalism but are not ready to commit to a recurring payment, have few products designed for them.

Micropayments, in theory, serve the casual reader. In practice, Piechota said, the evidence from wealthier markets has been mixed. The problem, he said, comes down to lifetime value. Over time, a subscriber typically generates far more revenue than the equivalent number of one-off article purchases from the same reader. When publishers introduce micropayments, some readers who might otherwise have subscribed instead opt to pay per article, reducing total revenue.

“Instead of getting 20 cents for an article, maybe it is better to give a free trial for a full subscription and then start charging,” Piechota said. “If you look at this user over three years, you will make more money.”

​​Piechota is careful to note that he has not seen hard data from Kenyan publishers on whether micropayments are cannibalizing subscriptions or complementing them.

The Daily Nation has publicly reported rapid growth in digital reader revenue, but the breakdown between subscription and transactional revenue has not been shared with researchers. Its parent company, Nation Media Group, said digital revenue rose by 11% in 2025, with paywall subscribers more than doubling, even as print circulation declined, though it did not disclose total subscriber numbers or the share of revenue from subscriptions versus one-off payments.

Based on patterns observed elsewhere, Piechota said day passes are likely more popular by volume, while subscriptions generate more revenue overall.

Even so, subscriptions are not entirely out of reach. In South Africa, News24 has surpassed 100,000 paying subscribers, suggesting that reader revenue can scale on the continent. Yet such successes remain concentrated in markets with higher incomes and more developed digital ecosystems, leaving publishers elsewhere to explore alternatives.

What makes Africa genuinely interesting to Piechota, however, is not micropayments themselves but the infrastructure in which they operate.

In Kenya, that infrastructure is already in place. According to Kenya’s central bank, Kenya had 90.4 million registered mobile money accounts as of January 2026, many tied to multiple SIM cards per user. The payment system is built around small, everyday transactions. Nearly 60% of devices are now smartphones, with most connections running on mobile broadband. The internet, in practice, is accessed through the phone and paid for in small, frequent increments, the same behavior micropayments for news are trying to capture.

That infrastructure is not easily replicated elsewhere. Mobile money payments that are routine in Kenya remain uncommon in Europe and North America, where credit cards dominate. African publishers have therefore been forced to solve a problem (frictionless small-value digital transactions) that their counterparts in wealthier markets have largely been able to ignore.

“Publishers in Africa are smart by not doing what other publishers are doing, but rather searching for how to make it work in their environment,” Piechota said. “This is innovation. This is agility.”

He also points to a broader structural argument. African markets may be leapfrogging in ways that matter. Desktop internet never fully took hold across much of the continent. The transition to digital went directly from feature phones to smartphones. This has made mobile-first thinking an operational necessity, and one that publishers in other markets are now scrambling to replicate.

But micropayments alone are unlikely to sustain most newsrooms, Newman cautioned. Even if readers are willing to pay small amounts for individual articles, the revenue generated from those transactions will rarely match the income from subscriptions or other revenue streams. “If you’re only paying tiny cents for individual articles, that is not going to fund the investments required,” he said.

The deeper diagnosis

Taken together, the picture that emerges from Nairobi is neither entirely hopeful nor cautionary.

The Standard’s micropayment experiments represent a genuine, careful adaptation to local conditions, the kind of audience-centric iteration that media researchers describe as a prerequisite for sustainable reader revenue. Africa Uncensored’s voluntary-contribution model suggests that emotional investment in specific journalism can mobilize reader support even without formal subscription architecture.

Piechota’s global view suggests that the frictions these publishers have had to solve — mobile payment integration, small-value transactions, casual-reader engagement — are problems the rest of the industry will eventually have to solve too.

Across the global news industry, Newman said, publishers are increasingly relying on combinations of revenue streams rather than a single model. Some pair subscriptions with voluntary contributions; others experiment with micropayments alongside traditional paywalls. “Ultimately it’s about mixing different models,” he said, depending on the audience and the market.

But the harder questions Mugendi raises remain unresolved. A payment mechanism, however frictionless, can’t substitute for editorial quality or relevance. And there is a risk, visible in wealthier markets, that micropayments become a ceiling rather than a floor, catching readers who might have been converted to long-term subscribers if the alternative had not existed.

Experiments in emerging markets may also shape how publishers elsewhere think about reader revenue. As news organizations test different combinations of subscriptions, donations and micropayments, the future may lie less in a single model than in adapting to local conditions.

“African markets have something to teach Western markets,” Newman said, “just as Western markets have things to teach African markets.”

Vidija is clear-eyed about the goal. “This is building a pathway to long-term subscriptions,” he said. “We are saying, if we continue investing in big analytical pieces, we can position ourselves as a brand that Kenyan audiences can trust.” The micropayment, on this reading, is not the destination. It is the door.

Whether enough readers will walk through that door, and keep walking, is the question that newsrooms from Nairobi to New York are still trying to answer.

“The deal structures, price precedents, intermediary take rates, and governance norms taking shape now will be difficult to revise once they are normalized,” write the authors Courtney Radsch and Karina Montoya, both from the institute’s newly named Center for Media & Digital Governance. (It previously went by The Center for Journalism & Liberty). “The question of whether publishers, journalism, or creators of any sort can make a credible collective claim before market structures crystallize will not stay open indefinitely.”

One of the most interesting sections of the report is a deep dive into new AI content licensing marketplaces, which often take a cut of the revenue they bring in for publishers. This includes new startups like Sphere, ScalePost, Defined, and TollBit, but also ones operated by Big Tech companies. Last summer, Cloudflare, which services about 20% of global web traffic, launched its “pay-per-crawl” marketplace, which allows publishers to set rates and charge AI companies each time one of their bots crawls their content. In February, Microsoft announced its Publisher Content Marketplace (PCM), which follows a “pay-per-use” model that allows publishers to sell “rights-cleared content” at set prices to Microsoft, and potentially to other AI developers.

Most commercial AI products repeatedly scrape news publications and retrieve up-to-date information from websites in order to answer specific user queries. This is known as retrieval augmented generation (RAG). The promise of these marketplaces is that they are building out new infrastructure that would allow news publishers to earn revenue from RAG systems. But many middleman marketplaces are also taking a big cut of that revenue, the report notes.

A startup like ScalePost takes roughly a 15% cut of the revenue earned by “rights holders.” The authors estimate, based largely on interviews with stakeholders, that Cloudflare is taking about a 30% cut of revenue.

ProRata.ai, a startup that has developed its own answer engine built exclusively on licensed publisher content, shares subscription and advertising revenue with publishers 50/50. However, each publisher is paid proportionally based on attribution, or how often their content appears in the answer engine’s results. As of last summer, over 500 publishers had signed up with ProRata.ai.

Meanwhile, startups like TollBit and Sphere allow publishers to retain 100% of their revenue. Instead, they charge AI companies a separate transaction fee.

It is yet to be seen just how much Microsoft will take from publishers that participate in its PCM.

The report points to Spotify as an important benchmark for evaluating these various “take rates.” Historically, Spotify has taken a 30% cut of revenue from streaming. Despite many drawbacks, that model has allowed music rights holders to earn significant revenue and propped up the industry during its transition to streaming. Still, the report concludes that further scrutiny of these marketplaces is needed, particularly when Big Tech is the one building the scaffolding.

“Regulatory attention is warranted on these platform operators in order to mitigate their data access advantages and ability to set de facto (and potentially coercive)  standards for an industry in which no independent standards yet exist,” the authors write.

You can read the full report on Open Markets, including more specific policy recommendations.

Correction: This story previously stated that TollBit takes 10-15% of revenue from rights holders. TollBit actually allows rights holders to keep 100% of revenue and charges AI companies a transaction fee. The name of the startup Sphere has been corrected.

At launch, the app is focused solely on U.S. polling data. After installing the app, ChatGPT users can use it to ask questions about The Economist’s ongoing Donald Trump approval rating tracker, which offers a variety of charts and data points broken down by state, demographic, and voting issue.

Through the app, The Economist aims to reach ChatGPT’s more than 900 million weekly active users where they are.

“Younger audiences are adopting tools like ChatGPT as a first port of call for answering questions or finding information. It’s increasing dramatically, and that’s not a trend that passes us by,” Josh Muncke, the vice president of generative AI at The Economist, told me. The team wanted to see “if we could build something relatively quickly and relatively lightweight that would allow us to test this new way of discovering content from The Economist.”

Back in December, OpenAI rolled out its app store, allowing brands to create third-party experiences within ChatGPT for the first time. These apps go beyond the “no-code,” tailored AI assistants — or CustomGPTs — that are available in the GPT Store. Instead, developers can build out their own interfaces and chat logic. ChatGPT apps are built on the Model Context Protocol (MCP), a standard that helps ChatGPT connect its models to external tools and data sources. All apps need to be submitted to OpenAI for review before they can appear in the app store.

While some market and business intelligence platforms, like MT Newswires and Dow Jones’ Factiva have already launched ChatGPT apps, so far The Economist is out front among consumer news publications. According to Muncke, his team at The Economist began working seriously on app development at the start of this year.

Currently, The Economist has no AI licensing deals with OpenAI or other major commercial AI developers. In part, the decision to narrow the initial pilot of the app to U.S. polling data was to minimize the chance of undercutting The Economist’s subscription offerings, or give ChatGPT access to too much of its content for free. Muncke’s team worked closely with The Economist’s data journalists and reporters to put up guardrails and fine-tune the app’s visual presentation.

“The Trump tracker is already an experience that is in front of our paywall,” said Muncke, referring to the underlying project that lives on The Economist’s site. “We thought we can explore this surface that as a publisher we think is important [without] directly exposing the depths of some of our premium written content.”

The app launch comes in the midst of a high-stakes midterm election cycle, just after Trump hit an all-time low net approval rating (-24) across his two presidential terms.

For users curious about how Trump is polling leading up to November, the app can answer questions about which state has the highest Trump approval rating, how his approval ratings compare to his first term, and how popular he is among young voters, among other queries. The focus on charts and other visualizations is meant to offer an experience distinct from what a user might get in a basic written response from ChatGPT about polling news.

The Economist hopes the app will build brand awareness among younger audiences. In general, ChatGPT refers very little traffic to news publishers’ sites. Rather than chasing clickthroughs, Muncke describes the launch as a fact-finding mission of sorts for The Economist to learn more about ChatGPT users and, more generally, the emerging audience turning to chatbots for news.

“We’re testing the waters,” he told me. “We’re trying to do that in a sensible way that still is connected to the principles of trustworthiness and quality and integrity of The Economist, rather than just move fast and break things. That’s not the business model we’re in.”

“The RACE to build AI infrastructures is unfolding town by town across America. In some places, data centers are welcomed,” Brockovich writes on the site (emphasis hers). “In others, they are delayed, contested or abandoned altogether. This MAP captures the real-world footprint of that race — revealing patterns of growth, conflict and uncertainty.”

As data center demand continues to grow rapidly, so are concerns about their impacts; in March, Andrew and I wrote about how investigating data centers is quickly becoming its own beat. As of publication, Brockovich’s map — similar to a map published by Business Insider, whom Andrew and I talked to for our story — shows the locations of 33 operational data centers, with 44 under construction and 27 proposed. There are also 2,716 community reports so far, and undoubtedly more will follow.

But why?

I mentioned here a couple of weeks ago that I’ve been studying economics to find more rigorous frameworks to describe why “creative destruction” has been better at destroying than recreating the news industry. The decline of original news by traditional media has not nearly been offset by the rise of newer media, mostly to the detriment of our democratic societies. The loss of local media in particular is associated with greater loneliness, lower awareness of public officials, and more corruption. It’s like an invisible tax levied on our communities that we pay civically, cognitively and sometimes even literally, in the form of higher local bond prices due to more wasteful government spending. Increasingly, this invisible tax is being silently levied by Big Tech.

These economic tools are helping me round out the story I have to tell about why things go wrong and how they could be made better.

(Alas, the post where I talked about re-learning calculus led at least a dozen of my readers to instantly unsubscribe. My managerial economics textbook indicates that if I want this newsletter to grow and not shrink, a marginal analysis would show I should write about something else. Unfortunately my English and journalism degrees are still in charge of my writing and, like the Green Goblin mask in “Spider-Man,” keep whispering that I should follow my muse.)

Over the last couple of weeks, I went on a detour to bone up on the subfield of behavioral economics, starting with a couple of its seminal books, Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow and Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s Nudge (the 2021 “final” edition). Kahneman and Thaler won Nobel prizes in economics for their psychological work, which demonstrated that the story told about human nature in mainstream neoclassical economics is basically false.

A basic premise of modern behavioral economics would go like this: People aren’t omnipotent utility-maximizers who always buy the best product obtainable at the best cost. People are people, and our brains make us perceive or do weird stuff that is not always aligned with statistical reality or our own best interests. (I always eat too much candy even though I know it’s bad for me, and I have crystal-clear self-awareness about this even at the precise moment I reach for the Hot Tamales at CVS.) But “irrational” is not a good description for predictable behavior. What’s truly irrational is not seeing it coming. A lot of the stuff we do can be explained by the quite ordinary cognitive shortcuts we take when coping with complex environments: such as the mostly terrible way we use the internet, which is mostly terribly using us.

This type of story about the psychological fragility of the news consumer will not be new to the veteran of media theory. We’ve been onto this game for more than a century, since Walter Lippmann’s 1922 Public Opinion. The book was a devastating portrait of the limitations of human psychology in comprehending the complexity of modern society, which readers like John Dewey correctly understood to be an indictment of a foundational mythology of self-government. Lippmann thought actually-existing modern democracy needed paternalistic experts to function properly. Dewey thought trust needed to remain with the little guy. (Nicholas Carr recently wrote an excellent account of this debate here.)

The future of news in the 20th century belonged to Walter Lippmann’s democratic paternalism. The winner-take-all nature of advertising markets, the artificial scarcity of broadcast spectrum space, and the forbidding industrial moats associated with the costs of news production and distribution, gave rise to the era of 20th century mass media, which still anchors our perception of what “media” is today. Huge newsrooms, huge audiences and huge profits concentrated control in hands of a small number of experts and businesspeople over what the public read, saw and heard.

Press criticism in the mass media era was important and interesting to read, because the experience of news consumption was a common one that could be studied, analyzed, criticized. If someone was harming society, you knew their name and what they were doing, which meant they were easy to blame — and even shameable. The mass media and its weaknesses (a deference to power, its bias toward affluent audiences, its of-the-times bigotry, its fondness for inflammatory but statistically insignificant crime stories) were legible and, by being legible, were confrontable.

The centralization of media production thus also concentrated power in the hands of journalists, who developed a strong craft mentality with anticommercial (or economically “irrational”) norms that lead to things like joining a union or a self-governed membership organization with independent codes of journalistic ethics, like the Society of Professional Journalists or Investigative Reporters and Editors. It wasn’t just that journalists had a romantic guild mentality about the importance of pursuing truth: It was that the centralization of industrial power gave journalists the means to exert a Galbrathian countervailing influence on their employers. Media owners might refer to this internal conflict as an “agency problem,” which is a fancy term for complaining about authoritarian workplaces that aren’t fully totalitarian.

Much of what people liked about 20th century mass media — mostly accurate public-interest news, delivered by skilled craftspeople on the front page and the top of the hour, where it was harder to ignore — was a shotgun marriage of journalistic norms with economic opportunity. Many of these norms remain in place today, perhaps even in defiance of low expectations. Most of this year’s Pulitzer Prize winners were commercial media organizations managing fiduciary duties to pursue profit with newsrooms that leveraged complex divisions of labor to pursue labor-intensive and probably loss-leading news projects that, to my eye, look a little lighter on AI wizardry in 2026 than industry innovator rhetoric would prefer to see. This year’s honorees even includes great newspaper villain Alden Global Capital, which won one Pulitzer Prize this year and was finalist for another.

A centennial update of Walter Lippmann’s Public Opinion for democratic media in 2026 would probably come to the same conclusion about the limits of human cognition under modern society, whose complexity is increasing at a logarithmic pace. The new part would be the displacement of the paternalistic expert class that Lippmann thought would be needed to manage this complexity.

The needs of your average media consumer, wherever imperfectly met by big news outlets, are now confronted with an embarrassment of options that seek to fill every marketplace desire imaginable, thanks to technological innovations driving content production and distribution costs to zero.

The dollar cost of encountering content has also fallen toward zero thanks to ad-supported platforms and massively subsidized AI agents. But the mental “decision costs” of finding accurate information have been driven skyward for consumers wandering a swamp of mostly terrible choices. The top-of-the-hour paternalism of 20th-century mass media has been traded in for the 21st-century paternalism of slop-slinging algorithms indifferent to the accuracy of the product or the compensation of journalists whose work feeds the entire ecosystem, usually without credit. What was once legible about media consumption has become increasingly illegible, depreciating our old tools of analysis and confrontation.

In one of those tremendous ironies provided everywhere by capitalism, I most frequently see the old criticism of mass media profit-seeking online when someone at an alternative platform is practicing some good-ol’-fashioned product differentiation. “You’ll never see THIS story in the legacy media!” Often you can, but shit is hard to find these days, and the energy required to believe a media stereotype (stereotypes frequently being true) is vastly lower than paying the cognitive tax of looking elsewhere for a longer/slower/duller version of content that’s already right in front of you.

Kahneman describes this as a cognitive fight between System 1, our brain’s automatic system, and System 2, our reflective system. And System 2 is very lazy. Algorithmically delivered media is perfectly turned to the biases of your System 1, and why not? Like a true scientist, the platform has been carefully gathering data to better predict what you’ll actually do next. It’s the experts and the advocates who wish that citizens had a surplus of civic impulses that, sometimes, we don’t. Whatever else you can say about it as a form of government, democracy is a lot of work.

The mass media era is fully and completely dead, and people have recently stopped using terms like “mainstream media.” Now there’s a bewildering eddy of bigger media and littler media and no Habermasian “public sphere” whatsoever. Bari Weiss’s right-wing makeover of CBS News is apparently more interesting to read about than to watch: The network’s dwindling audiences are probably switching to the nation’s now-number-one streaming channel, YouTube.

When I go out and chat with people, I have no idea what kind of media they’re consuming, if any at all. Some people just ask AI: OpenAI reported in February that ChatGPT is getting about a million prompts a week for local news. Others randomly encounter news when TikTok passes a news creator at them. They have to describe the videos to me. I deleted the app and have lately been preferring to take my news via print as if I were a million years old and the past 15 years of media innovation I lived and worked through and helped foment never happened. Ironically, by weaning myself off a longtime digital news addiction (apart from a couple mostly national apps), I’m probably far closer to the modal consumer news experience than when I was a Los Angeles Times reporter, which is to say: News is not something a lot of people are actively seeking out. “News finds you nowadays,” a survey respondent told the Pew Research Center.

We are all part of the counterpublic now. And a counterpublic tends to distrust whoever’s in charge. There’s a counterpublic occupying the White House as we speak, and it’s notable for the time it spends looking for someone else to blame for what’s going on.

I work on things like news subsides to support the supply side of news production. But in environments of overwhelming choice (like ours for digital media), Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein call for “libertarian paternalism” to help overwhelmed people make better consumer decisions. This repulsive term has the quality of being honest in that intentionally combines two unlikable words to describe a solution to the conundrum of how you guide flawed humans toward outcomes they might be happier with without depriving them of free choice.

Thaler and Sunstein’s preferred tool of libertarian paternalism is the “nudge” — intentional little features of “choice architecture” (how you structure people’s decisions) that gently guide people toward better outcomes. One of the most powerful nudges is a default, which is actually a major feature of traditional media, which would give prominent places to stories on the front page or in the newscast not because it might necessarily be the most engaging story of the day, but because it might be the most civically important. Our internet has mostly abandoned the principle of nudging people at important news.

Let’s take artificial intelligence’s structural hostility to journalism. A recent study by Aengus Bridgman and Taylor Owen of the Centre for Media, Technology and Democracy in Canada showed that ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Grok had been scraping Canadian news outlets (including paywalled stories — plunder!!), because the contents of those outlets’ work would appear in the AI bots’ responses. This news content was appearing unattributed. However, the bots would usually list attribution after being prompted — meaning that the data was in the AI model, it just wasn’t offering it up without extra user exertion. And users usually don’t like extra exertion. This is bad design that only harms news providers and consumers, especially given AI’s well known weakness of providing inaccurate, made-up outputs in addition to just ripping off news outlets and undermining their revenue models, which are based in some form or another on aggregating audience attention. The rapacious and uncompensated AI scraping of the open web is having the perverse effect of incentivizing more high-quality journalism to get gated behind paywalls where bots can get more easily blocked, ultimately driving up the costs of quality journalism to everyone on a social level.

Social media, too, could choose to feature quality news outlets as “defaults” or provide subtle “nudges” on content that prompt users to donate or subscribe to the news outlets providing high quality news videos on platforms like Instagram, which don’t pay for themselves. (I am worried about the rise of the “too-good Instagram news video” — I’m glad news outlets are becoming fluent in visual media, but I don’t know if they’ve gotten fluent in getting revenue from it.) Integration with donation or subscription tools could be made practically frictionless. Or hey, maybe sharing a better cut of advertising revenue. Doing so would, if anything, provide even stronger incentive for news outlets to keep providing high-quality visual content to platforms like Instagram at no actual cost to Instagram itself, which might make people feel better about Instagram (which is currently getting sued for creating an overly addictive product, mostly through evil nudges). Mostly, however, the platforms seem to find this a hassle or too controversial, if they even care about media at all: you’re probably just not innovating hard enough. Two things that are true is that more and more people are relying on creator economy journalists to provide them information, and that many of those creator economy journalists are doing it while going broke.

Google itself, the granddaddy of search, was once the greatest “nudger” of all toward media via its powerful “News” tab and other search features, which was its one redeeming feature in exchange for having illegally monopolized both the search and digital advertising marketplaces. But Google’s growing reliance on AI summaries for search seems to be contributing, at least in part, to a decline in the rivers of referral traffic it once provided to news outlets. New research of the impact of AI on news consumption via search indicates that it’s the smallest outlets (who benefit most from search discoverability) seeming to suffer the worst:

You probably couldn’t create a more anti-news internet if you tried (and some people seem to have tried). There are lots of things that have gone wrong for the news media in the 21st century, but the feature they have in common is the destruction of incentives to produce accurate information. Addressing these problems doesn’t require one fix but many — not just for the news outlets and journalists on the supply side, but to help out the exhausted, burned out, confused consumers on the demand side, who are getting drowned in content sludge.

Our digital economy has levied a gigantic cognitive tax on news consumers trying to find accurate information. The cost is just too much to bear.

The once-bipartisan idea that the nation’s media should exist to serve democracy continues to fade with it, too.

As a media historian, I think the story of CBS Radio News’ rise and fall cannot be told without telling another parallel story: the story of how the U.S. stopped demanding that media serve the public interest.

When CBS was born in 1927, radio was ascendant, and this new form of mass communication was spurring vibrant discussions about how media could better serve democracy.

Americans had already seen how concentrated wealth during the Gilded Age had tilted the news ecosystem by overemphasizing the concerns of the rich while glossing over inequality, graft and corruption. World War I further demonstrated the power of mass media to shape public opinion through propaganda, reinforcing calls for democratic oversight of broadcasting.

Just how to regulate radio was up for debate. But there was broad consensus across party lines that government could play a role in protecting the public from concentrated media power and, with it, foreign misinformation, bad-faith special interest messaging or fraudulent advertising.

The formative years

CBS radio traces its origins to the United Independent Broadcasters, a network of 16 local stations founded by music manager Arthur L. Judson. When Columbia Records bought a stake, it was renamed the Columbia Phonographic Broadcasting System.

Early broadcasts simply involved announcers reading short breaking-news dispatches distributed by the United Press wire service. Within months, Columbia sold its share to investors including William S. Paley, who streamlined the name to CBS.

Paley was no public media crusader. He was a businessman who wanted radio to turn a profit. But his management reflected a belief that radio could serve two masters: the public interest and advertisers.

He hired journalist Paul J. White to run the news division and created a regular news segment called “Something for Everyone.”

Though they differed on how best to achieve it, Democrats and Republicans agreed that radio ought to serve the public interest. In other words, because the airwaves belonged to all Americans, broadcasters had obligations beyond profit. They needed to provide reliable information, platform diverse viewpoints, and cover matters of public concern.

A cartoon from the March 22, 1924, edition of The Literary Digest reflects the fear that radio would be subsumed by corporate interests.

In the 1920s, then-Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover was charged with formulating federal radio policy. Though he was a staunch, pro-business conservative, Hoover was also an engineer who thought that the radio system should be “free of monopoly” and, like any machine, could be gradually improved so it would better serve democracy.

“The ether is a public medium, and its use must be for the public benefit,” he said in November 1925.

Republican President Calvin Coolidge signed the Radio Act of 1927 into law. Passed with overwhelming support, it required radio stations to demonstrate a commitment to “public interest, convenience and necessity” in order to receive a license.

Forging the public’s trust

By the time the 1934 Communications Act created the Federal Communications Commission, a regulatory agency tasked with licensing broadcasters and enforcing ownership rules, the idea that radio should serve the public had been normalized.

In 1935, Paley made Edward R. Murrow — the man most associated with CBS Radio’s public service mission — head of news programming.

With fascism threatening democracy across Europe, Murrow launched “World News Roundup” in 1938. The longest-running news program in American media, it featured live reports transmitted by shortwave from locations around the world. American audiences huddled around their radios nightly to hear CBS’ reports, which showed how live news could unite a nation and cultivate a richer information ecosystem than the uniform propaganda of Europe’s fascist strongmen.

CBS’ gripping coverage of World War II solidified its importance as an American institution. Murrow’s signature tag lines — “this is London” and, later, “good night and good luck” — helped forge the public’s trust in CBS’ reliable and informative programming.

The dangers of delusion and amusement

After the war, television challenged radio’s dominance. Paley understood that Murrow had built a deep trust among listeners, and he put him in charge of CBS News as the network expanded its programming to TV.

Yet Murrow grew uneasy with shifts in the network’s coverage, which, in his view, increasingly served the economic interests of its owners.

Speaking to the Radio Television News Directors Association in 1958, Murrow lamented how radio and television had forgotten “to operate in the public interest.” He worried that “we have currently a built-in allergy to unpleasant or disturbing information” and saw mass media increasingly “being used to distract, delude, amuse and insulate us.”

Without serious reporting and civic responsibility as their animating principles, radio and television were losing their democratic utility, becoming mere “wires and lights in a box.”

Corporations gain the upper hand

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, many of the rules dating from when CBS Radio News was born, like ownership restrictions and requirements for educational programming, remained on the books.

But during this period, media companies started spending enormous sums of money on donations to legislators who could do their bidding — and capturing the regulatory bodies that were supposed to be holding them accountable. The spirited debates about how radio could better serve democracy largely disappeared. Instead, the conversation shifted to whether government should have any role at all in regulating the media.

Principles that once had broad public support — producing public interest news as a quid pro quo for licensing, limits on foreign ownership and fairness rules that required stations to give equal time to both sides of an issue — faded away.

Any societal obligation outside of earning profit started being described as a threat to the American way of life. Those arguing that media should be regulated like a public utility in a pluralistic democracy were effectively ignored.

After President Bill Clinton signed the 1996 Telecommunication Act, critics argued that industry lobbying had helped dismantle much of the public interest framework that had long governed American broadcasting. The legislation relaxed ownership caps and cross-ownership rules, allowing a small number of large corporations to acquire far more stations and weakening the older public interest obligations tied to broadcast licensing.

Before the act, corporations were limited to owning 40 radio stations. Now, conglomerates like iHeartMedia and Audacy can own thousands.

“The tube is flickering”

Through it all, CBS Radio News’ top-of-the-hour bulletins remained on the air, a reminder of its original public mission. Yet increasingly, the deregulated radio ecosystem failed to perform that function.

Back in the 1920s, you could hear editorials arguing that the radio should not be given over to “propagandists, religious zealots and unprincipled persons to grind their own axes.” By the early 2000s, divisive shock jocks and hosts feeding on partisan anger dominated the radio dial.

In a 1938 radio address on CBS’ ethical commitments, Paley argued that “broadcasting as an instrument of American democracy must forever be wholly, honestly and militantly non-partisan.” By 2016, CEO Les Moonves defended CBS’ decision to increase its coverage of President Donald Trump’s spectacularly divisive politics to juice ratings: “It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.” Four years later, Trump awarded one of radio’s most polarizing partisan propagandists, Rush Limbaugh, the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

In his second term, Trump has abused his power over the media ecosystem. In 2025, the Trump administration’s FCC approved the merger of Paramount Global, the parent company of CBS, with Skydance Media. But it only did so after Paramount Global settled a lawsuit Trump had filed against CBS for $16 million.

Though many talented journalists and producers remain, CBS News’ recently hired editor-in-chief, Bari Weiss, has worked to make the network more friendly to the Trump administration. She temporarily shelved a “60 Minutes” segment critical of Trump’s use of El Salvador’s CECOT prison and promoted a friendly town hall with conservative commentator Erika Kirk, the widow of assassinated political activist Charlie Kirk. Ratings at the network have collapsed.

Though Paramount Skydance is using its enormous debt load to justify taking CBS Radio News off the air, the conglomerate is trying to purchase CNN’s parent company, Warner Bros. Discovery, in a move that would only further the monopolization of the news media.

Americans can’t say Murrow didn’t warn them.

“The tube is flickering,” he said in 1958. And unless Americans reclaim their right to information not colored by profit motive and special interests, “we will soon see that the whole struggle is lost.”

No news publisher has confirmed to Nieman Lab that an AI company has already scraped their content from the Wayback Machine. Still, in the five months since we published our story the number of news sites blocking the Internet Archive has continued to rise.

Overwhelmingly, these sites are local news outlets.

Our new analysis shows that more than 340 local news sites across the United States are now limiting the Internet Archive’s ability to access and preserve their stories. Many sites in our sample are owned by five of the seven largest local news publishers in the country: USA Today Co., McClatchy, Advance Local, MediaNews Group, and Tribune Publishing. The latter two are both subsidiaries of the “vulture hedge fund” Alden Global Capital.

Researchers, historians, and citizens around the world rely on the web archives of local news sites to do their work.

“Blocking the Internet Archive’s web crawlers threatens one of the most effective ways that we capture and store news content for the long term,” Edward McCain, a journalism librarian at the University of Missouri, said. “In the present we may have some workarounds, but in the long run, it weakens a vital link in primary source materials that we need to understand where we’ve been and where we want to go.”

Working journalists are among the most frequent users of the Wayback Machine’s local news archives. Over the last month, online petitions have called for news media companies to allow the Internet Archive to preserve their journalism.

“I cover news within a larger news desert in New York’s Rockland, Sullivan, and Rockland counties. This means I need to heavily rely on archival data of old news articles from now deceased, or zombie-fied, media outlets,” wrote B.J. Mendelson, the editor of The Monroe Gazette newsletter, in one recent petition signed by over 200 journalists. “Without the Internet Archive, my [work] would be incredibly difficult to do.”

In the face of publisher concerns, the Wayback Machine has highlighted its efforts to minimize abuse of its site, including implementing systems that limit bulk downloading and working with vendors like Cloudflare to monitor bot activity. “We are in conversation with many publishers and appreciate the opportunity to address their concerns,” Mark Graham, the founder of the Wayback Machine, told Nieman Lab, noting that the Internet Archive’s terms of use only permits using its collections for scholarship or research purposes.

Meredith Broussard, a data journalist and professor at New York University, said that as profit margins for news thin, it’s only become more important to news publishers to protect their intellectual property.

“This is the same fight that everybody has been having with the Internet Archive since its inception,” Broussard said. “Internet Archive is a very old-school, ‘information-should-be-free’ organization. But the people who are invested differently have different priorities. There are lots of different historical and legal and economic issues that are colliding in this situation. AI companies [are] the catalyst for the latest skirmish in a very old battle.”

Alden Global Capital is another major local news chain that has rolled out new restrictions on the Internet Archive. About 60 of those sites are owned by MediaNews Group, the Alden subsidiary that operates dailies across the country, including The Mercury News, the Denver Post, and the New York Daily News. Another seven publications are operated by Tribune Publishing, most notably the Chicago Tribune.

Alden has been criticized for aggressively acquiring U.S. newspapers and stripping them of resources for short-term profits. Alden did not respond to requests for comment.

In July 2025, Alden ran an editorial in more than 60 of its daily newspapers openly criticizing OpenAI and other AI companies that have used news content to train their models without compensation. “Securing permission from, and fairly compensating, those publishers who created this great foundation of knowledge is the right, just and American thing to do,” read the editorial. Both Alden publishers are part of the major copyright infringement suit against OpenAI and Microsoft that includes The New York Times and is currently winding its way through federal court.

Some independent local publishers, like The Baltimore Banner, are open to AI chatbots surfacing their stories without licensing deals. But they’re still concerned that a “back door” like the Wayback Machine’s might hurt their chances at being cited properly.

Last year, The Banner worked with the company DataDome to analyze crawler activity on its site. The findings were striking: about 25% of The Banner’s site traffic was coming from bots, including crawlers operated by the Internet Archive, according to Biswajit Ganguly, the chief technology officer and AI strategist at the Banner.

Based on that analysis, The Banner started blocking the Internet Archive, later adding one of its crawlers to its robots.txt file. It still lets major AI companies through, including crawlers used by ChatGPT and Claude.

As Ganguly explains it, the new restrictions on the Wayback Machine are less about negotiating licensing deals or preventing The Banner’s stories from appearing in AI products, and more about ensuring those products trace information back to The Banner instead of linking to sites that aggregate its work.

“We didn’t want the bots to be trained on our content, and then spit out answers based on the content without any kind of references, link, or attribution to our sources,” said Ganguly. “If ChatGPT finds something in the Wayback Machine…we were not sure how well it would be attributed back to us.”

He added that The Banner is still gathering information on how AI search products interact with news about the Baltimore region and the publication is open to lifting its block down the line.

“The threat is definitely not the Internet Archive,” Ganguly said. “But it’s a question of how the other actors are going to provide references or attributions and links back to the real creator of the content.”

Blocking as leverage for payment

Local publishers aren’t the only ones ramping up these efforts. Condé Nast, another arm of Advance Publications, has rolled out a coordinated effort to disallow the Internet Archive. Vogue, The New Yorker, Pitchfork, Vanity Fair, Bon Appetit, and Wired currently disallow four crawling bots from our list. (Last month, Wired covered the existential threat these blocks pose to the Internet Archive). Condé Nast did not respond to a request for comment.

The Atlantic has been working with Cloudflare to block the Internet Archive since last summer and added one of the Internet Archive’s crawlers to its robots.txt file in an update earlier this year, according to Anna Bross, The Atlantic’s SVP of communications. She said the decision is part of the outlet’s “aggressive” blocking policy.

“Our default is to block: No one should be scraping The Atlantic’s journalism without permission, regardless of the use,” Bross said.

The Atlantic’s CEO Nick Thompson commented on our January reporting in a video posted to LinkedIn in April. He said blocking the Internet Archive is important for publishers that want to maintain leverage when negotiating licensing with big AI companies.

“Because of the damages that can be done when you let all your content be scraped, because of all the leverage you lose, there will be worthy products that you previously gave your data to and now you can’t,” said Thompson.

Major international publishers have also started to block the Internet Archive, including the leading newspaper in Brazil, Folha de S.Paulo. Folha added three Internet Archive user agents to its robots.txt file in February.

“Folha believes that the sustainability of professional journalism — the very material the public record seeks to preserve — depends on protecting intellectual property,” said Sérgio Dávila, Folha’s editor-in-chief. “If AI companies wish to use this archive for training, they must enter into licensing agreements rather than rely on third-party repositories.”

Dávila noted that Folha invests in its own digital archive, Acervo Folha, which includes digitized editions of print issues going back to the paper’s founding in 1921. Access to Acervo Folha is available to paying subscribers.

What can be done?

Archiving is expensive; the technical infrastructure, storage, and expertise can be cost-prohibitive to smaller news organizations.

Before the rise of digital news, many papers maintained physical archives, often staffed with in-house librarians. Today, due to the contraction of the newspaper industry, most of those dedicated archiving roles are gone and the move to digital publishing has only complicated the issue.

A new content management system (CMS) can often lead to major archival losses. In 2024, thousands of articles vanished from the sites of the Daily Hampshire Gazette and the Greenfield Recorder in Western Massachusetts during a CMS switch. When publications close many former owners don’t want to shoulder the cost of maintaining a site. In 2022, a decade after The Hook, a Charlottesville weekly, went under, its archived site went offline, along with over 22,000 stories.

The Internet Archive is often touted as a hero of the web for taking on the Herculean task of preserving the entirety of the internet, and for stepping in when news organizations fail to preserve their own work.

In December, the Internet Archive partnered with the Poynter Institute and Investigative Reporters and Editors to train a cohort of 33 local and national news outlets on how to develop and implement an archiving strategy. The initiative, funded through a Press Forward grant, aims to train 300 newsrooms in digital preservation and in using the Internet Archive’s services by the end of 2027.

Most of the initial cohort is made up of independent and nonprofit local newsrooms, including Outlier Media, Charlottesville Tomorrow, and The 51st. Wired is the only publication in our dataset restricting Internet Archive access that is participating in the program.

As Broussard, the NYU professor, points out, while the Internet Archive is one of the few efforts to make archives free, it isn’t the only effort to archive news. News publishers have long licensed their journalism to commercial archives like ProQuest and LexisNexis, which are often available in libraries, universities, and for individual subscriptions. They’re not free, but they do exist. At least several publications in our sample appear in ProQuest databases, including the Chicago Tribune, The Baltimore Sun, Honolulu Civil Beat, and USA Today.

Economic incentives are a valid reason for publishers to want to keep their contents out of the Internet Archive, Broussard said, but news outlets should have a long-term, multifaceted preservation strategy. Even with a plan in place, the reality for many publishers is that it’s unlikely that they’ll be able to save everything.

“Every news organization, especially local news organizations, generally launch thinking, ‘we’re going to put stuff on the internet and it’s going to be there forever,’ and that’s not true,” Broussard said. “Anybody who told you the internet is forever lied.”

Correction: An earlier version of this story stated that NOLA.com was owned by Advance Local. It is currently owned by Georges Media Group.

On May 11, it was standup-comic-turned-media-mogul Byron Allen acquiring a 52% share of BuzzFeed for $120 million, which he plans to use to make a…competitor to YouTube?¹ Sure thing. And today, nine days later, it’s James Murdoch, son of Rupert, who is spending more than $300 million to buy most of Vox Media.

A decade ago, BuzzFeed and Vox Media were valued at $1.7 billion and $1 billion — further evidence (as if we needed any) that 2016 was another universe. Here are the Times’ Benjamin Mullin and Jessica Testa:

James Murdoch is acquiring roughly half of Vox Media, a dramatic expansion in American media for the younger son of the media mogul Rupert Murdoch. The deal includes Vox Media’s podcast network as well as New York magazine, a publication once owned by Mr. Murdoch’s father.

Mr. Murdoch, 53, emphasized that he was not looking to acquire a “daily news business” but rather wanted “longer-form, thoughtful journalism that can really speak to the culture,” he told The New York Times in an interview on Tuesday. “We want to create platforms where really amazing, talented people can come and do the best work of their lives.”

It’s a little sad that the third part of Vox Media that Murdoch is buying — Vox.com — doesn’t get mentioned in the Times story until the 10th paragraph, but that’s probably another sign of how far from 2016 we are. Here’s the corporate press release (Lupa Systems is Murdoch’s holding company):

“This acquisition aligns well with our existing holdings and investments and reflects both our interest in the forward edge of culture and our deep commitment to ambitious journalism and agenda-setting conversations,” said James Murdoch. “It will allow us to apply new tools across the businesses we are building, adding substantial production, distribution, and editorial capability to our group.”

Lupa’s acquisition of New York Magazine includes its must-read verticals, The Cut, Vulture, Intelligencer, The Strategist, Curbed, and Grub Street. Vox brings multiplatform leadership in video, text, and podcasts like Today, Explained. The Vox Media Podcast Network, home to popular shows such as Pivot with Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway, Criminal, and Where Should We Begin? with Esther Perel, has been the fastest growing business within Vox Media and will immediately put Lupa at the top of the podcast field, which now reaches 58% of Americans monthly, according to Edison Research, including two out of three people between the ages of 18 and 54.

Murdoch’s “existing holdings and investments” include the Tribeca Film Festival and Art Basel. Longtime Vox Media CEO Jim Bankoff will continue with the Murdoch-owned part of the company.

Vox Media’s collection of brands. The ones Murdoch isn’t buying are marked in red.

The parts of Vox Media that Murdoch isn’t buying — SB Nation, The Verge, Eater, The Dodo, and Popsugar — will be spun off into their own yet-to-be-named company. You might think of them as the ancien Vox Media — the blog-born sites that the company was originally built on. SB Nation (2005) and The Verge (2011) were the original two Vox Media sites. Eater (launched 2005, acquired 2013), Popsugar (launched 2006, acquired 2022), and The Dodo (launched January 2014, acquired 2022) also predate the April 2014 founding of Vox.com. Here’s the staff memo from Bankoff:

Eater, Popsugar, SB Nation, The Dodo, and The Verge are each in a strong place as distinct brands, and we have no plans to separate them. Each will continue under its current leadership, and Ryan will keep working closely with those leaders to deliver on every brand’s individual strategy. We have made real progress building a brand-led business, including a commercial structure designed to support each brand’s unique opportunity.

I confess that I have little confidence in Allen’s quixotic plans for BuzzFeed, whose business had already been poorly positioned in the years since Peak Facebook. But New York and Vox Media’s podcast network both seem to have steadier foundations and, with Bankoff and much of current management staying on, should be able to keep things going.

Maybe it’s unfair, but I can’t get my mind off of “Succession.” In Season 1, Waystar Royco — the show’s stand-in for Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp empire — acquires Vaulter, a digital media company very much of that BuzzFeed/Vox Media wave (though it was really more like Gawker Media than anything else of that era). But by Season 2, it appears the financials aren’t working out for its particular collection of verticals (and unionization is on the march), so Logan Roy orders it shut down.

Then in Season 4, the Roy kids team up to plan Vaulter’s spiritual successor, The Hundred, a digital news site whose pitch deck managed to include all the era’s most annoying media-VC-isms:

A digital hub delivering all the essential information needed to navigate the now. The world’s leading experts provide humanity’s most valuable knowledge in bespoke bite-sized parcels, designed to improve the lives of subscribers and the world in general. The antidote to the modern malaise of empty-caloried input-overload…An independent bespoke information hub with the hundred greatest top writers, experts and minds in every field from Israel-Palestine to A.I. to Michelin restaurants. It’s a one-stop info shop, with high-calorie info-snacks…It’s like a private member’s club, but for everyone. It’s like clickbait, but for smart people.

The Hundred is, according to Kendall Roy, “Substack meets Masterclass meets The Economist meets The New Yorker.” Of course, in the show, The Hundred gets quickly abandoned as an idea too. But if you were looking today at Vox Media’s properties, which ones look most like Vaulter? Probably the brands that were born in that early-2010s boom for bloggy, advertiser-friendly verticals. And which ones look most like The Hundred? Probably the brands that have elite cultural cachet (New York), news-cycle relevance (Vox.com), and expert-driven parasocial relationships (podcasts).

Look, neither of those fictional news sites is going to be a flattering comparison — it’s television, and they’re both played for laughs. But I can’t stop feeling like James Murdoch has decided to pass on Vaulter and buy The Hundred. For my money, Vox Media has been the most competently run of its peer digital media companies; while BuzzFeed and Vice had higher valuations at their peaks, the Vox Media assemblage of brands has maintained high quality and revenue diversification better than the rest. They’re the digital Condé Nast. It’s sad to see it broken up, and I worry about a great site like The Verge being put on an ice floe on its own. But I suspect both halves of the company could have sustainable futures ahead.

1. It’s typically not a good sign when straight news stories about your strategy are using the word “quixotic.”

“I really wanted my own channel, to do things on my own terms,” Stern explained in her announcement. “With more humor and personality. And because we’re at a moment where we need tech guidance more than ever.”

Stern isn’t the first journalist to tread this path; last year, I wrote about Dave Jorgenson, the former Washington Post TikTok Guy who left to start Local News International, and Joss Fong and Adam Cole, the co-founders of Howtown, who had previously worked for Vox and NPR. Newpress, a relatively recent creator collective, is helmed entirely by veteran journalists.

Like those journalists, Stern is relying on a mix of subscriptions and sponsored content (denoted by a large label and her use of a large golden mic in her videos). But Stern isn’t leaving legacy media entirely behind: a longtime NBC contributor, she now has a deal with the channel that lets it use her content and customize it for its own platforms, which provides a baseline of stability that many independent journalists would be envious of.

I spoke with Stern about her vision for the channel, the work of building up a new audience from scratch, her new book — I Am Not A Robot: My Year Using AI to Do (Almost) Everything — and how she’s using AI in her work. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

I’ve also talked to Dave Jorgenson [of Local News International] and Joss Fong and Adam Cole [of Howtown], and one thing in common for all of you is that you left large publications to do your own thing. They told me something similar about how they like having a team and the structures of journalism around them.

Speaking of which: you laid out those tenets on your website, and you clearly identify as a journalist rather than a creator. What’s behind those decisions?

The second donation of $33 million, from a donor who chose to remain anonymous, is meant to “build and acquire tools and services that will be shared with public media organizations across the nation.”

The network has also been flooded with member donations in the wake of federal defunding. NPR has to “fill a gap of $8 million in its $300-million annual budget,” Folkenflik reported. Without member donations, the network had “initially estimated it would come up $30-45 million short.”

Major gifts and member donations will not, however, prevent layoffs. NPR announced Monday that it’s restructuring and offering buyouts, in addition to beginning that technological transformation. NPR CEO Katherine Maher sent a memo to staff laying out the changes, and NPR media correspondent David Folkenflik has more details.

Three hundred staffers, “mostly within newsgathering desks in the newsroom,” will be offered buyouts with the goal of 30 people accepting by May 26; if they don’t, “more targeted layoffs would ensue,” Folkenflik writes. (NPR currently has 425 newsroom employees.) Some other bits from the piece:

— There are a few details on tech:

The network plans to overhaul its app and reshape its user experience across platforms to enrich the experience for listeners, readers and even viewers of its digital and streamlining products. And NPR’s senior corporate leaders — some of whom have deep roots in the world of tech — are pivoting from the mantra of “reaching people wherever they are” to encouraging people to use NPR on its own platforms.

— The network projects it will see $15 million less in member station dues this year. From Maher’s memo:

Federal defunding has hurt public media, and many of our Member stations are no longer able to pay fees at prior levels. NPR’s new Membership model incorporates a $15 million reduction in fees, based on our projections of station capacity. Meanwhile, economic uncertainty, a tough newscycle, and softness in radio listening has led to lower projections in sponsorship revenue.

— Several desks are merging:

NPR’s National and General Assignments desks next month will merge with a focus on deep dives, natural disasters, and news deserts. NPR’s regional bureau chiefs will become part of a new desk that works closely with member station journalists.

Beyond that, Evans says he is merging NPR’s desks covering culture, education, religion, addiction and sports to make a society-and-culture desk. He is unifying science and climate coverage in a single desk. And he plans to fold the global health team — now part of the Science desk — into the International desk….

NPR’s Washington desk will expand to include the states team and NPR reporters who focus on power and money. The new desk on power and policy would take in developments on the local, state, regional and national level.