Nieman Journalism Lab
In the U.S., when a publisher signs a licensing deal with an AI company, newsroom staffers don’t get a cut. Many newsrooms have licensed their content to OpenAI in bulk, for example. A staff reporter’s stories can be used as training data for the latest GPT model, or may surface in ChatGPT’s response to a...
I didn’t think it was possible, but it turns out I wasn’t generous enough to Advance Local. A few weeks back, we released our first monthly traffic rankings for U.S. local newspapers, and the big takeaway was the dominance of Advance Local, the chain that owns the dailies in Cleveland, Harrisburg, Newark, Syracuse, Birmingham, and...
Publishers and competitors have been calling to break up Google for decades. It’s too powerful, the argument goes, combining dominance in search, web browsing, ad selling, maps, email, video, mobile operating systems, and more. It uses its power in one segment to buttress others, stifling competition and taking too large a share of the economic...
Mike Evans knew something had to change. As the lead instructor for American Government 1101 at Georgia State University in 2021, Evans had watched his students over the years show up with fewer facts and more conspiracy theories. Gone were the days when students arrived on campus with dim memories of high school civics. Now...
A new report from FT Strategies, “Taking AI from the back-end to the front page,” digs into AI adoption case studies at 16 major newsrooms across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. All of the publications participated in AI Launchpad, a program run by the Financial Times’ media consultancy and Google News Initiative (GNI) from...
On June 13, High Plains Public Radio received some welcome news: It had been awarded a $750,000 grant from Press Forward. Over the next three years, the station will build out a regional news contributors network called the High Plains Civic Media Network for the rural communities it serves across the Oklahoma and Texas panhandles,...
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, one of the country’s major metro dailies, will stop putting out a print newspaper at the end of this year. The Journal-Constitution will publish its final print edition on December 31, The New York Times reported Thursday, ending a 157-year print run. Print newspapers, already vestigial in an era when news consumption...
Fake books. Made-up sources. Bogus trampoline bunnies. We’re all getting a lot of AI-generated content in our feeds these days. But a new working paper suggests there’s a silver lining for trusted news organizations: they may be able to benefit from the broader degradation of the information ecosystem and win over subscribers concerned about sifting...
Yesterday, Taylor Swift announced she was engaged to Travis Kelce (if you are somehow finding out about this for the first time from Nieman Lab Dot Org, please reassess your media diet). If anything else happened yesterday, well, no it didn’t. “If you have some news you need to get buried, now is the time...
When The 19th launched — with $8.5 million to start — in August 2020, they kicked off with a budget that most news outlets can only dream of. Five years and $100 million raised later, The 19th’s next chapter is focused on substantially growing its audience and making sure money is never a problem. Emily...
After years of financial struggles and narrowly avoiding closure at the start of 2025, the Chicago Reader is getting another lifeline. On Tuesday, the nonprofit alt-weekly known for covering arts and culture in the city announced it had been acquired by Noisy Creek, a media company founded last year by Brady Walkinshaw, the former CEO...
On Tuesday, the three newsrooms in the American Journalism Project-backed Signal Ohio network collectively moved to unionize, following in the footsteps of other nonprofit newsrooms like The Texas Tribune, The Marshall Project, City Bureau, and, just last week, Mission Local. “As the organization grows, we are unionizing across newsrooms and teams to ensure our mission...
New York — I knew I was in the right place because of the backpacks. Six years ago, I needed something that could carry my laptop, my camera, a couple of lenses, and my audio equipment, but also be used as a normal backpack on days I was traveling a little lighter. I settled on the...
The state of Mississippi just wants to protect its children, you see. That’s why they can’t be allowed to see your skeets. On Friday, the social network Bluesky announced that it had begun blocking the use of its services in Mississippi. At issue is a bill the Mississippi Legislature passed into law last year that...
Over the past year, major newsrooms across the country have rolled out generative AI chatbots. The Hearst-owned San Francisco Chronicle came out with its Chowbot for foodies and a Kamala Harris “news assistant” for voters. The Washington Post launched Climate Answers, its first-ever chatbot fueled by reporting from the climate desk. And chatbots that help...
If you were looking for a single journalistic catchphrase, you could do worse than “follow the money.” Investigating and documenting the flow of cash and other resources is almost always a worthwhile pursuit for someone trying to get to the bottom of things. Molly White, an independent journalist, software engineer, and one of the sharpest...
It’s a tough time to be interested in archiving the web — arguably the most transient medium for news since the birth of radio. On Monday, Reddit announced it would begin blocking the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine from crawling the site to make an archival copy. Wayback is the closest thing we have — as...
In the most remote parts of Alaska, staying in touch can involve a bit more effort than sending a text. Cell service is spotty, highways are nonexistent, and the postal service remains a vital lifeline, delivering supplies and mail by plane. But for anyone who wants to broadcast a different kind of message — a...
In the first federal election since news was banned on Meta platforms, Canadians lost out, a new report finds. The 2025 federal election was likely the “most poorly covered election in modern Canadian history” due to the erosion of local news and Facebook’s news ban, according to the Ottawa-based nonpartisan think tank Public Policy Forum...
Politico has become a testing ground for how AI clauses in union contracts could shape adoption in newsrooms across the U.S. The PEN Guild represents over 250 workers at Politico and its sister publication, energy and environment site E&E News. Earlier this year, the Guild alleged management had violated AI adoption guidelines negotiated into its...
One of my favorite Nieman Lab predictions in recent years came from Nik Usher, associate professor of communication studies at the University of San Diego. The prediction, “The future-of-journalism crowd stops ignoring local TV news,” used the film Mean Girls as an analogy to describe local news types. Usher describes how the “freaks and geeks”...
Alden Global Capital sure is confused a lot lately. The vulturous hedge fund has kindly offered to pillage The Dallas Morning News, just as it’s pillaged the other newspapers it’s bought over the past decade-plus. But the paper’s owners and executives don’t seem keen on the idea! Weird, right? And now Alden is “perplexed” that...
The Yomiuri Shimbun, Japan’s largest newspaper by circulation, has sued the generative AI startup Perplexity for copyright infringement. The lawsuit, filed in Tokyo District Court on August 7, marks the first copyright challenge by a major Japanese news publisher against an AI company. The filing claims that Perplexity accessed 119,467 articles on Yomiuri’s site between...
If “Why I’m Leaving New York” was the cliché essay topic of the 2010s, “Why I Left The Washington Post” is making a strong bid as the 2025 equivalent. There are so many entries, from Ruth Marcus to Robert Kagan to Ann Telnaes to Joe Davidson to Jennifer Rubin to Jonathan Capeheart to Perry Bacon...
Eight years after Report for America launched, its graduates are more often than not accepting permanent positions in their newsrooms. RFA launched in 2017 with the goal of placing “emerging journalists” in local newsrooms for a year of service and the option for a second year, with half their salary covered by RFA. The idea...
President Donald Trump is again attacking the American press — this time not with fiery rally speeches or by calling the media “the enemy of the people,” but through the courts. Since the heat of the November 2024 election, and continuing into July, Trump has filed defamation lawsuits against 60 Minutes broadcaster CBS News and The Wall Street...
The open-source publishing platform Ghost, which powers the websites and newsletters of many independent news outlets and positions itself as an alternative to Substack and Beehiiv, announced Monday that it’s introducing a number of upgrades aimed at increasing reach and understanding exactly what that reach looks like. In the changelog for Ghost 6.0, the company...
I think you can excuse public radio’s station managers if web traffic isn’t quite top of mind these days. Many are too busy fighting for their continued existence. Donald Trump’s May executive order to defund public media was of dubious legality. He’d proposed gutting the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in his previous budgets, but Congress...
Los Angeles — America’s second most populous city — is getting a new daily newspaper. News Corp, the parent company of The New York Post and The Wall Street Journal, is expanding westward with the California Post in early 2026, the company announced Monday (expanded announcement here; the release was first reported by Axios.) The...
Erlend Ofte Arntsen has filed more Freedom of Information Act requests than he can count — triple digits by one tally, quadruple when you include follow-ups and related requests. Now, a new newsroom assistant at one of Norway’s largest newspapers is transforming Arntsen’s workflow, saving time that could be better spent on shoe-leather reporting than...
Alden Global Capital just can’t understand. Why would any newspaper not want to be the next to pass through its digestive tract? That’s the tone of a letter the vulturous hedge fund’s executives sent last night to the owner of The Dallas Morning News. As I wrote on Monday, the DallasNews Corporation recently agreed to...
Willa Robinson has loved to read since she was a child. It’s a passion passed down from her father, who “read everything” and tended to fall asleep on Sunday afternoons with the newspaper over his face, she told me. The 84-year-old Robinson first began collecting books in the late 1970s, when she would spend her...
Philadelphia Inquirer subscribers can now access Alison Roman’s Caramelized Shallot Pasta, Marian Burros’s Original Plum Torte, and Sam Sifton’s Oven-Roasted Chicken Shawarma without subscribing to The New York Times. The Times is venturing into deals with other U.S. news publishers, similar to what it’s doing internationally. The current deal with the Inquirer, for instance, gives...
Last week, we published the first of our new monthly rankings: the top 25 local U.S. newspapers on the web, based on their traffic. (All hail the conquering Advance Local!) Today, it’s time for the second: the top 25 nonprofit news sites in the United States. Nonprofit news sites have an interesting relationship with web...
What’s the best scale for measuring independence — or lack thereof — in 2025? The media advocacy group Free Press (not to be confused with the Bari Weiss publication by the same name) decided the answer was “chickens.” The organization’s pointed new “Media Capitulation Index,” out Tuesday, ranks the 35 largest commercial media and tech companies...
By now, it’s a familiar move to watchers of Alden Global Capital, the ravenous hedge fund with the unusual hobby of sucking the lifeblood out of newspapers. See, Alden likes to wait until a newspaper merger or acquisition is juuuuust about consummated. Then, right before the final papers get signed, it swoops in with a...
The Kyiv Independent reached a major membership milestone last month with a global campaign telling readers “journalism needs a community, not a paywall.” After a month-long multi-country campaign, The Kyiv Independent has more than 20,000 paying members — up from 17,500 in May. Most members give $5 a month. About 70% of the outlet’s revenue...
Journalistic content is integral to answers from generative AI tools, a new report from Generative Pulse by Muck Rack finds. The authors of the report, published this week, analyzed more than one million citations output by generative AI models. Journalistic content was cited more than 27% of the time across all Muck Rack’s tests, and...
On Monday, the newsletter company 6AM City announced it had purchased Good Daily, a network of AI-generated local newsletters aimed at hundreds of small towns and cities across the U.S. In January, I uncovered Good Daily, which in less than a year had quietly expanded to more than 350 towns and cities. At the time,...
Over the years, the crisis facing local news has meant the disappearance of reporting on the arts, politics, sports, and local government. Newspapers have disappeared from many local communities, and the ranks of individual local journalists have plummeted over the past two decades. The retrenchment has also led to a loss of something else: reporters and columnists at local news...
The size of a news site’s audience isn’t everything. For an important story, reaching just one person can make a huge impact — if it’s the right person, someone who can take action based on what the journalist has learned and shared. Some of the best reporting in the world is aimed at narrow niche...
Today, Wired editorial director Katie Drummond announced what she called a “new era” for the publication, with an emphasis on connecting readers more directly to its journalism and the reporters who make it happen. To do that, Wired is enhancing its subscription offering ($48 annually, or $4 a month, though they are currently running a...
The Los Angeles Times will be a public company within the next year, its billionaire owner told Daily Show host Jon Stewart on Monday night. “Whether you are right, left, Democrat, Republican: you’re an American. The opportunity [is] for us to provide a paper that is the voices of the people, truly the voices of...
Champions of the almost entirely party-line vote in the U.S. Senate to erase $1.1 billion in already approved funds for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting called their action a refusal to subsidize liberal media. “Public broadcasting has long been overtaken by partisan activists,” said U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, insisting there is no need for government to...
On Friday, Congress authorized the Trump administration to cut off federal funding to public media in the United States. The passage of the Rescissions Act of 2025 revokes $1.1 billion of funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which distributes money to public media stations across the country. NPR, PBS, and their local affiliates have...
An original storytelling startup is giving visual data journalism a distinctly Asian flavor. Singapore-based Kontinentalist began with an initial assignment to report on the impact of China’s Belt and Road Initiative across Asia, but has since gone on to feature corruption on Cambodian monkey farms, foreign direct investments in debt-riddled Laos, and even myths and monsters from across...
In May, the Houston Landing shut down less than two years after its ambitious launch, laying off all 43 employees. The announcement that the board of directors had voted to close the nonprofit news outlet generated national attention, and many questions. The big one: How does a local news startup that appeared so promising —...
On Thursday, Dow Jones Newswires launched a new AI language service in French, allowing readers to access automated translations of breaking financial and investment news in real time. The new service is expected to produce “fluent” translations of between 500 and 1,000 stories each day on the wire, according to Dow Jones. The French service is...
In July 1965, police officer Edward Nugent shot and killed John Wesley Wilder, a Black man outside a cafe in Ruston, Louisiana. The officer — who fired five times and claimed his actions were in self-defense — wasn’t charged, and authorities ultimately ruled the case a “justifiable homicide.” But decades later, journalist Ben Greenberg discovered...
Press Forward, the philanthropic coalition that has vowed to grant at least $500 million to local news over five years, announced $22.7 million in grants to 22 newsroom projects on Wednesday. “We hope these awards can provide local newsrooms, organizations, and journalists with shared resources that strengthen their efficiency and capacity,” Dale Anglin, the director...