Nieman Journalism Lab
When Donald Trump signed an executive order to gut the government-run agency overseeing Voice of America (VOA), among the first in line to celebrate were Russian and Chinese state officials. “Today is a celebration for my colleagues at RT, Sputnik, and other outlets, because Trump unexpectedly announced that he’s closing down Radio Liberty and Voice...
There’s a lot out there to leak. The second Trump administration, historically unfriendly to the press, has thrown Washington into chaos. Tens of thousands of federal employees have been placed on leave or fired as billionaire Elon Musk’s DOGE tries to gut the government. And taxpayer-funded data is being destroyed. Amid the confusion, news organizations...
Billionaire Mark Cuban backing a startup is not, on its own, a big story. He’s done it hundreds of times. But I was interested in this particular investment highlighted by Sarah Perez in TechCrunch: (You can download Skylight for iOS and Android now. It…looks like an underpopulated TikTok clone — but one I could log...
A decade ago, journalist András Pethő co-founded the nonprofit investigative site Direkt36. He’d just resigned from Origo, one of Hungary’s leading news sites, over political pressure on the newsroom. Origo went on to become “a mouthpiece of Hungary’s authoritarian government” and “the website that shows how a free press can die.” Direkt36, meanwhile, has cemented...
What would happen if Congress defunded NPR and PBS — something Republicans have renewed their push for following a House hearing last week? First things first: “The funding bill passed by Congress and signed into law by Trump earlier this month included $535 million for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the entity that disburses funds...
On the morning of February 27, USAID workers who had been fired or placed on administrative leave during the Trump administration’s sudden dismantling of the agency went back to their offices at the Reagan Building and International Trade Center in Washington, D.C., for the last time. They’d been assigned 15-minute windows to clean out their...
Austin, Texas — The first time Donald Trump attacked White House reporter Ashley Parker by name on social media was in 2019. It was worrying and unsettling but Parker quickly focused on a silver lining. “There was this wonderful moment where I got to hear from everyone in my life,” Parker told a crowd at...
As LinkedIn post ledes go, Spotlight PA CEO and editor Christopher Baxter’s on a post last week was intriguing: “I recently had lunch with a staunch, pro-Trump Republican and highly successful business leader, and his views on local news changed my own.” In the post, Baxter, the founding editor of the six-year-old nonprofit local newsroom...
Robert W. McChesney, the lion of anti-corporate media scholarship, is dead at the age of 72. He was, for decades, probably the most prominent academic critic of American media from the left, focused on all the ways our idealized vision of a “free press” was actually hampered by the power of big business, the wealthy,...
It’s hard not to root for the National Trust for Local News. Heralded as a savior of local newspapers, the nonprofit has presented itself as the ideal foil to the hedge fund-owned chains that slash local newsroom jobs and chase profit over meaningful journalism. The Trust has grown at a remarkable clip since its founding...
Journalism’s biggest scoops usually require months — years! — of shoe-leather reporting. Developing sources. Building trust. Coaxing out documents. Analyzing data. Assembling tiny fragments of information — perhaps insignificant on their own — into a damning portrait of malfeasance, graft, or abandonment of duty. But sometimes, you just get dropped into the wrong group text....
In 1964, Philip Converse published what would become one of the most cited papers in all of political science, “The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics.”1 It was a result of a movement at the University of Michigan, where Converse taught, to do large-scale data analyses of the ideology of the American public —...
The digital media company Ziff Davis — owner of CNET, Mashable, Lifehacker, and PC Mag as well as a number of shopping and B2B sites — has acquired The Skimm. The Skimm will join Ziff Davis’s health and wellness division Everyday Health Group as part of the deal. The Skimm will operate as a standalone...
After a decade at the helm, Charlie Sennott is leaving the GroundTruth Project, the nonprofit journalism organization he founded in 2014 that also launched Report for America and Report for the World. Sennott, a 2006 Nieman Fellow, will take the GroundTruth Project name and newsletter to launch GroundTruth Media Partners LLC, a for-profit organization with...
Jake Fischer was at a friend’s birthday party when a push notification lit up his phone just after midnight on February 2. His first thought: “That can’t be real.” The incoming tweet from ESPN’s senior NBA insider Shams Charania revealed that the Dallas Mavericks had unexpectedly traded their young superstar Luka Dončić to the Los...
When ABC shut down FiveThirtyEight early this month, the site’s publicly available polling databases — like a presidential approval rating tracker — shut down, too. Many news outlets, including The New York Times and FiveThirtyEight founder Nate Silver’s Silver Bulletin, had relied on the data for election coverage, and people worried about its disappearance. “Collecting and maintaining...
The federal government does a lot of things. It lifts millions of seniors out of poverty! It forecasts avalanches! It invades foreign countries based on dubious intelligence! It determines what time it is! And when it’s got a spare moment, it protects the Constitution — or at least one copy of it. If you set...
The “Trump bump” isn’t just for news publishers in the United States. Last fall, four European news publishers sweetened their subscription deals by offering complimentary access to The New York Times, with the idea that their readers might want more expansive U.S. election coverage. Premium subscribers to news outlets like El País (Spain), Politiken (Denmark),...
On Friday, United States president Donald Trump signed an executive order to gut the United States Agency for Global Media, the parent organization of U.S. news agency Voice of America. More than 1,000 VOA employees were put on indefinite paid leave on Saturday, according to NPR. VOA and its affiliates had reached 420 million people...
Last fall residents of Mandan, North Dakota woke up to an unfamiliar newspaper at their doorsteps. The broadsheet Central ND News, printed on newsprint, had columns, standard-sized articles, and headlines. But there was an odd theme to its stories. Many referenced events that had happened nearly a decade earlier, when protestors had swarmed the rural...
On March 7, education reporter Hannah Dellinger published a story on the experiences of Michigan LGBTQ+ students since Donald Trump took office. Dellinger spoke to several students who have seen a rise in hate speech at school after the president signed a series of anti-trans executive orders. The lead voice in the story was Sebastian...
NICAR — the National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting1 — is one of my favorite annual journalism conferences, even if I haven’t been in a few years. That’s because it’s uniquely easy to benefit from even without attending. As the nation’s news nerds descend on a city (this year Minneapolis), they come bearing PDFs and slide...
When Ruth Marcus resigned from her position as an associate editor and longtime political columnist at the Washington Post on March 10, she said it was because Post publisher Will Lewis had killed one of her columns. Specifically, she’d written a column criticizing Post owner Jeff Bezos’ vision for an opinion page that advocated for...
Let’s start at the end. The acknowledgements of Murder the Truth, a startling and deeply researched new book by New York Times journalist and editor David Enrich, thanks the Times’ “unflappable” in-house lawyer. The business investigations unit overseen by Enrich has repeatedly been targeted by threats that are part of a larger campaign to weaponize...
If you care about public media and have read any news mentioning the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in 2025, chances are it’s been something scary / depressing / grim about how the president wants to defund it (not a new threat, but one that feels more real than it did a few years ago). That’s...
Wendy Monterrosa and her colleagues founded news site Voz Pública in El Salvador in 2020. A year into Nayib Bukele’s presidency, marked by frequent attacks on journalists, Voz Pública built a small newsroom focused on fact-checking and investigative journalism. But everything crashed down in early February when Donald Trump put on hold any funding from the United States Agency for...
Over the past year, AI chatbots have been widely criticized for how poorly they cite news publishers, and how little traffic they drive to the publishers they do cite properly. ChatGPT has often been at the center of this conversation. Last summer, I reported that ChatGPT frequently hallucinated fake URLs to news sites, even to...
Joe Rogan is, if nothing else, prolific. He’s published 2,286 episodes in the 15-ish years he’s been making his podcast, at an average of a little over two and a half hours each. New episodes drop three or four times a week, which means getting the full Joe Rogan Experience would take about 240 days...
Politico Pro is a high-priced item ($12,000 or more annually!) that is targeted at a demanding audience of lobbyists, agency staffers, corporate execs, industry think-tankers, and oligarchs either real or aspiring. It attempts to give high-leverage intel about the world of D.C. policy to people in a position to take advantage of that intel. So...
Generative AI hype has launched newsroom experiments around the world. Even though many of these early applications have become cautionary tales, the hype has endured for over two years since OpenAI publicly launched ChatGPT. In many ways, this is familiar territory for journalism. In a long line of digital technologies (smartphones, social media, the infamous...
OptOut News, a news aggregation app that shared journalism from “financially independent” and largely progressive news outlets like The Nation, The Intercept, and Grist, has shut down due to a lack of funding. Co-founder Alex Kotch — formerly an investigative reporter at the Center for Media and Democracy — told OptOut newsletter subscribers on Tuesday evening that...
Disney is cutting 200 positions across ABC News and Disney Entertainment, including shutting down FiveThirtyEight, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday night. From the Journal: The ABC news magazine shows “20/20” and “Nightline” are consolidating into one unit, resulting in job cuts, the people said. ABC is also eliminating the political and data-driven news site...
Billionaire newspaper owners are in the middle of a massive freakout about their Opinion sections during the second Trump administration. Last week, Amazon CEO and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos announced that the Post’s Opinion section would reorient itself “in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets…Viewpoints opposing those pillars will...
When the Taliban took over Afghanistan in 2021, Irish war correspondent Jane Ferguson was in Kabul and decided to stay to report on the aftermath, posting videos on Instagram. Ferguson, who has worked steadily as a freelancer covering conflicts in the Middle East for outlets like Al Jazeera, PBS, and The New Yorker, said that...
Among Ben Romo’s core ’80s memories as a kid growing up in Santa Barbara, CA: Placing third in a Big Wheel race on Leadbetter Beach. That accomplishment was documented in his hometown paper, the more than century-old Santa Barbara News-Press. It was the first time Romo remembers making the paper, but not the last; the...
There’s fresh data on podcast listening habits, and — unlike most podcast research — this study focused on people who regularly consume news podcasts. The Podcast Landscape, sponsored by NPR and conducted by Signal Hill Insights, claims to be the “largest public study of podcasting in America” with responses from 5,071 Americans ages 18 or...
Dave Jorgenson, best known as The Washington Post’s TikTok guy, has launched a new weekly news skit show called, incredibly, Local News International. The series will be similar to his other videos for The Washington Post but “it’ll cover news from all around the world with a sort of local news, lo-fi vibe,” Jorgenson explains...
What would a local media system that prioritizes working and middle classes over corporate profits and the interests of billionaires look like? A new public policy agenda released this week has some ideas. The Media Power Collaborative, which released its policy framework on Tuesday, describes itself as an organizing space for media workers and their...
News interviews from expert sources’ perspective One of the more consistent (and, sadly, unsurprising) findings in news research around the world is the dominance of men as sources in news stories. Numerous studies have examined the ratio of men to women as sources over the years, including two multinational studies this decade, and have found a fairly...
The thing about American newspaper opinion sections is this: Their owners get final say. If the man who signs the checks — it’s almost always a man — really really really wants to see his cocker spaniel run City Hall, you’ll probably see “Our Choice: Fluffernutter for Mayor” stripped atop the editorial page. For generations...
It is a challenging time to be a journalism student. Those entering the news industry face a profession struggling to recover public trust and attention, pay its journalists fairly, ensure they have a semblance of job security, and protect them from increasing — and intensifying — online abuse and harassment. Journalists’ salaries have remained largely...
When Spotify canceled the podcast Heavyweight in 2023, every audio producer I know (and listeners on Reddit) mourned. The podcast, which I can best describe as “a show about regrets and resentments and the past but FUN,” was an audio darling, with its signature mixture of wry humor and deeply touching stories that seemed to...
Student Press Freedom Day is Feb. 27 in the United States. But here in Korea — and in much of the world — it is just another Thursday. In Korea, awareness of student press freedom remains minimal, even nationally. In the professional sphere, while the Korean Constitution guarantees freedom of speech, press organizations often face...
Hours after Donald Trump was sworn in as president, users spread a false claim on Facebook that Immigration and Customs Enforcement was paying a bounty for reports of undocumented people. “BREAKING — ICE is allegedly offering $750 per illegal immigrant that you turn in through their tip form,” read a post on a page called...
New York, NY — On a grey February morning in lower Manhattan, inside a warmly lit, wood-paneled room, Ben Smith drew my attention to the smoked salmon benedict. “You should eat,” Smith, the CEO and cofounder of Semafor, mouthed. Across the table from him, a man named Jim Walden was getting animated about how he...
Over the last decade, journalists have unionized their newsrooms in record numbers. Since 2016, nearly 8,000 media workers from 146 companies have unionized with The NewsGuild-Communications Workers of America alone. To get a better sense of what union organizing in journalism looks and feels like for women, researchers Ever Josue Figueroa (University of Colorado, Boulder),...
The Press Gazette takes a look at three recently launched local news startups in London: London Centric was launched in September by former Guardian media editor Jim Waterson and offers readers regular email newsletters and in-depth reporting that they won’t find elsewhere. Based on Substack, it charges £7.95 per month for full access. The Londoner...
In December, Carla McCanna received a message from a recruiter at the AI training data company Outlier. McCanna, a recent graduate of Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, had never heard of the company, but the message came through Handshake, a recruiting portal hosted by the university. “The recruiter said my skills align with a...
Germany goes to the polls on Sunday for an election that could prove transformative. The key player is the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, which won 10.4% of the vote in the last federal election. Current polling puts AfD at roughly twice that level, a result that would likely rank them second behind the...
When the American Journalism Project launched in 2019, the Knight Foundation was among its earliest supporters. Right off the bat, the longtime journalism funder invested $20 million in the new organization created to provide venture philanthropy for local news. Six years later, the Knight Foundation is doubling down on that early support. On Tuesday, the...
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