Nieman Journalism Lab
Have you left Twitter? Would a new “link experience” be enough to lure you back? The platform formerly known as Twitter announced it was testing a new way to boost engagement for posts with links on Sunday evening. As X head of product Nikita Bier wrote: We’re testing a new link experience, starting on iOS...
Last year, Icelandic teacher María Hjálmtýsdóttir wrote a column for The Guardian on the country’s experiment with a 36-hour workweek. The piece offered rich personal anecdotes that only a local could provide. Readers learned, for instance, that Hjálmtýsdóttir’s husband is using some of his newfound free time to chat with his fellow hobbyist pigeon keepers....
Throughout modern American history, reporters who cover the Pentagon have played an invaluable role shining a light on military actions when the government has not been forthright with the public. For instance, reporters covering the Biden administration’s decision to withdraw from Afghanistan in 2021 revealed the chaos that ensued and repudiated official statements claiming the pullout was smooth. That included reporting on a drone...
Back in April I wrote about Kagi, a premium search engine that I found fixed many of my gripes with the state of the modern internet. Kagi recently launched Kagi News, and it’s designed to make keeping up with the news both easier and less overwhelming. As the company explained in a blog post announcing...
Social media — for those of us old enough to remember, “Web 2.0” — was once hailed as a democratizing force. The reality has been, of course, both contradictory and convoluted. It turns out that putting communication power in the hands of the people enables not just social justice movements like Black Lives Matter and...
When I hear the term “local newsletter,” I think of the type of news product I created as a local journalist: a roundup of community-specific news, whether it’s originally reported, aggregated, or a combination. But when I browsed Aniket Panjwani’s database of local newsletters, I found something very different. Yes, there were a few newsletters...
The most recent Engaged Journalism Exchange — a convening of journalism practitioners, funders, and scholars in San Francisco over the summer — began with Anita Varma describing how she’d been the target of a disinformation campaign, a home vandalism, and doxxing during the several years she’s been leading the Solidarity Journalism Initiative as an assistant...
Chris Keyes dreamed up his new publication, fittingly, while he was on a backpacking trip. It was March 2025, a little over a month after Outside Magazine had laid Keyes off as editor-in-chief. He’d been at Outside since 2007. “I really thought I was done with journalism, just because it’s been such a roller coaster,”...
Nonprofit news outlets of all types are enjoying revenue growth — but those that focus specifically on local news, rather than state, national, or global news, are doing especially well, according to the 2025 Institute of Nonprofit News Index, released Wednesday. Local nonprofits made up more than half (51%) of INN’s membership in 2024, up...
The generative AI wave isn’t coming — it’s already here, and it’s reshaping how the public finds information. In a new report, “Generative AI and News Report 2025: How People Think About AI’s Role in Journalism and Society,” my colleagues Richard Fletcher, Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, and I surveyed audiences across six countries, including the United States. Our...
All things equal, you’d rather not be intermediated. It’s just not a nice way to spend an afternoon! Picture it: You’ve got a perfectly nice little business going. You make widgets, and you sell them to people who want them at whatever price the market will bear. Everybody benefits. Then some new guy comes along,...
In September 2025, podcaster Pablo Torre published an investigation alleging that the NBA’s Los Angeles Clippers may have used a side deal to skirt the league’s strict salary cap rules. His reporting, aired on multiple episodes of “Pablo Torre Finds Out,” focused on star forward Kawhi Leonard. Leonard, one of the NBA’s most sought-after free agents, signed a...
Athens — In September, the Dutch investigative newsroom Lighthouse Reports worked with six other news outlets1 to co-publish an investigation into how Syrian president Bashar al-Assad’s totalitarian regime stole 300 Syrian children from their families and hid them away in orphanages in an attempt to force their parents to cooperate with the government. Reporters spoke...
Lot of news coming out of the networks this morning: Bari Weiss, founder of the pro-Israel, anti-woke Free Press, has sold the four-year-old news site to CBS parent company Paramount for a reported $150 million and is the new editor-in-chief of CBS News. And the left-leaning cable channel MSNBC has begun its split from NBC...
What messages — down to the specific words — get Americans interested in supporting local news? And which words have the opposite effect, alienating potential supporters? These might not be natural questions for local reporters to ask themselves, given that they apply a marketing or PR lens to a mission-driven profession often concerned with getting...
One year ago, The Guardian launched The Filter, a product recommendation site in the vein of sites like The New York Times’ Wirecutter and New York Magazine’s Strategist. Back then, The Filter was just for U.K. readers; now, The Guardian is bringing it to the United States. The Filter, like the rest of The Guardian,...
Wikipedia is one of the 10 most popular websites on planet Earth and, in this reporter’s opinion, one of humanity’s greatest modern achievements of the digital age. It’s the closest we’ve gotten to making all the world’s information freely available to all, the result of armies of volunteers constructing an incredibly robust architecture for knowledge....
In May 2024, Pooja Shali, an anchor for India Today, received a concerned message from a friend. The friend had been scrolling Instagram Reels and came across what appeared to be a video of Shali announcing the news on her morning show, First Up. Audiences across India are used to seeing Shali behind the anchor...
New York City’s mayoral Democratic primary this summer — in which Democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani defeated disgraced former governor Andrew Cuomo — captured the nation’s attention, making for another busy year in New York City politics and news. But the race has proven lucrative for Hell Gate NYC, the three-year-old, worker-owned news outlet. Of Hell...
Athens — “Our work was going in the trash.” That’s how Jason Koebler, cofounder of independent technology news site 404 Media, describes the situation that drove 404 to require readers to give their email addresses before reading articles. It was January 2024, “I was walking my dog and I basically had a panic attack,” Koebler...
VTDigger, the Chicago Reader, and Honolulu Civil Beat were three of the biggest gainers in web traffic among nonprofit news outlets in July 2025, according to the latest edition of our monthly rankings. Vermont had its third straight July with flash floods, but that wasn’t the main driver of VTDigger’s roughly 60% increase in web...
The New York Times has long believed the potential audience for its subscriptions isn’t just New Yorkers or Americans but “every curious, English-speaking person seeking to understand and engage with the world.” A new global-minded newsletter, modeled after the Times’ über-successful newsletter The Morning, is a big step in that direction. People at the Times...
One in five Americans say they regularly get news on TikTok, a dramatic uptick from just 3% in 2020, according to a Pew Research Center analysis published last week. “During that span, no social media platform we’ve studied has experienced faster growth in news consumption,” Pew researchers noted. Pew’s findings are important for media outlets...
A new report from News is Out, a national collaborative of queer news publishers, has mapped local LGBTQ+ publications across the U.S. The first comprehensive report of its kind, “The LGBTQ+ Media Mapping Project” paints a striking picture of how many of these community-centered news outlets are struggling to stay afloat during the second Trump...
The Baltimore Banner, the promising and growing local news nonprofit serving the city and greater Maryland, has named a new editor-in-chief. Audrey Cooper, editor-in-chief of WNYC and former editor-in-chief of the San Francisco Chronicle, will take the reins in a new city on October 13. Cooper replaces founding editor-in-chief Kimi Yoshino, who announced in May...
How about some good news? Could you use some good news today? A newspaper transaction doesn’t always have to go horribly. The worst possible outcome isn’t always predestined. Today, shareholders of DallasNews Corporation, owners of The Dallas Morning News1, voted overwhelmingly to make a lot of money by being acquired by the Hearst Corporation. (Hearst...
“Is there any way we can screw him?” asked President Richard M. Nixon. “We’ve been trying to,” an aide replied, alluding to the White House’s efforts to remove from the airwaves an ABC talk show host whose critiques of the administration had placed that “son of a bitch” on the chief executive’s enemies list. Over...
The Nordic countries are good places to launch news outlets. Trust in news is very high, and people are willing to pay for news subscriptions. Zetland, the membership-driven news site launched in Denmark in 2012, now counts 50,000 paid subscribers, and the publication has begun expanding its model to other countries. Last year, Zetland — whose...
Digiday held the most recent edition of its Digiday Publishing Summit in Miami last week, and it’s been rolling out highlights from many of the sessions. You’ll be shocked to learn that one big area of focus was AI. Two of them make for interesting paired reading — peeks into the AI strategies of The...
For the last several years, a few things about many journalists’ workflows have remained constant: They talk to their colleagues on Slack, contact sources via some combination of phone, email, Zoom, and messaging apps, and file their stories in Google Docs. But now, as the federal government ramps up its attacks on American journalism —...
The assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk has sparked a wave of political commentary. There were the respectful and sincere comments condemning the killing. Former President Barack Obama said, “What happened was a tragedy and…I mourn for him and his family.” And former Vice President Mike Pence said, “I’m heartsick about what happened to him.” But Kirk’s...
Tristan Werkmeister, 26, joined Reuters as the newsroom’s first social video reporter in January. The look of Reuters’ videos hasn’t radically changed — but output has. Reuters now produces four times as many vertical videos per day as it used to. Most of the videos are straight news bulletins but occasionally Werkmeister narrates an explainer-style...
This is supposed to be a website about media innovation, so I suppose we must acknowledge the innovation of Brendan Carr, Donald Trump’s chair of the Federal Communications Commission. For decades, the renewal of television licenses was overwhelmingly pro forma; a license has been taken away because of content exactly once, when a Mississippi station...
St. Louis — When Christiaan Mader co-founded The Current Media in 2018 as a scrappy local news nonprofit for Lafayette, Louisiana, he didn’t envision events playing a big part in organizational strategy. In hindsight, he said, he should have. At a panel for LION’s Independent News Sustainability Summit in St. Louis this month, Mader shared...
The Banner, the three-year-old Maryland news nonprofit that earned national recognition with a Pulitzer win this year, is launching a news bureau in Montgomery County. The expansion into Maryland’s most populous county — where it already has several thousand paying subscribers — brings The Banner into the northern Washington suburbs, and marks its first hub...
Long before the launch of The European Correspondent, there were just two friends, one in Amsterdam, one in Basel, swapping news updates from their corners of the continent. As they traded headlines back and forth, the thought dawned on them — hey, wouldn’t it be great to have friends all over Europe, sharing news just...
Of all of the Trump administration’s policy initiatives, this might be the one with the widest base of non-MAGA support. On Tuesday, the White House announced that it planned to make it much more difficult — likely impossible — for pharmaceutical companies to advertise their drugs on TV. You see, until 1997, drug companies were...
In 2020, as George Floyd’s killing and nationwide Black Lives Matter protests set off a “racial reckoning” in journalism, the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education (MIJE) was flooded with newsroom requests for company-wide diversity trainings. MIJE, a nonprofit founded in 1977, focuses on “equity, belonging, and diversity in news.” Martin Reynolds, the organization’s co-executive director,...
Could Rupert Murdoch’s $40 billion media empire ever lean liberal? Over the past few years, as Murdoch’s four children battled in court over who would control properties including Fox News, The Wall Street Journal, and the New York Post after his death, the possibility was slim but real. If Elisabeth, Prudence, James, and Lachlan Murdoch...
On July 22, Dave Jorgenson, also known as “The Washington Post TikTok guy,” posted a video to his social channels. “Dear Jeff Bezos,” it began, “If you’re reading this, you already know. I’m leaving the Washington Post and starting my own company.” And, he went on to explain, he wouldn’t be doing it alone: His...
What’s more wholesome and family-friendly than matching holiday pajamas? How about not having to fight with a family member over who gets to play Wordle? That’s the message The New York Times is sending with a new family subscription (and coordinated merch drop) on Monday. The new All Access Family option ($30/month for up to...
The rise of the internet, then social media, then the ubiquity of smartphones each successively raised questions about how journalists think about and interact with the people on the receiving end of their work. We’re talking about that nebulous concept known as the “audience” — or, as Jay Rosen famously said nearly 20 years ago,...
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...