Nieman Lab
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“We’re in their shit. They’re not in ours”: USA Today Co. execs defend Palantir deal
USA Today Co. executives are revealing new details about a controversial deal with Palantir. In a joint interview with Fast Company’s Alex Pasternack, three executives from the country’s largest newspaper chain explained why they moved ahead with the Palantir deal despite major opposition from their own employees. Mike Reed, the chairman and CEO of USA
Fox News attacks the media roughly every 15 minutes, our study finds. (CNN? Every 140 minutes.)
In 2025, trust in journalism reached a record low. According to Gallup, only 8% of Republicans expressed trust in the news media, compared with 51% of Democrats. New data show an uptick among Republicans, but overall trust remains near this record low, and the gap between Republicans and Democrats remains substantial. One of the key
Sinclair’s new Substack repackages its local TV reporting into a video podcast
“How young is too young for a life in prison?” “SpaceX debris is washing ashore. Who’s responsible?” “Why schools get paid even when students fail.” Those are the top headlines so far on Sinclair Broadcasting Group’s new Substack publication, The National Press, launched this week. The National Press repackages some of the top stories from Sinclair’s 178 local news stations — which employ around 1,200 journalists — into a daily, 30-minute broadcast-style show.
“Uber agents,” undercover AI personas, and other ways newsrooms are using AI in investigations
Late last month, about 150 journalists, researchers, and technologists gathered on the 15th floor of The New York Times Building for a forum on how AI is changing investigative journalism. Just outside the event space was a hallway commemorating the paper’s more than 140 Pulitzer Prize winners, dating back to 1918. One photograph had yet
Nieman Lab has a new look
You may have noticed that things look a little different around here. We’ve just launched the third major redesign in Nieman Lab history. Hope you like it! My No. 1 goal for this design (internal codename: Roscoe) was increasing design diversity on article pages — to enable a greater degree of art direction. In our
Subscribers are up, but growth is down. Here’s what worker-owned Hell Gate is trying next
With around $1.5 million in revenue, 2026 is on track to be a break-even year for the worker-owned local news site Hell Gate. “We’ve spent a lot of money growing this year,” Hell Gate co-founder Nick Pinto told me, “so the fact we’re ending the year in the same place with regards to our bank
A study of nonprofit newsrooms reveals some cracks in the model’s foundation
Over the past decade, nonprofit news has been seen as one of the bright spots in U.S. journalism — an emblem of hope for the future amid a landscape littered with failures and financial struggles. With an average of 10 local newspapers closing each month, joining the thousands that have met that fate already, conditions
ChatGPT is adding real cartoonists’ signatures to fake New Yorker cartoons
At the pearly gates, Dolly Parton, in a sparkling gown, stands arm in arm with Tim Curry, dressed as Dr. Frank-N-Furter. “I knew I chose the right plus one,” Parton says to God, who is standing at heaven’s reception desk. That’s the premise of a cartoon that went viral on Twitter in the days after
How a plan to turn the Spokane Spokesman-Review into “The People’s Paper” ended in a newsroom revolt
When the Spokesman-Review announced plans to transfer Spokane’s 143-year-old, family-owned newspaper to a nonprofit founded by executive editor Rob Curley, it took over the front page. “The People’s Paper,” read the April 16, 2025, headline, saying ownership would transfer “to you, the community.” Key to the plan was Curley, the folksy self-proclaimed “journalism nerd” who
Columbia Journalism School will pause its M.A. program (and launch an online degree)
The Columbia Journalism School will pause admissions for its Master of Arts program, dean Jelani Cobb announced on Thursday. The country’s most prestigious journalism school also announced a new online, part-time degree. In a note to alumni of the M.A. program, Cobb wrote that the university ad
California’s big local news bill becomes law
At the end of August, the state of California passed a bill to give news organizations tax credits based on the number of journalists they employ. It’s the largest local news bill in the United States — expected to generate as much as $40 million for the state’s newsrooms each year — and on Wednesday, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed it into law.
Two 23-year-olds used AI to create a daily audio briefing. It’s now the top news app in Argentina
As an engineering student, Valentín Virasoro worked part-time at a car dealership in Cordoba, Argentina. His boss at the dealership had a habit: Every day, he’d send an audio update covering the major stories in the automotive industry. Virasoro left the job in February to pursue a career in tech. But the idea of informative
Federal appeals court upholds Thomson Reuters’ landmark AI copyright win
On Tuesday, a U.S. federal appeals court ruled in favor of Thomson Reuters, upholding the company’s landmark win in a copyright infringement case against the now-defunct legal AI startup Ross Intelligence. The ruling marks the first federal appeals case to reject a fair use argument for using publisher content, without permission or compensation, to train
How publishers are rethinking audience engagement: Five takeaways from the Future of Media Technology Conference
Earlier this month, just across from the Tate Modern in central London, journalists and media managers gathered for this year’s Future of Media Technology Conference, a one-day event hosted by Press Gazette. Speakers included journalists, technologists, and media professionals like The Economist’s Andrew Palmer, Politico UK’s Katie Palisoul, The Reuters Institute for the Study of
NewsMatch will shift from a year-end campaign to a year-round model
Since NewsMatch launched as an experiment a decade ago, the annual end-of-year campaign has become a cornerstone in the fundraising strategy of nonprofit newsrooms across the country. First created by the Knight Foundation in partnership with the Institute for Nonprofit News and the News Revenue
NPR, the quintessential audio news brand, adapts to a video-first future
After just eight weeks on the job, NPR’s new chief content officer Nadine Zylstra had big news to share: NPR had landed Machine Gods, the new video-first podcast from veteran tech journalists Casey Newton and Kevin Roose. The deal, announced earlier this month, was something of a coup for NPR. Newton and Roose had announced
A lack of professional AI guidelines leads to feelings of “AI shame,” a new study finds
Are you a journalist who has used AI for work in some capacity but been nervous to tell anyone about it? Worried about how your bosses might see you, or that your work might be discredited? Well, academics are in the same boat. A new study, titled “Guidance over guidelines? Unpacking the
OpenAI doubles support for Lenfest’s AI and local news fellowships
OpenAI announced on Monday that it’s doubling its support for the Lenfest Institute’s AI Collaborative and Fellowship Program. Since the program launched in October 2024, it has placed AI fellows in 11 local newsrooms across the U.S., mainly in metro newspapers like The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Baltimore Banner, and The Minnesota Star Tribune. As the
When disaster strikes, newsrooms scramble. A new website aims to help tame the chaos
On the day Hurricane Helene hit Western North Carolina in September 2024, Laura Lee was thousands of miles away on vacation in Peru. “I feel guilty about not being on the ground with everybody when it actually went down, but it kind of was a blessing in disguise,” Lee, who was the news director of
David Ellison will get control of CNN after all (and don’t pretend an “independent editorial board” will mean otherwise)
Eighteen months ago, David Ellison was mostly known as an ATM for Hollywood producers seeking to pencil out budgets for quarter-zip dadcore flicks like Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, Jack Reacher: Never Go Back, and Transformers: Rise of the Beasts. But now, thanks to a timely reallocation of his father’s money, he’s set to be one
The Boston Globe’s Western Mass lesbian bar story pulled in “several thousand” new subscribers in about 72 hours
Annalisa Quinn’s story published Tuesday in The Boston Globe Magazine — “A Western Mass. lesbian bar required KN-95 masks. When it changed the rules, all hell broke loose” — is, in this reporter’s opinion, a perfect piece. That’s in part because it is written in such a neutral reg
“An astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions”: Court records show what Microsoft and OpenAI actually thought about AI training
Would you call large language models training on an internet’s worth of content “an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions”? Or perhaps you prefer the “largest theft of labor in human history”? Take your pick because those two options — and many more — appear in a
Five independent climate journalists are teaming up with a “pop-up newsroom”
Going independent usually means losing the collaboration that comes from working in a newsroom. Journalists operating on their own don’t have access to editors or colleagues to work through stories, unless they decide to hire some on their own. But a new team-up from five climate journalists aims to pave a different path.
News consumers are wary of most AI use in local news, a Chicago-based report finds
Local news providers weighing AI use in the newsroom should think twice, according to a new survey from the Medill Local News Initiative at Northwestern. “The Medill survey provides a warning to news leaders,” Stephanie Edgerly and Tim Franklin write in the report released this week. &
New York Times training editor: Take these four steps before you roll out new things
When I tell someone at work that I wrote a book called Saying No to New, I usually get a similar response each time. It’s something like, “But you advocate for new things here.” It’s true. At The New York Times, I’m a deputy editor on the newsroom development and support team. Our job is
The Library Newsroom Project could be coming to a library near you
Nieman Lab predictions don’t always come true, but Terry Parris Jr. is doing his best to make his a reality. As journalism reached breakneck speed to produce mountains of content for insatiable digital platforms, it “drifted away from where people actually live their lives,” Parris Jr. wrote last year. He predicted 2026 would “push us
The Atlantic is getting more subscribers from Google traffic, even as referrals fall
Like many in the news industry, The Atlantic is seeing its referrals from Google drop. At the same time, CEO Nicholas Thompson said, the number of subscribers The Atlantic gets from Google traffic has gone up. “Google is sending us fewer people who aren’t going to subscribe,” Thompson
Protein grams and retirement plans: Service journalism enters its next era
The Daily Mail’s head of newsletters, Josephine Forster, is trying to improve her readers’ lives. “They want to know how topical things will impact their lives, and what they can do about that,” she said. “You have to work a bit harder to meet that need. But it can be the difference between a 10-minute
Is science journalism dying? Comparing a “science crash” 40 years ago to today
When two popular science magazines — out of about 17 in circulation — ceased publication in the same year, one commentator said, “The science magazines didn’t shake out. They fell apart.” The general manager of one of the failed magazines said, “There was a perception that they were irrelevant.” One of the publishers remembered being
Would you send it to the group chat? Sports creator Frank Michael Smith on finding the stories worth telling
It costs one Cincinnati sports fan named Jack more than $1,600 a year to watch his city’s four sports teams play on TV. If he renews his subscriptions for another year, the price could exceed $2,000. Jack is a friend of Frank Michael Smith, a popular sports news video creator, who used Jack’s experience to
The golden age wasn’t so golden
People have felt grave doubts about the press long before the Internet or social media, at times when politics was polarized and at times when it was not. In the United States, the steady decline in media trust from 1970 and onwards has, in my opinion, been badly misread. It has produced or justified anxiety