According to the latest quarterly update from Zimbabwe’s Postal and Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (POTRAZ), VSAT subscriptions — including subscriptions to Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite services — jumped 513.79% in Q4 of 2024. In POTRAZ’s report, Starlink subscriptions have been grouped with traditional VSAT providers. The POTRAZ report says that ... [continued]
I know that not everyone who writes about EVs owns one, but I’ve had one in my driveway for a long time. My first one was a 2011 Nissan LEAF, followed by a Chevy Volt, a 2018 LEAF, and then a 2022 Bolt EUV. While I’ve also usually had a ... [continued]
An environmental theologian reveals clues about how the new pope may rise to meet the climate crisis.
Interview by Aynsley O’Neill, “Living on Earth”
From our collaborating partner “Living on Earth,” public radio’s environmental news magazine, an interview by producer Aynsley O’Neill with Erin Lothes, an environmental theologian.
Familia Torres has been making wine in Catalonia since 1870, but says it may have to move to higher altitudes in 30 years’ time
A leading European winemaker has warned it may have to abandon its ancestral lands in Catalonia in 30 years’ time because climate change could make traditional growing areas too dry and hot.
Familia Torres is already installing irrigation at its vineyards in Spain and California and is planting vines on land at higher altitudes as it tries to adapt to more extreme conditions.
The Afrobeats music genre has grown tremendously over the past two decades to become a global mainstream phenomenon. For example, I was pleasantly surprised a couple of years ago when we had dinner at a restaurant in Washington, DC, and they played quite a lot of Afrobeats. It was pretty ... [continued]
Tesla stock soared this week. There are different theories on why that is. I think the biggest and most likely factor was Donald Trump seemingly rolling back his big tariffs talk. Many on Wall Street see Trump as mostly bluster and bluffing, and didn’t take his tariff talk too seriously. ... [continued]
NIO has just launched upgrades to its EC6 and ES6 electric SUVs. The Chinese EV market is extremely competitive, and you have to be constantly rolling out new or very nicely upgraded EV models to stay competitive. With the EC6 and ES6 being core models for NIO, this update is ... [continued]
The Inster sits in front of the dealer’s lot, dressed in khaki. Is it Grannie’s “Ultimate Urban Assault Vehicle” to handle the chores in the cut and thrust of congested traffic? It certainly appears versatile and capable. The backseats fold flat for extra luggage or grocery space, or even to ... [continued]
Electric vehicles are transformational, and the Tesla brand steered a new era in automobile manufacturing around the world. Today, though, questions about the all-electric carmaker’s current viability loom heavily. It’s starting to become clear that Tesla has lost its appeal as a relevant pioneer — now it’s an isolated anti-woke ... [continued]
Ports sit at the crossroads of global trade, and increasingly, they’re also at the center of global decarbonization efforts. In the maritime sector, a careful and deliberate phased approach to electrification and zero-emission operations is critical. This article, the second in a series, focuses specifically on the initial five-year phase: ... [continued]
I’ve got one more highlight to share from the Snapshot of Global PV Markets report recently published by the International Energy Agency’s Photovoltaic Power Systems Program (IEA PVPS). This one was buried on the last page. The graph shows that solar PV power and electric vehicles (EVs) have been growing together ... [continued]
Diving into the Snapshot of Global PV Markets report from the International Energy Agency’s Photovoltaic Power Systems Program (IEA PVPS) earlier today, I found a handful of interesting highlights. A few more were buried toward the end. We’ve already reported on the fact that solar power now dominates new power capacity ... [continued]
The first study of microplastics in Texas coastal sediment was funded through a local environmental activist’s landmark legal victory over plastic pollution, one of many such research projects.
By Dylan Baddour
A recent study found surprisingly low levels of harmful microplastics in the sediments of Texas bays that are notorious for plastic pollution. This led researchers from the University of Texas at Austin to conclude the microplastics were being swept out to sea.
It's been six months since President Trump first announced the creation of the Department of Government Efficiency initiative, which has dramatically shrunk parts of the federal government. And with so many individual stories about federal workers losing their jobs around the country, the big picture can sometimes look blurry.
A team of NPR reporters has been looking at agencies — from food inspectors to nuclear scientists to firefighters and more — and today, we'll connect some of the dots on how DOGE cuts have impacted workers, and hear how Americans far beyond Washington may feel the effects of these cuts.
For sponsor-free episodes of Consider This, sign up for Consider This+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org.
A new study reveals that heat-tolerant symbiotic algae may be essential to saving elkhorn coral (Acropora palmata) -- a foundational species in Caribbean reef ecosystems -- from the devastating impacts of marine heatwaves and coral bleaching.
New research suggests that the negative effects of the ozone hole on the carbon uptake of the Southern Ocean are reversible, but only if greenhouse gas emissions rapidly decrease. The study finds that as the ozone hole heals, its influence on the ocean carbon sink of the Southern Ocean will diminish, while the influence of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions will rise.
It looks to me like a perfect storm for energy is coming to the United States. The Trump administration is trying to push energy resources that cannot be built quickly, while attempting to kill some that can. And this is happening just as demand is increasing. I believe we will ... [continued]
Playbook walks community newsrooms through creation of AI-assisted election dashboard
This article is part of “AI is here,” a series from RJI highlighting AI innovation in journalism. Read more here.
Bay City News, a digital news service covering 13 counties in the San Francisco Bay Area, has developed an AI-assisted strategy for local election coverage that creates opportunities for deeper and more efficient coverage — especially for community news organizations with limited time and resources.
Compiled into a free online playbook with the support of the Reynolds Journalism Institute (RJI) at the Missouri School of Journalism, the strategy involves using a data scraper to pull information into a central dashboard that provides voters with key information before local elections and displays real-time election day updates. The result is a prime example of “AI as assistant,” allowing reporters and editors to focus on impactful community coverage while automating the mundane but vital task of data collection.
“If you look at what the national organizations do, they are largely focused on the higher ticket races, and nobody goes down to the county and municipal level to help explain what’s on the ballot and actually cover results on election night,” said Katherine Ann Rowlands, owner and publisher of Bay City News. “So for a lot of smaller newsrooms, it’s a huge undertaking with literally hundreds of hours of dedication to making that happen. But it’s really hard to do it efficiently.”
The goal was to give Bay City News — and other news organizations across the country that can learn from its example — the breathing room to analyze and interpret election results, interview the candidates and make sense of electoral impacts on a community scale. This might seem like a straightforward task, but it has become increasingly difficult as budgets and staffs have shrunk, local news deserts have widened and audiences have shifted to social media or outright news avoidance.
For Rowlands and Bay City News, the answer was twofold: an AI platform, Claude.ai, capable of talking a novice through the process of coding a dynamic election dashboard, and an intern-turned-staffer ready to make it happen.
“I don’t come with a data science background, so I was heavily dependent on the AI,” said Ciara Zavala, who began as an audience engagement intern last summer and is now the outlet’s impact manager. “It was a back-and-forth conversation with the AI of troubleshooting and getting code that I could paste into WordPress.”
“If you look at what the national organizations do, they are largely focused on the higher ticket races, and nobody goes down to the county and municipal level to help explain what’s on the ballot and actually cover results on election night. So for a lot of smaller newsrooms, it’s a huge undertaking with literally hundreds of hours of dedication to making that happen. But it’s really hard to do it efficiently.”
Katherine Ann Rowlands, owner and publisher of Bay City News
Anthropic’s Claude.ai, nicknamed “Claudia” by Zavala and her colleagues, turned coding from a foreign concept to a process of trial and error with a patient, automated teacher. This assistance also made room for Zavala to put time, energy and skill into turning a data-driven dashboard into a visually appealing and accessible Election Hub.
Rowlands said those quality-of-life factors, far from afterthoughts, are essential to that most fundamental role of journalism: meaningfully engaging audiences.
“The dashboard looks fantastic, it’s very friendly to a reader and it’s easy to use,” Rowlands said. “That’s important, because if you just look at the raw results that the counties are pulling in, it’s pretty dense and not always easily searchable. The user experience was top of mind for us.”
And while voters and news consumers were top of mind, a close second was the community news industry, for which the RJI playbook offers a step-by-step accounting of the development process from conceptualization to implementation.
“News organizations can take this playbook and build something that serves the needs of their own audiences,” said Randy Picht, executive director of RJI. “This is a real, tested strategy that has already made positive impacts in the Bay Area, and I look forward to seeing its influence spread.”
Rowlands said she hopes to partner with other newsrooms to apply the strategy to the entire state of California, and she concurred with Picht’s vision of newsrooms throughout the country adapting the model to serve their own local communities.
“If you replicate the workflow — even if the details might be different — you can apply this to other states,” Rowlands said. “We have a country full of small newsrooms that are struggling with the same exact problem of shouldering a heavy lift on election night. This can make it so much easier and enable all of those newsrooms to focus more on the journalism and less on the data entry.”
See the Bay City News Election Hub here and review the RJI playbook here. To stay up to date on other RJI projects related to AI innovation and supporting the community news industry, consider subscribing to the free RJI Weekend Newsletter.
I just wrote an article about how much China dominates the world solar PV market. Though, looking through the Snapshot of Global PV Markets report from the International Energy Agency’s Photovoltaic Power Systems Program (IEA PVPS), a few other charts stood out to me at least as much as the ... [continued]
New research from an international group looking at ancient sediment cores in the North Atlantic has for the first time shown a strong correlation between sediment changes and a marked period of global cooling that occurred in the Northern Hemisphere some 3.6 million years ago. The changes in sediments imply profound changes in the circulation of deep water currents occurred at this time. This crucial piece of work, which showed sediments changed in multiple sites east of the mid-Atlantic ridge but not west of that important geographical feature, opens multiple doors to future research aimed at better understanding the link between deep water currents, Atlantic Ocean heat and salt distribution and ice-sheet expansion, and climatic change.
Support to developing countries is to be slashed by nearly 90 per cent, Save the Children tell Nick Ferris, just as climate change is putting food systems under ever greater strain
I was scrolling through the latest Snapshot of Global PV Markets report from the International Energy Agency’s Photovoltaic Power Systems Program (IEA PVPS) and I noticed the following chart. China has been the largest solar PV market far and away for several years now (I’ll come back to that later ... [continued]
The e-fleet solutions provider VEV is collaborating with Maritime Transport to install 17 high-powered electric truck chargers at three Maritime sites. Maritime is a UK integrated road and rail freight logistics leader. VEV is providing the following for the truck charger installation project: end-to-end site design infrastructure development software integration ... [continued]
A wide body of research shows that traditionally charismatic species receive more attention and conservation funding, which could be a problem for the most endangered animals.
By Kiley Price
When it comes to wildlife and plant conservation, “pretty privilege” is pervasive.
The New York Times last week talked to people about the amount they pay for newsletters, how they decide what to pay for and, in some cases, how the subscription costs can sneak up on them. In the last few years, writes Logan Sachon, more people are spending “significant amounts” on newsletters. Substack, the biggest of the newsletter platforms, has more than five million paid subscribers.
But like everything in the world of media, the newsletter business is also changing. Adweek’s Mark Stenberg writes about how Substack is becoming more than a newsletter platform. It’s also now “a destination for creators seeking to build smaller, more intentional audiences.” (Adweek’s CEO interviewed executives from Substack and Discord for a recent panel on how niche communities are developing around platforms.)
“We see big influencers from TikTok or Instagram come to Substack to ‘paywall the personal,’” Substack’s head of lifestyle partnerships Christina Loff told the group. “They want to get more real with superfans in a space they control.”
For those looking to start or migrate their own newsletters, Press Gazette this week has a detailed comparison of Substack, Ghost, Beehiiv and Kit.
News In Focus Headlines, resources and events aligned with API’s four areas of focus.
Civic Discourse & Democracy
>> Trump’s ‘big, beautiful bill’ buries a threat to free speech on page 380 (Popular Information)
Budget and tax legislation being considered in Congress includes a provision that would give the Trump administration “a powerful new tool to silence dissent,” write Judd Legum and Noel Sims. It would give the Treasury Secretary the power to end the tax-exempt status of nonprofit groups deemed a “terrorist supporting organization.” And it is “not hard to imagine this new power being abused by Trump,” Legum and Sims write.
Related: Trump attacks the press not just as an authoritarian but as a business rival (Freedom of the Press Foundation)
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Culture & Inclusion
>> A voice that never wavered (Editor & Publisher)
More than 40 years after its founding, the Dallas Voice remains financially stable and steadfast in its mission of serving the LGBTQ community in northern Texas, writes Bob Sillick. One of its strengths is stability. The publication has had the same owner publisher, Leo Cusimano, since 2013. The managing editor, Tammye Nash, has returned to the paper twice since first being hired in 1988 and expects to stay until she retires.
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Community Engagement & Trust
>> Come again? How to steer scientist sources away from jargon (The Open Notebook)
For journalists, getting scientists to avoid jargon “can be tricky at best,” writes Katherine J. Wu. She talks to journalists about their techniques for getting experts to talk more plainly. Among them is Regina G. Barber, a co-host of NPR’s science podcast Short Wave. She holds a PhD in physics and has reported on a number of complex scientific topics. Yet sometimes she has to ask scientists she’s interviewing to break things down.
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Revenue & Resilience
>> Join us: Steal this idea: Revenue successes with Table Stakes alumni
Looking for ways to get inspired about revenue? Table Stakes alumni (including employees of companies that have participated in the program) are invited to join our “steal this idea” session Thursday, May 29 at 1 pm ET to share your successes and hear how fellow alumni are innovating revenue tactics and strategies to boost the bottom line for community media and local news organizations. Learn more and register here.
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What else you need to know
🔮AP introduces new customer program on the future of news (Associated Press)
🙌 Democrat-Gazette Managing Editor Alyson Hoge to retire after 46 years (Arkansas Times)
Good morning, everyone. Tom Jones is off today, but the team at Poynter is keeping tabs on the latest media news and analysis. Here’s what you need to know. After […]
What do the Statue of Liberty and a super luxury jumbo Boeing 747-8 have in common? Other than their proximity to clouds, not much. But in response to concerns that […]
The change, revealed through public records, follows an activist campaign pushing for insurers to drop fossil fuels. But the reason is unclear.
By Keerti Gopal
The global insurance giant Chubb is no longer providing property insurance for a contested liquefied natural gas export project in southwest Louisiana, according to documents obtained by the Rainforest Action Network and shared with Inside Climate News.
WASHINGTON D.C. — Following is a statement from Abigail Ross Hopper, president and CEO of the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) on the reconciliation bill text released by the U.S. House Ways and Means Committee and the U.S. House Energy and Commerce Committee: “At a time when billions of dollars are ... [continued]
We forecast consumption growth of crude oil and other liquid fuels will slow over the next two years, driven by a slowdown in economic growth, particularly in Asia, in our May Short-Term Energy Outlook (STEO). The world economy, measured by GDP, increases 2.8% in 2025 and 2026 in our forecast. Excluding the ... [continued]
Archer’s Midnight eVTOL Aircraft Will Seek to Integrate Across the LA28 Games through Transporting VIPs, Fans, & Stakeholders, While Electrifying Vertiport Take-off-and-Landing Hubs for Key Venues LOS ANGELES—Today, Archer (NYSE: ACHR) announced that it has been selected as the Official Air Taxi Provider of the LA28 Olympic and Paralympic Games ... [continued]
The King is dead, long live the King! Not too long ago, I wrote about Costa Rica’s slow growth in EV adoption in recent months, saying that the rest of the region was not staying still and that should this situation maintain through 2025, the country was at risk of ... [continued]
The Trump administration eviscerated the only agency tasked with studying worker health and safety. Now, Republicans have revived a plan to stop OSHA “overreach.” Advocates fear it could further endanger workers.
By Liza Gross
A warming climate exposes more and more workers to increasingly hotter conditions every year, yet soon after taking office, Donald Trump indefinitely froze a heat illness prevention rule proposed under the previous administration and gutted the only agency that studies workplace health and safety.
For the first time in modern history, China’s annual CO₂ emissions have dropped—not due to economic turmoil or external shocks, but from a deliberate and sustained expansion of clean energy infrastructure. The significance of this milestone cannot be overstated. China’s emissions had risen relentlessly over decades, driven by rapid industrialization ... [continued]
