If broadcasters want to rebuild trust and remain relevant, they must “liberate their talent” and let their journalists act more like independent creators, Deborah Turness said in a speech in London this week.

“I believe the established media hasn’t confronted the hard truth that this revolution isn’t just about consumers moving to different platforms,” Turness, the former CEO of BBC News, said. “It’s that they are choosing more direct forms of journalism in a more fragmented media universe.”

Turness and BBC director-general Tim Davie resigned from their roles last November following reports that a BBC Panorama documentary about January 6 edited a speech by Donald Trump in a misleading way. (“The edit wasn’t up to editorial standards,” Turness said at Semafor’s Restoring Trust in Media summit in February, “but I don’t accept the charge that it was a sign of institutional bias.”)

In recent months, Turness said, she’s been “on a journey to piece together the new map of our media ecosystem, to gain a deeper understanding of what’s really going on beneath its surface.”

“I believe the impact of this revolution on established news providers may be greater than the advent of the digital age or the arrival of social media,” she continued, “because they were, in truth, about new platforms, new spaces where high-quality, trusted journalism could still find its place — essentially, same journalism, different location. This moment of disruption is so potent because it goes to the heart of how the relationship between news provider and news consumer is shifting.”

Turness’s speech, the 2026 Sir David Nicholas Memorial Lecture, was organized by the ITN 1955 Club in partnership with The Media Society and the Broadcasting Journalism Training Council. Here’s the main text of the speech. I left out the introduction where Turness talks about her connection to U.K. production company ITN, where she was CEO from 2021–2022. I also added some links and subheds and highlighted some key points to make it easier to read the text. You can watch the full lecture here.)

“You might have expected me to use this lecture to talk about my departure from the BBC, to focus on the unique challenges facing the new director-general — and I do want to wish Matt Brittin well next week — or to talk about how the new charter should strengthen the BBC governance to protect its independence.

As you would expect, I do have views on all of this and more, because I love the BBC and I care deeply about its future. It is a brilliant organization made up of amazing people. At BBC News, I had the privilege to lead a talented organization of over 5,000, delivering powerful journalism to half a billion people around the world in over 40 languages. I can see some of my former colleagues in the room this evening, and I remain so grateful for their dedication.

But tonight my focus is going to be broader than the BBC, because disruption being faced by our industry transcends all news brands. It impacts all journalists and all journalism everywhere.

I don’t plan on painting a relentlessly negative picture this evening. Those who know me well would not expect me to deliver a “game over” or a “we’re all going to hell in a handcart” kind of speech. I am an optimist, a cup-half-full person. I believe there are very good reasons to have faith in a bright future for what I call the established news providers, a term I prefer to “old” or “legacy” media with the implication that they belong somehow in the past or cannot succeed in the future. For decades, these organizations have delivered outstanding, brave, impartial, urgent journalism vital to our society. They are needed now more than ever.

So while I will be diagnosing the challenge tonight, I’m also determined to set out a positive way forward. I’m not coming to you tonight as someone, though, who has discovered all the answers. Quite the opposite. Working in the news media all my career, I’ve had the privilege of a front-row seat to the rapid pace of change over so many years, both witnessing and driving it in the U.S. as president of NBC News, the nation’s largest news provider; launching NBC News International as a global business and overseeing the global brand Euronews after its acquisition in the UK; as CEO of ITN, the U.K.’s largest PSB [public service broadcaster] production house, and then most recently, as CEO of BBC News, leading the U.K.’s biggest newsroom, while supporting its global revenue business. All to say, not to boast, that leading organizations, reshaping brands, launching new revenue models, is what I’ve been doing, publicly funded and commercial, local and global, and it’s perhaps given me a unique breadth of experience.

These past few months, I’ve had a chance to look from the outside in, rather than the inside out. I’ve used my time since leaving the BBC to go on a journey, to piece together the new map of our media ecosystem, to gain a deeper understanding of what’s really going on beneath its surface, where investment in the industry is going, what’s driving growth, how consumer behavior is changing.

I’ve spoken to people right across the industry, here at home and in the U.S, because as we know, the tidal wave of disruption that hits us here often begins across the Atlantic. I’ve explored how podcasts and subscription journalism are creating new revenue models.

I’ve spoken with those launching new platforms and building new startups, and to the private equity investors placing bets on their growth.

With independent journalists who left big networks to build their own entrepreneurial brands, helping establish a new journalist creator economy, and to those who are on the precipice of untethering from their media motherships, excited to join the party.

I’ve listened to the talent agents who are building out their clients’ brands, and I’ve compared notes with social scientists and the audience data experts tracking this rapidly changing media landscape.

These conversations have been fascinating and enlightening. Having the time to talk with brilliant people and explore ideas without the pressure of running a giant news corporation has been a complete joy. So when Nigel Dacre invited me to speak to you, it felt only natural to use this opportunity to share a progress report of everything I’ve learned so far. It’s why I’ve titled my lecture tonight “The Revolution Reshaping News: A Dispatch from the Front Line.”

“The wholesale shift from one information ecosystem to another”

I believe the impact of this revolution on established news providers may be greater than the advent of the digital age or the arrival of social media, because they were in truth about new platforms, new spaces where high-quality, trusted journalism could still find its place. Essentially, same journalism, different location. This moment of disruption is so potent because it goes to the heart of how the relationship between news provider and news consumer is shifting from institutions to individuals, from big media brands to personalities, from PSBs to independent journalists, all with dramatic consequences for where news consumption is collapsing, and where it’s growing at speed.

We’re all familiar with the decline in TV news audiences, with nearly 4 million fewer people getting their news from TV in the last five years, and that includes streaming. Maybe that decline would be less steep if PSBs and others had an obligation to give news on their streaming platforms more priority and to optimize it. I think that finding news on rail 9 or 11 or 13 of a streaming player is just not good enough. At the same time, we’ve seen a trebling of the number getting their news from YouTube and a 10-fold increase on TikTok.

I believe the established media hasn’t confronted the hard truth that this revolution isn’t just about consumers moving to different platforms. It’s that they are choosing more direct forms of journalism in a more fragmented media universe. We’ve seen an explosion of independent journalism and commentators hosting podcasts, creating their own YouTube channels, and publishing articles on Substack, where they can monetize their work directly, from Piers Morgan Uncensored on YouTube, to Emily Maitlis, Jon Sopel, and Lewis Goodall’s The News Agents podcast. From the hugely successful The Rest Is… brand to Jim Waterson’s fast-growing London Centric on Substack, and in the U.S., from Tina Brown’s Fresh Hell, which I highly recommend, to news brands like Puck or The Ankler.

This creator journalism is not a side show. It is fast becoming the show. Just look at the audiences the biggest independent journalists in the U.S have built on YouTube alone. Joe Rogan, more than 20 million subscribers. Tucker Carlson, 6 million. Megyn Kelly, more than 4 million. Mehdi Hasan, nearly 2 million and growing.

If we’ve been wondering for years what would eventually replace the broadcast news mass media model, I think we’re seeing the answer now. These new forms of journalism are taking the time, the loyalty, and the trust that consumers used to invest in big, mainstream news providers, and they’re moving it to new platforms.

To understand what’s driving this, I spoke to Piers Morgan, who has built a YouTube audience of more than 4 million with Uncensored and is now expanding the brand with History Uncensored and The Royals Uncensored, which launched a couple of weeks ago. He told me that particularly young people are incredibly informed about what’s happening in the world thanks to constant social media updates, but what they really want to know is what they should think about the stories in the news. He claims his viewers perceive him to be authentic and intellectually honest. It’s clear this is not just another technology-enabled stage in a story of media progress. What we’re witnessing is the wholesale shift from one information ecosystem to another, and if we’re honest, one where established news providers have, so far, struggled to authentically play at scale.

I would argue this is because this revolution is a rejection of and a reaction against the very broad reach model that the established media is built on. In many ways, it is the antithesis of everything that news media has traditionally stood for. What do I mean by this? Success in the new world is driven by a recognition that consumer trust is now earned through authenticity, through independence, and through opinion. Authentic, with the informality and unpredictability of real conversations. Independent, with the freedom for the presenter to speak their mind. Opinionated, without the need to constantly tread carefully around issues. All creating the sense of a one-to-one experience, a feeling of intimacy and a greater connection, versus the polished, controlled formality that is in the DNA of the established media. And, yes, the impartiality. This is the uncomfortable truth that has been crystallized to me through my conversations over the past few months.

That’s not to say there isn’t brilliant, bold, and fantastic creative work going on across the industry to respond to these new consumer demands. I enjoyed watching Cathy Newman’s innovative new evening program on Sky News last week, which is seeking to crack this exact challenge. CNN has showed a willingness to experiment in this space, too, and found out just how difficult it is. Lead anchor Jake Tapper abandoned his CNN studio to anchor part of his program from his personal office with the backdrop of political memorabilia and large vintage podcast-style mics, an attempt to mimic the more informal YouTube style. It had, at the very best, mixed reviews.

This new authenticity is hard, because authenticity has to be authentic, and consumers quickly see through any attempt that feels manufactured or fake. A glance at the Apple or Spotify top 10 podcasts or YouTube’s most popular channels shows us that this space is dominated by independent media, and traditional media have just not yet been able to fully crack the code and break their way in. These new forms of content are driving growth in audiences and in revenues. This is a new gold rush, with private equity investors eager to fund the next big talent and turn their brand into an empire.

The value of the global podcast market alone is projected to grow from $32 billion last year to $114 billion by 2030. $32 billion to $114 billion just by 2030. In this fragmented universe, news and information content across YouTube, podcasts, Substack, newsletters, social media, and more are far bigger in aggregate than any broadcast reach can deliver.

I’ve been talking to the founder of Substack, Hamish McKenzie, who is writing a new book called How to Save the Media. He argues that the disruption of established media has happened in three phases.

First, there were the big media institutions that were the juggernauts of the news industry; if you like, the gatekeepers of the channels through which the content flowed, and they controlled the editorial and the advertising revenues.

Then came phase two, the social media platforms, where creators have editorial freedom over their content, but Big Tech are now the gatekeepers of distribution and advertising.

But now, Hamish argues, we’re in the third phase, where Substack and podcasts are a gatekeeper-free world, where creators have ownership of their editorial, of their distribution, and a share of the revenue. A world where individual journalists are paid by individual consumers for their work and can build a viable business of their own. The U.K. is Substack’s second largest and fastest-growing market after the U.S., with over half a million people now paying subscriptions direct to writers for their work, and it has spawned a raft of competitive platforms, such as Beehiiv, now providing alternative places to grow a direct consumer base.

This new phase of one-to-one direct relationships is becoming well and truly mainstream, accelerating the downward spiral of the one-to-many broadcast model. This point was made starkly by U.S. media journalist Dylan Byers in a discussion on his Puck podcast. He said that “the long inexorable decline of linear television, particularly television news, that I have been talking about ad nauseam for years, really feels like it’s arrived now.” His guest, a former NBC colleague of mine, Noah Oppenheim, agreed, saying, “The era of broad reach is over. We now inhabit a fractured landscape, where trying to aggregate millions of viewers is not just a fool’s errand, but not worth a ton of time and effort.”

Noah has a point. Days like today tell us when there’s a huge news story, people are still gathering on broadcast platforms. But the overall trajectory is doubtless going down. And it has been for some time.

“We have lost Sarah”

The move away from mass reach and its replacement with a fragmented media landscape is what defines this revolution I’m talking about. It is a long-term, irreversible shift more profound than we have so far understood, and it’s completely reshaping our industry.

This was brought home to me recently when I spoke to Sarah, the nurse who treated me when I found myself in A&E after my hand became embroiled in a fight between a cat and a dog. Sarah asked me about my line of work, and it triggered a fascinating conversation. It turns out she’s a total news junkie, obsessed with politics here and in the U.S. Despite juggling long shifts at the hospital and a five-year-old, she never misses an episode of The Rest Is Politics or The News Agents. She listens to Pod Save America and The Rachel Maddow Show. She’s just downloaded Substack.

Not once did she mention a traditional news provider, despite growing up on a typical diet of BBC and ITV content. I asked her why, and her answer was very simple: I trust them. I feel like I know them. I feel like they’re not led into one way of thinking. They have edge.

Sarah is exactly the kind of person all news organizations want to reach — engaged, curious, committed, but making very different media choices, trusting in a new and very different way. We have lost Sarah.

And the reason why this matters transcends the impact on any one organization. It matters because this new media diet is, in the main, driven by commentary and conversation. And because the established media has not yet broken into this new world at scale, it isn’t yet the home of frontline reporting by courageous journalists from dark and dangerous places across the globe, or, with notable exceptions, the home of risky undercover investigations that expose wrongdoing and uncover lies.

I was listening to media podcast The Grill Room last week, where they were asking, “Are creators the new Cronkites?” I believe the answer is very clearly “not yet,” but if the established media want to continue to be the ones to carry forward that legacy, then they must find a way to succeed at scale in this new world. Otherwise, how will consumers access vital journalism in the future? And just as importantly, how will it be funded? Because the advertising revenues are following the consumers onto these new platforms, and it’s those revenues that fund expensive journalism, reporting live from downtown Tehran or the front lines of Ukraine, standing up as the powerful, exposing corruption and taking on vested interests.

It’s not only our duty to follow the consumer, but our necessity to follow the money, because journalism costs, and even if you’re funded by a license fee, the journalism is funded by people being willing to pay it, essentially a subscription model. In a world of dictators and autocrats, state-run propaganda, disinformation, and AI slop, the need for this eyewitness journalism funded and delivered by the established news media is more critical now than ever. Reporters Without Borders revealed last month that for the first time in the 25-year history of the World Press Freedom Index, over half of the world’s population lacks access to free, fair, and fact-based journalism.

So the challenge is clear: Will we wake up to the existential nature of this great shift in our industry? Will we respond with the speed, urgency, and purpose required? Or will we be like the proverbial frog in boiling water, who knew it was getting warm, but failed to jump in time?

As Rosa Luxemburg famously said, “Before a revolution happens, it is perceived as impossible; after it happens, it’s seen as having been inevitable.” And this revolution has been coming for a long time, but it’s not too late. I did promise I was going to be an optimist, and I believe there is still time to join it. I believe the established news media has everything it needs to succeed, the assets required to win in this new world.

First, the talented, experienced journalists who have spent a lifetime carving out a reputation and the consumers who crave connection with them; brands that have meaning for audiences; and a legacy of trust. The irony is lost on no one that many of the biggest names leading this revolution built their profiles inside established media players.

However, my optimism here is conditional on whether the established media is willing to deploy those assets to win and not be left behind. So tonight, I want to share some conclusions that I’ve reached having listened to those on the front lines of this revolution.

“On every metric…the long-term trend was down”

As I see it, there are three clear priorities. Restore trust; understand what drove the decline and how it can be reversed. Reconnect, through authenticity; come to terms with what it will really take to give consumers the authentic, independent voices they crave. Reinvent the newsroom; create an engine that delivers across this fragmented landscape.

Let me take each of these in turn. First, restoring trust. I believe that to understand why audiences are moving from institutions to individuals, we have to understand the long-term decline in trust in those institutions, a shift accelerated by global events, societal change, and new technologies.

Social scientist Alfie Spencer argues that the rupture in trust goes back to the 2008 financial crash, when banks were bailed out but so many ordinary people lost their hard-earned homes and livelihoods and suffered for years. The system failed them, and they felt they’d been lied to. This sense of injustice and powerlessness, of feeling betrayed, impacted in trusting governments, banks, and, yes, the media, too.

Over the following decade, this dissatisfaction with the traditional political and social order translated into the rise of populist movements. It was fueled by the growing sense that the system no longer works for them, that the routes to get ahead are closed off, that their children are no longer guaranteed a better quality of life than the previous generation, that others are being put ahead of them — exacerbating an us and them mood in society. We saw some of the consequences of that in the rejection of established political parties at last week’s U.K. elections. They continue to play out in the political drama we’re all witnessing today and tonight.

Meanwhile, social media platforms connected like-minded people and became the home of the growing disinformation industry. Troll armies and clickbait factories flooded the social media landscape with viral lies that fed on the outrage. Add to this highly polarizing events: Brexit, the 2016 U.S. presidential election, and then the 2020 Covid pandemic, all whipping up a perfect storm where dissatisfaction and disinformation could thrive together.

As a result, we saw a loss of trust in experts. The idea of agreed facts started to be undone. The concept of truth became replaced by your truth and my truth, all weakening critical parts of our social scaffolding. Trust in news was a casualty, falling, according to [the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism], from 51% in 2015 to just 35% last year, a 16-point decline.

This downward trajectory was the reality when I walked in to BBC News late in 2022. The BBC was then and remains today the world’s most trusted news provider, but on every metric, in common with many other institutions and news organizations, the long-term trend was down. In brand terms, trust is the BBC’s USP, its unique selling point, in the U.K. and around the world. As a CEO, I was therefore clear that my number-one priority must be to build a plan to reduce that decline in trust.

And we did. Working with some brilliant colleagues, some of whom are in this room tonight, the changes we made helped to turn the tide of decline. Through radical interventions, we saw trust begin to grow again, even during the last U.K. and U.S. election cycles, when it usually takes a massive hit, with public views of the trustworthiness of BBC News increasing from 57% to 62% in the year 24-25.

So what did we do? We started, as I’ve again been doing now, by listening to audiences, to ask consumers across the U.K. and around the globe one question: What would it take to grow your trust in BBC News? The answer came back in many languages, but a consistent message: Five requirements, which became a mission statement for BBC News.

They told us to “Earn our trust.” We need clarity in the chaos, giving them the facts that they need to make decisions about their own lives. We need courage, reporting from difficult and dangerous places and to uncover wrongdoing. Fairness and respect. Fairness is in reflecting the true breadth of the broadening political spectrum. Respect, recognizing that license fee payers are stakeholders and should be given a voice and a say in the BBC’s journalism.

And finally, transparency. Show us your workings, pull back the curtain on your journalism and how you check the facts so that we know why we can trust you. And that’s how BBC Verify was born. It was a new, industry-leading forensic journalism and fact-checking service, which quickly became the leading global verification brand, with Ofcom research finding it had fast become the most-used fact-checking tool in the U.K. And crucially, because we tracked this closely, it proved to be the most effective of all our initiatives in growing trust with the audience. A year after its launch, surveys showed that those who had consumed Verify content said they were more likely to trust the BBC as a result.

It’s all about earning trust, and “Trust is earned” was the title of the BBC News mission statement and became the organization’s tagline. The humility in reprising that statement was intentional and relevant to this conversation about this revolution. It was saying, please don’t think that we are a big institution that’s here to tell you what you need. We work for you, and we are listening, and we are striving to earn your trust. It was a cultural shift, and in my view, an overdue repositioning of the brand and the relationship between those who pay and those who serve. They asked for clarity, for courage, for fairness, respect, and transparency. But today, four years on, once again, listening to consumers, there is a new priority that I would argue we urgently need to add: Authenticity.

“News providers are going to have to be more prepared to liberate their talent”

And this is my second priority, to urgently reconnect through authenticity. The dictionary tells us that authenticity is the quality of being genuine, real, or true to oneself, rather than a copy or an imitation, and it is this sense of being themselves that is drawing consumers towards independent journalists and personalities and away from established media brands. And yet a news organization’s human capital has always been its greatest asset and helped to define its brand. The audiences, presenters, and correspondents are the DNA of the organization, but now, that human capital, in the new world, must be deployed in a very different way.

News providers will need to accept that in future, the connection with their consumers must flow through a more direct relationship with their talent and one that feels less controlled, less formal, less corporate, human to human. What might this mean in practice? Well, it might mean going to a news organization’s website and instead of finding content organized only around topics, being able to follow individual correspondence and specialists.

Let me explain further. Imagine, as a Channel 4 News consumer, if you could follow your most trusted journalists, just as you’d expect to do on a social platform. You might choose to follow Lindsey Hilsum or Matt Frei, Victoria Macdonald or Alex Thomson. And let’s take the excellent Victoria Macdonald, Channel 4’s health and social care editor, as an example. In this world, you would access a live feed of her health articles and analysis, receive an authored daily newsletter, personalized news alerts on health stories as they break throughout the day with links to Victoria’s take on those stories; a take, her expert analysis on what she thinks of them. You’d interact with her in online Q&As and be invited to in-person events. You would be able to build a connected relationship between you, the consumer, and Victoria, the correspondent. Imagine this today, as consumers seek credible information in the hantavirus outbreak with disinformation raging online. This deeper human connection with Victoria would pay dividends in the form of trust.

For too long, we, the established media, have limited the potential of our talent to build these kinds of direct relationships and undervalued the potential for what I would call the “connected correspondent” to express their professional perspectives in a way that really relates.

But we all have to accept those connections will not only be made on our own platforms. Journalists will want to build those relationships in spaces where people are increasingly getting their news, on YouTube, on Spotify, on Substack, and TikTok.

News organizations may worry all this is a challenge to the primacy of their own brand, and believe me, I get it. But my recent conversations have only strengthened my view that news providers are going to have to be more prepared to liberate their talent; to strike a new deal, if you like, with a compelling offer that outweighs the value of going it alone in the new talent economy.

This new deal could see news organizations providing capabilities, technology and support to enable their talent to be present in their own rights on the platforms and in the formats where growth now lies, while the talent agree to sign up to a set of values and principles, to impartiality, to the lines cannot be crossed, because I believe that it is possible to strike a different balance that retains the principle of impartiality but doesn’t let it get in the way of an authentic human conversation or written article.

I could see news organizations promote online routes to other platforms where consumers can discover more from the talent they trust. It might mean forging new business partnerships with their talent, with shared incentives and revenues. There isn’t a one-size-fits all template fit for this new deal, but without a willingness to embrace this kind of thinking, the draw will be too great and the opportunity too attractive, and the best will simply leave.

Now, if some of this sounds far-fetched, this is a reality right now in the U.S. news market. I recently spoke to Olivia Metzger, one of the most successful news talent managers in New York, who I worked closely with when I ran NBC News. Olivia told me that she used to spend — and we’re talking two or three years ago — most of her time negotiating exclusive multi-year deals for her clients to lock them in with big networks. Now, she spends the majority of her time trying to extract her clients from those same deals, offering maybe 20% of their time to the networks, while she helps them to monetize their IP and grow their brand with the rest of their time.

I’ve been speaking to some of those who’ve made the leap away from the established media. I’ve mentioned Piers Morgan. He told me, “Many more mainstream journalists could, and I know actively want to, do the same, if only their timid bosses let them off the leash and were more adventurous in the way they utilize their talent. If they don’t, then the inexorable migration” — there’s that word, again, inexorable — “of younger viewers and listeners away from mainstream media to YouTube channels like mine will continue at speed.”

I’ve also spoken to former CNN presenter Don Lemon, who has used that freedom to develop a groundbreaking new form of journalism on YouTube, pursuing a story as it develops, sometimes live-streaming for hours at a time, most famously leading to his arrest while covering an ICE protest at a Minnesota church back in January.

It’s enabled him to build his brand, what he calls the Lemon Nation, and a community of followers, his Lemonheads, who read his daily Lemon Drop newsletter. He claims he can now offer news “without corporate overlords” to his new direct consumers.

Closer to home, I caught up with Amol Rajan, who has walked away, or is about to, from Radio 4’s Today program to embrace this new world as an independent creator and entrepreneur, while remaining the host of University Challenge. He was buzzing with startup energy and ambition for how he can deploy his unique brand of accessible, intelligent journalism in this new world. We’ll all discover in the autumn whether Amol really is a traitor or a faithful when he heads to the castle with Claudia and the other celebrities.

Piers, Don, Amol. They’ve all reached the conclusion that to pursue growth in a world where authenticity is prized and rewarded, they must step away from established media players. And no doubt others will follow. So the challenge is, are we willing to make the new deal with our talent that is more appealing than to go it alone?

“Surviving this revolution that’s reshaping news will require nothing short of the reinvention of the newsroom”

And this takes me to my third priority, which is that surviving this revolution that’s reshaping news will require nothing short of the reinvention of the newsroom. Now, I know how hard news organizations are reforming and reinvesting. Believe me, I do. I know how tough it is to drive transformation and change in a 24/7 business during a relentless news agenda. In my time leading BBC News, I was fortunate to work with some outstanding leaders who understood the consumer challenge and delivered the change. Together we launched a live streaming operation. We reinvented digital products, integrated vertical video and live social media–style news formats. In fact, our live page covering the murder of Charlie Kirk saw over 63 million pageviews globally, with so many younger consumers. We invested in InDepth, a talent-led longread form of journalism on the BBC platform, and newsletters. We launched podcasts and visualized them; discovered new audiences on YouTube; and we aggressively grew a TikTok following with a 62% year on year growth to now reach 2 billion monthly views. We reached new audiences in new ways with new formats. We felt we were creating a truly digital-first offer.

But the brutal truth is, even with all this innovation, most large news organizations remain structured around the needs of broadcast, with key decisions being made with a broadcast-first approach, and the machine geared to the broadcast output. Yet I would argue that if the established media are to thrive in this revolution, then they need to start from where the consumer is, allocating people and resources on that basis, starting again to build a truly digital and social production studio that enables them to produce and distribute content in the formats and on the platforms that consumers want, a greenfield, or a startup approach, if you like. This studio must be capable of delivering a flywheel of content, from visualized podcasts to short clips, from newsletters to live streams, analysis articles to long reads, longform documentaries to live events, all supporting the talent-centered model that I described earlier. The output from this digital studio would become the building blocks of the broadcast offer, turning today’s newsroom model upside down. This flywheel newsroom, as I call it, is what a genuinely digital-first model looks like. It provides the broadcast, but it’s designed for the future.

For the avoidance of doubt, I am not saying we should be killing off the concept of the evening news bulletin. I’m saying we should make it differently. It’s no coincidence that, arguably, the world’s most successful news media story of recent times is rooted in a moment of total reinvention. Yes, I’m talking about The New York Times, which under the leadership of Mark Thompson decided to radically reinvent itself back in 2013. I was around the corner at NBC News and watched it all happening. Relentlessly investing in products, data and technology; launching the trailblazing The Daily podcast and a suite of newsletters; acquiring The Athletic to bolster sports coverage and Wordle as the core of a new daily challenges offer. By taking a ruthlessly digital-first approach, they transformed the Gray Lady, the epitome of old-school print media with a declining distribution model, into a data-driven media powerhouse, now with over 13 million overall subscribers, driven by a 16% year-on-year increase in subs. The reinvention of The New York Times is evidence that even in the most established of news media, it is never too late and you’re never too old to change.

So, I’m almost ready to file my dispatch from the front lines of this new revolution, having shared what I’ve learnt, from consumers to creators, from investors to innovators. I’ve said nearly everything I want to say tonight, but before I sign off, let me leave you with one further, perhaps provocative. thought: The lure of opinion and the amount of energy now generated by opinion-led journalism in all these spaces.

“The extent to which freedom of speech should become a companion to impartiality”

Debate and opinion have always been a critical part of the established news media’s broadcast offer, from LBC to Five Live, from Question Time to election debates and local radio phone-ins. Yet replicating this in the digital world has somehow proved so much harder. Instead, opinion today is the preserve of online spaces that have increasingly become echo chambers that keep people in their own tribes, reinforcing polarization, driven by algorithms that give you more of what you already think and what you already like, designed to incentivize division rather than promote understanding.

I believe established media operations have an opportunity to become the new town square, creating digital spaces where people are exposed to ideas different to their own, spaces that are thought-provoking and even provocative, that offer a kaleidoscope of thinking mirroring the diversity of opinion across the country.

I’m not arguing that correspondents working for organizations with a duty of impartiality should be giving their own opinions, or a free-for-all, with anyone able to self-publish on trusted news platforms and comment. What I’m asking is the extent to which freedom of speech should become a companion to impartiality. Hosting the debate and keeping people talking will be doing a great service to the public. Why wouldn’t an organization have a walled off op-ed section online, clearly signposted and thoughtfully curated, commissioning its own range of voices and linking to articles out from other news providers? Why wouldn’t they curate a range of podcasts from different perspectives, ensuring diversity of thought across the portfolio as a whole?

For PSBs, this will no doubt throw up some challenges. But from my initial conversations with regulators, there are no deal-breaking blockers. I think it’s time to trust that audiences are well-versed in navigating the difference between news and opinion, particularly if it’s clearly signposted.
And I’ve just found myself wondering if we’ve now reached the tipping point where the risks of getting into this space are outweighed by the consequences of not doing so.

I think that might be enough provocation for one evening. So I’ll come to a close tonight. I wanted to run towards some inconvenient truths and to be clear about the scale of challenge, but I hope that I’ve also been clear that established news providers possess all the assets and the equity required to respond and to prevail. I believe we are in a new golden age of journalism. The explosion of new platforms has opened up new routes for journalists to reach consumers with more original, thoughtful, intelligent writing and storytelling than ever before. In a world of AI slop and exploitative algorithms, consumers are seeking out this journalism and choosing human to human connections.

As Ted Turner, the legendary media disruptor who we lost last week, would famously remind the CNN newsroom, the news is the star. I believe news is the star and must remain the star in this new world, and that’s up to us. So this dispatch is rooted in optimism and confidence in the future of established news providers, provided that they are willing to do what it takes to restore trust by understanding what drove the decline and how it can be reversed, to reconnect through authenticity, by coming to terms with what it will take to give consumers the authentic, independent voices they crave. Reinvent the newsroom by creating the flywheel news engine for growth across this fragmented landscape, and to consider how to become the town square, creating the meeting place for ideas that can be the antidote to the echo chamber.

If the established media can do all this, then I am confident it will not just survive, but it will thrive as an essential part of this revolution that’s reshaping news. Thank you very much.”

At Nieman Lab, we’ve long covered the impact of student-run news outlets filling information gaps in their communities. Recent data from SimilarWeb shows just how far their work reaches.

In February, three Southern college media outlets — The Duke Chronicle (Duke University), The Daily Tar Heel (University of North Carolina — Chapel Hill), and the Red and Black (University of Georgia) — had major traffic gains as nonprofit news organizations.

The Red and Black’s February traffic increased by 36% over January, and then by 40% from February to March. It had about 210,000 visits in January and ended March with over 401,000.

Editor-in-chief Katie Guenthner said the growth is a combination of factors, including four February stories that made national news, along with newsroom workflow changes like publishing stories at 5:00 a.m. instead of 8:00 a.m., linking every Instagram Reel to a story on the website, and streamlining cross-team communication so published stories are pushed out on social media faster.

The Duke Chronicle’s visits were up 34% in February, from about 245,000 in January to 365,000. Editor-in-chief Dylan Halper told me via email that it’s likely due to three stories about a university professor’s longstanding relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. The Daily Tar Heel also saw a 29% increase in February, up from 245,200 visits in January to 317,700.

The overall top gainers by percentage were Buffalo-based Investigative Post (February) and education inequality outlet The Hechinger Report (March).

Investigative Post saw its traffic increase by 241%, from 46,000 in January to 159,000 in February. Much of that came from Investigative Post breaking a national story about the death of a blind Rohingya refugee who was detained by Border Patrol on February 25. Executive director and editor Jim Heaney said that story and its related follow-ups garnered more than 240,000 pageviews.

In March, The Hechinger Report’s traffic increased by 171%, up from 197,000 visits in February to 541,000. Director of audience development Nichole Dobo said multiple factors contributed to the skyrocket. About 45% of March traffic came through Google Discover, which Dobo attributed to an algorithm update to the product.

Dobo also said five stories in March each got more than 40,000 pageviews through Google Discover. Those stories were about conservative attacks on math curriculums, New York State’s reading programs, an opinion piece from an Arkansas teacher, another op-ed about working class students, and a trend story about universities trimming bachelor degree programs down to three years. Those five stories together brought in more than 766,000 pageviews, Dobo said.

“Our mission is to report on inequality in education, and we have made a big effort to show expertise on topics that serve our mission as a nonprofit newsroom,” Dobo said. “It is why we do so well on [Google] Discover on topics like math instruction and higher education. We’ve done consistent, quality coverage on those topics. It is for our human audience, but this kind of consistency also sends the right signals to the algorithm.”

Dobo said the Hechinger Report also revamped its impact tracking strategies late last year. One change: adding short survey questions to every story. On the math curriculum story, for example, 41% of readers who read the story and answered the survey question said they looked for more information about the issue after reading, which “strongly signals readers are hungry for more stories on the topic of math instruction,” Dobo said.

“Overall, across all stories in March we logged about a third of readers saying a story changed how they think about an education issue and 21% talked to others about it,” Dobo said. “These are great things to know so that we can better understand how our journalism is being used out in the world.”

Other gains

Injustice Watch: Injustice Watch is an investigative nonprofit focused on reporting on the Cook County court system in Illinois. Its traffic shot up through the first quarter of the year, from 36,000 visits in January to 56,000 in February to 124,000 in March. That growth is a result of Injustice Watch’s local election coverage, particularly its judicial election guide published on February 12 ahead of Illinois primary elections on March 17.

“This year, for the second time, we also had live election night results for the judicial races — which were not available anywhere else, since the AP doesn’t publish results for these down-ballot races,” managing editor Jonah Newman said.

The guide garnered 120,000 visits online and is always a popular feature that’s frequented during election season, he said. Injustice Watch also passed out 170,000 print copies across the county.

Capital B: Capital B — a digital nonprofit that covers Black communities in the United States — saw its traffic increase by 77%, from about 149,000 visits to 264,000.

Director of audience and innovation Mark S. Luckie said that traffic has been up across Capital B and its local verticals covering Atlanta, Georgia and Gary, Indiana. Traffic comes from a mix of sources, including social, Newsbreak, and Google.

“Google Search has been an increasing source of traffic for Capital B due to both distinct coverage of news and centering how it impacts Black communities and stories that have been undercovered and thus receive high search placement,” Luckie said in an email.

While he did not attribute the growth to any one story, he said two pieces — one about data centers and another about rural land seizure — were highly shared on X and Bluesky.

El Hilo: Radio Ambulante’s explanatory podcast, El Hilo (“the thread”), deep dives into one major story each week in Latin America or U.S. Latino communities. Its website traffic grew by 115% between January and February, from 53,000 visits to 116,000.

El Hilo’s website is its third-largest source of downloads, behind the major listening platforms, editorial director and host Eliezer Budasoff said. The team doesn’t typically focus on month-to-month traffic because listeners find episodes long after their release. But Budasoff said three February episodes — about Trump and Venezuela, Latinos in Hollywood, and organized crime in Mexico — likely performed well due to changes in the show’s format implemented at the beginning of the year.

“The main change is an adjustment in the focus of the episodes, which are now more analytical, reflective, and explanatory,” Budasoff said. “We’ve deepened the dimension of analysis and meaning-making based on current events, something that El Hilo has always had, but which has now become the central axis when planning production. We always provide context to understand the news behind the headlines; that’s one of the pillars of the show, but we reduced the narrative load to focus more on what what’s happening means.”

Adirondack Explorer: The Adirondack Explorer‘s visits grew by 86% in March, from 173,600 visits in February to 324,200. Editor-in-chief Melissa Hart that was mainly due to two stories: one story about an old growth forest that was picked up by Google Discover and a column about a trip to Yellowstone National Park that surfaced often in search.

“We hadn’t made any new changes to our content mix per se, but that particular story was part of ongoing coverage around mapping old growth forest and old trees’ important contribution to carbon sequestration,” Hart said. “While we don’t have immediate follow-ups planned, it’s definitely a topic we’ll continue to write about.”

Yale Climate Connections: Yale Climate Connections, a digital publication based at Yale University, saw a 54% increase in visits from February to March. Editor-in-chief Sara Peach said that was an unusual development; the publication usually sees its highest traffic during September and October — hurricane season.

Extreme weather, however, pulls in audiences all year around. Two of March’s top stories were about the ski industry’s response to climate change and record heat waves around the United States in February and March. Yale Climate Connections also attracts audiences with its Spanish-language coverage and international focus. In March, stories about a Mexican ranch and Indian musical instrument artisans were also top performers.

“Our main audience strategy is to encourage readers to sign up for newsletters in English and Spanish,” Peach said. We’re focusing on the newsletters because we view owning our audience list as more sustainable than relying on search traffic or algorithm-driven platforms.”

National Catholic Reporter: The National Catholic Reporter‘s traffic grew by 362,000 visits from February in March. Managing editor Stephanie Yeagle didn’t attribute the growth to any group of stories, but rather to an overall increase in organic search traffic, “showing that our team is writing on topics that interest people and winning at SEO.” Several stories have also been picked up by mainstream news outlets like The New York Times, CNN, and NPR. NCR also added weekend editor coverage, allowing NCR to report and respond to breaking news faster.

Executive editor Michael O’Loughlin, who joined the publication in January, said NCR has also been working on implementing his editorial vision of focusing on three areas of coverage: “hard news and analysis; stories that offer readers hope; and light-hearted pieces that explore the fun and quirky sides to faith.”

When Minneapolis became ground zero for the Trump administration’s unprecedented federal immigration crackdown, its local news institutions were, once again, on the front lines of a global story. And just as Minnesota’s nonprofits and public radio station punched above their audience weight with their reporting, so too did its local newspapers.

The flagship Minnesota Star Tribune saw almost 18 million visits in January, which is about 10 million more than December and a 138% increase, according to data Nieman Lab drew from Similarweb. That’s “about double” the Star Tribune’s usual traffic in January, vice president for communications and brand marketing Chris Iles told me. “The only time we’ve seen more traffic was in 2020 when we lifted paywalls during the pandemic and murder of George Floyd,” he said.

The Star Tribune didn’t lift its paywall entirely this time, but it did launch an unpaywalled live blog “as a form of public service journalism,” and allowed subscribers unlimited gift articles. The live blog was the newspaper’s top traffic driver in January, Iles said, and that month’s total gifted articles was double the 2025 monthly average. Its second most-read story identified the first of two American citizens killed by federal agents, and its third most-read story reported that the ICE agent who shot Renee Good had been dragged by a car in an earlier incident.

While the live blog was free to access, it may also have played a role in converting new subscribers; “we found that the live blog was a top touchpoint among subscribers that joined in January,” Iles said. The Star Tribune “nearly doubled” its subscription rate in January compared to the 2025 monthly average; 78% of those were annual subscriptions.

The Star Tribune and its in-house agency Foundry North went on to launch a brand campaign, “Because the world is watching.” The campaign positioned the Star Tribune “not just as a news source for Minnesotans, but as a critical window for the world to understand potential national and global implications” of Operation Metro Surge. The world really was watching; in January, traffic from outside Minnesota accounted for 61% of total sessions, Iles said, 177% higher than the 2025 monthly average. (Meanwhile, the Star Tribune’s Local News Fund received donations from 44 of 50 U.S. states.) At the same time, in-state traffic was 37% higher than the 2025 monthly average. The Star Tribune’s biggest sources of non-direct traffic in January were Google Search and Google Discover.

It’s worth noting audience bumps weren’t limited to Minneapolis’ local paper of record. TwinCities.com, the digital presence of the Alden-owned Pioneer Press, saw about 638,000 more visits in January compared to December, about a 39% jump and one of the biggest upticks in visits month-over-month of any local newspaper.

First, there’s The Cornell Daily Sun, the eponymous university’s independent student newspaper (while the Sun is still a for-profit newspaper, many other student publications are nonprofits these days; Hanaa’ took a look at standout examples of recent audience growth among nonprofit student media). In February, the Sun saw almost 117,000 more visits than in January, about a 44% uptick. Editor-in-chief Sophia Dasser attributed that jump to a deliberate foray into covering campus stories with a national angle.

“The February jump was driven pretty cleanly by two stories, both tied to Cornell’s appearance in national political coverage,” Dasser said. Those articles: “Hegseth Moves to Ban Tuition Aid for Military Members Seeking Graduate Education at Cornell, Top Universities” (58,800 visits) and “Epstein Corresponded With Cornell Undergraduate, Son of Powerful Law Firm Chairman” (46,100 visits). Those stories remain the Sun’s top two performers year-to-date. Google was an important referrer for the Sun, and Dasser noted that the newspaper’s reporting surfaced prominently in “Epstein Cornell” searches.

February happens to be editorial board election season for the Sun, Dasser said, and several incoming editors, including her, “were eager to broaden the paper’s coverage in a more national direction and so this kind of coverage was the product of that.” (She also pointed out that half of January falls during Cornell’s winter break, when the Sun has a lighter publishing cadence, so a portion of the month-over-month delta is likely “structural.”)

MyRGV.com, the online presence covering the Rio Grande Valley for AIM Media Texas newspapers The Monitor, Valley Morning Star, and The Brownsville Herald, saw more dramatic traffic spikes in February; its site received about 328,000 more visits in February than in January, a 283% increase, and its traffic grew another 32% in March. But digital content manager Emily D’Gyves told me the uptick has been a bit of a mystery to the team.

One story that wildly overperformed was “Public housing authorities requiring tenants prove legal residency” — D’Gyves said that story garnered about 95,000 users, when its stories typically see somewhere between 1,000 and 15,000 users, and other popular stories from the month had less than 25,000 users. In March, the same thing happened with two other stories: “DMV quietly passes legal status rule for vehicle registration, renewal” (almost 269,000 users) and “At 102, Clarence Hicks of Pharr reflects on being among the 45K remaining WWII survivors” (about 129,000 users). On the DMV story, its analytics platform Microsoft Clarity registered major upticks in traffic from states including California, Arizona, and New York. “We thought maybe the topic of immigration created an uptick in the analytics, but we’ve been covering that beat heavily before those stories blew up,” D’Gyves said. “Honestly, we weren’t really doing anything different.” The traffic influx lasted for about three weeks, and was “genuinely something we hadn’t seen before!”

D’Gyves has also noticed “strange, excessive drops” in traffic some months, and has heard similar reports from other digital media peers in Texas. Her best guess is these could be AI-related shifts, as the news org is starting to see users coming from ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot.

When I asked Nick Falsone, editor of Pennsylvania’s lehighvalleylive.com, about its traffic uptick in March, he also pointed to AI playing a role — but on the production side.

In March, Lehigh Valley Live had about 514,000 more visits compared to February, about a 53% increase. “March was a good month for us, buoyed by a couple of strategic changes we’ve made,” Falsone said. First, the team has started coordinating more closely with its PennLive colleagues on coverage with statewide relevance. Second, though, they’ve been using Advance Local’s in-house AI tools, which Falsone said “have enhanced our journalists’ ability to provide more comprehensive local coverage, including community news, traffic and weather updates, concert announcements, business openings and more.” Specifically, they “streamline the process of gathering data for stories,” which he said has increased the outlet’s local coverage while “freeing up our reporters to spend more time in the community.” Reporters and editors are still ultimately responsible for everything Lehigh Valley Live publishes, he added.

(It’s also worth noting Lehigh Valley Live is an Advance Local publication, and Josh has written a bunch about why Advance Local outlets tend to punch above their weight when it comes to digital audience. Unfortunately, it appears the digital-savvy chain is not just serving that audience journalism — this week, Popular Information reported that Advance Local has published mountains of gambling slop since 2022.)

This comic is co-published under a Creative Commons license by the Boston Globe Magazine and The Journalist’s Resource, a project of Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, which commissioned the work.

Interested in republishing this piece in print? Get the PDF.

Editor’s note:

In “Before the doctor sees it: Test results in the era of instant access,” Josh Neufeld uses comics journalism to highlight certain provisions in the 21st Century Cures Act. The comic draws on the findings of several academic research articles, along with additional sources — including interviews with researchers Bryan Steitz, an assistant professor in the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Vanderbilt University, and Liz Salmi, the communications and patient initiatives director at OpenNotes.

Steitz and Salmi are characters in the nonfiction comic, which discusses the implications of a rule that lets patients receive their medical test results as soon as they’re ready — often before their physicians have a chance to review them.

This piece adds to the growing field of graphic medicine, which uses comics as a tool to tell true stories about health care experiences, as well as to distill and discuss complex medical topics. 

Neufeld is the creator of several health care related comics, including “Vaccinated at the Ball: A True Story about Trusted Messengers,” which won the 2023 GMIC Award for Excellence in Graphic Medicine, Short Form, from the Graphic Medicine International Collective.

Source list

“Patient online record access in English primary care: Qualitative survey study of general practitioners’ views.” Charlotte Blease et al. Journal of Medical Internet Research, February 2023.

“As a journalist my partner fought for the facts. Yet the truth of his own medical condition was kept from him.” Charlotte Blease. The Guardian, April 2023.

“Leveraging large language models for generating responses to patient messages — a subjective analysis.” Siru Liu et al. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, March 2024.

“Knowing what the doctor knows.” Alvin Powell. Harvard Gazette, November 2022.

“Association of immediate release of test results to patients with implications for clinical workflow.” Bryan D. Steitz et al. JAMA Network Open, October 2021.

“Perspectives of patients about immediate access to test results through an online patient portal.” Bryan D. Steitz et al. JAMA Network Open, March 2023.

“The 21st Century Cures Act requires that patients receive medical results immediately — and new research shows patients prefer it that way.” Bryan D. Steitz and C. T. Lin. The Conversation, July 2023.

“Impact of notification policy on patient-before-clinician review of immediately released test results.” Bryan D. Steitz et al. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, July 2023.

“Repeated access to patient portal while awaiting test results and patient-initiated messaging.” Bryan D. Steitz, Robert W. Turer and Liz Salmi. JAMA Network Open, April 2025.

“HHS announces crackdown on health data blocking.” U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Press release, September 2025.

The post Before the doctor sees it: Test results in the era of instant access appeared first on The Journalist's Resource.

Documents and other collections of text can be goldmines for data journalism — if you know how to approach them as data. Here are some techniques and inspiration for your next data project.

From stories about political speech and song lyrics, to street names and social media chatter, data journalists now have a wide range of examples of text-as-data to draw inspiration and guidance from, while tools such as Pinpoint and NotebookLM are making text analysis easier than ever.

I compiled a list of over 200 pieces of data journalism where text or documents were used as sources. Quantification techniques ranged from counting the frequency of a single word and using Google’s ngram viewer, to machine learning and topic modelling.

Looking at those articles it’s clear that, once quantified, journalists tell the same stories about text as any other piece of data: using the seven most common angles.

But how those angles are used — and how often — is where it gets interesting…

Text-based data journalism most often uses an exploratory feature format

While most data stories about numerical data focused on scale or change, the data stories about text I looked at were overwhelmingly dominated by exploratory formats.

There are two obvious possible explanations for this. First, analysing text normally requires more time and skill than working with numerical data. That would be hard to justify for a simpler news article revealing scale or change.

Second, text is often rich and complex, lending itself more to exploration. The analysis itself will often require explanation too, especially if it involves classification.

The Pudding‘s scrollytell data feature on speeches in Parliament is a good example of an exploratory approach: text from over a million speeches is classified in two ways: by the gender of the speaker, and by the topic it relates to. It is quantified in terms of the percentage of time that speakers spend on each topic (code is shared in a GitHub repo).

The story explores the data through a number of themes: the economy, welfare, education, and so on. Although the focus is largely on variation between men and women, this is secondary to the primary exploratory angle.

The same thematic approach is adopted by South African data journalism website The Outlier in #SONA2022: How does it compare to the last 5 speeches by Ramaphosa? and by Sueddeutsche Zeitung in their feature on why Russians perceive the West as a threat.

Another way to structure an exploratory feature about text is by breaking the feature up around different questions. This is the approach taken by Quartz in The hidden structure of the Apple keynote (“Who’s on stage?”, “Who’s the funniest?” and “When is the unveil?”)

Stories about changes in language

Text can act as a proxy for cultural attitudes and fashions, or political focus, so it’s not surprising that many stories based on data analysis focus on changes in society or power that language can reveal.

Text from social media and forums can be analysed to answer questions about whether the mood of populations is changing (The war in Ukraine has made Russian social-media users glum) or if people are getting ruder (Foul-mouthed mothers are causing problems for Mumsnet).

Song lyrics can be analysed to identify trends in negativity and complexity while, over a longer timescale, book context can be analysed to conclude, as Jon Burn-Murdoch one Twitter thread, that “western society is shifting away from a culture of progress, and towards one of caution, worry and risk-aversion”.

Changes in political speech are an important indicator not only of the priorities of those in power, but also their relationships with each other and their role in setting the tone of national conversation.

One Guardian analysis, for example, leads on How rightwing rhetoric has risen sharply in the UK parliament, while the award-winning USA Today feature Hope’ is out, ‘fight’ is in: Does tweeting divide Congress, or simply echo its division?” reports that “Language has become more divided and emotional” based on an analysis of more than 2.8 million tweets posted by members of Congress (the original article is no longer online but parts can be seen here).

More simply, the Press Association used the official record of Parliament to calculate that mentions of “Brexit” had gone From nine mentions a year to 9,000.

A more investigative use of change is provided by the Washington Post’s investigation into claims that “USAID’s IG removed critical details from public reports”. By obtaining draft versions of audits reporters were able to identify what changes were made before publication: “more than 400 negative references were removed from the audits between the draft and final versions”

Ranking the most used words and phrases

“Doncaster is the least sexist place in Britain when it comes to street names,” the Doncaster Free Press reported in 2020. The newspaper hadn’t done the analysis: a PR firm had scraped the names of over 200,000 streets and classified them along gender lines. They had also ranked the places with the biggest gap between male and female proportions, and the most common names (Victoria and John).

Ranking can be a quick way to get a story out of a corpus of text — if you can identify a pattern to extract data from. ABC News in Australia, for example, analysed over 1,000 job descriptions to reveal “some of the most common words and phrases advertisers used to attract interns”, while The size of things: an ngram experiment “used Google Books’ Ngram dataset to find the most popular size analogies in English books”.

It turns out that “size of a pea” was the most common.

Even exploratory features can focus on exploring different rankings: the Pudding feature Sing My Name moves through sections ranking the most popular names in songs, which songs have the most repeat mentions of the same name, and what songs contain the most names, among others.

The scale of an issue — revealed in language

Text analysis can allow journalists to reveal the scale of a problem which is not visible in more traditional statistics.

Most of the text-based stories I’ve worked on at the BBC fall into this category: there are no official statistics on the outcomes of police misconduct cases, but I was able to analyse police watchdog reports for a story that revealed “Half of police employees who committed gross misconduct were not dismissed”.

Along similar lines, classifying text in festival line-ups led to the story Music festivals: Only 13% of UK headliners in 2022 are female and declarations of interest were analysed to establish that “One in five MPs continue to employ a member of their family”.

Social media analysis might focus on the scale of a problem on particular platforms: 3 million tweets were analysed for the story Scale of abuse of politicians on Twitter revealed and similar techniques were used by Amnesty and by the Turing Institute to establish the scale of abuse of particular groups.

Scale is a useful fallback angle if you are quantifying text, because no one else will have analysed the text before. The Guardian’s investigation into extremist Facebook groups, for example, leads on the finding that the network “exposes hundreds of thousands of Britons to racist language, conspiracy and disinformation” (my emphasis), while USA Today analysed campaign rally speech transcripts for Trump used words like invasion, killer to discuss immigrants 500 times.

It can also be a useful approach for factchecking or putting a news event into context, as in Der Spiegel’s story How much violence is in Rammstein’s lyrics? following allegations of sexual assault against the band’s singer (the investigation was later dropped)

Women versus men and other variation stories

Variation stories rely on an expectation of fairness, equality or parity. This limits the opportunities for this angle, but it can work especially well where language reveals implicit biases in society that are not quantified anywhere else.

The LA Times‘s scrollytell There are more women than ever in Star Wars. Men still do most of the talking is just one of a number of pieces of data journalism looking at gender variation using text. Others include The Gender Divide in Star Wars Scripts, Meghan gets twice as many negative headlines as positive, analysis finds, The New York Times’s The Words Men and Women Use When They Write About Love, and The Pudding’s The physical traits that define men & women in literature:

“Do authors really mention particular body parts more for men than for women? Are women’s bodies described using different adjectives than those attributed to men?”

Variation along lines of race is revealed in Football commentary racially biased, study finds and HuffPost UK’s The Met Police Are More Likely To Publish Your Mugshot If You’re Black, which classified press releases on criminal sentencing based on mentions of ethnicity, and compared the proportions to full data on sentencing by ethnicity.

Examples of political and ideological variation can be found in The Economist’s Twitter’s algorithm does not seem to silence conservatives and Paris Match’s political speech comparison Macron-Le Pen: Their silences speak volumes.

The Washington Post’s Almost all news coverage of the Barcelona attack mentioned terrorism. Very little coverage of Charlottesville did: “Even before we did our study,” the story notes, “research showed disproportionately high media coverage of terrorism committed by Muslims — even though right-wing extremist groups have committed more attacks”.

Given that databases of media coverage (such as Nexis) provide an accessible source of text data, this feels like an area ripe for more analysis.

‘Meta’ data stories are all methodologies

It is increasingly rare to find ‘meta’ data journalism angles: stories about a lack of data, poor data, or ‘Get the data‘ articles that share data for others to analyse. And the exclusive nature of text data makes it even more unlikely.

But the complexity of quantifying text for analysis means that there is sometimes a need to tell the story-behind-the-story about the methodologies that were employed: How Sky News investigated X’s algorithm for political bias, along with The Guardian’s How we measured the rise of populist rhetoric, and Reading the post-riot posts: how we traced far-right radicalisation across 51,000 Facebook messages are typical examples, while Behind the Guardian’s analysis of 100 years of MPs’ language on immigration shows another approach.

Connections, similarities, and correlations revealed by text analysis

Relationship angles were the least common in the examples of text-based data journalism I found. The few stories that did adopt this focus, however, pointed to at least three possible types of relationships that could be used for stories: correlations, similarities and connections.

A correlation angle can be seen in The Economist’s Why beer snobs guzzle lagers they claim to dislike, which visualises the relationship between word frequencies and user ratings.

The example points to the types of sources that might provide material for similar relationship stories: where text appears alongside a numerical measure. 

Reviews are just one such category of text data. Social media updates (which appear alongside numbers of likes, shares or views, and timestamps) and cultural texts such as books, songs and scripts (figures on sales, streams and views) have the same qualities. 

An alternative approach is to quantify text yourself, and combine it with other data: The Guardian used this to establish a relationship between Donald Trump’s use of a teleprompter and populism, while Paris Match used it to establish a lack of relationship between search interest and candidates’ mentions of an issue.

Similarities formed the focus of the network graph-led A Map of Lexical Distances Between Europe’s Languages and Lexical Distance Among Languages of Europe 2015. The methodology points to how the ‘distance’ between words can be quantified in order to identify patterns.

Connections are the focus for Mathematicians mapped out every “Game of Thrones” relationship to find the main character, which quantifies text by classifying two characters being mentioned in the same sentence as a connection. Although this is a ranking story (the focus is on identifying the ‘main’ character), the analysis could equally have been used to tell a story about relationships, and the same method could be adapted for any text where entities (people, companies, locations) are mentioned. Paris Match, for example, used co-occurrence analysis to identify what words candidates associated with ‘system’,

The Epstein files provide further ideas for working with text: The Economist’s Inside Epstein’s Network, for example, also chooses a ranking angle revealing the “500 people who appear most frequently”, and while The Guardian headlined their story as “Jeffrey Epstein’s elite relationships visualised”, what is specifically visualised is the relationships between correspondence and time. What is missing from coverage generally are the clusters, cliques and bridges that can be generated by the Epstein Document Network Explorer.

Leads from analysis of text

The Epstein files also provide an example of how data-driven approaches to text can provide useful story leads. The New York Times, for example, used AI to help “identify clusters, patterns and themes,” although it may be that this is being underused. “The brunt of the work,” they admit, “is being done by a team of editors and reporters across beats and bureaus who have been preparing to dig into the files long before they were published.”

Once you have collected a corpus of text, exploratory analysis can surface potential stories you may not have considered.

When I worked on the BBC story DBS background checks mean NHS staff ‘paying to work’, for example, the angle came as a result of identifying phrases which appeared multiple times in NHS job ads (we then went on to use the data to establish the scale of this). And once I’d collected documents on police misconduct, topic modelling allowed me to see common themes across a large number of documents, any one of which could have been an avenue for further reporting.

I’d love to know of any examples where text analysis has been used to identify story leads. If you’ve been involved in a text analysis project, please let me know in the comments or on LinkedIn.

In most American cities, the largest local newsroom still belongs to the local newspaper. But that certainly doesn’t mean the largest local news audience always goes to the people with a printing press. And in some cases, the local traffic champ isn’t even a TV station or public radio station — it’s a for-profit, digital-native news site.

When we write about local news here at Nieman Lab, we spend a lot of time on local papers, nonprofit news sites, and public radio stations — the sort of sites that usually aspire to produce quality watchdog journalism. That’s in part because investment capital in digital news media has tended to go to sites more national in scope (Politico, Axios, Vox) or topic-focused (The Verge, The Information, Morning Brew). But there are plenty of for-profit digital-first operations in cities and towns around the country, and some have achieved remarkable success with readers.

So we’re debuting a new regular set of traffic rankings for you — the top local for-profit digital-native news sites. This joins our similar rankings for local newspapers, nonprofit news sites, and public media outlets. Over the years, we’ve told you about plenty of local for-profit successes, from Ohio’s Richland Source and Idaho’s BoiseDev to North Carolina’s The Assembly and California’s Lookout Santa Cruz — founded by longtime Nieman Lab columnist Ken Doctor. Now, you’ll be able to see which sites are happy to open up Google Analytics each month.

First, a few words on who’s eligible for this list. There is no single database that lists all U.S. local for-profit news sites — just as there is no single list of local nonprofit news sites. So as we do with our nonprofit rankings, we rely on an external trade association to define our universe of sites. To be eligible for these rankings, a news site must be a for-profit member of LION Publishers — LION as in local, independent, online news. According to its latest lists, LION has 223 for-profit members and 218 nonprofit members.

That certainly means that there are some local for-profit digital natives that we’re missing — but we need to have a defined universe of sites to compare, and LION’s membership criteria fit the sorts of sites we’re interested in. (If your site really wants to be included, LION dues range from $140 to $550 a year, depending on your site’s annual revenue.) Also, we’re using LION’s own judgments on whether a site qualifies as for-profit or nonprofit. There are a surprising number of outlets that mix spiritual elements of the two — L3Cs, B corps, for-profits with an attached nonprofit, future nonprofits still in the process for 501(c)3 status — so we’re relying on LION’s delineations.

Here are a few of the remarkable for-profit local sites you’ll find in these rankings, followed by numbers for the first quarter of 2026.

TAPinto

TAPinto is to our for-profit traffic rankings what The Conversation is to our nonprofit rankings — the site whose success and structure virtually guarantee it the No. 1 spot in the rankings each month. Just as The Conversation is actually a global network of sites combined under a single domain name, TAPinto is a network of more than 100 local neighborhoods-and-suburbs news sites in New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, and Florida. Because they all publish at the same tapinto.net domain, their traffic gets combined here — even though individual sites are franchised out to local editors/publishers. Those franchisees pay a $5,000 fee upfront, plus about $8,000 a year and 10% of site revenue.

Muddy River News

Muddy River News is a local traffic monster in Quincy, Illinois, a town of just 39,000 residents along the Mississippi River. Founded in 2021 by Bob Gough, the former news director of local TV station WGEM, it’s an example of a digital outlet that has become much more popular than the market’s incumbent. In Similarweb’s most recent traffic estimates, Muddy River News drew 6.5× the monthly visitors of the Quincy Herald-Whig, the local newspaper that traces its history back to 1835. For context, its 858,624 visits in March were higher than the totals for the daily newspapers in larger cities like Memphis, Wichita, New Haven, Chattanooga, Richmond, and Boise. Its staff is up to seven full-time employees and a handful of part-timers.

Oil City News

Oil City News is a major traffic driver in Casper, Wyoming and one of the state’s largest websites, claiming 2 million pageviews per month. Publisher Shawn Houck was previously the CEO of Adbay, a local marketing and advertising agency, and he now runs sibling hyperlocal news sites in other parts of the state. Last year, Oil City News expanded into print, launching the 12-page Oil City Weekly. In March’s Similarweb numbers, Oil City News’ visits were more than 9× those of the local daily, the Casper Star-Tribune — still the state’s largest newspaper.

Lost Coast Outpost

Lost Coast Outpost describes itself as “Humboldt County’s home page. That’s Humboldt County, California.” In case you were to think LoCO was a stodgy old daily, the fact that its about page lists the site’s “official sonnet” should dissuade you. (“O mighty lighthouse rise to banish dark! / Illume, you scribes, benighted towns, cesspools / Of envy, lust, despair.”) The Outpost is owned by Lost Coast Communications, a local media company that also owns four radio stations, and it commits itself to a certain NoCal vibe:

Sometimes there is some sort of countywide emergency underway, and we drop everything to find out what is going on and get that to the public. That’s what you’d call “breaking news.” Other times we spend days or weeks to find out something interesting and perhaps alarming about a local branch of government, say, or a local company’s business practices. That’s what you’d call “investigative reporting” or “enterprise reporting.” Then other times we take a funny video of a dog leaning on a car horn in Old Town. If there’s a name for what kind of reporting that is, we don’t know it. But it doesn’t matter. It’s a thing about Humboldt County, and for Humboldt County. People like it.

Lost Coast Outpost’s monthly traffic, according to Similarweb, is around 10× that of the local daily newspaper, the Alden Global Capital-owned Eureka Times-Standard.

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