2025-05-16 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 […] The post Journalism is facing its crisis moment with AI. It might not be a ba …›
2025-05-16 Human vs. bot. …›
2025-05-16 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 post France gave the US the Statue of Liberty. Qatar offered Trump a $400 …›
2025-05-15 At a time when attacks on press freedom are heightening, including from the White House and President Donald Trump himself, legal support for journalists is shifting to meet new challenges. […] The post Legal support for journalists is evolving t …›
2025-05-15 Introducing our campaign to stop the spread of fake media. …›
2025-05-15 In Tuesday’s newsletter, I wrote about the upcoming book about Joe Biden from authors Jake Tapper of CNN and Alex Thompson of Axios: “Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, […] The post Why reporters are focused on a book ab …›
2025-05-15 President Donald Trump is facing backlash for his willingness to accept an airplane worth an estimated $400 million from Qatar’s royal family. ABC News first reported that Trump is set to accept […] The post Qatar’s $400 million plane gift …›
2025-05-14 “What you find when you get into a place is always more interesting than any preconception you have.” …›
2025-05-14 For weeks, we’ve eagerly wondered what kind of revelations would be revealed in a new book about former President Joe Biden. The title of the soon-to-be-released book by CNN’s Jake […] The post New book excerpts reveal bombshells about Biden …›
2025-05-14 Journalists must decipher real from fake at the speed of breaking news. But they may not be able to count on technology to solve problems of its own creation. …›
2025-05-13 Image by Fredrik Rubensson CC BY-SA 2.0 As universities adapt to a post-ChatGPT era, many journalism assessments have tried to address the widespread use of AI by asking students to declare and reflect on their use of the technology in some form of …›
2025-05-13 “The full picture may never really emerge.” …›
2025-05-13 Holding the powerful to account. That’s a key role for journalists. Among those in power are government officials. So whenever there is potential wrongdoing or misbehavior or shady business practices […] The post Instead of answering legitimate …›
2025-05-12 This article was originally published by Northwestern University’s Medill Local News Initiative and is republished here with permission. With the 2020 purchase of the Cook County News Herald in Northeast Minnesota, Jeremy […] The post Tech en …›
2025-05-12 On Trump, the pope, and AI. …›
2025-05-07 TLDR; Saying “AI has biases” or “biased training data” is preferable to “AI is biased” because it reduces the risk of anthropomorphism and focuses on potential solutions, not problems. Click image to explore an …›
2025-05-03 Earlier this month I was interviewed for a feature about data journalism in the Argentina newspaper La Nacion. Here are the full questions and answers, in English, published as part of the FAQ series. Data journalism is often associated wit …›
2025-04-16 Last May, as India conducted the largest democratic election in history, I spoke to reporters and fact-checkers in the country about the challenges they faced identifying political deepfakes. Many of them spoke to shortcomings in existing AI detection …›
2025-04-16 Newsrooms in Colorado that once employed hundreds could now “fit around a large dinner table,” Larry Ryckman, publisher and co-founder of The Colorado Sun, told me in December. Leaders at newsrooms like the Sun, seeing the rapid collapse of local n …›
2025-04-15 Houston, with a population of more than 2.3 million people, is the largest city in Texas — and the Houston Landing had funding to match. The nonprofit news startup raised $20 million well before it began publishing, from the American Journalism Proje …›
2025-04-15 Last week, Nieman Lab reported that Gannett, the country’s largest newspaper chain, had removed references to “diversity” from its corporate site and would stop publishing diversity information for its newsrooms. This week, it’s …›
2025-04-14 It was about five years ago that I first started noticing the name Eunji Kim on some interesting research. Best dissertation, best paper, best article — she seemed to be winning them all. In her (still relatively brief) career, she’s written ab …›
2025-04-10 America’s largest newspaper chain, Gannett, will no longer publish demographic and diversity data about its workforce, and has revamped its corporate site to remove mentions of diversity. The announcement was made in a company town hall meeting o …›
2025-04-10 Perhaps it’s surprising, perhaps not, but one thing has become clear about Donald Trump’s bizarre war with the Associated Press: The White House cares about it. It’s not just a symbolic gesture, red meat to throw MAGA’s way — …›
2025-04-10 Last month, Patch announced it was publishing AI-generated newsletters in 30,000 communities across the U.S. These newsletters scrape from local news sites, social media groups, and official town websites, then use large language models (LLMs) to selec …›
2025-04-10 A new AI function is being added to Google Sheets that could make most other functions redundant. But is it any good? And what can it be used for? Here’s what I’ve learned in the first week… The AI function av …›
2025-04-09 If you’re working out your newsroom’s AI budget for the rest of the year, maybe scrap the chatbot idea. According to a new Poynter/University of Minnesota study about how the American public feels about generative AI in journalism, 49% of r …›
2025-04-09 Eight years ago, a friend and I drove from Buffalo to Los Angeles in a 14-year-old Audi station wagon we nicknamed Gerhardt. It was an imperfect car: The brakes didn’t work until the day before we left and the check engine light stayed on until w …›
2025-04-08 Last week, G/O Media sold Quartz to a Canadian software company called Redbrick, firing the entire editorial staff along the way. It was the final death knell for Quartz, which had been cofounded by Zach Seward — now the editorial director of AI init …›
2025-04-08 Who actually wants impartial news? Your first thought might be: everybody! After all, if news is meant to be a reflection of reality, wouldn’t you want the least biased version of that reality — the one that matches up most with the world arou …›
2025-04-08 Crime news has been a fixture of journalism for centuries. The true crime genre, from documentaries to podcasts to YouTube channels to TikTok explainers, has boomed over the last decade. And news publishers are looking to standalone subscription produc …›
2025-04-07 Some of the gnarliest debates in my student newsroom were over granting anonymity and takedown requests. As staff writers and editors, we were taught to consider our duty to our readers when granting anonymity — and weigh that seriously against the r …›
2025-04-03 The Global Times, a daily English-language tabloid and Chinese Communist party mouthpiece, published an editorial cheering on the decision, denouncing VOA as a “lie factory” that reports falsehoods on China. Around the world, VOA provided some of …›
2025-04-02 There’s a lot out there to leak. The second Trump administration, historically unfriendly to the press, has thrown Washington into chaos. Tens of thousands of federal employees have been placed on leave or fired as billionaire Elon Musk’s D …›
2025-04-02 Billionaire Mark Cuban backing a startup is not, on its own, a big story. He’s done it hundreds of times. But I was interested in this particular investment highlighted by Sarah Perez in TechCrunch: Skylight, a startup taking on TikTok with a mor …›
2025-04-01 A decade ago, journalist András Pethő co-founded the nonprofit investigative site Direkt36. He’d just resigned from Origo, one of Hungary’s leading news sites, over political pressure on the newsroom. Origo went on to become “a mout …›
2025-04-01 What would happen if Congress defunded NPR and PBS — something Republicans have renewed their push for following a House hearing last week? First things first: “The funding bill passed by Congress and signed into law by Trump earlier this month …›
2025-03-31 On the morning of February 27, USAID workers who had been fired or placed on administrative leave during the Trump administration’s sudden dismantling of the agency went back to their offices at the Reagan Building and International Trade Center in W …›
2025-03-31 Austin, Texas — The first time Donald Trump attacked White House reporter Ashley Parker by name on social media was in 2019. It was worrying and unsettling but Parker quickly focused on a silver lining. “There was this wonderful moment where I …›
2025-03-27 As LinkedIn post ledes go, Spotlight PA CEO and editor Christopher Baxter’s on a post last week was intriguing: “I recently had lunch with a staunch, pro-Trump Republican and highly successful business leader, and his views on local news changed my …›