Category Archives: Journalism
Columbia Journalism Review→ Another Harrowing Chapter in Gaza
2025-07-29 Telling the story of starvation. …›
Columbia Journalism Review→ A Cash Infusion from Chatbots?
2025-07-29 Bill Gross, the founder of ProRata, has a plan to monetize generative AI for digital publishers. …›
Nieman Lab→ Alden Global Capital fails in its attempt to get its tentacles on The Dallas Morning News
2025-07-28 By now, it’s a familiar move to watchers of Alden Global Capital, the ravenous hedge fund with the unusual hobby of sucking the lifeblood out of newspapers. See, Alden likes to wait until a newspaper merger or acquisition is juuuuust about consu …›
Nieman Lab→ How the Kyiv Independent reached 20,000 paying members — with no paywall
2025-07-28 The Kyiv Independent reached a major membership milestone last month with a global campaign telling readers “journalism needs a community, not a paywall.” After a month-long multi-country campaign, The Kyiv Independent has more than 20,000 paying m …›
Columbia Journalism Review→ ‘Pretend Somebodies’
2025-07-28 Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit famously took down Gawker—but his most interesting media legacy might be something else. …›
Doc Searls Weblog→ In fewest words, yes.
2025-07-26 Here is my answer to the question Does SiriusXM know what station you are listening to? The SiriusXM streaming app logs what you listen to, when, and how you interact with programs and channels across your devices (phone, pad, smart speaker, website th …›
Columbia Journalism Review→ The Fight for Free Speech Goes Corporate
2025-07-25 As Paramount prepares for a merger, the Freedom of the Press Foundation stands to challenge the company for capitulating to Trump. Will it work? …›
Columbia Journalism Review→ To Crack a Grand Jury
2025-07-25 A paucity of indictments in LA. Plus: New Jerseyans want to vanish, Medicaid fraud (the corporate kind), and a plaudit for Rupert. …›
Nieman Lab→ Generative AI models love to cite Reuters and Axios, study finds
2025-07-24 Journalistic content is integral to answers from generative AI tools, a new report from Generative Pulse by Muck Rack finds. The authors of the report, published this week, analyzed more than one million citations output by generative AI models. Journa …›
Nieman Lab→ 6AM City acquires Good Daily’s network of more than 350 AI-generated local newsletters
2025-07-24 On Monday, the newsletter company 6AM City announced it had purchased Good Daily, a network of AI-generated local newsletters aimed at hundreds of small towns and cities across the U.S. In January, I uncovered Good Daily, which in less than a year had …›
Nieman Lab→ I teach college and report on Colorado media. More professors should do the same in other states
2025-07-24 Over the years, the crisis facing local news has meant the disappearance of reporting on the arts, politics, sports, and local government. Newspapers have disappeared from many local communities, and the ranks of individual local journalists have p …›
Nieman Lab→ How did newspapers in places like Harrisburg, Birmingham, and Syracuse become some of America’s most-read online?
2025-07-23 The size of a news site’s audience isn’t everything. For an important story, reaching just one person can make a huge impact — if it’s the right person, someone who can take action based on what the journalist has learned and shared …›
Nieman Lab→ Patrick Soon-Shiong says he’ll take the L.A. Times public within a year
2025-07-22 The Los Angeles Times will be a public company within the next year, its billionaire owner told Daily Show host Jon Stewart on Monday night. “Whether you are right, left, Democrat, Republican: you’re an American. The opportunity [is] for us …›
Nieman Lab→ Public media appeals to audiences for support after Congress cuts off its funding
2025-07-21 On Friday, Congress authorized the Trump administration to cut off federal funding to public media in the United States. The passage of the Rescissions Act of 2025 revokes $1.1 billion of funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which distr …›
BuzzMachine→ Whither Colbert? Whither democracy
2025-07-18 Like every sane American, I am outraged that CBS/Paramount/Ellison Inc. canceled — in the true meaning of the word — Stephen Colbert, capitulating to Trump in the rapid Orbanization of American media. Here I propose what I hope come …›
Nieman Lab→ What went wrong at the Houston Landing?
2025-07-17 In May, the Houston Landing shut down less than two years after its ambitious launch, laying off all 43 employees. The announcement that the board of directors had voted to close the nonprofit news outlet generated national attention, and many question …›
Nieman Lab→ A pressure test for AI: Dow Jones makes a translation push for real-time financial news
2025-07-17 On Thursday, Dow Jones Newswires launched a new AI language service in French, allowing readers to access automated translations of breaking financial and investment news in real time. The new service is expected to produce “fluent” translations o …›
Nieman Lab→ Press Forward grants $22.7 million to 22 newsroom projects
2025-07-16 Press Forward, the philanthropic coalition that has vowed to grant at least $500 million to local news over five years, announced $22.7 million in grants to 22 newsroom projects on Wednesday. “We hope these awards can provide local newsrooms, org …›
Nieman Lab→ ABC and CBS settlements with Trump are a dangerous step toward the commander in chief becoming the editor-in-chief
2025-07-15 It was a surrender widely foreseen. For months, rumors abounded that Paramount would eventually settle the seemingly frivolous lawsuit brought by President Donald Trump concerning editorial decisions in the production of a CBS interview with Democr …›
Nieman Lab→ How does Grok AI figure out its version of the truth? It asks what Elon thinks
2025-07-14 Of the many potential horror stories told about our AI-infested future, one of the more common goes like this: AI models cost such an ungodly amount of money to train and operate that they’ll be concentrated in just a few powerful hands. The olig …›
Nieman Lab→ A thousand days in, there may be an end in sight for the newsroom strike at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
2025-07-14 The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette strike has reached its 1,000th day. That’s about 143 weeks or 33 months or 2.75 years. The strike has been the longest ongoing strike in the country since December 2024. There’s reason to hope the strike — whi …›
Nieman Lab→ “Language that once clarified is now obscuring”: NewsGuard retires the labels “misinformation” and “disinformation”
2025-07-10 The end of an era? Since its launch in 2018, NewsGuard has been in the business of labels. The company has rated the reliability of online news and information, giving publishers “nutrition labels” that provide context for scores from 0 to …›
Nieman Lab→ New report maps a “severe” shortage of local journalists in the U.S.
2025-07-10 A group of journalism advocates from the nonprofit Rebuild Local News and the tech platform Muck Rack say they have counted — for the first time — how many journalists remain in the United States. The numbers, as might be expected, aren’t part …›
Nieman Lab→ Bluesky chooses sports news to launch push notifications
2025-07-08 The social platform Bluesky announced new notification settings on Monday — including the ability to opt-in to push notifications from your favorite news sources. Users who click the “bell” icon can get notified when accounts publish new …›
Nieman Lab→ Goodbye, “Click to Cancel”: Court strikes down FTC rule that was set to go into effect July 14
2025-07-08 Want to cancel that newspaper subscription or gym membership? Sorry, but you may have to pick up the phone after all. On Tuesday, the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals struck down the Federal Trade Commission’s “Click to Cancel” rule, …›
BuzzMachine→ The Times’ Mamdani vendetta
2025-07-04 The Times has it out for Zohran Mamdani. The record is clear. It is time to examine receipts. The latest attack on him is journalistically unconscionable, and so is the editors’ reaction to legitimate criticism. In a story played by its …›
PressThink→ Some personal news
2025-06-10 As we say on the internet, “some personal news.” After 39 years on the job I am retiring as an NYU professor. In this post I will take a few moments to reflect on my academic career. Spoiler alert: I am not leaving the field, or the fight f …›
BuzzMachine→ Here we go again
2025-02-06 In an endless game of lobbyists’ Whac-A-Mole, it’s a new year and here is new legislation trying to save the news. Except it’s not new. First, from Oregon, comes a rehash of bad legislation written by newspaper hedge-fund lobbyists, v …›
BuzzMachine→ The whole world is whining
2025-01-21 For 25 years now, the Edelman PR company has issued its Trust Barometer. This year, it’s all about grievances. It’s Festivus every day, the world around. Six in 10 people in the survey “hold grievances against business, government, and th …›
BuzzMachine→ How the #BrokenTimes covers the fascist oligarchy
2025-01-18 Two days to go until the fascist oligarchy comes to power in the United States and this is how our once-greatest newspaper, The New York Times, is covering what could end in the fall of American democracy. To The Times, all the world’s Trump …›
BuzzMachine→ It’s the racism, stupid
2024-11-09 Every current and common explanation for the reelection of Donald Trump — whether inflation or immigration, culture wars or campaign tactics, blaming Harris or Biden or the party — elides its true and root cause: racism. The U …›
BuzzMachine→ How Fucked Are We? Very.
2024-11-06 Nevermind every other theory or tactical complaint about what happened in this election. Kamala Harris did everything she possibly could to win. The fault is not hers. The fault is in our nation. We must come to the realization that Ameri …›
BuzzMachine→ The technology addiction trope
2024-10-17 Rupert Murdoch’s media have been a key source of moral panic about the internet and technology — see, for example, this from his Times declaring that phones are “dope” that imprison us all in an epidemic of addiction causing cognitive …›
BuzzMachine→ How they have failed us
2024-09-19 It is as if the editorial department at The Washington Post woke up one morning asking, in headlines I will quote below, “What are we doing wrong?” I will start by trying to answer the question for them, The New York Times, CNN, and the res …›
BuzzMachine→ What’s become of The Times & Co.?
2024-09-11 As often as I am disappointed in and critical of them lately, I will not cancel my subscriptions to The New York Times or The Washington Post. They should be so lucky, for I will stay on their cases. I also wish to support the good reporting that stil …›
BuzzMachine→ The unprecedented grand coalition
2024-09-06 As Nicolle Wallace exclaimed on her show Friday, Liz Cheney and Dick Cheney, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders have all gathered together around a cause. That cause is democracy and its standard bearer is Kamala Harris. This is a mome …›
BuzzMachine→ How Murdoch makes a meme
2024-08-29 I’ve long said that Rupert Murdoch is the single most malign influence in English-speaking democracy. He executes his strategy in small ways that add up. Here is an example: how a trope is born across Murdoch’s worldwide empire. Here is the edi …›
BuzzMachine→ California’s Deal for News
2024-08-22 A deal has just been struck in California by Assembly member Buffy Wicks that averts what could have been, in my opinion, disastrous legislation written by lobbyists to benefit primarily incumbent, investor- and hedge-fund-controlled news media in …›
BuzzMachine→ Could a new day dawn at The Times?
2024-08-18 Since I’ve been constantly criticial of The Times and its coverage of the election, here is a thread from the socials in which I note a Sunday morning of positive coverage of Kamala Harris leading the paper online: Well knock me over with …›