Nieman Lab→ The origins of Patch’s big AI newsletter experiment

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 …›

Nieman Lab→ Americans are really not into news chatbots, a study finds

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 …›

Nieman Lab→ Testing Kagi, a premium search engine for a broken internet

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 …›

Nieman Lab→ “Quartz is now a zombie brand”

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 …›

Nieman Lab→ Which types of people aren’t big fans of “impartial” news? People who don’t have power

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 …›

Nieman Lab→ Gannett launches a standalone true crime subscription powered by local journalism

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 …›

Nieman Lab→ Student media groups issue “unprecedented” alert advocating changes to takedown and anonymity policies

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 …›

Nieman Lab→ As Trump silences Voice of America, Russia and China seize the opportunity to reshape Africa’s news ecosystem

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 …›

Nieman Lab→ How to leak to a journalist

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 …›

Nieman Lab→ Can Bluesky’s AT Protocol build the decentralized social media ecosystem the Fediverse aspires to?

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 …›

Nieman Lab→ A Hungarian investigative news site finds YouTube success with an “old-fashioned” documentary

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 …›

Nieman Lab→ In 2011, NPR executives “drafted a secret plan for the worst”

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 …›

Iffy.news→ PolitiFact 2024: Voters Prefer Facts

2025-04-01 Voters tend to send the more truthful candidate to the US Senate. On average, winners perform better on PolitiFact checks than losers, incumbents better than challengers. But that may be changing. …›

Nieman Lab→ ProPublica wanted to find more sources in the federal government. So it brought a truck.

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 …›

Nieman Lab→ Far fewer Americans are hearing about Trump’s attacks on the media this time around, report finds

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 …›

Nieman Lab→ How can we reach beyond the local news choir? Spotlight PA’s founding editor has ideas

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 …›

Nieman Lab→ Robert W. McChesney, America’s leading left-wing critic of corporate media, has died

2025-03-27 Robert W. McChesney, the lion of anti-corporate media scholarship, is dead at the age of 72. He was, for decades, probably the most prominent academic critic of American media from the left, focused on all the ways our idealized vision of a “free …›

Nieman Lab→ “Some hard and important lessons”: One of the most promising local news nonprofits looks back — and ahead

2025-03-26 It’s hard not to root for the National Trust for Local News. Heralded as a savior of local newspapers, the nonprofit has presented itself as the ideal foil to the hedge fund-owned chains that slash local newsroom jobs and chase profit over meaningful …›

Nieman Lab→ Jeffrey Goldberg got the push notification of all push notifications — and a hell of a story

2025-03-25 Journalism’s biggest scoops usually require months — years! — of shoe-leather reporting. Developing sources. Building trust. Coaxing out documents. Analyzing data. Assembling tiny fragments of information — perhaps insignificant on their ow …›

Nieman Lab→ There’s another reason the L.A. Times’ AI-generated opinion ratings are bad (this one doesn’t involve the Klan)

2025-03-20 In 1964, Philip Converse published what would become one of the most cited papers in all of political science, “The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics.”1 It was a result of a movement at the University of Michigan, where Converse taug …›

Nieman Lab→ After years of exploring a sale, The Skimm is acquired by Ziff Davis

2025-03-20 The digital media company Ziff Davis — owner of CNET, Mashable, Lifehacker, and PC Mag as well as a number of shopping and B2B sites — has acquired The Skimm. The Skimm will join Ziff Davis’s health and wellness division Everyday Health Group …›

Current→ Who benefits most from CPB funding? A state-by-state look at station grants

2025-03-20 "Faced with the loss of public media’s chief financier, how do we evaluate the performance of CPB itself?" The post Who benefits most from CPB funding? A state-by-state look at station grants appeared first on Current. …›

Nieman Lab→ Report for America’s parent organization will “sunset” its in-house editorial projects to focus on funding local journalism

2025-03-19 After a decade at the helm, Charlie Sennott is leaving the GroundTruth Project, the nonprofit journalism organization he founded in 2014 that also launched Report for America and Report for the World. Sennott, a 2006 Nieman Fellow, will take the Ground …›

Nieman Lab→ The New York Times picks up the shuttered FiveThirtyEight’s poll tracking database

2025-03-19 When ABC shut down FiveThirtyEight early this month, the site’s publicly available polling databases — like a presidential approval rating tracker — shut down, too. Many news outlets, including The New York Times and FiveThirtyEight founder …›

Nieman Lab→ Wired’s un-paywalling of stories built on public data is a reminder of its role in the information ecosystem

2025-03-18 The federal government does a lot of things. It lifts millions of seniors out of poverty! It forecasts avalanches! It invades foreign countries based on dubious intelligence! It determines what time it is! And when it’s got a spare moment, it pro …›

Nieman Lab→ New York Times bundles give European publishers a subscription boost

2025-03-18 The “Trump bump” isn’t just for news publishers in the United States. Last fall, four European news publishers sweetened their subscription deals by offering complimentary access to The New York Times, with the idea that their readers might want …›

Nieman Lab→ Trump guts the 83-year-old Voice of America

2025-03-17 On Friday, United States president Donald Trump signed an executive order to gut the United States Agency for Global Media, the parent organization of U.S. news agency Voice of America. More than 1,000 VOA employees were put on indefinite paid leave o …›

Nieman Lab→ Local newsrooms are using AI to listen in on public meetings

2025-03-13 On March 7, education reporter Hannah Dellinger published a story on the experiences of Michigan LGBTQ+ students since Donald Trump took office. Dellinger spoke to several students who have seen a rise in hate speech at school after the president signe …›

Nieman Lab→ You can learn a conference’s worth of data journalism through these NICAR tipsheets

2025-03-12 NICAR — the National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting1 — is one of my favorite annual journalism conferences, even if I haven’t been in a few years. That’s because it’s uniquely easy to benefit from even without attending …›

Nieman Lab→ “More alarming by the day”: New York Times investigations editor on the legal threats faced by news publishers

2025-03-11 Let’s start at the end. The acknowledgements of Murder the Truth, a startling and deeply researched new book by New York Times journalist and editor David Enrich, thanks the Times’ “unflappable” in-house lawyer. The business investigations unit …›

Nieman Lab→ A public media collaboration on statehouse reporting moves forward in North Carolina

2025-03-11 If you care about public media and have read any news mentioning the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in 2025, chances are it’s been something scary / depressing / grim about how the president wants to defund it (not a new threat, but one that fee …›

Nieman Lab→ How Trump’s cuts are crippling journalism beyond the United States

2025-03-11 Earlier this year Meta announced the end of its U.S. fact-checking program and many fear the company will soon withdraw funding from its partners in other countries too. Funding from American philanthropic organizations is also drying up. According t …›

Nieman Lab→ AI search engines fail to produce accurate citations in over 60% of tests, according to new Tow Center study

2025-03-10 Over the past year, AI chatbots have been widely criticized for how poorly they cite news publishers, and how little traffic they drive to the publishers they do cite properly. ChatGPT has often been at the center of this conversation. Last summer, I r …›

Nieman Lab→ Politico Pro wants subscribers doing “deep research” on its site, not on ChatGPT

2025-03-06 Politico Pro is a high-priced item ($12,000 or more annually!) that is targeted at a demanding audience of lobbyists, agency staffers, corporate execs, industry think-tankers, and oligarchs either real or aspiring. It attempts to give high-leverage int …›

Nieman Lab→ News unions are grappling with generative AI. Our new study shows what they’re most concerned about

2025-03-06 Generative AI hype has launched newsroom experiments around the world. Even though many of these early applications have become cautionary tales, the hype has endured for over two years since OpenAI publicly launched ChatGPT. In many ways, this is fami …›

NYT Open - Medium→ How The New York Times systematically migrated from Enzyme into React Testing Library

2025-03-03 How we navigated the shift from Enzyme to React Testing Library at The New York Times.Illustration by Iris LeiBy Felipe BuenañoAs part of our efforts to maintain and improve the functionality and performance of The New York Times core website, we r …›

Iffy.news→ WikiCredCon 2025

2025-02-11 Expanding on our Iffy.news/Veri.FYI session at WikiCredCon (February 15 2025), asking Wikimedians to consider adding domain name as data in Wikidata… Wikimedia is a wonderful source of information about the credibility of news sources. But it’s …›

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 …›