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 …›

PRX Official - Medium→ Commonwealth Club World Affairs of California Releases “The Final Service” distributed by PRX

2025-04-03 Commonwealth Club World Affairs of California Releases “The Final Service,” A New Podcast Exploring the Decline of Church LifeThe series hosted by Ray Suarez and Mateo Schimpf is distributed by PRXCommonwealth Club World Affairs of California tod …›

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 …›

Online Journalism Blog→ How do I get data if my country doesn’t publish any?

2025-03-25 Spotlight photo by Paul Green on Unsplash In many countries public data is limited, and access to data is either restricted, or information provided by the authorities is not credible. So how do you obtain data for a story? Here are some techniques …›

RJI→ Leah Becerra joins RJI as product director for DODS initiative

2025-03-20 Under Becerra’s stewardship, the DODS Learning Center will make digital training resources more accessible to publishers Leah Becerra, formerly the senior digital editor at the Boston Globe, has joined the Reynolds Journalism Institute (RJI) as t …›

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 …›

PRX Official - Medium→ Radiotopia Welcomes “Proxy” with Yowei Shaw, “Never Post,” and “Selects” to the Network

2025-03-19 Radiotopia from PRX Welcomes “Proxy” from Yowei Shaw, “Never Post” hosted by Mike Rugnetta, and “Selects” to the NetworkRadiotopia’s spring 2025 podcast releases also include “Key Change” from “Song Exploder,” a new season of “ …›

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 …›

PRX Official - Medium→ Apple Podcasts Names “Radiotopia Presents: My Mother Made Me” A Series Essential

2025-03-11 Series Essentials spotlight the pinnacle of podcasting, celebrating the finest storytelling and the medium’s greatest achievementsApple Podcasts has selected Radiotopia Presents: My Mother Made Me hosted by Jason Reynolds as a Series Essential, a spe …›

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 …›

Online Journalism Blog→ 7 prompt design techniques for generative AI every journalist should know

2025-02-19 Tools like ChatGPT might seem to speak your language, but they actually speak a language of probability and educated guesswork. You can make yourself better understood — and get more professional results — with a few simple prompting techniques. H …›

PRX Official - Medium→ “Reveal” Named 2025 National Magazine Award Finalist for Podcasting

2025-02-14 The series “40 Acres and a Lie” also recently won a duPont-Columbia Award for audio journalism in the public interestThe investigative public radio show and podcast Reveal was announced as a finalist in the 2025 National Magazine Awards for podcas …›