Nieman Lab→ “Multi-local” newsrooms aim to get more news to more people

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 …›

Nieman Lab→ The Houston Landing raised $20 million pre-launch. Less than two years later, it’s shutting down.

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 …›

PRX Official - Medium→ Three PRX Partners Named Peabody Awards Nominees in the 85th Awards

2025-04-15 Public Service and Radio/Podcast nominees include “Long Shadow: In Guns We Trust,” “In the Dark,” and “This American Life”The Peabody Awards today announced multiple nominees in its 85th annual awards. The podcast series Long Shadow: In Gu …›

Nieman Lab→ Thomson Reuters is the latest media company to drop “diversity” language in response to Trump executive order

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 …›

Nieman Lab→ The unreality of reality TV: How competition shows influence U.S. politics and shape views about economic inequality

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 …›

PRX Official - Medium→ “Reveal” Wins 2025 National Magazine Award

2025-04-11 The investigative public radio show and podcast is distributed by PRXThe American Society of Magazine Editors (ASME) announced the winners of the prestigious 60th annual National Magazine Awards. The investigative public radio show Reveal won for podc …›

Nieman Lab→ Gannett will stop publishing diversity information, citing Trump’s executive order

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 …›

Nieman Lab→ The Trump White House is now sitting on any reporters’ pool reports it finds unflattering

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 — …›

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 …›

Better News→ The American Press Institute’s guide to influencer collaborations

2025-03-13 This guide shares lessons from four months of local news experiments. The post The American Press Institute’s guide to influencer collaborations appeared first on Better News. …›

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 …›