The website from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), launched during President Obama’s first term, provided constant updates on the agency’s climate research in plain English, alongside vivid charts and graphics. It lasted 15 years, until the Trump administration gutted the site in 2025; the entire staff was disbanded through layoffs or unrenewed contracts, and the URL now redirects to NOAA’s website instead. Text on the site, dated June 24, 2025, says the redirect was done to comply with an executive order and White House policies, and that “future research products previously housed under Climate.gov will be available at NOAA.gov/climate and its affiliate websites.”

Anyone who has been paying attention to the Trump administration’s second term will recognize the shuttering of Climate.gov as one part of a larger project to obfuscate reality, particularly around science and climate change. Cuts to NOAA and the National Weather Service have created gaps in weather data. Over the summer, the Department of Energy deleted more than 1,600 pages about energy efficiency and utility bill savings amid brutal heatwaves that stressed power grids across the country — around the peak of a cyclospora outbreak that would have been caught sooner if not for cuts to the federal surveillance programs that usually track food-borne illnesses. If the federal government was once the sun around which most scientific research in this country orbited, it has now become a black hole.

There is, however, some light in the dark. In August 2025, a group of former Climate.gov staffers launched a crowdfunding campaign to bring back the Climate.gov archives and continue its work, under a new name: Climate.us. It was spearheaded by Rebecca Lindsey, the program manager and longtime editorial lead of Climate.gov, and raised $530,000 over six months through a combination of individual donors and grants from foundations. This year, Lindsey and her colleagues hope to raise an additional $300,000. The team incorporated as a nonprofit with fiscal sponsorship from Multiplier, a California-based nonprofit that focuses on environmental and social justice issues.

The new site, which launched in June, looks much like the old one, but with a few notable changes. The team is less than a third of its old size — three people rather than the 10 who ran the site at NOAA — and many of the links that used to redirect to other NOAA sites now redirect to resources hosted by Climate.us itself, likea copy of the Fifth National Climate assessment, which no longer exists at its original URL.

I spoke with Lindsey over Zoom about the origins of Climate.us, the challenges of picking up where the government left off, and her hopes for the future. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

It was a 15-year effort that the government had made in trying to understand what the public wants to know about climate change, and then figuring out the best way to provide it to them. And so when everything started happening after the new administration took over in early 2025, it became clear that we were not going to be able to continue with business as usual as we had more or less done during the first Trump administration. We began getting instructions from NOAA [political appointees] to scour the site and find content that might be perceived to be in conflict with the executive orders on [DEI] and the Gulf of Mexico, and so that happened almost immediately. That was late January or early February.

Then NOAA experienced the loss of about 600 to 800 probationary employees as part of the DOGE-led purge, and myself and several of my colleagues also were fired. The remainder of the Climate.gov team were contractors, so their contract was still in place. They continued to keep the site running through the spring, but in May [2025] they found out that the contract was not going to be renewed and they were going to be removed too, so that was the entire team at that point. When I was fired in February, it was not clear that there was any sort of climate targeting because hundreds of other NOAA employees from all over the agency were also fired. But with the decision about the contract, it was obvious Climate.gov was being targeted, and they were not going to let the program operate anymore. All of us were devastated by that.

Six years after launching Lookout Santa Cruz, CEO Ken Doctor writes, the local news org is “thriving.”

“It’s fun to point to our 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News (covering the disastrous flooding of January 2023), but it’s the daily impact of big accountability stories and smaller know-your-city stories that makes us proud,” Doctor wrote. “We now reach more than half the adults in Santa Cruz County each month, and we are still growing our audience quarter by quarter. And though many have said it couldn’t be done, Lookout Santa Cruz achieved profitability on earned revenue — membership and advertising money — in 2026.”

No silver bullet has emerged to solve the crisis in local news but the most robust local outlets are relying on diversified revenue, with subscriptions or memberships and locally sold ads often serving as key revenue streams. Research also suggests that disciplined, low-overhead operations are more durable.

Doctor, a long-time contributor to Nieman Lab, made the move from media analyst to media CEO in 2020. He credited “a good year and steady progress, both on membership and advertising,” for the milestone.

Lookout launched a second newsroom in Eugene, Oregon, in 2025. The local news company expects to have 10,000 members across both locations by the end of the year.

“Lots of things [got better] over time,” Doctor told me, “and the Eugene launch has worked even faster, at about 60% of expenses covered by earned income in less than two years.”

About 60% of Lookout Santa Cruz’s revenue comes from advertising, with another 40% from memberships. In both Eugene and Santa Cruz, Lookout Local has more than 40 marketing partners. Average deal sizes range from $1,500 to $6,000, A Media Operator reported earlier this year.

A third newsroom and a consulting arm called Lookout Growth are on deck for 2027. Doctor hopes to have Lookouts in five locations — all in cities on the West Coast — by the end of 2028.

First rumored last month, Apple Reference Image will work with the camera cluster on the just-announced iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max. With the feature turned on, iPhone photos can be, in effect, saved twice — once as a normal, editable photo and once as an Apple Reference Image. The reference image will have a unique ID embedded in the image’s metadata that proves that the image was actually captured by a real iPhone camera, not generated by GPT-Image, Nano Banana, or any other AI image model.

Think of it as a counterpart to something like Google’s SynthID. SynthID is a signal that Gemini embeds in AI-generated images to proclaim: “This is fake.” Apple Reference Image will instead say: “This is real.”

But Apple and Google take significantly different approaches in generating this proof. SynthID embeds its signal directly within the pixels of the image — invisible to humans but visible to AI-detection tools. Apple Reference Image data is instead injected into the image’s metadata; the actual image isn’t altered. Capture telemetry data (like hardware IDs and sensor signatures) is sent up to Apple’s Private Cloud Compute, which then creates a unique signature tying the reference image to that specific iPhone. (Apple promises it doesn’t see the actual photo, only data about it, and the process only runs on photos you choose to sign.)

If you think of SynthID as a tag that follows an image around the web, Apple Reference Image is more like a receipt the photographer can show later as proof of origin. (Apple calls it a “digital negative.”) If AI-doctored versions of a photo start circulating online, a photojournalist could produce the reference image to conclusively prove what the camera sensor originally saw.

Camera companies like Nikon and Canon have embraced a different metadata-driven provenance standard named C2PA Content Credentials — C2PA standing for the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity. Google also supports the C2PA standard in its Pixel phones, and C2PA has some European media company members (Die Zeit, France TV, AFP). But Apple hasn’t signed on to using Content Credentials — and now we know it believes it has a better approach.

CrowdTangle’s end came slowly. Meta disinvested in the tool over years by cutting funding, disbanding teams, and restricting users. When the company finally announced in March 2024 that CrowdTangle would cease operations in August, a petition signed by more than 100 social media watchdog groups and others warned that, as a result, “almost all outside efforts to identify and prevent political disinformation, incitements to violence, and online harassment of women and minorities will be silenced.”

Now, a new crop of AI-powered tools is trying to fill the void. Arbiter is one of the projects leading the way. The platform uses large language models (LLMs) and AI agents to pull posts from social media platforms and analyze them at scale. It collects data from social media APIs, academic data dumps, and third-party data scraping companies. The platform currently works across several social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter (X), YouTube, TikTok, Reddit, Bluesky, and 4chan.

At the beginning of this year, Arbiter began onboarding its first news organizations, which now include the German public broadcaster Deutsche Welle (DW), the Argentine fact-checking organization Chequeado, and the Filipino news site Rappler. Users from more than 100 organizations have registered. For journalists trying to report on the harmful content distributed by social media platforms, access to a robust tool built independently from those companies is essential.

“We need independent mechanisms because it’s often been the case that incentive structures have clashed, and then good work that was done got washed away,” said Swapneel Mehta, the co-founder and president of SimPPL, the nonprofit behind the tool. “I want to build resilient mechanisms because the fact-checkers and journalists that we support can’t deal with their work being threatened…They have enough external challenges to their work.”

Prompt Arbiter with a question in plain language about a topic on social media and it will automatically identify keywords, label and cluster posts pushing specific narratives, extract claims, identify accounts pushing the same message across platforms, and output an AI-generated summary report. It can also produce reports on multiple platforms at once, tracking how narratives move across the internet.

One of Arbiter’s most novel features is its ability to map out trend lines for specific narratives, including when they first emerge and when they peak on specific platforms. The feature aims to help journalists see what false or misleading narrative might be on the horizon. It is one that Mehta says sets it apart from other “social listening” tools on the market, many of which are built for the PR and marketing industries.

“Social listening systems tell you where conversations are happening as they blow up. [They] send you alerts,” explained Mehta. “The problem is, as journalists, you want to be ahead of the alert. You want to be the one providing the alert, not receiving the alert.” As he puts it, by that time “the harms are done.”

How Arbiter sees what’s next

Arbiter is the flagship product from SimPPL, a nonprofit that has spent years exploring how to bring AI into the work of reporters and researchers working on information integrity. Mehta co-founded the AI research lab in 2021 with Dhara Mungra, another data scientist who now leads SimPPL’s product team.

Mehta’s past work includes developing a civic and health misinformation classifier system at Twitter, conducting research at Adobe and the University of Oxford, and coaching grantees of JournalismAI, a program out of the London School of Economics that supports AI projects in newsrooms around the world.

Arbiter is trying to solve a few problems that journalists and fact-checkers frequently face on social media. One is the poor quality of search results on platforms. “You really want a contextual layer on top. [For instance,] if I’m searching for climate skepticism, it’s not going to literally search for the word skeptic in all the posts,” Mehta told me.

Another challenge is making sense of the social media data that journalists can get their hands on. Simply plugging these data sets into commercial LLMs often returns few actionable insights. “Anyone who’s dealt with more than 100,000 pieces of data knows that throwing them at an LLM first blows up your credit card bill and then gives you garbage outputs that you can’t control,” he said.

To make sense of its data, Arbiter isn’t building on top of a single foundation model, but instead leaning on eight to ten different AI models within its stack. “From encoding your queries, to figuring out the right posts to retrieve, identifying coordinated networks within these posts, semantic similarity, network mapping, all use different [models],” said Mehta. Some of these layers are model-agnostic, and Arbiter allows newsrooms to select their preferred LLM provider.

One of the first newsrooms to test Arbiter was Nest Center, a media NGO based in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. Among its initiatives is the fact-checking site and Facebook page, the Mongolian Fact-Checking Center (MFCC). In recent years, Nest’s fact-checkers have reported on coordinated disinformation campaigns from Russia and China, Mongolia’s neighbors to the north and south.

“We were dependent on CrowdTangle, and then Meta gave us the Meta Content Library,” said Duuya Baatar, the cofounder and chairperson of Nest Center, referencing Meta’s own replacement tool for CrowdTangle. Released in November 2023, the Meta Content Library (MCL) has been criticized for restricting journalists’ access and removing the automated insights and sophisticated search features found in CrowdTangle. (Nest has MCL access as a member of Meta’s third-party fact-checking program, the U.S. version of which was shuttered in early 2025.)

“If you’re looking at a specific post, and if you want to look at a specific narrative, then MCL is okay. If you want to analyze how the information ecosystem is changing, then MCL is nowhere near CrowdTangle,” she said.

That’s the need that Arbiter has been meeting in Nest’s early testing. Soon after the newsroom received access, Baatar entered a prompt about a recent Mongolian Supreme Court ruling. The court had found that a criminal code outlawing the dissemination of “false information,” which had long been used to harass and intimidate journalists, was unconstitutional. The parliament was then tasked with drafting a replacement to the code.

Arbiter’s review of Facebook flagged some surprising commentary posted by several smaller accounts. Instead of focusing on “false information,” these accounts said Parliament’s replacement code would focus on “libel” and “defamation.” That, Baatar knew, would bolster the government’s ability to suppress press freedom in Mongolia.

“It was only my first use of Arbiter, and I was thinking that’s strange. I mean, as if that’s gonna happen,” Baatar told me. But weeks later, the Mongolian parliament announced a working group focused on folding libel and defamation into the criminal code.

Though Baatar had dismissed the early warning signs from Arbiter at the time, she said it bolstered her trust in the product. Now, three Nest Center staffers have full access to Arbiter and use it to monitor content in Mongolian on Facebook. (One of Baatar’s first notes to the Arbiter team was to improve its Mongolian capabilities, and they’ve gotten much better since January, she told me.)

“It helps us see certain narratives that are not popular now, but may become popular later,” she said.

Currently, all the newsrooms trialing Arbiter are using it for free. That accessibility has been key for the Nest Center, which can’t afford alternatives like Meltwater and other AI-powered social listening tools that weren’t built primarily for journalists. Arbiter is still exploring revenue streams beyond newsroom subscriptions, since Mehta says he’s conscious that many of the news organizations that could use the tool are cash-strapped.

Despite these advantages, though, Baatar doesn’t consider Arbiter a full replacement for CrowdTangle. “The only concern that I hear from my team is the volume of what it can actually get from sources,” said Baatar. While MCL is better for monitoring specific posters and specific posts because of the volume of content you can access through Meta directly, Arbiter is stronger at trend lines and emerging narratives. “MCL plus Arbiter is coming close to Crowdtangle.”

Finding the data workarounds

Arbiter went through months-long review processes to gain access to the APIs of major platforms, including Facebook and Instagram. Still, the tool is subject to Meta’s strict limitations on its API usage, most importantly rate-limiting: Using the API alone, Arbiter can only access so many posts at a time.

To build out its access, Mehta said he’s been working with third-party data providers that have vendor agreements with platforms, identifying carve-outs to collect public data without violating terms of service, and leaning on data donations from academics and civil society organizations. That last approach, he says, is inspired by the work many disinformation researchers have done on WhatsApp, using data donations to access posts on the otherwise encrypted messaging app.

In the long term, Mehta says he doesn’t see Arbiter as adversarial to social media giants and wants to continue working with Meta and other platforms through their APIs as long as they are willing. But he knows he can’t count on that access.

“Often these processes start off when you’re a small organization and they approve you because you don’t pose any kind of concern for management,” he said. “But as you grow, the kind of work you do changes.”

Disinformation researchers have been the target of major lawsuits in recent years for terms of service violations. In 2023, Elon Musk’s X sued the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) for allegedly “scraping” the platform and improperly using a third-party social listening tool called Brandwatch. The case was later dismissed. But Arbiter has still been working with a team of lawyers to review its processes and find any legal vulnerabilities in its current API workarounds.

“The last two or three years have been focused on figuring out the legal ways to activate the work that we’re doing,” Mehta said.

When it comes to CrowdTangle itself, Mehta says his goals for Arbiter go beyond simply servicing the newsrooms that used to rely on it. The tool’s ability to conduct analysis across platforms, not just Meta-owned ones, is one of its strongest features. Identifying a claim emerging across YouTube and X and Facebook, all at once, was something CrowdTangle could never do.

Still, the service’s shuttering loomed large in our conversations. “CrowdTangle is not a service that was mandated or regulated to continue being offered at any point. Platforms could decide that this was not a net positive and stop offering it,” said Mehta. If platforms will not take on this responsibility, he says someone else should be able to. “These are public conversations, and collecting public conversations in the public interest should not be illegal.”

Greenberg will launch The Upgrade on September 15, “bringing his investigative approach to the process and business of travel.” Harris-Bridson will launch Flamingo Media in January 2027 to cover “the increasingly interconnected market spanning entertainment, creators, brands, platforms, technology and capital.” And Covucci will expand FOIAball, which uses public records to uncover stories inside college football, to do even more reporting on “the powerful institutions and forces surrounding college sports, including political influence, surveillance technology, labor rights, and wealthy donors.”

Beehiiv, unlike (ahem) some of its newsletter platform competitors, does not take a percentage of paid subscription revenue. Instead, publishers that have outgrown the free plan pay a monthly subscription to Beehiiv. Members of the Media Collective get that monthly fee waived, as well as other perks like media liability insurance and pre-publication review.

When looking for candidates for the Beehiiv Media Collective, chief customer officer Preeya Goenka said she looks less to fill a specific, super-original niche than writers with a clear vision and the ability to stick to a publishing schedule.

“It might sound funny, but the actual topic or the industry is almost the least important part of what we look for [for the Media Collective],” Goenka said. “It’s more like, do they have a really good sense of what they want to write about?”

“A sense of consistency in publishing is one of the key factors for growth and for success,” Goenka said, using three times a week as an example. “A lot of times people are like, ‘Hey, I have this idea and I’ll publish when I have the time.’ We’d love to support them however we can, but they’re probably not the right fit for this program.”

Since the launch of the Media Collective in late 2024, its members have earned more than $5 million. One major success from the Beehiiv Media Collective is Oliver Darcy’s Status, which now has four full-time employees, plus part-timers working on sales and the podcast. The newsletter has 130,000 subscribers, including “several thousand” paid, Darcy told Peter Kafka in early August.

Like other success stories from the collective, Darcy worked for years at a legacy newsroom (CNN). Other members were recently with Wall Street Journal (Joanna Stern), Vanity Fair (Richard Lawson), Washington Post (Dave Jorgenson), and CBS News (David Begnaud).

You can read more about the Beehiiv Media Collective here.

These days, things look a little different. What was once a fledgling nonprofit newsroom is now a Pulitzer-winning powerhouse and one of three newsrooms that make up the Deep South Today network, along with two in Louisiana: Verite News in New Orleans and, as of last year, The Current in Lafayette. (The Garrison Project also folded into Deep South Today last year, and founder Ethan Brown is now Deep South Today’s special projects editor, leading criminal justice-focused work across the three newsrooms.) By the end of this year, Deep South Today will launch a fourth newsroom, Arkansas Today.

Ganucheau, a Magnolia State native who was the first reporter Mississippi Today hired, became the publication’s editor-in-chief in 2020 and is now the first executive editor and chief content officer for Deep South Today. The network has more than 80 employees, and a budget that surpasses $10 million. Earlier this year, it launched an investigative reporting center in partnership with The New York Times. A $3 million donation from board chair Andy Lack supports that effort and will establish a video operation called Deep South Today Studios.

Deep South Today’s leaders believe their network model — independent editorial operations that share infrastructure including payroll, tech, and business and audience staff — is critical to bringing more reporting to an underserved part of the country. “I think it’s the only thing that can work in a region like the Deep South that is under-resourced and is also serving a population that doesn’t have as much access to capital and financial resources,” said Deep South Today CEO Warwick Sabin.

Deep South Today’s revenue mix is roughly 55% philanthropy, 30% membership, and 15% earned revenue, Sabin said. “We’ve been looking at the philanthropy in these early stages as seed capital to build the infrastructure that allows us to maximize the revenue from the other sources,” he said. That includes growing memberships and earned revenue. Deep South Today wants to keep its reporting free to access, however, and securing grants will remain crucial.

Mississippi and Louisiana have the highest poverty rates in the country and some of the lowest levels of median household wealth. Regionally, the South’s nonprofit sector has fewer assets compared to the rest of the country. In that local economic context, philanthropy — specifically, national philanthropy — “is always going to be a really important part of what we do,” Sabin said.

Ahead of the launch of Arkansas Today, I spoke with Ganucheau and Sabin about the lessons they’ve learned so far and how they think about sustainable growth.

Plans for Arkansas

Sabin, a University of Arkansas alum who lived in Little Rock for almost two decades, “was already aware of the need for more local news in the state based on my own personal experience and observations,” he said. In 2024, the team conducted an analysis of existing media in the state, with support from the American Journalism Project. Sabin, Ganucheau, and other Deep South Today leaders have spent the past two years visiting the state and listening to Arkansas residents and journalists. “We’ve had a lot of conversations with the existing media in Arkansas to make sure that, first of all, we understood the needs even from their perspective, and where we could be complementary and additive, and definitely not disruptive or competitive,” Sabin said.

A civic information needs census the newsroom conducted this summer in partnership with Civic News Company indicated low levels of satisfaction with local information on topics from housing to political information. Nearly three-quarters of respondents said they thought news organizations in the state should do more investigative reporting. Respondents also said they preferred formats like social media posts and short videos over long-form text investigations.

The media makeup of Arkansas reminds Sabin of Mississippi when Mississippi Today was founded in 2016, he said. The dominant legacy media organization has been diminished by cuts — Sabin compared Mississippi’s Clarion Ledger to Arkansas’ Democrat-Gazette – and large swathes of the state are undercovered or uncovered. (Of the state’s 75 counties, four do not have a news source and 46 have only one, according to Medill’s 2025 State of Local News report. Arkansas has 8.1 Local Journalist Equivalents per 100,000 people, putting it around the middle of the pack in this year’s Local Journalist Index.) Beyond serving as its own destination for news, Sabin thinks Arkansas Today can prop up smaller rural newspapers around the state as a sort of wire service, as the Mississippi newsroom does, with the Associated Press moving away from newspapers.

Deep South Today sees need and demand for local news and information across the state, but plans to begin with reporters in Central and Northwest Arkansas. Although Northwest Arkansas is a relatively wealthy, fast-growing part of the state, Sabin says the region’s sources of local news have not kept up with its growth. (Access to local news varies by county, and current local news providers in the region include The Bentonville Bulletin and an Axios local newsroom.)

Ganucheau has not yet finalized Arkansas Today’s editor-in-chief, but he aims to announce the hire this month. The exact launch date of Arkansas Today will be their call. “We’re going to let [that person and the team they hire] be the architects of what this ultimately becomes in both staff structure, in beats, in coverage areas, in workflows, in all of it,” Ganucheau said. “It’s going to be their show to run, and we’re handing them not a blueprint, but a lot of research, a lot of findings, and a lot of connections and relationships that we’ve built over these past couple years.”

Staffing plans include an Arkansas-based audience editor and video editor, as well as a full-time investigative reporter, data journalist, and New York Times fellow. On the business side, Deep South Today has hired a managing director of sales and a senior director of development and partnerships.

“With Arkansas being this blank canvas,” Sabin said, “we’re able to pilot some things that we could then end up scaling across the rest of our network if they’re successful.”

The network, he added, is “aggressively looking at other places to expand.”

Doubling down on video

In 2024, Mississippi Today’s political team spent nearly six months investigating a powerful committee chair in the state legislature and published a multi-part series about how he helped steer millions in state taxpayer dollars to his own backyard. The series, Ganucheau said, got around 50,000 pageviews total, which he called both “a fine number in a state like Mississippi” and “a little disappointing to me.” So an editor got the lead reporter in front of an iPhone camera to read a 90-second script summarizing the investigation’s findings, and added some B-roll and charts.

Within 48 hours of posting that vertical video across Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and YouTube, it had roughly 600,000 views, Ganucheau said. Now, he said Mississippi Today is averaging 300,000 to 400,000 users on its website per month. This May, the news org garnered just under 5.5 million video views across platforms, a “high watermark.”

Early video experiments were successful enough that Sabin was able to fundraise off the increased engagement, first to expand Mississippi Today’s video work, then to replicate it at Verite. The newsrooms’ videos have performed best on TikTok, Ganucheau said, followed by Instagram Reels and Facebook Reels.

The work in those newsrooms led to the creation of Deep South Today Studios. While individual newsrooms have their own video teams and products, Deep South Today leadership now want to provide more centralized resources to supercharge newsrooms’ work, including creating more capacity for experimentation. Deep South Today board chair Andy Lack, former chairperson of NBC News, agreed to back the idea.

Ganucheau said he’s excited by indications that video can reach and engage new audiences. Deep South Today’s video viewers skew younger and more diverse than its text audience.

“I used to be very afraid of going to read the comments sections,” he said. “But going to Mississippi Today’s TikTok or Verite’s TikTok accounts right now and reading the comments under those videos is one of the greatest joys of my career so far — we’re seeing deep-level engagement with our journalism, with our reporting, in conversations with people who we’ve struggled to reach forever and struggled to get their actual engagement with the work in this way forever.”

As enthusiastic as he is, though, Ganucheau knows there’s a catch.

“The way that we can reach people in ways that we’ve never even dreamed of before is unbelievably amazing,” he said. “And I have no idea how to monetize it, shy of going to get grants and donations from people who see that success and that potential for what it is.”

Deep South Today, along with the rest of the industry, is “scrambling…to figure out how can we monetize this work in a way that’s not totally reliant upon these tech companies that we don’t control.” To this end, the remit for the Deep South Today Studios director includes developing a video monetization strategy.

Lessons learned from Mississippi

Before becoming part of Deep South Today’s central leadership team a year ago, Ganucheau served as Mississippi Today’s editor-in-chief for five years. “It took us a few years at Mississippi Today to get our legs under us — to figure out who we needed to be for Mississippians, who we wanted to be collectively as a newsroom and as a team serving the state,” he said.

One challenge was figuring out the right staff structure. When Ganucheau became editor-in-chief in 2020, the reporting staff had grown from the six or seven in the original launch plan to around 16, while the editing team had stayed the same size, making Ganucheau one of two editors for the 16 reporters. He added a third editor to try to correct the ratio, but it took another year or two to figure out that the right structure for the newsroom was a teams-based model, with designated editors for beats including education, healthcare, and government and politics, and each editor guiding teams of no more than four to five reporters. This structure has the added benefit of making fundraising conversations easier; “the regular pitch to funders effectively became, ‘If you want this specific reporting to be as strong as possible, we also really need this dedicated editor for these reporters,'” Ganucheau explained.

“It sounds so simple or easy to think of it this way now, in retrospect,” he said. “But we really battled [over] what is that right staff structure that’s going to support the type of journalism that we want to do, and how can we sustain it?”

Mississippi Today, with its focus on accountability reporting, has faced a challenge that’s familiar to many newsrooms specializing in investigative deep dives: How much daily, breaking coverage should the team do?

“I think that there were moments when we probably could have or should have done more daily or breaking news coverage than we ultimately did,” Ganucheau said. “Whether you’re a big national newspaper or a small startup nonprofit, every newsroom leader struggles with how [to] strike the balance between the quantity of output, the number of daily stories you do, versus the depth and quality reporting that takes more time and energy and resources over the long haul.”

Part of the challenge of getting that balance right, Ganucheau said, is that it requires staying on top of a constantly shifting local media landscape. Like most of the country, Mississippi lost daily coverage and newspapers between 2020 and 2025. During and after the pandemic, several newspapers in the state reduced their print frequency, and others shuttered. In 2022, the Clarion Ledger stopped printing a Saturday edition. More recently, the Associated Press’ two full-time Mississippi journalists took buyouts (though the news org later hired a multimedia/video journalist for Mississippi).

Ganucheau says he was too slow to see and respond to those changes with his predisposition toward prioritizing investigative stories over daily coverage. Emily Wagster Pettus, one of the AP journalists who took buyouts, joined Mississippi Today as senior editor last year and succeeded Ganucheau as editor-in-chief. Under her leadership, Mississippi Today has ramped up its daily coverage.

One strength of the network model, in Ganucheau’s view, is it harnesses Mississippi Today’s hard-earned lessons into a head start for Deep South Today’s other newsrooms. But it’s critical to him, and to the network’s leadership, that story ideas come from the local newsrooms, not from the top down.

For-profit newspaper chains loom large for Ganucheau as a case study in mistakes to avoid. “We have seen over time what’s happened when these companies regionalize a copy desk, or regionalize editing support, or regionalize story selection…It’s not local once you do that,” he said. “What we’re trying to do and build at Deep South Today is the opposite of how all of that has worked in the for-profit legacy world, and to me, the way that we avoid that is to let our individual newsroom leaders truly lead on behalf of their audiences.”

Looking ahead

Ganucheau and Sabin are both wary of taking Deep South Today’s success for granted.

“We are all eyes very wide open about how this could go in the wrong direction,” Ganucheau said. “I think that the biggest risk that we face in this particular moment is trying to do too much too quickly.”

That, he continued, is “a weird reality for us — we are trying to plug these enormous holes in local news in a region of America that just needs it so desperately, and we’re trying to do it in a sustainable way.”

Deep South Today strives to maintain a startup-like culture. “We’re trying to be as lean and mean as humanly possible,” Ganucheau said. As the organization grows, its leaders almost constantly assess what additional support to add, and how to fund it sustainably — an exercise that needs to happen “almost week by week at this point — it feels like if you wait a month to take a step back, it could be too late in some moments,” he said. “It’s [the] constant threading of that needle.”

“I don’t think tomorrow is certain,” Sabin agreed. “There’s too much change happening in the industry and in technology and in consumption habits. The economic landscape is always uncertain whether you’re talking about the business of journalism or the philanthropic landscape, so I think we’re all going to have to keep hustling and adapting and evolving according to circumstances.”

I suppose there are numerous candidates for that title. The debut of the iPhone in 2007? The launch of Google AdSense in 2003? The first YouTube video in 2005? All worthy nominees.

But for me, it’s the debut of Facebook’s News Feed. In 2006, on the day after Labor Day,¹ Facebook engineer Ruchi Sanghavi blogged about what she called Facebook’s “Facelift”:

You’ve probably noticed that Facebook looks different today. We’ve added two cool features: News Feed, which appears on your homepage, and Mini-Feed, which appears in each person’s profile.

News Feed highlights what’s happening in your social circles on Facebook. It updates a personalized list of news stories throughout the day, so you’ll know when Mark adds Britney Spears to his Favorites or when your crush is single again. Now, whenever you log in, you’ll get the latest headlines generated by the activity of your friends and social groups…

These features are not only different from anything we’ve had on Facebook before, but they’re quite unlike anything you can find on the web. We hope these changes help you stay more up to date on your friends’ lives.

Before that day, getting updates on your friends meant visiting each of their Facebook pages in turn. It wasn’t too different from the actual printed college “facebooks” that inspired the name — a set of pages you’re meant to flip through, looking for specific people. But combining them all into a single stream meant Facebook was no longer just hosting your friends’ stray thoughts — it was shoving them right in front of your face. As Michael Arrington wrote at TechCrunch:

It’s interesting because Facebook clearly gets the idea of an attention metastream, where page views aren’t the currency that matters but rather how effectively the service allows users to communicate. Facebook users will now have a much easier way of staying up to date on what their friends are up to. It may mean less page views for Facebook in the short run as users rarely have to leave their home/admin page to see what’s going on with friends, but if it makes users love Facebook more (is that possible?), it’ll pay off in the end.

(Yeah, gosh, is it even possible for users to love Facebook more?!?)

Users hated it, even protesting outside Facebook’s offices. It was one thing to post about your breakup to a place where your closest friends could find it; it was another to broadcast it on the metaphorical dorm loudspeaker. But people adjusted, the protests stopped, and one of the greatest money-makers in human history was born — soon to be duplicated in some form or another in just about every digital product.

So it’s somewhat fitting that today marks one of the most significant efforts by a national government to regulate and disrupt Facebook’s feeds — treating them more like a public utility than a private corporation’s product.

The Albanese government in Australia has announced its proposed “Digital Duty of Care” for major online platforms, which includes a requirement that Australians be able to “turn off” the algorithms that inject content from people and companies you don’t follow into your feeds. (In PR-speak, “My Feed, My Way.”) In other words, it’s a switch that would return you to the Facebook News Feed of 2006. Clare Armstrong for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation:

Every Australian will be able to choose whether they want their social media content served up by algorithms or not under a federal government proposal to “empower” people online.

Labor will seek support for an opt-in/opt-out system where platforms like TikTok, Instagram or Facebook would be required to send account holders a push notification asking them to decide if they receive recommended content.

The social media algorithm controls come under broader “Digital Duty of Care” draft laws that shift responsibility onto big tech to proactively reduce foreseeable harms or face fines of more than $100 million.

The bill (text here, explainer here) would require platforms to let users turn off all recommended content — and, more important to Facebook, block all targeted advertising. (It doesn’t require platforms to offer ad-free options; a user who turned off targeted advertising would just be served non-targeted ads.) The bill would also give users the right to reset the data profile a platform uses to target content at them.

“Just as we have basic safety standards for cars, toys or food, the duty of care applies basic standards for the online products we use every day,” communications minister Anika Wells said. This proposed internet time-machine will now go before Australia’s Parliament for approval.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Allegra Spender (@allegra.spender)

1. The post actually went up on September 5, 2006, not September 8 — but today’s also the day after Labor Day, so I’m counting it as the 20th anniversary. Sue me.

But this approach only works if those who believe in the free press — including elected officials — offer unconditional support. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has not.

On Aug. 21, 2026, the Pentagon fired the publisher, editor and a reporter at Stars and Stripes, citing insubordination and unauthorized media appearances. But the firings took place after the outlet ran a string of articles that cast the Pentagon in a poor light.

A view from the front lines

The newspaper, which is often simply called Stripes, has served overseas military forces and their families since 1918, with a 23-year break between World War I and World War II.

It has continuously remained in print since World War II, providing Americans serving overseas on American military bases everywhere from Okinawa to the Azores with news on topics ranging from high school football games to troop deployments.

When I was a reporter at Stars and Stripes in the late 1990s, I covered both the good and the bad from Bosnia and Kosovo during the NATO peacekeeping missions: the armed unit that doled out cash to Bosnians after the military ran over their farm animals; the soldiers who guarded a school so that the children of separate ethnic groups could attend together; and the military contractors who received no-bid contracts.

While some big stories are also written about in other news outlets covering the military, many of them are only discovered because Stars and Stripes’ civilian and military journalists work and live alongside service members in Europe, the Middle East and the Pacific.

It’s the very same premise behind good local newspapers: There’s little meaningful journalism about local issues without journalists who live and work in the communities they cover.

Stripes was able to provide the only eyewitness account of the negotiations that led to Germany’s surrender in 1945 because its reporter was in the schoolhouse in Reims, France, where Allied and German officials hashed out the terms.

Stripes journalists were also on the front lines of the Vietnam War, with The New York Times describing Stars and Stripes as the only military information outlet giving American troops in Vietnam a candid account of the war’s progress.

More recently, a Stripes reporter based in Bahrain was able to report how U.S. military families were experiencing Iranian drone attacks in Manama, which hosts the headquarters of the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet. She was able to report on the attacks firsthand because she was right there, evacuating alongside them.

Reporters clash with the Pentagon

It was another Stars and Stripes journalist who first reported on the problems aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln in July and August 2026.

The aircraft carrier was in the midst of an exceedingly long deployment due to the U.S.-Iran war. There had been food and water shortages, disrupted mail service and long, grueling workdays with little time off. Some sailors were experiencing mental health struggles, and at least one jumped overboard.

The reporter, Alison Bath, who is based at the headquarters of the U.S. Navy’s Sixth Fleet in Naples, Italy, had interviewed active-duty sailors and family members of sailors aboard the ship. She explained how she had reviewed “dozens of public social media comments and posts by crew members.”

Bath’s story and the follow-up accounts from other media outlets clearly angered Hegseth, who said it “completely misrepresented” the situation.

The media frenzy over the USS Lincoln largely overshadowed the work of another Stripes journalist, Lara Korte, who reported on the hardships, confusion and financial costs endured by military families who had to suddenly evacuate from U.S. Central Command headquarters in Bahrain starting on March 2, 2026.

Like Bath, Korte had interviewed several military family members, one of whom shared with Korte the audio recording of a virtual town hall meeting that the military held for the families. A Navy admiral said on the recording that the military “was in uncharted territory” and had little guidance for families who didn’t know where to live or how to retrieve their cars and belongings.

Though the Pentagon didn’t dispute Korte’s reporting, she was fired for “insubordination” alongside the editor-in-chief, Erik Slavin, and publisher, Max Lederer, on Aug. 21.

Bath is still employed by the paper.

You can’t manufacture credibility

Unlike most shuttered or shrunken news outlets whose advertising model was upended by the internet, Stars and Stripes has long been shielded from market forces thanks to a subsidy from the Department of Defense that covers roughly half its budget.

While this funding could be seen as anathema to journalistic independence, the U.S. government has mandated since the 1950s that the paper have editorial freedom.

Even before then, U.S. military leaders protected the newspaper’s independence. Gen. John J. Pershing, who commanded the American Expeditionary Forces in Europe during World War I, and Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, who commanded Allied forces in Europe during World War II, each ordered military commanders not to interfere with the newspaper. So did Navy Adm. John S. McCain Jr., father of the late Sen. John McCain and the commander‐in‐chief of U.S. Pacific Command during the Vietnam War.

That’s not what’s happening under the Trump administration.

In March 2026, the Pentagon instituted new guidelines requiring that Stripes content be “consistent with good order and discipline of the military.” The following month, the department fired Jacqueline Smith, the newspaper’s ombudsman charged with protecting its editorial independence.

Chief Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell described the moves as part of an effort to “refocus” the outlet away from “woke distractions that siphon morale.”

There’s always been a struggle between military leaders who want to control the reporting at Stripes and those who recognize that freedom of the press is exactly the kind of right that the U.S. military fights for.

Many current and former military commanders see a real benefit in the outlet’s editorial independence because of the values it communicates and the information it provides

Retired Army Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling is one such supporter. In an Aug. 25, 2026, article in The Bulwark website, he described the ways in which he relied on the newspaper’s reporting when he was a commander in Europe.

“Every major military command has an extensive communications apparatus,” Hertling wrote, “but none of those organizations can manufacture credibility. Credibility comes from readers believing that when something goes wrong, somebody will tell them. That’s why Stripes’ early reporting on the USS Abraham Lincoln was so important.”

Public media only works with no strings attached

On Aug. 27, the fired publisher, editor and reporter filed a lawsuit against Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell, the Defense Department, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and another public affairs official, Andrew Brey, alleging that they were fired in retaliation for news coverage that was unflattering to the military. The suit argues that this violated both their protected rights to free speech and Department of Defense policies and regulations.

The department hasn’t specifically responded to the allegations, but it did agree to a one-week reprieve of paid administrative leave as a federal judge considers the lawsuit.

The three journalists are being represented by the same legal team that represents the fired former employees of Voice of America, another government-funded news source that the Trump administration attempted to dismantle in 2025. Like Stripes, Voice of America received government funding even as it sometimes reported unfavorably on the government. And like journalists at Stripes, Voice of America reporters have died doing their jobs.

But despite the Trump White House’s unrelenting attacks on public, nonprofit and for-profit media outlets, the government funding model is having some success at the state level. The organization Rebuild Local News estimates that states will spend US$74 million supporting local journalism in 2026 via fellowships, media training, tax credits and more.

While the group’s leaders say these initiatives demand constant scrutiny to ensure there’s no creeping government interference or political strings attached to the funds, many supporters of local journalism see promise in this model. Government funding for independent media has long existed in Europe, Australia, New Zealand and elsewhere. Some of these outlets are widely trusted by the public.

But that trust doesn’t come easily. It requires political and military leaders to repeatedly reaffirm the ideal of a free and independent press — even when the coverage doesn’t go their way.

The Trust has been in discussions with the Vermont-based company about a possible acquisition for several months, according to Tom Wiley, the Trust’s CEO. Majority owner Bob Miller and minority owners Judy Kearns and Biddle Duke approached the Trust “looking for a way to ensure that VTCNG continued to serve its vital community role,” Wiley said.

“Establishing a sustainable future for our community newspapers has been our priority for several years,” the owners said in a statement. “By selling these publications to the National Trust, not only can they survive but there will be investment in expanding coverage to thrive in a climate where local news is so important and increasingly difficult to find.”

VTCNG currently operates “near breakeven,” according to Wiley, and “market forces have increasingly challenged the group’s financial performance.” The announcement states the Trust is paying a “nominal fee” to acquire the newspapers and it’d be accurate to describe the acquisition as “closer to a donation,” Wiley confirmed. The Trust plans to retain the entire VTCNG team, which includes 15 full-time and two part-time employees. Bill Stille, who has leadership experience at newspapers including The Buffalo News and The Columbus Dispatch, will serve as a transition and transformation adviser for the VTCNG team, where his remit will include identifying opportunities to strengthen partnerships and establish collaborations across the state.

The Trust relies on philanthropy but “more than 80% of revenue across the National Trust is earned through activities like subscriptions, advertising, commercial printing and events,” according to Wiley. None of the Trust’s state subsidiaries are yet profitable.

Some of the Trust’s acquisitions moved into the red under its ownership, as Corey Hutchins and Nieman Lab have previously reported. Last year, the Trust sold the majority of its Colorado newspapers to Arizona-based Times Media Group in a move its leaders said would allow it to double down on serving the seven communities where it still has a presence. At the time, chief growth officer Will Nelligan described the remaining communities the Trust serves in Colorado as “rural places and small cities where a for-profit operator wouldn’t go and where a traditional non-profit news model can’t work.”

In Vermont, the Trust will join a news ecosystem that includes the statewide nonprofit news pioneer VTDigger, which has faced turnover and financial losses of its own, as The Boston Globe reported this spring.

“Each state is unique, as is our role in them,” Wiley said. “We are eager to be part of what we view as a robust, collaborative news ecosystem in Vermont.”

In July, the Trust expanded its Georgia portfolio by acquiring two McClatchy newspapers, the Columbus Ledger-Enquirer and The Macon Telegraph (which shares a coverage area with the Trust’s startup, The Macon Melody).

Being approached by owners hoping to find a solid steward for their community newspapers — as the Trust was in Vermont — is not an uncommon phenomenon. The Trust regularly hears from newspaper owners and community leaders across the country, Wiley said.

“We will expand when we see a financially responsible way to serve our mission of driving the reach and impact of local journalism,” he said. “That includes instances when there will be a continued reduction in local news access or pending closure resulting in news deserts.”

Read more in the Trust’s announcement here.

Updated to attribute comments from the National Trust via a spokesperson to CEO Tom Wiley.

Trump’s power over what the federal government calls bodies of water seems near total. But he can’t control what the news media calls them. (Though he certainly tried with the Associated Press last time.)

Last October, I checked in to see how much success Trump had had getting “Gulf of America” into news copy. The answer: Not much, outside MAGA media.

And with his attention turning again to geography, I thought I’d check in to see if more outlets had been convinced. The answer: Nope. The opposite, in fact — “Gulf of Mexico” is increasing its lead.

I used Media Cloud to find all mentions of “Gulf of Mexico,” “Gulf of America,” or both in news stories between Feb. 1, 2025 and Aug. 26, 2026 — the day before “Lake America” was born. I looked at three different groups of news outlets, as defined by Media Cloud:

• 247 major national news outlets — think The New York Times, CBS News, the Chicago Tribune, TMZ, and Rolling Stone. (But this isn’t just the so-called “MSM” — a sprinkling of partisan sites like Breitbart and AlterNet also make the list.)
• 572 sites that Democrats tweet about more than average (and which thus likely have more Democratic readers) — a mix of explicitly liberal publications (The Nation, Mother Jones), mainstream outlets (The Boston Globe, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette), and magazines and magazine-like sites (Vogue, Pitchfork).
• 406 sites that Republicans tweet about more than average (and which thus likely have more Republican readers) — a list that includes Fox News, The Gateway Pundit, and The Federalist, but also less partisan outlets like the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, the Orange County Register, and a ton of local TV stations.

For each group, I added up how many times each category of outlet used only “Gulf of Mexico” and only “Gulf of America” in a story over each rolling 28-day period. (I’m not counting stories that use both, which are mostly stories about the renaming controversy.) Then I calculated the ratio of “Mexico” to “America” for each period and charted them below. (Note that the Y-axis is logarithmic. I tried using a linear scale, but it would have made the chart very, very tall.)

Three things stand out. First, “Gulf of Mexico” is overwhelmingly the more popular term, across all three of the groups.

Second, “Gulf of Mexico” is getting more popular over time, not less. When I last wrote in October, national outlets were producing roughly 3.75× as many GoM-only stories as GoA-only ones. By August 26, the day before “Lake America,” that ratio was about 7.2×. And the outlets that Democrats disproportionately favor have basically eliminated “Gulf of America” entirely — reaching a ratio of 69 “Mexicos” for every 1 “America” at its peak in late July.

If you run LOESS regressions on each group to determine the smoothed trend line across the entire timespan, you get this:

• National outlets go from using “Mexico” 1.24× as much as “America” to using it 7.23×.
• Democrat-favored outlets go from 2.51× to 26.89×.
• Republican-favored outlets go from 0.58× — that is, using GoA 72% more than GoM — to using GoM 3.13× as much as GoA.

Third, even the news sites that Republicans favor couldn’t quite accept “Gulf of America.” They could only stick with favoring GoA over GoM until around April 15 of last year — less than three months after Trump’s executive order. They’ve been on Team Mexico ever since, other than handful of days sprinkled in May and September 2025.

But categories are one thing — how about individual news sites? Here’s a (sortable) chart answering that question for the 292 sites that used either “Gulf of Mexico” or “Gulf of America” at least 10 times in this period. Click the filters to look at only Dem-favored, only GOP-favored, or all outlets, and sort the table by either GoA share or GoM share.

Of the 123 Republican-favored sites in this list, only 15 used “Gulf of America” solo in more than 50% of stories. (Fox Business, with 83% GoA, is the most loyal.)

In contrast, of the 117 Democrat-favored sites that published at least 10 stories mentioning the Gulf, 30 have never mentioned “Gulf of America,” even once. And among all 292 outlets, of all stripes, 157 used “Gulf of America” solo in less than 10% of stories.

All of which suggests that, while Donald Trump can get Google and Apple to follow orders, getting any media uptake of “Lake America” outside MAGA outlets will be a struggle.

The filing says the DOJ’s decision to intervene is an attempt to ensure that American AI companies remain “competitive” and are free to “develop a robust AI industry.”

The filing makes grand pronouncements about the harms that could come from a ruling in favor of The New York Times and the other plaintiffs in the news industry. A court finding that training large language models on copyrighted material isn’t covered by “fair use,” the DOJ says, would “threaten national security,” “give a competitive advantage to foreign adversaries,” and thwart “creative and scientific progress while hindering American prosperity.”

“The Administration is siding with a handful of trillion-dollar companies at the expense of the countless American creators whose work they stole,” said Graham James, a spokesperson for the Times, in a statement. “Both AI and creators can thrive — AI companies simply need to pay fairly for the content that makes their products possible, as copyright law requires.”

“If the administration’s position was accepted, it would result in an unprecedented, uncompensated transfer of IP rights from news organizations to tech companies,” said Matt Topic, a lawyer at Loevy & Loevy who is representing The Intercept in the case.

In its review of case law, the Trump administration largely reproduces a reading of “fair use” that has been put forward in court by many of the biggest AI players, including OpenAI. It argues that LLM development is “transformative,” meaning that the model and its outputs are different enough from original news articles and other content ingested from new publishers to constitute something “new,” or create a different “utility” than the original works.

OpenAI’s models aren’t trying to “directly entertain or educate” the way a Times article does, the administration argues, but are instead performing tasks like writing, translating, and solving problems.

The filing acknowledges the Times’ claim that ChatGPT has been used to reproduce the Times’ copyright material in its entirety. But it dismisses that concern as irrelevant, arguing that the litigation concerns the training of LLMs, not their outputs, and that the models’ most common uses should be separated from “how persons might hypothetically or anomalously” use ChatGPT.

The filing also cites the Times’ own LLM use as a reason to side with OpenAI in the case, arguing that LLMs “help people, including those working in creative fields, make things and get things done.”

I’ve reported for Nieman Lab on how the Times has used LLMs in Pulitzer-winning investigations and to source leads for beat reporters. Sometimes, the newsroom has used GPT models. The filing, however, cites and quotes a Futurism article, arguing that it shows “authors at the New York Times itself are using LLMs to help them ‘conceptualize and edit’ articles.”

That phrase from Futurism’s story actually references a controversy earlier this year when a freelance contributor used AI to structure and edit her first draft of a “Modern Love” column. The Times requires substantial AI use to be disclosed to readers, even from freelancers, but no disclosure appeared in that column and it’s unclear if the freelancer’s editors knew about her AI use before the column was published. It’s not a particularly compelling argument for how the Times is reliant on AI.

The DOJ also argues that a ruling in favor of The New York Times would hurt small and independent news publishers. Underresourced newsrooms can use LLMs “to compete,” the filing says — “by, for example, using an LLM to generate an image to accompany an article — which otherwise might require a photographer or license” or by “directing users to dissenting sources that offer contrary information.” (The Los Angeles Times famously did just that last year when it published an AI-generated counter perspective on the Klu Klux Klan beneath an opinion column.)

Another argument in the filing is that if OpenAI loses, all AI companies would need to pay licensing fees, disproportionately benefiting legacy media outlets due to “the sheer volume of their written publications.”

“It is not in the public’s interest for the largest technology companies to have an oligopoly on LLM training due to licensing entry barriers that function primarily as large subsidies for old mainstream media companies,” the DOJ claims.

It’s an odd position to take. Yes, anyone following the current state of AI licensing deals would tell you that small news publishers have barely seen a dime from OpenAI, even though much of their content has still been scraped to train LLMs. In many other countries, OpenAI has only signed deals with one of the largest news organizations in the country, leaving the rest behind. But legal precedents requiring payment for content could create leverage and new revenue streams for small publishers, since they have rarely been invited to the table to date.

Few small and nonprofit news organizations are suing OpenAI because litigation is so expensive. Many are concerned with copyright violations, but have let the Times take the lead on setting legal precedent as the most resourced newsroom in the U.S. (The Times has spent more than $30 million on AI-related litigation.)

“[The lawsuit] is not simply moral, it’s for the ultimate sustainability of these news organizations and these unique voices,” David Barlow, general counsel for The Intercept, another plaintiff in the Times case, told me in March 2024. “The principle of being able to take content without compensation is critically important to us — and so is our survivability. They go hand in hand.”

After being laid off in May 2025 from The Daily Dot, along with much of the news staff, Covucci decided to unleash his prodigious public records skills on the multi-billion-dollar world of college football. Many of the top programs, after all, are housed at public institutions subject to the Freedom of Information Act. His newsletter, FOIAball, has garnered roughly 7,500 subscribers, including 420 paid subscribers, in its first year. Subscriptions are $70/year or $7/month.

FOIAball has a rollicking, confiding, they-don’t-want-you-to-know energy — whether its subject is federal surveillance at college football games or the Spotify playlist Dianna Russini (allegedly) made for Mike Vrabel or how one university used a friendly charity to get tax-free NIL money or Pitbull failing to deliver a fight song commissioned by Florida International University.

Covucci got his start “in the blogging days” writing five or six times a day for the men’s humor site BroBible, where he also FOIAed the contents of Osama Bin Laden’s porn stash. His writing voice, as he puts it, remains “a little trolly” and “a bit mischievous.”

“This stuff is interesting and fun. You’re talking about really rich people. You’re talking about exciting football teams. You’re talking about big institutions and government and surveillance and all sorts of silly things,” Covucci said. “I get why some larger institutions want to be buttoned up, but I wish there could be more energy in media. This stuff is absurd. It would be silly for me to not cover it in that way.”

“I don’t want to say it’s, like, a totally new style of writing, but I haven’t seen too many people blending investigative reporting and personal essays,” he added.

Some of the sillier stuff includes which college team spent the most on fireworks in 2025, urinal algorithms, and whether Brutus, Goldy, Sparty, or The Duck (all mascots) made the most in booking fees. Covucci prides himself on each issue containing original reporting.

For now, though FOIAball uses “we” on its about page, it’s the royal we. FOIAball remains a one-man newsroom. More subscribers could mean hiring. With extra hands, Covucci said, he’d like to cover college basketball and Olympic sports. But making a living is the goal for now. Covucci aims to double his current number of paid subscribers in the next year.

Building FOIAball as a business feels like running “both a sales operation and a nonprofit” at the same time, Covucci said. He described a frustrating and fundamental tension with paywalls: He needs readers to pony up because they’ve fallen in love with FOIAball, but how will they if all the best content goes behind a paywall? Although the number of subscribers has steadily risen, Covucci hasn’t found a silver bullet for getting people to open their wallets. Right now, he mixes hard paywalls with softer “institutional support” asks.

“So much of it is trial and error,” Covucci conceded.

While hard paywalls can work when a story goes viral (see: this Aaron Rodgers post on X), subscriptions from a single big story tend to be “soft” and “drop off,” Covucci said.

Instead, he’s found direct, transparent appeals to readers convert better than hard paywalls on their own. One example from February, when he had 165 paid subscribers:

Normally, I show up in your inbox and tell you something you don’t know. That’s what great journalism is. Today, I’m doing the opposite. I’m going to tell you something you already know.

Paywalls don’t really work.

Covucci compared two scoops from the previous week and how they affected his subscription numbers. “Just one person” subscribed to read a paywalled report, while three paid on a free-to-read scoop. He leveled with his readers:

Building a paid subscriber base is a grind. I don’t mean that it is a drag or a pain. Just that it is a long process over time. There is no hack. I can’t publish one huge scoop that makes 200 people give me money. A good story earns two; the next story doesn’t. The scoop after that maybe gets one. The next zero. […]

What makes people really pay isn’t any one piece. It’s them falling in love with what they are reading. Believing in the mission. Caring about the coverage. Appreciating the voice and style and breadth. They want to ensure the publication stays afloat. Maybe even thrive.

I sincerely hope those thoughts have crossed your mind.

The email (which also included a discount on subscriptions) was a success. Generally, Covucci said, a hard paywall has been less effective than catching a nonpaying reader “at the right point,” after they’ve been reading for a while, and making a direct, personal ask to support the thing they already like. More recently he’s also been experimenting with “catchy, clicky text” in front of the paywall instead of paywalling the entire post. In both cases, beating the bystander effect is key.

“When readers see paywalls, I think they assume, ‘Oh yeah, plenty of people click through that, so I don’t have to,’” Covucci said. He’s done the same. “I think we’re all guilty of [thinking], ‘Someone else will do this.’ And not just in supporting media, but in lots of things.”

Later this month, Covucci will be announced as part of the next class of the Beehiiv Media Collective. Being in the collective means he won’t have to pay the roughly $120/month to the platform and will get other perks, including legal help and mentorship.

Covucci very diplomatically praised all FOIA officers when asked about securing the public records that serve as the backbone of his reporting. Still, some records have proven easier to acquire than others. Michigan State? Prompt and professional with requests. Less than 100 miles away at Michigan? Covucci said he has requests that are well over a year old still waiting to be fulfilled. Covucci said universities in Texas, Florida, and South Carolina are among the best at fulfilling requests as required by the law.

“I have found that southern conservative states are actually better at public records than northern liberal states,” Covucci said. “My theory is whereas liberal-leaning states think FOIA is great in practice, they sort of love the government and don’t want people to be bashing it, whereas conservative states are like ‘Here, take these government papers. We hate this thing. It’s probably wasting our money.'”

A decade ago, Georgia changed its public records procedure after the University of Georgia’s head football coach visited legislators and answered questions about the competitive disadvantages public records could pose. (Colleges in the state can now wait 90 days to respond to public records requests related to athletics.)

“I try to be understanding because it is a funky situation where these big, practically professional sports teams have just been slapped to the side of public institutions,” Covucci said. “I understand that it’s a bizarre situation, which is why I do it. I find the whole thing very fascinating.”

Using a combination of AI tools, custom code, and qualitative interviews, the researchers — Carrie Brown, Tara George, and Yi Luo — looked at metrics like relevance to New Jersey audiences, content types, and general communication approach to make a (delightfully highway-themed) interactive report. A few standout findings:

• About half (49.8%) of posts were highly specific to New Jersey. This, the authors write, “suggests these creators are making deliberate choices about what to cover, and much of it overlaps with the kind of community-level reporting that traditional news outlets have reduced.”
• Only about 1 in 4 posts (a combined 24.4%) were classified as news, opinion, or educational content. The most prevalent content types were, perhaps unsurprisingly, “lifestyle” (31.8%) followed by “promotion” (24.2%). (Content categories were a slight point of contention; the AI models generally agreed on categories, but human coders sometimes didn’t, which perhaps speaks to the blurriness of the types of things news influencers tend to post about.)
• The majority of influencers studied don’t see themselves as journalists, even if they cover things that local papers might have covered in the past, like sports, local restaurants, or community events. They don’t always fill the reporting gap left behind by local newspapers. “Most influencers produce opinion and commentary content rather than original investigative reporting,” the authors write. “They tend to react to and contextualize existing news rather than break stories — functioning as information brokers who amplify, curate, and add local perspective to coverage originating elsewhere. Attribution to the original sources is inconsistent.”
• Monetization is all over the place. “A minority of influencers support themselves entirely through content creation; others earn little or nothing from it,” the authors write. “Revenue sources include brand sponsorships, platform creator funds, affiliate marketing, and event fees — but creators described them as unstable and unpredictable.”
• Influencers have to put much more work into community management and audience engagement than traditional journalists do. Political influencers in particular have to deal with trolls, though they also have audience members who rise to their defense. Ambiguity, one journalist-influencer told the researchers, actually helps build trust.

You can find the full report here.

“The plan is to do long-term projects, uncovering misdeeds in government, business and organizations,” Richard Pérez-Peña wrote. “Nothing quite like it has been attempted, and despite having a lot going for it, Pro Publica will be something of an experiment, inventing its practices by trial and error. It remains to be seen how well it can attract talent and win the cooperation of the mainstream media.”

Nearly 20 years later, ProPublica is as remarkable a success story as we’ve seen in digital journalism. After launching with about 20 staffers, it expects to hit 250 this year. And one of its most remarkable transitions during that time is its growing interest in local news. What was once resolutely an Acela-corridor newsroom now has reporters in 20 states, plus structured partnerships with more than 20 local newsrooms, from Anchorage to Tucson, Tulsa to Burlington.

The site’s latest expansion is to California. In May, it announced a new California “investigative reporting hub” — ProPublica’s sixth — and it just named Bernice Yeung to run it. The longtime ProPublican who oversees its local initiatives is Charles Ornstein. He’s spent the past decade building its local work from a single site in Illinois to something that — with California now covered — very nearly covers the entire Lower 48. I spoke with Ornstein about the new operation out west, how ProPublica thinks about its increasingly scattered newsroom, and how it focuses on making local stories resonate nationally. Here’s a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.

So in late 2016, we announced the start of ProPublica Illinois. In 2017, we announced the start of the Local Reporting Network. That was really our first effort to say we have a role to play in this ecosystem. So fast forward to now, and we have 21 active partnerships through the Local Reporting Network. And with the addition of California, we will have 33 reporters on staff in 20 states who are covering local issues. And the reason that’s important, from my perspective, is that these are people who are sending their kids to school in those states. They’re worshiping in those states. They’re going to the grocery store in those states. They’re watching political ads in those states. They understand those states — they’re not parachuting into them. And I think that that gives us real visibility into what’s going on in lots and lots of different places.

The last time you and I talked, we were talking about the 50 State Initiative. As of October, we will be up to 30 states within that — so we have 20 more to go. And we want to pick those 20 and execute in those.

Part of working in this area and local journalism specifically is that you don’t know how the local ecosystem is going to change. And I think part of our role will be in response to what happens. But I also think we’re not just waiting for things to happen to do things on our own. We have a lot of exciting initiatives underway, and I think the key is to execute on them.

Assembly Bill 2222, known as the Community Newsroom Employment and Workforce Sustainability Act, creates refundable tax credits for the state’s news outlets based on the number of journalists they employ. After passing the State Senate on Sunday night, it passed the Assembly with a supermajority of at least 54 votes and will be sent to Gov. Gavin Newsom to be signed into law. The program will be funded by limiting California’s corporate tax deductions for executive compensation above $1 million and redirecting a portion of the revenue to local journalism.

Rebuild Local News, the nonprofit sponsoring the bill, explains the bill:

The Community NEWS Act creates refundable tax credits for employing full-time and part-time journalists and sole-proprietor local news providers. (“Refundable” means that credits in excess of an organization’s tax liability are paid in cash, like a grant.) The job retention credit is worth $20,000 per journalist for up to five positions, plus $15,000 per every additional journalist. Part-time journalist positions would be supported with $7,500 credits. A $15,000 “new hire” credit would be awarded to news organizations that expand journalist headcount, which can be stacked on top of the retention credits.

For example: A nonprofit community news website with three full-time news staffers covering the Central Valley would be eligible for $60,000 a year under this program. If the publication hired one more reporter — or converted a freelancer or part-time staffer into a full-time editorial employee — the publication would earn $95,000 in benefits.

In other words, “if you hire more people, you get more money,” Matt Pearce, Rebuild Local News’s director of policy, said on Monday. “If you lay people off, you get less money. If you don’t employ anyone, you don’t get anything.”

“California has, in recent years, been enacting several policies to support local news outlets — [like] the Berkeley Local News Fellowship program, the Propel Initiative, and AB 1511, which directs more advertising to community and ethnic media,” Pearce said. “The exciting thing about AB 2222 is that if it’s enacted, it becomes a bedrock for those other policies to multiply their benefits.”

AB 2222 follows the Illinois Local Journalism Sustainability Tax Incentive Program, which was enacted in 2025 to support local journalism in the state. In its first year, Illinois news outlets claimed $4 million in tax credits. New York allocated $90 million of its 2025 budget to local news payroll tax credits.  Earlier this year, New Mexico enacted the Local Journalist Employment Tax Credit, through which qualifying news outlets can claim up to 30% of a journalist’s wages in tax credits.

“Policymakers like the journalist employment subsidy partially because it’s very clear, and has a basic sound economic principle behind it: If there’s not enough local news, you can have more of it if you make it cheaper to produce local news by employing journalists,” Pearce told Sophie Culpepper in July. “Simultaneously, it is a policy that can reach across many different types of media outlets and business models in a transparent and broad way.”

The op-ed itself is about whether the Treasury Department should continue trying to lower long-term bond yields. (Druckenmiller says no.) The piece has a few telltale signs of being produced by AI. (“This wasn’t liquidity management, it was price management.” “If the 30-year must trade at 5.5% to clear, that isn’t a crisis. It is an invoice.”) NOTUS reporter Jeff Stein rang him up to ask and Druckenmiller acknowledged it.

Now, in most cases of that-smells-like-AI discourse, this is the moment where the writer offers some combination of denial, explanation, and apology — and the piece gets an editor’s note or taken down altogether. What made this episode different is that neither Druckenmiller nor Journal editorial page editor Paul Gigot offered any regrets or shame. “I write everything using AI now for the same reason I use a calculator when I do math problems,” Druckenmiller said.

“AI is a fact of modern life…nobody can doubt that his op-ed is his genuine opinion,” Gigot said. In a follow-up column, Gigot said there was no need to disclose Druckenmiller’s AI use, arguing that “it wouldn’t be honest for me to grandstand that our contributors never use a tool like AI. Mr. Druckenmiller’s sin against the media pharisees was admitting its use.”

Lots of op-eds, he noted, are actually written by PR staffers rather than the name in the byline, much the way we accept that politicians employ speechwriters — how different is AI? (New York Focus ran 54 recent op-eds from New York politicians through the AI detection tool Pangram. The majority of them were flagged for having at least some AI-generated text.)

I wanted to see if other U.S. newspapers were following the Journal’s lead in blessing the use of AI in opinion pieces. I reached out to editors at 24 prominent newspapers, and none that I heard from were willing to follow Gigot down that path. There were slight distinctions around how aggressively different papers police AI use — for example, proactively asking all contributors to state that they haven’t used AI versus only asking when a piece smells fishy. But most echoed the San Francisco Chronicle’s Matthew Fleischer: “Our audience is paying for the words and thoughts of human beings.”

The Oregonian

Helen Jung, opinion editor:

We don’t have a policy on AI for opinion submissions yet, though I’m working on one…But broadly, our goal is to publish op-eds written by local community members that advance their personal opinions and arguments on issues specific to Oregon. So, I don’t see an AI-generated response to a prompt as meeting that standard.

I have fed submissions through AI detectors, though I don’t find them super reliable. I know in some cases, an author has used AI to polish a piece, though the research, thought process and writing was theirs (according to them). But generally, each op-ed that I select for publication goes through at least a couple back-and-forth exchanges of edits and revisions between the author and me, so pieces can and do change significantly at times.

I think one thing we’ll need to grapple with in developing a policy is this: Businesses, nonprofits and governmental agencies very frequently have paid communications staffers who write op-eds on behalf of the organization’s leaders. We don’t have an issue with that. So I feel like it’s unfair to prohibit everyday community members from using a tool to improve what they have written (though again, not to generate content).

I will say that letters to the editor don’t get the same editing attention that op-eds do, although I have a freelance editor who fact-checks the letters and works with authors when she makes significant edits. The need for consistency is another reason we should get that policy together sooner than later.

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Brandon McGinley, assistant managing editor for opinion and community:

I should preface my remarks by saying that the Post-Gazette no longer has an opinion section. While I did serve as Editorial Page Editor from Aug 2023 to May 2026, upon acquisition by the Venetoulis Institute for Local Journalism (owner of the Baltimore Banner), the PG’s opinion pages were discontinued…

With that being said, I’m happy to let you know how we used to handle the question of AI composition. (I should also note that by “we,” I’m referring to a team of 2, including me, who pushed out a ton of content.) The short answer is that if we sussed out AI usage in composition, we wouldn’t take the piece.

However, given the limitations imposed by our skeleton team, we did not proactively ask contributors about their AI use. That might be different now, if we still ran op-eds, because the tech and its adoption have advanced so quickly that AI composition is less obvious to the naked eye and more and more people use it as a matter of course. But until May, we relied on our gut.

The Denver Post

Megan Schrader, editor of the editorial pages:

The Denver Post has a policy that we do not publish columns or letters to the editor that were written by artificial intelligence. The piece must be original to the author and exclusive to us for it to be considered. Generally, I reject guest commentary submissions that read like they were written by AI. If someone has pre-arranged to write on a specific subject for me and I suspect the submission was written by AI, I ask directly before we publish it. We also use Grammarly’s AI detector to screen the letters to the editor and columns. I am certain, despite these efforts, that we have published AI-written material unknowingly, but we try to prevent it.

We have run one or two letters in the past where we asked the letter writer to disclose that AI wrote the response. The letter writer explained the prompt they used and which service they used and then included a small portion of the response in quotes and attributed it to ChatGPT. I am not sure if I would do this again going forward, and I definitely would not do it for a full column submission.

We are looking at making certain these policies are clear and easily available on our website.

San Francisco Chronicle

Matthew Fleischer, editorial page editor:

Our online submission form for op-eds asks all writers to disclose any use of AI. As for how we communicate what we learn from that prompt to the public: We’re OK with AI research, fact-checking and basic copy editing and do not require that to be disclosed.

We have thus far not run a piece where someone has disclosed AI use — or has obviously used AI without disclosing — for the writing of a piece. I suppose someone could have submitted something and not disclosed. Anecdotally, however, AI Opinion pieces are almost always pretty bad and easy to spot. I’m loathe to explain the giveaways, because the people who submit these pieces without disclosing will know how they’ve been caught and adjust their practices.

So, I don’t think we’ve been fooled. But it’s possible.

We would not knowingly run a piece written by AI. If the writer used AI for certain parts of the piece, we would ask them to rewrite in their own words.

My general view is that our audience is paying for the words and thoughts of human beings. Where AI can help people express their own ideas more accurately that’s great. Argumentation should have a factual basis and AI is a useful tool for both fact-checking and finding primary source materials that strengthen rhetoric. But the human writing of a piece — with all the quirks and flaws that can come with it — is an essential part of the package we provide to our readers.

Los Angeles Times

Philip Gray, op-ed editor:

The Los Angeles Times embraces artificial intelligence as a research and reporting tool, but not for generating content. We are not OK with outside contributors submitting AI-generated text.

Our guidelines online for submitting an op-ed state that submissions should not include AI-generated text. It is not a regular topic of discussion during the back and forth of the editing process.

If we knew that a submission that we were editing included AI-generated text, our response would be to remedy that, not simply to disclose it to readers. We would either decline the submission or work with the sender to excise any AI-generated portions of the piece.

USA Today

A USA Today Co. corporate spokesperson:

You can find our opinion submission guidelines here, which state: “We do not accept submissions that include content generated by artificial intelligence (AI) and language learning models (LLMs).”

As a matter of policy, we do not accept submissions written with any assistance beyond basic spelling and grammar checking tools. Our reviewers are trained to flag submissions potentially written using AI in order to comply with the policy.

Atlanta Journal-Constitution

David Plazas, opinion editor:

We post our AJC op-ed guidelines on our website. One of the bullet points says this: “Essays must be originally written by the author, not AI, and must be exclusive to the AJC.” So, we want authors to write their original thoughts and not employ AI to pen them.

Our standards policies require us to disclose use of AI. Since I arrived in May 2025, I have not had to do that and have not knowingly published any essay written by AI.

Chicago Tribune

Chris Jones, editorial page editor:

[Are you okay with a contributor using AI in the writing or editing of an opinion piece?]

No. Not at this juncture. We are looking for human opinions, crafted and honed by humans. Period.

[Do you routinely ask contributors if they’ve used AI? Only when a piece seems unusually AI-like? Or not at all?]

They attest in our agreement with them that they did not use AI. When a piece seems unusually AI-like, we use software to try and figure that out.

Here are a few other metro newspapers that make a ban on AI usage in op-eds explicit on their websites:

The Boston Globe: Submissions must “not be created using Artificial Intelligence (spell check, punctuation, and grammar suggestions built into Google Docs or Microsoft Word are fine, but using AI tools to generate the content of the submission, explain ideas, create a draft, make writing or tone suggestions, and/or suggest alternate phrasing or word choices is not).”

The Philadelphia Inquirer: “A few other things that we don’t accept…items written by or with the assistance of large language models or other artificial intelligence programs.”

The Seattle Times: “We do not accept AI-generated op-eds.”

Kansas City Star: “Please do not use artificial intelligence to generate the text of your letter.”

The New York Times: “All writing and visuals that freelancers submit to The Times must be the product of human creativity and craft, and all submissions must consist solely of their original reporting, writing and other work…Freelance contributors must not submit any material for publication that contains content generated, modified or enhanced by [generative AI] tools, or that has been input into these tools.”

An MS NOW memo reported by Semafor offers new details on the subscription offering.

On Sept. 9, the network plans to launch a paid membership program “aimed at engaging its existing ‘super fans,’ and offering ways to reach and monetize new audiences that are not everyday cable news viewers,” Semafor’s Max Tani reported on Wednesday. MS NOW president Rebecca Kutler framed the membership program as the first in a suite of planned direct-to-consumer offerings.

MS NOW was renamed after NBCUniversal split off the progressive network and other cable networks into a separate company called Versant. Now, it joins networks from CNN to Fox News to its former sibling NBC News in making digital audiences and monetization a priority as audiences and revenue from TV steadily decline. In 2024, two years after launching and shuttering its streaming platform, CNN put up a paywall ($3.99 a month or $29.99 a year for “basic,” and $6.99/month or $69.99/year for “all access”). NBC News has done the same ($5.99 a month, or $59.99 a year), while Fox News offers subscriptions to its streaming platform Fox Nation for $8.99/month or $71.49/year. CNBC, a part of Versant, is also rolling out its own premium consumer product.

The MS NOW membership will be priced at $7.99 a month, or $79.99 per year, and will “offer perks like members-only content verticals, opportunities for subscribers to interact with the network’s personalities, community features for members to engage with each other, and a 24/7 network feed,” Tani wrote. He added that MS NOW “is leaning more into the parasocial relationship its fans feel with its journalists,” including with live events.

The membership program is based on online survey responses and interviews with 18,000 network viewers, according to Tani. MS NOW told him they found “the network’s fans felt the news media ecosystem was too fragmented, and wanted to get news in one place.” They also found target audiences “wanted online spaces to interact with people they agreed with” and “expressed excitement at the possibility of interacting with the platform’s journalists and personalities.” Kutler noted that the network sees little overlap between its TV viewership and the current audience for its free online content.

Read more in Semafor here.

Backstory, an experimental tool from Google’s AI research lab, Google DeepMind, is helping India Today sort through this stream of slop, scams, and disinformation.

After uploading an image and entering a basic question, Backstory can automatically run checks to determine whether the image is AI-generated, whether it shows signs of manipulation, and where else the image has appeared throughout its lifetime on the internet. Built on top of Google’s Gemini family of large language models (LLMs), Backstory also leans on AI agents to decide which authentication tools it will use and in what order it will use them. The final output is an AI-generated report summarizing what Backstory found out about the image, with citations, as well as a log of the steps it took along the way.

At India Today, Backstory is primarily used to take the first pass on fact-checking a piece of content, speeding up the beginning of the verification workflow.

“On our team, almost everybody uses Backstory in combination with other things. We use it as a quick reference — it gives you some context, it gives you some direction,” said Bal Krishna, who leads the fact-checking team. “It is doing all the work you might have done with five different tools, five different logins, in the same place. That’s the beauty of it.”

In the past, reporters at India Today might have needed to separately run an image through an AI image detector, conduct a reverse image search, and then stitch together a timeline of its historical appearances. Backstory will do all those things at once and, for now, it is entirely free to use.

“The unique value add for Backstory is that there are a number of bites at the apple,” said Zoe Darmé, a product manager for Frontier AI Research, the team at DeepMind building the tool. “A lot of times when we’re talking about looking at an image, trying to understand it in context, people are focusing on one part of the chain. Backstory is really trying to pull it all together into a single user experience.”

Backstory is still only available through Google’s Trusted Testers Program, but India Today’s fact-checkers are among the thousands of journalists, OSINT experts, librarians, and information literacy researchers Google has brought on to trial the tool. The team is currently collecting feedback from this group to make improvements.

That’s already a departure from the many AI authentication tools built without adequate input from journalists, according to a report published in July by Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy.

Many other commercial AI detections tools don’t take into account more nuanced forms of manipulation — like divorcing a photograph from its original context — that journalists encounter all the time. A lot of these tools also output percent confidence ratings. For example, they might spit out an 80% likelihood that an image is AI-generated. These ratings are a “black box” with little clarity provided on how ratings are decided or ways to communicate those numbers to readers, according to the report.

Darmé told me she thinks of journalists as Backstory’s core users, but does hope to make the tool more widely available in the future. Even if Backstory launched publicly, she says it will most likely appeal to a niche audience invested in the nuances of image verification, and looking to answer more than the binary question of whether an image is “real” or “fake.”

According to Mike Caulfield, a digital literacy expert and creator of the SIFT method, building for this niche might be even more impactful than building a universal tool for anyone on the internet.

“Information environments work in this very intermediated way, where what actually has the most impact on an information environment is to help the helpers,” Caulfield told me, explaining that vetted information flows out from trusted sources, including journalists and fact-checkers, but also more casual hobbyists he calls the “family fact-checker.”

Caulfield describes Backstory as filling a hole in the market by building for these helpers. He notes that not every beat reporter who needs to verify an image is going to have subscriptions to high-quality AI detection tools, or the expertise to use the dozen of tools in an OSINT specialist’s toolbox.

“There hasn’t really been a tool for something in between the general user and that highly specialized user; between Bob from Peoria [Illinois] — not to pick on Peoria — and Craig Silverman,” said Caulfield, name-checking the disinformation expert and investigative journalist. “This is a tool that really hits that underserved middle.”

As part of its AI detection features, Backstory can run a tool call for SynthID — a way to check for watermarks embedded in images created with Nano Banana, Google’s AI image generation model. Backstory also checks an image’s content credentials, looking for encrypted metadata added by companies who have signed onto the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA) standard, including Google, Adobe, and the BBC.

Caulfield, however, says the tool’s ability to trace the history of an image online is often its most useful feature. That feature allows journalists to see an image in its original context, and chart how that context may have changed over time.

“The integration aspect — telling the full story of the image — turns out to be the really time-consuming part,” said Caulfield. “Backstory takes an initial process that would take you 50 minutes, and it can shrink it down to three.”

This feature takes on a challenge that long predates the rise of AI-generated imagery. “If you talk to any fact-checker, I don’t think anybody is going to tell you that they wouldn’t have loved to have this tool in 2016,” he said.

Google DeepMind, like many of the largest AI model makers, has contributed to the more recent explosion of AI-generated imagery on the internet. Nano Banana has been routinely criticized for contributing to disinformation about politicians and public health, and even for its use by online scammers.

Most recently, Google Earth came under fire in late July for integrating Nano Banana into its platform, allowing users to easily manipulate and alter 3D satellite images. Just a day later, Google announced it would roll back the feature and build “stronger guardrails” after examples of false and misleading imagery spread widely online.

Darmé says the decision to build Backstory wasn’t a direct response to these types of criticisms, but it was an attempt to address deteriorating trust in media content on the internet at large.

“Having worked on tools that brought image generation to a large population of users, having listened really closely to feedback from users in terms of what they wanted, there’s a clear user need,” she said, explaining DeepMind’s investment in building an easy-to-use provenance tool. “That might be something slightly different than [feeling] this team has one-to-one personal responsibility to release a tool because we also are in a company that releases Nano Banana.”

Like most tools powered by LLMs, Backstory can’t guarantee accuracy. A disclaimer appears at the bottom of the tool, similar to the one that appears on Google’s general AI assistants: “Backstory can make mistakes, so double-check it.”

A common problem with using LLMs to authenticate images is conflation, when the models mistake one image with another that is visually similar, according to Caulfield. “If you put in an image that can be described in the same way as another image that’s very popular online, it’s not uncommon for the LLM to confuse the two images,” he told me.

This problem surfaced in my own testing. After prompting Backstory to generate a report on the history of my own headshot, it ended up mistaking my image with the headshot of another journalist, Carlos Maza. His headshot came up with the same text search terms, including “man with curly hair,” “black cap,” “smiling.” Backstory output a full report on the history of Maza’s headshot on the Internet, before I fed my name into the tool and it eventually corrected itself.

There are other limitations with the tool. Right now, Backstory can only process images, though the team is exploring video and other modalities, according to Darmé. In its context tracing reports, Backstory can also only reference images that have been indexed on search engines. Even when Backstory claims to have found the origin of an image, it could have had a life beyond the tool’s view.

“It’s possible that something might have originated on TikTok, which is not indexed. It might have originated on WhatsApp or Signal or any other closed group,” said Bal Krishna. “Using Backstory you should keep these limitations in mind. We always do.”

Due to these current shortcomings, Bal Krishna says India Today does not cite Backstory’s AI-generated reports directly in its published fact-checks, and reporters are expected to manually confirm any information they pull from the tool.

Still, he considers Backstory the “first robust tool made by a big tech company that was offered to fact-checkers” for image verification, and is hopeful it will only improve as feedback from testers is folded into the product.

When I asked if Backstory had sped up the daily work of his fact-checkers, he responded, “There is no doubt about it.”

But one publication is over it. If you want to write for The Food Section, you’ll have to pick up the phone.

“We’re switching to a pitch-by-phone system come September,” founder Hanna Raskin announced on Tuesday. “Having been deluged by AI-generated and enhanced story ideas this summer, we’re re-humanizing the process with a dedicated hotline (which has the added benefit of weeding out supposed reporters who aren’t in the habit of ringing up strangers.)”

The Food Section reports on food industries and issues in the American South, with bureaus in Asheville and Charlotte, North Carolina. It was the first solo newsletter to win a James Beard award and the first newsletter to win a National Magazine Award, according to its About page. Raskin currently takes story pitches through a Google Form.

Raskin told me that she’s noticed an increase of AI-generated story pitches since The Food Section upped its pay rates for freelancers on July 17. Raskin estimates that a quarter of recent pitches were “wholly AI, meaning neither the writer nor the proposed story appears to exist in the real world.”

“Like most editors on the receiving end of slop — some of which was disturbingly calculated to appeal to a publication that prides itself on exposing social injustice — I found the situation incredibly depressing,” Raskin said. “What was especially worrisome was I felt myself becoming more inclined to dismiss pitches from writers without sterling portfolios or connections to journalists in my professional circle. That’s hardly compatible with cultivating new voices or encouraging young reporters.”

Raskin plans to keep the pitchline open at designated hours and will see what happens. (“I’m not a fool: I’m sure there is an AI way to game this system too,” she noted. “But my hunch is it will work until it doesn’t.”) She’ll also coordinate with journalists to take pitch calls at times that work for them.

“We understand that many great writers — meaning the kind which aren’t AI — have hourly-wage jobs and other unmoveable obligations,” she said.

Media workers continue to battle the onslaught of AI pitch slop. Last summer, Wired and Business Insider retracted published stories by an “AI freelancer” named “Margaux Blanchard.” In July, Futurism reported that PR firms are using AI publicists to spam journalists with pitches.

Raskin plans to share the phone number in The Food Section’s newsletter next month. You can read the publication’s full pitch guide here.

“I follow Coach,” the seller told Dominic. “$120?”

@theathletic Follow along with @COACHKOE │ SPORTS CARDS at The National Sports Collectiors Convention as he helps a young collector on his journey to find a Caleb Williams card! Sponsored by eBay. #chicagobears #calebwilliams #sportscards #nfl ♬ original sound – The Athletic

The Athletic published the 97-second video of Coach Koe and Dominic to TikTok. It’s one of around 75 videos The New York Times’ sports site has published with sports-focused creators since launching a pilot partnership program last September. Others include explainers, like “How did this 21-year old go from playing college golf to beating Scottie Scheffler less than two months after turning pro?” and another on “one of the most expensive pieces of grass ever sold.”

Ahead of the World Cup this summer, The Athletic also produced videos asking sports creators in different countries about their tournament predictions and favorite soccer moments. And at the start of last year’s NBA season, The Athletic partnered with the social media–based basketball publication @halfpast*noon on a post about breakout stars.

All told, the videos have gotten a combined 50 million views, said Adam Park, The Athletic’s director of video growth. Since last September, The Athletic has also gained 100,000 followers across its different platforms.

The Times has joined forces with creators in the past. Last summer, The Athletic inked a seven-figure deal to license “Pablo Torre Finds Out,” a sports journalism podcast by Pablo Torre. NYT Cooking has also been partnering with independent food creators to diversify its video content and reach new audiences.

Most of The Athletic’s video content is still made in-house with its journalists, but the publication sees creator partnerships as a way to find new audiences. Younger people, in particular, tend to prefer getting their news via video, rather than reading or listening. Park said the existing audience of The Athletic is “quite even across age demographics” but noted the creator-led videos were helping the sports news site work with younger creators that have developed similarly young audiences. The Athletic declined to share details about its audience demographics.

“We have internal creators that host, do podcasts, or social video, but we really wanted to tackle the idea of taking a large-scale newsroom and translating that into more of the human, personal touch of a creator,” Park said. “How do we translate to younger audiences, and make our newsroom accessible to everyone? This felt like the easiest way of doing that.”

Finding the right creators to collaborate with means “a lot of watching TikTok and YouTube,” head of creative development Craig Custance said. Park and then-video growth manager Jordan Pun (who now works as the head of social analytics for MrBeast) compiled lists of creators whose content they thought would mesh well with The Athletic’s brand.

“It was really important to us, as we started connecting with creators, that we found people that wouldn’t feel completely off brand,” Custance said. “The Athletic is not a place of hot takes. If we were to bring in really strong, opinionated creators, it just wouldn’t fit. If we’re connecting with their audience, it would just be a mismatch. We had a lot of conversations about whether the people we’re reaching out to match our journalistic DNA, our storytelling, and our deep analysis.”

The workflow relies on lots of communication between the Times newsroom and the creators, Park said. Sometimes the creators pitch ideas to editors, who will provide feedback and previous stories The Athletic has published on the subject. Other times, editors will flag newly-published stories with creators who might be interested in talking about the reporting in their videos. Creators are paid for their work, though The Athletic declined to provide details or payment rates for the partnerships.

One creator they worked with, Frank Michael Smith, was proactive in finding stories that worked for both his audience and The Athletic, Park said. Smith, who covers several sports and has more than two million TikTok followers, pitches his ideas, scripts the videos, then sends them to The Athletic for editing and a fact-check. Once the edits are in, he produces the videos and files them. The Athletic also has editors who oversee the particular sport or team mentioned in the video review the piece.

Smith then publishes them with The Athletic as a collaborator. Between October 2025 and April 2026, Smith published 24 videos with The Athletic, pulling in 27 million views in total.

“What we built was a blueprint: proof that the creator economy and legacy media aren’t competing,” Smith wrote on LinkedIn in April. “We’re much more powerful together.”

Vertical video — both with journalists and creators — has been a commercial opportunity for the publication. EBay sponsored at least two videos from the Sports Card Convention, including the Coach Koe video. The Athletic’s daily World Cup video recaps, anchored by different journalists, were sponsored by Amazon Prime. Fan interview videos on the street were sponsored by Apple TV. One video, where Smith explains how Spain and Argentina stacked up against each other ahead of the World Cup final, was sponsored by Kalshi. Other creator videos are unsponsored.

The videos aren’t straight advertisements for those companies. Instead, Custance said, the ideas for the videos originated in the newsroom with editorial purpose, and advertisers were approached afterwards.

“We were going to do [the videos] anyway,” he said. “It’s like getting an ad on your story. Now we’re generating revenue with it as well, which is ideal.”

Today, The Athletic usually has at least one creator on its production calendar to produce content, Park said. The Athletic is currently hiring for a video growth manager to lead and expand the creator program.

“We started out as a longform, written company and have evolved constantly since day one,” Custance said. “For us, this is how the audience wants to consume sports news and analysis — on TikTok and Instagram.These [creators] are the people that have found the most effective ways to do it. How can we tap into that and expand our journalism in that way?”

AI providers have leaned into the idea of adding watermarks to the content they generate — sometimes visible to humans, sometimes visible only to a dedicated tool. But adding a watermark to visual media is a much less sticky problem than adding it to text — text that might be edited or removed from its original context. Other than looking for “It’s not X. It’s Y,” how can we know if a set of words we read came from a human or a chatbot? European regulators are forcing Big AI to come up with answers.

Last week, Anthropic announced that it would begin adding invisible watermarks to the text it generates, and on Friday, it explained how it’s going to work. Daring Fireball’s John Gruber has a good, clear piece that explains both the methodology and how it, in his mind, perverts the act of writing. In essence, it involves Claude intentionally changing some of the words it’s generating to less-likely options — picking “guava” instead of “mango,” say, or “auto” instead of “car” — in patterns that Anthropic can then detect. Some people don’t like it; Gruber hates it:

One of my fundamental problems with this is that no two synonyms carry the exact same meaning. “He leaped at the chance” and “He jumped at the opportunity” are very similar sentences expressing the same general sentiment, but they are not the same. The exact words we choose when writing matter. I want any LLM I use to choose the very best, most precise words at every single decision point. An obvious constraint that I accept is time and computation. Within the constraint of executing inference quickly, and at a certain cost per token, I want the best words. This constraint matches human writing. I could surely write a better column by taking longer to write it. I write with a sense of how much care I should put into every word and punctuation choice I make. I take more time with certain paragraphs, sentences, or even individual word choices when my gut feeling says I should.

In other words, these are necessary trade-offs. These factors are all in my interest: speed, cost, quality. Ideally I would like perfect writing, at instantaneous generation speed, at zero cost. None of those things are possible. Computation is not free of charge (and cloud-based LLM inference with leading models is actually expensive). Inference is not instantaneous. And great writing, whether natural or artificial, can only approach perfection.

The idea that anything other than my needs should factor into the generation of text for me is patently offensive.

Whether it’s more or less offensive than any other AI-generated text is an exercise left to the reader.

An animated phone vibrates on a blackened screen as ominous piano music tinkles in the background. When you click, speech bubbles appear. “It’s Thanasis Koukakis,” the person on the other end says. “I’m borrowing a phone…Just don’t try to reach out to me for now. Texts, calls, try to avoid it.”

This is the opening scene of Predatorgate, a new video game based on an investigation into the Predator spyware scandal in Greece. Koukakis was the reporter at the heart of that real-life story who discovered his phone had been infected with the highly invasive spyware. This narrative game is based on the investigation by Inside Story, and shows what it’s like to be in the shoes of a journalist under threat of illegal surveillance. In the game — which takes an estimated 30 minutes to play — Koukakis is a colleague who discovers his phone has been targeted.

Z. Daniel Barnett is a former investigative journalist and voiceover artist who worked on the Predatorgate game project with designer and developer Izzy Fiacco. “A game that deals with the concept of data security and also helps people to think critically about the news they’re reading, and the process that goes into making that news, is super important,” he said. Before this game, Barnett had never really considered how games and the news could be brought together. Predatorgate made him realize how a new format can bring stories about investigative journalism to new audiences.

“I think gamifying people’s understanding of journalistic investigations is really important,” he added, “because we live in a time where people’s media literacy is maybe lower than it’s ever been.”

Predatorgate, which Barnett has called “a love letter to old school journalism,” won the top prize at the Floodlight Investigative Journalism Game Jam in June this year. Run by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) and the Gabo Foundation, the idea behind the project is to encourage game developers to transform investigative stories into video games. Two games from the first edition are already being developed into commercial versions.

“Investigative reporting is such an amazing source of storytelling for video games because investigative reporting is full of dilemmas,” said Paul Radu, the co-founder of OCCRP, who is also co-creator of the Floodlight gaming initiative. “There are choices that reporters make all the time, and people get to experience these dilemmas and get to understand what investigative reporting is all about.”

And gamifying investigations, he added, helps investigative reporters reach new, younger audiences. “Video games are such a huge part of how society is shaped,” he said. “It’s how young people learn the world around them.”

An emerging market

More than three billion people globally play some form of video games. For a media industry with falling revenues and growing audience distrust, games — ranging from simple quizzes to fully-fledged downloadable games and augmented reality experiences — have become a new way to engage and inform audiences.

Experts say games increase visits to the outlet, increase the time people spend on a site, and promote loyalty and brand connection. They can also directly and indirectly help with monetizing through boosting subscriptions or drawing advertisers. Conor Dean, founder and CEO of GamesGrid, said in a webinar last year that games are going to become “just as essential as newsletters or podcasts” for publishers that are “losing audiences and advertising revenues.”

In the U.K., the Financial Times launched The Uber Game, where players stepped into the shoes of Uber drivers to see if they would survive the gig economy, a game based on actual interviews. The challenge: figuring out if you will make enough to pay your $1,000 mortgage payment, which is due in a week, amid competing demands on your finances, and moral ones, too, like seeing your children.

In Nigeria, the Centre for Collaborative Investigative Journalism (CCIJ) turned an investigative series about corruption in the 2023 Nigerian presidential elections into Data Vault Canyon, a multi-player Fortnite game.

“We knew that if we are talking about voting, elections, and participation, that young people are not going to be reading 3,000-word stories,” said Nelly Kalu, product and innovation manager at CCIJ. “So how do we get them to be interested and stay engaged? It doesn’t matter to us if they read the stories, as long as they understand the value of protecting their votes.”

Similar concerns exercised the team at the independent digital outlet Cuestión Pública. They have developed four games so far, including one that gamified publicly available data on the country’s previous elections into Game of Votes. “People are like, ‘Oh, this [story] is long and boring,’ or ‘Oh, this is too complex. I don’t understand it,'” said Edier Buitrago, the data editor and tech leader. For two of their games, they drew inspiration from beloved offline games like Guess Who and Cluedo to familiarize people with the large cast of officials, politicians, and families that dominate the country’s political landscape and have been involved in major corruption cases.

Newspapers have long had games sections, whether that’s a daily crossword, Sudoku puzzle, or a jumble. Games ensure habit and familiarity for the daily reader and build a continuing loyalty and relationship with a media outlet.

“Games usually bring highly engaged interactions to the outlet,” said Sisi Wei, chief impact officer at CalMatters, a California-focused nonprofit newsroom. “With an article, you might read it for some amount of time, but with a game, that amount of time goes up significantly.”

As with the Nigerian and Colombian cases, there’s often a practical, news-you-can-use element to the game. But games can also be built around humanitarian issues that don’t necessarily feel connected to a person’s daily life. For instance, Reality Reload, a game studio founded by a journalist-turned-game-designer, created a simulation around the American work visa process for immigrants. Built from interviews, players had to navigate hurdles and practicalities that an H1B visa applicant would.

Similarly, ProPublica created The Waiting Game based on deep reporting of the lives of five asylum seekers and invited readers to experience that for themselves. It turned asylum-seeking from an abstract tragedy into a lived reality, in a way that transcended what a text piece would have done. “That was a powerful way of creating empathy for the people whose stories we were telling,” said Wei who was then at ProPublica and reported the story. “The written word, video, audio, photography, all those mediums are things you consume,” said Wei. “But games, as a medium, are inherently interactive, and if you are invested in a storyline, you are asked to make a choice in order to progress the game.”

Crafting a game takes time and effort and involves artwork, music, sound design, playability, and needs to be finessed through multiple iterations. When you are dealing with real life, and real people there are also other considerations. “Should we use real names? Should we use completely fictitious names?” Pol Grasland-Mongrain remembers discussing with his teammates when designing Influence, a game that was a finalist at the Floodlight jam. Eventually they fictionalized a few names for their game, which puts the player in the shoes of a Mexican journalist.

Choices, conflict, tension, challenges, characters, a process to navigate: these are some of the key features that a news story must have to translate well as a game. “For instance, if I was writing a story about agricultural commodities in Midwest America, that’s not a game, right?” chuckled Barnett. “There’s no dramatic tension there.”

For a longer video game, a narrative arc is crucial, with not just the story itself, but also the process of how the journalist investigated it. For instance, Hunting the Hunter, the previous Floodlight winner, was based on a Ghanaian journalist’s undercover exposé of illegal cocoa smuggling. And the runner-up Dark Money drew on the OCCRP’s money laundering stories.

There’s no set formula that can ensure a good game, and individual tastes vary. But there has to be an element of fun. “If it’s too serious,” said Julie Dupiat, a French designer who worked on Influence, “it is not a game.” At the same time, the game should not trivialize the subject.

Some outlets, for instance, draw a hard line on what kinds of stories should not be gamified, even if they have the narrative potential for it. “Why would you want to make war a game? Why would you want to make abuse a game?” asked Kalu. “That’s a moral choice that you must make as a journalist, an ethical one, to not do that.” Similarly, at the game jam, Radu told developers: “You have one rule: don’t glorify organized crime. That’s it. The rest is up to you.”

Time commitment vs. return on investment

Games can take anything from a few hours to several months to complete, depending on the complexity, style, and cost. Data Vault Canyon, for instance, would have been costly to develop, but CCIJ cut costs by doing it in-house. Their metaverse designer had to retrain herself in different directions and experiment with various free online tools. “Our goal now, as we’re looking towards the future, is to be able to buy the tools that are needed,” said Kalu.

Experts say it’s also easier and cheaper to first try and build browser games that can be played on an outlet’s website itself. Wei advises beginning with simple games that break down practical information for audiences: navigating the school system, for instance, or deciding how to vote. “The news-you-can-use type of game is maybe more practical to start with,” said Wei, “because it gives the reader something very tangible they can get from it, and it’s a less daunting task for you because it’s often easier to communicate the information they need.” At a game jam some years ago, for instance, Wei created Heartsaver to depict how people who needed hospitals were maddeningly far away from them. It took just two days.

Ultimately, one one of the keys is collaboration and finding the right partners. If you are a journalist, “you’ll know what makes a good story, you won’t know what makes a good game,” said Barnett. “And on the flip side I think if a game developer wants to make a journalistic story [into a game], find a reporter to talk to.”

The key, says Kalu, is opening your mind to the possibilities. “We now look at all our stories with the question: is there a potential for productivizing or gamifying this?”

Chicago Public Media is already the parent nonprofit of two existing news sites, WBEZ and, since 2022, the Chicago Sun-Times. For chicago.com, though, the news org is teaming up with New_ Public, a nonprofit working to reimagine online public spaces, to launch a network of online communities for Chicago neighborhoods. Chicago.com (the enviable domain name was donated by the Chicago Community Trust) will host the network, which will be powered by Roundabout, the local community platform incubated by New_ Public over the past year. The partners will launch five neighborhood pilots this fall, and will recruit paid, contract “community stewards” to moderate conversations in each neighborhood.

“This is a community platform, not a news site — it’s very much not a news site,” Chicago Public Media CEO Melissa Bell said. “It’s crucial that we don’t think of this as a publishing platform.”

In a challenging national environment for media, Chicago has a relatively rich nonprofit news scene that includes robust neighborhood-level news coverage. But information access, and civic engagement, varies widely across the city’s neighborhoods, according to a civic information needs census of Chicago conducted earlier this summer in partnership with Chicago Public Media.

For a while now, publishers everywhere have been confronting the bleak reality that, with more and more people turning to social media for their news, news websites — like newspapers before them — are at risk of becoming obsolete. But what if a news website could be something fundamentally different? What if it could beat the platforms at their own game and offer people sick of doomscrolling something better and more useful?

Those are big questions where ‘if’ is the operative word. Building something different requires experimentation that could end in failure. But Chicago Public Media is, at the very least, asking those questions with its vision for what chicago.com could be. It hopes to build a participatory community resource that informs everything from where to volunteer, to plans for the weekend, to how neighbors can meet one another.

This vision for a role a local news org can play — a provider of useful local information (not just news) and a space for community conversation — is attracting energy and attention elsewhere, too. Village Media, the Canadian organization Chicago Public Media has pointed to as one model for what it hopes to build, just received $5 million from the Knight Foundation to expand to 15 communities in the U.S. (Chicago Public Media has also cited Front Porch Forum in Vermont, Zetland Media in Denmark, and the Daily Maverick in South Africa as role models.)

Bell cofounded Vox, a product of a different era of the internet, and had connected with some of the people behind New_ Public and Roundabout in that past life, before joining Chicago Public Media in 2024.

“I think all of us grew up at this time where we were inspired by the opportunity of the internet, and I have seen a lot of the challenges of what has happened to our digital space over the last 15 years,” she said. “When I came to Chicago Public Media, I really wanted to think about not just sustaining and stabilizing the great products that we have with WBEZ and Sun-Times, but really thinking about the future of public media overall. I couldn’t think of better partners than folks who were really focused on how to evolve the next stage of the internet and how we interact in digital spaces.”

Chicago Public Media and Roundabout don’t want to call all the shots on how chicago.com evolves; it’s something they’re explicitly inviting community members to “build with us.” But to understand what the platform’s network of neighborhood communities could look like, it’s helpful to start with the Roundabout pilots that already exist.

Roundabout has a presence in cities including Richmond, Virginia, and Portland, Oregon; the team showed me anonymized versions of its interface. It has many of the hallmarks you picture when you think of a social platform: a feed, posts, reaction buttons. The feed is ordered reverse chronologically, not algorithmically, and can be filtered by topics like arts & culture or pets. There’s a separate, second feed that features posts the community steward has flagged to bring to members’ attention. Posts might be introductions, or events, or requests or offers of help, or steward-posted discussion prompts or guides. There’s also a calendar feature, where users can submit or look for events.

One thing you won’t find: Profiles. The focus is on the shared conversation, not individual members’ digital presence or following, so community members don’t have profile pages.

Reaction buttons on the posts are designed to be “pro-social.” Community members can mark that they’re following a post, or mark it as helpful.

Posts are automatically moderated by an AI-powered tool that checks them against community guidelines, though posters can also flag posts for review by the human steward. Roundabout, and chicago.com, aspire to be spaces for real community conversation, including substantive disagreement. (In an attempt to avoid the toxicity on platforms like Nextdoor, no posts about “suspicious persons” are allowed.)

Stewards aggregate events and other PSAs from Roundabout into a newsletter that non-members can sign up for. Nationally, Roundabout now has more than 6,400 newsletter subscribers and Roundabout accounts in total across its pilots, according to Trei Brundrett, Roundabout’s founder-in-residence at New_ Public (and, like Bell, a Vox alum).

This is a digital platform designed to ultimately bring people together at local in-person events. “Our top priority is that people can find what they need and then take that info out into their community,” Bell said. She noted that corporate-owned social media platforms “are typically trying to keep [users] on there as long as possible, in order to show them as many ads as possible. We do not have that incentive for chicago.com.”

For the past year, artist and researcher Liza Pittard has been one of two stewards for Richmond’s Roundabout community, which includes a little over 1,300 members. (Stewards in Roundabout’s pilot communities are paid by New_ Public.) Many of the people she’s seen join, she said, are new to town and looking for connection. She spends about 15 hours a week on her role as a steward, she estimated, though it varies by week and tends to be more when she’s also organizing an in-person event. Much of that time is spent combing other social platforms for events and picking out the best ones so Roundabout community members don’t have to do the legwork of looking in 20 different places.

A big part of her role is “researching and becoming more aware of what’s happening around town,” she said, “and what kinds of conversations people around town are having outside of Roundabout.”

Brundrett sees community stewards as more than just moderators — almost like a “really great dinner party host,” he explained, whose role is more proactive than reactive. “It’s somebody who is thinking about, ‘hey, what do I want this to be?’ And they’re inviting people in, they’re setting the tone.”

Brundrett described the early joiners of Roundabout as “barn raisers” — people who are already civically engaged in some form, which might include holding a stake in local life as a local business owner. But he’s also excited about Roundabout’s potential to serve people who might be less civically engaged and are just looking for something to do this weekend.

Roundabout’s team sees these communities as places local reporters can be invited into to listen and build trust — places where they can answer people’s questions and learn what they should be reporting on. Reporters, and reporting, are not central to what Roundabout is; they are components that can strengthen the local community conversation that is central.

The primary unit of information, at first, will be “mostly text-based,” Bell expects. But she hopes chicago.com will grow into something that serves people in their preferred information medium, whether reading, listening, or watching (the landing page features short videos).

Chicago Public Media has not yet revealed which five neighborhoods it will launch pilots for, but said it’s looking for those that represent a diverse geographic, economic, and cultural cross-section of the area. “Our approach has been to find the strongest local moderators with the skills to keep community discussions constructive, safe, and civil, while focusing on areas with a deeply rooted sense of local identity and shared history, which research shows is critical to driving active participation,” Bell said.

When chicago.com debuted in July, the site got more than 1,000 email signups within the first two days; a third of those people weren’t already on the WBEZ or Sun-Times lists.

The goal is to keep chicago.com free to access and support it with a mix of memberships, sponsorships, and donations. “Business model innovation is an important piece of this project, and we’re working hard to develop that, but we can’t share many more details at this time,” Bell said. Chicago Public Media’s publications have faced layoffs and buyouts in the past two years, but last month Bell told the Sun-Times financial projections for 2026 suggest the organization will be “close to break-even.”

Bell hopes chicago.com will appeal to Chicago Public Media’s existing audience while also breaking new ground for them. And she hopes creating a social-media-style, participatory information hub corrects a mismatch in available news mediums and people’s actual information habits.

“We want to make sure that we’re providing [people] that information in a format that creates a daily habit like we used to have when you would wake up and get the newspaper from the front step, or turn on the radio and listen to it on your drive into work,” she said.

“If you think about the idea of a newspaper 30 years ago, it was news but it was also local information. We would look for the movie listings in the advertising section…You would have letters to the editor. You would have local businesses telling you what was happening that weekend,” she added. “I think that bundle idea is what we are trying to recreate, but just in a format that makes sense for today.”

Apple has approached publishers to use their news and up-to-date information in the revamped Siri AI, sources told the Journal. The company has reportedly discussed a “nine-figure budget” for the payments.

The next iteration of Apple’s voice-powered assistant was first promised in 2024 and is now expected to be released to the public later this year. (Beta reviewers seem to think it’s an improvement.)

Apple has proposed “a variable compensation plan” to news publishers, according to the Journal. The pay-as-you-go plan would see publishers paid only when Siri AI uses their content. It would be a break from other AI licensing agreements that have involved fixed fees and wide-ranging access to content. Apple currently makes payments to news companies for Apple News+ using a similar model, paying publishers “proportionate to the share of clicks they generate within the platform.”

The raid led to multiple federal lawsuits against the county government, public officials, and the city, accusing them of retaliating against the newspaper for its coverage. Last fall, Marion County agreed to pay $3 million to three journalists and a city councilor, settling some of those lawsuits. And on Tuesday, the third anniversary of the raid, the city of Marion settled with one of those reporters, Phyllis Zorn, agreeing to pay her $850,000, the Kansas Reflector reported.

The costly settlement is a vindication of press freedom at the local level in a year and political climate in which that freedom faces unrelenting stress tests. The raid is covered in the documentary “Seized,” which premiered at Sundance in January.

Other lawsuits against the city remain outstanding. But for Zorn, who retired and moved elsewhere in Kansas after receiving settlement money from the county last fall, the latest settlement ends a yearslong ordeal that has taken a severe toll on her health.

“They picked on the wrong people,” Zorn told the Reflector. “I think they thought they would get away with it because they’re some nothing little town in rural Kansas. But we were a newspaper. We have access to immediately draw the attention of the whole nation.”

Natural disasters have long been flashpoints for disinformation in Japan. Similar falsehoods surfaced online after a major earthquake hit Kumamoto Prefecture last month. But the 2024 Noto earthquake was a call to action for a coalition of Japanese news publishers, advertisers, and technology companies that was already pushing for better tools to fight misinformation.

Their solution: a new web standard called Originator Profile (OP), which helps ordinary users verify who published or created a website.

OP uses cryptographic digital signature technology to create tamper-proof credentials for websites. Each ID card confirms who published the content, whether professional organizations vouch for that publisher, and information about the publisher’s editorial and ethical standards. The exact user interface is not finalized, but a new browser extension released last month displays the information in a pop-up sidebar.

OP isn’t meant to judge whether all of the content on a website is true. It doesn’t authenticate specific photographs or video clips. Instead, it authenticates the site itself — for example, confirming that a news article is genuinely coming from the news organization it claims to be.

“We aren’t trying to dictate whether the information is accurate or not. It’s all about provenance: Where did this information originate?” said Makoto Yoshiike, deputy secretary general of the Originator Profile Collaborative Innovation Partnership (OP-CIP), the group advocating for the standard’s adoption.

OP is far from the first attempt at building new provenance tools in an information ecosystem flooded with AI slop, deepfake scammers, and “LLM poisoning” campaigns. Watermarking tools like Google’s SynthID and cryptographically signed metadata like the C2PA standard aim to tackle similar problems, but so far have mostly focused on addressing the rise of AI-generated imagery and audio.

“OP works within the HTML — it’s focused on the web page itself,” said Yoshiike. “We don’t want a whitelist for good media, separated from bad media. We just want to say it actually came from the authenticated sender of information.”

To develop the technical specs for OP, Dentsu partnered with Jun Murai, a professor at Keio University who is often credited as a founding father of the Japanese internet. He developed the web standards that allow Japanese language characters to travel through email and internet messages, among other innovations.

Next, Dentsu got news publishers on board. The largest daily newspaper in Japan, The Yomiuri Shimbun, was a founding member of OP-CIP. From the news industry’s perspective, there was a clear need to authenticate webpages that might be used as sources, but also a need to protect their brands, at a time when generative AI tools have made it easier than ever to spoof legitimate news publications.

Yomiuri itself has faced this challenge. “I actually caught one red-handed on Facebook,” said Yoshiike, noting that he’s been served fake versions of The Yomiuri Shimbun on his feed. “It’s still happening, individuals mimicking our article pages and luring users to fraudulent websites. Most of it is junk, but it happens every day.”

In December 2022, OP-CIP was officially established with nearly a dozen news publishers on board. The Noto earthquake in 2024, however, expanded the project’s scope. The Japanese national government, realizing the value of the authentication tool for government websites that deliver messages in crisis situations, began funding OP-CIP, and the organization started welcoming local governments into its ranks.

“When disasters strike, there is no end to fraudulent information being disseminated, individuals impersonating local governments or public utilities,” said Tatsuya Kurosaka, a project associate professor at Keio University and secretary general of OP-CIP. “That’s why we are thinking not only about the media context, but also public information more generally as well.”

Today, OP-CIP has built an impressive coalition of supporters. Among them are dozens of members of the Japanese Newspaper Publishers and Editors Association (Nihon Shinbun Kyokai). Major television networks, including NHK, the national public broadcaster, have also signed on. Members of the group from the tech sector include LINE-Yahoo (LY), which operates the most popular news aggregator in Japan and the messaging app LINE, which is used by more than 80% of the country.

While those members publicly signed on to support OP, so far only a handful have fully integrated the technology into their own operations. The Yomiuri Shimbun and The Asahi Shimbun, the two largest newspapers in Japan by circulation, have integrated OP into their content management systems, according to Yoshiike, who also works at The Yomiuri Shimbun as the senior deputy chief officer for the president’s office. Tottori Prefecture in Western Japan has also launched OP on its prefectural government websites. Dentsu is currently rolling out the technology for its ad buys, with hopes that it can help counter the recent sharp rise in ad fraud and AI scam ads across the country.

Yoshiike says that by early 2027 OP-CIP plans to have 50 major organizations operating with the OP standard in place.

Ultimately, though, the group sees Japan as its testing ground. In the years to come, they hope to export the technology and make it an international web standard, with the participation of international news publishers and global technology companies. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which is responsible for existing global internet standards like HTML and CSS, has already created its own OP working group to explore this possibility.

“We’re pushing full speed with implementation in Japanese society to show the W3C community how it works,” Yoshiike said.

Last month, OP-CIP released its first public tool to retrieve and visualize the cryptographically signed profiles on websites. The browser extension, called OP Inspector, is available on Chrome and Firefox. When a user lands on a Yomiuri Shimbun article, for example, the extension activates a pop-up sidebar that shows a badge verifying that Yomiuri Shimbun is the organization operating the webpage and links to the publication’s editorial standards policy and privacy policies.

Right now, the extension is only meant for developers working with the OP standard, though there are plans to fine-tune and release an extension for general internet users down the line. Eventually, OP-CIP hopes it can abandon the need for extensions and apps altogether. One current idea, if the standard is taken up by W3C, is for a badge to appear within a browser URL bar so that users can click it and access the OP without ever downloading an extension.

“My mother is 88 years old. I’m designing OP technology to be simple enough for even my mom to use,” said Kurosaka. “No specific skills are required.”

The project faces clear hurdles as it moves into the next stages of development. One will be adoption by social media platforms that are major vectors for disinformation on the internet. Currently, OP can’t appear on individual social media posts like article links shared on Facebook. It’s only accessible when a user navigates to that article’s webpage, limiting its impact on social media-fueled disinformation.

“I think it is a huge open question,” said Yoshiike. “Our technology side hasn’t caught up with the current social media standards. OP works within the HTML, so it’s not used in the application itself.”

Fully realizing OP’s potential will also require earning the support of tech giants like Google and Apple that hold tremendous influence within W3C. As search increasingly becomes a direct source of news for users through products like AI Overviews and AI Mode, their participation becomes even more essential.

“The last thing standing between us and the users is big tech companies,” said Yoshiike. “We know that it’s not going to come easy.”

As any Nieman Lab reader knows, journalism has seen drastic changes since 2014. One major shift in the last 12 years? About 20% of Americans now turn to news and commentary from influencers, content creators, and others on social media and platforms. Many of those do not self-identify as “journalists,” let alone subscribe to a professional association’s code of ethics, notes the SPJ committee that spearheaded the proposed revisions. The committee also highlighted the “dramatic rise” in the use of generative AI in newsrooms, citing a study that found 56% of journalists now use AI tools at least weekly. As AI-generated content is increasingly published by news organizations, the committee also says this introduced “persistent ethical and practical questions about the use and misuse of technology.”

One striking thing about the revision is that “AI” is actually nowhere to be found in the new code of ethics. In a report accompanying the proposed revisions, the committee writes that the term was sidestepped due to concerns it might “date” the code. (The SPJ omitted “social media” in its 2014 code for similar reasons.) Even so, these technologies motivate many of the changes and additions that were made, according to the report.

For one, the committee has added a whole new tenet to the job: “Identify misinformation and disinformation. Challenge provable falsehoods and avoid uncritically repeating them.” It is an implicit acknowledgement that the work of journalists increasingly revolves around authentication and verification. That’s no doubt in part because of the emergence of social media as a powerful vector for disinformation since 2014. It also calls attention to the responsibility of journalists to combat the recent flood of AI-generated imagery online.

There is another hat tip to this work in a revision that reads, “Journalists should verify the provenance and authenticity of information and sources.” The committee said it added phrases like “verify” and “provenance and authenticity” to add specificity for the “digital and AI age,” and strengthen the language around this work.

The new code also recognizes that journalists can be complicit in the spread of falsehoods and misleading imagery online. “Never publish fabricated content that could be confused with reality,” reads another revised line. Here “content” was added to “better address AI-generated images, graphics, and the misuse of AI in image production,” according to the committee.

The closest the code gets to naming AI outright is the addition of the word “technology” to one of its tenets. “Remember that speed, technology or medium do not excuse inaccuracy or unfairness,” reads the new copy. The committee explained that the addition is meant to address AI, but also “whatever technology may come next.”

Tacked onto that line is also a new sentence: “Journalists are ethically responsible for their work, regardless of tools and technologies used.” Here the committee says it’s conveying, in part, that human journalists are ultimately accountable for what they publish, even if their work is generated or assisted by AI.

The proposal caps a yearlong review process by a blue-ribbon committee. Now, SPJ members will have the opportunity to review, discuss, and comment on the proposal leading up to the SPJ’s national convention in October. There, the association will hold a vote for all members on the new code.

You can read the full proposal with the committee’s comments here.

We wanted to know how this plays out in comments sections. In a paper recently published in Journalism Studies, my coauthor Sheizaf Rafaeli and I analyzed nearly a million comments on 6,400 New York Times stories published between 2014 and 2022. We compared pieces from The New York Times’ data journalism section, The Upshot, to more traditional pieces published during the same period. (I am a computational social scientist who studies how information environments shape who participates in online public discourse. Rafaeli is the president of Shenkar College in Israel.)

Data journalists have sometimes wondered whether loading a story with data can be overwhelming rather than clarifying. We found that giving readers more information changes who comments, and how.

More information, more engagement

For each story, we measured several things: How information-dense it was; the numbers, sources, and charts it used; and how analytical the writing was. Then we looked at the comments on those stories. We tracked how many people commented, whether they were interacting with each other or only reacting to the story, and how much their comments leaned on sources and language that read as analytical versus emotional.

We found that stories combining statistics, external sources, and data visualizations produced a different kind of comment section. Regardless of the topic of these posts, readers tended to reply to each other. That raised another question: What were readers actually saying to each other, and how many of them were showing up to say it?

The answer turned out to hinge on something researchers call “affective style” — how much a comment is driven by feeling rather than reasoning. For example, in a comment on a 2014 Upshot piece about the World Cup, one reader wrote: “Typically, people hate good teams because they win too much and laugh at bad teams. So, if this is true, soccer fans are truly unique.” That’s affective — a feeling dressed up as an observation.

Under a different Upshot piece, this one on the shrinking American middle class, a reader wrote: “From 1950 to 1980 we had thirty years of demand side economy. From 1980 on we’ve had thirty years of supply side economy. Take your pick.” That’s not affective — it’s an argument, laid out for the reader to weigh. Denser, more analytical stories produced far more of this second type of comment.

The catch

The same stories that produced sharper, more analytic conversation also produced less conversation. The more analytically a story was written, and the more statistics it contained, the fewer people commented on it. Emotional stories did the opposite, drawing bigger crowds.

The presence of charts mattered less than you might expect. Stories with more visualizations tended to draw comments that were more analytic and better-sourced, but once we accounted for everything else a dense story was doing, the chart alone was not what moved a reader from reacting to reasoning; rather, that was the statistics and writing style.

Comments on denser stories were more likely to lean on outside sourcing and structured arguments. Researchers have connected this pattern to the digital divide, identifying a “data elite” as the subset of an audience that keeps engaging when others opt out. That tracks with something recent Pew research found about civic participation generally: People sort into distinct groups. As a comments section grows more reasoned, it also becomes more exclusive.

Most people who visit a comment section never post in it, and a section full of careful, evidence-based argument is a different thing to encounter from one that isn’t, whether or not you participate. Producing that kind of journalism costs real money, statisticians, data cleaning, chart-checking, extra editing, and that expense pays for what happens underneath the story, not just the story itself.

That is worth keeping in mind as newsrooms reopen comment sections after years of shutting them down. If the payoff is a more loyal, more engaged readership, it is not spread evenly across a newsroom’s output. Start with the hardest stories, not the easiest ones that will always draw a crowd on their own. That is where the more reasoned conversation was hiding.

“While USA Today Co. CEO Mike Reed championed this partnership as a way to drive revenue, we believe it threatens to undermine trust in our news outlets and raises serious questions about the data security of our readers,” the statement reads, in part. “We have significant ethical issues with Palantir, whose artificial intelligence (A.I.) software has been used to advance widespread surveillance and power immigration crackdowns. Not only does partnering with Palantir, a major player in the news we cover, create an inherent conflict of interest, but it fails the journalists who have been assaulted and falsely arrested while covering immigration enforcement actions and protests.”

BREAKING: USA Today’s journalists and media workers demand that the media company end its relationship with AI firm Palantir.

— The NewsGuild-CWA (@newsguild.org) August 10, 2026 at 12:01 PM

USA Today Co. — formerly known as Gannett — announced the partnership during its second quarter earnings call on August 6 as a way to “strengthen how we collect, connect and activate audience data to drive more effective and faster monetization across our platform.” Palantir’s software would be used to analyze and monetize customer behavior amid an industry-wide decline in search traffic.

In the statement, unionized employees (most of whom are journalists) write that USA Today Co.’s “commitment to upholding First Amendment principles to serve the democratic process is in direct contrast with a company like Palantir, whose cofounder, Peter Thiel, once said freedom and democracy were not compatible, and whose technologies have been tied to human rights abuses and surveillance activities.”

The company provided “minimal details” about its work with Palantir, the statement says. Employees found out about the partnership in an email about 20 minutes before the earnings call, said Mike Davis, a reporter for the Asbury Park Press and a vice-chair of the NewsGuild of New York.

“Part of the problem is that we know very, very little about how Palantir’s software is going to be used,” Davis told me. “It’s pretty surprising that our company would unilaterally decide to bring in such a controversial partner like Palantir without providing a complete explanation to its employees, most of whom are naturally skeptical journalists.”

Reed told investors last week that USA Today Co. would retain ownership of its audience data, and Palantir’s AI software would help the company make the most of it. USA Today Co. owns more than 200 local newspapers in the United States, making it the largest newspaper chain in the country. It also owns Newsquest, one of the United Kingdom’s most prominent local news publishers with more than 150 daily and weekly newspapers.

“Our editorial decisions remain independent and are guided by our longstanding journalistic standards and ethics policies,” the company told Nieman Lab in a statement when the Palantir partnership was first announced.

“We respect that employees have a range of perspectives,” Amy Garrard, vice president of labor relations at USA Today Co., said in an email statement on Monday. “Our agreement with Palantir is a business decision focused on strengthening how we connect and better serve audiences, advertisers, and subscribers. Our data remains protected under our existing privacy commitments, contractual safeguards, and applicable laws. As always, our journalism remains fully independent.”

But the partnership still raises potential concerns about the safety of journalists’ data in the future, Davis said.

“An investigative reporter who keeps a ton of sensitive notes, source information, and confidential documents on their devices is going to be naturally concerned about protecting that information, and who could blame them?” Davis said. “It’s pretty hard to trust management’s intentions when the goalposts shift so often that there’s always a fear that what’s true today won’t be true in six months. We’ve all seen the years of disinvestment in local news, especially in the name of going all-in on AI.”

Read the full statement here.

This story has been updated to include comment from USA Today Co.

In its Q2 earnings call Thursday morning, USA Today Co. chairman and CEO Mike Reed told investors he expects the partnership to “strengthen how we collect, connect and activate audience data to drive more effective and faster monetization across our platform.”

“Every visit, every session, and every moment of attention creates a signal,” Reed said. “When we connect those signals, they become actionable intelligence that allows us to engage users more effectively and monetize those relationships faster and at much greater value. The work our team is doing with Palantir is a direct extension of this strategy. We are applying Palantir’s AI-powered platform to one of the largest opportunities in front of us, converting the sheer scale of our audience into known, orchestrated first-party relationships, because that is what turns our reach into sustainable, higher value revenue.”

USA Today Co. owns more than 200 local newspapers in the United States, along with its national daily USA Today. The partnership with Palantir comes as search traffic continues to fall — a challenge faced by publications around the world, and one The New York Times mentioned in its own earnings report Wednesday. USA Today Co. reported 158 million unique visitors in the second quarter of the year, down from 180 million in the first quarter.

This decline “does not reflect lower demand for the content,” said Kristin Roberts, president of USA Today Media. “What it reflects is lower referrals from traditional search because of those consumer discovery changes that we’re seeing and witnessing.”

Palantir has been the subject of controversy in recent months for providing its technology to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the U.S. Department of Defense, and the Israeli military. The company’s co-founder and chairman is Peter Thiel, the billionaire entrepreneur who funded Hulk Hogan’s defamation lawsuit against Gawker, leading to the publication’s ultimate bankruptcy and closure.

USA Today Co. isn’t the only media company to enlist Palantir’s services. Axel Springer — which owns Business Insider, Politico, Bild, and The Telegraph — and Fox News have also partnered with Palantir for its data intelligence tools. Thomson Reuters has also been linked to Palantir due to ICE’s use of Palantir software and Thomson Reuters data, 404 Media reported in March.

“It’s important to note all of our data remains our data,” Reed told investors. “It’s really just leveraging this incredible AI and software that Palantir has to allow us to move so much faster and to be so much smarter with the data we have today. And…take a lot of the anonymous interactions we have today and turn those into known relationships…The more known relationships we have, the more data we create, the more signals we create, the more actionable intelligence we have.”

Roberts told USA Today Co. employees in an email Thursday that the Palantir partnership could result in “better recommendations and offers based on what people actually care about” and “smarter subscription and advertising experiences” for consumers and subscribers.

“USA TODAY Co. complies with applicable data protection and privacy laws and maintains strong standards for data security and governance,” the company said in a statement to Nieman Lab. “We require this of our vendors and partners as well, reflecting our belief that safeguarding protected personal information is essential to our business and the audiences we serve. Our editorial decisions remain independent and are guided by our longstanding journalistic standards and ethics policies.”

Roberts noted that World Cup coverage across USA Today’s network “generated 97 million pageviews, with search driving nearly 65% of that traffic. That reinforces an important point — when content meets a real and urgent need — search still delivers. But we are not building our future on search, even in our strongest categories. Great content still finds an audience, and our opportunity moving forward is to ensure that our distribution tactics keep pace with the way readers and viewers want to consume content in digital spaces.”

“I can see a day where we turn off scraping or making our content available for the [search engine links],” Reed said. “We’re actually more hopeful that we can be proactive with Google in negotiating a fair licensing deal. That would be our preferred path — to have our content appear both in traditional search as well as in AI summaries. But if we have to cut them off and block them in order to get to a deal, then we’ll do that for sure.”

Read the full earnings report here.

This story has been updated to clarify the relationship between Thomson Reuters and Palantir.