In a note to alumni of the M.A. program, Cobb wrote that the administration has “initiat[ed] a critical evaluation” of the M.A. curriculum. “To give this review the focus it deserves, we are temporarily pausing admissions for the upcoming admissions cycle.”

The school’s admissions page has been updated with a similar message.

Columbia will continue to offer its Master of Science programs in Journalism and Data Journalism. Current M.A. students are not affected by the pause. The estimated cost of attendance for the nine-month M.A. for the 2026-2027 year is roughly $120,000. The M.S. costs around $130,000 and the year-long M.S. in Data Journalism costs about $180,000. According to Columbia, around 80% of students receive some sort of financial aid.

The M.A. program was designed for working journalists with three or more years of professional experience “to go deeper into a specialized subject.” The M.S. degree, described as “the foundational program of the Journalism School,” is for students with “zero to three years” of experience.

The school also announced it will, for the first time in its history, offer an online degree. The new online Master of Science in Journalism program will be part-time with students earning a degree over two years.

“This new program brings an Ivy League J-School education directly to students across the United States,” reads one post from the Columbia Journalism School on X. “With guidance from CJS’s faculty of working journalists, you can develop your reporting skills while continuing to live and work in your community.”

Here’s the full note from Cobb:

Dear CJS M.A. Alumni,

I am writing to share an update about the Master of Arts program at Columbia Journalism School.

As part of our ongoing commitment to keeping our graduate education timely and innovative, the administration is initiating a critical evaluation of the M.A. curriculum. To give this review the focus it deserves, we are temporarily pausing admissions for the upcoming admissions cycle.

We want to reassure you directly: this evaluation phase reflects our commitment to continuous excellence. It does not alter the standing, prestige, or lasting value of your CJS M.A. degree.

The M.A. degree is grounded in deep domain expertise, rigorous analytical reporting, and subject-matter authority—qualities media organizations and independent journalists need now more than ever. The groundbreaking work produced by our alumni network across global newsrooms continues to define the high standards of this program and reinforce the strength of your credential.

Periodic curricular review is a standard practice at Columbia to ensure our specialized tracks advance alongside the media landscape. Current M.A. students are completing their nine-month curriculum without interruption, receiving the full scope of concentration coursework, thesis advisement, and faculty mentorship.

We remain immensely proud of your achievements and the impact of your reporting worldwide. If you have questions, please contact Dr. George Miller, associate dean for academic affairs.

Sincerely,
Jelani Cobb
Dean & Henry R. Luce Professor of Journalism

Nieman Lab has reached out to Columbia Journalism School for more details. This story will be updated.

Assembly Bill 2222, known as the Community Newsroom Employment and Workforce Sustainability Act, gives newsrooms tax credits of $20,000 each for up to five journalists on staff, and $15,000 for every journalist after, as well as $7,500 credits for journalists working part-time and $15,000 new hire credits.

The nonprofit Rebuild Local News sponsored the bill. “If you hire more people, you get more money,” Matt Pearce, Rebuild Local News’s director of policy, told Nieman Lab in August. “If you lay people off, you get less money. If you don’t employ anyone, you don’t get anything.”

Newsom told reporters that he sees some downsides of the bill, including the fact that it will benefit hedge fund– and billionaire-owned newsrooms. (The guidelines about the types of newsrooms that qualify are here; the program is “designed to be broadly inclusive.”) From the L.A. Times:

While speaking with reporters on Wednesday, Newsom acknowledged some of the concerns that have been raised about those who will receive benefits from the bill’s funds, specifically hedge funds and billionaire owners and outlets that he accused of spreading propaganda.

“It does subsidize those that don’t need to be subsidized,” he said. “We have hedge funds in this space. We have billionaires in this space. We have people that are profiteering in this space by gutting the newsrooms and extracting value out of the space that also are the beneficiaries.”

Newsom said he chose not to veto the bill because he believes its benefits outweigh the liabilities. He added that he hopes the Legislature and next governor can work to narrow down who benefits most from the legislation.

“We should not be subsidizing hedge funds,” he said. “We should be focused on where the need is the greatest, in my humble opinion, and I do think when you have no cap, the limitlessness of this…to some of the most well-heeled organizations, where now they simply could pull from this bill the benefits that they didn’t even ask for or need, is self-evident.”

The law goes into effect January 1, 2027, and newsrooms should see credits beginning in 2028.

Virasoro left the job in February to pursue a career in tech. But the idea of informative audio briefs stuck with him. Sometimes, he said, he’d get another employee to forward him his ex-boss’ voice notes. By August, Virasoro and his friend and co-founder Iván Schahovskoy Hoferek created Lisa AI, an app that uses artificial intelligence to generate personalized audio news updates.

Within days of its August launch, Lisa became one of the most-downloaded news apps in the country. As of September 30, it is the No. 1 app in the News and Magazines & Newspapers categories in the Apple App Store in Argentina. It’s also one of the top 100 most downloaded apps in the country, Virasoro said. About 70% of users who have downloaded the app actively interact with it. Audio briefs have a 90% completion rate, with about 80% of users returning to the app the next day. Virasoro declined to share the total number of downloads. Journalists have told Virasoro and Schahovskoy that they’ve been using the app to keep up with news on their beats, they said.

Virasoro and Schahovskoy are both 23. Lisa — whose name is inspired by the first Apple computer — is a response to the changing news consumption habits of young people around the world, Virasoro said.

“Younger generations like [ours] are so used to consuming personalized content through an algorithm that knows my interests perfectly and is constantly recommending content,” Virasoro said. “What Iván and I saw was: There is a journalist reporting on a topic that I am super interested in, but I don’t have a tool that directly shows me the content I care about in the formats we consume, like podcasts, threads, a language model like ChatGPT or Gemini, or a scrollable feed.”

Here’s how it works: Users download the app and indicate what topics they’re interested in, and their level of interest in each topic. Lisa then continuously scans dozens of Argentinian news outlets for recent stories about those topics. The result is a 10-minute “newscast” that summarizes articles about the user’s favorite topics and attributes the facts to the corresponding news outlets or journalists. Lisa only cites free news sites and cannot access paywalled content. It can produce up to two audio briefs per day, and each one includes a chat feature that provides links to the stories cited, so users can read the original journalism themselves. Lisa’s voice is calm, and sounds AI-generated. The voice has an authentic Argentinian accent, which Virasoro and Schahovskoy developed using voice-cloning technology.

The app is free to use. There is no subscription fee or advertising on the platform. It’s available worldwide in app stores, but only uses Argentinian news sources. Lisa is run by a volunteer team of five engineers and developers, and two advisors. Virasoro said they received some funding from angel investors, which he and Schahovskoy put toward the product development. They do not take a salary.

Intellectual property law in Argentina allows for news content to be used and redistributed within reason as long as the original sources are clearly cited, but doesn’t give the public free rein to republish news articles word for word. Excerpts of up to 1,000 words may be used for educational, informational, or scientific purposes, the law says. Similar to copyright law in other countries, Argentina’s law gives the Lisa team the ability to summarize and reference news outlets’ reporting, Schahovskoy said, and it’s why Lisa generates summaries with attributions rather than republishing articles from news outlets.

According to the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, 46% of Argentine adults reported that they avoided news in 2026. Trust in news fell to 26% in 2026, down 6% from the year before. While traditional media in Argentina struggles to stay afloat amid a decline in advertising revenue, nearly one in ten people reported getting news from a chatbot. Young Argentinians are increasingly turning to creators, independent journalists, and YouTube for their news. Worldwide, about half (52%) of young adults reported that they get their news from chatbots, video platforms, and social media. Podcasts continue to be popular, with 11% of adults reporting that they have used the medium to get news.

Virasoro and Schahovskoy saw the shift in news consumers’ attention to new platforms as “a societal problem” due to the lack of editorial curation of social platforms, often surfacing fake news. Even with Lisa’s early success, Virasoro and Schahovskoy don’t have plans to monetize the app anytime soon. They said they want to keep iterating for now, but are open to helping news outlets monetize for themselves within the app down the line. So far, three news outlets have reached out asking for their websites to be included in Lisa’s reading list. They don’t see the app as a competitor to news outlets, but rather a new way to help the news industry find new audiences.

“Traditional media is losing power — even though they do super professional and deeply dedicated work to ensure the information they make available to the public is fact-checked and verified,” Schahovskoy said. “We value it immensely, and we want society to trust [media] again, and to give them a platform built around current consumption formats that reduces friction between society and verified information.”

“The undisputed evidence reflects that Thomson Reuters’s materials possess a creative spark, and ROSS aspired to be a direct competitor by using them for a highly similar purpose,” wrote Judge Tamika Montgomery-Reeves, who sits on the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia, in her decision.

Notably, Montgomery-Reeves points out that the case does not concern a large-language model (LLM) or other generative AI tool. Ross’s competing AI search engine didn’t generate original text, but instead retrieved existing passages from judicial opinions. She argues that this may limit its impact on other AI copyright litigation.

“Under ROSS’s framing, this case appears to concern the future of AI legal technology. But appearances can be deceiving,” she writes. “In truth, this is no more than an ordinary copyright case.”

Thomson Reuters filed its lawsuit back in 2020, long before the release of ChatGPT and other generative AI chatbots as we know them. The first known AI copyright lawsuit in the U.S., the case echoes many more recent lawsuits between news publishers and AI companies like OpenAI and Anthropic. Thomson Reuters argued that Ross had copied thousands of “headnotes,” short summaries of the legal issues in a given case, that were published on its legal research platform Westlaw. These headnotes were then used to train Ross’s own competing AI-powered legal search engine.

In a February 2025 ruling, judge Stephanos Bibas sided with Thomson Reuters in the case. He rejected the argument that using copyrighted work to train the commercial AI model was legally permissible, as Ross had argued in court. One of the main factors in a fair use case is whether the infringing work impacts the market value of the original.

“Even taking all facts in favor of Ross, it meant to compete with Westlaw by developing a market substitute,” wrote Bibas in his original ruling. “And it does not matter whether Thomson Reuters has used the data to train its own legal search tools; the effect on a potential market for AI training data is enough.”

Legal experts have been keeping a close eye on Ross’s appeal with the 3rd U.S Circuit Court of Appeal. As the first AI copyright case to reach a federal appeals court, there was potential for it to set far-reaching legal precedent on fair use — precedent that could be taken advantage of by news publishers arguing in similar AI copyright cases.

Ultimately, Montgomery-Reeves’ ruling emphasizes that an AI tool that reproduces a copyrighted work’s text in order to compete directly with that work in the market, will likely not hold up to a fair use test. But she leaves room for generative AI tools to be considered more transformative than Ross’s AI search engine.

In the lawsuit Bartz vs. Anthropic, filed by members of the Authors Guild, a judge ruled that Anthropic’s use of published books to train its Claude LLMs was, in fact, fair use. It was only Anthropic’s decision to pirate books and store copies of them that lost them in that case. That ruling in June 2025 resulted in the largest settlement in U.S. copyright law history, granting a $1.5 billion payout to authors and publishers.

“Unlike the AI models in Bartz…ROSS’s AI platform cannot generate original expression, and the evidence here supports the opposite conclusion about transformativeness,” wrote Montgomery-Reeves, implying that her ruling does not contradict the ruling in that case.

In other words, if Ross had built a product that could output summaries of Westlaw’s headnotes with its own “original expression,” this fair use ruling could have looked very different.

Publishers are rethinking audience engagement in light of Google Zero

In the age of declining traffic, publishers are grappling with how to engage and retain audiences. There’s a shift away from volume toward relationship-building, with publishers exploring new ways to measure engagement beyond pure clicks.

App downloads, frequency of visits, and newsletter signups were identified as important indicators by The Guardian’s chief support officer, Liz Wynn. “You build motivation, support, effective comprehension of our mission, our purpose, why we exist, why we should keep coming back,” she said. “[It’s a] very important emotional driver, but it’s not enough on its own. We have to focus also on the habit and the value of driving people day to day.”

To build those habits, publishers are focusing on community-building, with some even employing AI tools to achieve that goal. Predictive models, such as using AI to recommend users their next read, were cited as a common example of how AI can help drive user engagement. Anna Sbuttoni, deputy head of digital at The Times and The Sunday Times, said her team is now using AI to help with another aspect of audience engagement: comment moderation.

“[Content moderation] is still overseen by humans, but it’s just brought that work way down, and it’s freed up that team to now do much more interesting and innovative community-focused work than they were doing when they were just spending hours and hours on this moderation job,” she said.

News organizations are training their own in-house creators

Another challenge for news media is increased competition from independent journalists and news creators. This phenomenon has been well-documented in research by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism (RISJ) and was a running thread of discussion across various panels, where legacy media organizations discussed how to adopt creator-led practices while preserving institutional trust, editorial authority and sustainable revenues.

The Economist is a prime example of this. The magazine has moved away from its legacy of journalistic anonymity toward putting its journalists’ faces, names, and personalities at the forefront of its value proposition. Its executive editor, Andrew Palmer, said one of the reasons the publication has begun to showcase its journalists is a desire to highlight the humans behind the journalism as AI advances.

“It builds a connection, so we definitely have a lot of subscribers who want to see what our journalists do and understand the workings of the newsroom,” said Palmer.

Like many newsrooms, The Economist is fostering in-house talent to put in front of the camera as a way to respond to growing audience interest in creators. The team at The Times and The Sunday Times is also thinking about its talent strategy as the next step in audience engagement. Putting journalists in front of the camera is one strategy it is beginning to employ to reach people who might not otherwise engage with the papers.

“How can we make people consider getting a Times subscription? A big part of that has been just a complete change in how we approach our social video formats, and that’s really putting our journalists at the front and center of that. Getting people to know the real journalists,” explained Sbuttoni.

Earlier this year, The Guardian announced the formation of Guardian Studios — a new creative hub for video-first, personality-led journalism. Leah Green, who leads the initiative, said the team is looking to create a new slate of YouTube shows built around on-screen talent. Green agreed that legacy media has a lot to learn from creators. But news media has one thing that individual creators don’t: brand recognition.

“There can be a [certain] panic and [an] overcorrection from legacy brands. There’s so much to learn from the creator economy: personality and how to create fandom,” said Green. “But brand is one thing that an individual creator can never have. It would be a mistake to try to replicate the creator economy.”

Jasmine Dawson, senior vice president of BBC Studios, said one of the main things legacy publishers can learn from creators is a deep understanding of their audience. Creators, unlike broadcasters and publishers, “live and breathe” in their audience’s world: They understand them and know what they want.

“Obsessing about your audience means not only knowing where they are, but what they want to talk about, what they want to hear from you, what they want to see from you,” she said.

Clicks from AI search are starting to become an important metric

Over the past year, publishers have been reckoning with what many describe as a significant decline in referral traffic, as changes to Google Search reshape how audiences discover news. Google’s rollout of AI Overviews and AI Mode, which provide AI-generated answers directly within search results, has heightened concerns that fewer users will click through to publishers’ websites.

“There’s a real tension that exists in terms of what’s happening in partnerships and their relationship with audiences,” said RISJ’s director, Mitali Mukherjee. “We don’t have a clear sign of what exactly will happen.”

This uncertainty is one of the main reasons publishers are investing in strengthening direct relationships with their audiences. At the same time, they are examining their relationships with AI companies and their presence in AI search. They want to remain visible across search and AI services while protecting the value of original journalism.

The world of AI search was described as the “Wild West,” with the rules of the game still unclear. No one knows exactly what gets to the top of AI search results, for example, making it difficult to build an optimization strategy around a technology with so many unknowns.

Tom Jackson, chief technology officer at News UK, underlined the need for news publishers to adapt their content to AI-driven search and discovery, while warning that the field is changing too quickly to make major strategic decisions based on today’s patterns.

“One thing I’m finding quite interesting, given my background, is that they’re saying richer metadata may become increasingly important,” said Jackson. “It’s going to be interesting to reopen that tagging and metadata box in this new, agentic AI–focused world.”

Despite the uncertainty, publishers still want to experiment with how they can maintain a presence on these platforms. Carly Steven, director of SEO and editorial e-commerce at the Daily Mail, said that, while the publisher’s default position is to protect its IP and focus on creating original content, it has also started experimenting in the AI search space.

“We are starting to test a nuanced approach to that…to be more visible on these platforms,” said Steven. “We know our readers are looking for information on these platforms and are starting to look for brands they trust.”

Show your value to monetize your content

What is the monetary value of journalism? And how do we make audiences pay for it? Those questions were at the heart of many discussions. The overwhelming response was that, in order to persuade audiences to pay for news, organizations need to demonstrate the unique value of their journalism.

For example, Katie Palisoul from Politico UK explained that the publisher is building better audience data and conversion journeys to demonstrate the value of its paid journalism to users of its free site. By introducing registration for free content, Politico can better understand its audience, identify registered users who are likely to subscribe, and guide them toward premium content.

“We are building some foundational elements to be able to show the value of our paid-for content, which is our policy journalism,” she said.

The question of monetization extended beyond audiences to conversations around AI, particularly the tension between the short- and long-term economics of allowing AI platforms to use publishers’ content.

In the short term, publishers have an incentive to participate in AI platforms — even if the compensation or referral traffic is small — because their content can be relatively fungible. But if every publisher accepts that weaker value exchange, does it undermine the economics of journalism in the long term?

Steven from the Daily Mail said that the question of fungibility has never been particularly relevant to the organization, as it strives to create content that is exclusive, original, and not replaceable.

“We are really focused on the absolute conviction that our business is valuable, and that that value needs to be paid for,” she said. “We are experimenting, adapting to the landscape as it changes, as new technologies emerge and they become established standards, but fundamentally believe that [our content] has value.”

Jackson from News UK framed licensing and deal-making as a core monetization path when it comes to AI, with a strategy that combines partnerships with legal action. This has led the company to strike a deal with Meta while also entering licensing conversations with other AI companies.

“Ideally we want to have relationships with all of these people and get fair value back. But if they come in and steal that content, we will sue them,” said Jackson. “It’s not just the monetary value of that deal, which is material. It’s also the ability to then have that close relationship with these organizations.”

Newsletters remain valuable for publishers in the age of AI

In the midst of such a future-oriented conference, one old piece of technology stood out as a winner across the panels: newsletters. They were framed as direct, differentiated products that deepen reader relationships and reduce reliance on platform algorithms. Many of the news organizations showcased at the conference have invested in newsletters, which remain a strong way to engage directly with audiences and counter declining referral traffic.

For The Logic, a Canadian newsroom focused on tech and business, newsletters have been a core part of the organization since the beginning. David Skok, The Logic’s CEO and editor-in-chief, said the publication hasn’t seen a drop-off in open rates, while advertiser performance has continued to grow. He attributes their success to treating the newsletter as a premium, central product of the newsroom. The Logic considers its daily newsletter briefing, which is written specifically by its journalists, the front page of the newspaper.

“The way we treat newsletters is really more as their own product,” said Skok. “We were a bit ahead of the curve in that we had this direct relation with our readers, because we just decided very early on that we weren’t going to build our business on the top of some of these algorithms.”

Politico Playbook also demonstrates the enduring appeal of newsletters, having spawned numerous global iterations since its launch in 2007. Palisoul from Politico attributed its success to an “obsession with audience”: The team knows exactly who its readers are and what they want from the product.

“The Playbook is written with an exact audience in mind: a prime minister, a cabinet minister…But authors think of that person as a person. They don’t think of that person as an MP,” explained Palisoul. “It’s fun. It’s cheeky. It’s got good humor. Great puns. It tells them where they can go for a drink. It’s really focused on the daily life of that individual.”

First created by the Knight Foundation in partnership with the Institute for Nonprofit News and the News Revenue Hub, NewsMatch has evolved into what many INN members think of as its flagship program. Now, INN is thinking about the next 10 years. If the first decade of NewsMatch helped newsrooms fundraise, “the next phase will focus on helping newsrooms build on that foundation with more advanced, flexible campaigns tailored to their goals and stages of growth,” according to a report INN released Tuesday. To support that evolution, NewsMatch will shift from “a single year-end campaign to a year-round model.” Next year, INN will pilot “NewsMatch catalyst campaigns” in which some INN members test new fundraising strategies, among other things.

About 600,000 first-time donors have contributed to nonprofit news via NewsMatch in the program’s lifetime, per the report. INN found that the average number of mid-level donors per newsroom (those giving between $1,000 and $5,000) more than doubled between 2021 and 2025.

In 2022, local matches surpassed national donors for the first time, a milestone for the program. The report indicates that INN’s leadership is thinking about how to keep bringing new funding to a field that has grown substantially since NewsMatch launched, even as newsrooms face funding and audience challenges. “INN fundraises annually for a program highly valued by our growing membership, but the program is not endowed,” INN executive director and CEO Karen Rundlet states in the report. “While INN has expanded support beyond the usual suspects in journalism philanthropy, cultivating these newer entrants to funding nonprofit journalism requires long lead times for donor education and buy-in.”

Read more and find the full report here.

The deal, announced earlier this month, was something of a coup for NPR. Newton and Roose had announced they were leaving their podcast Hard Fork at The New York Times to build something independent. The news that their next show was headed to NPR, another legacy outlet, was greeted with some surprise — especially because NPR has been cutting jobs and offering buyouts in its first full year without federal funding.

“I don’t think NPR has been buying, is the bottom line,” Zylstra said about the surprised reaction. “I don’t think people thought we would be open to that kind of big swing.”

“Candidly, it’s been a tough year,” she added. “It’s not a shock that everyone would be like, ‘How are those guys doing? I hope they’re okay over there.’ But we really are.”

Zylstra told me she feels she’s been “training [her] whole life” for the job. (She said something similar when she was hired.) Zylstra works from NPR’s Culver City offices. Originally from South Africa, she was previously an executive at Pinterest, YouTube, and Sesame Workshop. She does not have a journalism background.

“News as a content type is not where I feel confident,” Zylstra acknowledged. “But thank goodness for [Thomas] Evans, because he’s the editor-in-chief, and actually nobody wants my opinion on what’s the news anyway.”

Instead, Zylstra was tasked with helping NPR bloom in the next digital era. No one — especially not Nieman Lab readers — will be surprised to learn that involves video.

“We were always audio-first. But as you move into the digital world, you have to turn the lights on, right?” Zylstra said. “You can’t be in the digital world without video being part of the experience.”

Machine Gods is not NPR’s first video-first show. Wild Card and Newsmakers (and Tiny Desk Concerts, for that matter) all precede it. But acquiring the popular podcast may help NPR as it seeks to shift from “reaching people wherever they are” to nudging users toward NPR’s own platforms. NPR CEO Katherine Maher described third-party platforms as the “top of the funnel” in a recent interview and has directed funds toward overhauling NPR’s own app.

The press release calls Machine Gods a “major programming acquisition,” but Zylstra said she prefers the term “partnership.” NPR will pay Roose and Newton, who each own half of Machine Gods Media, and then sell sponsorships on the podcast and “all the various touchpoints” for the show, as Zylstra put it. (NPR declined to comment on the price and duration of the partnership. Bloomberg had previously reported the deal was approaching $5 million.) Machine Gods will get wide distribution and help with ad sales while staying independent. The twice-weekly video podcast will debut as a radio show next year — allowing the journalists to reach some of the roughly 33% of Americans who never or rarely listen to podcasts.

NPR, meanwhile, gets a built-in audience and a popular show focused on one of the biggest news stories in the world — plus a partnership that brings proven, solidly journalistic (read: relatively brand-safe) creators into the NPR fold.

Acquiring and distributing an external podcast like Machine Gods is a bit of departure for NPR, which has often chosen to elevate in-house talent or expand existing franchises. Two other launches, announced alongside the Machine Gods partnership, fall into that more familiar pattern.

• The new show Your Turn with Allison Aubrey, also scheduled for a mid-October debut, was created with Boston-based member station WBUR. Aubrey, a longtime health and science correspondent for NPR, will help listeners discover their “third turn” in midlife and beyond.
• The Indicator from Planet Money is — you guessed it — an expansion of NPR’s Planet Money franchise. The show, which currently releases new episodes of 10 minutes or less Monday through Friday, will add a Saturday edition later this year. The weekend version will bring the show’s “signature exuberant explainers to pop culture trends,” according to NPR.

During its four-year run with The New York Times, Hard Fork didn’t shy away from critical reporting, covering decision-making at tech companies as well as federal inaction on AI and other tech regulation. The news analysis from Newton and Roose, two well-connected and thoughtful journalists, was one of the strongest aspects of the show. (Other strengths, in this frequent listener’s opinion: the show is genuinely funny, and the co-hosts can productively disagree.)

I asked Zylstra how she is thinking about the news analysis element when much of NPR’s journalism is delivered with a just-the-facts straightness.

“I think our mandate is to be deeply reported and to express that in a way that represents our voice, and the guys’ journalism fits that perfectly,” she said. “It might have more of a op-ed spirit because there is more opinion in there than some of our news magazines — but that’s not where we are delivering headlines. We’re putting it in the context of a conversation between two friends in the same way that Car Talk would have. I feel like there’s space for both styles.”

In the original announcement, Newton said keeping Machine Gods free and widely accessible was a deciding factor in choosing NPR. “What sold us on NPR is its public-service mission,” Newton said. “We get to bring sharp, independent reporting on AI to millions of people for free, right where they already listen.”

Zylstra thinks NPR’s distribution could be a competitive advantage in future deals, too, as she tries to land more “big-swing” partnerships. New episodes of Machine Gods will appear on the NPR app, yes, but also YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and more. In January, the series will expand into an hour-long radio program distributed across NPR member stations.

Part of the power of public media, Zylstra said, is that its mandate is to distribute its journalism to as many people as possible.

“We don’t have the same [need to say], ‘We need to put it behind a paywall to drive subscription in order to blah blah blah blah,'” she said.

Member stations can choose when (and if) they’ll air Machine Gods. “I’m hoping they do it after [All Things Considered] in a kind of late-night vibe,” Zylstra mused.

Well, academics are in the same boat.

A new study, titled “Guidance over guidelines? Unpacking the uses and concerns of generative AI in communication science” and published in Information, Communication and Society, uncovers how communication scholars are using generative artificial intelligence in their academic work.

Researchers from the National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University in Taiwan, the University of Amsterdam, and Utrecht University surveyed more than 1,100 communication scholars from 77 countries about their use of AI, their concerns about AI in the workplace, and the kind of guidance they seek about AI use in their work. They also held four focus group discussions.

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This is the first systematic, field-wide, international empirical investigation of generative AI practices in communication research. We surveyed 1,138 scholars across 77 countries + did 4 focus groups. Small thread with 5 key findings

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— Hannes Cools (@hannescools.bsky.social) September 28, 2026 at 6:50 AM

The study reveals a disconnect between researchers’ beliefs about AI and their use of it. Nearly 70% of survey respondents already used generative AI in at least one research-related task, but respondents also mostly considered AI use to be inappropriate for most research-related tasks. While just over half of respondents said that using AI for writing texts (55%) and generating code (50.4%) were appropriate use cases, the study’s authors note that survey participants did not reach a consensus on appropriate or ethical uses of AI in their work.

The lack of institutional guidance on how best to use AI in research means researchers must develop their own ethical standards. This creates a stigma around AI use, according to the study’s authors. Refraining from AI use may put researchers at a disadvantage and slow down their work, but using AI could also be a disadvantage if journals reject research that discloses AI use. “Researchers may recognize an ethical obligation to disclose genAI assistance while fearing that doing so will lead others to perceive their work as less authentic or credible,” the study’s authors write. “This tension has been described as a transparency paradox.”

All of this results in feelings of “AI shame,” the authors say.

“While such hesitation is understandable given that reporting genAI use might reduce the chances of publication, it ultimately hampers open discussion about how these tools can be used ethically and responsibly in research,” the study says. “Transparency is therefore essential, as effective and meaningful guidelines can only be developed when we understand when and how genAI is being used.”

The study’s authors recommend that the communication research community — including individuals, institutions, and journals — create a “disclosure-positive” culture in its field by requiring researchers to disclose the stages of their work at which they used generative AI.

“Simply forbidding the use of genAI — or pretending that it is not being used — is neither sustainable nor constructive,” the authors write. “Instead, acknowledging its presence and defining transparent boundaries for its use will help align ethical standards with actual scholarly practices, fostering honesty, accountability, and trust within the research community.”

Read the full study here.

As the program moves forward, Lenfest plans to keep the same approach of embedding full-time engineering staff in local newsrooms for two years. In this next grant cycle, though, the program is expanding its reach beyond metro newspapers to consider fellowships for local TV news and statewide public service journalism.

“The key success factor seems to be that the fellows are hired locally, report locally, and are viewed as part of their local team, because they are,” Jim Friedlich, executive director and CEO of the Lenfest Institute, told me. “They’re not Lenfest employees, and they’re certainly not Microsoft or OpenAI employees. They’re free to work in any technology that they deem appropriate, and in every case, they were the first full-time AI employee at each news organization.”

The first cohort was funded with $10 million from OpenAI and Microsoft. Each company contributed $2.5 million in cash and $2.5 million in credits that could be used for enterprise licenses, cloud storage, and tokens for generative AI products.

Microsoft began distributing its grant funds six months after OpenAI and hasn’t decided yet whether it will renew its commitment once that cycle ends in 2027. OpenAI, meanwhile, is expanding its support, contributing $10 million to the program on its own: $5 million in cash and $5 million in credits.

“Funding supports people and implementation; credits allow for experimentation and make our technology accessible,” said Tom Rubin, the chief of intellectual property and content at OpenAI. “The goal is to create lasting capability for news organizations: deeper research, stronger reporting, richer user experiences, improved workflows, and more sustainable businesses.”

When the fellowship launched in 2024, OpenAI had just closed a funding round that valued it at $157 billion. Earlier this month, The New York Times reported that the company is considering a new funding round that could value the company at $1.5 trillion ahead of its IPO.

Alongside that growth, the company is expanding its role as a funder of journalism initiatives and institutions. In July, OpenAI renewed its funding of the Product & AI Studio, a program run through The American Journalism Project (AJP) to help nonprofit local newsrooms experiment with AI. The $5 million in cash and $3 million in credits will support the more than 50 news organizations in AJP’s portfolio. They’re encouraged to build tools and infrastructure that can be used by other newsrooms.

This month, OpenAI also announced it is donating subscriptions for more than 400 enterprise-level ChatGPT accounts to students and faculty at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University and the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York. In the announcement, OpenAI hinted at further donations to journalism schools down the line.

The Lenfest Institute fellowship is unique in that it brings full-time staffers with technical expertise into news organizations and assigns them newsroom leaders, or “executive sponsors,” to manage their work and ensure they aren’t isolated.

“You get a full-time person to follow the thread and be creative and attack problems as they come in,” said Tristan Loper, the head of national programs at Lenfest. “It’s not a part-time, or consulting, or project-based role. You live and breathe the problem…I think that leads to a lot of organic problem solving and cross-team collaboration.”

“Their fellow sat down with Kevin, walked through the code, and made some adjustments to their particular setup,” said Boggie. The Banner has since launched its own version of the tool.

A fellow from Chicago Public Media, which owns WBEZ Chicago and the Chicago Sun-Times, also customized a version of Dewey to interact with radio transcripts. Dewey is open-source, and the underlying code is available on GitHub to newsrooms outside the program as well.

Moving into the second iteration of the fellowship, Lenfest wants to emphasize the collaborative parts of the program further, prioritizing reusable AI tools that can be easily copied and customized for other news organizations.

As part of that push, Lenfest has brought on Sonali Verma, who leads INMA’s Newsroom Innovation Initiative and previously worked on Sophi, an AI-powered paywall product first built in-house at Canada’s Globe and Mail. This week, Lenfest is launching a new newsletter called Context Window, written by Verma, that will share what fellows have learned and link to specific tools and GitHub resources. It’s “all with an eye toward how this can be adopted” by other newsrooms, Loper said.

Chase Davis, formerly at The Minnesota Star Tribune’s AI Lab, where he oversaw the Lenfest fellowship, has also come on board as the program’s technical lead. Among other responsibilities, he’ll help newsrooms productize any AI-powered tools they develop.

Lenfest is encouraging all 11 of the current participating newsrooms to reapply for the next grant cycle, but Friedlich said half, at most, will be reaccepted, leaving room for more news organizations to join.

With this next cohort, Friedlich says he’s interested in exploring how AI can support the business of local TV news. He also sees promise in using AI to support regional public service journalism, such as accountability reporting on state legislatures.

OpenAI’s renewal comes as the U.S. local news industry continues to contract, in part because of traffic declines related to AI search. This month McClatchy laid off more than 90 unionized workers across 70 publications. USA Today Co. also made major cuts, referencing AI search–related traffic declines. Against this backdrop, many local newspapers are turning to AI to assist with story drafting, while AI agent–led news publications with little to no human editorial oversight continue to pop up across the country.

Lenfest says it will not invest in newsrooms that plan to use AI primarily to displace human reporting and writing.

“We believe really strongly that there should be a human in the lead, not just a human in the loop — [someone who] is leading the use of AI and its personalization and its adaptations, rather than double-checking the work when it’s about to go out,” said Friedlich. “That may sound old-fashioned, but we think it’s really important.”

This story has been updated to correct Chase Davis’s role at The Minnesota Star Tribune.

That’s in part because it is written in such a neutral register, containing paragraphs like:

Three housemates in their mid-20s opened it together, hoping to fill the void left by two local queer bars that had shuttered. One of the trio, Asa Rosario, a drag performer who uses it/its pronouns, envisioned a venue where it and its friends could perform.

and:

But by the time of Last Ditch’s monthly community meeting on September 11, only one of the original founders, Matellian, is still involved. The two others stepped back from the daily operation months before, Matellian says, citing various pressures and health issues. One had enrolled in clown school.

and:

Moreover, the Zoom attendees speculate that the mediator’s licensed status makes her a mandated reporter — an agent of the state, akin to police. One person going by “Moss” asks if the mediator could have them hospitalized against their will, adding that her presence is “wildly unsafe.”

Really, you just have to read it — and to do so, you will almost definitely have to subscribe to The Boston Globe, unless you get a Globe subscriber to email it directly to you. The Globe doesn’t offer New York Times–style gift links that can be shared on social media. (There are unauthorized ways to read the piece, like finding it on an archive site.)

People are subscribing, a lot of them. In the first day after the story was published, it drove 1,000 new Globe subscriptions. A Globe spokesperson told me Friday that it has now spurred “several thousand” people to subscribe. That’s in about 72 hours.

The challenge for the Globe, now, is to hold on to those subscribers. The Globe, like most newspapers, offers steeply discounted promotional rates to new subscribers — $1 for the first six months. After that, a digital subscription costs around $30 a month.

Nonetheless, the Globe would rather be in this position than not. “Great article!” one commenter wrote. “It reads almost like a visit to another planet, which it kind of is.” Conveniently, that other planet is in driving distance of Globe headquarters.

“I feel guilty about not being on the ground with everybody when it actually went down, but it kind of was a blessing in disguise,” Lee, who was the news director of Asheville-based Blue Ridge Public Radio (BPR) at the time, said. “I was in a place that had stable internet, so I could make calls and run point on some things that I don’t know I would have been able to do otherwise.”

Lee had created an emergency plan for the station long before the storm hit, but it was primarily geared around mass shootings. Helene, however, was an all-encompassing disaster: alongside more than 230 deaths and billions of dollars’ worth of physical damage, it knocked out water, power, and cellular services, in some places for weeks. When Lee made it back to Asheville with a car full of supplies she’d picked up in Charlotte, she had to put together a plan on the fly: The station would move to 12-hour coverage, rather than its usual cadence of two live shifts a day, and they’d air every single one of the county’s twice-daily updates, followed by a recap and debrief by the station’s reporters.

But first, she had to take care of some of the station’s most basic needs.

“One of my first tasks was just cleaning out the toilets and setting up a camp toilet, because we didn’t have running water,” Lee, who’s now the editorial director of the nonprofit news organization NC Local, told me. “When we think about emergency planning, sometimes we think just about the news and how we’re going to get the information out, which is obviously a huge part of it. But there’s also just this basic hierarchy of needs: People have to have a place to go to the bathroom. They have to have water. They have to have food. I didn’t worry if my reporters were fed on a daily basis prior to [Hurricane Helene].”

For the most part, Lee and her colleagues had to figure out how to respond to and cover the storm on their own. But a new service, built out of the lessons Lee and other editors around the country learned from covering disasters themselves, aims to change that. It’s called Emergency Mode for News.

“Having the time or the funding to create emergency plans for your newsroom is a luxury,” said Jessica Morrison, co-director of OpenNews, one of the three organizations — along with NC Local and Newspack — behind the initiative, which was started using a three-year, $1.2 million grant from Press Forward. That’s why Emergency Mode’s website has pre-made checklists for various kinds of extreme weather disasters, like hurricanes, wildfires, or extreme heat, written by journalists who have experience covering those types of disasters. The website also links to Grist’s disaster toolkit and has a module to help create an “action pack” with resources that change depending on whether the journalists coming to the site are preparing for a threat ahead of time, in the midst of an emergency, or recovering from a disaster.

“This isn’t about teaching you how to cover breaking news or emergencies or disasters,” Morrison said. “We know that journalists know how to do that. It’s about shoring up your operations.”

When Hurricane Helene knocked out cell service in Western North Carolina, Lee and her colleagues heard from audience members who couldn’t load the BPR website because cell service was too spotty. So they worked with Newspack and NC Local to create a text-only, low-data version of the website, which could be loaded quickly even when cell signal was scarce. (As Josh wrote in October of that year, NPR enabled a similar feature for its local stations as Hurricane Milton bore down on Florida.) Newspack used its experience with Helene to create a WordPress-based “lite-site” plugin that newsrooms could easily incorporate into their own websites, and is in the process of developing a second plugin to quickly enable liveblogging so journalists can post updates to developing stories as they come in.

Open News is also distributing $30,000 in microgrants to help newsrooms pay for things like specialized training, and hosting workshops to bring together journalists from across multiple newsrooms to share knowledge and create a sort of Emergency Mode community. “There’s a lot of knowledge in the field already, and we’re hoping to bring it together,” Morrison said. “A lot of what we have found in this first year was that what people actually wanted to do was just talk to each other about their experiences.”

In the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, Lee received emails from editors around the country offering help and support, including one from an editor in Lahaina, Hawaii, which had dealt with devastating wildfires in 2023, who wrote to say that “even if it feels like this is endless, it’s not,” she told me. Another editor helped set up a network of freelancers who helped triage Lee’s inbox, which was filling up with press requests from national outlets, updates from her newsroom, and messages from BPR’s audience.

“There’s so much that you can draw from what other people have experienced,” Lee said. “There’s no reason to have people reinventing the wheel every single time and feeling isolated while doing so.”

Emergency Mode also offers a variety of mental health resources, which Lee learned firsthand are essential during and after a disaster. “Our Slack just turned into a channel of horrors,” Lee told me. She instituted a practice of checking in with her reporters about what they’d do to help their mental health each day. “In those scenarios your brain is cooked,” Lee said. “You’ve been riding adrenaline, and you’re sleeping two or three hours a night, and you’re just adapting as best as you can.”

Disasters can take many forms, but for now Emergency Mode is focused on extreme weather and climate disasters. It’s on its second year of the Press Forward grant; the first year was spent building the resources that went on the site, including reaching out to contributors to write the checklists, and the second year, which is ongoing, will be focused on getting feedback from newsrooms and adjusting the site accordingly. (Morrison told me that one of the early points of feedback from newsrooms was that they needed the information to be broken up into smaller chunks than currently exist.) Those conversations will help shape what Emergency Mode becomes in its third year, and if it might exist beyond that.

“What is emergency preparedness for?” Morrison asked. “It’s to reduce the number of decisions that you need to make during a disaster. Journalism is hard. People are experiencing burnout, and to add to that, you’re a person living through an emergency or a disaster that you’re also covering. Is there something that we could do to make emergency preparedness a shared infrastructure effort for newsrooms? That’s the main project.”

His acquisition, through Paramount, of Warner Bros. Discovery has been held up by a lawsuit filed by blue-state attorneys general over antitrust questions. One reported goal of the AGs was to have Ellison sell CNN in order to close the deal, though California’s Rob Bonta labeled that speculation. But this morning, those AGs appear to have thrown in the towel. Here are Benjamin Mullin, David McCabe, Shawn Hubler, and Laurel Rosenhall at The New York Times:

Paramount reached an agreement on Monday to resolve an antitrust lawsuit delaying its $111 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, according to four people familiar with the negotiations, eliminating the last significant barrier to the creation of an entertainment and media colossus.

A group of states, led by California’s attorney general, Rob Bonta, a Democrat, sued Paramount in July, arguing that an acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery would concentrate too much power over cable TV and blockbuster films under one company.

After weeks of on-again-off-again negotiations, Paramount and the states agreed to a number of concessions to complete the deal, according to the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss details not yet made public. The entertainment giant has agreed to establish a board of journalists to ensure the editorial independence of CNN and CBS News and committed to distributing 30 movies in theaters every year. The company also pledged to spend an additional $1.5 billion on film production over the next five years.

So while another major national news outlet will be under the control of a major Donald Trump ally…at least there’ll be “a board of journalists to ensure [its] editorial independence”! (That this is all happening while the president Ellison supports bans all CNN reporters from the White House adds a tragicomic character to it all.)

If this particular move sounds familiar, it’s because it’s been a part of past news company acquisitions where concerns about antitrust or editorial control end up being downshifted into similar (and mostly toothless) “boards.” Their effectiveness has been, to be generous, extremely limited. Here are two of the most prominent examples — both involving Rupert Murdoch, and neither offering much reason for “independence” optimism.

1981: Murdoch acquires The Times and The Sunday Times

When Murdoch wanted to purchase The Times of London and The Sunday Times in 1981, he faced skepticism from both newspapers’ editors. In order to avoid an inquiry by the British antitrust authority, he agreed to empower a set of “Independent National Directors” who would have to sign off on the firing or hiring of a top editor, and who would also resolve any major disputes between Murdoch and editors.

How did it work? Here’s how the legendary editor Harold Evans put it in his 1983 book Good Times, Bad Times:

[Murdoch had] guaranteed that the editors would have control of the political policy of their newspapers; that they would have freedom within fixed annual budgets; that the editors would not be subject to instruction from either the proprietor or management on the selection and balance of news and opinion; that instructions to journalists would be given only by their editor; and that any future sale of the titles would require the agreement of a majority of the independent national directors. In my year as editor of The Times, Murdoch broke all these guarantees. He put his point of view very simply to the home editor of The Times, Fred Emery, when he summoned him from holiday on 4 March to his office shortly before asking for my resignation: ‘I give instructions to my editors all round the world, why shouldn’t I in London?’ He was reminded of the undertakings to the Secretary of State [for Trade, John Biffen]. ‘They’re not worth the paper they’re written on,’ Murdoch replied.

Murdoch is right. The guarantees are not worth the paper they are written on — unless the proprietor shares the spirit of them. If he does, they are merely ornamental; if he does not, they are unworkable. There is no point in trying to make them stronger. Internal freedom cannot be acquired by external rules, and at Times Newspapers and The Observer the State has gone as far as it ought in attempting to lay down rules for the conduct of a private enterprise. The true role for the State must be to administer the anti-trust laws honestly and effectively. Once an acquisition has been agreed, it is too late for petty bureaucracy. There is justification for firmness here, since there is a universal recognition that monopoly power represents a danger, in the words of the Fair Trading Act, to ‘the accurate reporting of news and the free expression of opinion’…

Editorial guarantees are a paltry defence and they may be delusive as well. At Times Newspapers their invention enabled an air of respectability to be given to an unnecessary and hazardous extension of monopoly power, and they suggest that The Times’s tradition has been maintained when behind the fake ivy it can so easily be plundered. The theory of the constitution is that the independent national directors would not permit this to happen. As one of the architects of the constitution, I believed this too. I found in reality that the national directors are incapable of monitoring the daily turmoil of a newspaper. This has nothing to do with their theoretical powers, and increasing or entrenching them would make no difference.

The Tory MP Woodrow Wyatt would later write about how he’d “had all the rules bent for” Murdoch in order to get his Times acquisition approved: “Through Margaret I got it arranged that the deal didn’t go to the Monopolies Commission which almost certainly would have blocked it.”

Evans lasted only a year under Murdoch’s ownership. A longer run was had by the conservative editor Andrew Neil, who edited The Sunday Times from 1983 to 1994. Giving parliamentary testimony in 2007, Neil said that the “independence” offered by these outside board members was not about real authority — it was about smoothing the path of an important news outlet into regime-friendly hands:

First of all, let us just remind ourselves. It was a conceit invented by John Biffen and the Thatcher Government to allow Mr. Murdoch to take over these papers in the first place, and it was put in place for that reason. It was not really put in place to protect the independence of the editors.

Then you look at the kind of people who became these trustees, and I do not know who they are today, but in my time they were really just a bunch of establishment worthies and Murdoch policemen and they had no real role. There was one exception which was Alistair Burnet who really did know and helped me on one occasion. When I rather foolishly, although the story was entirely accurate, published the story, “Queen dismayed by uncaring Thatcher,” which meant I had managed to pick a fight with both the Prime Minister and the Monarch in one day, the trustees then came into action. The trustees wanted my resignation and they petitioned Murdoch to get rid of me, and it was Alistair Burnett that dug his heels in and said, “Excuse me, the story’s true and it is not our job to get the resignation of the Editor, it is our job to protect the Editor,” so that was my only experience of them.

Even if they had a more worthwhile role to play, as I say, in reality, in practice, no matter how good the trustees are or how supportive, if you and the proprietor have fallen out of love, your position is untenable over time.

(That Sunday Times story may be familiar to fans of “The Crown.”)

Neil — arguably the most prominent conservative British journalist of the past half-century, and thus no fellow traveler of the left-wing Guardian — contrasted its control by the Scott Trust with the kabuki theater of an “independent board”:

The Scott Trust is a perfectly legitimate way of running a newspaper and, as you can see from the success of The Guardian and its on-line success globally, it works. That works. It is entirely different from the strong proprietor who controls the shares and the business of that company appointing a couple of trustees as a fig-leaf.

2007: Murdoch acquires The Wall Street Journal

In 2007, Murdoch made an unsolicited offer to the Bancroft family to acquire Dow Jones and its flagship newspaper, The Wall Street Journal. Several family members were concerned about what Murdoch ownership might do to the newspaper’s quality, and as part of the eventual sale, Murdoch agreed to the appointment of a “Dow Jones Special Committee” that would — much like its London predecessor — have final say over the hiring and firing of top editors, as well as changes that could be construed as forcing an editor out. (Things like “material reduction in compensation, relocation of principal place of employment, material change in duties or responsibilities…changes to the authority, reporting relationship and consultation rights,” and such.)

With that guarantee in place, enough hesitant Bancrofts were convinced to sell — though not everyone was on board. “Although I’m convinced that News Corp. offer is very generous in financial terms,” Dow Jones director Dieter von Holtzbrinck wrote in his resignation letter, “I’m very worried that Dow Jones unique journalistic values will long-term strongly suffer after the proposed sale…I do not believe that the Special Committee can finally prevent Mr. Murdoch from doing what he wants to do, from acting his way.”

Barely four months after the transaction closed, he was proved right. Murdoch managed a nifty end run around the “special committee” and ousted the newsroom’s top editor, Marcus Brauchli. Murdoch didn’t fire Brauchli. Instead, he layered over him, naming former Times of London editor Robert Thomson as publisher — but giving him direct oversight of the newsroom rather than the position’s usual business-side responsibilities. Brauchli, frozen out of major decisions in the newsroom he allegedly led, sent a note to staff saying he had “come to believe the new owners should have a managing editor of their choosing.” Brauchli was well compensated with a nice “consulting” gig for Dow Jones.

Because Brauchli had resigned rather than be fired, the approval of the “special committee” was not required. Murdoch informed its members as a fait accompli, telling one “I have no doubt that the New York Times will make trouble with it for a day or two, but I’m not too bothered by it.” The committee later issued a statement in which members “expressed the view that learning of the Brauchli matter after the fact failed to meet the letter and the spirit of the agreement.” But alas, the committee “decided there was no practical way to ‘unresign’ Brauchli and start the process over.”

Sarah Ellison¹, in her book on the Murdoch takeover of the Journal, described the special committee as “an artificial set of rules he would inevitably circumvent,” which seems dead on.

Right now, we don’t know much about what a CNN (or CBS News) “independent editorial board” will look like. Bloomberg reports that it “will be composed only of journalists, with no executives or shareholders allowed to join” and that “the board will be required to have political balance.” The deal does not appear to have any sort of hard enforcement mechanism built in for any violations of the “the letter and the spirit” of the editorial independence agreement. (By contrast, it does include a $30 million penalty for each film Paramount promises to release to theaters but doesn’t.)

But let’s be blunt. No matter how well-intentioned the members of these committees may be, if David Ellison wants to get around them, he will. It’s an artificial set of rules that a billionaire owner will inevitably circumvent. These “independent” boards are PR gestures, not vehicles for editorial protection. As Andrew Neil said, they are tools to get a controversial deal across the finish line. And at that, they seem to have succeeded once again.

1. Sarah Ellison, the longtime Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and Vanity Fair reporter, is no relation to David Ellison. Neither is Minnesota attorney general Keith Ellison, who was among the final holdouts for this Paramount settlement. Lots of Ellisons everywhere.

Take your pick because those two options — and many more — appear in a newly unredacted court filing in the ongoing New York Times v. OpenAI/Microsoft case. The motion was filed by a group of news publishers led by The New York Times. The most inflammatory language was not written by the Times’ lawyers, however, but by OpenAI’s and Microsoft’s own executives.

“Millions of people around the world will soon consider large models ‘hoovering up’ all their work to be an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions,” wrote Brent Hecht, Microsoft’s director of applied science, in the unearthed documents. “Almost no one intended for content they created to be used in this fashion, nor are they compensated for its use,” he wrote

In an emailed statement, a Microsoft spokesperson said Hecht’s comments “reflect one employee’s individual perspective, are not a legal analysis, and do not represent the company’s views.”

AI companies have publicly argued that their training falls under the legal doctrine of fair use. Publishers, however, have long warned that the AI companies’ plan to take content without compensation will severely undermine the news industry whose work trains those models. It appears at least some within the AI industry agree with the assessment.

Internal Microsoft communications identified the “real risk” that generative AI could “significantly disrupt the employment of the very people who generated the data on which the foundation model was trained.” A separate policy document put it like this: “LLMs are a product that destroys its supply chain.”

The current approach has created a “doom loop,” according to another internal Microsoft document.

“Our AI content strategy has started a ‘doom loop’ that will hurt the performance of our models and the entire web at the same time,” the document reads. “It is highly unusual that an end-product threatens the economic foundations of its essential suppliers, but that is the situation we have created for our LLM business with respect to its ‘content supply chain.’”

Elsewhere, Nick Turley, OpenAI’s head of ChatGPT, acknowledged that publishers face an “existential threat” from OpenAI’s products. The AI tools “are largely substitutive, period” and “will get more and more substitutive as they get better.”

OpenAI president and co-founder Greg Brockman told his colleagues: “[W]e are excellent at news btw. every time i do any generative stuff on NYT it seems to predict the next sentence pretty well.” Brockman also wrote that OpenAI’s model “seems to be particularly good at predicting text of news articles like whenever i have it complete in the middle of a sentence in a NYT article, it seems to complete the sentence on point.”

The filing also shows that OpenAI employees went out of their way to evade news paywalls to scrape websites. (When told about “a hack to get around nytimes paywall,” Brockman responded “ah nice.”)

Previously, these statements were heavily redacted or under seal. Some portions remain sealed.

“Easy to see why the AI companies had so many redactions,” wrote Digital Content Next CEO Jason Kint, who first shared the unredacted documents on X. “Their own people wrote the lede for NYT.”

You can read the court documents here.

“Betting the House” is a “pop-up newsroom” that consists of Emily Atkin, of the climate newsletter HEATED; Rachel Ramirez, a former CNN climate reporter who now writes a newsletter called The Confluence; Chase Cain, formerly of NBC and now the creator of the YouTube channel Chase What Matters; Ben Tracy, previously a climate reporter and CBS and now a video producer at Climate Central; and Tracy Wholf, who now runs the company WereWHOLF Media after being laid off from her job as coordinating producer of CBS’s climate team.

The project received support to cover reporting costs from Covering Climate Now, an organization founded by Columbia Journalism Review and The Nation in association with The Guardian and WNYC in 2019 to support climate journalism.

Over the course of five months, Atkin, Ramirez, Cain, and Tracy chose a topic to report on together — they landed on housing — and went out to report stories across the United States on the topic. Atkin went house-hunting in Florida’s “climate danger zone,” Cain reported on the home insurance crisis looming over New Orleans, Ramirez wrote about a clash between private property rights and public beaches in Hawaii, and Tracy produced a video about how coastal homeowners in North Carolina and Connecticut are adapting to a changing shoreline. Wholf, stepping into a role similar to the one she had at CBS, acted as editor and coordinator, organizing team calls and looking over drafts.

“The idea, really, is that as much as this is a climate story, it was also about how we can create new models for independent journalists to operate,” Wholf told me. “When major publications all report on the same thing, it elevates a topic and it gets more attention. So we decided to do the same thing and swarm-report on housing.”

The “pop-up newsroom” has a dedicated landing page on Covering Climate Now’s website with links to each journalist’s newsletter or YouTube video, and the journalists are all linking to the other works in the project on their own channels. Wholf says this works because the journalists don’t feel they’re in competition with one another and that they all have distinct individual styles. Ramirez’s newsletter, which focuses on oceans, for example, draws a different audience from Atkin’s, which describes itself as a “newsletter for people who are pissed off about the climate crisis.” The hope is that by linking to each other’s stories, each journalist will see a boost in subscribers — paid or unpaid — to their own channels.

“It’s taken a lot more time and energy than I initially anticipated, but it’s also felt like it’s been worth the investment,” Wholf said. “We need to start coming up with new ways in which we can function and operate and grow, and so our real goal here is to just try it out. We see this as, hopefully, an example that any beat could follow.”

“The Medill survey provides a warning to news leaders,” Stephanie Edgerly and Tim Franklin write in the report released this week. “Respondents showed clear distrust of AI in the news-gathering process. Discomfort with AI was widespread.”

Medill surveyed 1,223 adults in the Chicago area and found few respondents were comfortable with AI use for coverage prioritization, writing news stories, or generating images or video. About half of respondents were comfortable with AI use for editing spelling and grammar, while 22% were “very uncomfortable or uncomfortable” even with that application.

The researchers say the survey “can be taken as a microcosm for what is happening locally across the country.”

Two-thirds of respondents did not report any use of AI to find or consume local news in the past week; only 11% asked an AI chatbot a question about local news instead of using a search engine.

A few other tidbits from the report:

• Fewer people are paying for local news. The number of people who have supported a local news organization financially by subscribing, donating, or becoming a member dropped from 19% in 2024 to 14% in 2026. What’s more, this year six in 10 respondents (61%) said no one should pay for news. Those who do pay for news were more negative about the impact of AI on local news than those who don’t, including its potential to accelerate misinformation, cause errors, and take jobs from human journalists.
• Search engine use for local news is down. The percentage of respondents using a search engine to find local news daily declined to 34% from 41% in 2024.
• Newspapers are outpacing TV in the transition to digital (but both are in trouble). While newspapers are now a “niche product” and broadcast and radio are hemorrhaging audiences, “newspapers are far ahead in the critical task of going where the audiences are,” Edgerly and Franklin write. Of people who say they get local news at least once a month from a newspaper, 47% got that news via the newspaper’s website, app, or email. On the other hand, among those getting local news from TV at least once a month, 62% watched the broadcast and only 15% went to the TV station’s website, app, or email. “This shows that local TV news still has a long way to go to fix its audience problem,” the researchers write.

Read more and find the full report here.

It’s true. At The New York Times, I’m a deputy editor on the newsroom development and support team. Our job is to help reporters and editors learn new skills and tools through training and product rollouts. We train colleagues on AI, storytelling formats, engaging in the comments, and much more. And we build new tools that save our coworkers time so they can focus on making journalism.

Throughout my journalism career, I’ve worked on countless newsroom change initiatives at organizations big and small. You might say that I’ve been on the “new thing” beat, always studying emerging technology, and collaborating with colleagues to teach it to reporters and editors.

So, what gives? Well, it may sound counterintuitive, but the lessons in Saying No to New can serve as a secret weapon for newsroom innovation.

The first thing I tell people is that my book is not about saying no to all new things. It’s about resisting the pull of new things that distract us from what matters in life. Science tells us that humans are naturally drawn to novelty, which is why it can be so easy to get carried away by the hype of the next shiny new thing.

In our personal lives, that may be new stuff that costs money, creates clutter, or drains our time and attention. In a newsroom, that may be using technology in a way that conflicts with our journalistic standards. The book’s title, Saying No to New, acts as a sort of counterbalance to our bias for novelty.

But the book is also about leaning into newness — the right kind of newness. One of my central lessons is this: If you can get good at avoiding the wrong type of new, you’ll also get good at identifying the right type of new. At the Times, we are always on the lookout for new tools that help reporters parse complex data sets, or new workflows that save editors time. We help journalists grow their careers by teaching them new skills that will set them up for the future.

This nuance is important and core to the work my teammates and I do. Journalists certainly shouldn’t resist all new things if they want to stay relevant in this age of constant disruption. But we also shouldn’t recklessly embrace every newfangled thing that comes along. Striking that balance is the trick. You can do it with a strategy that investigates, interrogates, and experiments with new things.

Here’s how, drawing upon a decision-making framework I outlined in my book and examples from my career training journalists.

Embrace uncertainty

Humans do not like uncertainty — so much so that researchers have found that the more uncertain something becomes, the more stressed we become.

This matters when we’re training journalists on something new because a new thing is by definition an uncertainty. We don’t know how it will work, what will go wrong, or what will go right. Any new endeavor in a workplace is a journey down an uncertain path.

Here’s the problem: Because humans are allergic to uncertainty, we instinctively try to avoid it. One way is by thinking we can accurately predict the future. This is a phenomenon called the overconfidence effect. The more unknown something is (and thus, the more uncertain something is), the more confident we become in our ability to forecast the outcome.

This can get us into trouble at the start of a new initiative because we may set unrealistic expectations about it. This is known as the planning fallacy. When this happens, we “spin scenarios of success while overlooking the potential for mistakes and miscalculations,” wrote Daniel Kahneman and Dan Lovallo in a 2003 piece in Harvard Business Review.

To overcome these psychological hurdles, we should embrace uncertainty. My team always tries to keep an open mind at the start of a project. We outline our plan but also take note of what we don’t know. We expect messiness at the start of something new.

This is especially the case with AI. When we are preparing to train reporters and editors on a new AI tool, there is a lot we do know. We know that the Times has stated clear principles for responsible experimentation, like how the technology should always be used with human guidance and review. But there’s also a lot we don’t know. For example, we don’t know all the different ways a reporter might want to use a tool for research. We don’t know for certain whether the tool will end up being useful or not.

This mindset allows us to lead with curiosity and not assume we have all the answers. It also makes any new initiative a collaboration with our colleagues so we can work with them to find answers to our burning questions.

Size it up

It’s a myth that caution and skepticism are signs of resistance to a new tool. In my experience, when my colleagues start asking questions, it means they’re curious (they are journalists, after all).

They want to know how something works, but also why we’re doing something new in the first place. Why should they use a new tool? What purpose does it serve?

Don’t avoid these questions. Lean into them. Size up the new workflow task in your content management system or the new AI tool. Spell out why you’re doing something — and specifically, how it serves the journalistic mission. Interrogate the value it will bring to the daily work of a journalist.

With every new thing my team works on, we think about what motivates New York Times journalists. Reporting. Editing. Finding the truth. Telling compelling stories. We push ourselves to understand how the new thing will serve those motivations.

We have a policy on our team that every new project must start with a proposal. The proposal involves six simple prompts:

• Overview: A one-sentence problem statement.
• Proposal: What you’re going to do and why.
• Goal: One sentence that explains what you expect to achieve as a result of the project.
• Who: Who is working on the project, who from leadership is overseeing it and who needs to be kept informed.
• When: When it will start and when it will end.
• How it will work: A short outline of the steps you plan to take.

By drilling into these details, we remove the noise and hype of a new thing and focus on what matters.

When in doubt, try it out

We can never be 100% certain about the outcome of a new project. But that doesn’t mean we can’t remove at least some of the uncertainty about it.

The single best way to improve our predictions about what a new thing can and cannot do is by trying it out. My team starts any new initiative with a pilot phase. The pilot allows us to dip our toes into a new thing before rolling it out to the entire newsroom. For us, that often means training a limited number of journalists and studying the results.

Keeping the project contained has several benefits. It allows us to observe and ask questions. And it lowers the stakes — we expect missteps at this stage because, again, we couldn’t have predicted what would happen. If we’re rolling out new technology, we collaborate closely with our colleagues in product to gather feedback about the tool.

Last year, we wanted to explore how we might teach journalists the ins and outs of easy-to-use AI tools that could be used to help them find information and sift through datasets. As a pilot, we had members of our team spend time with two newsroom departments, teaching the tools and answering questions, while also paying close attention to the potential use cases and challenges. Then we stopped, assessed how it went, and used the pilot to design a program we would later bring to other desks.

Learn to learn

I interviewed Adam Cifu, a general internist at the University of Chicago Medicine. I wanted to understand how he assesses new things in the medical field. I mean, who better to learn from than someone who makes life-or-death decisions?

Dr. Cifu told me about something called evidence-based medicine, a framework for making smart decisions. He said that an essential principle of evidence-based medicine is what doctors do after a new treatment or procedure has been rolled out. Doctors will examine the results of a new drug, for instance, to determine whether or not it worked as intended.

Although the stakes are quite different in our line of work, there is an analogous step when introducing new things to journalists. As a new thing gets implemented within an organization, we must also evaluate the results and learn from what we find out. We want to know how many people are using it, how they’re using it, and whether it is being used in ways that we hoped — and then use that data to make informed choices going forward.

Last year, my team partnered with the Audience team at The Times to train reporters and editors on how to participate more in our story comments to engage directly with readers. As we made our way across the newsroom, training our colleagues on the best practices for facilitating great conversations with readers, we carefully observed the results. In addition to a central question — are people doing it? — we also measured the quality of the comments themselves.

This assessment gave us a multi-dimensional view of the outcome, which we then used to make adjustments in future training efforts.

As journalism reached breakneck speed to produce mountains of content for insatiable digital platforms, it “drifted away from where people actually live their lives,” Parris Jr. wrote last year. He predicted 2026 would “push us back toward the physical and tangible in the spaces we work, the ways we engage, and the products we create.” And he pointed to one civic space well positioned to serve as a starting point for that work: libraries.

After several years leading engagement journalism initiatives at ProPublica, The New York Times, and The City (now The City Reporter), and securing an MLIS from library school along the way, Parris Jr. has spent the past year as a John S. Knight fellow at Stanford refining his vision for the Library Newsroom Project. Through the project’s first pilot, a partnership with the Brooklyn Public Library’s Sunset Park branch, a group of community members has published more than a dozen editions of a free, print monthly bulletin called the Sunset Park Sun.

In August, Parris Jr. outlined his vision for “propagating” the Library Newsroom Project’s Brooklyn pilot in other communities around the country. “I once described the larger ambition as opening 16,000 community-led newsrooms, one in every public library in the country,” he wrote. Now, he thinks about the work in more expansive terms. He believes the goal should be “creating 16,000 places where neighbors can look more closely at where they live and make something public from what they find.”

I was curious about many aspects of the Library Newsroom Project (LNP), including other pilots in the works, its origin story, and its possibilities and limits as a form of local news. I sent Parris Jr. a bunch of questions; our email conversation has been condensed and edited for length and clarity.

“Google is sending us fewer people who aren’t going to subscribe,” Thompson said in an interview with longtime media journalist Peter Kafka. On the Friday episode of Channels, Thompson answered questions as the CEO of a profitable media company — and as a news creator himself.

Thompson has 1.6 million followers on LinkedIn and about 6,500 on YouTube. His videos and podcasts are produced independently of The Atlantic’s editorial team but provide revenue that gets reinvested into the newsroom. (The latest episode of The Most Interesting Thing in AI is sponsored by PwC.)

The Atlantic currently has 1.6 million paid subscribers, Thompson said. The magazine reported a profit in 2024 and has been in the black since.

Other tidbits from the hour-long interview:

The Atlantic is getting micropayments from AI startup Parallel Web Systems, Thompson said. The startup — founded by former Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal — is building web search infrastructure for AI agents (rather than humans). Most AI deals involve fixed-fee licensing but Parallel’s Index platform compensates news companies under a different rubric.

“Rather than paying only for content access, crawls, or citations,” Index pays more for “content that is uniquely valuable, hard to replace, or used in high-value agent work.”

Thompson, a prolific AI user himself, said personal experience helped convince him to pursue a deal. 

“We got excited about this because I was running all [of] these agent farms and realized [that] the vast majority of traffic coming out of my computer was no longer human. It was my agents running requests,” Thompson explained. “I was like, ‘God, we need to build an Atlantic business model for that.’ That led us to Parallel.” 

Thompson on the boundaries The Atlantic put in place when becoming one of the first news companies to sign with OpenAI back in 2024:

I prefer them paying us than not paying us, right? And many of the AI companies don’t pay. We set up a whole bunch of boundaries in the contract: How much can you summarize? Can you quote an author? Can you try to get your model to write like an author? These things we care about because we want it to be harder for AI to replace what we do.

Thompson said it’s been “a surprise” how little traffic is directed back to The Atlantic from ChatGPT.

He said the news org would be willing to resign a deal with OpenAI as long as there is “a fair exchange of value.”

“What are you giving us, and what are we giving you? Is it fair?” Thompson said. “And if it’s not, well, then we’ll block you from the site, or we’ll sue you, right? That’s the deal.”

A few years back, The Atlantic made a play for Substack-like newsletter subscribers. Thompson concluded the revenue-sharing experiment “didn’t work,” though he’s pleased some of the recruited authors — such as Tom Nichols and Charlie Warzel — have stuck around as regular Atlantic contributors.

“Maybe we didn’t set the numbers right,” he said. “Maybe the writers we recruited in weren’t right for that model.”

You can listen to the full Channels episode on Spotify or wherever you like to hit play on podcasts.

“They want to know how topical things will impact their lives, and what they can do about that,” she said. “You have to work a bit harder to meet that need. But it can be the difference between a 10-minute read of an article and somebody being willing to come back again and again.”

At the end of May, the Mail launched a six-week weight loss program — “The 30g Plan” — fronted by nutritionist Emma Bardwell. Promoted in print and online, it was months in the making and built around audience demand.

“We know weight loss is something our subscribers are very interested in and have very set views on, as they like common sense and practical fixes,” Forster said. “Emma’s plan is sensible and fits into the real world. She’s got her own story about how she used it in her own life. That is bang on for us.”

The series, which includes recipes and shopping lists and answers audience questions, illustrates a wider journalistic trend of helping readers live better. Sometimes called “service” or “utility” journalism, the approach provides content for people who want help with everyday decisions — moving, relationships, personal finance, food — and aims to offer a service beyond questions that AI can easily answer.

Providing guidance was the inspiration for Pensions & Prosecco, an independent publication from journalist and audience strategist Katie Binns and wine expert Elizabeth Hawthornthwaite.

Binns wrote about money and (U.K.) pensions for publications like The Times of London for years. “The thing with pensions is that they’re so easy to put off,” she said. “Lots of people don’t really know where to start, and I wanted to see if there was a format that could help change that.”

Pensions & Prosecco launched last November with live events, a newsletter, and social content. The events, so far only held in London, are small — around 30 attendees each — in order to be genuinely useful. Prosecco is always served, along with alcohol-free options.

“It’s a lot of confidence-building,” Binns explained. “Traditionally, journalism has been brilliant at helping people understand the world, but now I think people want journalism to help them navigate it. That doesn’t mean journalists becoming advisers or campaigners, but instead that we have to think harder about what someone can actually do after they’ve read a story.”

Pensions & Prosecco aims to turn intention into action. The same could be said of the new AI chatbot being developed by U.K. consumer brand Which?

Which?, the U.K. equivalent of Consumer Reports, long offered advice on the best items to buy and advocated for consumers’ rights. Now the publication’s leadership is exploring how AI could make that advice more personalized.

The move is part of a broader investment into health and wellbeing consumer advice, aimed, in particular, at younger and female audiences. New content areas include vitamins and supplement reviews and guidance on skincare, sleep, and exercise equipment.

Meanwhile, The New York Times’ Wirecutter has joined with American Public Media to launch a weekly radio show that aims to “make trustworthy, practical guidance more accessible to listeners seeking clear, independent advice in their daily lives.”

That word “trustworthy” is key. Trust in AI and creators is lower than trust in established news brands, leaving a gap publishers can fill.

Bloomberg has increased the number of explainers and other types of service journalism it produces. In June, it launched Bloomberg Money.

The site had always run some personal finance stories, but “we noticed in our analytics that those stories, especially the ones that were more service-oriented or actionable, tended to overperform,” said Katie Boyce, head of digital editorial at Bloomberg. “We decided it was something we really wanted to double down on and make a push for subscribers.”

The aim is to supply fairly sophisticated personal finance coverage, with the assumption that Bloomberg readers already have a baseline understanding of how to manage their money. “It really plays into the topics we think a Bloomberg audience would care about,” Boyce said, “whether it’s personal investing, real estate, or retirement.”

The hub, with the tagline “Everything you need to navigate your financial life,” has both U.S. and U.K. versions. It is cross-platform and includes explainers, original reporting, practical guides, a weekly TV show, a free newsletter sent out three times a week, and a live dashboard of key financial indicators.

Boyce has been pleasantly surprised to find that 62% of those using the hub so far are new to Bloomberg, while there has also been “strong engagement” from the existing subscriber base. Subscribers who read Money stories were 13% more active than average in the first month.

Bloomberg journalists do not offer financial advice, but Boyce said the initiative is still all about “helping people make smart decisions.”

“Our journalists are asking experts the right questions so our users can learn from them and make informed decisions. If readers finish a story having learned something they can take away, then we’ve done a good job in terms of utility.”

Pensions & Prosecco’s Binns agreed that the best evidence journalism has worked is what people do next.

“The things I care about the most are when people tell us about the actions they’ve taken — when someone says they’ve checked their state pension forecast for the first time, increased their pension contributions or booked their complimentary financial advice session with our sponsor after an event,” she said. “It just feels like we’re solving real audience problems, rather than simply talking about what we think matters.”

That sense of listening to the audience has also informed Forster’s experience at the Mail. The 30g Plan series was originally aimed at existing subscribers, but, put behind the new Mail+ paywall, it’s attracted new readers too.

Any publisher would want to keep new visitors, and, to that end, the Mail recently launched The Reset, a newsletter that’s “all things weight loss” and also covers anti-aging, skincare, and wellness. “We felt that was the best kind of way to keep these people and show them that we’d listened to what they were concerned about,” Forster said.

Boyce was keen to emphasize that journalism can’t only be about utility — it has to be unique and leverage expertise unavailable elsewhere. But, she said, “I think expectations have changed. Audiences expect to be able to take something away from the journalism they’re consuming. It’s not enough anymore just to give a headline or answer a simple question. AI and social have really taken that over.”

Ultimately, usefulness is becoming a core part of subscription strategy, as well as a way of attracting new audiences.

“People still want information, and they want good information, but information on its own isn’t enough,” said Binns. “They want context and someone to explain why something matters, what’s normal, what needs attention first, what can wait and what a sensible first step looks like.”

“Our journalism needs to help users learn something new, understand why a headline matters, and get a sense of what to expect next,” Boyce added. “If you can make it actionable and personal, there’s real value in that for subscribers.”

The year? 1986. What just a few years earlier had been called a “science boom” in the media industry was now dubbed a “science crash.” Cries of despair came from the science and science journalism communities, worried that interest in science “was a fad.”

The same worries have now reappeared 40 years later, as publishers have cut the science and environmental reporting staff at many newspapers and magazines. Perhaps the biggest shock came in late June 2026, when Scientific American was sold to new owners, who immediately laid off 15 staff members and cut salaries of many others. But it followed layoffs of science and environment writers at The Washington Post (where one of us, Chris Mooney, worked for nearly 10 years), The Wall Street Journal, National Public Radio, and CBS News.

One longtime science writer recently worried he was writing a eulogy for science journalism. Another said, “We’re in a greatly diminished journalistic enterprise in this country.” On Bluesky, one commenter said, “The media mass extinction rolls ever onward.”

So, as scholars of science journalism, we wondered: Is this just a cyclical repetition of worries that appear anytime there’s a setback in this field? Or is something new and more troubling happening?

The answer is a mix of both.

The moral panic

Scientists have complained about media coverage of science for more than a century, calling it both inadequate and, frequently, inaccurate. Despite many years of increased coverage and better-trained science journalists, scientific organizations routinely call for more and better science journalism.

Less clear is whether nonscientist adults actually want more and will pay to consume science content to a greater extent than they already do — at least when not delivered by celebrities like astronomer Carl Sagan in the 1980s or, in the current era, the former NASA engineer turned award-winning YouTuber and Netflix star Mark Rober.

In 1987, one of us, Bruce Lewenstein, analyzed the crash of the science boom. Bruce concluded then that an audience clearly did exist at the time for science journalism, though it might not have been as large as some commentators — and publishers — had hoped.

The commentary about a crash, in Bruce’s analysis, represented a moral panic — a real concern, but one where interested parties often exaggerate how serious or widespread a problem is. In reality, science journalism continued to thrive in the decades after the 1980s science boom, as new programs developed to train science journalists, new outlets appeared, and new formats arrived as the internet grew.

What the data shows

Perhaps the current concerns are again a moral panic: real, but not quite what people are claiming. As it happens, the other of us, Chris Mooney, has been collecting data to update the earlier analysis.

It appears today’s doomsayers have some points in their favor: Out of 29 prominent popular science magazines created in the United States since the 19th century, only 11 remain. And eight of the closures have happened since 2000.

Unfurl the caveats: This preliminary effort only tracks print magazine closures. And it only includes magazines covering broad scientific areas — not just one field, such as astronomy — and targeted at a general, popular audience. For instance, it largely excludes educational, alumni or membership publications. But we feel the main titles are here.

And the message is unavoidable: In science media, many efforts fail. They always have. For instance, McGraw-Hill launched an ill-fated mass media science magazine, Science Illustrated, back in 1946 — and saw it fold by 1949. There are many other such stories across the decades.

By far the starkest recent print loss is Popular Science, a title that traces its origins back to the Popular Science Monthly of 1872. As recently as 2011, Popular Science had a total distribution of well over 1 million magazines each month. But it cut back to bimonthly, then to quarterly, and then no print at all by 2021. By the end of 2023, there was no digital magazine. It continues to publish online science content and two podcasts.

National Geographic, another of the magazine giants, has also struggled. In 2023, it laid off multiple staff writers, according to reporting by The Washington Post, and ceased monthly newsstand sales. The magazine continues to publish in print.

That three of the oldest and best-known publications — Scientific American, Popular Science, and National Geographic — have all faced cutbacks in recent years surely points to something deeper afoot.

It’s not just journalism about science

Surveying the field of popular science publishing, two items of context seem relevant. First, it’s not just science journalism that’s in trouble. The entire structure of journalism is changing. The struggle of print publications goes far beyond the science realm and fundamentally reflects the rise of the internet.

The changes have arguably been even harder on print newspapers than print magazines. For instance, from 2000 to 2025, data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics shows a loss of roughly 80% of U.S. newspaper jobs, versus about 65% of jobs in the publishing of periodicals. Just as we finished this article, the hedge fund-owned McClatchey chain of newspapers announced major cuts to its newsrooms — apparently between 30% and 50% of the editorial staff at some publications, at some even more. Both newspapers and magazines have suffered from dramatic shifts in the market for advertising, which has moved online, and from how younger generations consume information.

Some of journalism’s challenges today are economic, some are political. And those are interrelated — the current fervor for profits encourages corporate consolidation and works against smaller outlets willing to forgo money in favor of meeting other goals. Those goals can include recruiting young people into science, or presenting the value of expert knowledge, or expressing awe at the natural world.

And second, in some ways, information and commentary about science is more widely available than ever. Web-only publications, social media feeds, YouTube — all offer those interested in science a much wider array of information than used to be available. It was over a decade ago now that the internet surpassed television as the primary source of science information for the public, according to survey data compiled by the National Science Foundation. The most promising new online venue for science journalism and communication today may be Substack, where individual journalists or personalities can garner their own dedicated, paying audiences.

So science communication is thriving, but that’s different than science journalism. What growth there is tends to favor quick takes and attitude, rather than institutionalized journalism with its commitment to verifying information as well as its costly trappings, including reporters who can spend months on a single project, a gaggle of editors, and, yes, lawyers.

Much online science information remains unfiltered — pushed by corporations, institutions, and some influencers for promotional purposes. Such communicators rarely dig deep for the errors, extended stories or conflicts of interest that are the lifeblood of journalism.

Concerns about failures of science journalism really amount to concerns about the collapse of institutional journalism more broadly. The social role of journalism — in a classic phrase, to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable — remains vital. But as journalist and media critic Tom Rosenstiel writes in his new book, The Next Journalism, new intellectual models need to emerge.

So, to answer our own question: Yes, some of the current concern may be overblown moral panic. But some of it is entirely justified. Still, we retain hope that science journalism will survive this economic, political, and technological shakeout. To do so, it will need to be as innovative as the researchers it covers.

Smith was a member of The Athletic’s pilot program for creators. Through that six-month partnership, he garnered 27 million views across 24 videos he produced with The Athletic, more than half of the 50 million video views the entire program cohort produced.

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

Smith’s success on social media has also afforded him opportunities to pursue different ventures. This past spring, he launched Geo Sports, a site for sports geography, history, and trivia games; they’ve have been played more than 15 million times.

I chatted with Smith about how he started out, access in sports journalism, and legacy media’s embrace of news creators. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

People have felt grave doubts about the press long before the Internet or social media, at times when politics was polarized and at times when it was not. In the United States, the steady decline in media trust from 1970 and onwards has, in my opinion, been badly misread. It has produced or justified anxiety about what we have come to call “the media” among journalists and pundits alike.

In the same era (1970–present) when measured trust in most American institutions has declined, leading news institutions have undergone a dramatic transformation whose reverberations have yet to be fully acknowledged — even by journalists themselves. Dissatisfaction with journalism inside journalism and outside grew in the 1960s. What came to be widely acknowledged as either “he said, she said” journalism or “false balance” journalism or “bothsidesism” has been the object of sharp, even derisive, and ultimately potent critique. As multiple scholars have documented, news since the 1960s has become deeper, more investigative, and more likely to take “holding government accountable” or “speaking truth to power” to be essential goals. In these past six decades, mainstream media not only continued to be fact-centered and verification-oriented but also guided by a more explicit avowal of the public service function of holding government accountable, just as important a value as the ideal of “objectivity” itself.

There is a large literature on the question of trust in the media, some of it very rich and carefully done, including work by the editors of (and other contributors to) this volume.^{1 2 3 4} At the same time, there is a kind of romantic — or just plain mythical — nostalgia for a media past that never was and that in a democracy never should have been. In this chapter, I will illustrate two bits of mythology — one about the founding era of the United States and one about the highly trusted media of the 1950s and 1960s. Both are clearly errors that should be flushed out if we are to arrive at a clear-minded assessment of the media skepticism that so many bemoan today.

The first myth

The first myth is wonderfully illustrated by something that historians of the founding era have long known but that I only learned quite recently. Journalists at ceremonial occasions celebrate the First Amendment of the Constitution as “first for a reason.” One example is Jill Abramson when she was executive director of The New York Times.⁵ And that reason? The reason, they say, is that the founders recognized free speech and notably a free press as fundamental to the republic they were building. And why? Obviously (to us) because the press is crucial to holding power to account. What’s wrong with this story?

What seems to have been largely forgotten is that the first ten amendments to the U.S. Constitution, widely known as “the Bill of Rights,” originally were 12 amendments that the young Congress sent to the states for ratification. In that group of 12, what we know as the First Amendment was third. However, the first two amendments were rejected, not ratified. One concerned the population size of congressional districts and the other pronounced that Congress could not award itself pay raises until after a subsequent election. So “freedom of religion, of speech, and of press” were not “first for a reason.” They were first by accident!⁶ Also important is that the newspapers the founders were acquainted with did little or no original reporting. They were still republishing news items shipped from Europe for much of their content, and they ran many voluntary contributions from readers. They were often outspoken, including criticism of President Washington and subsequent presidents, but they were issued by a printer from his print shop, managed by himself and a few apprentices. There was no newsroom. There were few or ordinarily no people hired to “report” the news. I have great respect for the authors of the U.S. Constitution, but they did not recognize newspapers as fundamental units of the republican government (the founders had contempt for “democracy” as such, because they believed an elected government was too likely to descend into mob rule).

The second myth

The second and even more important mythological point is that a better moment in the history of U.S. journalism was the period of greater trust — presumably the 1950s and 1960s — from which era trust in the media has sadly descended.

But should we accept that the decline in trust in the media is sad? Let me begin here with a question, rarely considered in the “declinist” presumption around us: How much trust should there be in a healthy constitutional democracy? To telegraph my position: I think there was far too much trust or general public complacency about the practices of journalism in the pre-Vietnam, pre-civil rights movement, pre-Watergate, pre-women’s liberation, pre-Stonewall era.

Consider, for example, the results that journalist and media critic Carl Sessions Stepp⁷ found when he compared ten metropolitan daily newspapers from 1963 to the same papers in 1999. He judged the 1963 papers “naively trusting of government, shamelessly boosterish, unembarrassedly hokey and obliging,” and he found himself particularly surprised to find stories “often not attributed at all, simply passing along an unquestioned, quasi-official sense of things.” In the “bothsidesism” style of news, still dominating newspapers in 1963, quoting one party to a dispute or an election contest and then quoting the other was the whole of the reporter’s obligation. Going behind or beyond the statements of the quoted persons, invariably elite figures, and appointed or elected political officials was not required. It was particularly in the work of investigative reporters in the late 1960s and 1970s that reporters became detectives seeking documentable evidence to confirm a view of the reality of recent events they were pulling together. Later, as digital tools for reporters emerged, the capacity to document and to investigate expanded, and a reporter did not require the extravagant resources of a New York Times newsroom to be able to write authoritative stories.

The anxiety among journalists that the public no longer trusts them reflects a reality that public opinion polls support — trust in the mainstream media has been in decline since about 1970. But something else has changed in the same period from the late 1960s forward: journalism. Journalism became less a reproduction or representation of the opinions of political office-holders — and more an independent-minded journalism free and indeed eager to criticize people in power. The public learns more than it used to about failings of governments and governmental officers and infers more regularly and readily and with more apparent justification that government (and other powerful institutions) should not be trusted. While trust in the media may be unhealthily low today, it was surely unhealthily high in the 1950s and early 1960s. To put it too simply, U.S. journalism shifted from what I will call a collusional (if there is such a word) press in which reporters protected politicians — both Republicans and Democrats — in exchange for politicians’ accepting them into their elite circles.^8 9 What the media became in the 1970s and after was more independent-minded, critical (of both Democrats and Republicans), more investigative, and more enterprising than the journalism of the 1950s.^10 11

This chapter focuses on developments in the United States but they are paralleled elsewhere in the world. See, for instance, the study by Esser and Umbricht¹² that examines the media systems of six different Western nations. At the same time, investigative reporting not only expanded greatly in various countries around the world but also internationalized with cooperative ventures like the International Consortium of Investigative Reporting (ICIJ). This and other international efforts (including the spread of dedicated “fact-checking” organizations) have advanced the complexity, ambition, and relative independence of journalism globally.¹³

Journalism Past was far less balanced through a societal narrowness of who gets covered than Journalism Present. The journalism of the 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s was less “fair and balanced” journalism in its faith in political insiders, omitting from consideration altogether the concerns and voices of a variety of social groups that lay outside narrow assumptions about who counts as “the public” that journalism is supposed to serve. The so-called mainstream media could reasonably have been called the “white media” or even the “white heterosexual male media” — or, worse still, the white heterosexual male media with a dangerously oversimplified understanding of what counts as a democratic society. That, at any rate, is the path I propose in this chapter.

When trust was too high: Collusional journalism

People often recall — or think they recall — that long-time CBS News television anchor Walter Cronkite was in his day “the most trusted man in America.” If you Google that phrase (as I did on October 11, 2021, and again on October 11, 2025) you immediately come up with Walter Cronkite. Why? Because a public opinion poll in 1972 asked respondents which of the leading political figures of the day they trusted most. Cronkite’s name was thrown in as a kind of standard of comparison — how do any and all of the politicians compare to some well-known and well-regarded non-political figure? Seventy-three percent of those polled placed Cronkite as the person on the list they trusted most, ahead of a general construct — “average senator” (67%), and well ahead of the most trusted of the politicians, Senator Edmund Muskie (61%). Chances are that any other leading newsperson, or probably a movie star or athlete, would have come out as well or better than Cronkite. In other words, the main reason Cronkite was “most trusted” is simply that he was the only non-politician among the persons listed in the poll.¹⁴

So the notion that Cronkite was unusually “trusted” is a phantom best forgotten. Somehow, people have wanted to believe that somewhere, just before all the ruckus began over civil rights and Vietnam and uppity women and the heroes of “Stonewall” who brought on a new, public self-respect for lesbians and gays and other people of non-standard sexual identities, at some time just the day before yesterday, the media had been a pillar of central, neutral, moderate, unquestioning Americanism. It ain’t so.

When Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson ran in 1952, he railed against what he called the “one-party press” — a Republican press, that is, and certainly he was right if you looked at the corporate ownership of the country’s newspapers, their antagonism toward Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal, and their overwhelming editorial-page support for Republican candidates. If you go back very much further than the 1940s, you reach a moment when “trust in the media” would have been an incomprehensible phrase. News outlets were understood to be and understood themselves to be advocates for one party or the other, not neutral truth-tellers. Readers trusted their own favored paper and distrusted the others.

In common parlance, there was no “news media” or “mainstream media.” There was “the press” and that, Richard Nixon decided in his presidential years, was too cozy and familiar a term. Journalists were, in his estimation, united against him — and he was not entirely wrong. Journalists went gaga about Jack Kennedy, bowled over in the 1960 campaign and the early days of the Kennedy administration by the charm of Kennedy, his wife Jackie, and his good-looking family. Nixon was a respected figure in Washington, but far from beloved, and certainly not charming, and he never got over the resentment he felt about journalists’ swooning over Kennedy.

Things would only get worse after Nixon became president. He felt aggrieved by journalists and the idea that they were biased against him led him to plan strategically to muddy their reputation. To refer to journalists as “the press” ceded them an emotional upper hand, an aura of rectitude armed with First Amendment privilege. Nixon judged that aura an unacceptable advantage and urged his staff to use the term, “the media.” William Safire, the public relations professional who became a speechwriter for Nixon, recalls in his memoir, “The press became ‘the media’ because the word had a manipulative, Madison Avenue, all-encompassing connotation, and the press hated it.” Nixon judged journalists to be his dedicated opponents, Safire recalls, and reports that he personally heard Nixon declare to his staff that “the press is the enemy” at least a dozen times.¹⁵

There was a moment, beginning in the late 1950s, when watching the television networks became part of everyday life for most Americans, however soporific those shows could be. This may have been the beginning of something called “the media.” Until then, Americans would have been hard put to identify a Thing that today people recognize as “the mainstream media.”

The full entrance of “the media” into the American vocabulary arrived at about the same moment as distrust in the media intensified — but in a one-sided fashion. Barry Goldwater and his supporters, in his 1964 campaign for the presidency, were convinced that the media, notably the three major television news networks, were deeply biased against the Republican candidate.¹⁶ Nixon’s later effort to make “the media” rather than “the press” the more common term for journalism may or may not have made a difference, but it was indicative that “the media” was something of a novelty for Americans and one that, early on, Republicans found more threatening than did Democrats.

Too often these days, low trust in the media is linked to some feature of the digital age — it’s an Internet problem or a Facebook problem or a Twitter problem or a generalized social media problem. Social media, after all, offer a microphone to individuals who want to promote any old picture of reality, no matter how lunatic, that suits either their politics or their crackpot sense of humor. This may well contribute to distrust of any and all assertions coming from unknown entities beyond our immediate social circles. But sharply declining trust in the media, as the academic literature clearly demonstrates — going back notably to Ladd’s detailed and thoughtful Why Americans Hate the Media.¹⁷ It predates George W. Bush and his unnamed adviser, who in 2004 spoke sneeringly to the New York Times Magazine of journalists as “the reality-based community”.¹⁸ It precedes the rise of Donald Trump, and it precedes social media. A full-bodied sense of “the media” as a powerful — and dangerous — social and political force found its voice before the digital era.

What has not become part of the common understanding is how dramatically journalism changed in the decades just prior to the Internet. The most significant change in American journalism between the 1950s and the early 2000s has been the rise of a more aggressive, more independent, more evidence-based, and more interpretive journalism. Various historians, social scientists, and journalists have documented these changes.¹⁹ With Katherine Fink, I have added to this literature, too.²⁰ In what Fink and I have called “contextual reporting,” the journalist’s work is less to record the views of key actors in political events and more to analyze and explain them. More than other concurrent changes, this one altered the front page, and in a way that put a premium on the story or stories behind the story. The move from writing down what political leaders said to contextualizing what they said and did, and why, offered a new model of journalism. This is also reflected in the changing role conceptions of U.S. journalists for whom the importance of acting as a watchdog has steadily increased, particularly since the 1980s.²¹ In consequence, studies have shown that an increasing negative depiction of politicians did go hand in hand with a decline in public confidence ratings of the press, described as “killing the messenger-effect”.²²

The new model seeped into the work of journalism with little fanfare. Journalists continued to defend their work as “objective” or “balanced” while, in practice, transforming what they meant by such terms. Fink and I found that in 1955, in the Washington Post, New York Times, and Milwaukee Journal, 85% of front-page stories were conventional who-what-where-when stories and 9% contextual. Focus on that first figure and track it through succeeding years: in 1955, 85% of all front-page stories were conventional who-what-where-when stories; in 1967, 79%; in 1979, 60%; in 1991, 51%; and by 2003, 47%. In 2003, then, 52% of front-page stories were contextual reporting, a percentage about six times greater than what it had been in 1955. This shows that contextual journalism emerged as a powerful and prevalent companion to conventional reporting. The news media became an institution to reckon with as never before, and not because news organizations had political agendas of their own — although sometimes they did — but because they had attained a preeminent role in civil society as a monitor of government action, the cardinals of accountability for American democracy.

This does not mean that all was well with American journalism by the 1990s, but it does mean that concern that the news media have fallen from the great days of Ida Tarbell or the great days of Woodward and Bernstein has been overdone. The Ida Tarbell days of muckraking lasted just a few years and never extended very far beyond a handful of middle-class national magazines; “muckraking” as Teddy Roosevelt derisively labeled it at the time, really didn’t influence the daily press. And when Woodward and Bernstein, more than half a century later, broke open the Watergate story, it would be months before any other news organization assigned reporters to the story. Investigative reporting a la Woodward and Bernstein did come to have some influence beyond the Washington Post, but it has never been a quantitatively significant part of any news organization’s budget or time on the air or space on the page, at least, not until the establishment of ProPublica (founded in 2007) and other substantial online news organizations that devote themselves primarily to investigative reporting.

What did change, and it changed in a major way, was a move from who-what-when-where reporting to analytical “how” and “why” reporting, often focusing on a broader time frame than the past 24 hours, offering a context for the story at hand.

People of an ardent conservative persuasion judge the media to be very liberal; people of powerfully liberal convictions find the media to be pawns in the hands of conservatives. This is a familiar enough phenomenon to have acquired a name in social psychology — the “hostile media effect”.²³ The familiar response of journalists has been that “we must be doing our job right if we have offended people of extreme views both left and right.”

The evidence is clear that in the 1940s, 1950s, and into the late 1960s, there was a chumminess among leading politicians and public officials and the reporters who covered them. What is not as well known is that this boys’ club atmosphere (there were women journalists and black journalists, but they were not welcomed in this world) was well institutionalized and fully embraced by the American Society of Newspaper Editors in their annual convention, normally held in Washington, D.C. The ASNE was the most prestigious association of leading editors and reporters from its founding in the early 1920s on. At the annual meeting, top public officials met these journalists in private plenary sessions, not open to journalists generally nor the public at all. Journalist historian Gwyneth Mellinger has documented this fully.²⁴

From both sidesism to assertive watchdog journalism

Our age, like so many others, is an age of both credulity and skepticism, but what may be distinctive about our time is that the skepticism is approved, encouraged, and taught. Complaints about snarkiness in reporters and columnists did not begin with social media. The capacity of journalism to demean and destroy is not a new discovery. But there is something different now, as there has been since roughly 1970, and that is the institutionalization of skepticism as a value. To be accepted as a grown-up, there has come to be a cultural pressure to be knowing, critical, and skeptical, if not cynical.

What is “trust”? And what is “the media” or “the news” or “journalism” that people are trusting or distrusting? What do respondents in surveys think the question is that they are answering? Does the person who distrusts the news reports on politics also distrust the news reports on the weather or on sports? Does news of the private lives of celebrities evoke more or less trust than news about coronavirus vaccinations?

As has been noted, the question of declining trust in the news media is vexed not only by the complications for survey respondents of understanding what “trust” means but also because “the media” is not a readily comprehensible entity.^25 26 What further complicates the analysis of declining trust is the underlying premise that the high levels of trust we have descended from were a good thing. But clearly, trust in institutions is salutary for democracy only to a point. The decline in trust in most institutions that public polling has documented since the late 1960s was a decline from what arguably was much too high a level of trust. This is clearly true with the federal government, the media, banking, corporate America, organized labor, and organized religion. Trust must be distinguished from complacency, the kind of complacency that (along with gerrymandering) makes most seats in Congress permanent sinecures, the kind of complacency that accepted President Eisenhower’s lies about the U-2 spy plane, President Kennedy’s lies about the “missile gap,” President Johnson’s lies about the war in Vietnam, and President Nixon’s lies about Watergate. It required the cultural revolution of the 1960s and 1970s to bring down that overgenerous level of deference to American political institutions and to yield a level of “civic skepticism”²⁷ more fitting for a democratic society.

What people don’t like about the media is its implicit or explicit criticism of their heroes. In a two-party system like the United States, the president is invariably either Republican or Democrat, and confidence in the president or the presidency is typically significantly higher among Republicans when there’s a Republican president and higher among Democrats when there’s a Democratic president. To the extent that the news flatters an opponent or criticizes a fellow partisan, trust will decline in ways that have little (or even nothing) to do with trust in the institution, only with portraits of the incumbent leader of the institution (see also Chapter 10). Moreover, people answering a poll may not be trying to accurately report their level of trust but rather acting politically to align themselves with their favored party’s perceived critique of the media.²⁸

Journalism in a knowledge society

To get some perspective on the “trust in media” question, we might think of the media as but one of a set of knowledge-producing institutions in a “knowledge society.” When sociologist Daniel Bell²⁹ popularized the term “post-industrial society” in the early 1970s and took universities to be the central institution of contemporary society, he wrote that modern societies place science and cognitive values at their center, bring scientists and social scientists (at least economists) more centrally into governmental policy-making, and bureaucratize intellectual work. He wrote that it would have been reasonable to name “post-industrial” society the “knowledge society” or the “information society” or the “professional society,” and he offered only contingent reasons for landing on “post-industrial”.³⁰ In any event, the university becomes, in Bell’s view, the central institution of the post-industrial world after World War II, accelerating in the 1950s because it is the location for the formation of professionals in science and engineering and for the advancement of research in these areas, research generating greater technical control over the natural and, to some extent, the social world. Academics, if they think about these matters at all, have largely given up the effort to locate a central guiding value or principle for higher education, but they nonetheless have implicitly adopted a principle of approved skepticism. One might equally call it a dogma of humility, the conviction that what we know and what we profess, whether in physics or in sociology or in literary studies, will over time be challenged and will be reconstituted in a different shape, and that this is how human knowledge advances, toward a new temporary consolidation (and another and another thereafter), not toward a finished unity. At the San Francisco Women’s March early in 2017, a child held up a sign that read: “What do we want? Evidence-based science. When do we want it? After peer review.” This says a lot.

Since 1945, more and more journalists have come to their work with a college education. Of journalists 55 years or older in 1971, 55% did not have college degrees; of those 55 and older in 2002, only 22% were not college graduates. Of 25–34-year-old journalists in 2002, only 7% were not college graduates. Over time, their readers were more likely to have college degrees, too. Between 1940 and 1970, the percentage of the adult population with college degrees grew from about 3% to 20%. In 2018, that percentage was 35%.³¹

Equally important, college students received a more critical education. Academic culture itself, like journalism, adopted more “adversarial” habits in the 1960s — not politically adversarial but intellectually adversarial. Faculty came to expect students to learn to “read against the text” in courses in the humanities, not simply to learn to revere accepted canons of high culture. And in the sciences and social sciences, students were increasingly encouraged not to memorize textbooks but to imagine themselves as fledgling scientists, moving on to the next level of insight by criticizing the assumptions, methods, or reasoning of the exemplars whose work they were assigned to read. Students heard the message that the morally right way to go through life was with an “open mind,” one eager for new evidence, not permanently stuck in yesterday’s convictions.

In a key early statement of this position, a faculty committee at Harvard in 1945 published General Education in a Free Society, the so-called Red Book, which insisted that the focus of college education should be “mental skills” and not common knowledge. The committee had begun with the opposite position but discovered that “they could not agree on a set of canonical works that would form the core of their own curriculum.” They also objected to treating modern science as “peripheral to general education” as it was in the view of earlier advocates of general education like Robert Hutchins at the University of Chicago.

This may seem far afield from journalism, but as journalism became a more sophisticated, more interpretive, less rote, and ritualistic practice, it became a newly recognized member of the knowledge professions or, one might say, a knowledge ecology.

The change in the media’s role was the joint product of several closely connected developments: government — especially the federal government — grew larger and more engaged in people’s everyday lives; the culture of journalism changed, and journalists asserted themselves more aggressively; and many governmental institutions became less secretive and more attuned to the news media, eager for media attention and approval. As the federal government expanded its reach (in civil rights, economic regulation, environmental responsibility, and social welfare programs like food stamps, medical insurance for the poor, and for the elderly), the women’s movement proclaimed that “the personal is political,” and as stylistic innovation in journalism proved a force of its own, the very concept of “covering politics” changed.^32 33 American journalism changed profoundly from “inside Washington” politics toward a widening focus on economic, social, and cultural life and toward a deepening of investigation and analysis to bring these additional corners of life to the public stage. Probably no example has been of such global significance as the #MeToo movement, powerfully propelled by investigative journalists at the New York Times and the New Yorker magazine and influencing comparable revelations around the world.

New norm of transparency makes public information public

News coverage became more probing, more analytical, and more transgressive of conventional lines between public and private, but this recognizes only part of what influenced a changing journalism. Not only did the news media provide a more comprehensive and more critical coverage of powerful institutions, but also powerful institutions adapted to a world in which journalists had a more formidable presence than ever before. “Until the mid-1960s,” historian Julian Zelizer simply observes, “the press was generally respectful of the political establishment”.³⁴ The decline of this respect helped bring more attention to political scandal. So did legislation to make governing more public, for example, through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) in 1966 that established a formal procedure for citizens to request the release of information that an agency of the government held, and to take the agency to court if it failed to release the information in ways the law required.

But FOIA was just the beginning of a new faith in “transparency” in government. The Legislative Reorganization Act of 1970 brought more “sunshine” to Congress. The National Environmental Policy Act of 1970 required federal agencies to provide and publicly release “environmental impact statements” making possible lawsuits to prevent or modify anticipated government actions affecting the environment; the campaign finance laws of 1971 and 1973 required public disclosure of campaign contributions; the Inspector General Act of 1978 and other legislations were transparency-oriented milestones. Politicians and government officers were now more often held accountable. The character of democracy shifted from one in which voters normally could express and act on disapproval of government incumbents only on election day to one in which the government was under a more continuous public surveillance.³⁵

This tied journalism to a new, more interpretive ideal. It made reporters themselves experts as never before. It requires time and often teamwork and a lot of resolve, persistence, and patience. It should also require acknowledgment that journalism has changed — and changed for the better. But popular recognition of this powerful and sweeping change has been swamped by the apparently irresistible story of the digital transformation of journalism, as if no other changes in news-gathering matter.

Post-1945, there has been a politicization of everyday life, a sprawl of rights-consciousness, and a new availability of low-cost civic engagement from 10K runs for breast cancer research, benefit concerts, blogging, and hashtag-spawned social movements. In this era, representative institutions constituted through elections remain central, but they are powerfully supplemented in ways notable enough to qualify as a new species of democracy. Various terms for this new model of democracy have been offered — from “audience democracy”³⁶ to “between-election democracy”³⁷ to “counter-democracy”³⁸ to “monitory democracy,” perhaps the most fitting.³⁹ Monitory democracy empowers civil society to hold the government accountable, not only at the voting booth on election day but in 24/7 surveillance of governmental activity or what Keane calls “the continuous public chastening of those who exercise power”.⁴⁰

In monitory democracy, we expect from the media “accountability journalism,” the watchdogging of government and other powerful institutions; we expect the media to offer a model of reasoned discourse about public affairs; and we expect the media to provide a representation of and a tolerance for various legitimate viewpoints (what counts as “legitimate” is, of course, contentious).

But the media are just one important institution that makes a monitory democracy work. Journalism has adapted to monitory democracy by adopting for itself more self-consciously and assertively than ever the role of holding government accountable to its constitutional duties and to a broad obligation to serve the public. “Accountability,” as a general term for holding the government accountable to the public, or to national laws and traditions, comes into frequent use at about the same time, growing rapidly from the 1990s on.⁴¹ “Accountability journalism” or “accountability reporting” are, likewise, terms of relatively recent invention. Leonard Downie, Jr., among the editors who oversaw the work of Woodward and Bernstein and later succeeded Ben Bradlee as the Washington Post’s executive editor, is not sure who invented the term but believes that he was one of the first or perhaps the very first to make regular use of the term to describe the kind of journalism he believed the most important. Downie writes, “I believe I was the first to use the term accountability journalism widely and often”.⁴²

In the United States, monitorial mechanisms have grown more extensive and more powerful from FOIA forward. Consider the Inspector General Act of 1978. Within a few years, it established in every Cabinet-level agency and most other major federal agencies an office of inspector general empowered to audit the department on an ongoing basis. Through semiannual reports and many other occasional reports on the agency each “IG” is empowered to monitor, the inspectors general make public an assessment of the agencies’ waste, fraud, and abuse of the public trust. In fiscal 2014, the then-existing 72 IGs supervised 14,000 employees with a total budget of $2.6 billion. The IGs initiated over 5,500 indictments, closed 5,900 successful prosecutions, and 5,200 suspensions or debarments, and issued 6,900 audits, inspections, and evaluation reports.^43 44 If you have been blissfully unaware of the position of inspector general across federal departments and agencies, you may nonetheless have heard of Michael Atkinson, IG for the Intelligence Community, a position he held from May 17, 2018. He was appointed to that position by Donald Trump, who had nominated him for the post. In September 2019, the whistle blower whose statement led to the House impeachment inquiry concerning President Trump, submitted his or her allegations to IG Atkinson, as is the requirement for whistle blowers in the intelligence agencies in accord with the Inspector General Act (1978) and the Intelligence Community Whistle Blower Protection Act (1998). Atkinson made the determination that the whistle blower’s complaint was “credible” and “urgent.” He forwarded it to the President’s Office of Legal Counsel. Finding no serious response there, he circled back to reporting it, again as required by statute, to the Congress. And that propelled the impeachment inquiry against Donald Trump. President Trump dismissed him from his office on May 3, 2020.

I have read dozens of New York Times news stories that are based directly on inspector general reports, always properly credited, but rarely taking a sentence or two to explain what the IG’s office is, let alone its relatively recent origin. Journalists do not inform their readers about what IGs do, nor do scholars of the media and democracy. The failure of journalism to do a bit of civic education when its reporting derives from IG reports does not differ much from the work of political scientists, political historians, or journalism scholars who have done scarcely anything to shine a light on the work of the IGs. There is only one academic book I know of that takes up the topic in the past couple of decades.⁴⁵

Conclusion

If Keane is right, democracy has morphed from legislative to monitory since 1945 and more intensively so since the early 1970s. If Bell and others are right, society has become less social-elite-centered and more university-centered and science-centered since 1945. And if I am right, journalism has also changed dramatically in the period 1965 to 1980 or 1990 — never quite abandoning the ideal of “objectivity” but in practice demanding of the best journalism a more interpretive and less strait-jacketed stance in the world. There is now less need to trust journalists, in a sense, because they identify their sources more often than they did in the 1950s and 1960s. But there is more reason to question them because their ambition to explain events and not to just record them inevitably requires sophisticated thinking on their part and just as inevitably calls on their own expertise and judgment.

In other words, people trusted “the media” more than the media deserved in the period up until the 1970s when measured trust levels began to fall, and it is perhaps not so strange that trust in news media has fallen in the United States (and many other countries) during a period when critical thinking has become a stronger norm and when journalism has become not only better and more professionalized but also less strait-jacketed and more independent, more critical, more assertive, and more empowered by the new norm and practices of transparency.⁴⁶ Perhaps it might seem paradoxical that media trust should fall as media quality improves, but in light of all the other developments that have taken place since the 1960s, it would probably be more surprising if media trust had not fallen.

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41. Dubnick, M. (2014). Accountability as a cultural keyword. In M. Bovens, R. E. Goodin, & T. Schillemans (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of public accountability (pp. 23–28). Oxford University Press.
42. Downie Jr, L. (2017, November 22). Email communication to Michael Schudson.
43. Hilliard, N. (2017). The accountability state: US Federal inspectors general and the pursuit of democratic integrity. University Press of Kansas.
44. Council of Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency (2014). Annual Report for Fiscal 2014. https://www.oversight.gov/reports/cigie-integrity-committee-fiscal-year-2014-annual-report
45. Hilliard, N. (2017). The accountability state: US Federal inspectors general and the pursuit of democratic integrity. University Press of Kansas.
46. Schudson, M. (2015). The rise of the right to know. Harvard University Press.

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.

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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.