In Journalism in the Age of AI, Rodrigo Zamith, Tomás Dodds, and I make the case that artificial intelligence is reshaping how we create, how we learn, and how we understand the world around us — and that journalism, the institution society depends on most to make sense of it all, is at the center...

Why has trust in American news media dropped so much in the past 50 years — much more than it’s declined in other rich western countries? To some people, I’m sure, the answer will seem obvious: Journalism’s just gotten worse. The news used to be produced by upstanding proud Americans who only cared about the...

Despite a newsy summer — including the Iran War, the FIFA World Cup, and four Pulitzer Prize wins — The New York Times’ subscription sales were slower than expected during the second quarter of 2026, the company said in its earnings report released Wednesday. The Times added 280,000 digital-only subscribers between April and June, a...

Ten years ago, I wrote a piece on how the internet was sucking journalistic resources out of the middle of the country and concentrating it on the coasts — primarily New York City. While digital publishing theoretically could have distributed reporters away from high-cost cities, in reality, it reduced the financial returns on local reporting...

A translation of a mass shooter’s cryptic journal in the days after an attack. A public records review that revealed failures to install flood warning systems in Central Texas. An exposé of American technology companies’ complicity in building the Chinese surveillance state. An audit of the SEC’s crypto lawsuits that showed weakening enforcement under the...

It has never been easier (or cheaper) to fake and alter media. The evidence that journalists rely on to verify facts — photographs, videos, documents, websites, and even audio calls with sources — can now be convincingly generated with AI. In June, dozens of journalists, technologists, and academics gathered at NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism...

Deliberate audience initiatives and breaking news alike have driven traffic to local newspapers in the last few months. According to Similarweb’s data, The Philadelphia Inquirer received 1.1 million more web visits in April than it did in March, about a 17% jump. Lisa Hughes, the Inquirer’s publisher and CEO, told me the spike coincided with...

Each quarter, we use Similarweb data to rank web traffic for local newspapers, public media websites, nonprofit news outlets, and for-profit local news sites. Today we’re bringing you our latest public media check-in, starting with KCUR, the NPR station in Kansas City. “I’m quite happy to say that our April traffic bump was largely a...

A labor dispute erupted at The Guardian’s London headquarters in December 2024, with nearly 500 journalists going on strike to protest the proposed sale of the Guardian-owned Observer. With the newsroom hobbled, the British publication’s management allegedly deployed generative AI tools such as ChatGPT and Claude to suggest headlines and write descriptions of photos for people...

Election season is a busy time for any newsroom. In the second quarter of 2026, some nonprofit newsrooms saw their coverage of the primaries — especially voter guides — pay off in both interest and traffic. In Nieman Lab’s quarterly ranking of nonprofit news outlets, four news outlets saw a bump in traffic thanks in...

Last July, the Republican-led Congress voted to end federal funding for public media, clawing back $1.1 billion in funds that had been previously allocated to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. (The CPB officially shut down this past January.) The depressing one-year anniversary is being marked by a slew of articles and updates on how public...

Over the past four years, a newsletter that began as a protest by an Arizona reporter frustrated with his own paper’s coverage of LGBTQ+ issues has grown to become a respected statewide publication. Now, it’s seeking to expand. Following a feasibility study, the nonprofit LOOKOUT — whose tagline is “Fierce. Independent. Queer” — is working...

It’s time for our latest look at which newsrooms are having success increasing their web traffic. We bring you four of these each quarter, looking at four different market segments: local newspapers, nonprofit news outlets, public media stations, and for-profit local news sites. Today’s edition looks at local for-profit news sites. (Eligible sites for this...

Last December, one of our readers received a renewal email from The Wall Street Journal. Over the coming year, the email said, she would be charged $76.99 every four weeks for her print and digital subscription — $19.25 a week, or $923.88 annually. The renewal email included one sentence in all caps: “THIS PRICE WAS...

Back in 2024, Nilay Patel, editor-in-chief of The Verge, coined the term “Google Zero,” which he defined as “that moment when Google Search simply stops sending traffic outside of its search engine to third-party websites.” It increasingly feels as if that moment has arrived, and some publishers appear to be heading toward the decision that...

Hazel Brannon Smith was almost certainly the most unpopular woman in Mississippi when she wrote an editorial in 1963 lambasting the racist White Citizens Councils in the Lexington Advertiser, a newspaper she owned. “The hierarchy of rulers in this totalitarian-like organization permit no deviation from its official line — and those who believe in and stand for...

When the podcast Signal Hill launched last year, I was immediately struck by its formatting. Instead of seasons, it launches issues; episodes, which vary in length from less than two minutes to more than an hour, are broken down by type, like “dispatch” and “feature” and “profile.” It looks, in other words, like a magazine...

One week into the FIFA World Cup, the Argentinian streaming channel Luzu TV was live on the air when host Florencia Peña falsely declared that Lionel Messi’s father, Jorge Messi, had died. Minutes later, Peña said nervously that producers had told her the information via her earpiece, but that she hadn’t seen it herself, that...

Civic engagement takes many forms. The term describes activities as disparate as voting, volunteering, attending religious services, and following the news. Yet “these behaviors are often studied separately, making it difficult to see how they come together in people’s day-to-day lives,” researchers from the Pew-Knight Initiative write in a new report published Thursday. Their study,...

PITTSBURGH — One indicator of the energy and interest around live events in newsrooms these days: At INN Days — the Institute for Nonprofit News’ annual conference, held last month in Pittsburgh — a series of lightning talks on “Events that Build Audience and Revenue” was a standing-room-only session. Presenters from five nonprofit newsrooms described...

“It’s not: Some people do features, some people do spot stories. You’re commanding your beat. You’re doing everything,” said Jamie Heller, Business Insider’s editor-in-chief. It’s a Tuesday morning news meeting at Business Insider’s headquarters in New York’s Financial District. More than a dozen editors have gathered in the conference room, while several more chime in...

In the final days of World War II, as the German Reich collapsed, Nazi officials ordered millions of party membership cards to be destroyed. The vast card index that documented membership across Germany survived largely because a paper mill operator, Hanns Huber, chose to hand the records over to the advancing US forces rather than...

As reports of drone strikes and fresh clashes between Ethiopian government forces and Tigrayan fighters surfaced in late January, fears of a return to full-scale war spread quickly. Flights to northern Ethiopia were cancelled, and tensions rose ahead of the national elections in June, bringing renewed attention to the role misinformation played during the last conflict. In...

The Black-focused national-and-local news outlet Capital B launched in 2022 with a staff of 16 and a first local focus on Atlanta, with plans to expand. Co-founders Lauren Williams and Akoto Ofori-Atta — then editor-in-chief of Vox and managing editor of The Trace, respectively — were looking for “large Black cities that have especially bad...

The 2026 FIFA World Cup, hosted in North America this summer, has been fascinating to watch from different angles — from the matches themselves to community celebrations to the controversies. The tournament has brought hundreds of thousands of visitors to major cities in the United States, Canada, and Mexico. It’s been directing new and returning...

As an elder millennial who still mourns the death of Google Reader (13 years ago this month, sigh) and uses the Feedly daily, I was intrigued by TechCrunch’s post: “A new app, HyperTexting, turns the open web into a scrollable social media-like feed.” HyperTexting, launched on iOS June 29, describes itself like this: Allow us...

The New York Times: It wants to be your one-stop shop for cooking, games, sports…and next, perhaps, local news? On Wednesday, the Times announced it will soon launch The Local, “a new journalism initiative aimed at serving and engaging communities.” The national news behemoth will kick off the new initiative in August with a pilot...

CENTRAL PARK, NEW YORK CITY — On a hot June day in Manhattan, a few minutes away from the sea lion pool in Central Park Zoo, up a hill and through a patch of shoulder-height shrubs, Benji Jones peered into a bottle filled with ethanol and dead bugs. “Oh, there’s some big guys in here,”...

Last year, MIT’s Media Lab came out with a buzzy study on a phenomenon that’s been coined “cognitive debt.” In short, the researchers found that when ChatGPT users offloaded essay writing tasks to their AI assistants, their own writing abilities declined. ChatGPT users consistently had the lowest “brain engagement” and task performance scores across the...

Most people in the news business agree on at least one thing right now. As search and AI reshape how people find information, the old model of waiting for audiences to wander in is finished, and we have to build direct relationships with readers instead. The numbers are stark. When Pew Research Center tracked the...