On Wednesday, the Trump administration threw its support behind OpenAI, backing the AI giant in its ongoing litigation with The New York Times. The Department of Justice voiced its support through a statement of interest (SOI) filed with the Manhattan judge overseeing the case, which includes a dozen other plaintiffs, including daily papers owned by...

A year ago, a spirited and public-records-powered newsletter needed a mascot. Sleuthy the Seal — born of a “fortuitous misunderstanding” — was created. Journalist and newsletter founder David Covucci promised his wife he’d get the plucky mascot tattooed if he could hit 500 subscribers with the solo venture. The football helmet-wearing seal quickly had a...

News creators are increasingly where people get their news (check out Hanaa’s ongoing series of interviews with news creators from around the world) and a new study from the Center for Cooperative Media at Montclair State University takes a deep dive into New Jersey’s local news influencers. Using a combination of AI tools, custom code,...

In October 2007, The New York Times ran a story about an unusual new news startup named — at least according to the Times copy desk — “Pro Publica.” “The plan is to do long-term projects, uncovering misdeeds in government, business and organizations,” Richard Pérez-Peña wrote. “Nothing quite like it has been attempted, and despite...

The state of California has passed a bill that could generate as much as $40 million for California newsrooms each year. Assembly Bill 2222, known as the Community Newsroom Employment and Workforce Sustainability Act, creates refundable tax credits for the state’s news outlets based on the number of journalists they employ. After passing the State Senate...

Any good op-ed can spark a public conversation, but most won’t start a debate over the nature of opinion writing itself. Last week, a Wall Street Journal piece by the billionaire financier Stanley Druckenmiller pulled it off. The op-ed itself is about whether the Treasury Department should continue trying to lower long-term bond yields. (Druckenmiller...

When MS NOW — known until last year as MSNBC — celebrated its 30th anniversary last month, Status reported that the focus was “as much about the future as the past.” Natalie Korach described early conversations about the network’s planned subscription product, which she wrote would be “centered around community, giving them access to their...

Every day the fact-checking team for one of India’s largest news organizations works to debunk a slew of false and misleading images circulating across social media. For the six-person team at India Today, that might include addressing an AI-generated archival photograph of a politician, a clip of deadly flooding ripped from its original context, or...

Whether you’re a reporter or an editor, your inbox has probably seen an influx of pitches, increasingly written with artificial intelligence. They’re likely bad, irrelevant, and annoyingly clogging up your email. But one publication is over it. If you want to write for The Food Section, you’ll have to pick up the phone. “We’re switching...

Last month at the National Sports Card Convention in Chicago, creator Brandon Pereira, who posts as Coach Koe, met a kid named Dominic. Dominic had spent the summer washing garbage cans to earn money to come to the convention and buy cards for his collection. He and Coach Koe browsed the offerings at the convention...

It was in 1964 that Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, asked to define obscenity for the purposes of law, wrote his famous heuristic: “I know it when I see it.” But when it comes to AI-generated content, we may think we know it when we see it — but our methods are far from perfect....

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

If a news outlet announces a website launch, you might think it’s safe to assume it’s a news website that’s launching. But that’s not what Chicago Public Media has in mind for chicago.com. Chicago Public Media is already the parent nonprofit of two existing news sites, WBEZ and, since 2022, the Chicago Sun-Times. For chicago.com,...

Hey Siri, how much is the news worth to an AI assistant? The answer, according to a report by Alexandra Bruell in The Wall Street Journal, starts at $100 million. Apple has approached publishers to use their news and up-to-date information in the revamped Siri AI, sources told the Journal. The company has reportedly discussed...

On August 11, 2023, local law enforcement seized electronics and reporting materials from the Marion County Record in a raid that provoked a national outcry over the blatant press freedom violation in small-town Kansas. The raid led to multiple federal lawsuits against the county government, public officials, and the city, accusing them of retaliating against...

On January 1, 2024, a 7.5 magnitude earthquake struck Japan’s Noto Peninsula, killing more than 700 people. In the days that followed, AI-generated images of the wreckage circulated widely and fake philanthropic websites scammed people out of donations. False claims that people were trapped under rubble diverted rescue efforts away from the places that needed...

On Monday, the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) dropped new proposed revisions to its code of ethics — the first revision to one of the most-cited media ethics standards in the country since 2014. As any Nieman Lab reader knows, journalism has seen drastic changes since 2014. One major shift in the last 12 years?...

Journalism exists to tell people what’s happening and give them what they need to understand it. That mission does not bend to budget or format. A story about a school board vote and a story about housing prices are both doing an essential job, just at different depths. The assumption underlying both types of stories...

More than 800 USA Today Co. employees are calling on the company to dissolve its recently announced partnership with Palantir, according to a joint statement from 31 unionized newsrooms published Monday. “While USA Today Co. CEO Mike Reed championed this partnership as a way to drive revenue, we believe it threatens to undermine trust in...

USA Today Co. has made a deal with software company Palantir to analyze and monetize user behavior, the company announced on Thursday. In its Q2 earnings call Thursday morning, USA Today Co. chairman and CEO Mike Reed told investors he expects the partnership to “strengthen how we collect, connect and activate audience data to drive...

Elon Musk launched Grokipedia last October as an anti-woke, AI-powered Wikipedia. It is, Renée DiResta wrote for The Atlantic at the time, part of “an escalating campaign to discredit Wikipedia and reshape what counts as a reliable source of basic information in the age of AI.” Grokipedia allows humans to suggest edits, but Columbia’s Tow...

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...