For a growing number of local journalists and supporters of local journalism, the relevant question in 2026 is no longer, “Should public policy to support local news exist?” but “What should public policy to support local news look like here?” At least 21 states and territories have proposed legislation intended to financially support local news...

Neither The Boston Globe nor the internet existed in the 1700s. But this past holiday weekend, in celebration of the Semiquincentennial (try saying that five times fast), the newspaper took a liberty of its own: imagining what its home page might have looked like on July 4, 1776. The entire page is a sepia-toned delight...

Local news has long been an exception to a troubling trend. Even as trust in national news organizations eroded over the past decade and partisan divides over the media widened, local news largely held its ground — majorities of both Republicans and Democrats continued to rate their local news media favorably. Despite facing major financial...

Disney did it, Netflix is doing it, and now The New York Times is serious about it too: Quit trying to log in with your old coworker’s mom’s email address. Wow, it finally happened. The New York Times cracked down on login sharing and now I can't use my old coworker's mom's account that I've...

“We are sitting in the middle of a fucking polycrisis.” That’s how Darryl Holliday introduced the first-ever News Futures Convention in San Francisco in March. While the idea of being in crisis is a common theme of U.S. journalism conferences, this was not a traditional journalism conference. News Futures, fiscally sponsored by the nonprofit civic...

Reading sad things about journalism — newspapers, especially — has been a big part of my job for almost two decades. On Monday, I came across such a story that seemed to be getting traction on social media. According to the link aggregator Sill, 18 people I follow on Bluesky had shared a link to...

“Welcome to Vilnius, the city where we face cognitive warfare for real,” Robertas Kaunas, Lithuania’s minister of national defense, said in his opening remarks at this year’s GlobalFact. On June 17, hundreds of fact-checkers assembled in Vilnius for the annual conference of the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN), part of the Poynter Institute. Roughly 180 fact-checking...

The World Cup is the gift that keeps on giving (to me). I was swiping through Instagram Stories during halftime of the Canada vs. Qatar World Cup match when I saw a post about a study about the political indicators of a person’s preference of soccer stars Lionel Messi, the Argentine forward, or Cristiano Ronaldo,...

If you have ever lived in the Washington, D.C. metro area, or had the misfortune of being stuck there during a snowstorm, there’s a good chance you’ve heard of the Capital Weather Gang. For eighteen years they were The Washington Post’s oracles of the atmosphere, covering local weather on the Post website and on social...

Over the past year, major news publishers have taken aggressive anti-scraping measures to curb the rise of AI crawlers. So far, most of these backend interventions have been out of reach for independent journalists who publish on third-party newsletter platforms. That is changing with a new partnership announced on Tuesday between Beehiiv and Cloudflare, the...

News video is as popular as ever. Publishers who remember the “pivot to video” from a decade ago might wince at the thought, remembering how misleading metrics led many publishers to invest in video content. But evidence from our newly published Digital News Report suggests the demand for news video is growing. A decade on,...

As campaign videos go, it was a classic. To the sound of a soulful pop ballad, a smiling politician meets voters in the street, chats to school children and visits a hospital. The only problem? The scenes shown in the video weren’t real. They were AI-generated, and shared and labeled as “illustrative” by an independent...

Social media is overwhelming. The amount of information, misinformation, and slop makes it hard for the average news consumer to wade through the deluge of posts and know who to trust. According to the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, more and more people are turning to creators for news. About 27% of adults...

The British government is asking social media companies to put more news — real news, produced by public service broadcasters like the BBC — high up in people’s feeds. And if companies refuse, it’ll pass laws to require it. That’s the main takeaway from a new report issued Tuesday on a host of issues relating...

This year’s Digital News Report marked a notable milestone: for the first time, social and video networks overtook news publishers as a source of news globally. As audiences continue to migrate toward digital intermediaries for news, AI chatbots are emerging as the next platform to watch. Findings from our 2026 survey show that one in...

You’ve seen the headlines, or TikToks — the traffic cones on statues, the pubs drunk dry, the throngs of men in kilts. The Tartan Army took Boston by storm in the best possible way last week during Scotland’s run of games in Foxborough, and The Boston Globe has chronicled the happy chaos with zeal. “As...

When The Washington Post’s management axed Book World in February, it wasn’t just one casualty among hundreds of layoffs; it was the latest high-profile death blow to a newspaper book review section in more than two decades of a thousand cuts. The AP stopped publishing book reviews last fall. Metro dailies like the San Francisco...

The 2026 Local Journalist Index, released this week by Muck Rack and the Rebuild Local News Coalition, contains a fair bit of bad news that may not surprise you: The number of working local journalists has plummeted over the last 25 years (and continued to decline last year), and the little coverage that’s left tends...

As we’ve reported previously, AI-generated journalism provokes distrust from readers, with audiences favoring a human touch. That might seem obvious, but a lot of questions lie buried in that broad statement. First, with so many ways to use AI, what does “AI-generated” mean, and how do audiences respond to different types and levels of AI...

On Monday, Substack announced a framework for a native sponsorship program, along with “Creator Kits” to help Substack users build media kits for potential brand partners. (It’s also hired its first head of brand sponsorships, Axios reported.) These tools will make it easier for writers to increase their revenue while continuing to build their subscription...

News sites are rapidly becoming the newspapers of the digital age. And you know what happened to newspapers. Worldwide, people in all age groups are ditching news sites and publishers’ apps in favor of social media and video networks. In fact, 18- to 34-year-olds are abandoning content on publishers’ platforms even more quickly than they’re...

It’s a beloved newspaper cliché: The reader sitting at the kitchen table sipping a hot cup of coffee while leisurely scanning the newspaper. The news consumption experience, for most people, hasn’t looked like that for a long time. But a new publication wants to update the news-and-coffee experience for the modern era. Enter: The Newsground,...

It’s been a big couple of years for Amy Bushatz. A former executive editor of Military.com, her husband’s military career had taken their family to the Matanuska-Susitna Valley of Alaska — northern suburbs of Anchorage that make up the state’s fastest growing region. (Perhaps best known in the Lower 48 as the starting point for...

Back in 2023, GBH, one of the public radio stations in Boston, put out a podcast called The Big Dig. Hosted by Ian Coss, the podcast was a deep dive into the infamous, massively expensive project in Boston that tore down an elevated highway and moved it underground.The podcast was wonky, filled with archival tape...

Josh Moyer remembers the exact moment he decided he needed to unionize. Moyer is a senior reporter for the Centre Daily Times, a newspaper in State College, PA, and for months he had been concerned about a new AI tool being rolled out in his newsroom. McClatchy, the Centre Daily Times’ parent company, had chosen...

The Institute for Nonprofit News released its ninth annual INN Index on Tuesday, analyzing data reported from hundreds of its members to understand the state of nonprofit news in 2025. The Index remains one of the most detailed snapshots of the revenue and audience picture across nonprofit newsrooms; this year’s data set primarily draws on...