What do we mean when we talk about news deserts? The term has become a shorthand for areas devoid of local news coverage. But a new essay from the Independent Journalism Atlas recalls that when Penny Abernathy popularized the term through her research, she used it to describe a more nuanced picture: To show what...

Apparently, 75% of your emotions are generated by smell. Or that’s what the internet says, anyway. The statistic appears everywhere from marketing books and articles to academic papers about the power of scent. As a perfumer (someone who creates fragrances) and journalist who writes about these things, I came across it several times, and when...

Meta has delayed the effective date of its new terms of service for business accounts to November 20 in the face of mounting pressure from the global news industry. Nieman Lab first reported on the terms on October 15. They would allow for the mass scraping of websites “associated with” business accounts on Facebook, Instagram,...

The largest news publishing trade association in the United States is calling on Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to suspend the implementation of the company’s new commercial terms of service, set to go into effect on October 30. In an open letter to Zuckerberg published Thursday, News/Media Alliance’s president and CEO Danielle Coffey wrote that Meta...

“Very interesting that The Ringer’s writers write on Substack and not…The Ringer.” “What’s the point of the website then?” “Hold up. You’re telling me The Ringer would rather make money on writing than not make money on writing?” These were some of the responses after The Ringer’s Zach Lowe announced his new newsletter. The Lowe...

AI inverts the traditional journalism hierarchy: Instead of reporters gathering information, editors deciding how to present it, and newsrooms releasing the same final story to everyone, AI agents deliver what readers ask for, refining or expanding on information as requested. It’s “an interactive process in a way the current news system isn’t,” write the authors...

The U.K. competition and consumer protection authority sent a formal letter to Meta to discuss its new commercial terms of service. On Tuesday, Will Hayter, the executive director for digital markets at the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), shared the update during a session of the communications and digital committee of British Parliament, after a...

More than 100 million voters are expected to cast ballots in the 2026 U.S. midterm elections. In recent election cycles, political reporting based on voter polling has drawn criticism, prompted scrutiny, and found defenders. As the debate over the value of polling continues, The Wall Street Journal is exploring new ways to cover public opinion...

Despite what my Facebook feed looks like, the platform’s not just for AI fruit videos and birthday posts. According to data from the Pew Research Center published Monday, 40% of adults in the United States regularly get their news from Facebook. That’s up from 36% in 2020, signaling the continued stability of the platform as...

Some consequential reporting of recent years has emerged thanks to what is normally defined as a “hack-and-leak,” a specific kind of cyberattack that results in the release of the information obtained by hackers. When Anonymous and allied collectives breached corporations and state agencies during the hacktivist wave of the 2010s, for instance, they turned stolen...

Semafor expects to have its second profitable year, thanks to a growing events, er, convening business, cofounders Justin Smith and Ben Smith announced. The news company, which launched four years ago, had its first profitable year last year on $40 million in revenue. In a note published Sunday, Smith and Smith said they expect “revenue...

Meta has removed the word “train” from its upcoming terms of service for business accounts. The company revised its terms after Nieman Lab’s story on Thursday exposed that the new terms would permit broad scraping of websites “associated with” business accounts, and possibly allow Meta to use that scraped content to train its AI models....

Meta can use web scrapers to crawl and collect content from websites “associated with” business accounts on its platforms, according to its new commercial terms of use. The update, set to go into effect on October 30, will include news publishers with business accounts. These accounts allow companies or public figures to manage Facebook pages,...

Mississippi Today had a question. Did the stories around its Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporting affect the way those investigations were received? It’s the kind of question local newsrooms can’t easily test on their own. But researchers from Local NExT Lab at Syracuse University could. In a national survey, 1,768 adults were shown the same investigation...

In December, Google launched its News AI pilot program, which licenses content from select publishers and uses it to test new AI features in Google News. On Thursday, the company announced that the program has added new partnerships, bringing the total number of publications in the pilot to more than 400 worldwide. At launch, the...

On a September afternoon in Manhattan’s Union Square neighborhood, Shreyas Sinha is sitting on a toilet, wearing a blue suit. Looking into the camera, he asks, “Why is it that everything I’ve been eating this year is giving me diarrhea?” Sinha is about to link the 2026 cyclospora outbreaks to decades of problems at the...

The fonts are Times New Roman and Arial Narrow, the colors are maroon and mustard, and the cursor is the 8-bit pixel hand. When Slate revived its original 1996 homepage to celebrate its 30th birthday this fall1, the team found a lot to like besides nostalgia. “I’ve read Slate since 1997, when I finally had...

If you thought last year was bleak, Medill’s annual State of Local News Report is here to ring the alarm bell louder. What was a “creeping erosion” has now “mushroomed into a full-blown Super El Niño-like event for local news, leaving widespread and long-lasting displacement in its wake,” writes Tim Franklin, founding director of the...

USA Today Co. executives are revealing new details about a controversial deal with Palantir. In a joint interview with Fast Company’s Alex Pasternack, three executives from the country’s largest newspaper chain explained why they moved ahead with the Palantir deal despite major opposition from their own employees. Mike Reed, the chairman and CEO of USA...

In 2025, trust in journalism reached a record low. According to Gallup, only 8% of Republicans expressed trust in the news media, compared with 51% of Democrats. New data show an uptick among Republicans, but overall trust remains near this record low, and the gap between Republicans and Democrats remains substantial. One of the key...

“How young is too young for a life in prison?” “SpaceX debris is washing ashore. Who’s responsible?” “Why schools get paid even when students fail.” Those are the top headlines so far on Sinclair Broadcasting Group’s new Substack publication, The National Press, launched this week. The National Press repackages some of the top stories from...

You may have noticed that things look a little different around here. We’ve just launched the third major redesign in Nieman Lab history. Hope you like it! My No. 1 goal for this design (internal codename: Roscoe) was increasing design diversity on article pages — to enable a greater degree of art direction. In our...

Late last month, about 150 journalists, researchers, and technologists gathered on the 15th floor of The New York Times Building for a forum on how AI is changing investigative journalism. Just outside the event space was a hallway commemorating the paper’s more than 140 Pulitzer Prize winners, dating back to 1918. One photograph had yet...

With around $1.5 million in revenue, 2026 is on track to be a break-even year for the worker-owned local news site Hell Gate. “We’ve spent a lot of money growing this year,” Hell Gate co-founder Nick Pinto told me, “so the fact we’re ending the year in the same place with regards to our bank...

Over the past decade, nonprofit news has been seen as one of the bright spots in U.S. journalism — an emblem of hope for the future amid a landscape littered with failures and financial struggles. With an average of 10 local newspapers closing each month, joining the thousands that have met that fate already, conditions...

At the pearly gates, Dolly Parton, in a sparkling gown, stands arm in arm with Tim Curry, dressed as Dr. Frank-N-Furter. “I knew I chose the right plus one,” Parton says to God, who is standing at heaven’s reception desk. That’s the premise of a cartoon that went viral on Twitter in the days after...

When the Spokesman-Review announced plans to transfer Spokane’s 143-year-old, family-owned newspaper to a nonprofit founded by executive editor Rob Curley, it took over the front page. “The People’s Paper,” read the April 16, 2025, headline, saying ownership would transfer “to you, the community.” Key to the plan was Curley, the folksy self-proclaimed “journalism nerd” who...

The Columbia Journalism School will pause admissions for its Master of Arts program, dean Jelani Cobb announced on Thursday. The country’s most prestigious journalism school also announced a new online, part-time degree. 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...

At the end of August, the state of California passed a bill to give news organizations tax credits based on the number of journalists they employ. It’s the largest local news bill in the United States — expected to generate as much as $40 million for the state’s newsrooms each year — and on Wednesday, California...

As an engineering student, Valentín Virasoro worked part-time at a car dealership in Cordoba, Argentina. His boss at the dealership had a habit: Every day, he’d send an audio update covering the major stories in the automotive industry. Virasoro left the job in February to pursue a career in tech. But the idea of informative...