Nieman Lab

Nieman Lab -

That time Rupert Murdoch endorsed Jimmy Carter (no, really) - 2025-01-09T18:27:59+00:00
It looks like some sort of mistake, a bizarre multi-paragraph typo: The New York Post endorsing Jimmy Carter, less than an inch below a masthead that proclaims “RUPERT MURDOCH, Publisher and Editor-in-Chief.” But it really happened. In 1980, the Post (arguably the most right-wing newspaper in America) and Rupert Murdoch (inarguably the most important right-wing...

GBH tried to sell the home of a legendary radio station. It kicked off a proxy war for the soul of audio. - 2025-01-09T17:03:02+00:00
One day last October, Jay Allison received an email from an employee at CAI, the radio station he heads in the Cape Cod village of Woods Hole, Massachusetts. There was a real-estate agent showing someone around the station, the employee said; did Allison know anything about that? “And then very quickly, maybe within a day,...

Let’s fact-check Mark Zuckerberg’s fact-checking announcement - 2025-01-08T21:27:24+00:00
On Tuesday, the CEO of a social network born to rate the hotness of college students announced he was taking it back to its roots by “restoring free expression.” The plan includes relocating Meta’s Trust & Safety employees to Texas (this may be a sleight of hand, if most of its moderation staff is already Texas-based) and...

MacArthur funds a Press Forward “cousin” abroad - 2025-01-08T19:36:01+00:00
In the MacArthur Foundation’s hefty end-of-year announcement of $20 million in grants to revitalize local news, there was lots to absorb. The lead funder of Press Forward committed money to more than a dozen organizations, including LION (receiving $4 million), Louisiana State University’s Manship School of Mass Communications ($400,000), El Tecolote ($350,000), The Oklahoma Eagle...

Academics team up to address the biggest challenges in local news research - 2025-01-08T18:26:19+00:00
If a philanthropic organization is looking to support local news in a given community, it typically wants to figure out the answers to a few questions before committing funding: What are the community’s information needs? Who, if anyone, is meeting those information needs, and what kinds of support would be meaningful to them? That’s why...

“A hard hit for the fact-checking community and journalism”: Meta eliminates fact-checking in the U.S. - 2025-01-07T19:46:30+00:00
Meta will replace its third-party fact-checking program in the U.S. with a crowd-sourced community notes program similar to the one used by X, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced on his Facebook page on Tuesday morning. The wide-ranging video message framed the decision as a move to “dramatically reduce the amount of censorship” on Facebook, Instagram, and...

Thousands of documentaries are fueling AI models built by Apple, Meta, and Nvidia - 2025-01-07T16:17:39+00:00
In November, The Atlantic published a groundbreaking investigation that showed more than 138,000 films and TV episodes had been used as training data for AI models. Until then it had been widely speculated, but not confirmed, that the output of Hollywood studios had been input into many of the large language models (LLMs) built by...

Solidarity journalism could help news organizations build credibility - 2025-01-06T18:54:02+00:00
“The news media is the least trusted group among 10 U.S. civic and political institutions involved in the democratic process,” the polling firm Gallup concluded in a 2024 analysis. Despite news organizations’ pledges to provide fact-based reporting, and ongoing investments to build trust, people across the political spectrum in the U.S. are unconvinced of mainstream media’s self-described credibility. The category “mainstream...

Can solutions journalism work for local newsrooms? - 2025-01-02T11:51:15+00:00
The news is often quite good at being bad — as in deeply negative and depressing. This systemic negativity in news coverage, in one estimation, has gone from being “a mere ‘news value’ to an overarching ‘news ideology.” And it’s not without consequence: It’s leaving audiences increasingly overwhelmed, frustrated, and apathetic, not to mention feeling helpless, stressed, and...

Lessons learned in The Building of Lost Causes - 2024-12-20T14:11:44+00:00
Ten years ago, in Vancouver’s oldest office building, a few colleagues and I launched what seemed like an impossible venture: a digital newspaper that would stand up to one of the most powerful forces on earth, the oil and gas industry. We funded it through crowdfunding and a handful of “social impact” investors who knew...

Publishers find the AI era not all that lucrative - 2024-12-20T14:09:04+00:00
“The AI era,” Sara Fischer writes in Axios, “is proving lucrative for media publishers looking to offset a slowdown in ads and subscription fatigue.” My prediction for 2025 is that this will not be true for most news organizations, because they’ll find that no technology companies are interested in paying for their content. While in...

Embrace the barbell - 2024-12-20T14:08:55+00:00
We live in a time of media fragmentation and hyperpolarization. This year’s presidential election raised further questions about traditional media’s relevance. And it seems increasingly clear that people are gravitating to extremes in the types of content they consume — whether scrolling short-form posts or listening to hours-long podcasts. We must meet them there. When...

Prediction markets go mainstream - 2024-12-20T14:07:46+00:00
For decades, the news industry has operated on a familiar rhythm: Journalists chase scoops, publish headlines, and define the news cycle. But a new model for information sharing is emerging. Prediction markets — platforms where users buy and sell shares based on the probability of future events — are poised to disrupt the media landscape...

The rise of informal news networks - 2024-12-20T14:07:12+00:00
Predictions — said someone — are a fool’s game. But there’s little doubt that in the next year we will continue to bear painful witness to the decline of America’s formal news structures. Twentieth-century news outlets will keep crashing by the wayside — victims to changing business and technological models, to hubris, to cultural mistrust...

Back to the bundle - 2024-12-20T14:06:11+00:00
We’ve covered 2024 as the fragmentation election, and media analysts mostly assume fragmentation will continue — more and more podcasts and Substacks and hyper-personalized TikTok accounts, and a weaker and weaker big media. But as one of the great early internet CEOs once said, there are only two ways to go in media: bundling and...

The longform renaissance - 2024-12-20T14:05:32+00:00
If I’m going to predict the future, I find it useful to return to the past. As a kid, I wanted to be a journalist because I dreamed of seeing the world, meeting people who were different from me, and telling their stories. I suspect many of us were drawn to journalism for similar reasons:...

Journalists explain legislative procedure - 2024-12-20T14:04:53+00:00
This will be the year journalism finally explains arcane legislative rules to the public — for national, state, and local government. Most people find talk of clotures, filibusters, committee votes, bill reconciliation, the legislative calendar, and beyond absolutely boring. If civic-affairs news is the broccoli of American journalism, then coverage of legislative procedure is the...

More small and mid-level podcasts hit the stage - 2024-12-20T14:03:25+00:00
In 2025, more podcasts will move from audio and video to the stage — and not just the big ones with big budgets. This already-growing trend will be adapted and invigorated by mid-tier and smaller shows whose audiences have been steadily increasing for years, whose listeners yearn for live interactions with hosts and shows that...

Data and context makes a comeback - 2024-12-20T14:02:52+00:00
Do you ever visit a friend’s house and find yourself surprised at how different their Netflix queue looks than yours? Or worry about the breaking down of a shared reality amid an increasingly fractured media landscape? As more of our digital experiences become mediated by personalization algorithms and fandoms built around individual content creators, I...

Newsrooms will keep losing their conservative audiences - 2024-12-20T14:01:41+00:00
The hard question isn’t how journalists should cover Trump, but how they should relate to Trump voters. Now that the furor of the election has died down, perhaps political coverage might be perceived as a little less partisan. And perhaps there’s an opening for conservative audiences to return to the news, if they’re not worried...

The 2024 gift guide for journalists - 2024-12-20T14:00:43+00:00
Are you still looking for a holiday gift for the journalist in your life, or perhaps just doing a little shopping for yourself? We’ve got a bunch of ideas for you, whether you’re looking to give someone something to wear, something to read, or something to help organize life. A game to play A local...

The media reckons with AGI - 2024-12-19T18:00:14+00:00
In 1988, NASA scientist James Hansen told the U.S. Senate that man-made climate change was real, imminent, and potentially catastrophic. It was a perfect opportunity for the media to start covering the issue with the importance and urgency it deserved. Yet journalists did not rise to the occasion. For decades, they peddled both-sidesism, failing to...

AI companies grapple with what it means to be creators of news - 2024-12-19T17:59:45+00:00
As generative AI creeps further into news delivery, discovery, and consumption, both the media and the tech industries will increasingly find themselves in a strange new digital landscape where tech giants aren’t just aggregators of journalism, but creators of it. The media and tech industries, frequently to the dismay of both, are deeply and inextricably...

AI helps us revisit old journalism territory - 2024-12-19T12:59:33+00:00
The hype wave around AI has peaked (or close to it), but its impact on the industry hasn’t yet been felt. I don’t predict that AI will take us “boldly where no one has gone before.” Instead, it will help us revisit old territory, digging deeper into abandoned wells to uncover untapped value, hidden insights,...

Cross-border collaboration shines light in dark corners - 2024-12-19T12:59:10+00:00
Around the world, illiberal regimes seek to control the flow of information. But they themselves are often open to certain new ideas — the innovations that other regimes have successfully used to suppress or obscure information that is unflattering or undermines their authority. This mutual emboldening adds another advantage to an already unfair fight, as...

The expert class confronts reality - 2024-12-19T12:58:23+00:00
Say what you will about The Washington Post’s much-maligned decision not to endorse a U.S. presidential candidate in 2024, but Jeff Bezos had a point when he wrote this: “Most people believe the media is biased. Anyone who doesn’t see this is paying scant attention to reality, and those who fight reality lose. Reality is...

Meeting people where they are - 2024-12-19T12:57:23+00:00
When Trump won in 2016, those in journalism circles wrung their hands. How had the media missed it? The field settled on an explanation: America’s elite newsrooms had overlooked middle America and neglected rural areas. Journalists misunderstood the zeitgeist. Listening became the new mantra. Employ journalists living in the heartland. Spend time in flyover country....

Inviting — and making sense of — meaningful participation - 2024-12-19T12:57:20+00:00
It’s hardly revelatory that journalism does not reside at the center of most folks’ lives today. We all now have more access to information, to analysis, and to opinions than at any point in human history, so newsrooms play a less central role on where and how we learn about the world than they did...

People won’t “like” you - 2024-12-19T12:57:09+00:00
We’re heading into Trump: The Sequel and we know how some of this show goes. It will be the same — but different. We know people aren’t reading; social media is full of algorithmic distractions; silly videos are addicting; and brain rot is real. We know we’ll be contending with news fatigue and many of...

Getting beyond the fact-check - 2024-12-19T12:57:02+00:00
In 2015, when I founded Lupa, Brazil’s first organization fully dedicated to combating disinformation, “fake news” was a niche term, Donald Trump was still a reality TV personality, and fact-checking was virtually unknown in Brazil. Back then, our mission was urgent and clear: uncover falsehoods, expose those responsible for it, and demand accountability. The work...