Nieman Lab

Nieman Lab -

The L.A. Times adds AI-generated counterpoints to its opinion pieces and guess what, there are problems - 2025-03-04T18:36:31+00:00
Billionaire newspaper owners are in the middle of a massive freakout about their Opinion sections during the second Trump administration. Last week, Amazon CEO and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos announced that the Post’s Opinion section would reorient itself “in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets…Viewpoints opposing those pillars will...

Noosphere aims to create a subscription bundle for your favorite journalists’ content - 2025-03-04T18:00:27+00:00
When the Taliban took over Afghanistan in 2021, Irish war correspondent Jane Ferguson was in Kabul and decided to stay to report on the aftermath, posting videos on Instagram. Ferguson, who has worked steadily as a freelancer covering conflicts in the Middle East for outlets like Al Jazeera, PBS, and The New Yorker, said that...

A new nonprofit wants to be a soft (and sustainable) landing spot for local news outlets in transition - 2025-03-03T19:35:31+00:00
Among Ben Romo’s core ’80s memories as a kid growing up in Santa Barbara, CA: Placing third in a Big Wheel race on Leadbetter Beach. That accomplishment was documented in his hometown paper, the more than century-old Santa Barbara News-Press. It was the first time Romo remembers making the paper, but not the last; the...

Why news podcast listeners break up with their favorite shows - 2025-03-03T13:58:11+00:00
There’s fresh data on podcast listening habits, and — unlike most podcast research — this study focused on people who regularly consume news podcasts. The Podcast Landscape, sponsored by NPR and conducted by Signal Hill Insights, claims to be the “largest public study of podcasting in America” with responses from 5,071 Americans ages 18 or...

The Washington Post’s TikTok guy will publish a Post-produced news series on his personal channel - 2025-02-27T19:00:45+00:00
Dave Jorgenson, best known as The Washington Post’s TikTok guy, has launched a new weekly news skit show called, incredibly, Local News International. The series will be similar to his other videos for The Washington Post but “it’ll cover news from all around the world with a sort of local news, lo-fi vibe,” Jorgenson explains...

A new public policy agenda has a vision for “local news for the people” - 2025-02-27T14:42:15+00:00
What would a local media system that prioritizes working and middle classes over corporate profits and the interests of billionaires look like? A new public policy agenda released this week has some ideas. The Media Power Collaborative, which released its policy framework on Tuesday, describes itself as an organizing space for media workers and their...

How gender affects sources’ attitudes toward interviews - 2025-02-27T14:38:21+00:00
News interviews from expert sources’ perspective One of the more consistent (and, sadly, unsurprising) findings in news research around the world is the dominance of men as sources in news stories. Numerous studies have examined the ratio of men to women as sources over the years, including two multinational studies this decade, and have found a fairly...

Jeff Bezos declares opinions questioning “free markets” no longer welcome at The Washington Post - 2025-02-26T19:59:30+00:00
The thing about American newspaper opinion sections is this: Their owners get final say. If the man who signs the checks — it’s almost always a man — really really really wants to see his cocker spaniel run City Hall, you’ll probably see “Our Choice: Fluffernutter for Mayor” stripped atop the editorial page. For generations...

Journalism school needs to do more to prepare students for the hard parts - 2025-02-26T14:00:39+00:00
It is a challenging time to be a journalism student. Those entering the news industry face a profession struggling to recover public trust and attention, pay its journalists fairly, ensure they have a semblance of job security, and protect them from increasing — and intensifying — online abuse and harassment. Journalists’ salaries have remained largely...

Heavyweight is coming back as a Pushkin podcast - 2025-02-25T17:41:45+00:00
When Spotify canceled the podcast Heavyweight in 2023, every audio producer I know (and listeners on Reddit) mourned. The podcast, which I can best describe as “a show about regrets and resentments and the past but FUN,” was an audio darling, with its signature mixture of wry humor and deeply touching stories that seemed to...

Student press freedom isn’t universal - 2025-02-25T14:09:40+00:00
Student Press Freedom Day is Feb. 27 in the United States. But here in Korea — and in much of the world — it is just another Thursday. In Korea, awareness of student press freedom remains minimal, even nationally. In the professional sphere, while the Korean Constitution guarantees freedom of speech, press organizations often face...

As Facebook abandons fact-checking, it’s also offering bonuses for viral content - 2025-02-25T14:00:18+00:00
Hours after Donald Trump was sworn in as president, users spread a false claim on Facebook that Immigration and Customs Enforcement was paying a bounty for reports of undocumented people. “BREAKING — ICE is allegedly offering $750 per illegal immigrant that you turn in through their tip form,” read a post on a page called...

The New York Editorial Board is picking up where The New York Times left off - 2025-02-24T19:46:55+00:00
New York, NY — On a grey February morning in lower Manhattan, inside a warmly lit, wood-paneled room, Ben Smith drew my attention to the smoked salmon benedict. “You should eat,” Smith, the CEO and cofounder of Semafor, mouthed. Across the table from him, a man named Jim Walden was getting animated about how he...

Unionization may offer extra benefits (but also extra work) for women journalists, according to a new study - 2025-02-24T15:04:43+00:00
Over the last decade, journalists have unionized their newsrooms in record numbers. Since 2016, nearly 8,000 media workers from 146 companies have unionized with The NewsGuild-Communications Workers of America alone. To get a better sense of what union organizing in journalism looks and feels like for women, researchers Ever Josue Figueroa (University of Colorado, Boulder),...

London’s local news startups find readers willing to pay - 2025-02-21T14:52:27+00:00
The Press Gazette takes a look at three recently launched local news startups in London: London Centric was launched in September by former Guardian media editor Jim Waterson and offers readers regular email newsletters and in-depth reporting that they won’t find elsewhere. Based on Substack, it charges £7.95 per month for full access. The Londoner...

Meet the journalists training AI models for Meta and OpenAI - 2025-02-20T19:54:04+00:00
In December, Carla McCanna received a message from a recruiter at the AI training data company Outlier. McCanna, a recent graduate of Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, had never heard of the company, but the message came through Handshake, a recruiting portal hosted by the university. “The recruiter said my skills align with a...

In Germany, social media algorithms are pumping out huge amounts of far-right, pro-AfD content - 2025-02-20T17:47:43+00:00
Germany goes to the polls on Sunday for an election that could prove transformative. The key player is the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, which won 10.4% of the vote in the last federal election. Current polling puts AfD at roughly twice that level, a result that would likely rank them second behind the...

The American Journalism Project receives $25 million to fund more nonprofit newsrooms and launch the “Knight Resiliency Lab” - 2025-02-19T19:53:31+00:00
When the American Journalism Project launched in 2019, the Knight Foundation was among its earliest supporters. Right off the bat, the longtime journalism funder invested $20 million in the new organization created to provide venture philanthropy for local news. Six years later, the Knight Foundation is doubling down on that early support. On Tuesday, the...

A German news outlet got rid of its comments section — and asks readers to debate instead - 2025-02-19T18:59:14+00:00
For years, news publishers have grappled with what to do with their comments sections. Commenters may be hostile or spread misinformation. Moderators are burned out. Some outlets have limited commenting privileges to registered users or subscribers. Some have developed their own commenting platforms. And more than a few have called it quits, referring users to...

A new report suggests journalism support orgs, funders, and local newsrooms unite around four goals - 2025-02-18T19:44:55+00:00
In her 2024 Nieman Lab prediction, Anika Anand, then deputy director of Local Independent Online News (LION) Publishers, described what she saw as a need for more coordination among journalism support organizations — sometimes referred to as intermediaries — to better serve journalists and newsrooms. “The lack of coordination across funders, associations, academic institutions, consulting firms,...

The New York Times will let reporters use AI tools while its lawyers litigate AI tools - 2025-02-18T19:40:10+00:00
As Walt Whitman once wrote, The New York Times is large. It contains multitudes. One part of the company is suing OpenAI and Microsoft for training their large language models on Times content. It seeks “billions of dollars in statutory and actual damages” for the companies’ “use of The Times’s uniquely valuable works.” But as...

Blurred lines: When it comes to news habits, age may be more important than nationality - 2025-02-18T16:43:21+00:00
A new report finds that when it comes to news consumption, age isn’t just a number. Older people look to the news for different things than their younger counterparts. The study — based on survey data from more than 45,000 people in 23 European nations — investigated what motivated people to consume news. Though there...

Trump wants news outlets to get on board with “Gulf of America” — or else. Will they? - 2025-02-13T15:00:47+00:00
Place names are political. When they change, it’s often the result of someone’s victory, whether political or military. When Saigon became Ho Chi Minh City or St. Petersburg became Leningrad, you knew there was a new boss in town. Other times, it’s a sign that someone or something has fallen out of public favor —...

BBC News finds that AI tools “distort” its journalism into “a confused cocktail” with many errors - 2025-02-13T13:00:28+00:00
When the BBC tested four generative AI tools on articles on its own site, it found many “significant issues” and factual errors, the company said in a report released Tuesday. The BBC gave four AI assistants — OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Microsoft’s Copilot, Google’s Gemini, and Perplexity — “access to our website for the duration of the research1...

If you ask New York Times reporters to spend less time on Twitter, will they? (Spoiler: yes) - 2025-02-11T18:49:45+00:00
It’s a question that’s crossed the minds of countless news executives over the past two decades: How can I get my reporters to spend less time on Twitter? For years, Twitter offered journalists an enthralling mix of community, excitement, and eyeballs. It was a buzzing global newsroom, where you could watch big stories break in...

The (nearly) full list of Good Daily’s AI-generated local newsletters - 2025-02-10T19:41:36+00:00
On January 27, I published a story on Good Daily, a network of AI-generated local newsletters that over the past year has quietly spread to 355 towns and cities across the U.S. Since our story ran, I’ve received requests to share a list of all the newsletters we’ve identified. These requests have come in from...

“Lightning in a bottle”: Meredith Clark on Black Twitter’s journalistic impact, legacy — and writing its “obituary” - 2025-02-10T19:40:59+00:00
Meredith Clark’s research started when she attended the National Black Journalists Association convention in New Orleans in 2012. As a journalist and a graduate student at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, she wanted to study how Black people use Twitter. At the conference, she passed out cards asking attendees to tweet at her...

Less is more, and discounts work: A new study looks at the minutiae of paywall strategy - 2025-02-10T19:36:54+00:00
On its surface, the definition of a paywall is straightforward: A digital popup that blocks you from reading the story you clicked on unless you pay up. But the catch-all term “paywall” conceals several smaller decisions that go into designing exactly how much a reader sees as a news org coaxes them to subscribe. Do...

How DeepSeek stacks up when citing news publishers - 2025-02-07T00:36:24+00:00
Over the past two weeks, DeepSeek has made a splash in the AI industry. On January 20, the Chinese startup released its new open source model, DeepSeek-R1, which beat competitors like OpenAI’s o1 on several important performance benchmarks, despite costing a fraction of the price to develop. In the DeepSeek hype cycle, however, little attention...

The Trump war on the news media takes an absurd turn - 2025-02-06T16:54:57+00:00
Here are a few of the things that, in the opening weeks of the second Trump administration, have gone from “totally normal” to “DEVIANT BEHAVIOR THAT SHOWS THE EVIL LURKING AT THE HEART OF THE AMERICAN MEDIA”: A television news program does bog-standard edits on an interview with a politician, of the boring sort that...