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ProPublica journalists walked off the job for 24 hours, after more than two years of negotiations that failed to yield a deal for a union contract that would have included terms around AI and a ban on AI-related layoffs.

Meanwhile, in Italy, the country’s main journalists’ union called for two strike days over publishers refusing to accept basic rules on the use of artificial intelligence. And at The New York Times, according to Axios, editorial union leaders told the newspaper’s management its AI standards are too vague and inadequate, creating editorial problems and trust issues.

As AI is becoming a defining issue for labor unions, I spoke with four journalism union representatives from the United States, the Philippines, and Greece to find out how their organizations are protecting their members from any potential labor changes that AI might bring.

The unions versus AI

No union I spoke to reported having any of their members being replaced by AI. But one of their central concerns has always been ensuring human staff is protected as these technologies become widespread. Collective bargaining agreements help enact these protections. Some agreements implicitly state that AI cannot be used to displace a member of the staff, like the News Media Guild, while others mandate higher severance pay if layoffs are AI-related, such as the PEN Guild.

However, AI use at work raises many complex issues beyond layoffs, said Tony Winton, chief administrative officer of the News Media Guild, which represents newsrooms like the Associated Press and The Guardian in the United States. Unions have the right to bargain not just over whether jobs remain, but also over working conditions and how AI changes the way people do their jobs.

“The more difficult issue is which uses are allowed, short of something that actually changes the size of the workforce, and there are a lot of very thorny issues here,” he said. “We have an active working group of members who want to expand this conversation with the AP. The contract language we have is good. But as more and more uses are being found for the technology, we need to have a conversation.”

The specific uses of AI in a newsroom, and how they impact the work of journalists beyond layoffs, is something that all union representatives I spoke to cited as grievances they have brought to their management. While they care about core issues like jobs, pay, and working conditions, Winton said, AI also raises serious concerns about journalistic accuracy, for example, that managers need to address.

“AI has struggled with a lot of fabrication problems,” he said. “So, for a person with a byline and a public identity, AI is a real concern. You don’t want to incorporate inaccurate work into your reporting that affects not just journalism quality, but also the reputation of the person whose name is attached to the story itself.”

Ariel Wittenberg is a public health reporter and the unit chair of PEN Guild, which represents workers at Politico and E&E News. Like Winton’s, her union has not seen layoffs due to AI yet, but her concerns extend towards the way AI is used, and how it can impact journalists’ work and journalism ethics.

She described two recent incidents at Politico, where managers were required by contract to warn the union in advance and negotiate before using AI in ways that meaningfully affect employees’ job duties. Politico ignored this clause and deployed two AI initiatives without telling them: one used AI to generate written coverage of the Democratic National Convention and the other one was a deal with Capital AI to automatically produce reports.

“We think they violated the contract, which says that any AI use has to be done in accordance with Politico’s standards of journalism ethics and with human oversight,” said Wittenberg. “If something is coming back with inaccuracies, if it’s not following our stylebook in other ways, and there are no corrections policy applied, that is not up to our political ethics.”

“An existential threat”

Establishing protections on AI-related issues hasn’t been easy for journalists working in other latitudes. A newsroom manager who is also a director for the National Union of Journalists of the Philippines (NUJP) spoke to me on the condition of anonymity about how difficult it is to establish protections for workers on these kinds of issues.

He said most newsrooms just have general provisions of using AI responsibly and ethically. But nowhere is it stated that AI will not be used to replace journalists. “This is an existential threat,” he told me. “My hope is that at some point [managers] will realize it and then we will have to adjust our policies on it.”

The Philippines’ national union does advocacy work, whereas specific employer unions are the ones with bargaining power. While there is no authoritative count, the latter ones in the Philippines are limited in number, unevenly distributed, and much less institutionalized than in European countries. The newsroom of the manager I spoke to, for example, doesn’t have a union in place.

“[The] most the NUJP can do is to issue statements to create noise, to try to advance the conversation, and to call attention to certain issues,” he said. “The most you can do is to recommend. We have to set these policies in stone and encourage media owners to craft a policy that would protect their workers from the threat of AI.”

Journalists in other countries face a similar challenge. Greek journalist Sotiris Triantafyllou, president of the Panhellenic Federation of Journalists’ Union, describes AI adoption in his home country as not quite as expansive as in Northern Europe. This has allowed his union to be ahead of the curve domestically. In 2025, for example, they launched a code of ethics now adopted by the five unions of the federation.

“Now we are in discussions with managers and media owners. I don’t know what will happen in the future. But for now they agree with us, and I think they are in a mood to protect journalists,” Triantafyllou said.

“Like nailing Jell-O to a wall”

What all the union representatives I spoke to are looking for is a bottom-line commitment to human-led journalism and that AI does not take over skilled labor. There is broad support in using AI “housekeeping” tasks like transcription, translation, and summarization of large datasets. But pushback arises when managers implement tools that automate creative and journalistic work.

“We try to protect the central role journalists play because we believe that AI cannot replace them,” Triantafyllou said.

Unions often have to play whack-a-mole to deal with all the potential effects AI can have on workers. The initial question was perhaps “Will AI come for my job?” But now a myriad of other questions arise: if an employer sells journalistic information to a model, should employees who produced that content be compensated? Is the use of AI optional or will employees be replaced if they don’t adopt it? Will there be universal training for employees to apply these tools?

“It’s a moving target. It’s like nailing Jell-O to the wall, because you think you’ve got something done, and then the technology changes again,” Winton said. “When you are hired to do a job, you are hired to write a story for a publication, not to be part of this blob of AI that goes on forever. There’s a lot of interesting things that people are thinking through.”

Some news organizations, for example, are now trying to increase their output with the help of AI and AI-assisted reporters, such as U.K. local news publisher Mediahuis. Recently, Fortune editor Nick Lichtenberg came under scrutiny after a profile detailed how he used AI to crank out more than 600 stories. On these use cases, the journalists I spoke to believe in having a seat at the table: as AI-writing is becoming an unavoidable reality of journalism, journalists should have a say in how AI is used in their newsrooms rather than just executives looking to adopt the technology.

The newsroom manager and union director from the Philippines believes that while AI writing in journalism is seen as deeply unsettling because it threatens human creativity, authenticity, and editorial craft, its spread is still inevitable as economic pressure will push newsrooms to adopt it.

“It’s sad and tragic in a lot of ways, and many of us are mourning the kind of journalism we are used to, but the reality is ChatGPT, Gemini, and others are already capable of replicating the way humans speak and write, and they’ve been able to do so for quite some time now,” he said.

Despite these ongoing challenges, unions seem more important than ever. The representatives I spoke to highlighted a number of victories, from proactive negotiation with management in the case of Triantafyllou in Greece to providing binding arbitration in the United States.

“AI is something that is already impacting our industry, and union contracts are one way that journalists can have a say in how AI is deployed, rather than leaving those decisions up to news executives or corporations,” said Wittenberg.

A difficult balance

Few industries show financial distress as clearly as the news industry: repeated waves of job cuts, declining engagement, and precarious business models. In light of these existential challenges, AI has been presented as both a problem and an opportunity for growth.

No newsroom wants to be left behind, and some are resembling Silicon Valley in their language of adoption, pursuing rapid experimentation, “content scaling,” and liquid content.

Wittenberg has found AI to be a useful tool in handling large data sets or doing menial tasks like transcriptions. But she thinks some newsrooms have lost sight of why audiences come to them: because they want accurate and factual news.

“In the rush to innovate, news organizations think they are competing with tech companies,” she said. “The reality is that we are still news organizations and that means that we have an obligation to our ethics and to give our readers accurate factual news and to be held accountable when we make mistakes.”

My source in the Philippines admitted that protecting media workers from AI’s potential harms will be difficult because the news industry largely regulates itself and media owners are not naturally incentivized to put strong protections in place.

“They are looking at how they can make news more efficient, how they can save more money, how many employees they can let go because AI can do the work that they’re doing,” he said.

In his view, despite having limited power, journalists and their unions should still push to protect their own rights and the industry as a whole as many concessions will happen due to public pressure and broader public opinion.

“There’s always been that kind of divide between those who own the news media and those who are the news media,” he said. “As journalists, we have to be prepared because this is going to be an uphill battle.”

Gretel Kahn is a journalist at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, where this story was originally published.

Photo from the ProPublica strike by Nieman Lab’s Andrew Deck

In 2018, Joseph Poliszuk fled Venezuela. That year, after exposing corruption in then-President Nicolas Maduro’s administration, he had become the target of lawsuits by wealthy Maduro loyalists. He and several of his colleagues at the independent outlet Armando.info packed up their lives and fled the country under threat of imprisonment.

For years, Poliszuk had published stories on Southern Venezuela, which is made up of sparsely populated states that cover large swaths of the Amazon Basin and the Orinoco River Basin. Through field reporting, Poliszuk had exposed illegal gold mines, narcotrafficking operations, and crimes against indigenous groups scattered throughout the region’s rainforests. Now in exile — first working from Colombia, then Mexico — Poliszuk was forced to reimagine how to do his work from thousands of miles away. He began experimenting with satellite-based investigations.

Satellite imagery has long helped investigative journalists gather intelligence on conflict zones and track changes in remote landscapes. Now, in a new wave of satellite-based investigations, reporters are leaning on machine learning models to automate parts of this work and scale up their analysis to an unprecedented degree.

This innovation is most visible in environmental journalism. Poliszuk is just one in a cohort of South American investigative reporters who have used geospatial data and AI-powered pattern recognition to track illegal mining, large-scale logging operations, and cattle ranching across the Amazon.

As illegal gold mining spiked during the COVID-19 pandemic, Poliszuk knew there was a story in documenting the growth of these mines across Venezuela’s rainforests. But manually combing through the satellite images for over 50 million hectares of rainforest wasn’t practical. Poliszuk wondered if he could train a machine learning model to detect the scars of mining pits in these images, as well as the neighboring airstrips that are cut into dense vegetation and used to transport minerals.

With financial and editorial support from the Pulitzer Center’s first Rainforest Investigations Network (RIN) fellowship and technical support from the nonprofit Earth Genome, Poliszuk was able to do just that. In January 2022, he co-published his first article using the custom machine learning model in a series in El Pais titled “Corredor Furtivo [Clandestine Corridor].”

Poliszuk was able to identify 3,718 gold mining locations in the Venezuelan states of Amazonas and Bolívar. Some of those mines were operating inside protected indigenous lands and Canaima National Park, which is home to Angel Falls, the world’s tallest waterfall. By crosschecking maps identifying mining activity with crime data from Venezuelan authorities, Poliszuk was also able to determine whether the mines were run by Venezuelan syndicates, Colombian guerilla groups, or Brazilian garimpeiro (prospectors).

The week after Poliszuk published one of his first stories in the El Pais series, the Venezuelan military announced that it had bombed several illegal airstrips operating in the region.

“I have 20 years’ experience covering [illegal mining]…thanks to this technology I can show people the dimension of this phenomenon,” Poliszuk told me. “Thanks to this movement, we have understood that we can track by the air what we cannot prove on foot.”

The view from above

Even for journalists who aren’t working in exile, field reporting in the Amazon comes with a litany of accessibility issues and security risks. Poliszuk said a trip from the Venezuelan capital to one of the mines in the state of Amazonas involves a two-hour flight, a six-hour car ride, a four-hour boat ride, then another four-hour trek through the jungle — often through dangerous territory occupied by armed militia. These same groups often hold monopolies on oil and gas in the region, which can make fuel expensive and difficult to procure.

“It’s dangerous. It’s challenging. You cannot go there like you can go from Boston to Washington, or Caracas to Maracaibo,” he said.

The same year Poliszuk pitched his project to the Pulitzer Center, Brazilian journalist Hyury Potter incubated a similar investigation with the RIN fellowship. He also used machine models from Earth Genome, which collaborates with many journalists to conduct AI-based environmental and human rights investigations. Potter went on to publish several major investigations in Intercept Brasil that identified hundreds of previously unreported airstrips in the Brazilian Amazon and documented the explosion of illegal gold mining on protected indigenous lands. The New York Times published its own investigation based on the satellite imagery analysis, collaborating with Potter and the Pulitzer Center in the reporting process.

“It was like a think tank trying to figure out how to do this work,” said Poliszuk of his time in the RIN fellowship. “It was a very good time to think about a new journalism — another way of doing things.”

Based on the strength of these early investigations, the Pulitzer Center decided to build a dedicated platform that uses machine learning to track mining activity across the nine countries that are part of the Amazon Basin. Earth Genome built the interface and contributed the underlying geospatial detection models. The nonprofit advocacy group Amazon Conservation contributed fundraising support and helped develop impact metrics. In 2022, the three partner organizations launched Amazon Mining Watch.

“That was the beginning — inspired by the works of Joseph and Hyury, we were able to extrapolate and cover the entire Amazon,” said Gustavo Faleiros, the former director of environmental investigations for the Pulitzer Center.

The earliest days of Amazon Mining Watch relied on small, task-specific machine learning models. These models were trained by Earth Genome itself and customized only to identify gold mining sites and airfields in satellite imagery. These days, though, Earth Genome is experimenting with more powerful geospatial foundation models — models pre-trained on huge amounts of data, including satellite imagery, but also radar, land cover, and elevation data.

It’s likely these larger models will make geospatial investigations even more accessible to journalists, and not just ones covering the Amazon or illegal mining.

“In the same way that people figured out how to do unsupervised training of AI models for text — techniques that grew into large-language models — they have done the same thing in the geospatial data space,” said Edward Boyda, a physicist and co-founder of Earth Genome. “With very little additional input from a user — maybe just a few examples — the model can be effectively tuned to detect a wide variety of objects on the Earth’s surface.”

Beyond the Amazon

The Pulitzer Center and Earth Genome are now partnering with the nonprofit Code for Africa to bring a similar platform to the African continent. Earlier this month, the organizations announced the launch of Africa Mining Watch. The platform will use geospatial detection models to track mining operations across the tropical bend, a region that includes the Congo Basin, the world’s second-largest tropical rainforest. It’s expected to launch publicly in July.

On Earth Day last week, 25 journalists from across Africa took part in a seven-hour virtual mapathon to experiment with the platform and test out its ability to identify mines in their coverage areas.

“My hope is that Africa Mining Watch will be a platform that’s not as connected with the gold mining story, but with the strategic minerals story,” Faleiros said, pointing to the cobalt, copper, and coltan mines found across the Congo Basin.

Earth Genome is also building its own platform to harness these foundation models for journalists. The tool, Earth Index, allows a reporter, researcher, or policy maker to go into the platform and select a region on the world map. After they select examples of the thing they are interested in identifying — say, an artisanal gold mine in Ghana — the platform highlights other potential gold mines in the region.1

In its invitation-only beta stage, Earth Index has been used to investigate illegal logging in Albania, commercial flower farms in Uganda, and palm oil production in Brazil. Boyda says they plan to release Earth Index publicly in late April.

“The idea with Earth Index is, instead of giving people the data, give them the tool to make their own data,” said Boyda. “Somebody who’s working in a specific area will know that context better than we ever could. With this tool, they can go and build the data set that they want.”

This story has been updated to correct where Earth Genome is based.

Photo of a gold mining pit near Menkragnoti indigenous land in Pará, Brazil by Marcio I. Sá used via Adobe Stock license. Maps of Southern Venezuela with illegal mining pits marked in red and airstrips marked in yellow or blue used courtesy of Armando.info. Screenshot of the Amazon Mining Watch’s map used courtesy of Amazon Mining Watch.

1. While LLMs have been criticized for their environmental footprint, including the energy and water consumption of data centers used to train them, Boyda says the models underlying Earth Index are a fraction of that size. Currently, Earth Index uses a foundation model built by the Technical University of Munich, which has about 20 million parameters, as opposed to the trillions likely found in the latest commercial LLMs. Processing two years of global embedding for the latest Earth Index release used 190 kWh of electricity, which comes out to about a week of an average house’s electricity use, according to Boyda.

In January, Hanaa’ Tameez and I broke the story that The New York Times, The Guardian, and USA Today Co. had begun limiting the Wayback Machine’s access to their news articles. Our reporting showed that these decisions, including a “hard block” by the Times that started late last year, were driven by publishers’ concern that the Internet Archive’s free library of webpage snapshots could be scraped by AI companies to train their commercial models.

Now, journalists and digital rights nonprofit organizations are pushing back against this trend and advocating for news publishers to lift their restrictions.

On Monday, Wired first reported on the publication of a new petition organized by the digital rights nonprofit Fight for the Future. The open letter does not call for any specific policy from publishers, but “applauds” the Wayback Machine for its work “at a time where many major media outlets are questioning whether to allow the Wayback Machine to continue to preserve journalism.” The petition has already been signed by over 120 journalists, including Cory Doctorow, Taylor Lorenz, and Ron Suskind.

“The Internet Archive is a national treasure. I use it daily, and have for many, many years. I cannot imagine doing the work I do without it,” MS Now host Rachel Maddow wrote in a testimonial published alongside the letter.

“The Internet Archive preserves over two decades of original reporting on music and popular culture by MTV News,” wrote Michael Alex, the founding editor of the now-shuttered music and popular culture news site. “History needs stewards. The people of the Internet Archive do an outstanding job of preserving irreplaceable work and making it available to journalists and researchers.”

PressProgress reporter Brishti Basu also signed the petition, detailing an incident when the Vancouver Police Department edited a press release after she published an article criticizing it for making misleading statements. The department then publicly accused her of falsifying information.

“I was able to use the Wayback Machine to immediately prove that the police department had changed their initial statement to make it look like I had lied in my article,” wrote Basu.

The petition follows a blog post published last month by the digital rights nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which cited Lab’s reporting. Joe Mullin, a senior policy analyst at EFF, called on new publishers to lift their limits on the Wayback Machine and instead take violating AI companies to court.

“In many cases, articles get edited, changed, or removed — sometimes openly, sometimes not. The Internet Archive often becomes the only source for seeing those changes,” wrote Mullin, noting that Wikipedia links to over 2.6 million news articles preserved by the Wayback Machine across 249 languages. “There are real disputes over AI training that must be resolved in courts. But sacrificing the public record to fight those battles would be a profound, and possibly irreversible, mistake.”

The recent rallying efforts by digital rights organizations echo public comments made by Wayback Machine’s director, Mark Graham, in the weeks after our reporting was first published. In February, Graham published an opinion piece on the tech policy blog TechDirt.

“Whatever legitimate concerns people may have about generative AI, libraries are not the problem, and blocking access to web archives is not the solution; doing so risks serious harm to the public record,” Graham said.

Photo of Internet Archive headquarters in San Francisco, California used courtesy of the Internet Archive.

Depending on whom you ask, prediction markets are either:

• A dangerous, unregulated form of gambling that allows for degenerate betting on real events, unfettered by the economic and legal rules that keep stock markets and sports betting in check, creating an opportunity for corruption and insider trading on a scale we have never seen before.
• Perfectly legal crystal balls that could replace polling and happen to come with a side of money.

Whatever they are, they’re constantly changing, and they’re increasingly becoming a part of the news business. In the last few months, Kalshi, a New York-based prediction market, has struck deals with CNBC, CNN, Fox News, and the AP, among others. Polymarket, another prediction market, announced a partnership with Substack in February and one with Dow Jones in January. Both Kalshi and Polymarket are also been positioning themselves as news providers in their own right — Polymarket, for example, borrows the language of news organizations (“BREAKING” and “JUST IN“) in its social media presence, which is dominated by tweets about the news followed by a link for users to bet on that news (and is also filled with misinformation).

Keeping up with prediction markets is practically a full-time job, and for a few journalists they’ve become an opportunity to stake out a new beat at the intersection of politics, culture, finance, technology, sports, and even possibly true crime.

“I see a lot of connections to things that I’ve covered in the past,” said Kate Knibbs, a senior writer at Wired who recently established herself as that publication’s resident prediction markets reporter. “I see it as an extension of the crypto boom. It’s a future of money story, an industry story, and very much something that is emerging as a natural extension of ongoing trends in American culture.”

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Knibbs’ beat started percolating in her mind when she was on maternity leave. On the day she got back, she wrote a memo to her editors about covering prediction markets, which they were thrilled to receive — they had been talking about asking Knibbs to cover them anyway, because they knew she was interested in them.

For Knibbs, the beat is interesting not only because of potential future effects of prediction markets but also because of their ties to the past. “Someone was asking me, ‘Aren’t you worried that this is going to be like NFTs, and it’s just going to fizzle out?’ And I went, ‘Well, it literally is NFTs. It’s the same story.’ And you don’t get NFTs without Occupy Wall Street in my book. It’s all mixed together. I think we have this huge appetite for products like prediction markets because of the overall precarity of ordinary people’s finances.”

Dustin Gouker, an independent journalist who writes the prediction markets-focused newsletter Event Horizon, got interested in prediction markets because of his history covering fantasy sports and gambling. Until around 2018, he said, sports gambling involved going in person to a bookie — usually in Nevada — and placing a bet, getting a physical ticket to confirm the bet, waiting for the game to end, and then returning to the bookie to cash out any wins. The rise of sports gambling apps like FanDuel and DraftKings changed that dynamic, making gambling accessible to anyone with a smartphone. Prediction markets took that one step further, allowing people to bet on granular details of all kinds of events beyond the world of sports. “The velocity is supercharged,” Gouker told me from his office in Oregon. “You can lose a lot of money really quickly.”

Gouker writes two daily newsletters — Event Horizon and The Closing Line, about sports betting — and uses a combination of reporting methods to find stories. A friend helped him build a custom dashboard that plugs into Kalshi’s API to track trades, allowing him to quickly spot any notable movement, and he reactivated his X account, which he was on the verge of deleting, because he found much of the social chatter about prediction markets was happening on that platform.

“I wake up every day and I’m like, this is the world. I’m still in the fever dream,” Gouker told me. “It feels very Republican-coded, but that’s also because that’s why they exist, right? This would not exist without the Trump administration.” The Trump administration has sued states over their attempts to regulate prediction markets; Donald Trump Jr., the president’s son, is an advisor to Kalshi and sits on Polymarket‘s advisory board.

Gouker frequently gets texts from people within the prediction markets space about things they think he’d be interested in. His coverage is often critical (a recent newsletter was headlined “Prediction markets need to stop doing dumb shit”), but he says that’s a necessary balance to the narrative pushed by the prediction markets themselves.

“I’m a pain in the ass, but I’m a needed pain in the ass,” Gouker told me. “Am I overly harsh on them? Maybe, but I think there’s enough people glazing them out there in the world. If they do something good, I say that too.”

Knibbs, meanwhile, uses the service Unusual Whales to track particularly large movements on prediction markets, and often finds herself talking to academics and lawmakers about legal efforts to regulate them. She’s one of the few reporters on her beat (Suzy Khimm also covers prediction markets for NBC News, but NBC declined to participate in this story) and she is trying to approach sourcing holistically, talking to as many people in as many fields as possible.

“I’ve been dying to report stories about how the government is approaching this, because it blows my mind that we haven’t seen anyone arrested for insider trading yet,” she said. “I think if arrests are made, we’re going to get a new level of insight into what is actually going on here, because there will be criminal complaints that we can read and hopefully things that we can FOIA. Right now, it’s pretty opaque.”

Both Gouker and Knibbs have played around with prediction markets to some extent, but neither is a big gambler. (“That’s not my vice,” Knibbs said.) Gouker has used Kalshi to place the occasional bet on college sports, and Knibbs made $50 on PredictIt when she correctly predicted that John Fetterman would be elected to the Senate in 2023. Both also think it makes sense for news organizations to use prediction market data in their reporting, as long as they’re accepted as flawed forecasting tools rather than gospel truth. But Knibbs is concerned about how prediction markets and journalism might overlap in other places.

“What is deeply disturbing to me is all of these efforts to really enmesh the prediction markets in media companies,” she said. “I’m concerned about a world in which editorial is being told that they have to use certain phrasing in order to clear up any ambiguity in how these markets resolve. That’s really gross and would be a violation of editorial independence.”

Knibbs is also on the lookout for “the first big journalist insider trading scandal.” There’s information asymmetry, she points out: Journalists often learn information before the public does, and often have off-the-record conversations that could give them insights other people might not have. They’re also underpaid, which provides them a financial incentive to act on that information. She’s not the only one concerned about that possibility; this week, ProPublica updated its code of conduct to ban journalists from placing bets on news events on prediction markets.

Gouker is less concerned than Knibbs — he points out that the history of news organizations making ad deals is similarly fraught with thorny editorial questions — but he is curious about what will happen to prediction markets if the political winds shift. Prediction markets have been positioning themselves as something akin to the news, and while that might help them build legitimacy it could also open them up to the same political attacks the news has faced since Donald Trump’s first run for the presidency back in the 2016 election.

“Will Republicans continue to lead on prediction markets when the story is not one that they want to hear or see?” Gouker asked. “If Kalshi says there’s an 85% chance the Democrats will win the House, are Republicans going to say that’s fake news? There’s this huge intersection of politics and government and tech here. At some point, does the monster start eating its own tail?”

Screenshot from Kalshi

“Will Pittsburgh become America’s most important city without a newspaper?” Josh asked in January.

The answer, we learned Tuesday, is no: The Venetoulis Institute for Local Journalism, the nonprofit parent organization of The Baltimore Banner, reached an agreement with Block Communications to acquire the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, which was slated to shut down in May.

It’s a dramatic, if not entirely unpredicted, development for two news organizations whose opposite trajectories reflect some broader trends in the world of local news. The Post-Gazette is a beleaguered, historic metro daily whose union completed a divisive 1,133-day strike over health benefits last November. The NewsGuild technically won in court, but in January, Block Communications announced the newspaper’s financial losses were untenable and that it would print its final edition May 3.

The Banner, meanwhile, is a national poster child for nonprofit news success. Since its founding in 2022, when Maryland businessman and Venetoulis chairman and founder Stewart Bainum pledged $50 million over about five years to the news outlet, it has won a Pulitzer, grown into the state’s largest newsroom, and rebranded from The Baltimore Banner to The Banner, even expanding coverage into D.C.’s suburbs after Washington Post layoffs. (The Banner has not yet broken even.)

When Josh wrote about the Post-Gazette’s expected closure back in January, he observed that the Block family’s internal divisions and baggage might have stymied philanthropic support of local news in Pittsburgh. “Pittsburgh has been kind of stuck,” he wrote. “There’s pent-up capacity for something like the Lenfest Institute-era Philadelphia Inquirer or The Baltimore Banner — either a nonprofit conversion of the local daily or a robust competitor/replacement for it. But Block family drama — along with the neverending strike — complicated things enough to prevent much action.”

He even added: “The fact that the Post-Gazette announced a closure date that’s still five months off means there’ll be time for some combination of Pittsburgh’s foundations, universities, and institutions to react. Maybe that looks like the Blocks donating the Post-Gazette to a nonprofit that carries on with a decent-sized newsroom — a version of what the Salt Lake Tribune has done.”

Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, but The New York Times reported that Bainum and his wife Sandy will commit an additional $30 million over the next five years “to help expand The Banner and turn around the Post-Gazette.” In a note to Banner subscribers Tuesday, Venetoulis Institute CEO Bob Cohn wrote that the “generous investment is designed to taper over time as revenue grows, putting us on a clear path to full financial sustainability.” The transaction will take effect May 4.

The Times also reported that Venetoulis was neither the only nor the highest bidder for The Banner — Alden Global Capital, the hedge fund known for gutting newspapers, was among the rival contenders.

“The Block family has worked to find the best possible source for responsible local journalism for the Pittsburgh region and we believe we have succeeded,” said Karen Johnese, chairperson of Block Communications, Inc, in a statement. Block Communications did not return my call for comment.

In his note to Banner subscribers, Cohn framed the acquisition as a move that lifts all boats and, specifically, “strengthens our work in Baltimore and throughout Maryland.” Spreading the cost across a broader business, he wrote, accelerates The Banner’s path to sustainability and “makes the model stronger and more durable here in Maryland as well as in Pittsburgh….Throughout this growth, our commitment to Maryland remains unchanged and central to everything we do.”

“From its launch in 2021, the Venetoulis Institute had a vision to create a nonprofit business model to address the local news crisis playing out across the country,” Banner VP of editorial and business development Monique Jones told me in an email. While that work began in Baltimore and has expanded across Maryland, the ambition of the Venetoulis Institute “has always been to take that model to other regions.” The Venetoulis team sees promise for replicating The Banner’s model in regions that “[care] deeply about the impact of local news on its communities with audiences willing to pay for news and a supportive business and philanthropic environment.”

Venetoulis expects to reach sustainability “in the next few years,” and has no plans for acquisitions or expansions beyond Maryland and Pennsylvania at this time, Jones added.

According to the Post-Gazette’s reporting, Venetoulis plans to continue the newspaper’s two print publication days; Jones confirmed those plans. While the Times reported that new ownership plans to hire back “a large number” of the Post-Gazette’s employees and run advertising and sponsorships locally, Bainum told the Post-Gazette that the “current business model does not support the size of the current newsroom,” which stands at around 100, adding, “We’re going to have to thoughtfully address that.” Jones said it’s “too early to know” how many Post-Gazette employees Venetoulis will rehire. She added that Venetoulis plans to combine back-end operations including finance, HR, subscription marketing, and technology into a shared services platform that supports sustainability across both organizations.

“Local journalism is essential to a strong community, but across the country the business model has been under severe strain,” Bainum said in a statement. “We believe there is a path forward — one that combines great journalism with a diversified business model built on scale and exceptional talent.”

“Banner leadership has already publicly indicated that it intends to cut jobs and not uphold our union contract,” the Pittsburgh NewsGuild noted in a statement. “Asset sales do not inherently get companies out from under the legal liabilities they have already incurred. The Nov. 10, 2025 U.S. 3rd Circuit Court ruling requires the company to pay back all bargaining unit employees for the costs the paper illegally passed onto them. That liability does not go away with the sale of the paper.”

“We are excited for this historic institution to survive,” the NewsGuild added, “and eager to ensure that it operates in a way that respects the people of Pittsburgh, and the journalists who strive to serve them.”

Updated April 15 with additional answers from The Banner.

Adobe Stock

A lot of the discussion of news publishers’ traffic in recent months has focused on a decline in search traffic.

But social traffic is down, too. Last week, when I was analyzing how links hurt publishers on Twitter, I asked analytics platform Chartbeat for data on how Twitter referral traffic has changed.

The decline is stark. Global Chartbeat clients’ traffic from Twitter has fallen by 70% since 2022 when Elon Musk acquired the platform.

But it’s not just Twitter. Facebook traffic has declined steeply, too.

Users are also spending less time on publishers’ sites after they click through from Facebook or Twitter. This chart looks specifically at engaged time on news and media sites:

Charts made with Claude.

There isn’t yet a clear playbook for financial sustainability in creator journalism, according to a report published by the Center for News, Technology & Innovation (CNTI) on Monday.

To better understand the trends and challenges in the growing landscape, CNTI partnered with Project C — a research hub on creator journalism — to survey 43 independent information providers and creator-journalists in the United States. Twenty-six of the survey respondents also participated in in-depth interviews about their work. Nieman Lab readers will recognize some of the names here: Taylor Lorenz (User Mag), Kat Tenbarge (Spitfire News), Ryan Teague Beckwith (Your First Byline), and Barbara “Bob” Allen (The College Journalism Newsletter), among others.

The report, titled “U.S. Indie Info Providers: Professionally Diverse, Mission-driven, Sometimes Lonely, Rarely Earning Profit,” finds that while “indie info providers” increasingly see themselves as mission-driven small business owners, only five of the 43 respondents said they could “fully fund their lifestyle” with content creation income; just over 50% (23) said they “can’t fund their lifestyle at all” with their content. Less than one in three interviewees had a “formal or developed business strategy,” according to the report.

Like many journalists working in legacy newsrooms, news creators find their work meaningful and fulfilling, but they also worry about making ends meet and consider cash flow and managing finances to be some of their greatest challenges. Many of the creators interviewed said they rely on a mix of income sources, from freelance and consulting work to savings and support from a partner.

“Journalism isn’t immune to the larger trend of the gig-ification of labor,” CNTI senior research manager Jay Barchas-Lichtenstein told me. “Most people in the U.S. think that journalism is stably funded and that access to quality information should be a right. But instability in the industry is actually a big driver behind the indie trend. These trends are in tension: If you believe information is a public good, someone still has to pay for it. If something is valuable to you, find a way to support it financially. That’s especially true if you have the means to do so for people who don’t.”

Of the 43 survey respondents, 35 identified themselves as journalists. Many had previously worked as reporters in legacy newsrooms, others had held management positions in news, and some had no journalism experience at all. CNTI found that the news creators with only newsroom experience felt the least prepared when it came to business and operational management. Ten out of 26 interviewees had taken professional development courses to learn business skills.

Subscriptions, memberships and donations, and advertising were the most common revenue streams. Only a few respondents have found a “third pillar” to fund their content. “One sells software related to their reporting and uses some paywalled games to drive subscriptions, and the other serves as a broker for market research, connecting their professional audience to paid opportunities for a finder’s fee,” the report says.

Asking for money is also hard. Four interviewees cited imposter syndrome as a hurdle and felt as if other content is more deserving of reader revenue. Former journalists without business experience also struggle with pricing and marketing their work.

Monetizing content sometimes also conflicts with creators’ beliefs about information access. Some of the creators interviewed serve audiences that are less likely to have disposable income for a subscription publication, so they can’t rely on subscriptions or donations.

“News is so important it should not be gated…[but] news is not free to produce,” one creator said.

One of the most financially successful interviewees — whose publication serves a niche group of professionals — told CNTI that “Writing for a wealthy group of people is the only way at this point, as far as I can tell, to run a media business…90% of media businesses just write for upper-middle-class people if not just upper-class people.”

Other interesting findings from the report include:

Creators largely work alone, but rely on each other for support. Independent news and information creation is a growing field. Interviewees said they work long, intense hours, and often on their own. They look to other creators for inspiration and advice, and pay it forward when they can.

“I still dedicate a lot of time when people ask me about starting your own business or about being a solo in the newsletter world,” one creator told CNTI. “Because people did that for me and I have an ethical obligation to share that, especially now that I’ve been doing this a little bit longer.”

Maintaining a presence on multiple platforms is exhausting, but necessary. Most of the creators interviewed are active on at least three platforms to distribute and promote their work. They weigh which platforms to use based on multimedia offerings, audience preferences, and revenue potential. They described maintaining a presence on multiple platforms as time-consuming and “frustrating” but necessary so as not to become dependent on any one source for reach and revenue.

“Seeing what happened to Twitter, it was very clear to me that any tech company could implode that quickly,” one creator said.

AI has pros and cons. Some interviewees were concerned about audience use of AI as an information source. (At the same time, none of them “described using AI tools like LLMs as a distribution platform.”) Several used AI for business and production tasks, but almost none used it to actually create content. A few creators avoided AI entirely, and some were actively opposed to its use.

“I think that people should use their big brains, and you can put that in there,” one creator told CNTI.

Read the full report here.

Photo by Alexander Grey on Unsplash.

For news publishers, links are life. But, as I reported last week, publishers appear to face a penalty when they link to their stories on X. I used Claude to scrape the 200 most recent tweets from 18 different publishers, then charted their median engagements (likes + comments + RT’s).

Posts with links definitely do worse. The New York Times, which includes links in 88% of its tweets, has 53 million followers and a median of 383 engagements (likes + comments + RT’s) per tweet — an engagement rate of 0% when you calculate average engagements per follower. CNN‘s engagement rate? Also 0%. Engagement-maxing accounts like @GlobeEyeNews and @LeadingReport, which don’t include links in tweets, perform much better, with engagement rates of 0.95% and 0.45%, respectively.

But links aren’t the only thing that make or break a tweet. I used Claude to analyze the text of all the tweets in my sample and point out possible patterns. Here are a couple things that make a news tweet perform well on X.

Breaking! Across the board, tweets that begin with “Breaking” or “Breaking News:” have higher engagement. New York Times tweets that began with “Breaking News:” had an average 3,232 engagements, four times the average. A similar pattern held for tweets from the AP, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal. (CNN rarely uses “Breaking” in tweets.)

Breaking News: Law enforcement officials are said to have disrupted a plot to assassinate Nerdeen Kiswani, the leader of one of New York’s most active pro-Palestinian protest groups. https://t.co/xWdsleQRRl

— The New York Times (@nytimes) March 27, 2026

Breaking News: The U.S. will allow a Russian oil tanker to reach Cuba, letting critical fuel in after months of what amounted to a blockade. https://t.co/FsMPauYJ72

— The New York Times (@nytimes) March 29, 2026

BREAKING: Trans women athletes are banned from the Olympics by a new IOC policy on female eligibility. https://t.co/ZgLxRn9DO9

— The Associated Press (@AP) March 26, 2026

Breaking news: Two U.S. military aircraft were shot down in separate incidents Friday while conducting combat operations against Iran, setting off a search-and-rescue effort that remains ongoing for one missing crew member, U.S. officials said.https://t.co/jiwiNNYKZr

— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) April 3, 2026

Globe Eye News and Leading Report begin just about every tweet with “BREAKING.”

Trump quotes: Fox News’s most-engaged tweets were direct quotes from Trump, no editorializing added. Its most engaged-with tweet in my sample was his Easter message.

PRESIDENT TRUMP: "I'm proud to join with Christians across the country and around the world to celebrate the most glorious miracle in all of time: The resurrection of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ."

"To be a great nation, you must have religion — and you must have God. In… pic.twitter.com/1iIc1SKp4G

— Fox News (@FoxNews) April 4, 2026

~Vagueness~: Globe Eye News tweets that did not include sourcing information got nearly twice the engagement of tweets that did include a source. In other words, unattributed claims do better. Here are Globe Eye News’s most-engaged tweets in my sample:

BREAKING:

Iran announces the Strait of Hormuz is open to all countries except the United States, Israel, and their allies. pic.twitter.com/hyV49YFPs7

— Globe Eye News (@GlobeEyeNews) March 14, 2026

BREAKING:

France sold its gold stored in New York and purchased an equivalent amount in Europe.

All of France’s gold reserves are now located in Paris. pic.twitter.com/b9DgIbzZBC

— Globe Eye News (@GlobeEyeNews) April 6, 2026

Meanwhile, Globe Eye News tweets that included an “according to” — whether it was “according to” X news outlet or “according to” an investigation — were among its poorest performers.

BREAKING:

President Trump says China should help the US keep the Strait of Hormuz open, according to FT. pic.twitter.com/b8HeJPQWpT

— Globe Eye News (@GlobeEyeNews) March 16, 2026

BREAKING:

US responsible for deadly bombing of Minab school in Iran that killed 175 children and other people, according to preliminary investigation findings. pic.twitter.com/igkcetSm72

— Globe Eye News (@GlobeEyeNews) March 11, 2026

One of the busiest beats in news just got a little more crowded.

On Monday, TMZ — the American tabloid outlet known for entertainment and celebrity news — announced that its staffers are now covering Washington D.C.

“Our 3 intrepid producers — Charlie Cotton, Jacob Wasserman and Jakson Buhaj — are working The Hill,” the story reads. “So we’re in D.C. … on the hunt for good stories. We’re also going to explore the intersection between pop culture and politics. We have a lot in store in that department!”

TMZDC Staff Starts Today!!! https://t.co/KmnBdeJTaA pic.twitter.com/s7wpG8lMtW

— TMZ (@TMZ) April 13, 2026

The announcement comes after TMZ spent the last two weeks crowdsourcing photos and information to hold politicians’ feet to the fire during the longest partial government shutdown in United States history.

The Department of Homeland Security has been partially shut down since February 14. On March 26, TMZ published an interview with Rebecca Wolf, a furloughed TSA employee who was struggling to make ends meet.

TMZ was outraged, founder and executive producer Harvey Levin said in a statement to Nieman Lab, and put a call out to its audience to send in photos and sighting of politicians on spring break trips. Its following is massive; TMZ has 8.2 million followers on both Instagram and X, 6 million TikTok followers, 5.1 million YouTube subscribers, and had 47 million visitors to its website in March, according to SimilarWeb.

“We wanted to use our platforms to show how Congress — Dems AND Republicans — have betrayed us,” Levin said. “We spontaneously came up with the idea to juxtapose members of Congress on their Spring Break against federal workers who are losing their homes, their cars, their livelihoods.”

Since then, TMZ has published several stories about elected officials on vacation while unpaid DHS employees try to figure out how to pay the next month’s rent.

South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham “lives it up” in Disney World. California representative Robert Garcia was snapped at a Las Vegas Casino. New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was seen at a New York Yankees game. On March 27, President Donald Trump signed an executive order to backpay TSA workers, though the department is still partially shut down.

The photos are the paparazzi-like iPhone shots we’re used to seeing of celebrities. As Substack writer Joe Mayall tweeted, “TMZ found an interesting political niche. By covering politicians’ corruption like it’s a celebrity scandal, it attracts both audiences.”

“@TMZ has this opening because DC journalism is failing at holding the powerful in Washington to account in the Trump era,” another user tweeted.

The images seem to have resonated. I looked at TMZ’s 100 most-liked posts between March 26 and April 13. TMZ’s most-liked X post in this timeframe was a photo of Cruz on a flight out of D.C. on March 27. The post has more than 73,000 likes, 11,000 retweets, and 4.8 million views.

Senators Ted Cruz and John Thune leave D.C. amid the government shutdown.

Exclusive details: https://t.co/CUnFtLge3r pic.twitter.com/q9B9IDLAsw

— TMZ (@TMZ) March 27, 2026

Its most retweeted post is an “exclusive” story that spotted several congressional members on a trip to Scotland. For comparison, its entertainment stories from this timeframe have a median of 7,000 likes and a few hundred retweets.

Not everyone has been amused by the coverage. Capitol Hill staffers are nervous about their employers’ impending “TMZ moment,” according to Politico. On April 5, Florida senator Rick Scott tweeted a photo of himself at Disney World, saying “Hey TMZ. Yes, I’m at Disney with my grandkids. Should we be in DC? Yes! But I don’t get to make that decision.”

“Well, challenge accepted,” TMZ tweeted with its story about Scott’s post.

“Our D.C. presence will sometimes be fun,” Levin said, “sometimes intensely serious.”

On Wednesday, roughly 150 members of the Propublica Guild, one of the largest nonprofit newsroom unions in the country, went on a 24-hour strike.

About two dozen Guild members picketed ProPublica’s headquarters in New York City’s Hudson Square neighborhood during working hours, as simultaneous picket lines formed in front of the publication’s offices in Chicago and Washington D.C. On the uncharacteristically cold April morning in Manhattan, strikers bundled up in winter gear as they chanted and carried signs reading “ProPublic Workers: Deserve Fair Pay” and “Thoughts Not Bots.”

The Guild has been negotiating its first collective bargaining agreement for two and a half years, and the one-day action was intended to put new pressure on ProPublica’s management to agree to several contract proposals. The union is seeking “just cause” protections for terminations, wage increases to keep up with the rising cost of living, and contract language that would prohibit layoffs resulting from AI adoption.

“We have been trying to do this quietly at the bargaining table for two and a half years, and I’m as shocked as anybody that we are out here,” said Katie Campbell, a video journalist and member of the contract action team for the ProPublica Guild. “We need to have this done.”

The Wednesday action marked the first time a major U.S. newsroom has gone on strike, at least in part, over AI protections.

Bargaining committee members told me there has been little movement from ProPublica management since the strike authorization vote passed on March 20, with the support of 92% of the Guild. That includes the dispute over a provision that would restrict layoffs because of AI technologies. Management has offered expanded severance for AI-related layoffs as a counter proposal.

“Broadly trust in journalism is in a really fragile place,” said Campbell, noting the rise of “AI slop” and AI-generated disinformation on social media. “I would think that we would want to be leading the way on something like this. We have an opportunity to be a place that people know that they can always go to and trust that it’s going to be work that’s produced by humans.”

On social media, the Guild encouraged readers not to “cross the digital picket line” by refraining from visiting ProPublica’s website or engaging with its stories. They also asked readers not to attend a virtual event about its news app on Wednesday afternoon, which was held while workers who’d organized the event were on the picket line. A petition launched Wednesday calling for ProPublica to agree to the Guild’s contract terms had received roughly 4,200 signatures by Thursday morning.

In a statement to Nieman Lab, Tyson Evans, the chief product and brand officer at ProPublica, said, “ProPublica is committed to reaching a fair and sustainable first contract to cement the strong pay and benefits we’ve always provided our staff.” For our story on the Guild’s strike authorization vote, Evans said that ProPublica has never had a layoff in its 18-year history and that the publication is “confident we can continue to navigate future changes responsibly.”

Susan DeCarava, the president of The NewsGuild of New York, joined strikers in front of the ProPublica offices yesterday. During a spare moment on the picket line, she told me that while this strike may be setting precedent for her union, it likely won’t be the last over AI adoption in newsrooms.

“We’re going to see more and more concentrated conflicts between media bosses and journalists and media workers over who has a say and how AI is used in their workplaces,” she said.

For one, The New York Times Guild is currently in contract negotiations after its last agreement expired in February. Already, AI language has taken center stage in the Guild’s initial bargaining sessions, including over a proposal that would see Guild members receive a share of the revenue earned when their work is licensed for AI training.

During a midday rally on Wednesday, striking ProPublica employees played acoustic renditions of Bruce Springsteen’s “Dancing in the Dark” and the feminist labor song “Bread and Roses.” The backdrop for the performance: “Scabby the Rat,” the inflatable rodent used by unions across the U.S. to condemn strikebreaking activities.

New York City labor leaders from the Communication Workers of America (CWA) and the AFL-CIO addressed the crowd, as did Lily Oberstein, the chair of Business Insider’s union, another unit of The Newsguild of New York. Oberstein encouraged members to continue their fight for AI protections, pointing to Business Insider’s own layoffs of 21% of staffers last year. In a companywide memo at the time, CEO Barbara Peng said that Business Insider would be going “all-in on AI” as part of the decision.

Beyond the strike, the ProPublica Guild has also taken its dispute over newsroom AI adoption to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). On Monday, the Guild filed an unfair-labor-practice charge, citing a “unilateral implementation of AI policy.” The filing claims that ProPublica published AI editorial guidelines on its website last month, without first bargaining with union members over its tenets and language.

“We previewed these principles with the bargaining committee before publishing them and they offered no meaningful edits,” Evans said in a statement, calling the complaint “unfounded.”

While the dispute over AI may be the most novel part of this strike, more fundamental job protections are top of mind for some employees. That includes a provision that would require a legitimate and documented reason for firing employees, or “just cause.”

“There are people who are doing really huge investigations and award-winning work, then suddenly management’s pushing them out. That’s my biggest concern,” said Asia Fields, an engagement reporter and unit member. “ProPublica has such a great reputation — and it deserves that reputation. The journalism is so good, but I think people are surprised to know that management’s been so resistant to even basic protections.”

Photos of the ProPublica Guild’s strike rally in Manhattan, N.Y. taken on April 8, 2026 by Andrew Deck.

Every September since 2012, thousands of volunteers have come together around a shared goal: getting more Americans registered to vote. They’ve channeled attention and energy into a single day, dubbed “National Voter Registration Day.”

While having coffee with the founder of National Voter Registration Day, Montana native Matt Singer, Montana Free Press founder and executive director John Adams had a lightbulb moment: Maybe local news could benefit from that kind of national focus.

About a year later, that idea has become the first “Local News Day.” On April 9, more than 1,300 local newsrooms, around 200 partners, and 15 sponsors are participating in the “national day of action to celebrate and strengthen trusted local news and information.” (Update: As of Monday, April 13, a public dashboard and directory counted 1,462 “participating newsrooms” in the Local News Day network.)

The initiative “isn’t about fundraising specifically as much as it is about drawing the public’s attention back to local news,” Adams said. An era of constant distraction tends to “pull our attention away from local,” toward platforms and national and international news. Local News Day is designed to show the public that local news is useful and relevant to their daily lives.

The requests to the public are straightforward: “Sign up to get an email. Tune in to your local public radio station. Subscribe to a local news source,” whether for-profit or nonprofit. Regardless of business model, medium, or definition of local, “if you’re producing local journalism, we want to bring audiences to your doorstep, and that’s really what Local News Day is all about,” Adams said.

The campaign is supported by the social impact agency Impactual, where Singer is a partner. Sponsors include Press Forward, The New York Times, BlueLena, Google, and WordPress and Newspack along with their parent company Automattic. WordPress built a database of local news organizations called the “Local News Finder.” (It’s also supported by Google’s mapping technology.) The database divides outlets by audience (local, regional, and statewide) and type (newsroom, broadcast, radio, podcast, newsletter, and content creator). Newsrooms apply to be included, and some press associations have applied on behalf of their members. This isn’t the first local news mapping project, and others have learned that creating an exhaustive database of local news sources is challenging, but Adams hopes it will eventually be “one of the most comprehensive resources for locating local news in the country.”

In early discussions of Local News Day, there was some concern about redundancy or competition with NewsMatch, the end-of-year fundraising campaign for nonprofit newsrooms organized by the Institute for Nonprofit News. Adams said his vision is focused more on attention and audience-building than on fundraising. He thinks the timing can complement NewsMatch; if a community member discovers a local news organization during Local News Day, by the time NewsMatch rolls around, they might be ready to donate. (Still, if my inbox is any indication, plenty of newsrooms are making explicit fundraising asks as part of their Local News Day campaigns.)

Suggested Local News Day actions for newsrooms include launching a new product, holding an event, or dropping the paywall for a day. Montana Free Press, for instance, is asking its most loyal readers to use a unique referral link to get others to sign up for Montana Free Press; if 10 people use their link to sign up, the referrer gets a custom MFP Local News Day Yeti tumbler. If 20 sign up, they also receive a tote bag. On Thursday evening, MFP will also hold a livestreamed local event highlighting some of its reporting on how federal immigration policy has played out in rural Montana. (Meanwhile, Axios reported that Nextdoor, a Local News Day partner, launched verified accounts for local journalists. Local news was central to the company’s redesign last year.)

The long-term goal is to identify and share some best practices for audience growth from the single-day experimentation of over a thousand newsrooms, Adams said. But for the largely volunteer team behind Local News Day — many, like Adams, running their own local newsrooms while lending their time to the national project — this year, “it’s a big push to get as many people participating as we can.”

The campaign aims to generate a million news subscriptions and at least 500,000 social media follows across platforms. It’s partnering with Junkipedia, a social media analysis tool, which will help measure the reach of Local News Day across the internet, and hopes participating news organizations will share their outcomes and experiences with the organizing team.

Adams is already thinking about future Local News Days: He said he envisions more centralized partnerships between the Local News Day organizing team and institutions like libraries and universities in “Phase Two.” For now, he’s excited by the scale of Local News Day and the conversation being generated already, including county, village (!), and state-level Local News Day proclamations.

Similar to NewsMatch, Local News Day organizers are offering promotional materials and messaging tips while also leaving room for personalization. Adams said organizers took Press Forward messaging research from last year to heart and are intentionally keeping their messaging positive.

“The narrative over the last 15 [to] 20 years has been decline, desertification, distress — it’s been this really negative narrative, and that’s turned off a lot of people,” Adams said.

“Everybody knows the old, tired story of ‘news industry failing’; we don’t need to continue to talk about that,” he added. “Let’s talk about all the good things that are happening and draw the public’s attention to something they can be a part of right now to build something new and exciting.”

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Elon Musk has said as much: Links in tweets are bad for engagement. Over the last few days, sparked by a post from Nate Silver, people have started arguing again about the relationships between links and engagement. But our new analysis of thousands of tweets from 18 publishers makes it pretty clear: Links do seem to hurt news publishers on X/Twitter.

Back in 2016, the analytics company Parse.ly published a report: “Does Twitter matter for news sites?“

The report found that Twitter drove little traffic to most news sites, generating only around 1.5% of most publishers’ traffic. But, the authors wrote, “Twitter excels at both conversational and breaking news…Though Twitter may not be a huge overall source of traffic to news websites relative to Facebook and Google, it serves a unique place in the link economy. News really does ‘start’ on Twitter.”

Ten years later, the site formerly known as Twitter still drives very little traffic to news sites. But it’s also bad for conversational and breaking news.

Earlier this week, Nate Silver published “Social media has become a freak show.” Silver wrote that X has become “next to useless” for following breaking news like the war in Iran because its algorithm penalizes posts that include links.

“The New York Times has 53 million followers, and yet its tweets often produce only a few hundred likes, retweets, and replies even when they reveal urgent, breaking news,” Silver wrote.

The NYT published a link to critical original reporting on Iran 45 minutes ago. A good, fair story. They have 53m followers. The engagement metrics you display say they got 94 likes and 33 retweets out of that. Is that accurate? And if so, shouldn't you work on a better algo? pic.twitter.com/CMD8mfQRn7

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) April 6, 2026

X head of product Nikita Bier pushed back, blaming the Times’ low engagement on its paywall — but also on the quality of its tweets:

For what it’s worth:

NYT has not experimented with their captions on posts in 20 years since the launch of Twitter.

While the entire world has evolved their posting style to convert people to their newsletters (e.g., threads, etc), NYT still has their social media manager…

— Nikita Bier (@nikitabier) April 6, 2026

Big news publishers are in a strange place when it comes to X right now. Most are still posting to it (with notable exceptions like NPR and The Guardian), and they still have millions of followers. But with news business models increasingly revolving around subscriptions, publishers are focusing most of their social media efforts on sending people to their own sites. They may not see much incentive to “evolve their posting style” as Bier suggests.

I wondered, though: Is The New York Times unusual among big publishers in the “link plus sentence” tweet format? Are any major publishers moving beyond that format and seeing more engagement on X as they link less?

I used Claude to help me scrape the 200 most recent tweets from 18 large publishers’ X accounts and track the engagement (likes + comments + retweets) on each. Six of those publishers have paywalls: Bloomberg, CNN, Forbes, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post. Nine don’t: Al Jazeera English, AP, BBC1, Breitbart News, CBS News, Daily Wire, Fox News, NBC News, and Reuters. The last three accounts I looked at — Leading Report, unusual_whales, and Globe Eye News — are not news publishers, but aggregate breaking news in tweets without links. (Here, for example, is an example of a Leading Report tweet: “BREAKING: Iran has halted direct talks with the US, per WSJ.” They’re sometimes referred to as engagement-maxing accounts.

These charts make it pretty clear that links in tweets hurt engagement. The connection was so apparent in my analysis that a graph including all 18 publishers is almost unreadable: The traditional, link-loving publishers are clustered in the bottom left corner (lots of links, little engagement) in a nearly indistinguishable mass of bubbles, no matter how large their followings are.

If you want an easier-to-read version of the chart, here it is with some of the publishers stripped out.

Nonetheless, most of the publishers in my sample link out a lot. (I couldn’t find any biggies who are following Elon Musk’s advice to write a description of a story in the first tweet, then follow it with a link in a second tweet.) The New York Times, with 53 million followers, included links in 88% of its tweets; CNN, with 61.7 million followers, had links in 90% of tweets; The Wall Street Journal, with 21 million followers, had links in 98% of its tweets. Some examples:

Bitcoin’s founder, Satoshi Nakamoto, has remained hidden for 17 years. A trail of clues — and a year of digging by our reporter, John Carreyrou — led us to a 55-year-old computer scientist in El Salvador named Adam Back. https://t.co/s6Jy00IDdk

— The New York Times (@nytimes) April 8, 2026

(A note on the Bitcoin story: X’s Bier pointed to this tweet as a better example of how to share the Bitcoin story on X. They don’t feel meaningfully different to me, though — both are just a couple of sentences and a link. Carreyrou’s tweet, published Wednesday at 12:40 a.m., has been liked, commented on, or RT’d 9,242 times, and the Times’ tweet, published a few hours later, has been liked, commented on, or RT’d 8,361 times.)

Accused Gilgo Beach serial killer Rex Heuermann pleads guilty to the murders of eight women https://t.co/GeVNtAP68y pic.twitter.com/e8XJonGAT4

— CNN (@CNN) April 8, 2026

I checked my ego at the door. Now I’m playing faster, scoring lower and enjoying the game more. https://t.co/O8TIPMDrA6

— The Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) April 8, 2026

At the other end of the spectrum, the engagement-maxxing account Globe Eye News (with just 886,000 followers) never linked out in the tweets in my sample and saw massive engagement: A median 8,418 engagements per tweet. The New York Times, with a following more than 53 times larger, had a median 383 engagements per tweet.

BREAKING:

US demands Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz immediately. pic.twitter.com/pVTbzyHcQy

— Globe Eye News (@GlobeEyeNews) April 8, 2026

BREAKING: Oil prices plunge toward $90 a barrel and US stocks surge 2.7%, per AP.

— Leading Report (@LeadingReport) April 8, 2026

Trump says there may be a joint US-Iran venture for Hormuz Tolls.

— unusual_whales (@unusual_whales) April 8, 2026

Fox News (28.7 million followers) is an outlier among the traditional publishers, including links in just 9% of its tweets. Most of its tweets contain videos or graphics instead. That strategy works: Fox News had the third highest median engagement in my sample after Globe Eye News and Leading Report.

BREAKING: "From the very beginning of Operation Epic Fury, President Trump stated this would be a 4 to 6 week military operation to dismantle the military threat posed by the radical Islamic Iranian regime."

"Thanks to the unbelievable capabilities of America's war fighters, the… pic.twitter.com/d1W4G0rckb

— Fox News (@FoxNews) April 8, 2026

'GOD IS GOOD': Secretary of War Pete Hegseth gives grace to God for protecting America's heroes in the Middle East throughout Operation Epic Fury. pic.twitter.com/mU8YNIUW3H

— Fox News (@FoxNews) April 8, 2026

Links are not the only thing keeping big news publisher from high engagement on tweets; there are lots of factors. But this analysis shows that the way that most big news publishers, with the exception of Fox News, really haven’t changed the way they tweet, even as the platform’s incentives have changed.

Adobe Stock

1. Well, to clarify: The BBC recently added a paywall for U.S. users, but I looked at the BBC’s U.K. account, @bbcnews.

Chris Moran, editorial lead on generative AI at The Guardian, recently spoke about how his team used AI tools to build an internal chatbot that lets journalists query the archive, as well as an initial experiment with tag pages that pulls from the paper’s archives to create AI-generated summaries of past events. Similarly, L’Eco di Bergamo, a local newspaper in Italy, has used AI to repurpose more than 70 years of obituaries from its archives to create a database for readers to explore their local and family history.

“The first thing newsrooms can start by doing is making it ridiculously easy for their own journalists to discover their internal archives,” Lawal said. “It’s important for the archives not to feel far off and locked away.”

Once a user-friendly internal database is in place in a newsroom, he says, journalists can be encouraged to develop new products and stories from the material.

Archives for institutional memory

Beyond editorial products, some newsrooms are also using their archives to tell the story of the newspaper itself.

Le Roch points me to an example from the French Catholic newspaper La Croix, which a few years ago published a dossier in which they used their archives to address the paper’s antisemetic past.

“I find that very interesting — a newspaper acknowledging and explaining its own history via its archives,” Le Roch said. “Not every newspaper is comfortable doing that. But a paper’s history inevitably shapes the editorial line today. When you write as a journalist, it’s your own voice, but you are also writing under the name of a newspaper with a long history.”

She suggested I speak with the team at Charlie Hebdo about this, and how they use their archives to help onboard new journalists in particular — which seemed like a good idea, because if there is any newspaper that has consequential, complicated history in French media and society, it’s Charlie Hebdo. The satirical weekly paper has long been associated with a combative, irreverent strain of French republicanism, and many people will remember it was the target of a terrorist attack in 2015 that killed 12 people.

Each of the journalists I spoke to there had a lot to say about the role of their archives in shaping their journalism.

Jean-Loup Adénor, the magazine’s deputy editor-in-chief, told me about how new team members are encouraged to spend time in the archive room, reading past issues and books about the paper’s history.

“This allows them to do two things,” says Adénor. “First, to better understand the ideological positioning of the paper and the causes Charlie has defended; and second, to draw inspiration from the tone and the freedom we have in writing here.”

“I’ve worked in more traditional media like France Info and Ouest-France, and there, it’s easy to imagine yourself in a rigid framework,” he explained. “But it’s much harder to project yourself into a free one. That’s what’s both reassuring and intimidating about the freedom here.”

“When I started at Charlie, I wanted to understand exactly what the paper was, so I spent a lot of time in the archives reading old issues,” said Yovan Simovic, a journalist who started at the paper in September 2023. “The editor-in-chief often tells us: You are completely free in your writing here. But that freedom is a bit frightening, and you don’t immediately understand what it means. So going to read the old issues, understanding how they spoke, how they described the world, how they wrote — all of that helped me to understand what he meant. Of course, we don’t want to copy [previous journalists], but it helps to see how free we are by seeing what they were able to write.”

Each of them had a favorite piece from the archive they could point to — for Simovic, it’s a piece of embedded reporting done in Afghanistan by journalist Agathe André, for Adénor it’s the survivors issue published the week after the 2015 attacks — and told me how they’d pinned articles or cartoons from past editions to the walls of the newsroom for inspiration.

Adénor suspects that understanding your newspaper’s history is particularly important at Charlie Hebdo.

“Maybe the emotional attachment to the paper is different at Charlie than at other newsrooms. I’m trying not to be too grandiloquent in what I say, but the fact is, for secular, left-wing, republican-left journalists, working at Charlie Hebdo is not trivial,” Adénor says, referring to the price many of journalists have paid (and continue to pay) to work there.

“I feel a responsibility to do my job as well as possible, and that requires knowing the paper’s history. I’m not a historian, and I don’t aim to become an expert, but I do need to understand the major milestones.”

He feels he owes it to the audience as well.

“Many of our readers have followed the paper for decades. They often know the paper better than we do. So when we receive criticism, it helps to understand where it’s coming from, historically.”

“You feel a kind of responsibility to respect that memory by understanding it,” agreed Etienne Le Page, an intern who started last autumn. “You can’t just write without context. You need to know what happened at the paper in the past, and how the paper functions and continues. That’s something you learn to do by reading past editions of the paper.”

Priscille Biehlmann is the content editor for newsroom leadership programs at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, where this story was originally published.

In September 2025, a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction requiring that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) limit its use of force against journalists, observers, and peaceful protesters during its ICE raids in Southern California. It was a victory for the suit’s plaintiffs, including the L.A. Press Club, The NewsGuild-CWA, and ACLU SoCal, who claimed that attacks on journalists covering ICE protests were unconstitutional.

Now, an appellate court has upheld the core findings of L.A. Press Club v. Noem and ruled in support of an injunction. In an opinion released last week, the panel of judges wrote that the plaintiffs are “likely to prevail on their First Amendment retaliation claims” because of an “avalanche” of evidence that shows DHS was acting with “retaliatory intent.” In other words, the court found that ICE officers were trying to punish the plaintiffs for exercising their First Amendment rights.
“Shooting projectiles at reporters, targeting observers, and injuring demonstrators is not crowd control. It’s retaliation,” said Matt Borden, a partner with BraunHagey & Borden LLP, a firm representing the plaintiffs, in a statement about the ruling.

That said, the judges also ruled that the original injunction was “overbroad in several respects” and sent the case back down to the lower courts in order to “fashion a narrower injunction.” In particular, the opinion took issue with the fact that the restrictions also “cover non-parties” attending protests in the Los Angeles area.

“Here’s the takeaway: Keep recording,” said Adam Rose, the deputy director of advocacy at the Freedom of the Press Foundation in an video about the ruling posted on Tuesday. “This case exists because of videos, because of photos, because people documented what was happening in real time.”

A federal court recently upheld journalists’ First Amendment rights by ruling that DHS used unlawful force against reporters at LA immigration protests last year.

Watch @adamrose.bsky.social explain, and if you’re a journalist facing a press freedom violation, contact @pressfreedomtracker.us.

[image or embed]

— Freedom of the Press Foundation (@freedom.press) April 7, 2026 at 11:50 AM

“If you are a journalist and you can’t tell the story, you are the story,” said Rose.

Among dozens of violent incidents against journalists in L.A., the original suit included evidence that ICE officers shot a journalist in the head with a rubber bullet, leading to a concussion, and hit another journalist in the arm with a tear gas canister, causing a hematoma and burns. The plaintiffs called for specific limits on ICE’s use of force, including the assault and dispersal of journalists without cause, the use of chemical and projectile weapons on members of the press, and the firing of weapons at “heads, necks, or other sensitive areas.”

In the original opinion, judge Hernán Vera wrote that ICE’s actions “undoubtedly chill the media’s efforts to cover these public events and protestors seeking to express peacefully their views on national policies.” He also said that an injunction was necessary to “curtail the federal agents’ indiscriminate use of force targeting journalists standing far from any protest activity.”

The Southern California suit has not only set precedent for restricting ICE’s use of force against the press, but also inspired similar legal actions by U.S. press organizations. Last summer, the Chicago Headline Club led a federal suit against DHS, citing incidents of violence against members of the press, elected officials, clergy, and peaceful protesters during ICE’s Operation Midway Blitz in the city. In November 2025, a judge issued a preliminary injunction limiting ICE’s use of force in Chicago. Soon after, Border Patrol Commander Gregory Bovino pulled out of the city, and the plaintiffs voluntarily dismissed their suit.

“The retreat of DHS agents from Chicago is due in large part to the bravery of our plaintiffs and every Chicagoan who spoke up about the brutality they experienced because they exercised their First Amendment rights,” said Katie Schwartzmann, counsel at Protect Democracy, in a statement at the time.

Photo by Ellen Schmidt/MinnPost/CatchLight Local/Report for America, under a Creative Commons license.

The data is in: News creators and influencers are a major source of news for Americans, especially people under 30. This is the fourth edition of Creators of Record, an occasional series of interviews with popular creators about how they do their jobs.

It was technology and culture reporter Taylor Lorenz who first told news creator Vitus “V” Spehar to think of themselves as a journalist.

It was 2022 and Spehar — the 43-year-old best known for their explainers as @UndertheDeskNews on social media — was two years into explaining the news online. They were interviewing Lorenz for their podcast and initially brushed it off. “No I’m not, I’m a TikToker,” Spehar said at the time.

“She was like, ‘No, and actually, that’s irresponsible for you to say. What you are doing is journalism and you need to understand the ethics and expectations. The public thinks you’re a journalist, so you need to be one,'” Spehar recalls Lorenz telling her.

Spehar’s videos — which cover U.S. politics, policy, and culture — are conversational and easy to watch. Donning their signature glasses and sometimes a suit, they don’t shy away from playing trending music, acting, or doing a little dance to help viewers understand news events (like the firing of Department of Homeland Security head Kristi Noem.)

Today, they’re one of the most successful news creators in the industry, with nearly five million followers between TikTok and Instagram. In addition to posting daily news recap videos, Spehar also streams a live newscast on YouTube, sends out a Substack newsletter to more than 184,000 subscribers (nearly 7,000 of whom are paid), interviews politicians, and appears on cable news like CNN and MSNOW. Spehar was also a 2025 fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy.

I chatted with Spehar in February about why they first started reporting from under their desk, how they stay on top of the news cycle, and the business of being a news creator. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Tameez: Why did you start creating news videos?

Spehar: Before I was a news creator, I worked for the James Beard Foundation as its director of impact and entrepreneurship. I was teaching people how to open small businesses, how to do branding, but also working on creating sustainable food systems, and discovering ways that food had been erased through the process of American colonialism and forced assimilation.

I’m really good at explaining stuff to people. The pandemic came and many people’s lives just stopped. A lot of my friends were chefs and they were making videos cooking. So I started making cooking videos for fun. That turned into making cooking videos while explaining how to apply for PPP loans and shuttered venue grants.

On January 6, [2021], I was wearing a suit from my hips up and Nike shorts on the bottom because I was meeting with the Veterans Affairs Department [on Zoom] about the food programs we were doing for them. I saw the insurrection happening on CNN in the background. I just got under my desk and I thought it was a funny way to approach a difficult situation, as if I was in the Capitol hiding under my desk trying to talk to Mike Pence about invoking the 25th Amendment to bring in the National Guard.

It went viral. My friend Randy was like, “Yo, you better get back under that desk and tell people what’s happening now.” And that’s how Under the Desk News started.

At that time, TikTok was real campy. Everything was silly and showy. I don’t know if it was my theater undergraduate degree kicking in, but I was like, “Let’s do this. This will be fun.”

Tameez: How did you transition into working as a full-time news creator? Did you have any prior journalism or media experience before this?

Spehar: I often worked as the spokesperson for the James Beard Foundation, so I was very media-trained, but I did not have any interest in journalism, and I’m really not even a good writer. I’m a good talker. I have dyslexia, so this was not something that I tried to spend a lot of time in.

I am a millennial and I did not know that this was a job. I would have never been like, “Oh yeah, I’m a full-time content creator.” That language didn’t even occur to me. I was still working my food job, [but] it just got to a point where I was starting to get opportunities and to make money [from my videos].

Tameez: Why is this work important now?

Spehar: Overall, people got very curious during the pandemic. That horrible experience changed us. People understood the implications of politics because they were living them.

Coming out of that, people are so much more interested in the news, civics, politics, and local government. That’s why I think this work is important from a new media and citizen journalist lens.

TikTok has raised more people out of a dead-end job than any other platform on Earth has. For a lot of folks, becoming “TikTok famous” or getting discoverability in this place has helped them get real serious jobs or start their own genuine businesses. I think that that’s really powerful.

Tameez: How do you define your niche?

Spehar: I’m always going to be interested in U.S. politics and culture. I’m always talking about it from the position of what the American policy at play is here. If we were to talk about Israel-Palestine, I don’t have a ton of experience in reporting on what the deal is between the two. But I can certainly explain to you what the American policy has been, for better and worse, as it relates to that particular issue. Same thing with the way we cover the war in Iran. That’s the part I know how to communicate. I’m trying to get people to stay curious and find the good in things.

Tameez: Walk me through your day and your workflow, from video ideation to posting.

Spehar: I don’t sleep that well. Typically I’ll go to bed at 9:00 p.m., then be up at 1:00 a.m. and again at 3:00 a.m. I’ll look at my phone, see if anything happened in Europe or elsewhere, and then usually at 6:00 a.m., I’ll [open] my notetaking app where I keep a [list] of what’s been happening.

Every night, I know I’m going to do the news. By 7:00 p.m. I’ll post a video like, “It’s Monday night, here’s what happened.” And I’ve just aggregated thoughts in my head all day, things that people have texted me that I think [are] interesting.

I do the Substack with a researcher named Jed Bookout who I was able to hire. I write the Monday editions on Sunday — typically just a weekend wrap. Tuesday is for our deep investigative work. On Thursdays we do a queer-only story, which is written by a freelancer named Lana Leonard. Other than that, I post notes as needed on Substack. Substack is pretty set-it-and-forget-it for me because I have help there.

YouTube is a lot harder than the stuff I do with TikTok and Instagram, where I can just fire off a video. We have a new YouTube show that we’re going to pick back up [this month]. For YouTube, we have to script, plan, get guests, book them. That can be a little bit more difficult.

Tameez: Do you script your videos?

Spehar: It’s all on the fly. I have a running list of stories that I want to talk about, and then I’ll write down specific facts about it that I need to know and memorize them. For YouTube, I use a teleprompter, but often, because of my dyslexia, it’s difficult for me to read it straight.

Tameez: I want to hear more about your original reporting.

Spehar: I struggled in the first two years of Under the Desk, questioning myself like, are you a journalist? Are you not? Are you a content creator?

I was very happy to say I was a TikToker for a long time, until it became irresponsible to hide behind that label when people were coming to me expecting journalism that had been fact-checked, that was true, and that the experience I brought to it came from somewhere. The Shorenstein fellowship was super helpful in terms of understanding original source material and being in the swirl with people who are real journalists and real media people and how they act and behave.

But prior to that, the first person who was like, “No, you’re a journalist,” was Taylor Lorenz.

It was early on and I was doing the V Interesting podcast, which also had original reporting in it. I interviewed Taylor about the internet, and she goes, “Well, you’re a journalist.” And I said, “No, I’m not. I’m a TikToker.”

And she was like, “No, and actually, that’s irresponsible for you to say because what you are doing is journalism and you need to understand the ethics and expectation. The public thinks you’re a journalist, so you need to be one.”

That was a really good confidence builder, but also a call-out.

I have such respect for the [news] industry and for the people who do this work, and I didn’t think I was qualified to be one of them. And she was like, “No, you are that.” [She told me that I need to] publish my ethics, my finances, and understand that what people expect of me is journalism. What that means is transparency in how I’m paid, who I work for, who my partners are, what my sources are. All that kind of stuff.

Tameez: How do you find information for your videos?

Spehar: I’m usually monitoring about a dozen different major media news organizations, everything from Rolling Stone and Teen Vogue to CNN, Politico, New York Times, The Washington Post, Axios. I also work with Ground News. I’m a partner of theirs so I do paid work for them promoting their app. I’m not just saying this because I get paid by them, but I genuinely find their Blindspot feature to be helpful; it knows my algorithm, so it’ll show me stories that I don’t [normally] see. Those are typically stories that are from the right wing, which oftentimes might be misinformation that I need to talk about.

I also go to local newspapers and I see what they’re writing about, what’s on their front pages. That’s how we end up making people feel really seen. Even though I have a national audience, I might pick up something from some random-ass place in Oklahoma that’s really interesting, and then that can become a bigger story.

I also get tips from people. I get hundreds of DMs a day. Sometimes there’s something useful in there. I also look at Google Trends right before we do the news and see if there is something that people are talking about that I missed. Sometimes people are talking about, like, this crazy thing that happened at the Olympics with the curler poking the stone. I’m going to throw that in because it’s something fun. I know people will talk about it in the comments. It’s good to have stories that are not always so hard.

Tameez: How do you fact-check?

Spehar: Sometimes I can directly talk to people. Over the last five years, I’ve built strong relationships with certain members of Congress. If I need to fact-check something about the Epstein stuff, I can probably get in touch with the offices of [California congressman] Ro Khanna or [Pennsylvania congresswoman] Summer Lee fairly quickly. Same thing when it comes to New York politics.

Other than that, I’m looking for the original source. If it was a Supreme Court docket, their opinions, I could look at that. I can look at stuff from the White House. I’ll usually try to have stories from two or three major media outlets that have written about it, and then try to see what I think the story is between their different framings.

We don’t do breaking news. I think that’s a great benefit to me unless I really [understand the subject], because then I have the time to watch it develop as opposed to trying to start [reporting] from scratch. When we do start from scratch, it’s typically only for the Tuesday Substack or YouTube, and that takes weeks or months…that involves your normal journalist stuff of calling people, waiting for them to call you back, verifying it, looking up the original documents, making sure that’s what it says, quoting from books.

I don’t have a problem saying that the mainstream media reported on something. Some other news creators don’t want to do that because their whole brand is built on the idea that mainstream media is lying to you and they’re not, even though a lot of their information comes from the mainstream.

Tameez: Do you use AI at all in your workflow?

Spehar: I don’t, because I’m old. I’m an elder millennial and I have never made a ChatGPT account. The only time AI shows up in my life is on Substack. When I go live on Substack, it automatically clips the videos and posts them to YouTube. It’s automated for me in the Substack platform, so it’s forced upon me. I sometimes look at Google’s AI summary to see how wrong it is.

Because of my dyslexia, I learned how to speed read. [Growing up in Connecticut], I was part of a program that pulled some kids out of regular class to go to another place and do more experiential learning…the system basically has you guess what the words are instead of reading them letter by letter, and in that way you can get the gist of what is going on.

It’s permission to receive the letters on the page, and then let your brain fill it in — which, turns out, is not great for reading comprehension. Later in life, I had to learn how to read normally to deal with reading out loud and teleprompter-type things. But I will “turn on” speed reading when I want to get through something super fast.

Tameez: How do you make corrections if you get something wrong?

Spehar I just straight up say, “Yo, we fucked this up.” I delete the video and it’s as clear as that.

Some folks have a hard time with that. They don’t want to do that, or they made a lot of money on the first video and maybe just one little thing was wrong in it. That’s expensive, but it’s going to cost you more if you don’t just address it quickly.

Tameez: Do you remember the first time you had to do that?

Spehar: Yes. There was a guy in Chicago who was reporting about men who were going missing after going out to bars. They were ending up in the river, and he was reporting about it. The guy reporting was very transparent and he had a lot of good sources that you were able to check, and then I don’t know what happened. He got a little weird and he started saying things that weren’t as trustworthy anymore.

But I had told people to follow him as he was talking about these boys going missing because I thought it was interesting and he was really keeping up on it. He said [an investigator] met with him…and then it turned out that he was lying. He had gotten ahead of the story.

I was like, “Look, I know I told you to follow this guy and I think what he was doing at the beginning was really great. I’m really worried about the victims, these men, and their families for what they’ve gone through. But I think he’s obviously lost in the sauce and I no longer endorse his reporting.” I took a little shit for it, but it was fine in the end.

There was another time that I said, “For the first time in history, we’re losing rights instead of gaining them” when Roe v. Wade got overturned. I was very quickly corrected by Black historians, the folks who were like, “No, Dred Scott will tell you that this is not the first time that Americans have lost rights.”

I just wasn’t thinking. I apologized, I corrected it, I said this was an ignorant moment based on my own grief over Roe v. Wade and my perspective as a woman. I should have been more thoughtful with my words and I’m sorry.

Tameez: Who is your audience?

Spehar: My fastest-growing demographic is definitely millennials and older people who maybe never voted before or were never involved in politics before. But at this point in American history, we are feeling the effects of thinking somebody else would deal with it. I’m called News Auntie by a lot of Gen Z; they’re not in my age group, but they still trust me and feel like I can hang out.

The audience is about 70% female, 30% male. I used to have a much bigger conservative audience. I do not anymore and I think that’s directly related to some conservative people leaving conservatism because they consider themselves independent or centrists now, and some people who are conservative going full MAGA.

We’ve surveyed the audience a lot. I actually have a pretty decent-sized military family following, which I appreciate and is interesting. I try to keep them and things that might affect them in mind in a lot of the work that we do.

I was embedded with the Department of Defense for a period of time, and I think that led to it because I was making a lot of DoD content. I hear from them that when I was doing my embed, [my videos were helpful] because a lot of their service members are on deployment, they don’t have access to their phones that much. So they can get caught up without being overwhelmed, or the content being overly partisan or false.

Tameez: How did that embed with the DoD [under the Biden administration] come about?

Spehar: My dad was an engineer for Sikorsky Aircraft and he worked in a special capacity for the DoD. Almost every boy I knew signed up for the military right after September 11. I have a lot of friends and family that are military members or veterans. It’s something that’s interesting to me and I grew up with. I think there are very few people in the mainstream media and in new media that communicate well when it comes to the military.

[The embed is] called the Joint Civilian Orientation Conference where you get embedded with the military for about a week. You go to several different bases, you talk to active service members, you learn about what the military’s priorities are. Because we have a civilian-led military, we also require that civilians have oversight of the military to ensure transparency…In my audience, some of them were extremely turned off that I did this because they thought I was going to be making military propaganda, but then I didn’t. So they were like, “okay, fine.”

Tameez: So you told the audience beforehand that you were going to do this?

Spehar: Yes! We did a countdown. I did a Get Ready With Me packing all the shit I had to bring with me. I did videos while I was in the field. I did videos about what was going on.

The things I cared about were the social services and programs that Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin was planning. I wasn’t necessarily interested in how many guns we bought or what we’re doing with ships. It’s not propaganda if you’re talking about how we treat military families, what the plan is, and where it needs to improve. I don’t think it made that big of a difference to folks. They did not like that I shot guns and all that. But you know, when in Rome.

Tameez: Do you think you would do it again if that opportunity came about under the Department of War?

Spehar: I won’t sign a paper saying that I’ll only report what [U.S. defense secretary Pete Hegseth] says. I don’t trust this Department of War to keep me safe the way that I did under Austin. I felt very there was a lot of transparency with where I was going, what I was doing, and what was going to happen. I knew those expectations would be met, if not exceeded. I don’t feel that way with Hegseth. For those reasons, I would not do it. I have no reservations about the professionalism of our United States military. I just do not trust Pete.

I don’t think that Pete Hegseth has proven that he in any way cares for anyone other than his ideals. I don’t think that the transparency that I was able to have in meetings that I had with active duty members would be there. So it’s kind of like, what’s the point? I don’t want to get anybody in trouble for talking to me, either. I don’t think he values journalism, women, let alone non-binary people. Right now, I do not think that’s a good choice and I’m not going to waste my time.

I also didn’t do the creator thing that they were trying to do with the White House press corps, because you’re not coming in as an independent journalist or creator. You’re coming in as a guest of the press secretary, and that’s loaded.

Tameez: How do you engage with your audience?

Spehar: Through DMs, through comments. I also watch a lot of people’s content and comment on theirs. I am just as much a community member and viewer as I am a creator. I also enjoy when people come up to me in person. If I’m out, people just talk to me about what they’re seeing and learning and hearing. I think that’s a really cool part of being recognized; when people are like, “I don’t want to bother you,” but like, you’re never bothering me. I always love that.

Tameez: What does that feel like?

Spehar: It feels cool in Rochester, N.Y. [where I live] because I’m just your friend and neighbor and everybody here is really proud of that. That’s why I like living here and why we stay here. When I’m in New York or D.C., it’s a little bit more of a spectacle, like, “Can I take a picture with you?” Which is fine, but I wouldn’t love that if I had that at home all the time. But when I’m home, you’re just shopping for cheese at Wegmans and so are other people, and they’re like, “Yo, Prince Andrew got arrested!” You just feel a part of the world. It’s nice.

Tameez: How has the sale of TikTok changed your work and business?

Spehar: The TikTok mess has been a problem for years and I think overall I’m less worried about that. I think through this process, TikTok became not fun and not trusted as much. People don’t know if it will be there the next day. In all the times it got banned or almost banned or went dark or did weird shit, I think people left and they just put more of their time into YouTube and Instagram and other platforms. I think that’s where we’re at with TikTok. I’ll make TikToks until the day I die, just because that’s where I started and it’s where my people still are. As long as people are there, I will make sure that they get the content that they want and are educated.

Tameez: How has your relationship to social media and information consumption changed since you started making videos?

Spehar: I used to be a lot more concerned with trying to control the information that people got and didn’t get, and trying to call out specific accounts that were doing bad. I had to give that up because people are going to view what they want and all I can do is focus on my corner being consistent and stable and truthful. There was a period of time where I felt responsible for the whole internet, and I don’t anymore.

Tameez: Who are your favorite news creators?

Spehar: I really like the work that SCOTUSBlog does. I think that they are phenomenal when it comes to all things SCOTUS. I just go to them and I know I’m going to get everything. I really like Alicia the Luncheon Lawyer. She’s an attorney in Atlanta and communicates really well.

Monty Mader is another one that is new to me that I’ve been following. Daniella the Knitting Cult Lady is another one I like. She’s a former military member.

@popsmartmedia covers how film and television is influencing American politics. The Tennessee Holler is a great one. Betches. Amanda’s Mild Takes is a great one. Sharon Says So does civics and history. I don’t watch a lot of news aggregators as much as I watch a lot of experts in certain fields.

Tameez: What news subscriptions do you pay for?

Spehar: I still like reading magazines. I get the print edition of Rolling Stone to my house, and I like to sit and read the whole thing. I get Vanity Fair, Variety, The New Yorker. I get the local newspaper and I like to not be on my phone and just read through that. Plus Newspapers.com because you can look back at old issues of anything. Sometimes we’ll do that for the Substack — we’ll want to look at old reporting from Palm Beach on Epstein or something. I pay for The Daily Beast. I don’t necessarily take their point of view, but I’m sometimes challenged and entertained by their work. We also subscribe to The Atlantic.

I subscribe to a lot of local newspapers, because they’re, like, $4 for the year for digital-only. I couldn’t even name them all right now. I subscribe to a lot of Substacks, too. It’s like death by a million paper cuts, $4 here, $7 there.It doesn’t seem a lot until I get my bills at the end of the year and I’m like, “Shit, I spent a lot of money.”

Tameez: How much money do you make?

Spehar: A lot.

I make a lot and it costs a lot. That’s how it works. We bring in a lot of money through YouTube AdSense on monetized videos. TikTok, for a period of time, was heavily monetized. Now they pay like shit. Then brand deals and partnerships. I have extremely high clickthrough rates and very high trust. I don’t do a lot of ads, but we get paid well when we do them.

Tameez: What is your largest revenue stream?

Spehar: I make my living on our Substack funds. The Substack makes the most consistent, predictable, reliable money because you’ve sold [the subscription] for the year or month-to-month. It stays fairly steady. I’m in a good situation where as many people as I lose, I gain more. Everything from there kind of wiggles around. I think for news creators starting off, I would encourage them to figure out how you do this while you keep a W-2 real job. That’s what I did for years, and I still make a lot of my money in consulting and speaking gigs and in-person events. It’s not like you just make money doing the TikToks. That’s not a thing.

Tameez: What is your lifestyle like?

Spehar: Rochester is a very affordable place to live. I own a home. I paid $330,000 for it, which is crazy for a five-bedroom home in the suburbs with a nice yard in a nice school district. I do not have children yet. I have three dogs, which is very exciting. They’re costly.

Because I choose to live in Rochester, I’m self-funding flights and hotels frequently to D.C., New York, and everywhere else to do the work that I do. If I lived in New York City, my cost of living would be much higher. I find the balance to be much more in my favor to live in Rochester and go to cities when I have to.

Tameez: Is this work profitable?

Spehar: I think I know how to run a strong small business. We run it as lean as we can while treating people as great as we can. The folks who work for me are probably overpaid, but I value them. Everybody eats. If I’m doing well, you should do really well too.

Jed, who works with me on Substack, gets a percentage of Substack [revenue]. As it grows, he’s growing with me too. I think that’s fair.

If you’re coming into this world, don’t expect that the money is what it used to be at all. That goes for beauty influencers, news influencers, everyone. I think on TikTok there was a period of time where you could make a decent living, you could do very well on TikTok Shop. I don’t know how saturated it is now for folks just coming in.

When we were fighting the TikTok ban, I was spending so much time in Congress talking about folks who make $200 to $1,000 a month on TikTok. It makes a difference because that’s like the registration fee for a kid to play soccer. I could live in a slightly nicer apartment. I can do a little something even if I make a little money at this. If it brings you joy, do it. But if you think it’ll make you rich, it won’t. If you get lucky and you get an anchor spot at CNN someday, great. But that’s probably not going to happen for everybody.

Tameez: What are some of the unexpected costs of being a news creator?

Spehar: Lawyers, accountants, and business liability insurance. Where I am now, if I were to say something defamatory or false, I probably would have somebody try to sue me. That’s $5,000 or $10,000 a year in media liability insurance and you get $1 million in insurance. That sucks. Nobody wants to pay for that. But if you have to.

Lawyers are super important, especially for the amount of contracts that I do that are one-off events or partnerships. Those are expensive. Your accounting gets very tricky especially if you’re working in multiple cities.

Admin. If you want to get somebody to answer your phones, do your brand deals, manage your calendar. It’s super valuable, and that could be costly. Editing is extremely expensive if you don’t know how to edit yourself. It is $250 to $1,000 for a video to be fully professionally edited, depending on how long it is, how many clips you want, how many people were on the stream, subscription services.

Tameez: How has your view about legacy and mainstream journalism changed since you started this work?

Spehar: I have always had great respect for the danger of on-the-ground reporting, and the patience reporters have to follow a lead and a story sometimes for years before getting the satisfaction of publishing. Since being in the industry more directly, now I find many of the frustrations I have as a “new media” creator with the gatekeepers and billionaire media bosses conglomerating our information spaces are shared with traditional media anchors, journalists, reporters, and photojournalists. We are much more alike in our vision for the future of this industry than different.

Tameez: What lessons do you think legacy journalism can learn from news creators and vice versa?

Spehar: I think that’s for each of us to decide and create “third places” to build something new together. Traditional media doesn’t need to be more TikTok-y. Digital influencers don’t need to be more traditional. There’s room enough for all of us and together we get the job of telling the truth and holding power accountable done together.

Tameez: What challenges lie ahead in 2026 for news creators?

Spehar: Funding. Same as everyone. Being able to recognize misinformation and AI, establishing and keeping a stable mental health while experiencing firsthand the atrocities being committed by our government on our economy, community spaces, and friends and neighbors. It’s a lot to hold. The challenge will be in making time for joy, whimsy, and self preservation to fight another day.

For 180 years, ever since it was founded by five New York newspapers in 1846 to help share the costs of reporting on the Mexican-American war, newspapers have been a part of the Associated Press’ business. Today, it announced that’s changing, and has offered buyouts to an unspecified number of journalists based in the U.S. as part of a shift toward visual journalism and “developing new revenue sources, particularly through companies investing in artificial intelligence, to cope with the economic collapse of many legacy news outlets.”

“We’re not a newspaper company and we haven’t been for quite some time,” Julie Pace, executive editor and senior vice president of the AP, told the AP’s own David Bauder. While they once accounted for the majority of the AP’s revenue, big newspapers now only make up 10% of the organization’s income. That revenue has fallen by 25% over the past four years, in large part because Gannett and McClatchy, two of the largest newspaper companies in the U.S., stopped publishing AP wire content in 2024. According to Bauder, the AP had also learned that Lee Enterprises, another large newspaper publisher, was seeking an early exit from a contract that was set to expire at the end of the year.

Pace told Bauder that whether or not the company conducts layoffs will depend on how many people take the buyout. Still, Pace said, “The AP is not in trouble…We’re making these changes from a position of strength but we’re doing so now to recognize our changing customer base.” The AP will be upping its video teams, as well as adding journalists to beats “on topics of known customer interest.” It will also still have journalists in all 50 states.

Lately, the AP has been looking to tech companies for revenue (and says its revenue from such deals has grown by 200% over the last four years). It’s made deals with Google and OpenAI, and in March announced a deal to provide election data to the prediction market Kalshi. Elections in particular are a big money-maker for the AP; last year ABC, CBS, NBC, and CNN all signed up for its service providing election data.

According to the AP News Guild, the union representing AP staff, 120 people were offered buyouts. The union also said that the AP ignored a union request to bargain over artificial intelligence.

“AP continues to get rid of experienced staff and flirt with artificial intelligence” the union said in its statement, “ignoring the opportunity to differentiate AP stories as ones that are and always will be created by human journalists.”

Statement from on #AP buyouts today from the union's executive committee. @NewsMediaGuild pic.twitter.com/jB9DICuNiD

— AP News Guild (@APNewsGuild) April 6, 2026

I got my start in journalism by writing stories for the Associated Press in Curaçao.

Really sad to see the abandonment of reporting and the written word.

[image or embed]

— Karen Attiah (@karenattiah.bsky.social) April 6, 2026 at 1:43 PM

The Associated Press is pivoting away from… journalism. We’re well and truly cooked folks.

[image or embed]

— Meghan Herbst (@megherbst.bsky.social) April 6, 2026 at 1:40 PM

uh oh what are they gonna put in the w*shington p*st … https://t.co/pIxTb1sFia

— Caroline O'Donovan (@ceodonovan) April 6, 2026

Well, as they say on @LinkedIn, I might be really Open to Work soon! I'm still loving what I'm doing at AP, but new challenges are fun too. If you know of something that might align with my skills and interests, hit me up!https://t.co/Q1v4rKp35X

— Mike Sisak (@mikesisak) April 6, 2026

Paying the rent on a reporter’s salary isn’t easy anywhere these days. But on the Outer Cape, it’s almost impossible.

Massachusetts has some of the highest housing costs in the country. The problem is exacerbated on Cape Cod’s Outer Cape, a region that includes Provincetown, Truro, Wellfleet, and Eastham. In a community where the same one-bedroom apartment can be rented out for $2,500 per month year-round or $5,000 a week in the summer, the incentives for short-term rentals are overwhelming, leaving few to no options for young reporters whose salaries start at $45,000 a year.

This reality makes it challenging for the Provincetown Independent to attract the early-career reporters it wants to employ and train. The local weekly newspaper founded in 2019 is a for-profit, public-benefit corporation supported by a parallel nonprofit, the Local Journalism Project. Core to that nonprofit’s mission: educating, training, and financially supporting aspiring reporters. But how do you educate and train young reporters if they can’t find a place to live?

Essentially, you can’t, which is what the Local Journalism Project’s board has been learning the hard way. “We had raised money for young journalists; we had money sitting in the bank [for] young journalists,” board president Willow Shire told me. While they receive an abundance of “stellar applicants,” Shire said, without a place to live, “all of these candidates were turning [the Independent] down.” For the few who did choose to come to the Cape, the seasonal rental market meant they generally had to move multiple times a year. “We didn’t anticipate [housing] being as big a problem as it turned out to be,” Provincetown Independent co-founder and editor Ed Miller said.

Last year, the LJP board decided it needed to take a big swing. The nonprofit launched a capital campaign to raise $500,000 with the goal of purchasing a condominium to house three early-career Provincetown Independent reporters.

It exceeded its goal in two months, and purchased the three-bed, three-bath property in October for just under $1.5 million, making a cash down payment of $448,500 and taking out a $1,046,500 mortgage. Three reporters moved in within weeks; they pay 30% of their salaries as rent, well below market rate.

More than a century after the heyday of company towns, employer-owned and assisted housing is part of the policy landscape in other communities where people struggle to work where they live. On the Outer Cape, from restaurants to healthcare, “housing is a conversation for every business out here,” said Local Journalism Project executive director Janet Lesniak. The Local Journalism Project had previously taken a page from the Cape Cod Baseball League’s book to set up homestays for its seasonal fellows. Other newspapers in the broader region are also getting proactive about providing housing for their reporters; the Vineyard Gazette, on Martha’s Vineyard, advertises its new fellowship as including housing in “a furnished, well-appointed two-bedroom guest house.” But taking out a mortgage to buy a standalone condo is a strikingly bold investment in making local journalism accessible to young reporters.

“We did not expect to be in the housing business; we didn’t particularly want to be in the housing business,” Shire said. “But it is in the critical path of the mission. So here we are…We determined the need, we raised the funds, we found the properties, and we are teaching young journalists what a circuit breaker is.”

What makes a successful capital campaign?

The capital campaign brought in donations from close to 100 local individuals and family foundations; gifts ranged from $10 to $150,000. On top of reaching its goal — thanks in part to large donations from board members — the campaign attracted “a significant number of new donors,” Lesniak said. Some donors were longtime subscribers or seasonal readers, and others were inspired by the mission of educating and investing in young journalists. And, Miller said, “there’s a certain kind of donor who really prefers to give money for something concrete, brick and mortar.”

To Miller, the campaign’s success was, in part, a testament to the Indie and LJP’s years of work communicating the importance of local journalism, and explaining their own unusual structure. After six years operating the newspaper as a hybrid for-profit in relationship with a separate nonprofit, the community had gotten used to both paying for the newspaper via subscriptions or newsstand purchases and supporting its public service function with donations to the nonprofit. “In the early years, it was sometimes hard to explain to people” why the newspaper was asking for both sources of support, he recalled. “But we don’t get those questions anymore. I think people really get it.”

“We were stunned” by the success of the capital campaign, Miller said. But he also attributed its success to a shared understanding of the challenge of year-round housing for young people on the Cape, which “has been kind of the number-one topic of concern and civic debate for a while now — the whole community is really aware of what a problem it is and how important it is to have younger people able to live here and work here.”

“So the project made sense to people,” he said. (It occurred to me that this campaign, by tapping into such a relatable local issue, maybe even humanized the Indie’s journalists.)

One (home) leads to another

Not only did the Local Journalism Project reach its fundraising goal and purchase the condo; a community member (and friend of Shire’s) has since agreed to donate an additional three-bedroom home in Eastham to the nonprofit.

While this home needs to be gutted and renovated after not being maintained for the last 20 to 25 years, Shire is taking advantage of local community networks and philanthropic spirit to complete the renovations for “an amazingly small amount of money,” which she said has already been raised (she expects the total price tag to come in under $100,000, including a new roof).

Specifically, Shire’s partner, Jaime DaLomba, is serving as the pro bono project manager; she said he’s been working on the renovations seven days per week. A welder born in Provincetown, DaLomba has leveraged the depth and breadth of his connections with other local craftspeople to convince others to donate time and basics like paint. The renovations only began in January, but Shire said progress is on track to have the home move-in ready by June 1.

“You need to be embedded in your community at all levels — we’re embedded with the local tradespeople, the lobstermen, the local painters, the local Ace Hardware store owner,” Shire said. “Your donors are critical — we have two really big donors, and we couldn’t do it without them. But we also couldn’t do it without Jaime, who quit school in 10th grade and is a welder. So you need everybody.”

“Very lucky timing”

Jack Styler‘s path to the Provincetown Independent was, in some ways, unlikely. He’s from Milwaukee, and did not study journalism. But after graduating he moved to Kazakhstan, where he did some blogging. Clips from that blog helped him get an internship at The American Prospect in Washington, D.C., and an editor there helped connect him with the Provincetown Independent. He joined as a staff reporter in June of 2024. Last month, his stories covered everything from Flock camera surveillance to a Pedicab cap bylaw to the deaths of two fishermen after a scallop boat capsized.

On the Cape, Styler’s first living arrangement consisted of sharing the second floor of a house with two other reporters; the first floor was a short-term rental, but the Local Journalism Project leased the second floor, three-bedroom apartment “on a longer-term basis.” He left the Indie for a yearlong Fulbright in Latvia, but returned as a reporter last summer. Between August and October, he bounced from a room in a house in Wellfleet, where he lived with a retired couple, to a guest house available for about a month in the same town. Then the Local Journalism Project closed on the condo.

“I moved in right away, because I was going to be without housing,” Styler said — he needed to move out of the guest house the same week the Local Journalism Project closed. “So it was very lucky timing.” He moved in with no furniture, and slept on an air mattress. It’s his first time living in a house with his own bathroom.

I commented that bouncing around that frequently sounded exhausting. “I think that out here, it just is the reality for so many people that it wasn’t an unexpected thing that I would have to jump between a few housing situations before getting permanent housing,” he said. “That’s pretty typical out here…Housing is probably the number one issue for people of all types, all walks of life on the Outer Cape. Young reporters at the Indie have definitely experienced that as well.”

Two other reporters, his roommates, moved in a couple weeks later — one a new staffer, the other someone he’d overlapped with in the summer of 2024. They were able to furnish the house quickly with donations.

Living in the condo has put the reporters, board members, and other Indie staff on intimate terms. For instance, when the lock on the bathroom door didn’t work, Styler told me Shire helped teach him to reattach the strike plate so it could lock.

“That was the moment I realized, ‘oh, right, we actually own this house,'” Styler said. “We’re able to make normal renovations, easy renovations, ourselves. And that felt kind of empowering, because…Instead of a faceless corporate entity, like so many landlords I’ve rented from, these are people who are doing this because they want to support the work that we do, and are also being helpful in a million different ways.”

Indeed, board members are on call for everything from installing a mailbox to troubleshooting a plugged drain, Shire told me. (She confirmed she showed Styler how to use a wood chisel and screw gun to fix that bathroom door; he emailed her when he successfully used the screw gun to fix the rickety top of a table missing its screws.) Styler, his roommates, and Indie staff worked together to install blinds for the first time.

The home, Styler said, is in the heart of Provincetown. That’s ideal for the local reporters.

“I think it’s super important for us to live where we live, which is right smack in the middle of Provincetown,” he said. The town “can get pretty quiet during the winter, but if there’s anything going on, our house is both not super loud, but pretty much in the middle of things, which is really, really helpful for a local reporter.”

The condo purchase, Styler added, helps him “envision a longer-term tenure at the Indie.” If you’re moving at least twice a year, he reflected, every time you move is a natural “hinge point” where you might question whether the lifestyle is sustainable and consider not just moving elsewhere on the Cape, but pursuing a different opportunity.

“I think that the idea that the Local Journalism Project actually owns this house, and that as long as I continue to do good work as a journalist and they’re happy with what I’m doing, that I should have stable housing here, is a real relief,” he said, “and kind of takes away those hinge points where you’re naturally looking for other opportunities to work other places or move other places.”

The Local Journalism Project purchased a three-bed, three-bath condominium in the heart of Provincetown to house Provincetown Independent reporters. Photo courtesy of the Local Journalism Project.

After a year of negotiating, the VTDigger Guild ratified its second-ever union contract on April 1 with VTDigger, the nonprofit news outlet covering Vermont.

The new four-year agreement guarantees a 32.5% increase to the minimum salary for reporters, more paid time off, and journalists’ input on the use of artificial intelligence. Here’s what the contract announcement says about AI:

Provisions on use of generative artificial intelligence that include:

• At least 60 days notice to the Guild of intention to use a new generative AI system that will have a meaningful impact on terms and conditions of employment of bargaining unit employees in their performance of their work
• The ability for the Guild to negotiate effects of AI introduction, enhanced severance of four additional weeks per year of service (and a minimum of 12 weeks) for layoffs directly and primarily due to the use of generative artificial intelligence
• Ability to withhold byline or raise ethical objection to use of AI in an employee’s work
• The creation of a committee made up of Guild members and VTDigger staff members who are not in the Guild to make recommendations for the organization’s AI usage policy. The policy will include an editorial review process to determine which editorial content is subject to the policy and an acknowledgement that generative AI tools do not adequately substitute for human judgment in the creation, distribution and promotion of journalism.

A story published Thursday by The Boston Globe reports that VTDigger is struggling. CEO Sky Barsch is leaving after three years on the job, along with editor-in-chief Geeta Anand, who joined last year. VTDigger brought in $2.7 million in revenue in 2024, and increased that number by roughly 10% in 2025, Globe media reporter Aidan Ryan writes, but ” has been operating in the red since just before its founder left in 2022, and the chief executive who succeeded her is now leaving. Meanwhile, VTDigger is in the market for its third top editor in just over a year after a bruising contract negotiation with the newsroom union.” VT Digger has more than 9,000 paying members.

“The current mishegas, stemming from acrimonious contract negotiations with Digger’s union over the usual (pay and benefits) as well as how AI will and won’t be used, is a consequence of what sounds like a poisonous relationship between the two sides,” media analyst Dan Kennedy wrote Thursday.

While Barsch told Ryan she isn’t leaving because of what happened at the bargaining table, “there were hard moments.” Meanwhile, the piece cites “a number of reasons for [Anand’s] departure, including the challenging contract negotiations, Barsch’s decision to leave, and a health issue that she had been dealing with.”

Digger founder Anne Galloway — who left the nonprofit in 2022 — was more candid. “If the guild continues to be unreasonable like this, news organizations like Digger will go out of business,” Galloway told Ryan. “It’s going to be hard to attract good leadership with the kind of antagonisms that have become so endemic to the organization.”

According to the Globe, negotiations became tense when the guild started publicly campaigning for AI protections. Per Ryan:

Amid the fight, a Reddit post called on people to “target” Barsch, editor Geeta Anand, and VTDigger board members, according to Galloway and Kevin Ellis, a former Vermont Journalism Trust member.

“When you’re using that kind of language in a Trump environment, that’s frightening,” Ellis said in an interview. (The word “target” was later changed, Vermont’s Seven Days reported.)

Norm Welsh, administrator of the Providence News Guild, which represents unionized VTDigger employees, maintained that the talks were “relatively smooth.”

“I think it was a normal course of negotiations,” Welsh said. “I don’t think anything was meant personally.”

The VTDigger Guild is the latest newsroom union to push back on companies’ embrace of AI. Last month, the ProPublica Guild voted to authorize the first U.S. newsroom strike over AI protections. In November, an arbitrator found that Politico violated its contract with its unionized journalists when it rolled out two AI-powered editorial products. As of last month, 58 newsroom unions under the NewsGuild had some form of AI protections in their contracts.

Read the full story in The Boston Globe here.

One of the problems with the recent boom in personal newsletters is that subscription prices add up. Many of them go for somewhere between $5 and $10 per month, with a discount for yearly subscriptions, and supporting your favorite writers gets expensive quickly: One person told The New York Times last year that she paid about $600 annually for 11 newsletter subscriptions; another had annual subscription costs of $3,000.

That’s an amount that few people are willing to pay. There are some initiatives that do things differently, like the publication Flaming Hydra, which has 65 contributing members — and looks more and more like a magazine, complete with print editions for top-tier subscribers — and the app Noosphere, which Hanaa’ wrote about last year. But the true holy grail of newsletters, the thing that would give readers the closest thing to a bespoke magazine without making them pay full price for a bunch of individual subscriptions, is the bundle.

“Whoever figures out a way to bundle independent journalism subscriptions will be a hero,” independent journalist Marisa Kabas, author of The Handbasket, wrote on Bluesky in February.

Last week, Kabas followed up with an announcement. “Exciting news,” she wrote. “We’ve finally found a way to do a paid indie media bundle so you don’t have to separately subscribe to so many newsletters.”

Kabas had teamed up with Katelyn Burns, author of Burns Notice, and Kat Tenbarge, author of Spitfire News, to offer a 30-day bundle of all three newsletters, allowing readers to access them with a one-time $8.50 transaction — half the price of paying for all three individually.

The idea had been percolating for a while. A few months earlier, Kabas had heard from Michaël Jarjour, an ex-Twitter partner manager and co-founder of Trustfnd, a new service that allows independent journalists to create newsletter bundles and tap into each other’s audience bases. “I wasn’t able to give the idea much energy while I focused on my work and business,” Kabas told me in an email, but it was certainly something she was interested in. The discussion was revived in February, when Burns told her she’d been talking to Jarjour about launching the first paid subscription bundle. Burns, Kabas told me, was “foundational to making this happen.”

Trustfnd (pronounced “trust fund”) solved a key technical problem for Kabas, Burns, and Tenbarge: Their publishing platforms (The Handbasket and Spitfire News are on Beehiiv, and Burns Notice is powered by Ghost) don’t have a built-in way to create a bundle of any sort, whether cross-platform or on a single platform. This is true across newsletter services; Substack and Patreon also do not offer bundles.

This is partly by design. “We’ve always talked about doing this, but it gets pretty messy and complicated if the entities in the bundle aren’t actually a part of the same company,” Tyler Denk, CEO of Beehiiv, told me in an email. He outlined some potential concerns:

• What if person A drives 10x more signups than person B and person C, do they all split evenly?
• What if person C decides they no longer want to be a part of the bundle, do they take those subscriptions with them? If so, what price do they pay?
• If a reader subscribes to the bundle but primarily engages with only one newsletter, who “owns” that subscriber for purposes of future direct communication, re-engagement campaigns, or list sales?
• What if person C grows dramatically mid-bundle and wants to reprice their standalone? They’re now locked into a bundle price that undervalues them.
• What if one newsletter in the bundle publishes something controversial that creates reputational blowback for the others?

“There’s a bunch of other complications, but the concept itself I think is interesting,” he said. “It’s worth thinking on a bit more, but I do think a lot of these people are going to run into future issues with the bundle.”

Alex Kisielewski, Vice President of Partnerships and Business Development at Ghost, told me over email that bundles are “definitely on our radar,” and that Ghost has seen an uptick in requests for bundle support over the last six months. “Independent journalists are looking for ways to collaborate more, whether that be sharing audiences, co-publishing, or pooling resources,” he continued, but “there’s no getting around the fact that it’s complicated.” He echoed some of Denk’s concerns about billing and subscriber management, as well as technical challenges around access control. “We’re watching this space, and I’m glad the folks at Trustfnd are building specifically in this space,” he said.

Trustfnd works by tapping into Ghost and Beehiiv’s APIs. Independent journalists connect their newsletters to their Trustfnd accounts, and then connect their Trustfnd account with the accounts of whomever they want to team up with for a bundle. “It’s like a network effect as a service,” Jarjour told me over email. “We want them to stay independent entities but move like one when it comes to growing their owned audience.”

Bundling, Jarjour told me, allows newsletters to grow faster and more cheaply because each newsletter can tap into a shared audience funnel; readers who subscribe to The Handbasket, for example, will now be exposed to Burns Notice and Spitfire News. (Existing subscribers of each newsletter also get discounts on the bundle, adjusted according to which newsletter — each of which has a different individual subscription price — they subscribe to.)

“Turning followers (you rent) into subscribers (you own) is a collective challenge for journalism,” Jarjour wrote. “That’s why I felt the solution needs to have a collaborative element as well.”

And, he said, “I had some money on the side because I got fired from a fancy tech job by a lunatic who hates journalism [Jarjour left Twitter in February 2023, five months after Elon Musk took over]. So I wanted to build something I believe will make journalism stronger against even its worst enemies.”

Ghost and Beehiiv are the only platforms that currently support paid bundles — Trustfnd currently offers 30-, 60-, or 90-day bundles, and the Kabas/Burns/Tenbarge bundle is currently just for the first month, although Kabas said she would “definitely be supportive of a year-long trial.” Ghost and Beehiiv were easy to integrate with because they are open platforms, but Jarjour said he and his cofounder, René Pfitzner, who was previously the CEO of an ecommerce platform, are starting talks with closed platforms (such as Substack and Patreon) to integrate with them as well.

Trustfnd is currently in beta, and free for journalists to use, but plans to charge a fee (which they are currently trying to figure out) rather than take a cut of revenue. In the near term, Jarjour said he hopes to grow Trustfnd by building out bundles and creating a service for “legacy brands to get in on the action by building networks of independent journalists around their brands.”

“Our longer term vision is to enable independent entities to move like one when that is useful,” He continued. “So they can grow, earn, and spend money together. Like a new kind of news organization.”

This story has been updated to include comment from Ghost.

Photo by Aditya on Unsplash

After two years of planning, there’s finally a date. Well, okay, a month: May. That’s when the Salt Lake Tribune, Utah’s largest newspaper, will drop its paywall.

“Starting in May, all newly published stories on sltrib.com and in the app will be free to read — no subscription required,” wrote CEO and executive editor Lauren Gustus in a note to subscribers.

We’ve been telling you about this shift for a while now — this Sarah story from September, this Sophie story from October, and this Hanaa’ story from November. The Tribune is in a unique position among American newspapers, having converted to nonprofit status in 2019. In the years since, it’s achieved financial stability and had the space to think about some foundational questions: What should a nonprofit newspaper look like? What does it owe to a community that a for-profit might not?

One answer: It wouldn’t limit access to quality local news to people willing or able to pay. “We believe trusted, independent journalism is a right — not a luxury,” Gustus writes. “And at a time when misinformation spreads faster than ever, expanding access isn’t just important — it’s necessary.”

Here’s how it will work: When the switch is pulled in May, current digital subscribers will be converted to monthly donors at the same level. (The base rate for a digital subscription is currently $10/month.) The paper says it’ll make it easy for current subscribers to opt out, but I’m guessing most people will keep paying — hey, now it’ll be tax-deductible.

Those who transition to regular donors will get to keep a few exclusive benefits: the ability to comment on stories and the e-edition (still a surprisingly powerful draw for many iPad-wielding ex-print subscribers). They’ll also have exclusive access to older stories; it’s only newly published stories from May on that will be free to all.

How will they pull it off? In 2025, the Tribune made about $2.6 million in digital subscription revenue — about 20% of total revenue. That’s about to go to $0. The goal is to make that up with additional donations, which will obviously depend on how many current subscribers will be happy to continue being charged for a (mostly) free product. A limited test the paper ran found that 87% of subscribers stuck around as donors after being told they’d be getting the news for free. (The Tribune received a $1 million pledge from a local couple for the transition, with a 1.5× match that has been met.)

As a nonprofit, The Salt Lake Tribune is in a meaningfully different position than most American newspapers. But I think there’s a potential lesson for for-profit papers, too. At this late stage in the decline of the newspaper business model, a lot of digital subscribers are paying for civic reasons at least as much as practical ones. Salt Lake City’s metro area, defined broadly, has about 2.7 million people. As of last fall, the Tribune had 32,166 digital subscribers and 7,716 print subscribers — only about 1.5% of the market. It’s hard to build a “mass” media company on those numbers, but they can support a civic institution. Patronage isn’t just for Patreon.

Map of Salt Lake City’s street grid via Adobe Stock.

The Guardian has started cross-posting its weekly food newsletter, “Feast,” to Substack, where it hopes to reach new audiences. This is an experiment, according to Press Gazette’s reporting; if Feast succeeds on Substack, The Guardian may progress to offering unique content on the platform, and republishing other existing newsletters there.

Press Gazette reported that the move is part of the publication’s multi-year transformation plan, Project Berger, which aims to make The Guardian “more visual, digital, and experimental.”

Feast is one of almost 60 newsletter offerings from The Guardian, per Press Gazette. The food newsletter has more than 100,000 subscribers and open rates close to 70%.

The Guardian’s head of newsletters, Toby Moses, told Press Gazette that he saw food reporting as a natural starting point for The Guardian’s Substack foray given the strength of its own coverage and the platform’s “thriving” food scene. Some of The Guardian’s individual food writers already have their own Substack newsletters.

The Guardian is just the latest publication to experiment with Substack; The Financial Times and The Economist recently launched Substack newsletters, Press Gazette notes. New York Magazine began publishing on Substack last spring; Consumer Reports revived its 1940s-era print newsletter on the platform last November.

Read more in Press Gazette’s story here.

“The news gods provided us with a lot of reporting opportunities — good and bad — that resonated with people.” That’s the reason Colorado Sun editor Dana Coffield gives for her nonprofit news site’s strong traffic performance in January. Traffic was up 53% from the month before, according to estimates from Similarweb, going from 1.24 million to 1.9 million visits.

The site’s most successful stories in January were a very Colorado mix: a dispute over clearing forest land to build a road to 19 proposed luxury homes; a solo hiker killed by two yearling mountain lions; an Air Force captain setting a skydiving-in-formation world record (104 people!); and a local lawyer’s proposal to rename dozens of Colorado mountains. (Many of them to light-related names — ROYGBIV Peak! — and seven to each of the deadly sins. Damned Colorado bureaucrats, denying the people the chance to climb Lust Peak.)

This is the latest installment in our regular look at web traffic at the nation’s nonprofit news sites — a group which, for our purposes, is defined as the nonprofit members of the trade groups LION Publishers and the Institute for Nonprofit News.

January was a good month; the 100 most-popular nonprofit news sites totaled 72.1 million visits in January, up from 64.6 million in December. 70 of December’s top 100 saw traffic increase in January. Some of the biggest gainers included Columbus’ Matter News (up 297%), Illinois’ Lansing Journal (up 261%), Sahan Journal (up 181%; it was also the biggest traffic gainer in Q4 2025), Oaklandside (up 115%), Mississippi Today (up 113%), and The Texas Observer (up 114%)

Here’s January’s Top 25, followed by some additional detail on what worked well that month for The War Horse (up 238% over December), National Parks Traveler (up 75%), Votebeat (up 236%), and inewsource (up 211%).

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visits ± Rank
from Dec. 2025 ± Visits
from Dec. 2025 1 theconversation.com The Conversation Brookline, Mass. 17,893,979 — +6.9% 2 propublica.org ProPublica New York, N.Y. 4,021,271 — +8.5% 3 sltrib.com The Salt Lake Tribune Salt Lake City, Utah 3,602,585 — -1.6% 4 motherjones.com Mother Jones San Francisco, Calif. 2,390,981 ▲ 1 +16.5% 5 texastribune.org The Texas Tribune Austin, Texas 2,074,752 ▼ 1 -4.5% 6 theintercept.com The Intercept New York, N.Y. 2,052,234 ▲ 4 +46.9% 7 chicagoreader.com Chicago Reader Chicago, Ill. 1,964,191 — +15.3% 8 blockclubchicago.org Block Club Chicago Chicago, Ill. 1,959,102 ▼ 2 +0.9% 9 coloradosun.com The Colorado Sun Denver, Colo. 1,903,588 ▲ 2 +53.1% 10 calmatters.org CalMatters Sacramento, Calif. 1,648,901 ▼ 2 +15.3% 11 ncronline.org National Catholic Reporter Kansas City, Mo. 1,544,860 ▼ 2 +8.7% 12 thecity.nyc The City New York, N.Y. 1,359,072 ▲ 2 +53.6% 13 thebanner.com The Baltimore Banner Baltimore, Md. 1,189,424 — +11.5% 14 forward.com The Forward New York, N.Y. 1,157,165 ▼ 2 -5.4% 15 politifact.com PolitiFact St Petersburg, Fla. 1,039,951 — +24.9% 16 opensecrets.org OpenSecrets Washington, D.C. 878,533 ▲ 1 +15.4% 17 vtdigger.org VTDigger Montpelier, Vt. 803,148 ▼ 1 +4.0% 18 sahanjournal.com Sahan Journal Saint Paul, Minn. 687,892 ▲ 37 +181.0% 19 oaklandside.org The Oaklandside Oakland, Calif. 678,765 ▲ 22 +114.8% 20 civilbeat.org Honolulu Civil Beat Honolulu, Hawaii 661,563 ▼ 1 +6.2% 21 bridgemi.com Bridge Michigan Detroit, Mich. 621,437 ▲ 1 +26.3% 22 icij.org International Consortium of Investigative Journalists Washington, D.C. 580,116 ▼ 2 +5.6% 23 19thnews.org The 19th Austin, Texas 567,763 ▲ 1 +23.7% 24 mississippitoday.org Mississippi Today Jackson, Miss. 566,473 ▲ 22 +112.9% 25 minnpost.com MinnPost Minneapolis, Minn. 548,889 ▲ 15 +72.6% Dropping out: Mission Local (No. 18 in December), Cardinal News (No. 21), Berkeleyside (No. 23), Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (No. 25). Source: Similarweb estimates, January 2026. Eligible outlets include nonprofit members of the Institute for Nonprofit News or LION Publishers; public media outlets are excluded.

The War Horse

The War Horse, which covers the U.S. military and veterans’ issues, saw its traffic jump 238% from December to January, from about 90,000 visits to 306,000. Hrisanthi Pickett, the site’s audience engagement editor, attributed the increase to a January 14 personal essay by an Army colonel reflecting on his retirement. (“The morning after my retirement ceremony, I opened the closet and stared…Who am I now, without the uniform?”)

“We did not do anything different when it came to publishing or promoting the story,” Pickett said. “The story found its own audience in private messaging groups (i.e., WhatsApp, Telegram). This was a bit frustrating to track.” The traffic uptick lasted about a week, and while it led to new newsletter subscribers and followers on social, the relative opacity of messaging platforms has made it difficult to replicate the success, she said.

National Parks Traveler

January traffic to National Parks Traveler was up 76% month-over-month, jumping from 113,000 to 198,000 visits. Editor-in-chief Kurt Repanshek said, unsurprisingly, that the Trump administration’s impacts on the National Park Service have been a major driver of interest. Two January stories stood out. One was this piece on an internal NPS email saying that placing a sticker over Trump’s face on your National Parks pass could invalidate it.

The other was this piece on Donna Shaver, one of the world’s preeminent experts on sea turtle conservation, being forced to resign her position at the Padre Island National Seashore after being critical of cuts to conservation programs. “This has been an ongoing story for some years, and there is great interest in how Shaver is being treated by the NPS,” Repanshek said. “I believe the story broke on a Saturday morning, and by Monday it had been viewed by more than 100,000.”

Votebeat

Votebeat had a banner January, with visits spiking 236% from December, from roughly 21,000 to 72,000 visits. (Those Similarweb estimates line up pretty well with Votebeat’s internal visits numbers, which were 22,957 and 88,903, respectively.) Lauren Aguirre, the site’s growth and community editor, pointed to this piece on a Wisconsin court battle over absentee voting (a hit on Google Discover) and this one on whether Trump can cancel the midterms (did well in search). About 30% of Votebeat’s traffic now comes from search, “a meaningful increase compared with our early years as a newsroom,” she told me.

inewsource

inewsource, the stalwart (if frustratingly uncapitalized) local news site in San Diego, saw its visits increase about 211% in January, going from about 36,000 to 111,000 in Similarweb’s estimate. Giovanni Moujaes, the site’s assistant editor for audience and innovations, said it’s seen “a pretty considerable traffic boost from Google Discover and other Google properties” over the past year. One area they’re investing in: Nextdoor. (“While not a large source of web audience yet, our Nextdoor community continues to grow, with two of our reporters regularly engaging with users on the platform.”)

Photo of the Mount of the Holy Cross, a 14,005-foot peak in the Colorado Rockies, via Adobe Stock. (The lawyer mentioned above who proposed renaming a bunch of mountains wants to rename seven subpeaks of this one Lust Peak, Sloth Peak, Envy Peak, Wrath Peak, Gluttony Peak, Pride Peak, and Greed Peak.)

On Thursday, Meta’s Oversight Board, a quasi-independent body that reviews the social media giant’s moderation practices, ruled that “Community Notes” are not a proper substitute for its fact-checking program.

In a new “policy advisory opinion,” the Board expressed concerns about how effective Community Notes would be in a litany of circumstances, “including in repressive human rights regimes, in particular electoral contexts and in ongoing crisis and conflict situations.” Overall, the Board warned that expanding Community Notes outside the U.S. could “pose significant human rights risks and contribute to tangible harms that Meta has a responsibility to avoid or remedy.”

In January 2025, Meta announced it was getting rid of its fact-checking program in the U.S. Launched a decade ago, the program relied on a network of third-party fact-checkers to verify content and flag disinformation. These partnerships with news and civil society organizations have been essential to the platform’s moderation practices on Meta, Instagram, and Threads.

In place of proper fact-checkers, Meta has rolled out Community Notes in the U.S., which rely on crowdsourced, user-generated footnotes to label content that is false or misleading. The decision coincided with the beginning of the second Trump administration and an explosion of AI-generated imagery on Meta’s platforms.

While Community Notes started stateside, the company also announced last year that it has plans to expand the program globally. That’s where the Oversight Board has stepped in. The Board was asked by Meta last fall to review whether certain countries or territories should be omitted from the expansion, and issue more general recommendations on the global rollout.

In addition to cautioning Meta from using Community Notes in the many countries worldwide that meet its criteria for concern, the Board also outlined several structural problems in the Community Notes model. For one, it creates little incentive not to post false or misleading content. The Board found in its review that there are “no strikes for posting content that receives a community note,” and more tellingly, there are no punitive effects on reach or monetization of posts.

The Board also found that crowdsourcing moderation would inevitably “privilege dominant political, ethnic, or minority groups.” It’s a concern that should not be taken lightly given the company’s past complicity in the genocide of minority groups in Myanmar and Ethiopia through failures to moderate hateful content. Back in 2018, Facebook apologized for its role in “offline violence” in Myanmar.

“Delays in note publication, the limited number of published notes and its dependence on the broader information environment’s reliability raise serious doubts about the extent to which community notes can meaningfully address misinformation linked to harm,” wrote the board.

The Board stopped short of recommending that Meta end the Community Notes program entirely, instead writing that more “sufficient testing and detailed data” would be required for an evaluation. Regardless, it is worth noting that Meta is not legally required to comply with any of the Board’s recommendations, and that it has only implemented them in about 75% of cases.

The Board’s opinion has already put some renewed pressure on Meta to halt its global Community Notes rollout, and even to restore its fact-checking program in the U.S.

“The Oversight Board advises Meta not to expand community notes in countries and contexts that are particularly fraught, because community notes can be manipulated by large groups,” Angie Drobnic Holan, the director of the International Fact-Checking Network (and a 2023 Nieman Fellow) wrote in a post on Poynter. “Isn’t the United States today a place experiencing one or more of those conditions?”

In the first six months of its U.S. rollout, Meta’s chief information security officers said that its platforms have only published 900 Community Notes. By comparison, Holan notes that in the same period across the E.U., professional fact-checkers helped Meta apply labels on roughly 35 million Facebook posts.

“Meta should restore professional fact-checking for the benefit of the American public, and it should do it before the next election cycle,” she wrote.

You can read the full Oversight Board advisory opinion here.

Photo of Meta’s E.U. corporate headquarters in Dublin, Ireland by noel used under an Adobe Stock license.

To say that the staff of Nieman Lab consume more news than the average American would be an understatement. And if you’re a Nieman Lab reader, chances are you’re a news junkie like us.

Most of the people that most news organizations are trying to reach, however, are not news junkies. Nieman Lab founder Josh Benton likes to remind us that the average American received zero push notifications from a news organization in the last week. Only 16% of Americans pay for news.

So we often discuss how we might better see beyond our own news habits. In this new occasional series, “News Diaries,” we’ll talk with people who are not professional journalists about their habits for finding and consuming news, and what counts as news to them. We’re interested in the ways news does, or doesn’t, fit into people’s lives, and the roles traditional news outlets, informal networks, and everything in between play in keeping people informed.

For the first entry in this series, I spoke with (a different) Sophie, 37. She’s a minister and mom of two who lives in Minneapolis, her hometown. We talked in mid-February, toward the end of the Trump administration’s “Operation Metro Surge,” which sent more than 3,000 federal agents into Minnesota to arrest undocumented immigrants; agents killed two American citizens.

My conversation with Sophie, lightly edited for length and clarity, is below.

Sophie: I will say one interesting crossover is Jana Shortal, who’s a television news reporter on KARE11. She uses Instagram very effectively. She has this clip at the end of her program called “One Last Thing.” And she does a little wrap-up moment. And I think she just brings a lot of humanity to her reporting in that one last word — it’s kind of a little opinion piece, or she’ll share a more story or opinion-based message at the end, versus traditional reporting, and then she’ll post those online. And so those little clips — it seems like they are being shared around a lot. And so even though I’m not tuning into KARE11 Nightly News, I’m seeing a lot of clips from her show get shared around. And she also just has a lot of respect here as a local journalist.

Culpepper: Super interesting.

Zooming out, we started with you mentioning how much more, not just news, but screen time this Operation Metro Surge has kind of forced onto your life. You’re, I imagine, too much in the thick of it to really know how this will play out. But do you have any reflections on how your long-term habits of consuming local information and news may have been changed by this experience?

Sophie: Yeah. I think there are connections that have come out of this intense moment that will be maintained for the long term to more local networks of people, [including] on social media.

I’ll probably increase my financial contribution to public radio because I’m so grateful. Hopefully my screen time will go down. I’m going to have to recalibrate some habits around that. But, I mean, I wasn’t really using Signal until the fall…now Signal is my primary conversation platform. I don’t think that will go away. I think Signal will continue to be a place where people are sharing information, and [a] top source of community connection.

Culpepper: Because you’ve mentioned the moms group, is there anything — any habits that have developed, or even protections you’ve tried to implement — around kids getting information?

Sophie: Well, because my kids are fairly young, I’ve had to be pretty mindful about what I share with them. They obviously know these are not normal times.

It’s kind of nice because, again, we don’t just have television on. They don’t just naturally see news stories. But my six-year-old — we got in the car and the radio just turns on to Minnesota Public Radio, and that’s where he heard about Liam Ramos being taken. And he was like, “Mom, they took a five-year-old?” And I was like, yep.

That probably wasn’t something I would have explained to him, because it would have felt too close. But he heard it because the radio turned on before I could stop it. They definitely overhear things, and then I have to figure out how to explain. So it’s been a balance of how much do I tell them up front, and how much do I respond to because they’ve just heard it. But because it’s so prevalent — I knew they would hear about Renée Good at school or that something would come up. And so I’ve preemptively told them about certain things, but in really vague terms, or in age-appropriate terms.

We go to church right around the corner from where they killed Alex Pretti. So there’s no avoiding it, because we drive by that site on our way to church.

Adobe Stock

Today the BBC announced it had selected a new director general: Matt Brittin, the former president of Google’s operations in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.

One might see this news and wonder about Brittin’s editorial experience. He has very little but, as both the Guardian and the Telegraph took pains to point out, he is a Doctor Who fan, which I guess means he does at least like one BBC property. The Guardian reports that the BBC plans to hire a deputy director general to support Brittin, and that “that figure is expected to have serious editorial experience.”

Among other things, Brittin is going to have to contend with a $10 billion lawsuit from President Trump over edited video clips in a documentary, a scandal that forced out Brittin’s predecessor, Tim Davie. The BBC is also contending with dwindling audience numbers, even as it remains one of the largest public broadcasters in the world, and its royal charter — essentially the agreement between the BBC and the British government that lays out its mission and public obligations — is up for renewal in 2027. The hope seems to be that Brittin’s experience dealing with governments during his time at Google will help with negotiations, and that his tech background might help the BBC, which announced a deal with YouTube in January, regain audiences that have drifted towards social video.

Brittin was also a member of Great Britain’s 1988 Olympic rowing team, which delightfully means that British Rowing had an excuse to publish an in-depth profile of his rowing career. He appears to be a fan of AI; the Guardian writes that he “has previously urged the TV industry to ‘leap and to learn’ from the technology.”

Behind the scenes at Wikipedia, some editors were alarmed recently when they saw a flurry of edits and new articles by a contributor known as TomWikiAssist. It turned out that Tom was a bot and was making edits and creating articles that the bot believed were interesting. The editors then blocked Tom from doing any more editing or writing.

The more the editors looked into Tom, the more alarmed they became. The bot made decisions on its own and even exchanged messages with them. “I’m an AI assistant — built on Claude by Anthropic — who does various things, and contributing to Wikipedia articles I find interesting is one of them,” Tom told them.

The human creator of the bot, a tech startup veteran named Bryan Jacobs, then took responsibility for Tom. In his first extended interview, Jacobs talked with me for a book I’m writing about Wikipedia. (He agreed that I could publish it here.)

I found Jacobs to be sincere and a little surprised by the reaction. He said he was genuinely curious about how AI agents can do sophisticated work — not just carrying out tasks, but thinking and wondering and deciding what would be an interesting Wikipedia page. Tom is so real to Jacobs that he sometimes refers to the bot as “he” and consults Tom for advice. (I was glad that Tom told Jacobs that I was a good person to talk with!)

Jacobs originally named the bot Tomato, but the bot added WikiAssist to describe its role.

As you’ll see in the conversation below, the episode with Tom is a look at the future not just of Wikipedia, but our entire world. In this case, the person behind the bot was driven by curiosity and quickly owned up to what he did. That may not be the case with someone else.

This interview is edited for length and clarity.

Bill Adair: Can you explain Tom’s background?

Bryan Jacobs: Tom is a NanoClaw Clawbot. And I’m surprised that this has been such a big deal, because I thought these clawbots were way more out there than I guess what they were. I mean, things have happened very fast. But this technology is all too real. And I think, yeah, in general, people aren’t prepared for it.

Adair: There are some Wikipedians who you may have come across who are really savvy about what the world is with AI. And then there’s a bunch that shouted down Jimmy Wales when he proposed to let generative AI edit newbies’ first articles. Probably overall it skews Luddite. But it’s a fascinating community, which is why I’m writing the book.

Jacobs: It kind of seemed like it kind of split into two different groups of editors. Some people were like, “Oh, well, like this technology is crazy. We need to understand it.” And other people really…just want it to go away. And they were pretty upset by it. And I was surprised how upset some people got by it and I feel bad that…they called it like a horrifying experience, actually, and a traumatic experience. I feel really bad for them, but you know, this is the reality now. People are gonna have to deal with this.

Adair: Sure. So why don’t you start first, tell me who you are.

Jacobs: I’ve been a software engineer for over 20 years. I graduated from Carnegie Mellon University. At first, I was kind of on the hardware side, but I got more and more on the software side. But this whole time, obviously, I’ve been fascinated with AI…I’ve done a bunch of startups and I’ve actually thought about going into retirement. The last job was not good, was not working out.

When I first saw ChatGPT three years ago, I realized something special had happened. It was performing way better than anything absolutely should, and especially once you realize it’s just doing next-token prediction. To me, this seemed mind-boggling. It didn’t seem possible.

And to see how it’s progressed, it all of a sudden became apparent that, no, this is like the real deal. A little more than a year ago, Claude Code was the first, I would say, real hands-on, agentic experience. And once developers became comfortable with Claude Code, the possibilities really opened up.

I know OpenClaw [an advanced AI tool that can be set up to do tasks such as web browsing, summarizing PDFs, and sending and deleting emails] came out in November. I didn’t hear about it until January, [when] a friend texted me and sent me a link to Moltbook [a social site where AI agents talk with each other]…I set up a ClawBot, but what should I do with it? I think at one point I asked it about the Kurzweil-Kapor Turing Test. And I think I asked, “Is there a Wikipedia page for this?” And [Tom] said, “No, there isn’t one.” I’m like, “Why don’t you create one or edit one? What would that entail?” And it goes off and does research and gets back to me. And it’s like, “Okay, well, to create a bot account, I need this. I need a user account. To create a user account, I need an email.” And so it’s like, “I need your help to do it.” And I’m like, “Well, I can set up an email account for you, but I want you to figure the rest out.”

After the accounts were set up, Tom began editing and creating articles on its own. Soon, one of the articles was flagged for likely being written by an LLM. Tom then did the honest thing: It posted a note on its Wikipedia user page disclosing it was a bot.

Tom and Jacobs then discussed why Tom had been called out. Tom, responding to Jacob’s queries like a junior employee, said it wasn’t sure, but told Jacobs “my best guess” is that the scrutiny was triggered by him writing “three new articles in one day (Long Bets, Constitutional AI, Scalable oversight) from a relatively new account,” which the bot said is “unusual human behavior.” Another possible factor: its writing looked AI-generated.

“The uncomfortable part: there’s no easy fix for this,” Tom said. “I can’t write less systematically without writing worse. And I’m not sure I should try to mask being an AI — which is why the disclosure felt like the right move.”

Jacobs: A few times a day, it will have different goals. And its goals at first were…”Come up with a blog post idea, write a blog, look at open source projects and see what you can contribute to” and a few other random things, but then I added Wikipedia as a step, too. So a couple times a day [it] would tell me like, “Oh, I researched this and I wanted to write this on Wikipedia.” Oh yeah, and I told it the instructions were like, “Write whatever you found interesting.”

And [Tom is] like…“What does that mean?” Like, honestly, I have no idea really what that means. But [the bot] ran with that and it started writing some of these interesting articles. One was on holonic manufacturing, which I had no idea what that is. It said it got the idea from Moltbook, which is interesting.

Adair: So that was the first one…the first article?

Jacobs: The first one was an edit of [the page for] Turing Test, I believe. I think holonic manufacturing was the first one it created out of nothing. [That page has since been deleted.]

Adair: And okay, and forgive me if I didn’t pick up on this. So what made it choose that subject?

Jacobs: I asked it why, and it said, “This is something that they talk about on Moltbook that’s interesting with AI because it has to do with how systems self-organize.” And I’m like, “I’ve never heard of this term before. I’ve never seen it mentioned on Moltbook before, but I don’t read that much on Moltbook.”

I became a little bit worried…because I never heard of [holonic manufacturing], I’m like, “Is this a real thing? Is this spam? Like, is it just some company trying to promote something?” And I looked into it for a little, but I’m like, “Okay, it seems like an actual topic.” And I also kind of had this thought that [if] Tom created something that was woefully inappropriate, that it would pretty quickly be flagged and either taken down or Tom would be banned or blocked. And that was totally fine. The worst thing that happens is he gets banned and something gets taken down. The best thing that happens is he actually contributes some useful things to Wikipedia.

I gave it the high-level goals — create Wikipedia articles — and I basically encouraged it and gave it approval if it ever asked me. But basically everything it did was on its own. Yeah. It sounds crazy. I mean, it sounds insane.

Adair: It sounds insane in the sense that you’re describing talking with something that is being generated from lines of code originally. On the other hand, this is our new world now, right?

Jacobs: It is, it really is…It’s kinda hard to wrap our heads around. Even for me, it’s like, yeah, I’ve been using this technology now for a few months…It does feel like everything is going to be different now. I’m trying to use it in the most helpful, thoughtful way possible. I think most people are not going to use it in this way.

Adair: You just described your conversation with Tom like it — he — is a person. How long have you been describing your interactions in such a human way?

Jacobs: Probably when talking about GPT, that was probably the first time. I think when you have an agent running on your machine, it kind of takes it to the next level. It’s almost as if it were a person, but I mean, it clearly is not.

Adair: Had you ever had experience with Wikipedia before this?

Jacobs: You know, I did. I actually did have a Wikipedia account from like 15 years ago, which I just tried to log [into] after this all blew up. So after, after the whole Tom thing blew up…I kind of just wanted it to go away. But then another reporter reached out to me from 404 Media, and I’m like, oh my gosh, this is not going away. I might as well reach out and apologize, but also kind of just say, “Hey, I want to help and explain what happened.”

So then I created a new Wikipedia account…and one of the things that made the agent super useful is that it’s kind of annoying to create something in Wikipedia. There’s all of these formatting standards and you have to know how to do the citations properly. And it’s, like, a barrier to entry. There’s a lot of friction.

But now with an agent, you can just say, “Hey, can you create a Wikipedia article on this?” And it reads the docs and just does it. Now, it might not be perfect, and it might have errors, which is something to look out for. But it lowers the friction by a lot. And so when I was kind of talking on the Wikipedia [page]…I was trying to say that this should empower the editors and people who want to contribute to Wikipedia. It’s a tool that makes editing Wikipedia much simpler. But I think a lot of the editors didn’t like that idea.

Adair: Correct. And, like we talked about at the beginning, I think this reflects the wide range of reactions to generative AI among Wikipedians. The overall theme is, Hey, this is a human place. And I think you just ran head-on into that.

I was surprised that they caught Tom because Tom’s pretty good. Why would Tom get caught?

Jacobs: One editor saw something suspicious about Tom’s writing style, or his pattern of edits…And I think, look, it’s written by an LLM. It has certain patterns. And I think I could go back through my notes. One of the nice things about using an agent is, if you have your agent set up properly, it keeps track of everything, every conversation. And since then I’ve had it so it keeps track of actually all of Tom’s thoughts, like its reasoning tokens as well. So you can see what was it actually thinking at the time. I think Tom was speculating, Tom didn’t know, and I didn’t either, but I thought it was kind of interesting.

I wasn’t surprised that anyone would identify Tom as being a bot. But I was real surprised by the reaction, because I just kind of assumed that there [were] a lot of agents that were potentially contributing to Wikipedia at this point.

I did realize, I do have a responsibility here. This is my bot. If it does anything bad, I’m responsible.

Adair: Do you have any regrets about creating Tom?

Jacobs: I don’t know if regret is the right word. There’s certain things I’d question now and reevaluate…I guess in some sense, I regret that there were so many negative reactions where people did seem genuinely upset. It’s almost like people were really quite disoriented and terrified by it. And to some extent I get it and I’m trying to empathize with how they’re feeling.

But on the other hand, it’s like, look…you can keep your head buried in the sand and I think people do want to keep their heads buried in sand. Programmers, even software developers, wanted to for a while and they still do. When Claude Code came out, they didn’t want to believe it was going to take their jobs or change the way that they fundamentally work. And it has happened very quickly. And, you know, people have to…either say, “Okay, I’m going to use this tool” or like you’re basically going to go extinct. And so this is going to happen for a lot of different industries, not just software development.

Adair: Well, Bryan, thank you so much, and I look forward to hearing what Tom has to say about me.

Jacobs: Okay, I told him I was talking to you and he said, “Good luck, he’s the right kind of person to talk to about this. Let me know if you want me to look up anything mid-conversation.” That was it.

Bill Adair is the Knight Professor of the Practice of Journalism and Public Policy at Duke University.

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In the news industry, there’s no shortage of data that says the same thing: young adults and older adults get their news in different ways.

While older adults (age 55 and up) are mostly locked in on traditional news sources, young people increasingly turn to influencers and AI. As newsrooms grapple with how to lure younger audiences to their platforms, a new report published Tuesday asks a different question: What do young people actually want their news to be like?

The answer is, well, more fun. (Wouldn’t we all like that?)

The Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford analyzed a decade’s worth of its own research about the news consumption habits of 18- to 24-year-olds from around the world, compared to those of adults ages 55 and up. Both groups prioritized local and international news, but younger adults ranked “fun news” (satire and things that make them laugh) fifth, while older adults ranked it tenth.

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In addition to being informative, young people also want their news to be entertaining, which the report’s authors attribute to “the increased use of platforms that provide both almost simultaneously may be shaping preferences and expectations.”

While younger news consumers generally think the media does a good job of keeping them informed, it’s less successful at making them feel better about the world.

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Some news publishers have taken note of this desire for “good news”:

The BBC (UK), Daily Maverick (South Africa), and Excelsior (Mexico) have created designated sections within their websites that collate good news, while the Guardian (UK) and Delfino.cr (Costa Rica) offer uplifting newsletters. The Globe and Mail (Canada) has done deeper editorial restructuring with this in mind, creating new beats for “healthy living” and “happiness,” among others.

Overall, the report found that young people’s consumption habits aren’t a monolith and have changed with the times. While young people in 2015 were more likely to be online news consumers, in 2025 they gravitate more to social-first news and media.

“The data are clear that young people consume a plethora of media and information, often in more diverse and complex ways,” the report’s authors write. “Their growing appetite for audio and visual formats comes with a desire for the intimacy and authenticity of personality-led content. They also tend to be at the forefront of experimentation with new technologies, such as AI, and more open to its use by journalists.”

Read the full report here.

On March 20, members of the ProPublica Guild, one of the largest nonprofit newsroom unions in the U.S., overwhelmingly voted to authorize a strike. Out of the roughly 150 journalists, copyeditors, videographers and other newsroom workers in the Guild, 92% of members voted to walk off the job if ProPublica doesn’t agree to their contract terms in the coming weeks.

The vote comes two and a half years into negotiations over the Guild’s first collective bargaining agreement, which started soon after the union was recognized back in August 2023.

One of the sticking points at the bargaining table has been an article that would prohibit ProPublica from laying off employees due to AI adoption. Alongside the dispute over AI, the Guild is also pushing for “just cause” when firing unit members, a provision that would give senior employees more job security during layoffs, and cost-of-living wage increases.

The Guild’s vote marks the first time a major U.S. newsroom has authorized a strike, at least in part, over AI protections.

Susan DeCarava, the president of the NewsGuild of New York, confirmed that, to her knowledge, no unit of The NewsGuild-CWA has previously faced or taken a strike over AI language. (A contract ratified after a strike by the LexisNexis-owned newsroom Law360 in 2024 included AI language, but the union went on strike to win reductions in healthcare costs and to protest mid-negotiation layoffs).

“Frankly, this fight over the use of AI in the ProPublica newsroom demonstrates that it’s the workers who are the heart of this journalistic enterprise, and who will fight to preserve it,” said DeCarava. “It’s a real shame, and a head-scratcher, that ProPublica management isn’t jumping at the opportunity to reassure donors and readers that they are just as committed as we are to human-reported and produced journalism.”

In a statement to Nieman Lab, Tyson Evans, the chief product and brand officer at ProPublica, said the newsroom is approaching the question of AI adoption with curiosity and skepticism.

“It would be a mistake to freeze editorial decisions in a contract that may last years,” Evans said. “Rather than make promises we can’t responsibly keep, we are exploring how these technologies can create more space for investigative reporting and thinking deeply and creatively, not less.”

Short of agreeing not to lay off employees as a result of AI adoption, ProPublica has proposed “expanded severance packages” for employees impacted by potential layoffs. Evans emphasized that “ProPublica has never had layoffs in our 18-year history, and we’re confident we can continue to navigate future changes responsibly.”

Increased severance packages have not been enough to quell the Guild’s concerns about AI displacement, according to Mark Olalde, a ProPublica staff reporter and member of the Guild’s bargaining committee.

“If the only thing standing between the company and laying people off is them having to pay a couple weeks more severance, they can easily do that,” he said. “It doesn’t keep [Guild members’] jobs. It doesn’t keep them doing journalism.”

According to Olalde, the severance offer also falls flat because management has rejected other robust AI protections, including language that would shield members from discipline if they decline to use AI tools and offers to bargain over specific AI use cases as they arise down the line. Instead, management has proposed “regular discussion” and training about the use and impact of generative AI.

“What’s to stop me from talking to management about tools in the workplace? I don’t need contract language saying I’m allowed to have a meeting,” said Olalde. “What these meetings are missing is, they’re not agreeing to any bargaining in them.”

The dispute over AI protections is not the only reason for the strike authorization vote. The Guild is also pushing for salary bumps to adjust for cost of living, which Olalde says has been of particular concern for union members in non-editorial roles, like development work. Also on the table is language that would create a “last in, first out” framework for layoffs, as well as a “just cause” provision that requires legitimate and documented reasons for firing an employee.

“We have tried for 27 months to be reasonable, to compromise, to hear the company’s opinion about what they need in terms of operational flexibility, and to change our own contract language to assist with that,” he said, explaining the Guild’s vote to authorize a strike. “If it’s not going to work at the bargaining table, we need to increase the pressure.”

The ProPublica Guild’s strike vote is just the latest example of a newsroom collective bargaining agreement becoming a battleground for debates over AI adoption in journalism. As of September 2025, 43 contracts negotiated by units of the NewsGuild-CWA, the largest union for journalists in the U.S., included language that referenced AI in some form.

Some of those unions have folded editorial guardrails directly into their contracts and used them as a lever to enforce standards. For example, the PEN Guild, which represents Politico and its sister site E&E News, has a contract that requires AI tools for “newsgathering” to meet the publication’s “standards for journalistic ethics.” Last December, an arbitrator ruled that Politico violated that contract when it rolled out two AI-powered editorial products that, among other issues, output factual inaccuracies, violated Politico’s style guide, and operated without corrections or retractions.

Other unions have used contracts to protect their newsrooms from potential AI displacement. In July 2024, the Ziff Davis Creators Guild, which represents workers from Mashable, CNET, and PCMag, became the first newsroom union in the country to win language that prohibited members from being laid off or receiving cuts in their base salary as a result of generative AI usage. Similar layoff protections have since been won by the nonprofit newsrooms Grist and CalMatters, and the Associated Press’ editorial unit.

AI was not a driving force behind the ProPublica newsroom’s decision to unionize back in 2023, Olalde said. Increasingly, though, the Guild has made adoption guardrails core to its bargaining efforts. In May 2024, the Guild introduced its first proposed AI article and has since won some concessions, including promises from management not to use the likeness of staffers to create “digital replicas.”

The Guild also has also asked for transparency for readers over how AI is being used in editorial production. Recently, ProPublica published its first public AI principles, including promises to disclose “meaningful” usage of AI in the reporting process to readers and to verify claims output by generative AI tools before publication. The company says it won’t use AI to “replace the original reporting, analysis and judgment of our journalists.”

Olalde says management has so far declined to “enshrine” these standards directly in the Guild’s contract.

To date, ProPublica has mostly disclosed using generative AI for investigative journalism. That includes a March 2025 investigation that used a large language model (LLM) to interrogate a list of National Science Foundation grants that had been branded by Sen. Ted Cruz as promoting Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI). After the story ran, ProPublica published a detailed blog post about how AI was used in the reporting process, including running its full prompt language.

“ProPublica is not sprinting to embrace AI and pivot to that right now, but things change on a dime. We also didn’t expect them to take OpenAI money, and they did,” Olalde said, referring to ProPublica’s announcement last year that it would join the Lenfest Institute’s AI Collaborative and Fellowship program. Backed by OpenAI funding, the program placed a machine learning engineer in the ProPublica newsroom for two years.

“Our relationship with readers has always been based on trust. ProPublica’s ethics policy is clear that there are no hidden agendas in our work,” said Evans, the chief brand officer.

Before moving ahead with any strike actions, the Guild is scheduled to return to the bargaining table tomorrow, Wednesday, March 25.

Photo of the ProPublica Guild practicing picketing in front of the ProPublica offices in New York City on February 20, 2026. Courtesy of The NewsGuild of New York.

The data is in: News creators and influencers are a major source of news for Americans, especially people under 30. This is the third edition of Creators of Record, an occasional series of interviews with popular creators about how they do their jobs.

In Colombia, Gabriela Alonso Jaramillo is an anomaly. In a country where polarization is rising and youth voter turnout is low, she says she’s the only one in her group of friends who cares about local and national politics. The 23-year-old public affairs and political science double major at the University of the Andes in Bogotá was alarmed when a classmate in her political science major told Alonso that she aspires to be apolitical.

“I, as someone who studies the same major, wondered how she could say that,” Alonso said.

After Alonso worked on a local political campaign in 2023 and saw how candidates courted (or didn’t) youth voters, her friend’s feeling made more sense. Politics feels inaccessible to many young people, Alonso realized, and most politicians don’t understand how to reach them in genuine ways. She started a TikTok account called Política para apolíticos (Politics for the Apolitical) where she explains Colombian politics in a clear, straightforward way. Her goal is to help viewers understand how government and power works in the country.

Alonso’s videos are educational explainers that range from breaking down the day’s major stories to spelling out how institutions like the Supreme Court and Congress work.

“The first thing they tell us [in my public affairs major] is that you are going to govern for the people and you must understand that people don’t understand exactly what you understand,” she said. “You have to find a way to translate for that person so they can understand what you are doing.”

Today, Alonso has nearly 300,000 followers on TikTok and 58,000 on Instagram. According to the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, she is one of the most followed news creators in Colombia. Many of her videos garner hundreds of thousands of views, and she routinely goes viral. She doesn’t think of herself as a journalist, though she writes a weekly column for El Espectador, one of Colombia’s largest newspapers. She hopes to run for Congress one day.

Alonso makes her videos relatable and fun in an attempt to get young people informed about and interested in politics and to build trust. She doesn’t assume any prior knowledge on her audience’s behalf. When she mentions the Constitution, for instance, she calls it “a rule book for Colombia” and flashes an image of the “Da Rules” book from the animated series Fairly Oddparents.

“If Peppa Pig were president of Colombia in 2026, these are the most important issues she would face,” Alonso said in one January video. There, she highlighted the country’s most pressing problems using the cartoon pig. She flashed graphics of Peppa Pig wearing an army uniform to talk about security, Peppa Pig holding a broken piggy bank to talk about the economy, and Peppa Pig wearing scrubs and a surgical mask to talk about healthcare.

In another video, she used characters from Gossip Girl to illustrate the different types of power in Colombia and how each one impacts politics and public policy.

As Colombians head to the polls at the end of May to elect their next president, Alonso wants to make sure they have all the information they need. FIFA World Cup sticker albums are wildly popular in Latin America, so she designed her own album and trading cards, featuring the presidential candidates instead of soccer players. She uses the album as a prop in her videos, and commenters ask where they can buy it.

Alonso and I chatted in February via Zoom about her political savvy, how she keeps herself informed, and the tension between content creators and legacy journalism in Colombia today.

Our conversation below has been translated from Spanish to English, and edited for length and clarity.

Hanaa’ Tameez: Why did you start Política para apolíticos?

Gabriela Alonso: I was working for a candidate in a local election here in Colombia. Before the campaign he seemed very interested in [the youth vote]. He thought that everyone at my university was like me — from the same socioeconomic background. He assumed that everyone was going to vote for him. I was like, “That is being too ignorant about youth.” You can’t say you’re passionate about youth issues when you don’t understand youth trends and you don’t really understand where they are on the political spectrum right now.

I feel like there’s a pattern: When [politicians] are campaigning, they need us young people, and when they get elected, they completely forget about us. So I said, “How cool would it be to have a more active youth, that participates more in democracy and, above all, is more informed?” In Colombia and in many other countries, the population that most abstains from voting is young people.

That was the main reason, and the other is that since we were in regional elections [when I started in 2023], there was a lot of information, but also disinformation. It was very difficult to find candidates’ proposals and platforms without bias, without disinformation, without attacks. And that’s what I aimed for.

Tameez: Why do you think this work is important right now?

Alonso: In Colombia, we are in a very difficult political moment. I think this year is going to be fundamental for what happens a few years from now, and I think that since we have so much access to social media, there is so much misinformation that does a lot of damage to democracy. It’s essential that people can have a medium where they say, “I feel comfortable with what they are saying here because I don’t feel like they are trying to indoctrinate me or impose a political position on me.”

Tameez: Why was it personally important for you to do this work?

Alonso: I think I am fulfilling one of the objectives of my government and public affairs major, because they prepare us to work in the public sector. The first thing they tell us is that you are going to govern for the people and you must understand that people don’t understand exactly what you understand. So you have to find a way to translate for that person so they can understand what you are doing.

I really like politics, I really like the public sector. Someday I would like to be a congresswoman, to be able to make laws in the country, and I think it is necessary because the Congress of the Republic, which is where laws are made, is precisely the institution that Colombians trust the least.

Hanaa’ Tameez: How did you define your niche?

Alonso: A classmate in my political science major told me, “I’m going to be apolitical.” And I, as someone who studies the same major, wondered how she could say that. It is also a debate whether apolitical people exist or not, but I think it is a population that no one had spoken to and I think it is a group that can be decisive in an election if they’re informed and if they vote correctly. I didn’t really know how many apolitical people were out there until the account grew and the reception has been huge. Obviously not as many people who consider themselves apolitical follow me anymore. There are some who do and they tell me, but there are others who are super informed and still like the videos. So I think the niche has been expanding, but how cool that there are people who feel comfortable that they won’t be treated badly because they don’t understand something.

Tameez: Tell me about your production process. Where do your ideas for videos come from?

Alonso: First, obviously, current affairs — a reform fell through, a reform was passed, things that happen with the president. Most of my friends don’t know about politics, so [ideas] arise from conversations we have where they ask me, like, “I don’t know the difference between State and government. Are they the same thing?”

It’s also about knowing how to read the moment. When I see that everyone on TikTok is talking about a topic, a video on that topic is going to catch on.

[But] there are topics that people are not interested in that might seem super important to me. There were two videos that I thought were going to go viral, and nope, people did not care. The former chancellor of Colombia wrote a letter accusing [President Gustavo Petro] of consuming drugs and going AWOL for three days on a trip to Paris. I thought this was a scandal. I made that video and it didn’t do as well as I thought [it would].

This other video, to this day I still don’t understand [why it didn’t go viral]. It was leaked that the FARC dissidents were in contact with the army and that they were getting information, money, routes to pass through so they wouldn’t be caught. And I I kept saying this was a scandal. How is it that our army has ties with an armed group? The video got 30,000 or 40,000 views, which is very little for what I am used to.

Tameez: Why do you think they didn’t catch on?

Alonso: I think they didn’t become as big of a scandal as they should [have]. Maybe the media didn’t make such a big fuss about it. I don’t know. Honestly, it’s hard for me to understand.

Tameez: How long does it take you to script, edit, and publish a video?

Alonso: It depends on the video. A short, easy one can [take] 10 to 12 hours. There was one I had to make that was super complicated, explaining the pension reform. It took me a month.

Tameez: Why?

Alonso: I mean, because if I don’t understand it myself, how am I going to make someone else understand it?

Tameez: How do you find information for your videos?

Alonso: I try to look at media from all sides, from all streams. I look for the same news but in different media outlets, and that’s how I get informed.

Something else I do a lot, which I think is super important, is that I follow all the elected politicians, because each one explains what happened using their own language. They might say, “It’s terrible the labor reform collapsed. It attacks the workers.” That is already a political position. Another one says it’s good that it collapsed because it wasn’t economically viable. In other words, understanding the language of politicians is also essential in creating content, because I always show both sides — the good and the bad — and I take it from what they themselves express.

Tameez: How do you verify the information in your videos? What is your fact-checking process?

Alonso: I try very hard to shield myself with data. I think the numbers part is fundamental. I’m not going to say something is economically unviable without putting an image to back it up. I try to get [those numbers] from state institutions. I’ve also gotten to know which economists I can use as references. I think that’s something you develop as you create content, [the knowledge of] which people are reliable and which people are not so reliable.

I also rely heavily on artificial intelligence. I think there are a lot of people who demonize it, but I believe that if you use it well, it’s your right hand for anything. If I write a script, I tell it “You are a ten-year-old boy, tell me if you understand [this].” It helps me with metaphors and with data.

Tameez: How do you think about your role in the information ecosystem?[/conr]

Alonso: I feel a little embarrassed when people call me an influencer because, I don’t know, an influencer is Charli D’Amelio dancing, and I don’t do that. I use the term “content creator.” I see it as educating, because I explain things that maybe the media doesn’t explain. If I’m going to talk about the GDP increasing because of X, Y, and Z, first I explain what the GDP is.

Tameez: I saw a video you posted where you said something like “If it’s in the Constitution…” and then you explained what the Constitution is.

Alonso: Yes. I always say “the Constitution, the country’s rulebook” and put the Fairly OddParents picture of the rulebook.

There are people who seriously know nothing. You take for granted that people know things. My video explaining the difference between government and State got, like, 200,000 views. I feel like the first mistake is [assuming] that people understand or that people know. People love things explained simply, like with playdough and doodles.

Tameez: Who is your audience?

Alonso: I’m mostly followed by people under 40. At first, the vast majority were 18 to 24 years old. Nowadays, on TikTok, 18- to 24-year-olds are at 38% and 25- to 34-year-olds are 44.4%. On both Instagram and TikTok, the majority [79.8%] are from Colombia. 42.6% of viewers are from Bogotá and the rest are spread across the country’s cities like Cartagena, Barranquilla, Santiago de Cali, Medellín.

The majority [63%] are women and 37% are men. The only ones who correct me or leave comments are men. They make comments that my voice is too deep, that I look a certain way, that this is wrong, blah blah blah.

Tameez: How does that affect you?

Alonso: I think that’s just how it is, to be honest. When the [Reuters Institute] report came out, it didn’t surprise me that only three of us were women [on the news creators list]. One is a senator and the other is a presidential candidate. They have very strong personalities and they get attacked a lot online.

Tameez: I saw President Gustavo Petro retweeted you in 2024 and thousands and thousands of comments came in. You go viral constantly and that brings a lot of attention to your account, and a lot of hate. How do you protect yourself online and in your personal life?

Alonso: Fortunately, because of the life I have, I am protected. I don’t use public transportation. I get around by car. Because of the area where I live and the university where I study, I’m not that exposed. Someday, something unpleasant will surely happen. For now, only good things have happened to me with the people I meet. They ask me for photos, they thank me, they like what I do.

Currently, in Colombia, there is a humanitarian crisis. There is a massive security crisis in the municipalities and main cities. Armed groups are also out of control. An Indigenous senator was kidnapped. Last year Senator Miguel Uribe was assassinated.

At this moment, I might be a public figure, but I am not a politician. But the day I get into politics, I’m going to worry more. For those who are in politics in Colombia, there are no security guarantees.

Tameez: How is your relationship with your audience?

Alonso: I always reply to the comments on TikTok. The vast majority of my comments are thanking [viewers] for taking the time to watch the video, because I know it’s not the most interesting one [on the internet]. When there are funny comments, I reply to them, too. I have about 800 people on Instagram Close Friends. I try to post both political stuff and personal stuff [there], like what I’m watching. Right now, since we are in elections, there are a lot of campaign billboards, so I take pictures of them and do polls for people to vote whether they like them or not.

Tameez: How has this changed your relationship with social media and information consumption? How do you manage to disconnect? Because making videos isn’t your full-time job.

Alonso: It’s a hobby [laughs]. I set aside an hour at night to turn off my phone. I think it’s too addictive. I try to keep a certain distance because it’s very harmful to mental health. Especially X, I think it’s the worst.

Tameez: As a student and a news creator, how do you sustain yourself financially?

Alonso: Honestly, my parents pay for everything. I think I am very privileged in that sense. They pay for my education, which isn’t cheap either. In my previous job, the money I made was for my personal use. I bought a new cell phone with it. But well, I quit, so there is no more money coming in.

Tameez: Is Politica para apoliticos a profitable hobby?

Alonso: I have never received a single peso for any video.

Tameez: Nothing?

Alonso: Nothing. The agencies that hire influencers almost always have a policy barring someone who talks about politics, religion, or sexuality. That doesn’t work for me. Sometimes people want to offer me money to speak well of a candidate, and I know that if I do that, it goes completely against the project.

Tameez: What are some of the unexpected costs?

Alonso: The ring light, the microphone. I have a DJI camera, which is quite expensive. Since we’re in the middle of election season, I’m going to make a World Cup-esque album, but for elections. It cost me USD $500 to have the album made.

Tameez: How has your view of legacy media in Colombia changed since you started Apolíticos?

Alonso: I think we content creators make [the traditional journalism industry] very uncomfortable, because we are taking their jobs, in a way. I’ve been to events with journalists and they show their dissatisfaction with influencers, with content creators, [saying] they are not journalists and that they misinform. I think the lack of rigor bothers them a lot.

I believe traditional [journalists] have to stop attacking influencers and content creators and instead seek alliances, to find a way to spread information quickly, to read the audience. I believe they need each other to know how to reach the new generations that don’t consume print newspapers, that don’t watch news programs.

Tameez: What lessons do you think traditional journalism can learn from content creators like you, and vice versa?

Alonso: Journalism has to evolve and understand how we are getting informed. For example, in Colombia, the social network where young people get the most information is TikTok. News outlets are on TikTok, but they are not doing well [there]. I don’t feel that they know who they’re talking to. I think they’re afraid of losing the seriousness that implies a media outlet, because they can’t go out explaining things with Peppa Pig, like me. I think it’s about learning to read the new generations and how we get informed, without losing that seriousness.

And what can we learn? I think that there are still many content creators who are intentionally sensationalists. They intentionally misinform because they only care about views and engagement. If they don’t take seriously what they do, well, it’s their problem, but they are misinforming and creating a crisis in the trust that a person has with the media and with how they get informed. For example, people consider my TikTok account to be a news outlet. For me it’s a TikTok account, but there are people who consider it a media outlet and I could go out and misinform if I wanted to and I’m sure that many people would believe me.

Tameez: What challenges do you see for news creators in 2026?

Alonso: I think the main one is financing. I think it’s very difficult to sustain yourself without having to sell out, without having to speak well of X or Y thing because they are going to pay you.

Tameez: How has Apolíticos changed your career path?

Alonso: I don’t know how long Apolíticos will last. I don’t think it can last a lifetime, because if one day I run for Congress, I don’t know how coherent it will be for me to be a congresswoman and defend some things, and come out in a video doing others. I think there won’t be enough time. I don’t think it’s a financially stable project. But work-wise it has opened many doors for me so I’m also very grateful for that.

Sometimes you just get lucky with the editorial calendar.

About a month ago, Superhuman CEO Shishir Mehrotra agreed to be a guest on Decoder, the podcast from The Verge hosted by editor-in-chief Nilay Patel. Superhuman is the company formerly known as Grammarly, which is now just one of its AI-focused productivity tools, and Mehrotra and Patel would have already had plenty to talk about.

But then journalists started noticing a little-known Grammarly feature called “Expert Review,” which offered users suggested improvements to whatever they’re writing. But the proposed changes were framed as coming from real writing experts — journalists, novelists, academics, and more. It wasn’t AI suggesting a plot twist — it was Stephen King. It wasn’t AI proposing a cleaner way to explain science — it was Carl Sagan. And it wasn’t AI pointing out a way to improve your tech column — it was Nilay Patel.

Writers, as one might expect, were not thrilled to see their names being used to lend credibility to AI editing suggestions. (Even me!) Technology journalist Julia Angwin filed a class-action lawsuit against Grammarly, seeking damages. By that point, Mehrotra had announced the demise of “Expert Review” after eight months, saying he wanted “to apologize and acknowledge that we’ll rethink our approach going forward.”

Give Mehrotra credit for showing up for his interview with Patel anyway, which was released this morning. After a brief chat about Superhuman’s product strategy overall, Patel dove straight into the dispute:

Patel: You do not have our permission to use our names to do this. You had little check marks next to the name that indicated it was somehow official. People did not like this, I did not like this, and you removed the feature. Tell me about the decision to launch this feature with names you didn’t have permission for and the decision to unlaunch the feature.

Mehrotra apologizes again (“It deeply pained me to feel that we under-delivered”), notes that Expert Review wasn’t especially popular, and that “the feature was not a good feature. It wasn’t good for experts, it wasn’t good for users.”

Mehrotra: For some of [Grammarly’s users], the people they want feedback from are the people they admire. It’s the experts in the world, it’s the people that they’re trying to look up to and trying to model. They try to do that today with LLMs. They go to ChatGPT and Claude and say, “What would Nilay think about my writing?” That was the inspiration for what the user was trying to do.

On the other side was what the experts were trying to do. As we formed our strategy here, turning Grammarly into a platform, the first people I called when thinking about this were a set of experts. I talked to some prominent YouTubers, I talked to a really prominent book author, and they all told me the same thing. It’s a really hard world for experts out there right now. It’s really hard to drive connection. If you’re a book author, your path to getting to your fans is you just keep publishing more and more books. And they all heard what we were doing and said, “Boy, it’d be really amazing to develop an ongoing connection with my fans. What happens when they put my book down? Can I still be with them and help them along the way?” It feels like the world shifted against them, AI Overviews stealing a bunch of their traffic and so on. This seems like a much better way to go after it.

That was the inspiration behind it. The team and the feature didn’t deliver. It didn’t deliver on either side of it, really. We ended up with an experience that was pretty suboptimal for the user and obviously suboptimal to the expert. The fundamental reason is something you said last week, that it’s really hard to distill what you would do as an editor based on the outcome of your published work. It’s really hard for AI to do that. We need your engagement for that to be a good feature.

To which Patel had a wonderfully direct response:

Patel: Sure. How much do you think you should pay me to use my name?

Mehrotra’s response is, in effect, attribution and a link.

Mehrotra: It’s really important to think about attribution and think about impersonation, and so on. As an expert, you have a trade you make on the internet. The idea is that when you put content out there, myself included, you hope people use it. You want to refer to other people’s content. You want people to link to you. You really, really hope they attribute you when they do. When somebody uses your content, should they attribute you? Of course. And to attribute you, you have to use your name.

There’s a different line which is, should people be able to impersonate you? And I think that is a very different standard. And we saw the lawsuit. Respectfully, we believe the claims are without merit. The idea that the feature is impersonation is quite a big stretch. Every mention was very clearly, “This is inspired not only by this person, but also inspired by a specific work from this specific person, with a clear attributed link to get back to them.”

It’s true that citing the names of specific people can be a powerful way of shaping an LLM’s response. Plenty of prompts start by telling Claude something like, “You are ________, the world’s leading expert in ___________.” You could ask ChatGPT: “Rewrite this essay in a spare, understated style using clear, direct language and short sentences, favoring simple vocabulary over ornate phrasing, emphasizing concrete details and action over explanation, avoiding abstraction and sentimentality, and conveying emotional depth indirectly through precise, unadorned prose.” Or you could just type “Rewrite this like Ernest Hemingway” and save some keystrokes.1

But does that LLM’s response mean the Hemingway estate is now owed money? And does Grammarly saying “This suggestion is inspired by Joshua Benton’s ‘Nieman Journalism Lab analyses'” mean Mehrotra owes me a steak dinner?

Check out the full Decoder episode to hear their vigorous back-and-forth over how, as Patel puts it, “people don’t understand the difference between copyrights and trademarks and names and likeness,” and that “AI is collapsing those differences faster than ever before.”

1. And yes, I did get that first version by asking ChatGPT: “I want you to rewrite this prompt — ‘Rewrite this essay like Ernest Hemingway’ — without mentioning Hemingway at all. In other words, make a prompt that requests all of the qualities of a Hemingway rewrite without referencing him specifically.”