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...
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...
“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...
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...
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....
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...
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...
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...
Will AI come for my job? This is the question at the heart of AI anxieties across many industries right now. For journalists, this question is constantly being re-pondered and re-examined as more companies are incorporating AI into their workflows. AI can help with research and background. It can do transcriptions and translations, generate illustrations, and produce podcasts...
