The Nieman Foundation for Journalism

On March 7, education reporter Hannah Dellinger published a story on the experiences of Michigan LGBTQ+ students since Donald Trump took office. Dellinger spoke to several students who have seen a rise in hate speech at school after the president signed a series of anti-trans executive orders. The lead voice in the story was Sebastian…

NICAR — the National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting1 — is one of my favorite annual journalism conferences, even if I haven’t been in a few years. That’s because it’s uniquely easy to benefit from even without attending. As the nation’s news nerds descend on a city (this year Minneapolis), they come bearing PDFs and slide…

When Ruth Marcus resigned from her position as an associate editor and longtime political columnist at the Washington Post on March 10, she said it was because Post publisher Will Lewis had killed one of her columns. Specifically, she’d written a column criticizing Post owner Jeff Bezos’ vision for an opinion page that advocated for…

Let’s start at the end. The acknowledgements of Murder the Truth, a startling and deeply researched new book by New York Times journalist and editor David Enrich, thanks the Times’ “unflappable” in-house lawyer. The business investigations unit overseen by Enrich has repeatedly been targeted by threats that are part of a larger campaign to weaponize…

If you care about public media and have read any news mentioning the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in 2025, chances are it’s been something scary / depressing / grim about how the president wants to defund it (not a new threat, but one that feels more real than it did a few years ago). That’s…

Wendy Monterrosa and her colleagues founded news site Voz Pública in El Salvador in 2020. A year into Nayib Bukele’s presidency, marked by frequent attacks on journalists, Voz Pública built a small newsroom focused on fact-checking and investigative journalism. But everything crashed down in early February when Donald Trump put on hold any funding from the United States Agency for…

Over the past year, AI chatbots have been widely criticized for how poorly they cite news publishers, and how little traffic they drive to the publishers they do cite properly. ChatGPT has often been at the center of this conversation. Last summer, I reported that ChatGPT frequently hallucinated fake URLs to news sites, even to…

Joe Rogan is, if nothing else, prolific. He’s published 2,286 episodes in the 15-ish years he’s been making his podcast, at an average of a little over two and a half hours each. New episodes drop three or four times a week, which means getting the full Joe Rogan Experience would take about 240 days…

Politico Pro is a high-priced item ($12,000 or more annually!) that is targeted at a demanding audience of lobbyists, agency staffers, corporate execs, industry think-tankers, and oligarchs either real or aspiring. It attempts to give high-leverage intel about the world of D.C. policy to people in a position to take advantage of that intel. So…

Generative AI hype has launched newsroom experiments around the world. Even though many of these early applications have become cautionary tales, the hype has endured for over two years since OpenAI publicly launched ChatGPT. In many ways, this is familiar territory for journalism. In a long line of digital technologies (smartphones, social media, the infamous…

OptOut News, a news aggregation app that shared journalism from “financially independent” and largely progressive news outlets like The Nation, The Intercept, and Grist, has shut down due to a lack of funding. Co-founder Alex Kotch — formerly an investigative reporter at the Center for Media and Democracy — told OptOut newsletter subscribers on Tuesday evening that…

Disney is cutting 200 positions across ABC News and Disney Entertainment, including shutting down FiveThirtyEight, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday night. From the Journal: The ABC news magazine shows “20/20” and “Nightline” are consolidating into one unit, resulting in job cuts, the people said. ABC is also eliminating the political and data-driven news site…

Billionaire newspaper owners are in the middle of a massive freakout about their Opinion sections during the second Trump administration. Last week, Amazon CEO and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos announced that the Post’s Opinion section would reorient itself “in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets…Viewpoints opposing those pillars will…

When the Taliban took over Afghanistan in 2021, Irish war correspondent Jane Ferguson was in Kabul and decided to stay to report on the aftermath, posting videos on Instagram. Ferguson, who has worked steadily as a freelancer covering conflicts in the Middle East for outlets like Al Jazeera, PBS, and The New Yorker, said that…

Among Ben Romo’s core ’80s memories as a kid growing up in Santa Barbara, CA: Placing third in a Big Wheel race on Leadbetter Beach. That accomplishment was documented in his hometown paper, the more than century-old Santa Barbara News-Press. It was the first time Romo remembers making the paper, but not the last; the…

There’s fresh data on podcast listening habits, and — unlike most podcast research — this study focused on people who regularly consume news podcasts. The Podcast Landscape, sponsored by NPR and conducted by Signal Hill Insights, claims to be the “largest public study of podcasting in America” with responses from 5,071 Americans ages 18 or…

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

What would a local media system that prioritizes working and middle classes over corporate profits and the interests of billionaires look like? A new public policy agenda released this week has some ideas. The Media Power Collaborative, which released its policy framework on Tuesday, describes itself as an organizing space for media workers and their…

News interviews from expert sources’ perspective One of the more consistent (and, sadly, unsurprising) findings in news research around the world is the dominance of men as sources in news stories. Numerous studies have examined the ratio of men to women as sources over the years, including two multinational studies this decade, and have found a fairly…

The thing about American newspaper opinion sections is this: Their owners get final say. If the man who signs the checks — it’s almost always a man — really really really wants to see his cocker spaniel run City Hall, you’ll probably see “Our Choice: Fluffernutter for Mayor” stripped atop the editorial page. For generations…

Mark MacGann is no stranger to the inner workings of power. As Uber’s chief lobbyist in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, he played a central role in the company’s aggressive global expansion, convincing governments and regulators that Uber’s gig-economy model was a force for good. But in 2022, MacGann was revealed as the whistleblower behind the Uber Files, a trove of over 100,000 documents and 18 gigabytes of data exposing the company’s ethically dubious practices, including misleading world leaders, bypassing local laws, and refusing to provide basic labor protections to its drivers.  The global investigation into Uber was led […]

National Public Radio (NPR) aired its first broadcast on May 3, 1971, marking the debut of its flagship news program “All Things Considered.” The format was a radical departure from commercial radio at the time, and featured immersive audio design and a narrative-driven, conversational approach. The program opened with a 24-minute audio portrait of a massive anti-Vietnam War protest in Washington, D.C., and was followed by an eclectic mix of segments — including a conversation between Allen Ginsberg and his father about LSD and youth counterculture. Thus, the first NPR program was born. In a new book about NPR’s 50-year […]

The presidential election had a clear winner: Donald Trump. But Kamala Harris wasn’t the only loser. There was another campaign fatality eulogized by the press: fact-checking.  “Last Stand of the Pinocchio,” read a Slate headline on election eve. “It’s time to abandon the foremost symbol of journalistic impotence in the Trump era.”  Having run out of superlatives to describe Trump’s persistent legacy of lies, many critics concluded that the fault was in ourselves. If fact-checking worked, his campaign would have failed or, at the least, the lies would have abated. It was a compelling argument, natural to journalists who seek […]

Old-style newspaper boxes flank the entrance. From beyond them comes the smell of ink and newsprint. When the presses roll, the floor vibrates.  The building that houses the Portland Press Herald seems a throwback to journalism’s heyday. In fact, it’s part of a case study of the industry’s potential future.  What happens when the outlets producing most of the news in a state become nonprofit? With little outside notice, that has quietly but steadily been taking place in Maine, New England’s northernmost state. Most of the daily and many of the weekly newspapers have come under the ownership of the […]

Phchum Ben, a popular 15-day festival in Cambodia, is a time when people gather with their families to honor their ancestors. Dressed in traditional Khmer clothing, they bring meals to pagodas where monks chant and pray. Some, hoping for luck and good health, release birds into the sky as they make a wish.  During a recent Phchum Ben celebration, however, the reality for Mech Dara, one of Cambodia’s best-known investigative journalists, was the opposite of that of those free-flying birds: he was headed for a metal cage. Dara had been on his way home from celebrating the festival last September […]

James Okong’o, a 2025 Nieman Fellow, was until recently a digital investigation journalist for Agence France-Presse (AFP), covering Anglophone African countries from his base in Nairobi, Kenya.  It is not uncommon in Africa today for public figures to quietly retract debunked claims, or even to issue public apologies.  Take, for example, the apology issued by police in Nairobi, Kenya, after a colleague at Agence France-Presse and I uncovered their use of unrelated photos from past protests to hunt down individuals linked to violent anti-government demonstrations in 2023. Such an official mea culpa would have been unthinkable in the time before […]

Becoming the editor of a campus paper is daunting. Student journalists are signing up for long hours of hunching over proof sheets, managing staff and making tough coverage calls. Drake White-Bergey expected all that. What he didn’t expect was the harassment.  White-Bergey, a recent graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, just ended his tenure as editor-in-chief of The Daily Cardinal, a nonprofit independent student newspaper. During his months in office, he told me, harassment was something he had “come to live with and work around.” The most extreme case came around the start of the Israel-Hamas war in October 2023 […]

Whenever Alessandra Loche walks her dog, Samantha, down Via Marconi in the northern Italian city of Bergamo, flashbacks of army men loudly loading coffins on their trucks send shivers down her spine. “It takes me a few seconds to get back to the present, even after all this time,” she said with a slumbering tone of voice and sadness in her eyes. “My body stops shaking once I calm down with breathing exercises I learned during therapy.” Today Loche is a freelance reporter covering the court beat for a variety of Italian outlets, but five years ago she was a […]

Picture a world where evidence doesn't matter, where the loudest voices win, and where calling out falsehoods is seen as an act of bias. Welcome to 2025. Donald Trump — the most fact-checked presidential candidate in history, because he’s spoken the most falsehoods — won the White House again. The social media company Meta, which owns Facebook, ended its third-party fact-checking program, with CEO Mark Zuckerberg claiming that fact-checkers are biased. Partisan podcasters and viral video snippets command attention, while the business models for longform journalism struggle. Public trust in news in the United States is at an all-time low, […]

Last year, I was invited to attend The New York Times’ Adversarial Reporting Training, a four-day course designed to teach reporters how to stay safe in precarious situations. Known as ART School, the training takes place at a giant photo studio in Brooklyn’s bustling DUMBO neighborhood and includes lessons on conducting risk assessments, minimizing the threat of online harassment, and negotiating protests that turn violent. We practiced dragging weighted dummies across the floor — while being pelted with nerf balls — to simulate transporting a wounded colleague. And we were taught how to change a flat tire and apply tourniquets.  […]