The Nieman Foundation for Journalism

It’s a golden age for those who like to play low-stakes games on the internet. Heck, even LinkedIn knows once-a-day puzzles are great for engagement and getting users to come back again and again. And now we have another game to add to the mix. On Monday, Apple debuted an original word game, called Quartiles,…

Facebook users who deactivated their accounts for six weeks before the 2020 U.S. presidential election weeks may have been less likely to cast a vote for Trump as a result, according to a new study that is the largest of its type to date. The study, “The effects of Facebook and Instagram on the 2020…

In March, NPR’s David Folkenflik and Miranda Green of Floodlight co-published a story about The Richmond Standard, a local news site in the town of Richmond, California, that is wholly owned by Chevron. There are no full-time journalists on staff; a PR firm in San Francisco oversees the publication’s operations. It is, Folkenflik and Green…

Back in March, The Markup broke some news about a small-business advice chatbot being piloted by the New York City government. The bot — available at chat.nyc.gov — was meant to be an AI-powered, one-stop shop for entrepreneurs looking to set up a business. The city said the bot could tell visitors, in plain English,…

This past Monday, 15 works were awarded the Pulitzer Prize for journalism. In a first for the prestigious awards, two of those winners disclosed using AI to produce their stories. “We are not aware of precedents offhand,” said Marjorie Miller, administrator of the Pulitzer Prizes. “Previous data discerns winners may have used low-level machine learning…

In a normal year, the last Thursday of April might have been a quiet day for Northeastern, and for junior Eli Curwin. It was the penultimate day of undergraduate student exams for spring classes, and, like many students, Curwin was set to return home the next day. Just a week before, he had handed off…

Last year the Canadian government passed a law, the Online News Act, that would require platforms like Google and Meta to pay publishers for linking to their content. Rather than pay up, Meta removed news from Facebook and Instagram in Canada. “News links and content posted by news publishers and broadcasters in Canada will no…

Some day in the distant future, scholars looking back on the evolution (devolution?) of the American news business will consider May 6, 2024 a date worthy of note. They’ll see it as the day the most prestigious prizes in journalism reflected the changing face of the field itself. On Monday afternoon, the 108th edition of…

On Monday, the Pulitzer Prizes recognized some of the best journalism by American news outlets, including brilliant examples of local reporting. In the Breaking News category, the award acknowledged “detailed and nimble” coverage of devastating flooding and mudslides by digital startup Lookout Santa Cruz, which is not even four years old. Chicago-based City Bureau and…

On World Press Freedom Day last week, the International Consortium of Investigative Reporters said in a statement that “governments worldwide are failing to protect — and frequently cracking down on — independent media in 2024, casting a shadow over Reporters Without Borders’ annual press freedom rankings in a major global election year.” Decreasing press freedom sometimes…

Legislatures don’t move at the speed of newsrooms. The California legislature now moves into its second year of addressing its state’s shrinking newsrooms. The cry of the Democratic majority is clear: “Save local news.” Yet those three seemingly simple words — “save”, “local,” and “news” — have slowed progress, as legislators parse how the new law may…

Protest movements can look very different depending on where you stand, both literally and figuratively. For protesters, demonstrations are usually the result of meticulous planning by advocacy groups and leaders aimed at getting a message out to a wider world or to specific institutional targets. To outside onlookers, however, protests can seem disorganized and disruptive,…

The Pulitzer Center has officially kicked off The AI Spotlight Series, a new training initiative that aims to teach 1,000 journalists how to do AI accountability reporting over the next two years. On April 21, roughly 40 journalists gathered at the University of California, Berkeley for the inaugural “Introduction to AI reporting” session, which was…

In the United States, many conservatives read news coverage with suspicion or outright hostility. The result is that stories they feel positively about “feel like exceptions” and coverage that “challenges conservative sensibilities, even if fairly, will reinforce pre-existing perceptions,” as Ursinus College journalism professor and Tow Center fellow Doron Taussig wrote in recent work. Fair…

In November, a few days after Sam Altman was fired — and then rehired — as CEO of OpenAI, Reuters reported on a letter that may have played a role in Altman’s ouster. Several staffers reportedly wrote to the board of directors warning about “a powerful artificial intelligence discovery that they said could threaten humanity.”…

In December, the Tenement Museum in New York City opened its latest exhibit, “A Union of Hope: 1869”. The exhibit is a carefully curated recreation of Joseph and Rachel Moore’s apartment in SoHo, that aims to immerse visitors into what life (and home) was like for the couple at that time. It was the first…

The press rewards negative politicians with attention, and that engenders more negativity. Politics can seem almost synonymous with negativity, with politicians bashing opponents with almost reckless abandon — at political rallies, in attack ads, on congressional floors, and on TV. Which begs the question: Does all this negativity actually work — and what’s causing it in the first…

The Financial Times is the latest major news publisher to sign a content licensing deal with OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT. The new deal will allow ChatGPT to pull information in real time from the FT’s published stories when answering user prompts. Details taken from those stories will appear in ChatGPT as a summary or…

Last Saturday, I was at a community gathering of around 30 Vietnamese immigrants, all in their 50s and 60s, in Oakland, California, when I asked if anyone knew anything about AI or artificial intelligence. None of them had ever heard of it. In the past year, AI has become one of the most hyped technologies….

The nonprofit newsrooms CalMatters and The Markup announced last week that they were joining forces. CalMatters, founded in 2015, is an established statewide newsroom, while the 4-year-old Markup focuses on technology and stories that are national — even global — in scope. Nabiha Syed, chief executive officer of The Markup, said the idea of a…

The heavy rain had been pounding for three days straight. I peered through the raindrops running down my window as  streaks of lightning crackled and thunder echoed in the distance above the mountains.  News started to trickle in. Record rains. Rumors of landslides. Floods engulfing villages.  I prepared my equipment and started charging drone batteries. […]

I became a journalist in 2009 for one reason: I wanted to focus my work in a field that promoted social justice. Prior to that, I was working in technology, a much more lucrative field given the presence of foreign companies that built their offshore tech operations in the Philippines. It was an inauspicious time […]

Ten years ago, AP photographer Anya Niedringhaus died in Afghanistan, shot dead in her car by a fanatical police officer who also badly wounded her close friend, AP journalist Kathy Gannon. Killings of journalists in Afghanistan, Gaza, and Syria in that crisis year brought deep grief and soul-searching in the journalistic community. The ISIS beheadings […]

As one of the world’s leading experts on media manipulation and disinformation, Joan Donovan studies the darker side of the internet — online threats, conspiracy theories, extremist rhetoric, to name just a few examples. Donovan is an assistant professor of Journalism and Emerging Media Studies in the College of Communications at Boston University. Her book, […]

Cameron McWhirter, NF ’07, on the reporting behind the book “American Gun”  Zusha Elinson and I are reporters for The Wall Street Journal. He works out of San Francisco; I work out of Atlanta. We’ve covered a lot of mass shootings — horrific events that have been traumatizing American society with sickening regularity for years […]

Olivera Perkins, NF ’08, is redefining the economics beat at Signal Cleveland Chillingly high inflation was still in effect when Signal Cleveland, the nonprofit news organization, went online in late 2022. As the economics reporter, it was a given I would cover the issue. But I didn’t want to cover it as legacy media had […]

What makes Steve Stadelman, an Illinois state senator, so concerned about local news? It’s not just his 25-year career in local broadcast media, which he left to enter politics in 2013. Stadelman says it doesn’t take someone from within the industry to notice that there’s a local news crisis unfolding across Illinois (and the rest […]

My college roommate gets her news from a talking fish on TikTok. And she’s not the only one. The “Talking Fish News” has 325,000 followers, and it is one of many accounts playing off of the beloved SpongeBob SquarePants character who is a talking fish news anchor in the show. The account, which reports on […]

“Newshawks in Berlin: The Associated Press and Nazi Germany“ (Columbia University Press, March 2024) tells the story of how the largest news wire serving American newspapers covered the Nazis after they came to power in 1933. The book details how AP’s journalists endured onerous censorship, making both journalistic and moral compromises, while still managing to […]

In January 2024, Pulitzer-prize winning photographer Barbara Davidson traveled from her Los Angeles home to the California-Mexico border town of Jacumba. The month before, U.S. law enforcement had taken into custody a record number of migrants — more than 225,000 people — and negotiations around border security and immigration legislation ramped up ahead of the […]