Errol Morris on whether you should be afraid of generative AI in documentarieswww.niemanlab.org “Our task is to get back to the real world, to the extent that it is recoverable.”
Nieman Lab
We are the Nieman Journalism Lab, part of the Nieman Foundation at Harvard. We're trying to figure out the future of news.
Are you willing to pay for CNN.com? Prepare to be asked before year’s endbuff.ly The cable news network plans to launch a new subscription product — details TBD — by the end of 2024. Will Mark Thompson repeat his New York Times success, or is CNN too different a brand to get peopl...
ChatGPT is hallucinating fake links to its news partners’ biggest investigationswww.niemanlab.org Nieman Lab’s tests show ChatGPT is directing users to broken URLs for at least 10 publications with OpenAI licensing deals.
Worldwide, news publishers face a “platform reset”www.niemanlab.org Some findings from RISJ's 2024 Digital News Report.
Business Insider’s owner signed a huge OpenAI deal. ChatGPT still won’t credit the site’s biggest scoopswww.niemanlab.org "We are...deeply worried that despite this partnership, OpenAI may be downplaying rather than elevating our works," Business Insider's union wrote in a letter to management.
Business Insider’s owner signed a huge OpenAI deal. ChatGPT still won’t credit the site’s biggest scoopswww.niemanlab.org "We are...deeply worried that despite this partnership, OpenAI may be downplaying rather than elevating our works," Business Insider's union wrote in a letter to management.
Business Insider’s owner signed a huge OpenAI deal. ChatGPT still won’t credit the site’s biggest scoopswww.niemanlab.org "We are...deeply worried that despite this partnership, OpenAI may be downplaying rather than elevating our works," Business Insider's union wrote in a letter to management.
“Neither feast nor famine”: In 2023, nonprofit news continued to grow — but the audience picture is more complicatedwww.niemanlab.org While the sector is still growing, that growth is slowing, by some metrics. And audience data for 2023 shows that across all outlets surveyed, average monthly web traffic fell.
What can The Wall Street Journal’s new ad campaign tell us about its future?www.niemanlab.org The new brand campaign is aimed at younger versions of existing Journal readers. The various “It’s Your Business” ads center some of the newsroom's edgier and more evergreen journalism.
Apple brings free call recording and transcription to iPhones; journalists rejoicewww.niemanlab.org "There are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks when decades happen."
How YouTube’s recommendations pull you away from newswww.niemanlab.org Plus: News participation is declining, online and offline; making personal phone calls could help with digital-subscriber churn; and partly automated news videos seem to work with audiences.
What’s in a byline? For Hoodline’s AI-generated local news, everything — and nothingwww.niemanlab.org None of the AI writers seems to have a specific beat, except possibly for what can be best described as "police exploits," which they all cover with gusto.
We always thought The Epoch Times was sketchy, but this is really somethingwww.niemanlab.org The Department of Justice has charged the CFO of The Epoch Times — the shadowy, Chinese-backed, pro-Trump, conspiracy-embracing, billboard-loving, and weirdly successful media company — with conspirin...
Does curiosity make you read more hard news? How about anxiety?www.niemanlab.org A new study finds that certain personality traits might make you exaggerate — or underestimate — how much political news you consume.
The Washington Post loses its executive editor and heads in a new direction (or three)www.niemanlab.org Sally Buzbee is no longer the executive editor of the Washington Post after nearly three years on the job, the paper announced Sunday evening. She had been the first woman to hold that position at the...
For most news outlets, Trump’s conviction was front-page news. What about local chains?www.niemanlab.org On Friday, May 31, front pages around the world blasted the historic news that a former president of the United States and current leading presidential candidate had, for the first time, become a felo...
What’s in a byline? For Hoodline’s AI-generated local news, everything — and nothingwww.niemanlab.org None of the AI writers seems to have a specific beat, except possibly for what can be best described as "police exploits," which they all cover with gusto.
What’s with the rise of “fact-based journalism”?www.niemanlab.org "To describe one form of journalism as 'fact-based' is to tacitly acknowledge that there is also such a thing as 'non-fact-based journalism.' And there isn’t."
This local stingray story deserves an immaculate receptionwww.niemanlab.org I generally click fast on sea creature news and "What is really going on with Charlotte the stingray?" by Emily B. Cataneo, published this week by North Carolina digital news magazine The Assembly, wa...
Postcards and laundromat visits: The Texas Tribune audience team experiments with IRL distributionwww.niemanlab.org As social platforms falter for news, a number of nonprofit outlets are rethinking distribution for impact and in-person engagement.
Indian journalists are on the frontline in the fight against election deepfakeswww.niemanlab.org The ongoing general election is a pressure test for how to report on political voice clones and video spoofs
In an increasingly fractured Europe, this project is betting on one-on-one talks as a way to find common groundwww.niemanlab.org "We get requests from all over the world, and everyone says that their country is experiencing unprecedented levels of polarization or a breakdown in social cohesion."
After criticism over “viewpoint diversity,” NPR adds new layers of editorial oversightwww.niemanlab.org "We will all have to adjust to a new workflow. If it is a bottleneck, it will be a failure."
Increasingly stress-inducing subject lines helped The Intercept surpass its fundraising goalwww.niemanlab.org "We feel like we really owe it to our readers to be honest about the stakes and to let them know that we truly cannot do this work without them.”
“Impossible to approach the reporting the way I normally would”: How Rachel Aviv wrote that New Yorker story on Lucy Letbywww.niemanlab.org "So much of the media coverage — and the trial itself — started at the point at which we’ve determined that [Lucy] Letby is an evil murderer; all her texts, notes, and movements are then viewed throug...
Screenshots are one big winner of Meta’s news ban in Canadawww.niemanlab.org "We observe a dramatic increase in posts containing screenshots of Canadian news stories in the post-ban period."
For the first time, two Pulitzer winners disclosed using AI in their reportingwww.niemanlab.org Awarded investigative stories are increasingly relying on machine learning, whether covering Chicago police negligence or Israeli weapons in Gaza
How NPR and Floodlight teamed up to uncover fossil fuel “news mirages” across the countrywww.niemanlab.org “It's information. But it's not news."
What it takes to run a metro newspaper in the digital era, according to four top editorswww.niemanlab.org "People will pay you to make their lives easier, even when it comes to telling them which burrito to eat."
Newsweek is making generative AI a fixture in its newsroomwww.niemanlab.org The legacy publication is leaning on AI for video production, a new breaking news team, and first drafts of some stories.