After months of extracting and analyzing information from parliamentary websites, documents, and other public records, Demócrata — a recently launched news outlet focused on Spanish government and public policy — published a series finding that in general Parliamentary sessions, the ones that get the most attention, men gave nearly two-thirds of the speeches. Women were underrepresented on congressional committees related to “state matters” like defense, economic affairs, and budgeting, but make up the majority of members on committees focused on equality, gender violence, and children’s rights.

Stories like these are what Demócrata aims to provide news consumers in Spain: Data-based journalism that helps to holds politicians accountable. That series, for example, included a methodology of how the journalists obtained the data, organized it, and decided what to include. (For instance: “Participations of less than one minute duration have also been left out. They mostly deal with oaths to take possession of seats, questions of order, requests to speak…They accounted for less than 1% of the total interventions collected.”)

“It brings a lot of transparency to the legislative process,” said Pilar Velasco, a veteran investigative journalist and Demócrata’s editorial director. “When the noise of politics occupies the entire news cycle, it generates a space for opacity that isn’t reported on.”

The site fills a gap in Spain, which will hold its general election in December. “It’s a good year to launch a news outlet with a focus on politics and policies,” said Eduardo Suárez, the head of editorial for the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. “[Demócrata’s] value proposition is to report on public policies and Parliamentary debates in much more detail than mainstream publications. Newspapers in Spain are much more focused on politics than on public policies, and this might provide an opening for a publication like Demócrata, whose goal is to cover those policy debates in a more nuanced and granular way.”

Demócrata is the country’s only news outlet that specifically covers Parliament and public policy from an accountability lens daily, according to the Iberian Digital Media Map by Iberifier, a European Commission–funded initiative. (Another initiative in Spain, Civio, was founded in 2012 and focuses on data-powered watchdog reporting on the environment, healthcare, and the justice system.)

Demócrata has a team of seven. It’s funded by an initial investment from its board of directors and from advertising, though Velasco wants to expand into sponsorships, paid events, and subscriptions. The site has multiple sections: Agenda (an archive of the weekly newsletter that summarizes what’s happening in Parliament in the coming week), Actualidad (updates and play-by-play of laws and amendments), Políticas (news on proposed and ongoing policies), Quieren Influir (economy stories), and an analysis and opinion section. The site’s initial target audience is political insiders and politics junkies, but Velasco said the stories are written so that general audiences will be able to understand them as well. The Agenda newsletter has around 2,000 subscribers.

Demócrata’s goal is to use its data expertise to tell stories that other outlets can’t. Leading up to the outlet’s launch, the data team spent months building the software it uses to scrape and analyze data that, while technically public, is disorganized and difficult to parse. When the country’s far-right party, Vox, called for a vote of no confidence against the current ruling socialist party this past March, Demócrata published an analysis of Vox’s legislative footprint in the current parliamentary session, finding that the party has so far failed to pass any laws.

Velasco, who was an investigative reporter for Spain’s largest radio network Cadena SER, where she investigated political corruption cases, experienced first-hand the challenges of telling data stories for radio, where it can be difficult to delve into numbers. As a 2018 Yale World Fellow and one of the co-founders of Spain’s Investigative Journalists Association, she also saw American sites like Politico cultivated audiences for in-depth political reporting. When Demócrata founder David Córdova (who is also the director of a public affairs consulting firm, Vinces) approached her for the project, she saw it as a chance to experiment and try something new. (Demócrata is editorially independent from Vinces.)

“The mission is permanent scrutiny of institutions,” Velasco said. “Through continuous supervision of the work of politicians and legislators, information transparency, we believe, can strengthen institutional credibility. [The news] that comes to us from Parliament is often the political discussion, statements, politicians fighting with each other, and press conferences. But the legislative branch is a pillar of the State where many things happen that regulate life in society. It is what orders us and regulates us. And all of that wasn’t being covered in Spain with the specialization it deserves.”

One of Velasco’s goals in the next few months is to continue the work on a platform, already in progress, that will monitor updates to every piece of legislation in Parliament in real time. Down the line, she hopes to launch a chatbot that can answer reader questions. Demócrata has also partnered with Political Watch (a group of academics who monitor Parliament), design studio Flat26, and the think tank Ethosfera, which is helping Demócrata with its own ethics and transparency policies.

“We sort of feel like a hub for people who already had innovative ideas about parliamentary information,” Velasco said. “We get a lot of pitches for [collaborations]. When that you’re a small outlet, to grow you have to put springboards in places to get to the next level, and you can’t get there on your own.”

Juana Summers is struck by “an incredible sense of responsibility.”

She took over one of the host chairs at “All Things Considered” in June 2022 after many years as a political correspondent for NPR. Now almost a year into her new role, she sees herself as a guide to making the news program — and NPR in general — a place where people can feel represented.

Part of that, Summers believes, starts with the audience knowing her.

“I am never setting at the door that I am a Black woman, I am a stepparent, I am a woman who grew up in the Midwest and lived in a low- and middle-income home growing up, and who went to private religious schools,” said Summers, 34. “All of those dynamics are things that inform how I do my journalism, and the degree in which I lean into any part of that varies from story to story.”

Summers is one of the four women of color — three of them Black — who have taken over hosting duties at flagship NPR programs over the past year. Leila Fadel moved to “Morning Edition” in January 2022, joined just over a year later by veteran NPR host Michel Martin. Ayesha Rascoe became the host of “Weekend Edition Sunday” in March 2022. Their roles extend beyond the voices delivering the headlines. Each are editorial leaders with immense influence over what and who is covered.

“It would seem that after NPR top executives and news managers saw its three most popular women of color hosts departed within the last year, they would have pondered seriously about why these stellar female journalists left, with serious determination to make progressive changes at the public network to recruit and retain women of color hosts,” said Sharon Bramlett-Solomon, an associate professor at Arizona State University and an expert on race and gender in broadcast journalism.

Bramlett-Solomon added that leadership at NPR now faces a unique challenge in showing their commitment “to move forward with dramatic and meaningful transformation in programming inclusion and not simply window dressing on the set.”

Whitney Maddox, who was hired for the newly created diversity, equity and inclusion manager role in January 2021, said that in her role, she has especially focused on women of color at NPR: “What’s happening with them? How are they doing? What do they need?”

She has created a monthly space for women of color at the organization to meet and share about their day-to-day experiences and voice what resources they need. Her work also includes consulting to the flagship programs and checking in on their workplace cultures and how people are supported, including how stories are pitched and edited.

Maddox also started Start Talking About Race, or STAR, which is a twice-monthly event open to everyone in the organization. From these conversations, Maddox said she’s already seen an impact.

“This is moving beyond this space into how people are pitching their stories,” Maddox said. “Editors have come back to me and said, ‘A point that somebody made in STAR — I used that when I brought up a point of how we should think differently about how to source this story.’ There is a process, there is time, there is changing people’s hearts and raising their consciousness to understand why this work is important.”

The leadership of Fadel, Martin, Rascoe, and Summers are key parts in acting on conversations surrounding equity. Their roles in the host chairs are a signal of NPR’s commitment to reflecting their audience, Marrapodi said. “Our job is to be public media for the entire public,” he said. “We’re here for everybody. Our job is to hold a mirror up to society. And this is what society looks like.”

Fadel, 41, is acutely aware that her in the host chair is a representation of what society looks — and sounds — like.

“I just never thought it could happen. Clearly women have held host seats at NPR long before me, and people of color have moved up through the organization, but I just never imagined it,” she said. “How could I have imagined this for myself? There was no one who looked like me, who was an Arab woman, who was Muslim, doing this job.”

“I think about that responsibility and I take it very seriously,” Rascoe said. She said she thinks about her late grandmother, a sharecropper from North Carolina, constantly as she works. “I think about her and I think about my whole family, and I never want to make them not proud of me. I never want them to look at what I’m doing and say, ‘What is she out here doing? How is she representing us? We didn’t raise her that way.’”

Even the sound of her voice has been true to Rascoe’s roots: As her executive producer Sarah Lucy Oliver said, “Ayesha sounds like herself. She says she sounds like a Black woman from Durham, North Carolina.”

Oliver described what she calls “NPR voice” — a low register, stripped of any regional dialects, that registers as white and male — as the prevailing sound of NPR. Rascoe, she said, is a disruption to that.

“For decades, listeners have been accustomed to a particular kind of NPR voice. You can run through the dial and figure out when you’ve landed on an NPR member station,” Oliver said.

Hearing a voice like Rascoe’s “is a definite change in direction, and is exactly the kind of voice NPR wants to bring to the air,” Oliver said. “This is part of the real world. People speak differently. People have different regional accents. People use different kinds of colloquialisms. NPR is trying to sound more like the real world now.”

But Rascoe has had to reckon with the way audiences — used to that staid, white, and masculine NPR voice — perceive her. She has received racist listener feedback: coded messaging urging her to “sound professional,” telling Rascoe about how they don’t like her voice.

Rascoe says this is “all just a way of saying, ‘You are Black, and you are a Black woman from the South, and therefore you are stupid.’” When she first arrived at NPR in 2018 from Reuters, where she was a White House correspondent, it was a shock. “I will not try to pretend that it didn’t hurt and that it wasn’t frustrating,” she said.

Though Rascoe said she has received nothing but support from her colleagues and managers, her experience speaks to the dynamic at play in newsrooms nationwide aspiring to evolve, change and grow in being representative in their journalism.

The work of “disrupting the whiteness that journalists of color so often feel in white newsrooms” is hard and real, Bramlett-Solomon said — but doable, especially when there is real, on-the-ground support from management, with actual dollars behind it to show it.

Rascoe is aware of the fact that by simply being on air in such a high-profile way, she is doing that work of not only changing NPR, but changing American audiences’ expectations more broadly on credibility within the news.

“I have a voice that is not a voice that people necessarily expect — but it’s mine…Hopefully, it helps expand their idea of what authority, what professionalism and what intelligence can sound like,” Rascoe said.

Martin, 63, first joined NPR in 2006 to launch “Tell Me More,” an interview-focused show that aired on NPR member stations nationwide from 2007 to 2014. She then became host of “Weekend All Things Considered,” a position she held until joining “Morning Edition” as one of the hosts in March.

After decades in journalism, and many years at NPR specifically, Martin is deliberate and thoughtful in her imagining of the organization’s future and her role in it. As someone with a long history with the organization — one that includes using her voice to help push NPR forward on how it thinks about and covers race — she brings to her new role the ability to hold the past in the present while continuing to look forward. She said she’s constantly thinking not only about her time at NPR, but the ways journalists of color have worked to serve communities throughout history in how she approaches her role today.

“I just want us to keep getting better,” Martin said. “I want us to keep getting better because if you aren’t, then you are not growing. If you are not growing, then you’re dying.”

Martin steps into leadership at the flagship program at a time when the political climate often makes it tough for journalists to report. Martin says she thinks journalists play an especially important role “to help us understand each other’s experiences.” Without helping audiences dig into the nuances of why people believe what they do — and why the political is so personal for so many — journalists aren’t doing the job they are charged with executing.

“Yes, the words are changing and we’re all having to learn to use different language and to recognize different identities that were perhaps not part of our own experiences before. But that’s life. That’s learning. That’s education. That’s the news,” she said.

Martin said she takes inspiration from the way that Spanish-language and Black newspapers have crafted their coverage strategies.

“The origin of these news outlets was not just to talk about the politics that particularly affected these communities, but also to help people understand how to live in the new world that they were in: telling people things like how to register to vote, how to register your kids for school,” Martin said.

It is exactly this kind of work — often dismissed by editors and audiences alike as “unserious” for being service-oriented or because its target audience is those from historically underrepresented backgrounds — that Martin has always prioritized, and sees as essential now more than ever.

“What I want the most is for us to keep moving forward and not lose sight of our mission, which is to serve the public…I want us to keep doing our jobs because I think the country really needs us,” Martin said. “I want us to get more honest and stronger and more clear in how we serve people by helping them understand the world that does not lead them to carry the baggage of waking up and saying, ‘Whose side am I on today?’ That’s not who we are and I think not being that is so important.”

To think about equitable journalism means to consider the weight and totality of experience that exists behind each voice that feels unheard. That’s something that Martin’s “Morning Edition” co-host Fadel thinks a lot about, too. Fadel said she sees a major part of her job as being someone who can actively make and support a “safe space” for a range of voices, opinions, and perspectives in the editorial process.

Being fully present as herself in the host chair is a critical element of that, Fadel said — while also acknowledging that simply sitting in the seat doesn’t mean her newsroom, or any other, is done with the work of thinking holistically about what representation means in journalism.

“Change doesn’t happen because one person sits in a chair,” Fadel said. “It requires action at every level. This is happening at NPR, but of course there is more work to be done. Diversity isn’t just who is in a newsroom, but whose voices are in a story, and there is still a lot of work to be done there. We have a very diverse newsroom, but we need to always make sure it is more than white men whose voices get to talk about what happened.”

Fadel said she thinks all the time about how her own journalism can help change other people’s — and predominantly white listeners’ — perceptions.

“I didn’t see myself and my family in the stories I saw on the news. My father is from Lebanon and I grew up in Saudi Arabia. Talking about people like my family in the news meant only talking about people who were ensconced in conflict. It was all conflict. But there are real people who exist in these places where there is conflict. And they are nuanced and may all experience pain differently and joy differently and have lives outside of the conflict going on around them.”

Sitting in the host chair at “Morning Edition” is a way that she feels she can change this kind of sentiment across journalism, writ large.

“Representation matters,” she said.

Founded and funded by Politico founder Robert Allbritton, the Allbritton Journalism Institute (AJI) will launch a nonprofit news outlet that covers government and politics, with veteran journalists overseeing an inaugural fellowship class.

Breaking into journalism can be difficult; journalism school is expensive, and entry-level salaries tend to be low. AJI’s stated purpose is to be a training ground for “aspiring journalists from underrepresented backgrounds” to cut their teeth, according to Semafor, which first reported on the initiative.

“It takes time and repetition to get good at journalism — to build sources, to identify stories, to report them out and write them and present them in a way that actually serves the intended audience,” said Tim Grieve, the former Politico Pro and Protocol editor-in-chief who will lead the institute’s (as-yet unnamed) publication. “We want to give aspiring reporters that time, without asking them to take on student loans or find some other job to support themselves.”

The fellows will be paid $60,000 per year for two years, with benefits. AJI plans to hire 10 fellows to begin this September and add another 10 each year; by September 2004, 10 first-year fellows and 10 second-years will be working on a mix of assigned and self-created beats, Grieve said. The fellowship application (due May 31) asks questions like “Where and how do you get your news?” and “If you were going to change one thing about Washington journalism, what would it be, and why?”

“Fellows will have health insurance, paid time off, and an annual salary of $60,000 to report for the institute’s publication and learn from over 20 professional journalists, who will serve as mentors.”

Welcome, Allbritton Institute, new kind of J-school. https://t.co/Vy1UJXWOe7 — Jay Rosen (@jayrosen_nyu) May 2, 2023

This September, the selected fellows will take a four-week “immersion course in the practical application of journalism skills, from ethics and newsgathering to writing and distribution,” before they start reporting and writing. Throughout the two years, they’ll continue to attend seminars and workshops while also reporting. The teaching faculty so far includes Atlantic staff writer Tim Alberta, Washington Post local enterprise reporter DeNeen L. Brown, and The Independent’s Washington correspondent Eric M. Garcia. The newsroom will be led by Grieve, former BuzzFeed News politics editor Matt Berman, former Washington Post Magazine editor Richard Just, and former Axios senior editor Kate Nocera.

Why a journalism institute with a stacked newsroom attached instead of a new newsroom with a robust fellowship program? Allbritton may have his hands tied after selling Politico off to Axel Springer for more than $1 billion in 2021. As Semafor’s Tani reported, “the Politico founder said that while he agreed to some restrictions about his own next business moves as part of the deal (primarily not turning around and starting a Politico competitor), the two sides also agreed to carve out space for Allbritton to pursue nonprofit opportunities.”

This is find and admirable and he’s welcome to do with his money as he pleases, but “not enough journalists in D.C.” doesn’t really feel like the main existential threat to this industry at this moment https://t.co/KtTBwwzODt

— Nick Manes (@nickrmanes) May 2, 2023

With trust in the news media at an all-time low, Grieve said he hopes the fellows will help readers understand “why people in power (or people who want power) think what they think and do what they do — which all helps to explain what Washington does (or doesn’t) do.”

In addition to Politico, Allbritton has launched other news outlets. In 2010, he launched the Washington, D.C. local news site TBD, which ran for six months before being shut down. The tech-focused Protocol had layoffs soon after launch in 2020, then was shut down in 2022 after Politico’s sale.

But the stated purpose of AJI’s associated publication is to develop journalists who will go on to work at other news organizations. According to the site’s FAQ, “By the end of the program, graduates will have the background necessary to cover the inner workings of Washington — and will be ready to take on reporting jobs at the country’s best outlets.”

“A handful of newsrooms have great training programs, and we’d love to learn from their successes. But many don’t, either because they have no one to train or not enough people to train them,” Grieve said. “On an individual level, all the editors I know wish they had more time to mentor their reporters, but they’re under so much pressure to produce that they just can’t do it. We’re turning that on its head: Our editors’ first job is teaching and training their reporters; the journalism they produce will be the result.”

Well, this looks like competition for journalism schools from Allbritton. In my experience students are uncomfortable writing in public until they feel they’ve learned enough. So I’ll bet his salaried “students” will be much farther along. https://t.co/Nier36WuPn

— Jeff (Gutenberg Parenthesis) Jarvis (@jeffjarvis) May 2, 2023

With so many of the digital publications closing or struggling, this hopefully (on a small scale) will address one key thing the digital publications did in politics, which is really provide solid, entry level reporting jobs https://t.co/2cOECqPcX5

— Katherine Miller (@katherinemiller) May 2, 2023

This could be cool. Politico’s internship program has been a bfd for a lot of young journos. In recent years, it’s helped jumpstart some exceptional latino news talent, too. https://t.co/Tu47Sb48EB

— Pablo Manríquez (@PabloReports) May 2, 2023

Correction: A previous version of this story suggested that Robert Allbritton shut down Protocol. It was actually shut down after Allbritton sold it with Politico to Axel Springer.

“I think anybody who has in the past enjoyed reading the internet purely for fun can see that there’s a real dearth of URLs to type into one’s address bar these days,” Livingstone told me in a chat with Lavery this week. We conducted the interview in a live Google Doc — my way of allowing both of their internet voices to operate at a maximum, and eliciting comparisons of The Stopgap to “a stately pleasure barge of a site” (Lavery) or “a burnish’d throne??” (Livingstone). The Stopgap launched Wednesday morning, and you can read it here.

Don't worry, no one's going to try to make money from this one. That lesson's been learnt! This one's just for fun, and per its tagline: "Better than nothing"

That's @The_Stopgap, remember. Accept no substitutes, and watch this space.

— Daniel M. Lavery (@daniel_m_lavery) April 27, 2023

The Stopgap’s motto: “It’s better than nothing.”

This will be an old fashioned, general interest blog, mostly written by us. We’ll make no money, produce no podcasty newslettery bullshit, and pay nothing—although readers can donate direct to guest authors thru financial socials.

— jo livingstone (@Jo_Livingstone) April 27, 2023

For curious journalists like me, spending time reading academic research about journalism and democracy reveals a mixed picture.

There’s plenty of research to show that journalism is still a critical part of an engaged society. Decades of evidence–based studies show a correlation between news consumption and political engagement. People who read more news tend to vote more regularly and engage more in their own community.

Newer academic studies tend to look at very specific practices around types of journalism and find insights particular to certain beats or coverage areas — and there’s quite a lot of it. Just a few examples include how journalists use empathy in covering homelessness, whether fact-checking changes false beliefs, and how audiences react to watching coverage of terrorism.

But keeping track of all that academic research across subject areas is no easy task. Here’s where professors Mark Coddington and Seth Lewis have stepped up an email newsletter (hosted on Substack) that aims to showcase the most compelling research published each month. The newsletter is called RQ1, and Nieman Lab republishes it each month.

Coddington and Lewis are both former journalists who became academics. (For several years, Coddington wrote the “Week in Review” column for Nieman Lab.) They now study their former colleagues amid a changing digital news environment, tackling issues of data journalism, social media, news engagement and news aggregation. (Coddington is at Washington and Lee University, while Lewis is at University of Oregon.)

“We’ve had trouble ourselves keeping up with the constant flow of new research on news and journalism, and we want to help you keep up with it as we try to wade through it as well,” they write in the newsletter.

As editor-in-chief of PolitiFact, I have a high interest in keeping up with academic research on fact-checking, and as a Nieman Fellow I’ve been studying research about the connection between journalism and democracy, so I reached out to Coddington and Lewis with a few questions. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

El Salvador’s El Faro recently announced that it’s moved its business operations to Costa Rica after years of attacks from President Nayib Bukele. In Guatemala, journalist José Rubén Zamora is imprisoned for publishing an investigation into 144 corruption cases linked to President Alejandro Giammattei; the newspaper he founded, El Periódico, was raided and its bank accounts were frozen.

In Honduras — a country that according to Reporters Without Borders has been “slowly sinking into nightmarish disaster for more than a decade” — the government dismantled an agency designed to protect journalists.

In Nicaragua, press freedom has faced attacks from all sides and is only getting worse under president Daniel Ortega, now in his fourth consecutive term. The country now ranks 160 out of 180 on Reporters Without Borders’ Press Freedom Index. At least 185 journalists have fled the country since 2018, with at least seven going into exile in the first three months of 2023, free press advocacy group Voces del Sur found. As of February, at least 22 journalists had been stripped of citizenship due to their reporting on Ortega’s regime.

Journalists who work through these precarious conditions emphasize that international coverage from mainstream media outlets can help pressure their countries’ governments to reverse course. Such coverage can also influence how humanitarian aid budgets are spent.

At the International Symposium of Online Journalism earlier this month, a panel in the Spanish-language Colloquium on Digital Journalism convened four of Nicaragua’s most prominent journalists, all of whom are living in exile, to discuss the harrowing conditions they’ve lived through — offices being burned down, embargoes on supplies like newsprint and ink, imprisonment for sharing information on social media — and how they’ve innovated to keep publishing.

Below is an excerpt of the discussion of how these Nicaraguan journalists pivoted after being forced into exile, and the challenges they face today. Questions and answers have been edited for length and clarity, but if you can, you should watch the entire recording of the session here.

The panel was moderated by Dagmar Thiel, the U.S. director of Fundamedios, a free press advocacy group that supports Hispanic journalists in the Americas.

The panelists:

• Anibal Toruño, the owner and director of Radio Darío, one of the country’s oldest radio stations. His citizenship was revoked.
• Juan Lorenzo Holmann, the publisher of Nicaragua’s leading newspaper La Prensa. His citizenship was revoked and he was exiled to the United States after being imprisoned for 18 months. Today, all of La Prensa’s staff operates in exile.
• Martha Irene Sánchez, the director of República 18 and the president of the Independent Journalists and Communicators of Nicaragua. She has lived in Costa Rica since 2021.
• Miguel Mendoza, a veteran sports journalist who was imprisoned for 18 months and exiled to the United States in February.

On April 7, the Crimson sent out the first edition of its Metro Briefing newsletter, a new weekly roundup of coverage of the Cambridge-Boston area. The Metro Briefing includes summaries of the top local news and arts stories from the past week and a list of local events.

In recent years, student journalists have filled local news gaps around the country, covering statehouses and reporting on higher education to partnering local professional publications. Beyond the Crimson, Cambridge’s primary local news outlet is Marc Levy‘s nonprofit news site Cambridge Day. (Cambridge Day’s newly formed advisory board launched a crowdfunding campaign on Tuesday to raise $75,000; by comparison, the Crimson’s 2020 tax filings show the paper made more than $756,000 that year, 80% of it from donations.) The Gannett-owned Cambridge Chronicle serves the city in name only; on Thursday, there was not a single story on the site’s homepage about Cambridge.

The Crimson’s managing editor Brandon Kingdollar and newsletters editor Elias Schisgall answered my questions via email about the Crimson’s decision to expand its local news offerings. The interview is slightly edited for length and clarity.

If you’re a student journalist filling in local news gaps in your community in an innovative way, get in touch: hanaa@niemanlab.org.

The problem is even more acute when it comes to covering the nation’s statehouses. The total number of full-time statehouse reporters declined by 6% from 2014 to 2022. Yet state legislatures handle key issues, including abortion rights, voting rights and educational curriculum standards.

Where full-time staff reporters have disappeared, university-led statehouse reporting programs have stepped in, according to research from the nonprofit, nonpartisan Pew Research Center. More than 10% of statehouse reporters are students, and in some states they are a significant presence in the statehouse media corps.

Journalism boosts democracy

An informed citizenry is vital to a thriving democracy. Researchers have found strong ties between the availability of local news and community engagement, voting participation and number of candidates running for local office. Less local news leads to increased polarization and higher municipal government costs to taxpayers as accountability reporting declines.

Statehouse reporting programs are part of a larger commitment by universities to connect student education with local news needs. Through classes, newsrooms and media collaborations, these programs give students essential opportunities to use skills they have learned in classrooms – and provide badly needed local news coverage. Emerging scholarship finds partnerships between news outlets and universities are effective at both teaching students and serving the public.

I lead a national effort to document these programs around the country as part of the Center for Community News. As of early 2023, we had cataloged more than 120 programs in which university-led student reporting is contributing to local news coverage. Here’s our map showing university-affiliated local news programs around the U.S.:

Among those, we found 20 instances of university-coordinated statehouse reporting, covering 19 states; Florida has two.

How the programs operate

These programs are not internships but statehouse reporting bureaus led by veteran journalists who assign, edit, and vet student work to ensure it meets ethical and professional standards.

Once ready for publication, the students’ work is shared with media platforms around the state, almost always free of charge. During 2022, about 250 student reporters produced more than 1,000 stories for 1,200 media outlets across 17 states. The remaining two states’ programs, in Texas and Vermont, started in 2023.

Under professional direction, student reporters are producing important state-government stories across the country.

For example, at the University of Missouri, student stories on lack of high-speed internet service in rural areas in 2018 built momentum for lawmakers to pass new legislation that has provided millions of additional dollars to increase access to broadband.

In early 2023, the University of Florida’s statehouse team broke the story of a $300,000 private swimming pool being built at the mansion occupied free of cost by the university president just before Ben Sasse, a former U.S. senator, assumed that role.

In Louisiana, 92 publications run stories from Louisiana State University’s statehouse reporting team. In a companion effort, called the Cold Case project, students dive deeply into racist murders from the state’s past. In late 2022, a series of stories about the police killing of two students at Southern University led to a public apology by Gov. John Bel Edwards.

In Montana, a student statehouse reporter wrote a probing story in early 2023 questioning spending in a state fund focused on mental health and health prevention. The story was republished widely, including in small papers like the Ekalaka Eagle, serving a town of 400 people, as well as the statewide news outlet the Montana Free Press. A week later, Gov. Greg Gianforte announced $2.1 million in new spending on universal mental health screening from the fund.

As far back as 2016, series of stories from the University of Maryland’s Capital News Service generated a lot of attention about the lack of state oversight of nursing homes. Maryland Attorney General Brian Frosh cited the students’ work in his pursuit of new regulations; legislators passed two laws addressing issues raised in the series.

New programs launch

In Vermont, the University of Vermont’s Community News Service started a statehouse reporting program this spring with three students who each receive six credits and a stipend of $1,000. Together the students have already published 23 stories on issues as wide-ranging as diversifying agriculture and child marriage.

For our university, the program meets several needs: Students get experience, media outlets get content and the university meets its public-service mission.

Clearly, more colleges and universities can step in to fill statehouse reporting gaps. We found that in just eight states — Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky, Mississippi, South Carolina, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Rhode Island — there are 42 colleges and universities with more than 200,000 students within 10 miles of the statehouses.

Public universities, with their public service mission and long-standing journalism programs, provide most of the student reporters in our study. Private colleges are largely missing.

But in Indiana, some of the 1,000 students at tiny Franklin College staff the Statehouse File, producing stories like a deep dive into the KKK’s effects on the state and an examination of pregnancy-related deaths due to new abortion laws.

Student journalists in these university-led programs are filling local news gaps, adding legislative stories that are lacking while also building skills, polishing their clips and learning how government works.

I believe more public and private universities need to follow their lead. Democracy depends on an informed public.

Authorities in Vladimir Putin’s Russia have increasingly used criminal charges against their own journalists as part of a “increasing crackdown on free and independent media,” as Jodie Ginsberg, the president of the Committee to Protect Journalists, has put it. But prosecutions of international journalists in Russia are still rare enough.

Indeed, media historians like myself have to reach back decades to recall similar incidents. History shows that when they do occur, arrests of foreign journalists over espionage charges tend to provoke a diplomatic tempest.

Tinker, tailor, soldier, journalist?

Take, for example, the Prague “show trial” of Associated Press reporter William Oatis at the height of the Cold War in 1951. The prosecution of Oatis on spying charges was choreographed to suit the Soviet authorities, but the only real issue was that Oatis talked with Czechs and didn’t get government permission first.

“Reporting is not espionage,” The New York Times said in an editorial at the time. “[Oatis] was doing what all good newspaper men do in countries whose governments have not chosen to crawl back into the dark recesses of pre-historic barbarism.”

The case became a cause celebre from 1951 to 1953, and led to years of travel and trade embargoes between the U.S. and Czechoslovakia, which was then strictly controlled by the Soviet Union.

When Oatis was finally released in 1953, the journalist emerged weak and tubercular, describing his prison experience as akin to being “buried alive.” Still he carried on reporting, returning to the U.S. to cover the United Nations for decades before retiring.

Oatis’ case was perhaps the most famous during the Cold War, but it was far from the only one. Other American journalists who were arrested in Soviet sweeps of countries behind the Iron Curtain included Oatis’ fellow Associated Press reporters Leonard Kirschen — arrested in 1950 in Romania and held in jail for a decade — and Endre Marton, who was arrested in Hungary in 1955 along with his wife, Ilona Marton, who worked for United Press. They were released in 1956 and smuggled out of the country and into the U.S. the following year. Dozens of reporters from other agencies and other Western countries were also expelled from Eastern Europe around this time.

The risks of reporting

Of course, arrest wasn’t the only way to silence a reporter. Then — as now — there’s a risk of violence and death.

Dozens of journalists were killed around the world’s hot conflicts in every year of the Cold War. With the fall of the Soviet Union in the 1990s, attacks on journalists slowed down. Nonetheless, the global death toll since 1992 stands at over 2,190, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. And in nearly 8 out of 10 cases, the murderers go free. Of those deaths, at least 12 have involved journalists covering the war in Ukraine, according to a March 2023 report by the human rights organization Council of Europe.

As part of its crackdown on free and independent media, Russia’s forces have been particularly hostile to journalists on the front lines of Ukraine, the Council of Europe report noted. Meanwhile, data from the Committee to Protect Journalists suggest an uptick in the number of Russian journalists being held behind bars. Of the 19 currently imprisoned, half were picked up by authorities after the invasion of Ukraine.

Journalists working in hostile nations or in war zones do so knowing the risk that death or imprisonment may be used as diplomatic leverage or as a warning to other journalists. It is part of the job.

Cover stories

Yet not all reporters or editors are innocent observers. It is true that over the years, American journalists have indeed worked with, or even for, the U.S. government or intelligence services. Several hundred, at least, worked closely with the CIA and other intelligence agencies during World War II and through the course of the Cold War, according to evidence that emerged during the Watergate era.

For many, the collaboration had laudable aims. American journalist Virginia Hall used her credentials as a New York Post reporter to help the French resistance in World War II, guiding downed Allied airmen to safety in neutral countries and arranging weapons drops.

Her story was told in the book A Woman of No Importance. The Norwegian journalist Erling Espeland did similar work in World War II.

In some cases, like that of The New York Times’ Donald A. Allan, American journalists transitioned from World War II reporting into work for intelligence agencies with relative ease. Allan quit the Times in 1952 and supposedly went to work for CBS and United Press. But later, he said that was nothing more than a cover for his work with the CIA.

In 1975, the U.S. and Russia signed the Helsinki Final Act, starting a process of detente and trade normalization, including guarantees of press freedom. Still, Western journalists were routinely harassed and detained in the Cold War Soviet Union. In a case that resonates with that of Gershkovich’s, in 1986 Nicholas Daniloff, the Moscow correspondent for U.S. News & World Report, was arrested and detained on charges of espionage. He was later allowed to leave the Soviet Union.

A totalitarian tool

Most journalists today would reject the practice of being entangled with the work of the intelligence services. In 1996, Society of Professional Journalists president G. Kelly Hawes rejected the use of American journalism as a cover for intelligence.

“The public shouldn’t have to fear speaking to the press, and journalists shouldn’t have to fear for their safety,” he said. “Our integrity is compromised and our lives are endangered. That is wrong.” And to be clear, Gershkovich and The Wall Street Journal have denied the espionage claims.

But to officials in an authoritarian government like that of Russia, journalists are not much different from spies. It is, after all, a reporter’s job to uncover uncomfortable truths, often hidden from the wider world.

Seen in that light, slapping a charge of espionage on a journalist is one of the more Orwellian tools in the authoritarian playbook.

Protocol, the technology news site that Politico founder Robert Allbritton launched in 2020 and then sold to Axel Springer along with Politico in 2021, shut down abruptly last November, laying off its 60-person staff. Its enterprise editor, Tom Krazit — who, all the disclosures, was my editor at Gigaom until 2015 when that site abruptly shut down, and who has been covering the tech industry for 20 years — launched a Substack while considering what to do next. He launched and ran Protocol’s enterprise and cloud computing newsletter, and eventually managed five writers before the shutdown.

Krazit bought the email list for that newsletter, including more than 20,000 subscribers, from Politico Media Group in February. Today, he’s relaunching it as Runtime. (“The folks at Politico Media Group wanted me to make clear that Runtime is in no way associated with Politico or Protocol, and, for the record, I am extremely happy to make that distinction,” Krazit noted in his launch post.)

The Runtime newsletter will come out three times a week, and an accompanying website will include a mix of long-form reporting, interviews, and explorations of emerging technologies. “You can’t drop a 1500-word report in a newsletter unless you’re Ben Thompson,” Krazit said, explaining the need for the website. “I’m not going to try to get away with that right off the bat.”

Runtime will be free to read and ad-supported; Krazit is its only full-time employee for now, and he’s hired some help with ad sales. Eventually, Krazit plans to hire more reporters, but he didn’t want to raise VC money. “I don’t want to promise anybody a job in these crazy times without being sure I can support that person beyond a short period,” he said.

The newsletter is launching on the publishing platform Ghost, which has emerged as a Substack competitor and hosts properties including The Atlantic’s subscriber-only newsletters, Luke O’Neil’s Welcome to Hell World, and David Sirota’s The Lever. “Substack is really nice. I’ve been doing a blog slash newsletter for the last few months, and I really like a lot of the things they offer, but they as a business seem very clearly geared around paid subscription,” Krazit said. “There are people on there who have sponsorship business models, but those don’t really seem aligned with [Substack’s] long term view.” Ghost, in his view, made more sense for an ad-supported newsletter.

Krazit added that enterprise reporting — which he defined simply for me as “writing about the business of businesses selling technology to other businesses” — is a unique space, advertising-wise, compared to consumer-focused tech reporting. “People who read this kind of content are reading it for business reasons, not so much for their own personal interests,” he said. “Runtime kind of has the luxury of being in a market where people want and need the kind of quality, in-depth journalism I’ve always wanted to provide. And there is a ton of sponsor interest in this market.”

Specifically, it looks a lot like the SEO-driven, human-written, meh content that you’ll find all over the rest of the internet. As Noor Al-Sibai and Jon Christian reported for Futurism on Thursday:

The 40 or so articles, all of which appear to be SEO-driven travel guides, are comically bland and similar to one another. Check out these almost-copied lines:

• “Now, I know what you’re thinking – ‘Cape May? What is that, some kind of mayonnaise brand?'” in an article about Cape May, in New Jersey.
• “Now I know what you’re thinking – ‘but Caribbean destinations are all just crowded resorts, right?'” in an article about St Maarten, in the Caribbean.
• “Now, I know what you’re thinking. Puerto Rico? Isn’t that where all the cruise ships go?” in an article about San Juan, in Puerto Rico.
• “Now, I know what you’re thinking- bigger isn’t always better,” in an article about Providence, in Rhode Island.
• “Now, I know what you’re probably thinking. Nepal? The Himalayas? Haven’t we all heard of that already?” in an article about Khumbu, in Nepal.
• “Now, I know what you’re probably thinking. “Brewster? Never heard of it,” in an article about Brewster, in Massachusetts.
• “I know what you’re thinking: isn’t Stockholm that freezing, gloomy city up in the north that nobody cares about?” in an article about Stockholm, in Sweden.

That’s not the bot’s only lazy trope. On review, almost everything the bot has published contains at least one line about a “hidden gem.”

You can see all the articles (THAT WE KNOW OF) here; they’re bylined “As Told to Buzzy,” a winking bow-tied robot with the bio “Articles written with the help of Buzzy the Robot (aka our Creative AI Assistant) but powered by human ideas.” Forty-four of them were published this month.

The articles are pretty bad.

this stuff is GOLD, what is everyone worried about!!! pic.twitter.com/3JkqkoEFQB

— Kathryn VanArendonk (@kvanaren) March 30, 2023

BuzzFeed is publishing AI-generated travel articles.

On the one hand, they're terrible. On the other, they're just reflecting back the fact that most travel writing online is truly awful.https://t.co/oUA0qX5uXu pic.twitter.com/fvCIDvDAN8

— Max Tani (@maxwelltani) March 30, 2023

credit where credit's due, this is an astonishing lede pic.twitter.com/JfTfumLSQy

— Kathryn VanArendonk (@kvanaren) March 30, 2023

Now, I know what you’re thinking: The concern isn’t that these specific articles are going to win any awards, it’s that AI’s future potential is so great that this is simply the tip of the iceberg and human writers will soon be replaced by a sentient, independent Buzzy.

Maybe. But another way to look at it is that a lot of the human-written content that Buzzy’s articles are competing with are also pretty bad — “essentially human-made AI”:

it was bc there was the need for more and constant content stream. so writers would scour the internet for what's been written before and essentially just rewrite it, maybe give it a new placement. but it was all the same, very random pool. same terminology, etc.

— cale g weissman (@caleweissman) March 30, 2023

anyway, now AI is actually doing this and it's worse in a different but funnier way: https://t.co/3M22BYhsnA

— cale g weissman (@caleweissman) March 30, 2023

A BuzzFeed spokesperson told Futurism that the company is using Buzzy + a human editor “to unlock the creative potential of UGC so we can broaden the range of ideas and perspectives that we publish,” with people picking the topics (in this case, specific cities) and Buzzy doing the, um, generating.

It’s not that different from a freelance assignment I did in my twenties: A human editor assigned me to write some articles about the promise of 5G — a topic about which I knew nothing — and I googled 5G, read other content mill-ish articles about it, and compiled them into my “own” article. The content I created wasn’t really meant to be read by humans who actually needed to know anything about 5G, in the same way that anybody who is planning a trip to Morocco probably shouldn’t get their recommendations from Buzzy. (Its recommendations are: Go to Marrakesh, the mountains, and the desert. It’s far away. Bye!)

In the 5G case, I was basically Buzzy, except I was getting paid. Buzzy works for free. You know, for now.

"They're taking the jobs of severely underpaid offshore 'content writers' for chum-bucket sites that no one reads except for ad-fraud bots!" If they can fake the money, it's a perfect closed circle.

— Steven Scott (@scottstev) March 30, 2023

Very formulaic picture-driven travel listicles. But this experiment shows that the writing is on the wall for anyone currently making a living from generating that type of content. https://t.co/uWAxfxJCyi

— Peter Aldhous (@paldhous) March 30, 2023

Responses to the decline have ranged from luring billionaires to buy local dailies to encouraging digital startups. But the number of interested billionaires is limited, and many digital startups have struggled to generate the revenue and audience needed to survive.

The local news crisis is more than a problem of shuttered newsrooms and laid-off journalists. It’s also a democracy crisis. Communities that have lost their newspaper have seen a decline in voting rates, the sense of solidarity among community members, awareness of local affairs and government responsiveness.

Largely overlooked in the effort to save local news are the nation’s local public radio stations.

Among the reasons for that oversight is that radio operates in a crowded space. Unlike a local daily newspaper, which largely has the print market to itself, local public radio stations face competition from other stations. The widely held perception that public radio caters to the interests of people with higher income and education may also have kept it largely out of the conversation.

But as a scholar who studies media, I believe that local public radio should be part of the conversation about saving local news.

Advantages are trust, low cost and reach

There are reasons to believe that public radio can help fill the local news gap.

Trust in public broadcasting ranks above that of other major U.S. news outlets. Moreover, public radio production costs are relatively low — not as low as that of a digital startup, but far less than that of a newspaper or television station. And local public radio stations operate in every state and reach 98% of American homes, including those in news deserts — places that today no longer have a daily paper.

Finally, local public radio is no longer just radio. It has expanded into digital production and has the potential to expand further.

To assess local public radio’s potential for helping to fill the local information gap, I conducted an in-depth survey of National Public Radio’s 253 member stations.

The central finding of that study: Local public radio has a staffing problem. Stations have considerable potential but aren’t yet in a position to make it happen.

That’s not for lack of interest. Over 90% of the stations I surveyed said they want to play a larger role in meeting their community’s information needs. As one of our respondents said, “The need for the kind of journalism public media can provide grows more evident every day. The desire on the part of our newsrooms is strong.”

To take on a larger role, most stations would need to expand their undersized news staff.

Sixty percent of the local stations have 10 or fewer people on their news staff, and that’s by a generous definition of what constitutes staff. Respondents included in this count broadcast and digital reporters, editors, hosts, producers and others who contribute to local news and public affairs content in its various forms, as well as those who directly provide technical or other support to those staff members. In addition to full-time employees, stations were asked to include part-time employees and any students, interns or freelancers who contribute regularly.

The staffing problem is most acute in communities that have lost their newspaper or where local news gathering has been sharply cut back. Many of these communities were judged by the respondents to have a below-average income level, which limits the local station’s fundraising potential.

Although the staffing problem is more pronounced at stations in communities where local news is in short supply, staff size at nearly every station falls far short of even a moderate-sized daily newspaper.

The Des Moines Register, for example, has a daily circulation of 35,000 copies and a nearly 50-person newsroom — a staff larger than 95% of local public radio stations.

Limitations on potential

One consequence of the staffing problem is that local public radio is actually not all that “local.”

The survey found that in the 13-hour period from 6 a.m. to 7 p.m. on weekdays, only about two hours of locally produced news programming was carried on the average station, some of it in the form of talk shows and some of it as repeat programming. For stations with a news staff of 10 or fewer people, the daily average of locally produced news — even when including repeat programming — is barely more than one hour.

This is only one indicator of the limitations of an undersized newsroom.

Stations with a news staff of 10 or fewer people, for example, were only half as likely as those with more than 20 to have a reporter routinely assigned to cover local government. Some stations are so short of staff that they do not do any original reporting, relying entirely on other outlets, such as the local newspaper, for the stories they air.

A small news staff also means it’s hard to create content for the web, as illustrated by stations’ websites. The stations with 10 or fewer people in their newsroom were only half as likely as those with a staff size of more than 10 to feature local news on their homepage. A local station’s website cannot become the “go-to” place for residents seeking local news on demand if the station fails to provide it.

The stakes for democracy

With more staff, local public radio stations could help fill the information gap created by the decline of local newspapers. They could afford to assign a reporter full time to cover local government bodies like city councils and school boards.

It would still be a challenge for stations in rural areas that include multiple communities, but that challenge is also one that newspapers in rural areas have always faced and have in the past found ways to manage.

With adequate staff, local stations could also make their programming truly “local,” which would broaden their audience appeal.

Programming created by NPR, PRX, and other content providers accounts for much of the appeal of local stations. But it can be a handicap in areas where many potential listeners have values and interests that aren’t met by national programming and where the station offers little in the way of local coverage. As one respondent noted, stations must provide coverage “that reflects the entirety of their communities.”

How much new money would local stations require to expand their coverage? Based on our respondents’ estimates and a targeting of the funding for the communities most in need, roughly $150 million annually would be required.

Given that these communities tend also to be the ones in below-average income areas, the funding would have to come largely from outside sources. That won’t be easy, but it needs to get done. As the Knight Foundation’s Eric Newton noted, local news gives people the information they “need to run their communities and their lives.”

Pew Charitable Trusts announced Wednesday that it will transfer its Stateline news service to States Newsroom, and will provide a $3 million grant to help ease the transition.

Stateline will get a redesigned website at Stateline.org this spring and a new home for its nonpartisan reporting on trends in state policy in News from the States. The new addition represents a significant expansion for States Newsroom, bringing its headcount to roughly 180 journalists dedicated to covering state politics and policy across the U.S.

States Newsroom was “incubated” at launch by the progressive nonprofit Hopewell Fund before becoming its own nonprofit in 2019. (The newsroom, which publicly lists every donation over $500, did not receive funding from Hopewell.) Its newsrooms are studded with experienced reporters — often snapped up from local newspapers — who are guided by five national editors. The network publishes a national roundup, a newsletter on abortion rights, and (often left-leaning) editorials and commentary in separate opinion sections.

States Newsroom currently has journalists on the ground in 32 states. The network also partners with nonprofit newsrooms in eight additional states, including The Texas Tribune, Vermont Digger, and Mountain State Spotlight in West Virginia.

As part of Pew Charitable Trusts, Stateline has covered trends in politics and policy that cut across state lines for the past two decades. Recent articles have looked at how Republican legislators are raising new barriers to ballot measures after voters in some conservative states turned out to support abortion rights, what states and cities are doing about a dangerous additive appearing in street drugs, and the states considering ending “turn right on red” after a rise in pedestrian deaths. Stateline also keeps closer tabs on rural communities in America — including a lack of lawyers and an experiment to help hospitals in rural areas — than your average national publication.

Stateline executive editor Scott Greenberger, who used to be a statehouse reporter in Texas and Massachusetts himself, stressed how difficult it is for a reporter busy with a single legislature to keep up with what was happening in the other 49 capitals. With gridlock in Washington, D.C., more action is taking place at the state level — and that includes national groups pushing policy agendas in multiple states at once, Greenberger said.

“If you’re a statehouse reporter focused on a single statehouse, you might not understand that some legislation is part of something bigger,” Greenberger said. “That broader perspective is a big part of the value of Stateline that provides.”

The newly merged newsrooms will use their reporting power to compare the ways different states are dealing with similar challenges — like water access issues, housing shortages, and rules around the 2024 election.

“The election will be decided nationally, but how people vote, when they can vote, and who can vote — all those decisions are not made in Washington. They’re made in state capitals across the country,” noted Fitzsimon, pointing to Stateline’s coverage of proposed changes to election rules. “Very rarely do things happen in a vacuum in one state capital, whether it’s the changes in higher education, the debate over critical race theory, or transgender rights. Those things are not only related but, in many cases, they’re being pushed by the same folks. We want to continue to work, with Stateline’s expertise, to figure out who those folks are, what their agendas are, how it’s translating across each capital, and what it means to people who live there.”

The news comes after years of newspapers reducing the number of journalists dedicated to statehouse coverage. A surge in nonprofit newsrooms has partially made up for the newspaper losses. Twenty percent of the reporters covering U.S. statehouses work for nonprofits, according to a Pew Research report we covered last year.

The decision to find a new home for Stateline reflects those changes in the news industry, as well as the news service’s odd fit within an organization more dedicated to policy than journalism.

“Pew made the decision that at this exciting time for nonprofit news outlets and this very important time for statehouse coverage, Stateline would be able to grow and flourish in an organization that was focused purely on news, as opposed to one that where journalism was just part of the mission,” Greenberger said. “It made sense for it to be part of a journalism-only organization.”

“I think this merger with States Newsroom gives us a footprint that no one else can even come close to matching,” he added. “We’re not just a handful of reporters in odd places.”

States Newsroom plans to expand, but only where it can fill a gap in news coverage, Fitzsimon said.

“You’ll see us in the states where there is not a strong, thriving daily nonprofit,” Fitzsimon said. “Many nonprofits that pop up are [focused on] long-term investigative reporting, which I totally support and think is wonderful. But we also need the daily hard-hitting coverage to complement that. At some point we’ll have some presence, whether it’s a partner or a newsroom, in 50 states and complement that with the great work that Scott and his team do at Stateline.”

“Both organizations were doing good work, but this takes it to a new level,” he added. “We need more coverage. We need more transparency on public officials. We need more reporting, because I think even more vital decisions will be made in state capitals in the coming years. This positions us, collectively, to really give people the information they need to make decisions and to find out what’s happening across America, not just in Washington.”

In April 2020, VonKaenel had stopped printing the 31-year-old News & Review and laid off 34 staffers, including 14 from the newsroom. The employees who remained were still publishing online, and VonKaenel applied for a Paycheck Protection Program loan, but it wasn’t clear how long the paper would be able to stay in business.

Larry Lee grew up working for the Observer, Sacramento’s African-American weekly newspaper, under and with his late father, Dr. William Hanford Lee, who founded it in 1962. The Observer had become an established, award-winning institution in Sacramento’s Black community, and in the early pandemic it survived and even thrived, breaking ground on a new office building in August 2020.

Lee had been collaborating with other news outlets in the city since 2015, and when VonKaenel called him, he suggested collaborating and sharing stories with other newsrooms in the area. The two rallied seven Sacramento news organizations into a collaborative called Solving Sacramento, to report on the city’s biggest issues with a focus on solutions. The outlets in the collaborative include the Sacramento Observer, the Sacramento News & Review, the Sacramento Business Journal, Russian American Media (a three-publication media company serving Russians and Russian-Americans), Outword Magazine (an LGBTQ+ publication), Sacramento’s NPR station Capital Public Radio, and Univision Sacramento. It’s funded through donations and grants from the Solutions Journalism Network and the James Irvine Foundation with the Local Media Association acting as the fiscal sponsor.

Sacramento isn’t a news desert, but issues like the arts, communities of color, and housing can fall through the cracks. All of the collective’s audiences are impacted by the city’s housing crisis, but their needs and challenges are often unique. Instead of racing to compete, Lee said each publication’s audience would benefit from all of them working together.

“COVID was the moment where you say, ‘Whatever we were doing before, now’s a good chance to either fix it or find another solution,'” Lee said. “Anyone who’s in a collaborative knows it takes a long time to get it going, especially when you’re talking about a region where there are historical trust issues. Newsrooms fight for content and advertisers. We had to get to a point where regular meetings and conversations were happening.”

Solving Sacramento’s first project was reporting on the problems with and solutions to housing affordability in the city, using a grant from the Solutions Journalism Network. Since launching last June, the collaboration has published more than 80 stories on affordable housing, homelessness, and resources that explain what affordable housing is and Q&As with local housing experts. The next focus area will be the revival of the city’s arts scene.

The lead editors from each publication get together to discuss related housing issues that need coverage, and then decide which publication will take the lead on reporting. Once the story is published, all members of the collaborative have the option to re-publish it, and it’s also made available on the Solving Sacramento website.

For one story, the collaborative contracted local journalism students to go door-to-door to talk to Sacramento residents about how they experienced the city’s housing crisis. The story first ran in the News & Review and then was translated into Spanish and republished by Univision.

“Sacramento is changing,” Lee said. “It has historically been a political, bureaucratic town, and COVID exposed the weaknesses in the fabric and the structure of how people live in Sacramento. [Covering issues] from a lens of equity is really important. Trying to do that as a single newsroom is practically impossible.”

Collaboration between news outlets has become increasingly common all across California. VonKaenel said that if more grant money comes through, Solving Sacramento will be able to start reviving local arts coverage, alongside continuing its affordable housing reporting. The goal is to add multiple reporting subjects, but Lee said he also wants the collaborative expands into hosting community events, helping to ensure the future of existing local newsrooms, and even starting new ones to fill other reporting gaps.

“Ultimately we would like to get to a point that’s more than just story sharing, possibly with ways that can help with the sustainability of each of our individual newsrooms and help build the capacity,” Lee said. “We’re a better community if we have healthier newsrooms, and I think there’s enough resources in the region to help us [all] be sustainable.”

In contrast, the public release of ChatGPT on November 30, 2022, was very much a watershed moment, and it has many of us asking (before the fact, this time!) how our jobs and industry could be changed with the advent of the natural language functions of artificial intelligence.

Not surprisingly, the huffing and puffing over the past three months about ChatGPT and other similar AI-powered platforms run the gamut from a rush to mock its shortcomings to doomsday warnings that the machines will take our jobs. What’s clear is that all the predictions and public experiments are provisional, as the technology is rapidly evolving and so many applications are still to be discovered.

My own particular contribution in these early days comes instead from looking backward. By no design of my own, I’ve found myself swimming in the AI waters for the past decade in my job as co-founder and editor of the online magazine Worldcrunch, which publishes English editions of top foreign-language journalism.

Even before we launched in 2011, we were regularly being questioned about AI, though nobody was yet calling it that. Instead, would-be investors and partners, editorial and tech colleagues all wanted to know: “…and what about Google Translate?”

Some saw burgeoning machine translation as a threat to our business model. Others saw it as an inevitable downward pull on the quality of our editorial product. My reflex back then was to dismiss the machine, pointing out some of its more outrageous errors and assuring that it could never be good enough to take the place of our 100%- human translation.

Still, in Worldcrunch’s first years, working largely with freelance translators, I would find myself occasionally “catching” those who I suspected of using the machine. Sometimes it was incoherent copy, sometimes it was blatant errors (names, for example, get translated as words: Marine the Pen, anyone?) And sometimes I would get suspicious simply because the copy came back so quickly.

The truth is some of our best translators were also already using the machine…and there was nothing to “catch.” It was a tool, and professionals knew how to use it to help them be as good (and, yes, as fast) as possible. Those who abused or misused it were rather quickly spotted, and didn’t last long working with us.

Irene Caselli, a veteran journalist and editor on our team who speaks five languages, has been leaning on machine translation tools for years — even before they were really any good. “When it first came out, I would sometimes use Google Translate just to have many of the basic words and structure laid out in the new language on the page,” she recalled. “But I would have to check word by word.”

In the years since, while the machine has gotten exponentially better (today Irene prefers DeepL), she is quite conscious about when and how to use it. The output is generally stronger on more straightforward political and informational journalism, and weaker on writerly work and stories that “change register” within the same piece. In the languages where pronouns are often omitted (Italian, Spanish, French, etc.), translation programs still tend to use the default “he,” though Caselli says they are improving and can sometimes figure out that it’s “she” based on context.

So while 10 years ago she used the technology “to be able to type less,” Caselli says now, “I can sometimes use it as a bonafide first draft where I can just go through and edit the copy, spotting any mistakes along the way.”

When Le Monde launched an English edition last year, it did so with the systematic integration of an AI-powered translation platform into the editorial process, with human oversight.

Here at Worldcrunch, one application that’s been revealed over time has been automated translation’s role in our work as editors. In many (though not all) of the languages we translate from, the machine has gotten good enough that I can refer to it when trying to rephrase a clunky sentence in a translated piece from a language I don’t know. Perhaps even more useful has been the ability to browse through entire newspapers in a variety of languages and feel confident assigning stories to translators who don’t necessarily know the kind of pieces we’re looking for. That can save a ton of time and mental energy.

Even with the advances of machine translation, plenty of translators — of all ages — still choose not to use it. And I’ll always prefer to get story pitches from seasoned journalists who speak the languages. I imagine that AI natural language tools will largely be used for purposes of speed and shortcuts, and that will differ down to the level of individual affinities and working habits.

With that said, the potential changes we’ve begun to imagine with ChatGPT for the production of news and journalism — and all across the creative industries — go beyond speed. It’s fundamentally different from the various digital bells and whistles that have been thrust upon us over the past decade or two.

The first round of public experiments have been interesting to watch. There are initial ethical questions for news companies vis-à-vis readers. Medium has established a first policy on “transparency, disclosure, and publication-level guidelines” for the use of AI language tools.

But ultimately, if we stay on the current trajectory, it’s utterly plausible that AI language tools will begin to blend into our daily workflows, similar to how Google and Google Translate have. That’s a very big deal.

These advanced automated language models get at the very essence of what we do — or at least half of it: the writing, synthesizing information, crafting stories that has always made us muttering hacks feel, well, human.

The Google-Facebook era put our earning power on the line. This runs deeper. It’s an ego thing. Will we be reduced to the machine’s fact-checker?

Yet there’s the other half of what news and journalism is about, which makes us feel human in another way — and that stands beyond the reach of the databases and algorithms. We are also doing our job (and feeling alive) when we find or figure something out first. Our digital world — and creativity itself — can be so derivative that we can forget that we’re here because every day new stuff happens. We see things, make connections, and occasionally, according to the famous dictum, do the only “real” journalism: Publish what someone else doesn’t want published.

To further soothe our fragile egos, we can borrow from another old industry dictum: If journalism is the first draft of history, the machine goes nowhere without us.

Here are some thoughts, culled from Worldcrunch’s experience with machine translation, that may be applicable to using AI natural language tools.

— Maximizing the utility of automation requires human reasoning/thinking/creativity before feeding it to the machine, and human oversight (which may include more reasoning/thinking/creativity) after it comes out the other side.

— Don’t manage down: Online tools are best left in the hands of individuals.

— Editors will have to rely on the same “red flag” instincts that catch sloppiness, laziness, plagiarism, etc. (though some tools to help keep up in the early days would be nice!)

— Include regular training and an open conversation about new ways to use it, and possible pitfalls (we haven’t done enough of this with other internet tools).

— If the tools are powerful and reliable enough to integrate into the editorial process, publicly labeling work as “Produced with AI,” etc., will ultimately be pointless.

— Factor in exponential improvement in quality and precision.

— Factor in that human oversight will always be necessary.

— Speed matters.

— Quality matters more.

—Accuracy matters most.

When not covering AI for the FT, Murgia is finishing her first book, Code-Dependent, out in February 2024. We caught up via email. Our back-and-forth has been lightly edited for clarity and that British proclivity for the letter “zed.”

Mensah M. Dean, a recent Pulitzer Prize finalist for work published by The Philadelphia Inquirer, will staff the Philly bureau alongside engagement reporter Afea Tucker. In Chicago, the coverage will be led by engagement reporter Justin Agrelo and reporter Rita Oceguera.

In its announcement on Wednesday, The Trace explained the two cities were chosen because they are places with “chronic” gun violence where city officials have faced “little accountability” for failing to effectively address the issue. The Trace plans to launch additional local outfits, and is already accepting suggestions.

Big news: We’re officially launching our local reporting initiative.

We’ve created local bureaus in two cities, Chicago and Philadelphia, and hired four great reporters.

Today, we’re unveiling a dedicated home for coverage on our website: https://t.co/1xy1f0vNcm pic.twitter.com/yZZru23ybV

— The Trace (@teamtrace) February 21, 2023

In an interview, The Trace staffers stressed that news-gathering would look different in the local bureaus — “more democratic” and “community-driven.” The goal is to flip a pattern that’s all-too-familiar for people in neighborhoods affected by gun violence: a reporter shows up on your block on one of the worst days of your life, talks to the cops, lingers long enough to grab a few “telling” details, and then — poof! — you never see them again.

Joy Resmovits, The Trace’s senior editor for local impact, cited community listening — which she defined as asking people what information they need as a starting point for reporting — at places like The Seattle Times and Epicenter-NYC as engagement work similar to what she hopes The Trace can accomplish in Chicago and Philadelphia.

More and more outlets, Resmovits said, are “understanding that service work is useful and necessary in and of itself — and can also lead to scoops in more traditional stories.”

So — what does it look like in practice? Engagement reporter Justin Agrelo said his efforts in Chicago began with eight months of speaking with “everyone in the gun violence space” that he could find. That included people who had experienced gun violence themselves, community organizers in neighborhoods experiencing high levels of violence, health care workers, violence prevention workers, and more.

“A common theme that we heard was that the episodic crime story, which gun violence in Chicago often gets framed through, does very little for folks who have been affected,” Agrelo said. “In some instances, it makes them feel less safe, like when it reveals which hospital victims have been taken to.”

(That response is not unique to Chicago, either. The Trace recently covered a peer-reviewed study conducted by a trauma unit surgeon who wondered, after seeing her patients in the news, what effect media coverage might be having on them. The Philadelphia-based researcher Dr. Jessica Beard discovered a range of responses among survivors but, ultimately, came away believing that newsrooms should publish fewer one-off stories.)

Philadelphia residents, merchants, and community leaders are watching a new police initiative with skepticism — will more officers make a difference in the neighborhoods where gun violence is most common?@MensahDean reports: https://t.co/jBiEoP1tZs

— The Trace (@teamtrace) February 7, 2023

Agrelo, a Chicago native who previously worked at City Bureau, said he’s been trained to think about how to “horizontalize” media as much as possible. That means he’s asking constantly asking himself, “How do we allow the folks who are closest to the issue lead the way? How do we — for lack of a better word — pass the mic and allow them to help set the news agenda?”

One of the first projects to come from the early months of his on-the-ground engagement work is a storytelling network for survivors of gun violence. Participants in the group (who will be paid a $700 stipend) will receive hands-on training in storytelling and the basics of journalism.

To help flip this dynamic, we’re launching a program for survivors of Chicago gun violence — and their friends and loved ones — to tell their own stories. https://t.co/3HlmBbi2KT

— Justin Agrelo (@jstnagrlo) February 15, 2023

The nonprofit newsroom, which has long worked with partnering publications to distribute its reporting, has teamed up with local newsrooms in both cities. In 2021, for example, an explainer on benefits available to victims of violent crime was co-published by a newspaper (The Chicago Sun-Times), digital newsroom (Block Club Chicago), and Spanish-language publication (La Raza Chicago). The local bureaus hope to take these partnerships even farther. With the storytelling series, The Trace plans to publish the stories widely and, “because we know not everyone in Chicago has access to the internet,” through a print zine designed by local Chicago artists.

Like any nonprofit newsroom reliant on foundation funding, The Trace has impact goals. Like any newsroom, it’ll track audience metrics and, among its 24-person staff, has plenty of journalists hungry to break big stories. But, at least in their local newsrooms, staffers are reaching for other goals, as well.

“I am excited, as a reporter, to learn in this space that I’m entering,” Agrelo said, after I asked what the team would consider a successful first year. “Even just through my conversations over the past eight months, there’s so much that community members have taught me about reporting and framing and Chicago. [A year from now] I want to feel like I’m more comfortable or more equipped to tell these stories.”

“Impact works both ways, right?” he added. “I also hope that we can recognize and measure and track how this experience changes our reporting practices. I’d like us to think about impact internally, too.”

After graduating from the Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism in 2014, Padilla Dalmau, who was born and raised in San Juan, landed a job as a metro reporter at El Diario, the largest Spanish-language newspaper in the United States. The years on the job covering crime and the New York City Police Department were emotionally grueling. But Padilla Dalmau learned Puerto Rican history through the diaspora communities she was covering, which she had never learned about in school. She then went on to become an associate producer for NowThis en Español. But the longer she worked in the U.S., the more she started to feel news stories about Puerto Rico tended to focus on problems, without explaining how colonialism contributed to them.

“[The news media covers] Puerto Rico through this lens of ‘poor Puerto Ricans going through another hurricane,’” Padilla Dalmau said. “The problem is not [just] the hurricanes. We’ve been dealing with hurricanes for centuries. The problem is the slow response, because of the bureaucracy of the local, state, and federal governments. The biggest problem is that the [news media] shows breaking news without contextualizing the historical and socio-political reality that makes our lives here challenging.”

After seeing the coverage of Hurricane Maria in 2017, Padilla Dalmau decided to move back to the island in 2018. By 2019, she left NowThis to be a freelance video producer and take a break from journalism. Then, the pandemic hit.

In 2020, Padilla Dalmau noticed that Puerto Rican scientists all over the world were lending their expertise to help make sure the already vulnerable healthcare system in Puerto Rico wouldn’t collapse. Padilla Dalmau and fellow journalist Edmy Ayala started partnering with those scientists to publish a newsletter that delivered verified, factual information about the pandemic to Puerto Ricans in a calm, non-alarming way. They published under the name “9 Millones” (meaning “nine million”), which signifies the three million Puerto Ricans living on the island and the six million in the diaspora.

Padilla Dalmau and Ayala caught the attention of the weekly news podcast Latino USA by Futuro Media in June 2020, which then had the two produce an episode on how Puerto Rican scientists hacked the Covid-19 response on the island.

“A lot of the networks that organized during Hurricane Maria reorganized during the earthquakes that happened in 2019 in Puerto Rico, and then organized again during the pandemic,” Padilla Dalmau said. “These networks start happening, and then they become consistent and stronger.”

That episode led to a grant from the Solutions Journalism Network to cover elections in Puerto Rico, a spot in the Lion Publishers Startups Lab Bootcamp, and a grant from an accelerator program in Puerto Rico. Between those opportunities, the responses from a growing audience, and interest from other journalists, Padilla knew there was a market for new, constructive, and nuanced storytelling about Puerto Rico. Today, 9 Millones is both a publishing and crowdfunding platform for journalists looking to investigate stories about Puerto Rico that are going untold in mainstream news outlets.

With that initial support, Padilla Dalmau wanted to build a network of journalists to work with and figure out a way to nurture the communities they cover through their storytelling. One of the journalists she connected with was Bianca Graulau, an independent video journalist who left TV news in the U.S. to return to Puerto Rico and produce investigative journalism (she’s also the journalist who created the documentary portion of Bad Bunny’s docu-music video about Puerto Rico’s most pressing issues, El Apagón).

Padilla Dalmau said partnering with Graulau was a case study that proved that crowdfunding for specific stories by independent journalists works.

Graulau had already been using Patreon to fund her journalism. She currently has 384 patrons, over 75,000 YouTube subscribers, 179,000 Instagram followers, and 694,000 followers on TikTok. In the summer of 2021, Padilla Dalmau and Graulau launched 9 Millones’ crowdfunding platform with a call for donations to support a story Graulau wanted to produce about overdevelopment in Puerto Rico that was endangering natural resources. In 48 hours, they received $10,000.

“We are doing people-powered journalism. That people were paying us to do this was amazing,” Padilla Dalmau said. “Part of the reason [Graulau] was interested is because she did a story about [overdevelopment] and people were asking her how they could support her so she could keep doing that work. It came from a demand, and that’s why I think it was so successful.”

In the last three years, 9 Millones has crowdfunded $55,000 for independent journalism. It works with a mix of independent journalists who self-publish in their medium of choice and publications who want to publish the stories and front some of the costs. In 2022, 9 Millones worked with 31 people (from journalists to production crews) to develop stories. Some of those include a feature on the threats to Puerto Rico’s coral reefs, Graulau’s story on overdevelopment, and Padilla Dalmau’s own story on the landfill crisis in Puerto Rico.

In its first year, 9 Millones was funded mostly by grants and partnerships. In the second year, Padilla Dalmau offered content consulting, which she quickly found was time-consuming and took away from what she really wanted to do: work with journalists to tell stories on their own terms. In year three, 9 Millones started leading workshops for nonprofits on how to use media and storytelling to advocate for communities.

This year, with another grant from the Solutions Journalism Network, Padilla Dalmau will go into local communities in Puerto Rico to work with and develop community journalists who are already documenting their own stories. 9 Millones will offer them trainings based on their needs and then help distribute their stories to reach a larger audience.

“I always ask people, ‘What’s the dream story you want to do?'” Padilla Dalmau said. “And then I ask, ‘What do you need to make that happen?’”

In the past year, page A1 of The New York Times has frequently featured stories with one similar theme: “whether care and support for young trans people might be going too far or too fast,” in the words of Tom Scocca writing recently in Popula. By his estimate, these front page stories have totaled more than 15,000 words combined, not counting coverage of similar topics in the Opinion section and New York Times Magazine. He added:

Page A1 is where questions go. Is the number of young trans people suddenly unusually large? Is it good for young trans people to be getting medical treatment as drastic as breast-removal surgery? If they’re deferring more drastic medical treatment by taking puberty blockers, is it harmful for them to take those puberty blockers? If they’re not getting medical treatment at all, are their schools letting them socially transition too easily?

On Wednesday, in two separate open letters to Times leadership, two different groups argued that the Times’ coverage of transgender, non⁠-⁠binary, and gender nonconforming people is biased. (The timing was coordinated, the organizations said.)

“The Times has in recent years treated gender diversity with an eerily familiar mix of pseudoscience and euphemistic, charged language, while publishing reporting on trans children that omits relevant information about its sources,” reads the open letter organized by the Freelance Solidarity Project, the digital media division of the National Writers Union.

The letter is addressed to Philip B. Corbett, the Times’ associate managing editor for standards. Initially signed by more than 200 Times contributors, including Alison Roman, John Herrman, Jia Tolentino, and Virginia Sole-Smith, the letter has gained thousands more signatures since Wednesday morning.

The letter notes that Times coverage has been used to support anti-trans bills across the country:

Last year, Arkansas’ attorney general filed an amicus brief in defense of Alabama’s Vulnerable Child Compassion and Protection Act, which would make it a felony, punishable by up to 10 years’ imprisonment, for any medical provider to administer certain gender⁠-⁠affirming medical care to a minor (including puberty blockers) that diverges from their sex assigned at birth. The brief cited three different New York Times articles to justify its support of the law: [Emily] Bazelon’s “The Battle Over Gender Therapy,” Azeen Ghorayshi’s “Doctors Debate Whether Trans Teens Need Therapy Before Hormones,” and Ross Douthat’s “How to Make Sense of the New L.G.B.T.Q. Culture War.” As recently as February 8th, 2023, attorney David Begley’s invited testimony to the Nebraska state legislature in support of a similar bill approvingly cited the Times’ reporting and relied on its reputation as the “paper of record” to justify criminalizing gender⁠-⁠affirming care.

The letter draws parallels between the Times’ coverage of trans people and, in earlier decades, its coverage of gay people and HIV/AIDS and its treatment of gay employees. “New York Times managing editor and executive editor A. M. Rosenthal neglected to put AIDS on the front page until 1983, by which time the virus had already killed 500 New Yorkers,” they write. “He withheld planned promotions from colleagues he learned on the grapevine were gay. Many of his employees feared being outed.”

That last link is to a 2018 piece in the Times’ T Magazine, “Six Times journalists on the paper’s history of covering AIDS and gay issues.” Reading the Times’ early HIV/AIDS coverage, T Magazine editor-at-large Kurt Soller wrote then, is “to be reminded how news coverage shapes perceptions and policies, particularly when it comes to oppressed communities.”

In an interview with Hellgate NY, Jo Livingstone, a critic and writer who helped organize the Freelance Solidarity Project’s letter, argued that the Times’ reporting on trans people is intended in part to drive views and outrage:

There are really not that many trans people in America. There aren’t that many trans children in America. This is an issue which affects a lot of people, in theory. In practice, maybe not so much.

But because it’s a question that seems to relate to institutions that people feel a lot of ownership over, for example, schools, especially primary schools, you know, “what are people doing with my child when I’m not around?” I think that there’s a paranoia at the heart of what makes people want to read about this stuff, which is only getting more and more intense, the more the coverage.

Newspapers have a passive explanation — what people want to read is the news that we report. And just to go back to what I was saying before, that is a willful misreading of what journalism does in society.

GLAAD also published an open letter on Wednesday and protested outside Times headquarters, calling out the Times’ “irresponsible, biased coverage of transgender people.” That letter was signed by more than 100 equality and media organizations and individuals including celebrities like Judd Apatow and Margaret Cho.

GLAAD’s letter includes specific demands for the Times, including a meeting with trans community members and more hiring of trans employees. The Freelance Solidarity Project’s letter simply asks for a response.

Charlie Stadtlander, The New York Times’ director of external communications, provided a statement on Wednesday afternoon:

“We received the open letter delivered by GLAAD and welcome their feedback. We understand how GLAAD and the co-signers of the letter see our coverage. But at the same time, we recognize that GLAAD’s advocacy mission and The Times’s journalistic mission are different.

As a news organization, we pursue independent reporting on transgender issues that include profiling groundbreakers in the movement, challenges and prejudice faced by the community, and how society is grappling with debates about care.

The very news stories criticized in their letter reported deeply and empathetically on issues of care and well-being for trans teens and adults. Our journalism strives to explore, interrogate and reflect the experiences, ideas and debates in society — to help readers understand them. Our reporting did exactly that and we’re proud of it.”

I asked Stadtlander to clarify which letter this statement is referring to — just the one from GLAAD, or also the one from the Times contributors? He responded:

The letter you linked to with the numerous signatories was delivered in person by GLAAD reps to the NYT this morning. GLAAD issued press releases and letters of their own simultaneously, but the open letter you’re talking about came to us through GLAAD. The statement applies to both.

On Thursday, the group of Times writers behind the letter told me, “GLAAD confirmed to us that they did not deliver a copy of our letter to the New York Times. We look forward to clarification from the Times.”

You can read the Times contributors’ letter here or sign it here. You can read GLAAD’s letter here or sign it here.

180 (and counting) past and present New York Times contributors have signed an open letter to the paper’s standards editor condemning the ongoing unethical anti-trans bias in its coverage of trans, non-binary and gender nonconforming people. Read it here https://t.co/0A9Ryp4R5K

— stasis baby (@HarronWawker) February 15, 2023

Permit me a thread on something I have first-hand knowledge of. My child transitioned when he was 20. This is a good letter Chris links to. What is most disturbing to me about the treatment of trans issues even by the mainstream media is how facile it can be, lacking nuance.
1/5 https://t.co/Ck6Ji1Fyj8

— Jon Ralston (@RalstonReports) February 15, 2023

Last week, NYT published a (very rare) column defending trans people from right-wing attacks. Then an editor went in and removed mention of trans people from the headline. https://t.co/FLGVWFPd0F pic.twitter.com/z2MDWAxqYn

— Parker Molloy (@ParkerMolloy) February 15, 2023

…from 1963 to 1987 was deeply problematic. At the time, the first instinct of all those involved would doubtless have been to claim they were just telling all sides of the story. But bias can often disguise itself as neutrality/objectivity. This merits real self-examination. >

— Mark Harris (@MarkHarrisNYC) February 15, 2023

…but those pieces no longer look expert or objective. Many other stories assigned by crime or city-desk editors treated homosexuality only as an urban scourge, a blight on the streets. They don’t look great either. It’s always worth asking: How will this be read in 10 years? x

— Mark Harris (@MarkHarrisNYC) February 15, 2023

“To suggest that there is no relationship between the way that we are using language at the newspaper to discuss people’s lives, people who are also being debated in court, is to really be willfully ignorant of what it is that we do as journalists.”https://t.co/7xXOgedB1A

— Hell Gate *subscribe today!* (@HellGateNY) February 15, 2023

The clever AI chat program has captured the imagination of the public for its ability to generate poems and essays instantaneously, its ability to mimic different writing styles, and its ability to pass some law and business school exams.

Teachers are worried students will use it to cheat in class (New York City public schools have already banned it). Writers are worried it will take their jobs (BuzzFeed and CNET have already started using AI to create content). The Atlantic declared that it could “destabilize white-collar work.” Venture capitalist Paul Kedrosky called it a “pocket nuclear bomb” and chastised its makers for launching it on an unprepared society.

Even the CEO of the company that makes ChatGPT, Sam Altman, has been telling the media that the worst-case scenario for AI could mean “lights out for all of us.”

But others say the hype is overblown. Meta’s chief AI scientist, Yann LeCun, told reporters ChatGPT was “nothing revolutionary.” University of Washington computational linguistics professor Emily Bender warns that “the idea of an all-knowing computer program comes from science fiction and should stay there.”

So, how worried should we be? For an informed perspective, I turned to Princeton computer science professor Arvind Narayanan, who is currently co-writing a book on “AI snake oil.” In 2019, Narayanan gave a talk at MIT called “How to recognize AI snake oil” that laid out a taxonomy of AI from legitimate to dubious. To his surprise, his obscure academic talk went viral, and his slide deck was downloaded tens of thousands of times; his accompanying tweets were viewed more than two million times.

Narayanan then teamed up with one of his students, Sayash Kapoor, to expand the AI taxonomy into a book. Last year, the pair released a list of 18 common pitfalls committed by journalists covering AI. (Near the top of the list: illustrating AI articles with cute robot pictures. The reason: anthropomorphizing AI incorrectly implies that it has the potential to act as an agent in the real world.)

Narayanan is also a co-author of a textbook on fairness and machine learning and led the Princeton Web Transparency and Accountability Project to uncover how companies collect and use personal information. He is a recipient of the White House’s Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers.

Our conversation, edited for brevity and clarity, is below.

Accessibility is a relatively small area of focus in journalism right now. There aren’t yet a lot of roles like the one I’m starting now. At its core, I think journalism is about wanting valuable information accessible to as many people as possible, and I believe I have potential to create real change if I invest fully into it. Thankfully, the Post agreed and created this new title.

At an organization like the Post, we have great opportunity to contribute to the broader discussions surrounding accessibility and technology. I’ve often found myself wishing conversations in this area were more inclusive of people with a diversity of backgrounds and identities. It’s essential to think about accessibility not just in the context of disability but also in the context of other inequities affecting news coverage and access to news. For instance, writing in plain language for users with cognitive disabilities can also benefit users with lower reading literacy. [The Post published a plain language version of Foreman’s introductory blog post.] Making pages less complex can make them more user-friendly and also possible to load in the first place for folks in areas with bad internet, etc.

It’s definitely stressful to be the first in this new role. I feel deep down like I need to justify its creation with every step that I take. My managers and colleagues have been fully supportive, and it is thanks to them that the role exists, so I would say that the pressure feels self-enforced. Thankfully, there is a lot of collaboration in the accessibility world, and I have already been in contact with some folks from outside of The Post regarding how we can support each other.

“I see people getting into the news business in ways that they couldn’t before,” Baquet said. “I had coffee a couple of months ago with the editors at New York Focus, which is a small newsroom in New York that’s examining the state government and the prison system. They do great stuff.”

“The Dean Baquet shoutout … we nearly fell out of our seats,” Akash Mehta, the editor-in-chief of New York Focus, told me recently.

Mehta co-founded New York Focus with editor-at-large Lee Harris in 2020 after months of freelance reporting on the state budget negotiations and its impacts at the start of the pandemic as a freelancer. Before that, Mehta had worked in local and state politics — serving on his local community board, interning for local legislators and for electoral campaigns. He considered himself civically engaged, and it wasn’t until he started working as a journalist that he fully realized how confusing state politics could be.

“With each of these stories, I encountered these ‘What the fuck’ moments: How is it possible that my state, that I’ve lived in all my life, is run like this?” Mehta recalled. “I thought of myself as a pretty well-informed New Yorker, but I had no idea of the insanity, for instance, [of how] the state budget is crafted each year. We decided that if there was no [existing] home for that kind of accountability journalism, then it fell to us to create it.” Upon its launch in October 2020, New York Focus became the first nonprofit newsroom covering New York State politics.

New York has the third-largest economy in the United States, after Texas and California, but it’s losing more residents than any other state. The number of newspapers operating in the state declined by 40% between 2004 and 2019, according to the University of North Carolina Hussman School of Journalism and Media’s News Deserts project, and coverage is often centered around New York City.

“The way that Albany works is incredibly opaque,” Mehta said. “There’s a lot of opportunity for accountability reporting to help citizens participate in government and [help] people in power to make more informed decisions. Even on a really scrappy budget, and in just two years, we’ve seen that this type of reporting can lead to real impact and policy consequences.”

Last spring, the New York State Board of Elections started enforcing campaign finance transparency laws after New York Focus reported on violations. In 2021, after Focus investigated, the state’s health department released data on drug overdose deaths.

More recent stories have covered police surveillance, the New York City Housing Authority’s failure to comply with federal hiring laws, and the state senate’s rejection of Governor Kathy Hochul’s nominee for chief judge of the state’s highest court. A “Perspectives” section also runs occasional opinion pieces. Focus stories have been picked up by publications like Politico, Vox, and the Albany Times Union.

I’m very skeptical that Governor Hochul’s nominee would have been rejected this week, had it not been for @nysfocus‘s in-depth reporting last year on the direction of the state judiciary & its highest court. (1/)

— Taniel (@Taniel) January 19, 2023

New York Focus is currently funded through grants from the Open Society Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Vital Projects Funds, and others; it also receives donations from individual donors and revenue from some publishing partnerships. (The site has co-published with local outlets like the Albany Times Union, City & State, and The City, and with national outlets like The Intercept, The Nation, and Fast Company. So far, it’s only asked national partners for payment, so that revenue stream has only provided a few thousand dollars a year.) Readers can opt to become members and make monthly recurring donations, starting at $1. Focus has a full-time staff of six and is planning to expand in the coming year. Most of the team is based in New York City, though they “criss-cross the state on Amtrak,” Mehta said.

Rebecca Klein, the general manager and publisher of New York Focus, said Focus averages 30,000 unique website visitors per month, with a newsletter open rate over 50%. Its audience is so far “New York political insiders” mostly based in Albany and New York City.

Moving forward, New York Focus plans to build out its co-publishing network, letting hyperlocal publications run its work for free. A statewide listening tour is also in the works.

“We’re trying to take this group of New York political insiders who really care about our work and continue to serve them — and also expand what it means to be a New York political insider,” Klein said.

The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday on a staff memo at BuzzFeed that laid out plans for the digital media company to use OpenAI — creator of ChatGPT — to help write quizzes and other content. In the memo, BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti wrote AI will play a role in both editorial and business operations at BuzzFeed within the next year.

“For example, a quiz to create a personal romantic comedy movie pitch might ask questions like, ‘Pick a trope for your rom-com,’ and ‘Tell us an endearing flaw you have,'” the Journal’s Alexandra Bruell reported. “The quiz would produce a unique, shareable write-up based on the individual’s responses, BuzzFeed said.”

But, hey! Humans will still provide “cultural currency” and “inspired prompts,” according to Peretti’s memo.

“If the past 15 years of the internet have been defined by algorithmic feeds that curate and recommend content, the next 15 years will be defined by AI and data helping create, personalize, and animate the content itself,” Peretti wrote.

Maybe it’s because the announcement comes as several news organizations announced layoffs and other cuts, but many found the update grim.

a sentence to put on journalism’s tombstone if I’ve ever seen one: “BuzzFeed remains focused on human-generated journalism in its newsroom, a spokeswoman said Thursday.” https://t.co/QWYpwzHf9v

— Samit Sarkar (@SamitSarkar) January 26, 2023

Attention Twitter and BuzzFeed corporate: I am actually an AI chatbot. I produce quality, human-adjacent content. I pass the Turing test. I very rarely go to the doctor. I plan vacation days well in advance! Union? What union?! [muffled screaming]https://t.co/Yvj2SKk6C6

— Matt Shuham (@mattshuham) January 26, 2023

Somebody’s gonna end up with the job of editing this garbage. Will have to be the most soulkilling new job in media since whoever signed up to revive zombie Deadspin. https://t.co/Ul8PHm68E0

— Kevin Collier (@kevincollier) January 26, 2023

The stock market on the other hand? $BZFD ultimately jumped 120% on the news that the company plans to use AI to generate content, its biggest gain since going public in December 2021.

Two recent WSJ stories about BuzzFeed’s business come ahead of this stock jump, by @jtoonkel + @alexbruell

Last night, ~ $10m deal with Meta for creator content: https://t.co/erMv5OyhsN

Today, using ChatGPT to assist with content creation: https://t.co/aTUB9YxMsc$BZFD

— Kerry Flynn (@kerrymflynn) January 26, 2023

The AI-powered chatbot that can generate humanlike text on most prompts was released in late November 2022 and had a million users within a week. But we’re still learning about how it works — and how it came to be. (Time magazine, as one example, recently revealed OpenAI paid workers in Kenya less than $2 an hour to wade through some of the darkest parts of the internet.)

In one recent case of AI-powered articles gone wrong, the outlet CNET had to issue “substantial” corrections, respond to accusations of plagiarism, and ultimately hit pause on their whole AI experiment earlier this month. BuzzFeed must be hoping that using similar technology for quizzes will be less fraught.

Random quizzes and lists is exactly the type of content you should use AI to create. This is fine. https://t.co/3pOwI80U68

— Ross Maghielse (@Maghielse) January 26, 2023

As a student at Morgan State University in the early 2000s, Carter wanted to be a sports writer. But one professor, Frank Dexter Brown, encouraged him to experiment with reporting on different beats.

Carter was the editor-in-chief of the student newspaper The MSU Spokesman, and after graduating in 2003, he went on to work for the university in a public relations role. By 2009, he knew firsthand that HBCUs weren’t covered the same way as predominantly white institutions.

“I started thinking about why HBCUs don’t get more coverage institutionally,” Carter said. “The goal with HBCU Digest was to tell the HBCU story in a different way. I never knew that I would fall in love with higher education and, particularly, the ways in which [institutions] can transform lives.”

After 11 years of running HBCU Digest, Carter left to work for Howard University as a director of operations, strategy, and communications in 2021. But his work on the Digest caught the attention of Sara Hebel and Scott Smallwood, the co-founders of Open Campus Media, a nonprofit investigative news outlet covering higher education.

It led Hebel and Smallwood to the idea for the HBCU Student Reporting Network, a paid reporting fellowship for student journalists to cover the HBCUs they attend for broader audiences around the country. The program, with an inaugural class of six, launched this week, with Carter serving as editor and Wesley Wright as assistant editor. It’s funded through grants from the Knight Foundation, Carnegie Corporation of New York, Craig Newmark Philanthropies, and the Scripps Howard Fund. The fellows will be paid a $1,200 stipend per month for the semester-long fellowship.

The first class of fellows: Auzzy Byrdsell of Morehouse College; Brittany Patterson of Southern University and A&M College; Jasper Smith of Howard University; Skylar Stephens of Xavier University of Louisiana; Alivia Welch of Jackson State University; and Tyuanna Williams of Claflin University.

The fellowship is modeled on the CalMatters College Journalism Network, which launched in 2020 to increase news coverage of California’s public universities. Fellows in the HBCU Student Journalism Network will spend 10 to 15 hours per week during the semester working on a range of stories with guidance and mentoring from Carter and Wright. They’re most looking forward to covering “funding and enrollment trends, campus arts and sports cultures, and students’ and colleges’ roles in social justice,” according to the Open Campus news release.

Carter said part of the reason that HBCUs have gone undercovered is dwindling resources in the local newsrooms in the same communities as the HBCUs. Story budgets are often dictated by what assigning editors are most interested in. Reporters have limited bandwidths and education reporting has traditionally meant covering the local school boards and the largest college or university in town, which are hefty beats on their own. (One bright spot: The Plug, which covers Black and brown tech companies, has an entire newsletter devoted to covering tech and innovation out of HBCUs.)

“Typically, coverage has been about struggles and financial issues at HBCUs,” Carter said — and less about “faculty excellence, student workforce development, political mobilization, or even the impact of HBCUs on agriculture, secondary education, medicine, and law. [But] news operations are starting to connect the dots of what diversity means and how you get there in terms of workforce development, and HBCUs are a central part of that.”

The Student Journalism Network comes at a particularly important time for HBCUs. Three years into a global pandemic and after the murder of George Floyd in June 2020, HBCUs have received millions of dollars in philanthropic donations and nationwide attention. Author and philanthropist MacKenzie Scott donated over half a billion dollars to nearly two dozen HBCUs between July and December 2020. The recipients put the donations toward funding their endowments, hiring faculty, upgrading technology and facilities, and more, according to The Plug. In 2021, the Knight Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the MacArthur Foundation together committed $20 million to Howard University to open the Center for Journalism and Democracy, which is now led by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author Nikole-Hannah Jones.

Enrollment at HBCUs has increased over the last three years (even as college enrollment nationwide has declined) as students look for safe and inclusive environments to study. At the same time, corporations and major companies are pushing to diversify their workforces; some have started investing in HBCUs to do so.

But none of those are enough to fix major institutional issues like historic underfunding and discrimination, Carter said. (”$50 million helps, but it doesn’t address a $250 million problem.”)

Wright, who works as the student media advisor at Florida Atlantic University, said that as with other beats, when there are fewer or no reporters covering institutions, both local communities and the institution suffer. The student network fellows have the advantage of already knowing their campus communities best.

“People who work at HBCUs [often] feel like [journalists] parachute in after a tragedy or after some phenomenon, and then they leave,” Wright said. “This fellowship has a different tenor. We’re not sending somebody from another part of the country to parachute in and interview a football coach and that person has no local context. We’re working with [students]. There’s no [better] way to be close to an institution than through somebody who lives in a dorm.”

The fellowship will help students build their portfolios, network with professional journalists, and have their stories republished by Open Campus Media’s reporting partners, creating a pipeline of emerging Black journalists when they graduate.

“It is literally a dream come true for me,” Carter said. “I always wanted to see young reporters take an interest in higher education, specifically HBCUs. I didn’t want to do this work by myself forever.”

There is perhaps no more studied — or worried-about — dimension of news over the past five to ten years than the decline of media trust. It’s extremely well-documented at this point, across virtually all corners of the globe. And we now have hundreds of studies examining just about every facet of this decline — its causes, its effects, and its many proposed solutions.

But there’s one less-studied group of people for whom a declining trust in the news media might be particularly damaging for journalists: whistleblowers. Journalists have depended on whistleblowers for some of their most consequential stories of the past several decades. But since whistleblowers often initiate an interaction with journalists, their act is a leap of faith that requires significant trust in both the journalist individually and the professional standards and impact of the news media more generally.

That’s the argument that undergirds a new study by the University of Georgia’s Karin Assmann, published late last month in Journalism Practice. If whistleblowing to a journalist is about the greatest act of trust one can put in the media, Assmann wondered, what were whistleblowers’ criteria for that trust, and how do they evaluate journalists’ performance in light of those criteria? And more broadly, might the decline in media trust generally make it less likely that individual whistleblowers choose to trust journalists with their secrets?

Assmann interviewed 16 American whistleblowers who contacted journalists between the 1970s and 2010s. Nearly all of them worked for U.S. government agencies, and several were quite prominent, including Daniel Ellsberg and Jeff Wigand.

Assmann analyzed these interviews through the lens of institutional logics, the set of practices, assumptions, and values that govern a particular social sphere. She noted that whistleblowers are news consumers just like anyone else — they have an outside understanding of journalism’s institutional logic, one that they must see as substantially more valuable and trustworthy their own institution’s logic in order to use the former to expose the latter.

She found that whistleblowers were drawn to journalists because of the overlap between their own motives and their perception of journalists’ motives — keeping the powerful in check and advocating for the public interest. Their goal was to produce social change, so the name recognition and status of the journalist they approached played an outsized role in their criteria for trust.

Two other criteria were unsurprisingly significant: a commitment to protect their identity and substantial subject matter expertise. What’s more surprising is that many of them — about half — now see the news media as antagonistic and much less likely to fulfill the role they had hoped for when they blew the whistle. They variously described the news media as “corrupt, biased, politicized, self-serving, beholden to the government and neglectful of their sources,” Assmann wrote.

Some of their misgivings are rooted in specific failures of the journalists they worked with — in one case, journalists named the whistleblower at a press conference without his consent. Others were based on a more generally cynical disposition toward the press.

Many of the whistleblowers said they would attempt to circumvent the news media when releasing similar information today, given the ease of self-publishing and their perception of declining specialized expertise among journalists. Yet they were wary of this strategy too, citing the sophistication of government surveillance tools (especially in cases like that of Reality Winner) and susceptibility to censorship by social media platforms.

These whistleblowers have heavily bought into the institutional logic of journalism, with its self-regard for its watchdog role and strong professional standards, Assmann concluded. But even as they continue to reach out to the news media, their trust in journalists to hold up those standards has eroded. “Their expectations are increasingly difficult to meet in the U.S. media environment, where newsrooms cannot afford dedicated beat reporters with the expertise and resources necessary to be discovered and trusted by the next whistleblower as a reliable collaborator,” she wrote.

Research roundup

Examining podcast listeners’ perceptions of the journalistic functions of podcasts. By Kelsey Whipple, Ivy Ashe, and Lourdes M. Cueva Chacón, in Electronic News.

Podcasting, as this study notes, “is both new and old, confident but still coming into its own” — a teenager of a medium, having been born around 2004.

The audience for podcasts has grown tremendously in recent years (consider: how many podcasts have you listened to just in the past week?), so it’s a thoroughly established element of digital storytelling — and yet one without clearly established boundaries, practices, or normative expectations. And when it comes to news on podcasts, should we describe it, as various observers have, as “confessional” or “personal” journalism,” as “audio nonfiction novels,” as “soundworks” — or something else entirely? Moreover, what do people want and expect of podcasts as a form of journalism?

This study explored those questions through a representative national survey of U.S. internet users, about half of whom reported being podcast listeners. The results seemed, on the surface, somewhat contradictory: There was “notably low trust in podcasts as a source of news” and yet also “strong support for the perception that podcasts are a form of journalism and information-sharing.” That is, podcast listeners indicated that they trusted it less as a source of information than radio and other traditional forms of news…and yet they also very much saw podcasting as an important vehicle for journalism.

What might explain this gap? While the study couldn’t say for certain, it seems plausible, the authors suggest, that at least part of it is that creators and listeners are still working out what ethical standards and storytelling norms should look like (er, sound like) in this emerging medium.

Perhaps it’s also a matter of exposure and of developing greater media literacy. Survey results indicate that “people who listen to podcasts more frequently trust them more as a source of information and are more likely to agree with the statement that podcasts are journalism — and that podcast hosts and creators are journalists,” the authors write. “Similarly, consistent (daily or monthly) listening to a podcast could provide listeners more insight into the podcast production process, and this could influence listeners’ perceptions of podcasts as a form of journalism.”

The researchers also looked at how podcast listening was connected with different perceptions about core journalistic functions (e.g., should the press be adversarial like a watchdog? more of an interpreter of events? etc.). They found that listening was most strongly correlated with the idea that journalists should “provide entertainment and relaxation” as one of their roles. “Podcast listeners may indeed understand podcasts to be a form of journalism,” the authors conclude, “but they may tune in to these shows to unwind and be entertained.”

“News for life: improving the quality of journalistic news reporting to prevent suicides.” By Florian Arendt, Antonia Markiewitz, and Sebastian Scherr, in Journal of Communication.

Covering suicide is complicated terrain for journalists. Debates about the relative quality of such coverage have often focused on how truly poor it can be, and why that’s so significant. After all, sensationalistic reporting on suicide — particularly when specific details are provided about the method and location of suicide, etc. — has been shown to increase the likelihood of “copycat” suicides. But it’s not all bad: News coverage that eschews such details and instead emphasizes hope and recovery can be associated with a decrease in suicides.

But how strong is the evidence for such impact on society? Can we really draw such a linear connection between better news coverage and better social outcomes, both in general and on this important issue in particular?

The study here offers a unique approach. First, the authors made an intervention, launching a web-based campaign to promote higher-quality suicide reporting and offering this training to newsrooms in Germany. Ultimately, 22 newsrooms participated in the training, which included having journalists watch videos and also help in spreading awareness to their colleagues. Then, the researchers tested the effects of the intervention on changes in news content (did reporting improve?) and on the rate of actual suicides (did the numbers go down?).

The results are rather heartening: A content analysis of more than 4,000 articles indicated that reporting on suicides improved in quality, and a subsequent time-series analysis found “tentative evidence” for an actual reduction in suicides.

“Acknowledging limitations in terms of causal interpretations,” the authors write, “the findings support the claim that high-quality news can save lives. Similar newsroom interventions run elsewhere may contribute to preventing suicides globally.”

Signaling news outlet trust in a Google Knowledge Panel: A conjoint experiment in Brazil, Germany, and the United States. By Gina M. Masullo, Claudia Wilhelm, Taeyoung Lee, João Gonçalves, Martin J. Riedl, and Natalie J. Stroud, in New Media & Society.

What to do about the crisis of trust in news that we described at the top? Among the many proposals, some have suggested that greater journalistic transparency — that is, pulling back the curtain on who journalists are, how they do their work, and so forth — might facilitate greater audience trust, as news processes and practices come more fully into public view. But does that really work? Generally, the evidence has been inconsistent, these researchers note.

This study attempts to study journalistic transparency in a slightly different way. It uses a conjoint experiment (which allows for the manipulation of many more variables than usual experimental designs, offering a finer level of assessment and causality), and does so in three countries: Brazil, Germany, and the United States, with more than 6,000 participants in total. This more sophisticated approach, the authors argue, allows them to “parse more precisely whether a particular transparency attribute signals to the public that a news outlet is trustworthy.”

Importantly, too, the researchers treated transparently a bit differently than other studies by focusing on a Knowledge Panel-like box of information that people would come across about a news organization when they search for it on Google. They found that, indeed, “journalistic transparency can cue trust when it is done at the level of the entire news outlet, or the domain level, and comes from an external source, Google, as opposed to the outlet itself.”

The study also finds that, at least in Brazil and the U.S., two pieces of information in a Knowledge Panel offer particularly strong indications that a news outlet is trustworthy: “a brief description of the news outlet and an explanation of other sites accessed by people who frequent that news outlet’s website.” In Germany, meanwhile, “information about journalists and the description of the news outlet were the strongest cues.”

In all, the study offers vital clues about the importance of Knowledge Panels in cueing heuristics that ultimately influence whether people trust news organizations.

“Just a ‘mouthpiece of biased elites?’ Populist party sympathizers and trust in Czech public service media.” By Klára Smejkal, Jakub Macek, Lukáš Slavík, and Jan Šerek, in The International Journal of Press/Politics.

There’s so much interest in studying trust in news that it’s worth highlighting just one more study in this vein — this time from the Czech Republic.

You won’t be surprised to learn that people with populist attitudes tend to have lower trust in the press. This is especially true when talking about public service media (PSM). Despite the fact that in European countries with strong democracies, such government-supported media tend to be highly professional as well as fairly autonomous from outside influence, the drumbeat of criticism about them has continued to grow in recent decades, and particularly from populist politicians and those supporting them. However, exactly why trust in PSM tends to be so lacking among populist-leaning citizens has remained less clear, this study suggests. Is it simply an ideological mismatch, or something more?

The authors address that here by exploring “how populist party sympathizers differ from the sympathizers of other, non-populist political parties in terms of what they expect from the news media they trust, and how this difference affects their trust in PSM.” In particular, the study tests two types of expectations that could predict trust: first, the expectation that trusted media are impartial, and second, the expectation that trusted media tend to look out for “us” and serve “our” in-group accordingly.

A representative survey of the adult Czech population finds that, for populist party sympathizers, trust in PSM links exclusively to their assumption that media should “conform to their worldview,” while those supporting other political parties “expect normative standards [of journalism] to be maintained.” To be clear, what the authors call “cohesive trust” and “normative trust” are both important and can co-occur for people. What’s significant is that the path to engendering trust in PSM among populist party sympathizers appears to flow only through the former and not the latter — which underscores the overall challenge of improving trust in the press, particularly in Europe but elsewhere as well.

“Government eyewitness: Considering new approaches to political coverage through local TV’s greatest strengths.” By Brian Calfano, Costas Panagopoulos, and Elisa Raffa, in Journalism & Communication Monographs.

For television as a form of news, its visual qualities as well as the personal connection that people may feel toward the journalists and personalities involved can be one of its greatest strengths. And yet, as these authors note, the same things “also expose the medium’s glaring weaknesses in support of democratic governance. To the extent that visual aesthetics, production techniques, sensationalism, and conflictual framing of political issues overshadow informative journalism, TV’s bad tendencies may make American politics worse, not better.”

So, what might be done about this? Calfano and colleagues offer a monograph — which is like a journal article, but much longer and more elaborate — that brings together insights from sociology, political science, and communication “to focus on how best to bring political coverage of value to TV audiences.”

They begin by tracing the development of the Eyewitness News model that is now universal in local television, and then, using a combination of survey and field experiments, investigate how audiences react to eyewitness reporters, particularly when modifying the use of a policy vs. partisan frame by reporters.

“Across these experiments,” they find, “audiences, and especially Republicans, respond more favorably to local than to national reporters and to the use of a policy than a partisan frame.”

A second set of experiments, among others they provide, examines “false balance and truth-telling in local TV stories about the 2020 presidential election” — and again finds that the local reporter wins out against a national counterpart when it comes to audience response, especially for Republicans.

Ultimately, the authors argue that local TV, being less encumbered by the partisan feelings associated with national networks, has more leeway to adapt and make a difference for people. In their view, “local TV news has the most latitude to demonstrate the kind of political reporting approach that offers the most audience value in keeping with the media’s characterization as the Fourth Estate. We hope that a local TV approach to political reporting (i.e., reducing the strategy and partisan conflict reporting, expanding the scope of topics that count as ‘political’), will influence a reform movement among national outlets.”

The nonprofit, nonpartisan news startup aims to “expand the breadth, depth, and long-term financial sustainability of investigative journalism in Canada” by building public interest databases, collaborating with other newsrooms, and publishing its own investigations. A week after launching, IJF has shown some political leaders have been breaking their party’s pledge to stop allowing lobbyists to attend cash-for-access fundraisers, taken a sobering look at the country’s public-housing system in partnership with The Walrus, and cataloged, alongside the National Observer, a lobbying blitz by Canada’s largest oil and gas group.

The IJF mission is fairly simple. They hope to follow the money — and leave the door wide open for other journalists. But that doesn’t mean compiling this amount of data into useful, searchable databases has been easy.

In the United States, public records can be frustrating to access and analyze, with information siloed across federal, state, county, and local websites. Schwartz said journalists face a similar situation in Canada.

“Before [launch], all of this data was required by law to be public, but you might literally need to go to a government archive to access it,” Schwarz said. “You almost certainly would have had to go to a government website where the data will be stored, let’s say, alphabetically by politician name. Really simple things like, ‘Who’s the biggest donor?’ or ‘How many people donated to x party in y year?’ were all but impossible to answer.”

The IJF staff (and more than 80 volunteers) spent two years collecting, cleaning, and analyzing nearly 9 million rows of data from government websites so they could launch with eight public interest databases:

• Lobbying Registrations: We have data on the laws lobbyists want changed and government funding they’re asking for at the federal and provincial levels. Users will be able to search by lobbyist name and keyword (e.g. electric school bus, pipelines, solar panels, wealth inequality, etc.)
• Revolving Door: Every lobbyist who used to work for the government at the federal level and in Saskatchewan, Ontario and British Columbia. Users can search by company (e.g. Suncor or TD Bank), by department (e.g. Environment, Finance), or by individual lobbyist name.
• Lobbyist Meetings: Which lobbyists are meeting with which politicians.
• Government Funding: All money received by lobbyists from provincial, territorial, municipal, federal and international governments. Users can search by company, dollar amount, and government program.
• Political Donations: All donations to politicians at the federal level and in every province and territory from 1993 to the present. Users can search by donor name and recipient name. They can also refine the search by location, amount, political party and donor type (e.g. Union, Corporation, Individual).
• Charity Tax Returns: The tax returns for all Canadian charities from 1990 to the present, searchable by revenue, expenses and programs of interest. Users can compare charities on revenue increases or expense-to-revenue ratios.
• Grant Recipients: How much money foundations give to each charity they support. Users can search by donor, recipient, amount, region, and topic area (e.g. the largest funders of environmental charities, the largest funders of poverty-alleviation charities, etc.)
• Charity Employee Salaries: The salary ranges for senior charity staff throughout time. This will show how much top-paid employees make.

The IJF currently has a staff of 12, including eight who are full-time employees. The reporters, developers, and editors are scattered across the country — though IJF recently began to rent co-working space a couple of days a week in Toronto, where roughly half of the team lives.

Before launch, Schwartz worked at the National Post, Maclean’s, The Logic, and the Calgary Herald. He currently serves as the national chair of the Canadian Association of Journalists (a volunteer position) and launched that organization’s annual diversity survey.

In an introductory post, Schwartz wrote that Canada has lost hundreds of media outlets and thousands of full-time journalism jobs in the past 15 years. The total number of newspaper articles published annually has been cut in half, with the number of articles on civic affairs down by a third.

To help resource-strapped outlets, IJF wants to provide reporting power — alongside the data — to partnering publications. “We don’t just say, ‘Here’s the database.’ We assign a reporter, they assign a reporter, and they work together to dig in,” Schwartz said.

Since 2021, the nonprofit has raised nearly 800,000 Canadian dollars ($596,024) from 10 donors.

“I’m incredibly grateful to the funders we have because they funded an idea, right? We came to them and we said, ‘Wouldn’t it be amazing if any Canadian could see who the largest donor to their politicians are?’” Schwartz said. “And they said, ‘Yes, that would be amazing. Let me give you money to go out and make it happen.’”

Still, Schwartz hopes to grow additional revenue streams, starting with reader support. “I would be a lot more comfortable if we had more funders,” he said. “You never want to be in a position where there’s the potential for conflict of interest.”

Though the databases will be free for “simple searches,” the IJF also plans to sell data access. Organizations “seeking to make money off the databases” and those interested in complex searches or real-time alerts will be charged a subscription fee. The four subscription plans cost between CA$10 and CA$60 per month.

Looking ahead, the IJF has its eyes on building more databases that would be of interest to journalists and the public, including compiling financial disclosure forms (including stock ownership) filed by politicians. And as more journalists discover their free resources, Schwartz also hopes to unlock more stories hidden in the data by teaming up with local reporters.

“We know that we don’t know everything about Canada,” Schwartz said. “There are reporters all across this country who would see a name and say, ‘Oh, that’s a huge real estate developer in my town. The fact that they donated is really significant.’ Then they can use the data to ask pointed questions.”

• Media outlets with extreme biases — regardless of whether it was a conservative or liberal bias — tended to use shorter sentences and less formal language than nonpartisan outlets.
• Mainstream news organizations, as a whole, wrote at a higher reading level. For example, stories from Reuters wire service were written at the level of someone who had completed a year and a half of college, on average. Meanwhile, Wonkette, a far-left online publication, wrote at a ninth-grade reading level, on average. American Thinker, a far-right online publication, wrote at an eleventh-grade level.
• Far-right and far-left outlets took a more negative tone than nonpartisan outlets. They generally had a lower ratio of positive to negative words.

The researchers describe their findings in a paper forthcoming in Journalism Studies, “At the Extremes: Assessing Readability, Grade Level, Sentiment, and Tone in US Media Outlets.” While the findings apply only to the 20 media outlets studied, they provide insights into how these news organizations differ and why some audiences seek information from partisan media, which often don’t adhere to professional journalism ethics or norms.

The paper’s lead author, journalist-turned-researcher Jessica F. Sparks, says people generally prefer simpler, easier-to-understand language. “Hyperpartisan” outlets use words a larger share of the population understands. They also present issues and events in simpler terms — often by leaving out key facts and context, especially when it benefits one political party over another, Sparks points out.

“We, as humans, are what we call ‘cognitive misers,'” she explains. “There are people who like to use more cognitive energy, but most of us don’t. And so, when we think about it that way, when we read simplified text — especially text that frames things as us-versus-them — it’s easier to process that than [news reports that examine] the complex goings-on of Washington.”

Sparks, a doctoral student at the University of Florida, and coauthor Jay Hmielowski, an associate professor at UF’s College of Journalism and Communications, analyzed 5,847 news stories published during three one-week periods in early 2021. They only looked at stories that did not appear behind paywalls, however, partly because they wanted to focus on coverage accessible to anyone.

They examined political coverage from a range of news organizations, including broadcast, digital-native and news wire outlets. Of the 20 studied, seven were nonpartisan. Three were far-left outlets, two were far-right and eight outlets produced stories that tended to lean at least somewhat to the right or left.

Sparks and Hmielowski determined outlet bias based on information gathered from three news bias-rating websites: AllSides, Ad Fontes Media and Media Bias/Fact Check. They gauged the negativity of each outlet’s coverage with Readable, a tool that compares the number of negative words — “bashing” and “forbidden,” for example — to positive words — for instance, “accomplished” and “great” — in a written work. Readable assessed stories’ formality based on factors such as sentence structure, the prevalence of impersonal, formal language and whether personal pronouns such as “we” and “I” appeared in the story.

The researchers relied on two widely used readability scales, the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level and the Gunning Fog Index, to determine the grade level needed to understand news stories produced by each outlet.

Sparks says she was surprised to find similarities between the far-left and far-right media organizations she studied. Both wrote at a lower grade level and used simpler, less formal language.

“Most research has suggested that right-wing media is very distinct from other forms of media and what we found is that’s not necessarily the case with readability,” she adds.

Advice for journalists

It’s unclear whether partisan outlets intentionally make their content easier to read and understand. But Sparks and Hmielowski indicate their readability helps set them apart from nonpartisan news organizations.

“If audiences are seeking content that reflects their attitudes and that rejects mainstream journalism, partisan media outlets on both sides of the political spectrum benefit from differentiating themselves both in content substance and content style,” the researchers write. “Sentence structure, informality, and tone might be one way to achieve that.”

Sparks, whose journalism has appeared in publications such as The Washington Post and Indianapolis Monthly, says it’s important for journalists working in nonpartisan newsrooms to use simple language. But they also need to provide the public with a nuanced understanding of the issue or event they are reporting on, even if it complicates a news story.

Her advice to reporters: Take time to explain the various sides of an issue. If partisans are oversimplifying an issue, note that in your coverage.

“This study, I think it gives us a better idea of what we’re up against and what journalists at reputable organizations might want to consider when they’re writing news about heavily partisan politics,” she says.

Over the course of two years, one of the researchers, Annsar Shahhoud, played “Anna.” Shahhoud learned that these officials were easy to find on Facebook, had relatively public profiles, and were members of active, intelligence-related Facebook groups. She sent them friend requests, told them about the alleged research she was doing, made them feel comfortable, and conducted lengthy interviews. In 2019, when a new military recruit leaked a harrowing video of a mass civilian execution to the researchers, they already had the network to track down the responsible officers.

Published in New Lines Magazine, the details of this investigation — about how Shahhoud and her co-author Uğur Ümit Üngör conducted the covert research, what they found, and the toll the process took on them — are chilling. Shahhoud and Üngör were interviewed on the New Lines podcast, and recently, the magazine published an illustrated video using details from the story and audio from the podcast to create a visual experience.

This particular case, while dark, heavy, and troubling, embodies New Lines’ mission to serve audiences that want to read longform, narrative journalism with all of its complicated, messy, and tangled threads.

In one segment of the podcast, Shahhoud and Üngör talked about what it was like to move on from the imaginary person they’d created in Anna, New Lines managing editor Ola Salem said. “The details of not only what the story is, but what goes on behind the story: That is the stuff we love to run.”

Founder and editor-in-chief Hassan Hassan, along with Salem, launched New Lines Magazine in October 2020. It’s published and funded by the nonpartisan think tank New Lines Institute for Strategy and Policy, which was founded and is led by Iraqi American entrepreneur Ahmed Alwani. (Alwani is also the founder of Fairfax University of America, a private, non-profit university in Fairfax, Virginia.)

At first, Alwani was skeptical about the Institute publishing a magazine, Hassan said. But Hassan kept re-pitching the idea and, in 2019, wrote a first-person essay for The Atlantic that described how different the Syria he grew up in was from the Syria overtaken by the Islamic State that he covered as a journalist.

“As many readers pointed out publicly and privately, the personal was much more illuminating than the work I’d done before,” Hassan later wrote for New Lines about that essay. “About how wars dismantle societies and how their effects carry on long after the gunshots go silent and the headlines shift.”

There needed to be a home for more of these types of stories that humanized these difficult subjects, Hassan thought. The idea of a magazine showcasing and educating people about complex issues eventually appealed to Alwani and he agreed to the launch. The magazine’s name plays on the idea of creating space for new narratives.

“Often when an editor declines or dilutes a good story, it’s to say it’s too in the weeds. I always joke, ‘What’s wrong with weeds?’” Hassan said, adding, “Readers do have the bandwidth to read complex stories as long as you make them readable and accessible, but at the same time, deep and nuanced and thoughtful.”

New Lines started out solely covering the Middle East, which was Hassan and Salem’s expertise as career journalists in the region. Over the last year, with a remote staff of 25 scattered around the globe, New Lines has grown into its tagline: “A local magazine for the world.” It now publishes stories from all over the world, with an emphasis on local reporting from journalists and experts.

The magazine, which has been online-only since its launch but will sell print quarterly editions starting this month, publishes one or two stories every weekday that fall into its five categories: reportage (deeply reported enterprise dispatches from the ground), arguments (arguments based in facts, data, and the writer’s professional experience), anchored in history (essays that use historical context to explain the present), first person (writers use personal experience to tell a story larger than themselves), and review (essays about books, films, and other media).

A sampling of recent stories: Reporting on the origins of a cholera epidemic in Syria, lessons about the coexistence of Indian Hindus and Muslims from the oldest mosque in South Asia, a photoessay on the “vanishing craft” of handmade Sudanese caps, and an essay on how immigrants in America infuses their own culture into Thanksgiving. Above each headline is an indication of how many minutes the story takes to read. The byline includes a one-line biography about the writer so the reader has a sense of whose work they’re about to consume. (I originally found New Lines through its reporting on Pakistan and stayed for its gorgeous World Cup coverage, including “Bisht, Please”).

New Lines also has two podcasts. The Lede, published weekly, mostly interviews reporters about their New Lines stories, their reporting processes, and their sources. Wider Angle, launched in November of this year, hosts conversations on global politics and culture.

Everything New Lines publishes is long. Most stories are supposed to take 10 to 35 minutes to read. Podcast episodes range from 20 to 85 minutes long. New Lines has found an audience for it, with hundreds of thousands of website visitors per month, Salem said. New Lines reached one million monthly views for the first time in 2022 and boasts monthly reader activity in every country in the world, according to Salem. (“Some months we miss out on getting readers from Greenland, but still from all other countries,” she said.)

That’s a lot of screen time. With that in mind, New Lines decided to launch not only a print magazine but also a coffee table book of 50 essays from its first year of publication. New Lines’ art director, Joanna Andreasson, often paints illustrations to accompany stories, which led to the idea for print products. (These will also be New Lines’ first efforts at establishing revenue streams outside of the Institute).

“You can carry it with you and you don’t have to be distracted by the internet,” Salem said.

Hassan described New Lines’ pillars as “the granular, the personal, and historical” stories that help readers understand why things are the way they are. The news cycle doesn’t dictate the publishing schedule, he said. The staff has daily meetings about the day’s news and from there, they decide whether or not they have something meaningful and insightful to contribute to the conversation. If the answer is yes, they get to work on finding the right story. If the answer is no, they get to work on other stories. (”We’re getting away from Twitter and the legacy media temptation and pressure to say something just to say something,” Hassan said.)

“Our essays can take us to small rural towns, the peripheries away from the big cities and the urban centers,” Hassan said. “We forget that much of the world is actually more on the periphery and in the smaller cities. This is quite useful and it draws in an audience that really gets excited about what we are doing. There’s a certain circle of people who like stories that offer them depth, nuance, and treat them as sophisticated readers rather than dumb readers who can’t read beyond 400 words.”

Some predicted the tech could be “a game-changer” for journalism, particularly resource-strapped local newsrooms. Others cautioned that producing convincing disinformation just got a lot cheaper and faster, raised ethical questions the news industry is only beginning to grapple with, and predicted that AI-written content will soon flood the internet.

A prediction by Gannett’s Eric Ulken read, in part, “I don’t imagine we’ll see GPT-3–produced copy in the pages of The New York Times in 2023, but it’s likely we’ll turn to machines for some previously unthinkable creative tasks.”

I didn’t realize how close we were to that first possibility until I listened to a recent episode of The New York Times podcast Hard Fork, hosted by Times tech columnist Kevin Roose and Casey Newton of Platformer.

“I will make a confession here on this podcast that I have tried to write parts of my column using AI,” Roose said. “I’ve said, ‘I’m sort of stuck on this paragraph. I wonder if it could help me figure out a way to complete this thought.’”

Roose hasn’t been entirely impressed with the results. (He used an app called Lex that he described as a “Google Doc with GPT-3 built in.”)

“Sometimes what it comes up with is passable, but it’s not good,” Roose said. “It’s not something that I would be happy to pass off as my own, even if it were ethical to do so — which I don’t think it would be.”

Our own Joshua Benton came to a similar conclusion after experimenting with GPT-2 back in 2019. Since then, the Microsoft-backed tech company OpenAI has trained its language processing AI on a much larger dataset and introduced a chatbot interface that will bring the technology to many more users than earlier iterations. OpenAI is also developing a watermark that’ll help detect text generated in ChatGPT.

Even with the improvements, Roose said he hasn’t been tempted to include AI-generated writing in his Times column just yet.

“I wouldn’t actually be copying and pasting any of the text verbatim, because it just, frankly, isn’t that unique or interesting or stylish,” Roose said in the episode.

“Maybe it’ll get to a point with GPT-4 where it’s better than I am, and then I’ll have to have some hard thoughts about what I can ethically and spiritually stand outsourcing to the AI,” he added.

Roose envisions using AI help to outline and research his columns. In an earlier Hard Fork episode, the hosts discussed using the tech to generate story ideas, submit broken code for corrections, and create multiple explanations for complicated concepts at different levels of difficulty.

Roose also mentioned another way that AI may help him write his columns.

“One thing that I do when I’m writing is I try to anticipate what people might object to, what good points people might make in response to some argument that I’m making,” Roose said. “I feel like I’m O.K. at that, but a GPT-3 or GPT-4 might be better at it. I might be able to paste in my column and say, ‘What are three counterarguments to this?’”

“Right,” Newton quipped. “Until now, if you wanted to find out why your argument was stupid, you had to tweet out a link to your story.”

Their most recent episode also included Hard Fork’s own predictions. (Newton said “the media’s divorce from Twitter will begin in earnest” in 2023 and Roose claimed to be “medium-confident” that TikTok would be banned in the United States before the year was through.) You can listen or read a transcript here.

Shanquella Robinson’s death could have easily fallen through the cracks. In the first two weeks after the 25-year-old from North Carolina was pronounced dead during a group vacation to Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, her story was limited to a few local news reports. It appeared that her death would be treated like those of many other Black women and girls — with cursory, if any, attention from the news media. But then, video of a woman being beaten emerged, and the news of her death went viral.

One tweet by North Carolina blogger Mina Lo with the words, “Rest in Power Shanquella Robinson” has garnered more than 50,000 likes and nearly 17,000 retweets. National news organizations, including CNN and the New York Times, have since picked up Robinson’s story, highlighting the power and potential of Black media platforms. From the killing of Lauren Smith-Fields last year to Robinson last month, Black people online have been a driving force behind elevating stories about missing and murdered Black women and girls in the absence of mainstream media.

Black women and girls face high rates of intimate partner violence, sexual assault, and homicide. However, their cases are rarely treated with urgency. Robinson’s case stands out for the level of attention it received due to not only her family’s advocacy, but also the Black-owned blogs and social media accounts that recirculated the video and emerging details, pushing it into the view of a wider audience.

“We’ve relied on the connections that we have in Black communities to spread the word of issues that are of importance to us for centuries,” said Dr. Meredith Clark, an associate professor of journalism and communication studies at Northeastern University who researches Black Twitter and Black resistance online. “It reaffirms something that we say a lot — ‘We all we got’ — and this, to me, is an example of what that looks like in a news media context.”

From Ida B. Wells’ investigations of lynchings in the South to the Black press’s role in unearthing the truth about the killing of Emmett Till, Black media outlets have historically been vital sources of information about violence against Black people, particularly when mainstream media have disregarded their stories through systemic bias and racism.

“That’s where we could go and send out our messages,” said Nicole Carr, a journalist at ProPublica and professor at Morehouse College who teaches a social justice journalism course.

More recently, especially over the past decade, social media has become a popular tool for gathering and sharing information related to social and racial justice. It is where the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter was born in 2013 and where activists, scholars and others have strategically used hashtags and other messages to quickly disseminate information to the general public.

“In matters of social justice, particularly when they relate to our community, we provide through those platforms the leads that are necessary to make mainstream outlets pay attention,” Carr said. She added that for journalists, in particular, social media can provide a jumping-off point for their coverage. Journalists might see a claim on social media and decide to follow up with a public records request to see if there is any validity to it.

“I’m not comparing Twitter users to the Black press as a whole. I’m just saying we have always found spaces to amplify important messages and get the word out, even when we’re unable to do that in so-called mainstream spaces,” Carr said.

Specific elements of Robinson’s case also stood out, adding to public shock and awareness.

The video and the contradictory accounts of her death drew wider attention to her case. The publicized details have also left many social media users wondering how someone could travel with people who appeared to be her friends and die violently less than 24 hours later.

The people who traveled with Robinson returned to the United States and told her parents that she died of alcohol poisoning. However, their stories were inconsistent with the information on her death certificate published online on November 16. The autopsy report lists Robinson’s cause of death as a severed spinal cord and trauma to the neck. It made no mention of alcohol poisoning.

That same day, Twitter users quickly began circulating a video showing a naked woman being viciously attacked by another woman. In multiple media reports, Robinson’s mother has confirmed the naked woman is her daughter. In the background of the video, a man can be heard saying, “Quella, can you at least fight back?”

After the video was released, Mexican authorities announced that they were investigating Robinson’s death as a femicide — the gender-based murder of a woman. On November 18, the FBI confirmed its involvement in the case.

An arrest warrant has been issued in Mexico for one person in relation to Robinson’s death.

“Black Twitter was responsible for amplifying the clear evidence of foul play,” Carr said.

Media and criminal legal researchers told The 19th that Robinson’s story might have gone unnoticed in a sea of other developing news around the country without circulation of the video.

“People tend to enter stories through the predominant visual. Usually it’s a photograph but videos as well. So that video of her being attacked caught a lot of attention as a very, very clear indication that something was wrong,” said Dr. Danielle Slakoff, an assistant professor of criminal justice at Sacramento State University who studies media portrayals of women crime victims.

Through the years, video has been “one of the critical tools to helping people understand a crisis as it unfolds,” in cases where Black people experience harm, Clark said, citing the nearly nine-minute video of George Floyd’s killing in May 2020 as one example.

In addition to the video, there is a relatability factor, she said. Many people have experienced going on a group vacation or a girls’ trip. The violence leading to Robinson’s death is a shocking turn of events.

Robinson’s mother told NBC News that she credits Black social media with the attention her daughter’s case has received. Such widespread coverage is rare for women of color, particularly Black women and girls, who are often overlooked, research shows.

Slakoff and her research team analyzed news coverage of white and Black missing women and girls in 11 U.S. newspapers over a four-year period. Missing Black girls and women accounted for about 20% of the stories they looked at, though they represent an estimated 34% of missing people, Slakoff said.

In a separate study, Slakoff also found a difference in the media portrayals of white and Black women crime victims. White women are depicted as more sympathetic while Black women are portrayed as complicit in the violence against them by highlighting details like their intoxication level or clothing at the time.

Both the number of news stories and the way those stories are told can make a difference for these criminal cases, Slakoff said. “There is a very long history of white women and girls being viewed as the ideal victim,” she said. “They are viewed to be in need of protection. So in essence, they are seen as worthy of our attention, but they’re also worthy of our resources.”

The disproportionate attention white women receive from the news media, public, and police has come to be referred to as “Missing White Woman Syndrome.” Over the last year, the national fixation on the disappearance of 22-year-old Gabby Petito, a white woman, in addition to the HBO documentary “Black and Missing” have reignited conversations about these inequities.

In light of the skewed interest from news media and law enforcement, Black Twitter has been critical in raising awareness and questions around Black women’s deaths beyond Robinson’s case.

Following the 2020 police shooting of Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old EMT, initial reports labeled her a potential suspect, while many news outlets did not report on her death at all. Hannah Drake, a Louisville-based writer and activist, helped call attention to Taylor’s death on social media, which shifted the media narrative about the circumstances of Taylor’s death.

In May of that year, The 19th’s editor-at-large, Errin Haines, reported on Taylor’s death, prompting other mainstream news outlets to follow, making it a national story. After repeated demands for accountability, the officers involved in Taylor’s death were ultimately charged.

In another case, Black social media users on TikTok amplified the story of Lauren Smith-Fields, a 23-year-old Black woman who was found dead in December 2021 after spending the night with an older white man she had met on the dating app Bumble.

Fields’ autopsy results indicated her cause of death was a result of fentanyl, promethazine, hydroxyzine and alcohol, but her friends and family said she was not a drug user and called for the police to do more. Following criticism from Black TikTok users about disparate treatment between white and Black victims, more mainstream news outlets began to cover her death. Her case remains open.

Despite more national conversations about bias against Black women victims, researchers told The 19th they believe Black social media will continue to bear the responsibility of sharing these stories.

All of this is also happening at a time when digital communities made up of historically marginalized groups, such as Black Twitter, face questions about their future following billionaire Elon Musk’s chaotic acquisition of the platform.

Questions about Twitter’s future are tied to how Black people will advocate for missing and murdered Black women and girls moving forward, Clark said. “It’s integral to thinking about how marginalized communities share information and get traction around stories that otherwise would not get attention.”