Laura Hazard Owen

Cambridge, New York

Editor at Nieman Lab

Founder and Editor at I'll Be Right Back

Editor of @niemanlab, mom of 3. DMs open. (I also write an occasional parenting newsletter: https://t.co/uOfiEAiJcK)

Articles

How to leak to a journalist

3 weeks ago | niemanlab.org | Laura Hazard Owen

There’s a lot out there to leak. The second Trump administration, historically unfriendly to the press, has thrown Washington into chaos. Tens of thousands of federal employees have been placed on leave or fired as billionaire Elon Musk’s DOGE tries to gut the government. And taxpayer-funded data is being destroyed. Amid the confusion, news organizations and individual journalists are changing how they try to attract would-be tipsters.
In 2011, NPR executives “drafted a secret plan for the worst”

3 weeks ago | niemanlab.org | Laura Hazard Owen

LINK: www.nytimes.com ➚ | Posted by: Laura Hazard Owen | April 1, 2025What would happen if Congress defunded NPR and PBS — something Republicans have renewed their push for following a House hearing last week?
The New York Times picks up the shuttered FiveThirtyEight’s poll tracking database

1 month ago | niemanlab.org | Laura Hazard Owen

LINK: www.nytimes.com ➚ | Posted by: Laura Hazard Owen | March 19, 2025When ABC shut down FiveThirtyEight early this month, the site’s publicly available polling databases — like a presidential approval rating tracker — shut down, too. Many news outlets, including The New York Times and FiveThirtyEight founder Nate Silver’s Silver Bulletin, had relied on the data for election coverage, and people worried about its disappearance.
FiveThirtyEight is shutting down as part of broader cuts at ABC and Disney

1 month ago | niemanlab.org | Laura Hazard Owen

Disney is cutting 200 positions across ABC News and Disney Entertainment, including shutting down FiveThirtyEight, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday night. From the Journal:The ABC news magazine shows “20/20” and “Nightline” are consolidating into one unit, resulting in job cuts, the people said. ABC is also eliminating the political and data-driven news site 538, which had about 15 employees.
The L.A. Times adds AI-generated counterpoints to its opinion pieces and guess what, there are problems

1 month ago | niemanlab.org | Laura Hazard Owen

Billionaire newspaper owners are in the middle of a massive freakout about their Opinion sections during the second Trump administration.
London’s local news startups find readers willing to pay

2 months ago | niemanlab.org | Laura Hazard Owen

LINK: pressgazette.co.uk ➚ | Posted by: Laura Hazard Owen | February 21, 2025The Press Gazette takes a look at three recently launched local news startups in London: London Centric was launched in September by former Guardian media editor Jim Waterson and offers readers regular email newsletters and in-depth reporting that they won’t find elsewhere. Based on Substack, it charges £7.95 per month for full access.
BBC News finds that AI tools “distort” its journalism into “a confused cocktail” with many errors

2 months ago | niemanlab.org | Laura Hazard Owen

LINK: www.bbc.co.uk ➚ | Posted by: Laura Hazard Owen | February 12, 2025When the BBC tested four generative AI tools on articles on its own site, it found many “significant issues” and factual errors, the company said in a report released Tuesday.
OpenAI will fund four Axios Local newsrooms as part of a broader partnership focused on “juicing local news”

Jan 15, 2025 | niemanlab.org | Laura Hazard Owen

LINK: openai.com ➚ | Posted by: Laura Hazard Owen | January 15, 2025OpenAI has entwined itself with 19 news publishers and organizations from the AP and The Atlantic to Le Monde and Spain’s Prisa Media to the American Journalism Project and Lenfest Institute. Now, for the first time, the company is directly funding newsrooms.
The Guardian won’t post on X anymore - but isn’t deleting its accounts there, at least for now

Nov 13, 2024 | niemanlab.org | Laura Hazard Owen

The Guardian said Wednesday that it will no longer post on X, saying it is “a toxic media platform” and “its owner, Elon Musk, has been able to use its influence to shape political discourse.”The news organization does not, however, appear to be deleting or locking its accounts there.
I’m a journalist and I’m changing the way I read news. This is how.

Nov 12, 2024 | niemanlab.org | Laura Hazard Owen

Around 1 a.m. on July 27, 2017, I woke up, opened my politics Twitter list, and lay in the dark watching (via tweets) the Senate’s failed vote to repeal parts of the Affordable Care Act. Around 1:30 a.m., Arizona Senator John McCain cast the deciding vote to save the ACA. For the next hour and a half I read reaction tweets and watched clips of McCain’s thumbs-down. A little over three years later, I was waking up my husband in the middle of the night to tell him Trump had COVID.

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Laura Hazard Owen

Articles

How to leak to a journalist

In 2011, NPR executives “drafted a secret plan for the worst”

The New York Times picks up the shuttered FiveThirtyEight’s poll tracking database

FiveThirtyEight is shutting down as part of broader cuts at ABC and Disney

The L.A. Times adds AI-generated counterpoints to its opinion pieces and guess what, there are problems

London’s local news startups find readers willing to pay

BBC News finds that AI tools “distort” its journalism into “a confused cocktail” with many errors

OpenAI will fund four Axios Local newsrooms as part of a broader partnership focused on “juicing local news”

The Guardian won’t post on X anymore - but isn’t deleting its accounts there, at least for now

I’m a journalist and I’m changing the way I read news. This is how.

Contact details

Emails

Socials & Sites

X (formerly Twitter)