Laura Hazard Owen

Cambridge, New York

Editor at Nieman Lab

Founder and Editor at I'll Be Right Back

Articles

“Local” is now the most common type of nonprofit news outlet in North America, research finds

1 week ago | niemanlab.org | Laura Hazard Owen

LINK: news.inn.org ➚ | Posted by: Laura Hazard Owen | May 28, 2025A few years back, “single-subject nonprofit newsrooms” — sites like The Trace, The Marshall Project, and Chalkbeat — got lots of attention as one possible future for nonprofit news. Between 2008 and 2021, the number of single-subject nonprofit news sites quadrupled, the Institute for Nonprofit News (INN) found.
Mozilla is shutting down Pocket, its read-it-later app

2 weeks ago | niemanlab.org | Laura Hazard Owen

LINK: blog.mozilla.org ➚ | Posted by: Laura Hazard Owen | May 22, 2025The read-it-later app Pocket was Mozilla’s first acquisition, back in 2017. On Thursday, the company announced that it is shutting down Pocket (as well as its fake review–detecting extension, Fakespot). Mozilla:Pocket has helped millions save articles and discover stories worth reading.
No more transcripts of Trump remarks on the White House website (and the old ones are gone, too)

2 weeks ago | niemanlab.org | Laura Hazard Owen

LINK: www.nbcnews.com ➚ | Posted by: Laura Hazard Owen | May 22, 2025Videos will replace official written transcripts of Trump’s remarks on The White House’s website, NBC reported Wednesday night:As recently as Sunday, transcripts of Trump’s speeches and comments were still showing up in the “Remarks” section of WhiteHouse.gov. The next day, they were gone, snapshots of the site from an internet archive show. The only transcript appearing now is of Trump’s inaugural address on Jan. 20.
New York Times publisher: We’re facing “the most frontal attack on the American press in a century”

3 weeks ago | niemanlab.org | Laura Hazard Owen

LINK: www.nytimes.com ➚ | Posted by: Laura Hazard Owen | May 14, 2025“A vastly smaller, financially weakened and technologically disintermediated profession now finds itself facing the most direct challenge to its rights and legitimacy, as well,” New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger said in a talk at the University of Notre Dame Tuesday that the Times also ran in its Opinion section.
Inside a high school newspaper’s fight for editorial independence

1 month ago | niemanlab.org | Laura Hazard Owen

Last September, Theogony, the student newspaper of Alexandria City High School in Virginia, published a story: “Transportation issues plague school year.”Alexandria City High School (whose football team inspired the 2000 film “Remember the Titans”) has two campuses 0.6 miles apart, and students are required to take buses to shuttle between them throughout the school day. Julia Gwin, Theogony’s news editor, reported that the buses were routinely late, resulting in students missing class.
Eggs are how much? News outlets launch grocery price trackers

1 month ago | niemanlab.org | Laura Hazard Owen

A three-pound bag of Wyman’s frozen wild blueberries. A pound of salmon. A dozen large brown eggs. Each month, students at the University of Southern Maine check the prices of these items, and more, at four grocery stores across the state: The Whole Foods in Portland, the Shaw’s in Bangor, the Walmart in Farmington, and the Hannaford in Caribou.
How to leak to a journalist

2 months 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”

2 months 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

2 months 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

Mar 5, 2025 | 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.