Nieman Lab

6 days ago | niemanlab.org | Sophie Culpepper

LINK: www.bostonglobemedia.com  ➚   |   Posted by: Sophie Culpepper   |   May 8, 2025A deep look at how private money has taken over high school hockey. An investigation of the consequences, and structural causes, of a high school football player’s devastating brain injury. An obituary honoring a star Concord-Carlisle High School diver killed in a Florida car crash. These are a few of the stories from recent months that exemplify The Boston Globe’s push to deepen its coverage of high school sports.

6 days 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.

1 week ago | niemanlab.org | Sarah Scire

LINK: nytco-assets.nytimes.com  ➚   |   Posted by: Sarah Scire   |   May 7, 2025What’s the diminutive of “bump”? A bumplet? Whatever you want to call it, the news industry seems to be experiencing something less than the well-documented “Trump bump” it enjoyed during the president’s first term. The New York Times announced this morning it’d added 250,000 new digital-only subscribers last quarter. The news organization now has 11.66 million total subscribers. It’s a healthy number.

1 week ago | niemanlab.org | Sarah Scire

In the lead-up to the 2022 midterm elections, a coalition of journalism groups trained 45 journalists in 21 “intensive” sessions over nine months. The editors and reporters came from 22 news organizations ranging from public radio stations to small-town newsrooms to large metro dailies. Afterwards the groups behind the Democracy SOS trainings — Solutions Journalism Network, Hearken, and Trusting News — wanted, quite reasonably, to know: Well, did any of it work?

1 week ago | niemanlab.org | Corey Hutchins

Across the country, the kinds of budget cuts that have decimated newspapers over the years are now slicing into local TV news stations. A trend of TV news layoffs “is only just the beginning,” one broadcast trade publication warned in a recent headline. Amid the bleedout, a company has been seeking to reimagine local news in the cord-cutting era of streaming TV. Those behind it are in conversations with potential funders about launching in four states and eventually spreading across the nation.