Nieman Lab

The Nieman Journalism Lab is dedicated to guiding journalism as it navigates the challenges of the digital age. The rise of the Internet has led to an explosion of news and information, but it has also disrupted the traditional business models that have supported quality journalism for many years. Journalists nationwide are facing job losses or adapting to a dramatically different online landscape. Our goal is to showcase innovative approaches and understand what leads to their success or failure. We aim to uncover valuable ideas that others can adopt. We want to assist reporters and editors as they embrace their online roles, help established news organizations find ways to thrive, and support the new startups that may either enhance or replace them. We maintain a positive outlook. While we don't claim to have all the solutions, we are connected to many insightful individuals. Our readers play a crucial role in this exchange, and we encourage your input to make the Lab a space for collaborative idea-sharing. We invite you to share what’s happening in your area or what you believe should be happening. We hope you find value in our work and join us in this ongoing conversation.

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Articles

You’re more likely to pay for news if you’re rich, old, and/or white

2 days ago | niemanlab.org | Laura Hazard Owen

LINK: www.pewresearch.org ➚ | Posted by: Laura Hazard Owen | June 25, 2025Who pays for news? The Americans who do are disproportionately older, wealthier, more educated, and more Democratic than the U.S. population at large, the Pew Research Center noted this week. This is not new. Other studies have also found that Americans who make over $150,000 a year are most likely to pay for news. In all, 17% of American adults paid for news in the last year, Pew found.
A new report documents “the surprising breadth of student reporting in public media”

3 days ago | niemanlab.org | Sophie Culpepper

LINK: www.uvm.edu ➚ | Posted by: Sophie Culpepper | June 24, 2025How much overlap and collaboration is there between public media and higher education? That’s the question a new report from the Center for Community News at the University of Vermont set out to answer.
Nonprofit news executives share tips on handling the tough times

4 days ago | niemanlab.org | Sophie Culpepper

— This month, a nonprofit news conference panel titled “Leading Organizations Through Change (And Sometimes Crisis)” drew a standing-room-only crowd. In the panel, part of the Institute for Nonprofit News’ annual INN Days conference, executives of three prominent news nonprofits talked about their “hard-earned experiences” taking over.
An unscientific peek inside Meta’s Community Notes shows the pilot is “not ready for prime time”

1 week ago | niemanlab.org | Sarah Scire

LINK: indicator.media ➚ | Posted by: Sarah Scire | June 18, 2025When Meta killed its third-party fact-checking program in the U.S. earlier this year, the social media giant behind Facebook and Instagram said it would replace its professional fact-checkers with a crowdsourced Community Notes program similar to one launched by Twitter.
Minnesota’s Sahan Journal dives into AI with strategic goals and open eyes

1 week ago | niemanlab.org | Lev Gringauz

As journalists around the world experiment with artificial intelligence, many newsrooms have common, often audience-facing, ideas for what to try. They range from letting readers talk to chatbots trained on reporting, to turning written stories into audio, creating story summaries and, infamously, generating entire articles using AI — a use case vehemently rejected by many journalists.
Wordle who? The Atlantic launches a suite of new daily puzzles and games

1 week ago | niemanlab.org | Sarah Scire

The Atlantic debuted a handful of new games and puzzles on Tuesday. The magazine’s “digital parlor of puzzles and play” now includes:A fill-in-the-blank game with a history twist called Bracket City. The game is licensed from creator Ben Gross. The “devilishly difficult” Caleb’s Inferno is a crossword from The Atlantic’s resident puzzle master that gets more difficult as you solve downward.
“Piracy is piracy”: Disney and Universal sue AI image generator Midjourney in a Hollywood first

2 weeks ago | niemanlab.org | Andrew Deck

LINK: variety.com ➚ | Posted by: Andrew Deck | June 12, 2025Yesterday, Disney and Universal Studios (which is owned by NBCUniversal) sued the generative AI company Midjourney in U.S. district court in Los Angeles.
Beyond pageviews: Small news nonprofits develop their own metrics to measure impact

2 weeks ago | niemanlab.org | Sophie Culpepper

— What’s the right metric to measure a news organization’s success? A panel of news leaders, most representing small, local outlets, proposed answers to this question in a breakout session at the Institute for Nonprofit News’ annual INN Days conference last week. It was a conversation as much about nonprofit messaging as about newsroom mission, tailored to smaller outlets that don’t equate audience scale with success.
Let’s get to the point: Three newsrooms on generating AI summaries for news

3 weeks ago | niemanlab.org | Sarah Scire

Takeaways. Summaries. Key points. Whatever you call them, bullet point lists summarizing articles are popping up on more and more news sites. The technology powering these summaries is evolving even as newsrooms find themselves pushed to adopt and adapt. The results have not always been perfect or, uh, bulletproof. But three news organizations out in front on this technology and reliably generating reader-friendly summaries are The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, and Yahoo News.
“Oh yeah, my dad reads The Washington Post”

3 weeks ago | niemanlab.org | Laura Hazard Owen

I’ve been at the Post now for 10 years, and as we have all seen, the media has changed. There was a time when we could go to people and offer this kind of opportunity, and people would jump at that because a platform to get a story about yourself was a huge thing. Now, when I’m doing stories about creators, it’s just one of many platforms, and [the Post] may mean nothing to them, because their audiences may never read a paper, may have never picked up one in their life.