Nieman Journalism Lab

In March, NPR’s David Folkenflik and Miranda Green of Floodlight co-published a story about The Richmond Standard, a local news site in the town of Richmond, California, that is wholly owned by Chevron. There are no full-time journalists on staff; a PR firm in San Francisco oversees the publication’s operations. It is, Folkenflik and Green...

Back in March, The Markup broke some news about a small-business advice chatbot being piloted by the New York City government. The bot — available at chat.nyc.gov — was meant to be an AI-powered, one-stop shop for entrepreneurs looking to set up a business. The city said the bot could tell visitors, in plain English,...

This past Monday, 15 works were awarded the Pulitzer Prize for journalism. In a first for the prestigious awards, two of those winners disclosed using AI to produce their stories. “We are not aware of precedents offhand,” said Marjorie Miller, administrator of the Pulitzer Prizes. “Previous data discerns winners may have used low-level machine learning...

In a normal year, the last Thursday of April might have been a quiet day for Northeastern, and for junior Eli Curwin. It was the penultimate day of undergraduate student exams for spring classes, and, like many students, Curwin was set to return home the next day. Just a week before, he had handed off...

Last year the Canadian government passed a law, the Online News Act, that would require platforms like Google and Meta to pay publishers for linking to their content. Rather than pay up, Meta removed news from Facebook and Instagram in Canada. “News links and content posted by news publishers and broadcasters in Canada will no...

Some day in the distant future, scholars looking back on the evolution (devolution?) of the American news business will consider May 6, 2024 a date worthy of note. They’ll see it as the day the most prestigious prizes in journalism reflected the changing face of the field itself. On Monday afternoon, the 108th edition of...

On Monday, the Pulitzer Prizes recognized some of the best journalism by American news outlets, including brilliant examples of local reporting. In the Breaking News category, the award acknowledged “detailed and nimble” coverage of devastating flooding and mudslides by digital startup Lookout Santa Cruz, which is not even four years old. Chicago-based City Bureau and...

Legislatures don’t move at the speed of newsrooms. The California legislature now moves into its second year of addressing its state’s shrinking newsrooms. The cry of the Democratic majority is clear: “Save local news.” Yet those three seemingly simple words — “save”, “local,” and “news” — have slowed progress, as legislators parse how the new law may...

Protest movements can look very different depending on where you stand, both literally and figuratively. For protesters, demonstrations are usually the result of meticulous planning by advocacy groups and leaders aimed at getting a message out to a wider world or to specific institutional targets. To outside onlookers, however, protests can seem disorganized and disruptive,...

The Pulitzer Center has officially kicked off The AI Spotlight Series, a new training initiative that aims to teach 1,000 journalists how to do AI accountability reporting over the next two years. On April 21, roughly 40 journalists gathered at the University of California, Berkeley for the inaugural “Introduction to AI reporting” session, which was...