April 4, 1983 was the 15th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. The day before was a Sunday, and I was with my family in the virtually all-white church we attended in Memphis. I was 11 and naive … Read more
Journalism confronted a unique set of challenges in 2023. Artificial intelligence experienced an unprecedented boom this year, allowing journalists to automate some tasks and shift focus onto reporting projects — but also raising concerns about the accuracy and prominence … Read more
The past year has been a difficult one for a free and independent press. An unprecedented number of journalists and other media workers have been killed in the war between Israel and Hamas. A Wall Street Journal reporter was imprisoned … Read more
Anyone who’s spent any time in the journalism industry has heard these statistics over and over: About 2,500 newspapers have shuttered in the past two decades. One-fifth of Americans live in a news desert. Several major outlets have laid off … Read more
Let’s start with an encouraging statistic: Despite years of demoralizing reports on sweeping media layoffs, nearly 300 new digital local news organizations have launched since 2016. That number, which comes from a 2021 study by Project … Read more
Mining public records can be tedious work — especially more than 40 million of them. But as the findings finally came into focus, not even the just-the-facts questions of their veteran investigative editors could dampen the excitement of the young … Read more
Alissa Quart, NF ’10, on the reporting behind her book “Bootstrapped” The dark inspiration for “Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves From the American Dream” came from the news but also from my lived experience. I direct the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, a … Read more
In my quarter-century as a journalist, I’ve seen many media business models come and go. Each new idea brought with it the hope that this new business structure — or funder or technological development — would be the thing to … Read more
Press Forward launch. Alden still buying. Texas Tribune’s reckoning. Invasions of Kansas newsrooms. Beyond news fatigue, active news avoidance. “Prompt engineers,” perhaps replacing journalists. With just a few months to go until 2024, we enter a potentially perilous presidential … Read more
After a gunman fatally shot a professor on the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill campus on Monday, Aug. 28, the editors of The Daily Tar Heel, UNC’s student newspaper, were unsure of what their front cover should be. Read more
