Sara Fischer

The Harris campaign has been editing news headlines and descriptions within Google search ads that make it appear as if the Guardian, Reuters, CBS News and other major publishers are on her side. It's a common practice in the commercial advertising world that doesn't violate Google's policies, but the ads mimic real news results from Search closely enough that they have news outlets caught off guard. The campaign buys search ads with news links to give voters searching for information about Vice President Harris more context.

Substack is on track to more than double its politics and news subscribers in 2024, executives told Axios.

Dotdash Meredith, one of the largest digital publishers in the US, inked a deal with OpenAI to license its content to train 

Meta will not "proactively recommend political content from accounts you don't follow" on Threads. The policies, which are the same it

News companies are reversing course on hard subscriptions—once seen as a safer alternative to the volatile ad market—in favor of flexible paywalls, membership programs and more ads. A strategy focused mainly on subscriptions requires upfront spending on premium content. That takes time to pay off—and many publishers don't have the cushion for that in the current ad slowdown. At the same time, many outlets have learned that simply throwing a paywall up over your previously free content doesn't work either. It throttles ad revenue without capturing enough new subscribers.

A new report saying billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong has sunk hundreds of millions of his own money into an unprofitable Los Angeles Times underscores how desperate the news industry is to chart a plan for survival in the digital era. If billionaire owners can't make the L.A. Times or the Washington Post profitable, then the news industry has to ask itself: What can?

The decline of local newspapers accelerated so rapidly in 2023 that analysts now believe the U.S. will have lost one-third of the newspapers it had as of 2005 by the end of next year — rather than in 2025, as originally predicted. Most communities that lose a local newspaper do not get a replacement, even online. Over the past two years, newspapers continued to vanish at an average rate of more than two per week, leaving 204 U.S. counties, or 6.4%, without any local news outlet.

After months of experimenting with artificial intelligence (AI) to make their work more efficient, some newsrooms are now dipping their toes in more treacherous waters: trying to harness AI to detect bias or inaccuracies in their work. Confidence in the news media is at 

Traffic referrals to the top global news sites from Meta's Facebook and X (formerly Twitter) has collapsed over the past year, according to data from Similarweb. Website business models that depended on clicks from social media are now broken, as regulatory 

The world's biggest streaming companies are coming together to launch the industry's first coalition, the Streaming Innovation Alliance (SIA). The streaming industry has faced few regulatory threats over the past decade, but that's changing as more television consumption moves to digital. The new group is led by two former policymakers acting as senior advisers: former Representative Fred Upton (R-MI) and former Democratic Federal Communications Commission Acting Chair Mignon Clyburn [a member of the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society Board of Directors].