Journalism

Digital sources have become an important part of Americans’ news diets—with social media playing a crucial role, particularly for younger adults. Overall, just over half of U.S. adults (54%) say they at least sometimes get news from social media, up slightly compared with the last few years. Facebook and YouTube outpace all other social media sites as places where Americans regularly get news. About a third of U.S.

Sen Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), along with Sens Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), Mazie Hirono (D-HI), Dick Durbin (D-IL), Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), Tammy Duckworth (D-IL), Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), and Tina Smith (D-MN) sent a letter to Assistant Attorney General Jonathan Kanter and Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Chair Lina Khan to highlight the risks that new generative artificial intelligence (AI) features pose to competition and innovation in digital content, including journalism, and to urge both agencies to investigate whether the design of these features violates the antitrust laws. “Recently, mu

The dust has yet to settle after August’s surprising deal between Google and California lawmakers, sidestepping two major legislative efforts to force tech giants to pay local newsrooms for their content.

California lawmakers intend to shelve legislation that would have required Google to pay news outlets for distributing their content, and in its place announced a new public-private partnership between the state and Google that will fund programs to research artificial intelligence and bolster local journalism.

The Washington Post recently published its first-ever story built on the work of a new AI tool called Haystacker that allows journalists to sift through large data sets—video, photo or text—to find newsworthy trends or patterns.

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

Project 2025 echoes Donald Trump’s critical view of the media. As a result, it proposes to strip public broadcasting of its funding and legal status, thus endangering access to reliable news for American citizens. The authors allege that Big Tech colluded with the government to attack American values and advance “wokeism.” In response, they envision sweeping antitrust enforcement not on economic grounds, but for socio-political reasons.

In the hour after President Biden announced he would withdraw from the 2024 campaign, most popular artificial intelligence chatbots seemed oblivious to the news. Asked directly whether he had dropped out, almost all said no or declined to give an answer. Asked who was running for president of the United States, they still listed his name.

Elementary democratic theory holds that self-governance requires a free—and, by implication, a functional—press system. However, today, much of the American press infrastructure is being dismantled by a deeply systemic market failure, with little hope for self-correction. While significant democratic deficits have always existed in American journalism, it is becoming glaringly obvious that a purely commercial press system cannot provide for a multiracial democratic society’s basic information and communication needs.

The free flow of information and the exchange of ideas is the lifeblood of our cultural lives and our democracy. Humans need connections to one another like they need air and water. And a democracy needs citizens to exchange information and ideas. That is what democracy is all about: competing ideas in a debate that plays out freely over time. With freedom of thought and expression, democracy thrives. In contrast, the first goal of the tyrant is to control thought and information.  Today we are confronting that challenge.