The Daily Digest: April 17, 2025
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| Tracking the prices of supermarket staples over time is a service to readers — and a way to keep an eye on the national economy. By Laura Hazard Owen. |
What we’re reading
Media Finance Monitor / Peter ErdelyiAbundance near Perugia →“The [International Journalism Festival] serves as a near perfect metaphor for a lot of the journalism it showcases: incredibly valuable and potentially empowering, but often a little too difficult to access for some, especially if you are not already into it.”
Nieman Reports / Elias SchisgallWith international students at risk, campus newspapers loosen editorial policies →“At The Daily Tar Heel at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, editor-in-chief Laney Crawley said the paper is granting anonymity more readily than before and has acceded to two or three takedown requests from columnists who have immigrant relatives and who have written things critical of Trump. The editors of The Exponent at Purdue University in Indiana have gone even further: They announced in February that they would remove all names, photos and identifying information of pro-Palestinian students from their published content.”
The Verge / Jess WeatherbedWikipedia is giving AI developers its data to fend off bot scrapers →“Wikipedia is attempting to dissuade artificial intelligence developers from scraping the platform by releasing a dataset that’s specifically optimized for training AI models. The Wikimedia Foundation announced on Wednesday that it had partnered with Kaggle — a Google-owned data science community platform that hosts machine learning data — to publish a beta dataset of ‘structured Wikipedia content in English and French.'”
Latin American Journalism Review / Marta SzpacenkopfAfter historic floods, Reporters Without Borders mobilizes to help local newsrooms in southern Brazil become more climate resilient →“The initiative is part of a new global RSF directive to incorporate the climate crisis into its mission to defend press freedom and protect journalists under threat.”
WAN-IFRA / Lucinda JordaanNewsrooms are countering news avoidance by offering uplifting content to break negative news cycles →“Some newsrooms have a dedicated section, like the BBC’s
Uplifting Stories and the Daily Maverick’s /www.dailymaverick.co.za/good-news-roundup/">Good News Round-up; some run weekly series, like McClatchy’s ‘
Uplift’ print package and EcoNews’ weekly ‘
Constructive News’ reels on Instagram; while podcasts and newsletters are proving a win for Rappler’s
Be The Good.”
The Verge / Emma RothGoogle lost its advertising technology monopoly case →“Over the course of three weeks, the DOJ argued that illegally monopolized three separate markets in the ad tech space: that for publisher ad tools, advertiser ad networks, and the ad exchanges that facilitate transactions. They also argued that Google illegally tied together their publisher ad server and ad exchange in violation of antitrust law.”
Columbia Journalism Review / Lauren WatsonStudent journalists wrestle with censoring their own work →Campus publications are
navigating a surge in requests to take down previously published material. “The requests have come from students and alumni alike, seeking the removal of quotes or identifying information—such as dorms, majors, and class years—from published stories.”
Press Gazette / Charlotte TobittFacebook referral traffic is increasing again after algorithm change, Similarweb data shows →“In January this year Meta said it ‘will take a more personalised approach to political content, so that people who want to see more of it in their feeds can’ across Facebook, Instagram and Threads, resulting in more news content appearing. Similarweb data estimating Facebook’s share of total social referral traffic in March 2024 versus 2025 appears to confirm the change in strategy is having a positive effect on many of the biggest news websites.”
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