“Some have happiness, everyone has summer”

The Weekly Wrap: March 22, 2024

“Some have happiness, everyone has summer”

Cambridge is in a cold snap and I’m thinking about this saying from Finland, officially the world’s #1 happiest country. The same report found that the United States has “fallen out of the top 20 for the first time since the World Happiness Report was first published in 2012, driven by a large drop in the wellbeing of Americans under 30.”

Many, many days in the journalism industry could be considered bad days. At Nieman Lab, we try to balance out unhappy stories with stories of innovation and renewal. As usual, both are on our site this week. Among the green shoots: Stories from our new staff writers, Neel Dhanesha and Andrew Deck. Andrew wrote about a new legal strategy that The Intercept and other small publishers are using to fight OpenAI. Neel wrote about Julia Angwin’s new venture, Proof News, and about Sequencer, a new worker-owned science publication. As Sequencer’s writers put it:

As journalists, doing nothing in this moment felt tantamount to endorsing a dysfunctional status quo. Despite the state of our industry, we’re chronic optimists who are convinced that there are other models for quality science journalism — one that serves writers and readers better.

Sequencer is our idea of an alternative.

We too are fundamentally optimistic (it says so right on our About page!) and we’ll keep bringing you those spring and summer stories.

— Laura Hazard Owen

From the week

Proof News is Julia Angwin’s attempt to bring the scientific method to investigative journalism

The cofounder of The Markup wants to expand beyond tech with her new publication. By Neel Dhanesha.

The Intercept charts a new legal strategy for digital publishers suing OpenAI

Raw Story, AlterNet, and The Intercept are among the first smaller publications to go up against the AI goliath for copyright violations. By Andrew Deck.

Find your people: These groups bring digital news orgs together for learning, sharing, and venting

Confuse your INNs with your LIONs, your ANNOs with your ASLNs? There’s no problem a Venn diagram can’t solve. By Joshua Benton.

I used ChatGPT as a reporting assistant. It didn’t go well.

The AI tool ignored basic instructions about sourcing and citations. But it’s a pretty good newsroom coding partner. By Jon Keegan, The Markup.

From zines to paying every staffer $84K: How LA Public Press is trying to do local news differently

“I don’t think there’s a circumstance where if you can just twist the dials the right way it’s going to unlock lots and lots of earned revenue from a big subscriber base.” By Sophie Culpepper.

How Sahan Journal grew into a vital source of news and information for Minnesota’s immigrant communities

Five years after launch, Sahan Journal has a $3 million annual budget and 23 full-time staffers. By Ellen Clegg and Dan Kennedy.

Sequencer launches as a writer-owned popular science magazine

Gannett will stop using AP content next week

U.S. Latinos’ news consumption differs depending on their dominant language and birthplace

Highlights from elsewhere

Washington Post / Lauren Weber and Sabrina Malhi

Women are getting off birth control amid misinformation explosion →

“Physicians say they’re seeing an explosion of birth-control misinformation online targeting a vulnerable demographic: people in their teens and early 20s who are more likely to believe what they see on their phones because of algorithms that feed them a stream of videos reinforcing messages often divorced from scientific evidence.”

404 Media / Jason Koebler

Deadspin is becoming a gambling referral site →

“A poorly protected IP address suggested that the new owner had ties to the online gambling industry.”

Substack / Richard J. Tofel

What went wrong at the Center for Public Integrity? →

“What to make of this, beyond mourning the loss of CPI itself, and its good journalism? A great deal of the focus, as I hope the narrative above reflects, should be on a Board that seems to me, fairly consistently, not to have provided the necessary leadership.”

NBC News / Daniel Arkin

Crime stories drove readers to GoFundMe campaigns, only the victims didn’t exist →

“The articles published by Blast News 365 would most likely raise eyebrows among anyone who regularly reads professionally produced news content. The articles were riddled with typos, grammatical errors, off-kilter formatting and other red flags. They were also filled with discrepancies. The father killed in the hit-and-run is alternately identified as ‘Herman Cruz’ and ‘Henry Cruz’ in the span of just two paragraphs, for example.”

Semafor / David Weigel

The viral “bloodbath” clip and the rise of the liberal video influencer →

“Millions of people pay attention to the Florida-based Filipkowski, the Minnesota-based Rupar, and the anonymous Acyn, a video editor in Los Angeles who works under Filipkowski at the activist liberal news site MeidasTouch. They have a combined 2.3 million followers on X, formerly Twitter, though only Filipkowski pays for a blue check. And their editorial judgments have immense influence on campaign coverage and the political discourse.”

Slate Magazine / Dan Kois, Nitish Pahwa, and Luke Winkie

The oral history of Pitchfork: The inside story of the magazine everyone loved to hate →

“Over the past two months, Slate spoke to more than 30 Pitchfork writers, editors, and executives, past and present—as well as critics, industry luminaries, and some of the musicians whose careers Pitchfork made and destroyed—to tell the story behind the raves, the pans, the festivals, the fights, the indie spirit, the corporate takeover, and, of course, the scores.”

Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism / Mitali Mukherjee

Almost one billion people head to the polls in an India threatened by misinformation and government censorship. Will AI make things worse? →

“While not strictly nefarious in intent, AI deepfakes are a key part of India’s elections in 2024, a year in which this massive nation of more than 1.43 billion people will vote for the government they want to see for the next five years.”

Garbage Day

“The traffic firehose days of the 2010s aren’t coming back” →

“And LinkedIn is not the secret to infinite pageviews. But it might be a fertile spot to build an audience with relatively manageable issues. For all its retro, business casual vibe, LinkedIn is actually more in line with the way we tend to use the internet now…They’re using specific platforms to express specific parts of themselves.”