Journalism

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.

I realized some months ago that all those books piling up on my side table aren’t going to read themselves. All those places I’ve been wanting to visit aren’t going to visit themselves. And so on.

Social media platforms are an important part of the American news diet: Half of U.S. adults say they get news at least sometimes from social media in general. But specific platforms differ widely in structure, content and culture. A new Pew Research Center survey finds that the ways in which Americans encounter news on four major platforms—TikTok, X, Facebook and Instagram – vary widely. Key findings from this study include:

Press freedom around the world is being threatened by the very people who should be its guarantors—political authorities. This is clear from the latest annual World Press Freedom Index produced by Reporters Without Borders (RSF).

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

A pending bill in the California state legislature, the California Journalism Preservation Act (CJPA), would create a “link tax” that would require Google to pay for simply connecting Californians to news articles. We have long said that this is the wrong approach to supporting journalism. If passed, CJPA may result in significant changes to the services we can offer Californians and the traffic we can provide to California publishers. By helping people find news stories, we help publishers of all sizes grow their audiences at no cost to them. CJPA would up-end that model.

The Federal Communications Commission's Wireline Competition Bureau (Bureau) announced the E-Rate and Rural Health Care (RHC) programs’ annual caps for funding year 2024. The adjusted amounts represent a 3.6% inflation-adjusted increase to both programs’ funding year 2023 annual caps. The E-Rate program funding cap for funding year 2024 is $4,940,076,139. The RHC program funding cap for funding year 2024 is $706,926,603.

The slow crash of newspapers and magazines would be of limited interest save for one thing: Traditional media had at its core the exalted and difficult mission of communicating information about the world. From investigative reports on government to coverage of local politicians, the news served to make all the institutions and individuals covered a bit more transparent and, possibly, more honest. The advice columns, movie reviews, recipes, stock data, weather report and just about everything else in newspapers moved easily online — except the news itself.