Many popular drag queens like Trixie Mattel, Bianca Del Rio and Bob the Drag Queen got their big break on the hit TV series RuPaul's Drag Race. However, not many people know about the two individuals who helped bring the show to life: Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato. They are the executive producers and co-founders...
In 1892, Ida B. Wells began editing the Memphis Free Speech, and used the newspaper to crusade against lynching. Her motto “Truth is mighty and will prevail” lives on in investigative journalism to this day. For the last two decades, many Black women have been lauded as the 
News publishers are worried — with good reason — about changes coming to Google Search. AI-generated content replacing links on some of the most valuable space on the internet, in particular, has left media types with a lot of questions, starting with “is this going to be a traffic-destroying nightmare?” The News filter disappearing from...
Is local news readily available in your town? Do reporters still cover your school board and other municipal meetings? If you answered yes, you are likely wealthier than the average American, and you live in or near a metro area. The State of Local News Project at Northwestern University documents the changing local news landscape...
When the funding coalition Press Forward announced its first six local chapters last November, the MacArthur Foundation said funders wanted “as many communities as possible to join the movement.” Now, 11 more communities of different scales have come onboard, bringing the total number of local chapters to 17 scattered throughout the country. On Wednesday, Press...
Nine years after leaving the show, Jon Stewart recently returned to guest-host “The Daily Show” through the 2024 presidential election. “He’ll help us all make sense of the insanity and division roiling the country as we enter the election season,” Chris McCarthy, the CEO of Showtime/MTV Entertainment Studios, said in an announcement in January. Stewart...
Many people believe at least one conspiracy theory. And that isn’t necessarily a bad thing — conspiracies do happen. To take just one example, the CIA really did engage in illegal experiments in the 1950s to identify drugs and procedures that might produce confessions from captured spies. However, many conspiracy theories are not supported by evidence, yet still attract believers. For...
In the first weeks of my first job in journalism, the editor-in-chief stormed into the newsroom, furious — the photo editor had not photographed the event that he had planned the front page around. He stood before her, red-faced and yelling, before grabbing a copy of the AP Stylebook off a nearby table and throwing...
This newsletter is almost four years old, and during that time we have chronicled again and again how research has shown how deeply frustrated many consumers are with news as it exists today. In the U.S., that’s especially true for conservatives who feel alienated by the mainstream media, and thus have abandoned local and national news sources in favor of Fox...
Uncertainty in the news industry, hype around AI, and hope for better business models and new revenue streams have all helped to drive news organizations to adopt AI technology, a new report from the Tow Center of Digital Journalism at Columbia University finds. Felix Simon, a researcher and doctoral student at the Oxford Internet Institute,...
The New York Times ended 2023 with 10.36 million subscribers, including 9.7 digital-only subscribers, according to an end-of-year report presented to investors on Wednesday. The Times added 300,000 new digital-only subscribers in the last months of 2023, more than it added in any quarter for the previous year. The Times now makes more than twice...
The hosts of the most popular news podcasts hardly ever fly solo. A new report from the Pew Research Center finds news podcasts are more likely than other types of top podcasts to feature guests. Only about 15% of the top-ranked podcasts — which Pew defined here as appearing in the top 200 of either...