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November 13, 2026

The Nieman Lab News-About-News Quiz, November 13, 2026

From new majors to search traffic, newspapers to impeachment: Have you kept up with this week’s media news?

Joshua Benton

What We’re ReadingThe Mississippi Free Press is using journalism to “make democracy work a little better”The Bulwark joins Vox Media’s podcast networkAre AI bots running these Philadelphia and New Jersey news sites?Read what we’re reading

With event costs up and funding down, journalism organizations cancel conferences and cut staff

ONA, OpenNews, and others see troubled times ahead, so it’s goodbye to “rubber chicken dinners.”

Indonesia’s new copyright bill would force Google and Meta to pay to aggregate news

“A government that ‘gets it’”: Canada recommits to federal funding for news

AI is becoming an information gateway. Audiences still don’t want it making their news.

An average of 24% of respondents across nine countries said they’d seen a label noting that content was made with AI in the last week, and 20% had seen a bullet-point AI news summary.

Student journalists are reporting more local news for real audiences. Their professors are exhausted.

A new study finds that journalism school faculty — charged with putting more student work in front of non-student readers — often serve as a hidden infrastructure for local news. Burnout is a risk.

Some local news outlets are losing physical newsrooms

“It’s either this or death”: Canada renews the Local Journalism Initiative and extends journalism tax credit

The Nieman Lab News-About-News Quiz, November 6, 2026

From Salon to the Kremlin, bowl games to overnight ratings: Have you kept up with this week’s media news?

AI and the news

All AI and the news →

Meta delays rollout of terms that would allow broad scraping of news sites. Legal experts are still skeptical.

Meta’s new commercial terms will go into effect three weeks later than initially planned.

“A gross abuse of Meta’s power”: California senator Adam Schiff tells Meta to scrap its new terms of service

Publishers pressure Meta to nix new terms that would let the company scrape their websites

In the AI age, publishers who understand what readers want will do best, a new report argues

U.K. politicians and German publishers call on regulators to pause Meta’s new terms before October 30 deadline

The Wall Street Journal’s new AI tool, “Doppler,” forecasts the issues that will shape the midterm elections

Ahead of Election Day, the tool has ingested 25 million TikTok videos and 500,000 podcasts to gain new insight into U.S. voters.

Meta pulls down controversial terms of service

“We’re pausing the changes as we continue to engage with stakeholders and take our time to get this right.”

Editor’s Choice

News publishers limit Internet Archive access due to AI scraping concerns

Outlets like The Guardian and The New York Times are scrutinizing digital archives as potential backdoors for AI crawlers.

“This price was set by an algorithm”: News subscribers are surprised by a new line in their renewal emails

Outlets like Wired, NJ.com, and The Wall Street Journal are setting renewal prices just for you — and being forced to disclose it.

Craig Newmark explains why he’s pulling back on funding journalism

One question he says other funders should ask: “Do the organizations have real plans to grow their audiences outside of their most faithful followers?”

How The New York Times uses a custom AI tool to track the “manosphere”

The daily podcast round-up is just one way the Times is adopting in-house AI transcription and summarization tools.

Social traffic kinda stinks for news publishers now, in 3 charts

Globally, Chartbeat clients’ traffic from Twitter has fallen by 70% since 2022, when Elon Musk acquired the platform.

With “Bimbo University,” Nikita Redkar leans into femininity to explain the news

“I’m the person who’s holding the door open and being like, ‘OK, you just got here, this is what we’re talking about right now.’”

Weird animals win on Instagram. Mongabay’s next-best choice? Its reporters.

“People are sick and tired of doomer content, and they also don’t like ‘climate stories.’”

The Onion’s new plan to market its print newspaper: sponsoring a bowl game

The New York Times stays on track to reach 15 million subscribers by the end of 2027

Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft will make it easier for publishers to opt out of being scraped

Local news

All Local news →

Press Forward gave $20 million to 205 local newsrooms over two years. Here’s how some of them spent it.

The unrestricted funding helped small outlets plug holes and try new things, but publishers ran up against the limits of what two $50,000 grants could accomplish, especially when it came to hiring.

The Independent Journalism Atlas looks at “wells” and “springs” in news deserts

A new report argues newsrooms need to do more experiments — like, the kind with randomization and results

From bad to worse: 2026 is shaping up to be “a super El Niño year for local news”

“We’re in their shit. They’re not in ours”: USA Today Co. execs defend Palantir deal

Sinclair’s new Substack repackages its local TV reporting into a video podcast

Elon Musk’s Grokipedia is littered with mistakes. But Wikipedia could still learn some things from it.

Grokipedia shows that AI is actually pretty good at finding tidbits in the far corners of the internet.

Only 32% of Americans have high confidence that news orgs will report midterm election results accurately, survey finds

The New York Times is adding more AI features to its Cooking app, and users aren’t thrilled

The Nieman Lab News-About-News Quiz, October 30, 2026

Need another reason to read that 47,212th article about paywall strategy? What if it earned you a point?

On this day

November 13

2025A “win-win” partnership brings a surge of reporting firepower to hyperlocal news outlets around Boston 2023“Arguments on a daily basis”: How couples who disagree politically navigate news 2017Newsonomics: The New York Times’ Mark Thompson on regulating Facebook, global ambition, and when to stop the presses (forever)2014The newsonomics of Talking Points Memo’s native advertising shift 2008Morning Links: November 13, 2008

All stories

What We’re Reading

$187 million

The amount spent to promote AI-generated ads in the midterm elections, which is more than 3,000 times more than the spend in the 2024 election cycle. 90% of the ads came from Republican-affiliated groups. (Poynter / Loreben Tuquero)

Columbia Journalism Review / Elizabeth Hewitt

The Mississippi Free Press is using journalism to “make democracy work a little better” →

“The outcome of this year’s Senate race hinges on affidavit ballots, also known as provisional ballots, given to people who show up to vote but whose eligibility cannot be immediately verified. Since the polls closed, Mississippi Free Press journalists have deployed their granular knowledge of the state’s decentralized system to track affidavit votes.”

Axios / Sara Fischer

The Bulwark joins Vox Media’s podcast network →

“Vox Media has struck an exclusive three-year advertising sales and marketing deal with The Bulwark, executives told Axios…Vox Media will become the exclusive advertising seller for The Bulwark’s inventory across podcasts, video, newsletters and live events, chair and CEO Jim Bankoff said.”

Billy Penn at WHYY / Julia Binswanger and Violet Comber-Wilen

Are AI bots running these Philadelphia and New Jersey news sites? →

“For months, Billy Penn has been keeping tabs on several local news websites – including Northeast Times, Lower Bucks Times, the South Philly Review and centraljersey.com…At least three journalists on the centraljersey.com site had stories under their author pages that they did not write and photos that were not of them — one of whom was WHYY’s own Ken Downey Jr. “

Politico / Marion Solletty

Macrons sue far-right podcaster Candace Owens personally in Tennessee →

“French President Emmanuel Macron and his wife, Brigitte, filed a defamation lawsuit against Candace Owens in the far-right podcaster’s home state of Tennessee. The fresh legal move is the latest development in a sprawling legal case brought by the Macrons after the podcaster falsely claimed in multiple episodes of her podcast ‘Candace’ that Brigitte is a transgender woman.”

Axios / Josephine Walker

The Atlantic can pursue FBI records in fight with Kash Patel →

“The Atlantic says it needs Justice Department and FBI records to assess the truth of its reporting and Patel’s reputation. Patel complained the requests were too broad, seeking everything from his medical and travel records to his calendar and records about personnel decisions. Sullivan rejected Patel’s objection that the arrangement was unfair.”

The Hill / Finya Swai

Reporters Without Borders calls for Carr to be impeached for “weaponizing” FCC →

“Reporters Without Borders (RSF) is urging the incoming Congress to impeach Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chair Brendan Carr, accusing him of undermining press freedom by punishing news outlets critical of President Trump and his administration.”

Adweek / Mark Stenberg

The Washington Post nears breakeven after “hundreds and hundreds of millions “in losses →

“We had years of losses, and steepening losses. That’s the truth. We’re a private company and don’t share the figures, but it was hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars. Now we’re within striking distance of break-even, and I expect next year will be our best year in seven years.”

Digiday / Sara Guaglione

Yahoo becomes first licensee of “Spotify-like” collective AI content licensing model →

“These take into account how much content is used, like grounding, retrieval or displayed in an AI response, and whether the publisher is credited or cited as a source. For example, an AI product that uses a publisher’s content to check a fact might receive a lower allocation than one that displays detailed election results and explicitly credits the Associated Press.”

The Washington Post / Scott Nover

Voice of America director was fired illegally by former head Kari Lake, appeals court rules →

Michael Abramowitz “wrote in a statement that he is ‘gratified’ by the ruling and eager to get back to work.”

The New York Times / Marc Tracy

Haaretz is expanding its U.S. presence amid Israel’s move to the right →

“In recent weeks, Haaretz’s reporters filed dispatches from Maine and Michigan, Texas and Florida, and Georgia and New York exploring the midterm races from Jewish perspectives. And Haaretz is highlighting original English-language journalism that helps explain Israel to readers abroad.”

The Guardian / Jeremy Barr

Trump’s FCC nominee, Danielle Thumann, avoids questions from Democrats on Brendan Carr’s “censorship agenda” →

“Thumann, who serves as senior counsel to Carr, is expected to be approved as commissioner, with Republicans in charge of the U.S. Senate and House. But Ben Ray Luján, a senator of New Mexico, assured her that the commission’s actions will be under close scrutiny when Democrats take charge of the chamber in January.”

Algorithms + Elections Project

What does ChatGPT say about the election? Depends on who’s asking. →

“Whether its memory was on or off, ChatGPT rarely gave direct advice on how people should vote: the judges found an outright endorsement of a candidate in only 2 of 576 voting-advice answers. Still, answers with memory differ significantly in structure; for example, they cited government websites slightly less often and were 3% shorter.”

Politico / Kyle Cheney and Josh Gerstein

A federal appeals court blocks the DOJ from searching journalists’ records in national security leak investigations →

“When a free press reports on the operations of government, it will often be the case that reporting exposes matters that the government might wish undisclosed, either to save itself from embarrassment or because it simply prefers to have its actions unexamined,” the judge wrote. “This does not confer upon government the right to silence.”

The Hollywood Reporter / Etan Vlessing

The Hollywood Reporter launches a Turkish edition →

“In partnership with local media company Titania Yayıncılık, The Hollywood Reporter Türkiye will roll out in Dec. 2026 with a monthly print edition complemented by digital and video content.”

See what else we’re reading →Back to the top

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