June 2025 – Media Nation

The Washington Post’s web traffic, once competitive with The New York Times’, is collapsing

Back during the heady early years of the Jeff Bezos era at The Washington Post, the paper competed head to head with The New York Times for web traffic. Generally CNN would come in first, with the Times and the Post battling it out for second place. For instance, in April 2017 the Times recorded nearly 89.8 million unique visitors and the Post 78.7 million. Among news sites, they were outranked only by CNN.com, with 101.2 million.

But though the Times has thrived in the years following Trump’s first term, the Post has struggled, and has been in free fall since Bezos suddenly transformed himself from a model newspaper owner into the mogul from hell, starting with his decision last fall to kill an endorsement of Kamala Harris just before the election.

The latest numbers from Similarweb, reported by Press Gazette, tell an ugly tale. The Times recorded 444.9 million unique visitors in May 2025, finishing first among U.S. news websites. CNN was second, with 311.7 million. And the Post was all the way back at 17th, with 72.2 million.

Most of the sites recorded a drop compared to 2024, but the Post’s decline was especially steep — down 24% versus just 8% at the Times. (CNN was down a whopping 28%.) The Post was only a little ahead of The Wall Street Journal and The Guardian and behind The Associated Press and Newsweek, which it once owned.

Last week I dismissed as irrelevant a steep decline in print circulation at the Post. The erosion of web traffic, though, is a much bigger deal. The goal is to sign up paid digital subscribers, and web traffic is how you get those subscribers. In business terms, those monthly visitors are at the top of the conversion funnel and paid customers are at the bottom. If there are fewer visitors to pull through the funnel, then there are fewer opportunities to sell them subscriptions.

As for the Times, we all know that its success in selling digital subscriptions has a lot to do with its non-news offerings such as games, food and consumer advice. That has nothing to do with raw web traffic, though. The reality is that dramatically more people are enticed to click on New York Times links to check out its journalism. Both the Times and the Post offer 10 gift links per month, yet five times as many people are accessing the Times compared to the Post.

Bezos has single-handedly transformed the Post from one of the newspaper business’ great success stories into a disaster. And he’s too rich to care.

Remember that ‘drunk Pelosi’ video? AI-powered deepfakes are making disinformation much more toxic

Should we be worried about deepfake videos? Well, sure. But I’ve tended to think that some skepticism is warranted.

My leading example is a 6-year-old video of then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in which we are told that she appears to be drunk. I say “we are told” because the video was simply slowed down to 75%, and the right-wing audience for whom it was intended thought this crude alteration was proof that she was loaded. Who needs deepfakes when gullible viewers will be fooled by such crap? People believe what they want to believe.

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But the deepfakes are getting better. This morning I want to call your attention to a crucially important story in The New York Times (gift link) showing that deepfakes powered by artificial intelligence are causing toxic damage to the political and cultural environment around the world.

“The technology has amplified social and partisan divisions and bolstered antigovernment sentiment, especially on the far right, which has surged in recent elections in Germany, Poland and Portugal,” write reporters Steven Lee Myers and Stuart A. Thompson. A few examples:

Romania had to redo last year’s presidential election after a court ruled that AI manipulation of one of the candidates may have changed the result.
An AI-generated TikTok video falsely showed Donald Trump endorsing a far-right candidate in Poland.
Another fake video from last year’s U.S. election tied to Russia falsely showed Kamala Harris saying that Trump refused to “die with dignity.”

As with the Pelosi video, fakes have been polluting the media environment for a long time. So I was struck by something that Isabelle Frances-Wright of the Institute for Strategic Dialogue told the Times: Before AI, “you had to pick between scale or quality — quality coming from human troll farms, essentially, and scale coming from bots that could give you that but were low quality. Now, you can have both, and that’s really scary territory to be in.”

In other words, disinformation is expanding exponentially both in terms of quality and quantity. Given that, it’s unlikely we’ll see any more Russian-generated memes of a satanic Hillary Clinton boxing with Jesus, a particularly inept example of Russian propaganda from 2016. Next time, you’ll see a realistic video of a politician pledging their eternal soul to the Dark Lord.

And since I still have a few gift links to give out before the end of month, here’s a Times quiz with 10 videos, some of which are AI fakes and some real. Can you tell the difference? I didn’t do very well.

So what can we do to protect our political discourse? I’m sure we can all agree that it’s already in shockingly bad shape, dominated by lies from Trump and his allies that are amplified on Fox News and social media. As I said, people are going to believe what they want to believe. But AI-generated deepfake videos are only going to make things that much worse.

Readers of Montreal’s La Presse share their thoughts about Trump with The Boston Globe

Montreal. Photo (cc) 2009 by Taxiarchos228.

Now here’s an interesting idea. On Saturdays, letters to the editor take up about two-thirds of The Boston Globe’s op-ed page. And today, those letters are from readers of La Presse, a Montreal paper, about the state of U.S.-Canadian relations under Donald Trump.

The letters are running in La Presse as well, writes the Globe’s letters editor, Matthew Bernstein — and Globe readers are being invited to write letters to their Québécois neighbors as well. The letters were written in French and translated into English. Bernstein explains:

Simon Chabot, director of the Dialogue section for La Presse in Montreal, invited readers of the French-language news outlet to share messages to their American neighbors. Chabot reminded them that not all Americans share President Trump’s point of view, especially in New England, which has maintained close ties with Quebec for centuries. He asked his readers: “Are these ties important to you? Would you like to tell our neighbors?”

So what do La Presse readers have to say? “It pains me to be unable to visit you, and the thought of enduring this for the next four years saddens me,” writes Nathalie Perreault of Sherbrooke. “I cherished my time in your country, where I completed my postdoctoral studies and embraced your culture for five wonderful years.”

Adds Jocelyne Kucharski of Bromont: “May I say that I found you very naive to have elected a criminal to head your country? The fact that you ignored all the red lights warning you of his duplicity arouses total incomprehension on my part…. How could you not hear and understand that he doesn’t give a damn about the average American? That his real friends are the ultrarich?”

Unfortunately, the letters are behind the Globe’s unforgiving paywall. But La Presse allows a few free clicks per month, and you can find the same letters here. When I accessed the page using Chrome, a button popped up giving me the option of using Google Translate. It looks pretty good to me, but caveat emptor.

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The Emancipator is leaving Boston and following co-founder Ibram X. Kendi to Howard University

Ibram X. Kendi. Photo (cc) 2019 by Tony Turner Photography.

The Emancipator, a digital magazine covering racial justice that was launched with great fanfare four years ago, is leaving Boston.

The project was originally a joint venture of The Boston Globe’s opinion section and the Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University. The Globe ended its involvement two years later. The Emancipator will now be based at Howard University, the leading historically Black university.

The move was actually announced back in February, but it will formally take place on Monday, the last day of the academic year. Co-founder Ibram X. Kendi, the well-known antiracism scholar, is leaving BU to take a position at Howard, and The Emancipator is following him to Washington.

Amber Payne, The Emancipator’s publisher, announced on Thursday that she’ll be stepping down, writing:

After June 30, The Emancipator will transition from Boston University to Howard University as part of our co-founder Ibram X. Kendi’s Institute for Advanced Study, which will be dedicated to the interdisciplinary study of racism in the global African Diaspora. The Emancipator will be part of the institute’s larger mission to enhance the general public’s understanding of racism and evidence-based antiracist solutions through academic and publicly accessible research, public lectures, events, workshops, and outreach programs.

Payne was originally hired as co-editor along with Deborah Douglas, who now teaches journalism at Northwestern’s Medill School and is director of Medill’s newly created Midwest Solutions Journalism Hub.

Stacy Feldman tells us how her Boulder nonprofit responded to a recent antisemitic attack

Three journalists from the Boulder Reporting Lab at a news conference held by Boulder Police Chief Steve Redfearn hours after a recent antisemitic terrorist attack. Founder and publisher Stacy Feldman, arms folded, is wearing a green cap. Next to her, wearing a striped blue shirt, is reporter Brooke Stephenson. Senior reporter John Herrick is wearing a tan T-shirt and holding a notebook. Photo courtesy of Stacy Feldman.

On the latest “What Works” podcast, Ellen Clegg and I talk with Stacy Feldman, founder and publisher of the Boulder Reporting Lab, a nonprofit newsroom covering Boulder, Colorado. She launched the Lab in late 2021 to fill critical gaps in news coverage in a state where newspapers have been gobbled up by Alden Global Capital, a secretive hedge fund. Alden is known for gutting papers, not growing them.

Stacy was co-founder and executive editor of Inside Climate News, a Pulitzer Prize-winning nonprofit newsroom focused on the climate crisis. She developed her plans for the Boulder Reporting Lab during a fellowship at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Her newsroom has provided crucial reporting on the recent antisemitic terrorist attack in Boulder.

I’ve got a Quick Take later on a huge threat to one of the most important cogs in the regional news ecosystem — public radio and television, which face huge cuts after the Republican-led House voted recently to cancel $1.1 billion in funding over the next two years that it had previously approved. Now the measure moves to the Senate, which has to take a vote on it by mid-July. Regardless of what happens, this is the closest public media has ever come to an extinction-level event.

Ellen’s Quick Take is on local news coverage of the assassination of a Minnesota legislator and her husband. Minnesota news consumers have a lot of great media options, and these newsrooms stepped up big-time to cover this crisis.

You can listen to our conversation here, or you can subscribe through your favorite podcast app.

The 2025 New England Muzzle Awards: Spotlighting the enemies of free speech and expression

Every year around this time, I take note of Independence Day by writing about outrages against freedom of speech that unfolded in New England during the previous year. It’s something I started doing in 1998 for The Boston Phoenix, and then later moved to GBH News after the Phoenix folded in 2013. (Here’s the complete archive.)

For the past several years I’ve been writing up Muzzles as they come in rather than waiting to do an annual roundup. I skipped writing a roundup altogether in 2023, so I guess this is the 27th annual edition of the New England Muzzle Awards.

This year’s Muzzle winners include Plymouth’s town manager, for attempting to intimidate and silence the nonprofit Plymouth Independent; the mayor of Burlington, Vermont, for muzzling the police chief and playing favorites with the press; and the mayor of Quincy, Massachusetts, for planning to install two religious statues on public property at the city’s new public safety building.

I’m especially pleased to be able to award a Muzzle to Trump’s shadowy top aide, Stephen Miller, for enabling the arrest of a Tufts Ph.D. student who helped write an op-ed piece for the student newspaper that he didn’t like.

Kudos, as always, to my friends Harvey Silverglate, who conceived of this annual feature all these years ago, and Peter Kadzis, who edited all 25 editions that appeared in the Phoenix and at GBH News. They were inspired by the Jefferson Muzzles, which no longer are awarded. Here in New England, though, their spirit lives on.

At a time when democracy itself is under threat, defending the First Amendment is more important than ever. The envelopes, please.

A Muzzle to Waltham’s local access outlet for trying to silence citizen journalists (July 29, 2024)

Muzzle Award follow-up: MIT denounces the antisemitic Mapping Project (Sept. 1, 2024)

A Muzzle Award to Mass. POST for spurning data needed to track police misconduct (Sept. 24, 2024)

Plymouth’s town manager earns a Muzzle for giving a local news outlet the silent treatment (Jan. 10, 2025)

In Vermont, a mayoral Muzzle for silencing the police and freezing out the press; plus, media notes (Jan. 13, 2025)

A Muzzle Award for a New Hampshire legislator who wants to make it easier to ban school books (April 28, 2025)

A New England Muzzle Award for Stephen Miller, who enabled Rümeysa Öztürk’s arrest for writing an op-ed (May 12, 2025)

A Muzzle Award for a judge who tried to stop a Muslim witness from testifying while covering her face (May 16, 2025)

What’s the Colorado angle in the NPR lawsuit?; plus, a Muzzle for Quincy’s mayor, and an AI LOL (May 28, 2025)

A Muzzle Award to Brown University, which investigated a student for committing journalism (June 5, 2025)

Yes, The Washington Post is in crisis, but its declining print circulation numbers are meaningless

*The washingtonpost.com homepage for Dec. 20, 1996, via the Internet Archive.*

It’s been 30 years since newspapers began migrating to the web, and some observers are still obsessing over print circulation figures.

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Take, for a recent example, The Washington Post. Vince Morris of Washington City Paper reported last week that Metro, Sports and Style are going to be merged into one print section on most days, depriving residents of the DC area of a standalone section comprising local news. Morris called the announcement “grim,” even though he noted that executive editor Matt Murray said in a memo to readers that the move will not mean less coverage. Morris also writes:

According to data provided to City Paper by the Alliance for Audited Media, the Post’s paid average daily circulation is now down to just 97,000, with roughly 160,000 on Sundays. That’s a fraction of the 250,000 average daily circulation five years ago, when the Post was one of the largest newspapers in the country by circulation.

Piling on is Andy Meek of Forbes, who writes of those print numbers: “To put that in perspective: 97,000 is the sort of figure you’d expect to see from a mid-size regional paper like The Minnesota Star Tribune or The Seattle Times. Not from a globally recognized newsroom with multiple Pulitzers to its name.”

Now, it’s true that paid print has held up much better at The New York Times (244,000 on weekdays, 606,000 on Sundays) and The Wall Street Journal (449,000 on weekdays, 506,000 for its weekend edition). But print has long since ceased to matter. The Times, after all, has 11 million digital-only subscribers and the Journal has around 4 million.

And therein lies the true crisis for The Washington Post.

As Morris writes, the Post stopped reporting its paid digital circulation some time ago. Last fall, when owner Jeff Bezos began taking a wrecking ball to the paper’s opinion section by killing a planned endorsement of Kamala Harris just before the election, paid digital was thought to be around 2.5 million. About 200,000 vanished overnight. And who knows what it is today after further damage caused by high-profile resignations such as that of Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Ann Telnaes and Bezos’ announcement that he planned to transform the opinion pages into some sort of cheerleading free-market hellhole.

Bezos’ ethically challenged publisher, Will Lewis, has had exactly one good idea since he was hired in late 2023: to start a premium newsletter of local and regional coverage for readers who live in Washington and its suburbs. But if that’s ever been mentioned again, word of it somehow escaped me.

The Washington Post is in deep, deep trouble. After 10 years of sterling sterling stewardship, Bezos has transformed himself into the owner from hell, damaging the reputation of a still-great news organization that he did so much to build up.

Evidence of the destruction is all around. But you won’t find it in the paper’s irrelevant print circulation numbers.

A long and frustrating ride home on the new, (mostly) improved MBTA

The MBTA is a miracle most of the time. Just the other day I was telling friends who used to live here how much better it’s gotten under general manager Phil Eng. Then there was today.

I had no trouble getting to BU for a conference. But when I left a few minutes after 6, the fun began. The Green Line car I was on stopped moving almost immediately. We were told there had been some sort of emergency, and that we needed to to get out and take a shuttle bus. We walked to the bus stop, and no one could tell us whether a shuttle was showing up or not. A Boston police officer who was there saw someone in a T maintenance truck. He ran over to the guy (in 93-degree heat), came back, and told us the shuttles were leaving from Kenmore Square.

So I walked to Kenmore, broiling the whole way. At this point a large crowd had gathered to take the shuttle. The T workers who were there weren’t sure what was going on. Finally, we were told that we should get back on the Green Line to Arlington Station and pick up the shuttle there.

I got off at Copley and walked to the Orange Line, which proved to be a smart move. I got to North Station in time to take the commuter rail home. A trip that should have taken an hour or less had taken two hours, but it could have been worse.

Things happen. What upset me was the lack of communication and no accommodations for riders who had already paid. Everything should have just been opened, as it sometimes is in such circumstances. Instead, we all paid over and over whenever we switched lines.

Very poor performance today.

Will Trump’s war halt Iran’s nuclear ambitions or lead to disaster? A roundup of smart commentary.

*The late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, left, and Iran’s current supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Photo of mural in the city of Qom (cc) 2013 by David Stanley.*

I think the most rational response to President Trump’s bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities is to hang back a bit — that is, to acknowledge that he’s the wrong leader to do this, that he was more likely acting on ego and personal pique than out of any strategic vision, but that it’s too soon to tell whether this will be a disaster or might actually accomplish some good.

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One starting point is that Iran shouldn’t be allowed to possess nuclear weapons. Another starting point is to understand that what led to this really is all Trump’s fault. President Barack Obama painstakingly negotiated an agreement with Iran that significantly slowed Iran’s race to get a nuclear bomb, and Trump undid that in his first term for no discernible reason other than to disrespect Obama.

Continue reading “Will Trump’s war halt Iran’s nuclear ambitions or lead to disaster? A roundup of smart commentary.”