Media – Page 8 – 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.

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.

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.”

Pew media study confirms that polarization is mainly a right-wing phenomenon

*Pew’s “News Media Tracker.” Click on the image to access the interactive version.*

Surveys in which people are asked whether they trust the media invariably come to two conclusions: (1) Despite findings that show widespread distrust, people actually do trust the news sources they use; and (2) Democrats avail themselves of a far wider range of sources than do Republicans.

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Those verities were reconfirmed by a study published earlier this month by the Pew Research Center. Titled “The Political Gap in Americans’ News Sources,” the researchers found that a majority of Republicans and Republican “leaners” rely on Fox News, with smaller percentages also consuming other right-wing sources such as Breitbart, the Tucker Carlson Network and Joe Rogan’s podcast.

Democrats and Democratic leaners, meanwhile, get their news from a variety of mainstream sources such as The New York Times, NPR, the three big broadcast networks, CNN and MSNBC, with some delving into The Atlantic, The Guardian and Axios.

Interestingly, more Democrats (16%) than Republicans (12%) rely on The Wall Street Journal, which is owned by the Murdoch family. The Journal’s opinion section is extremely conservative but increasingly unsympathetic to President Trump’s agenda on tariffs and other economic issues, while its news pages are superb.

One aspect of the Pew report that I found fascinating was an interactive graphic called the “News Media Tracker,” which shows how popular and trusted 30 media outlets are with Democrats and Republicans as well as with different age groups. I don’t see any way of embedding it, but you can access it by clicking here or on the graphic above. It’s a fantastic tool, though it would be even better if you could track party affiliation and age group; as it’s set up, you have to choose one or other other.

The phenomenon that Pew tracks is sometimes called “asymmetric polarization,” meaning that our deeply polarized political culture is more a consequence of Republicans moving far to the right than it is of Democrats moving left — although that has happened too.

In 2017 I wrote about a similar study for GBH News. The study, which was published by the Columbia Journalism Review, was based on social-media sharing habits rather than a survey, so Breitbart actually did much better among Republicans than Fox News, whose website was wretched back then. (It looks a little better now.)

The challenge is that Fox and its ilk are purveyors of weaponized propaganda, cheerleading for Trump rather than reporting the news fairly and truthfully. Mainstream outlets, for all their many faults, are dedicated to reporting the truth, verifying their facts and correcting their mistakes.

Thus we end up with asymmetric news coverage as well, in which the mainstream reports critically on Republicans and Democrats while the right-wing outlets are critical only of Democrats. It’s a huge factor in understanding our broken politics.

How Sahan Journal is using AI to streamline its operations; plus, more on search, and screening pitches

Cynthia Tu of Sahan Journal. Photo (cc) 2025 by Lev Gringauz / MinnPost

Like it or not (and my own feelings are mixed), artificial intelligence is being used by news organizations, and there’s no turning back. The big question is how.

The worst possible use of AI is to write stories, especially without sufficient human intervention to make sure that what’s being spit out is accurate. Somewhat more defensible is using it to write headlines, summaries and social-media posts — again, with actual editors checking it over. The most promising, though, is using it to streamline certain internal operations that no one has the time to do.

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That’s what’s happening at Sahan Journal, a 6-year-old digital nonprofit that covers immigrants and communities of color in Minnesota. It’s one of the projects that Ellen Clegg profile in our book, “What Works in Community News.” And according to Lev Gringauz of MinnPost (one of the original nonprofit news pioneers), the Journal has embarked on a project to streamline some of its news and business functions with AI. (I learned about Gringauz’s story in Nieman Lab, where it was republished.)

Bolstered with $220,000 in grant money from the American Journalism Project and OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, the Journal has employed AI to help with such tasks as processing financial data of the state’s charter schools, generating story summaries for Instagram, and adding audio to some articles.

The real value, though, has come in bolstering the revenue side, as the Journal has experimented with using AI to retool its media kit and to understand its audience better, such as “pulling up how much of Sahan Journal’s audience cares about public transportation.”

“We’re less enthusiastic, more skeptical, about using AI to generate editorial content,” Cynthia Tu, the Journal’s data journalist and AI specialist, told Gringauz. Even on internal tasks, though, AI has proved to be a less than reliable partner, hallucinating data despite Tu explicitly giving it commands not to scour the broader internet.

And as Gringauz observes, OpenAI is bleeding money. How much of a commitment makes sense given that Sahan Journal may be building systems on top of a platform that may cease to exist at some point?

Two other AI-related notes:

➤ Quality matters. In his newsletter Second Rough Draft, Richard J. Tofel has some useful thoughts on the panic over Google’s AI search engine, which has been described as representing an existential threat to news organizations since it will deprive them of click-throughs to their websites.

Tofel writes that clickbait will be harmed more than high-quality journalism, noting that The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal have been hurt less than HuffPost, Business Insider and The Washington Post. “If there is one overriding lesson of publishing in the digital age,” Tofel writes, “it remains that distinctive content remains the most unassailable, the least vulnerable.”

Though Tofel doesn’t say so, I think there’s a lesson for local news publishers as well: hyperlocal journalism should be far less affected by AI search than national outlets, especially for those organizations that emphasize building a relationship with their communities.

➤ Here’s the pitch. Caleb Okereke, a Ph.D. student at Northeastern, is using AI to screen pitches for his digital publication Minority Africa. He writes that “we are receiving 10x more pitches than we did in our early days after launch,” adding: “With a lean editorial team, we faced a challenge familiar to many digital publications: how do you maintain depth, fairness, and attention when the volume scales but the staff doesn’t?”

He and his colleagues have built a customized tool called Iraka (which means “voice” in the Rutooro language) and put it to the test. As he writes, it’s far from perfect, though it’s getting better.

“As of now, editors are using Iraka individually to provide a first-pass on submissions, testing its utility alongside regular human review,” Okereke reports. “Every pitch is still manually read, and no editorial decisions are made solely based on the model’s output. This staged integration allows us to observe how the tool fits into existing workflows without disrupting the editorial process.”

Thugs assault U.S. senator for asking a question; plus, showdown for public media, and an odd omission

This morning I feel like anyone who comments on media and politics ought to say something about Thursday’s unprovoked assault on U.S. Sen. Alex Padilla. But I’m at a loss for words. I assume you’ve seen it; if you haven’t, here it is (gift link), along with a detailed New York Times account.

Federal agents are seen dragging the California Democrat from a room where Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem was holding a news conference, forcing him to the floor and handcuffing him. He was soon released and was not charged, but this is what an authoritarianism takeover looks like.

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I was interested that Noem at least had the presence of mind to lie, falsely claiming that Padilla had “lunged” toward the stage and didn’t identify himself. All you have to do is watch the video to see the truth. All he was trying to do was ask a question. And, of course, Republicans, including House Speaker Mike Johnson, have picked up on her lies. Heather Cox Richardson writes:

While much focus has been on the assault itself, what Noem was saying before Padilla spoke out is crucially important. “We are not going away,” she said. “We are staying here to liberate this city from the socialists and the burdensome leadership that this governor and that this mayor have placed on this country and what they have tried to insert into the city.”

In other words, the Trump administration is vowing to get rid of the democratically elected government of California by using military force. That threat is the definition of a coup. It suggests MAGA considers any political victory but their own to be illegitimate and considers themselves justified in removing those governmental officials with violence: a continuation of the attempt of January 6, 2021, to overturn the results of a presidential election.

Finally, I am never going to mention Noem without reminding you that she bragged about shooting her dog and her goat.

Public media’s last stand

I had hoped that President Trump’s plunge in the polls might stiffen the spines of House Republicans enough that they would not vote to defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which provides some of the revenues for PBS and NPR. No such luck.

As NPR reports, the House voted on Thursday to eliminate $1.1 billion in previously appropriated money that was supposed to fund CPB for the next two years. Another $8.3 billion was cut from international-aid programs. The measure passed, 214 to 212, with every Democrat and four Republicans voting against it.

So now it’s on to the Senate, where the Republican majority is slightly less right-wing than the House’s. At this point, though, all bets are off.

A curious omission

There is so much going on, nearly all of it bad, that I’m going to have to leave most of it aside. But I do want to mention that on Thursday I listened to Ezra Klein’s New York Times interview (you can subscribe to “The Ezra Klein Show for free at all the usual podcast haunts) with former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert, who has accused the Netanyahu government of committing war crimes in Gaza.

It was a long, fascinating conversation. Yet there was scarcely a mention of Iran’s nuclear-weapons program and none at all of the possibility that Israel would soon act to destroy it — something that definitely had been in the news lately.

And now Israel has attacked Iran. In retrospect, it seems like a lost opportunity.

ABC goes too far in pushing out Terry Moran; plus, Google’s AI assault, and Jay Rosen moves on

*Terry Moran, right, interviews Donald Trump in April 2025. Public domain photo by Joyce N. Boghosian via the White House.*

How to behave on social media has bedeviled journalists and confounded editors for years. Marty Baron clashed with reporters Wesley Lowery and Felicia Sonmez over their provocative Twitter comments back when he was executive editor of The Washington Post, and those are just two well-known examples.

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The latest journalist to run afoul of his news organization’s social-media standards is Terry Moran, who was, until Tuesday, employed by ABC News. Moran was suspended on Sunday after he tweeted that White House official Stephen Miller and President Trump is each a “world-class hater.” The tweet is now gone, but I’ve included an image. On Tuesday, Moran’s employer announced that they were parting company with him, as NPR media reporter David Folkenflik writes.

I think ABC was right to suspend Moran but wrong to get rid of him, and that media critic Margaret Sullivan got the nuances perfectly when she wrote this for her newsletter, American Crisis:

I’m amazed that Moran posted what he did. It’s well outside the bounds of what straight-news reporters do. It’s more than just calling a lie a lie, or identifying a statement as racist — all of which I think is necessary. Moran is not a pundit or a columnist or any other kind of opinion journalist….

I would hate to see Moran — with his worthy career at ABC News, where he’s been for almost 30 years — lose his job over this. I hope that the honchos at ABC let a brief suspension serve its purpose, and put him back to work.

Unfortunately, this is ABC News, whose corporate owner, Disney, disgraced itself earlier this year by paying $15 million to settle a libel suit brought by Trump over a minor, non-substantive error: George Stephanopoulos said on the air that Trump had been found “liable for rape” in a civil case brought by E. Jean Carroll when, in fact, he’d been found liable for sexual abuse. The federal judge in the Carroll case even said in a ruling that the jury had found Trump “raped” Carroll in the ordinary meaning of the term. But Disney couldn’t wait to prostrate itself before our authoritarian ruler.

So when Moran violated ABC News’ social-media policy, as the organization claimed, he no doubt knew he could expect no mercy.

Continue reading “ABC goes too far in pushing out Terry Moran; plus, Google’s AI assault, and Jay Rosen moves on”

Journalists covering the unrest in LA are being obstructed, assaulted and injured

You may have seen the video. Lauren Tomasi of 9News in Australia is doing a standup in the middle of a Los Angeles street. Behind her, some distance away, are uniformed police officers. She tells viewers that “the situation has now rapidly deteriorated. The LAPD moving in on horseback, firing rubber bullets at protesters, moving them on through the heart of LA.”

She flinches briefly as another rubber bullet is fired. Then another — and she’s hit in the leg, crying out in pain and bending over. The camera moves away from her and we hear a male voice asking, “You OK?”

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Tomasi went live after the incident and doesn’t appear to be much worse for the wear. She was lucky. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, law enforcment officers have assaulted, obstructed and injured a number of reporters who are covering the unrest in Los Angeles touched off by an ICE raid at a Home Depot on Friday. The CPJ writes:

Law enforcement in Los Angeles, California, shot non-lethal rounds that struck multiple reporters while they covered protests that began on Friday, June 6, and escalated over the weekend following immigration raids. More than 20 others were reported to have been assaulted or obstructed.

And though Tomasi didn’t appear to be seriously hurt, rubber bullets can cause severe injuries. CPJ reports that Nick Stern, a British freelance photojournalist, underwent emergency surgery for injuries caused by a plastic bullet that struck him in the leg. The CPJ notes: “Stern told the BBC that he was wearing a press card around his neck and carrying his camera when he was shot.”

Is law enforcement targeting journalists? “Tomasi, holding a microphone and talking into a camera, was clearly a journalist,” writes Poynter media columnist Tom Jones. But as you can see from the video of Tomasi, she had embedded herself with a large swath of protesters. It’s possible that the police were firing at the protesters and she just happened to be in harm’s way.

The more important question is this: Why were officers firing at a crowd of what appeared to be peaceful demonstrators?

By the way, the “more than 20” number cited by CPJ is up to 37 as I write this, according to a database being maintained by journalist Adam Rose. There are some harrowing reports of journalists’ being taken to the hospital and being struck in the head and in the eye. CNN’s Erin Burnett is quoted as saying, “The officers are also pushing us … They knew we’re media. They were just as happy to push me as to push anybody else.”

“We are greatly concerned by the reports of law enforcement officers’ shooting non-lethal rounds at reporters covering protests in Los Angeles. Any attempt to discourage or silence media coverage by intimidating or injuring journalists should not be tolerated,” said CPJ executive Katherine Jacobsen. “It is incumbent upon authorities to respect the media’s role of documenting issues of public interest.”