It’s time for a check-in on how digital outlets that rely partly or entirely on artificial intelligence are hollowing out the already-beleaguered news business. What better time than now, while we’re in the midst of a national freakout over AI? (The latest: Karen Weise and Mike Isaac report in The New York Times on concerns within Microsoft and OpenAI that AI scraping amounts to “an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions.”)
I’ll begin with what strikes me as the most well-intentioned of the projects that have caught my eye recently: Nanopress, which produces morning newsletters for more than 70 communities and neighborhoods in the Boston area by scraping information from local government, civic groups and news organizations.
I’m passing along this email I received from PR and corporate communications at USA Today Co. in response to my post about the newspaper chain’s deal with AI surveillance company Palantir, which has drawn protests from union employees.
Hi Dan –
I saw your piece published yesterday regarding USA TODAY Co.’s relationship with Palantir and wanted to reach out. Was there a reason you chose not to contact us for comment before publication?
In particular, I noticed the line: “From perusing the coverage, I’m not entirely sure exactly what Palantir will be doing for USAT.” Given that uncertainty, I was surprised that no effort was made to seek clarification from the company directly.
This initiative supports our broader strategy to strengthen audience relationships and create greater value across our business. In this work with Palantir, we’re leveraging AI to create a unified intelligence layer to serve our expansive audience better, deepen engagement, and drive growth across subscriptions, advertising, and e-commerce.
Our editorial decisions remain independent and are guided by our longstanding journalistic standards and ethics policies.
Please note, USA TODAY Co. complies with applicable data protection and privacy laws and maintains strong standards for data security and governance. We require this of our vendors and partners as well, reflecting our belief that safeguarding protected personal information is essential to our business and the audiences we serve.
Sharing a quote below addressing the open letter from the Guild/unionized employees which you can attribute to Amy Garrard, Vice President of Labor Relations, USA TODAY Co.:
“We respect that employees have a range of perspectives. Our agreement with Palantir is a business decision focused on strengthening how we connect and better serve audiences, advertisers, and subscribers. Our data remains protected under our existing privacy commitments, contractual safeguards, and applicable laws. As always, our journalism remains fully independent.”
ICE agents on the streets of Los Angeles in 2025. Public domain photo by DHSgov.
For USA Today Co., our largest newspaper chain, there is no bottom. Formerly known as Gannett, the publicly traded company is reviled in communities across the country for slashing its newsrooms. Now the chain is embarking on a venture that is sleazy even by its own low standards: a deal with Palantir, the infamous AI surveillance firm.
The optics of partnering with Palantir — a company that provides military targeting software and wields a vast surveillance panopticon — are undeniably touchy. It’s worked hand in hand with ICE, secretly providing the agency a tool that scours citizen’s Medicaid and other government data to create a map of people it could potentially deport. It also supplies the Israeli military with an AI battlefield decision-making tool that can analyze enemy targets for elimination.
Now USAT’s employees are fighting back. Natalie Korach, reporting for the media-news site Status, notes that workers (sub. req.) at the company’s 31 unionized publications have signed a statement urging executives to “immediately end its partnership with the company,” citing Palantir’s work with the federal government. As Jon Schleuss, president of The NewsGuild-Communication Workers of America, told Korach, “It’s a company that is actively involved in highly sensitive matters that journalists are covering. Having that company now on the inside of the systems that the journalists use to then write about that company, I think is where the problem is.”
On top of that, Korach reports that USAT is embarking on yet another round of layoffs and buyouts.
From perusing the coverage, I’m not entirely sure exactly what Palantir will be doing for USAT. Korach writes that Schleuss says readers don’t want AI news content, but that doesn’t seem to be what this is about. Rather, chair and CEO Mike Reed told investors that Palantir will build an “intelligence layer” to “strengthen how we collect, connect and activate audience data to drive more effective and faster monetization across our platform,” according to an account in Nieman Lab.
Then again, as Darren Zullo reported for Boston.com last year, USAT is already using AI to generate stories. Because of course it is.
This is not a defense of using AI to write. Rather, it’s a critique of the slipshod standards that have long pervaded the op-ed pages of our major newspapers. As University of Maine media historian Michael Socolow has written, the op-ed page, unveiled by The New York Times more than half a century ago, was originally conceived as a way of giving a voice to various members of the community.
That function survives, but the voice, in all too many cases, belongs not to the ostensible author — in many cases an elected official, a business executive or a nonprofit leader — but, rather, to a ghostwriter who’s either a staff member or an outside consultant. Yes, the actual writer talks with the person whose byline will deceptively grace the piece, and yes, that person will also have final approval. But many op-eds are no more the work of the bylined “author” than a major political speech is the original rhetoric of the person delivering it.
Earlier today, Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell’s office put out a photo and a statement saying that he’s sick, not dead or comatose. The conspiracy theories started immediately. I’ll begin with a straight-news post on Bluesky from Phil Lewis, an editor at HuffPost:
Social media users started questioning when the newspaper he’s holding had been published. I’ve seen suggestions that it’s from April. Well, no. In fact, it’s the front page today’s Washington Post sports section. (And minor props to McConnell for grabbing the sports pages.)
Even more ridiculous: You can see in the top photo that McConnell has the requisite four fingers and a thumb on his left hand. Almost immediately, though, an image started circulating showing McConnell with five fingers, thus “proving” that the photo is an AI fake. If you hadn’t seen the original, you might even believe it. mfa08 is an anonymous Bluesky account with 1,000 followers.
Eight years after my book “The Return of the Moguls” was published, what is the state of newspaper ownership by civic-minded billionaires? Jon Keller of WBZ-TV (Channel 4) put that question to me on his “Keller at Large” program, which was broadcast Sunday morning.
My answer: not what I had hoped. John and Linda Henry have proved to be good stewards of The Boston Globe, and another billionaire sports owner, Glen Taylor, has similarly revived The Minnesota Star Tribune. But Jeff Bezos’ ownership of The Washington Post has taken a disastrous turn after 10 good years, and other masters of the universe have failed to step up.
Jon and I talked about some other media-related topics as well, including:
◘ The rise of independent local-news projects, especially in affluent suburbs. News deserts, unfortunately, persist in rural areas and urban communities of color.
◘ A New England Muzzle Award I recently gave Gov. Maura Healey for proposing to prevent public access to birth, death and marriage records for many decades — overturning a tradition of openness that dates back Puritan times.
◘ A crisis at the Internet Archive, as more than 300 local newspapers have blocked access in order to prevent AI companies from scraping their content without compensation.
Thursday’s webinar on “Audience, AI and Events” was a rousing success. We want to thank all of our presenters as well as the local-news publishers, journalists and volunteers who gave up part of their day — and, in a few cases, their entire day — to pick up ideas and learn new skills.
We recorded all of our sessions, and you’ll find them below. For our three workshops, led by Emily Turner, Dr. John Wihbey and Iris Adler, we used breakout rooms so that participants could work on projects assigned by the facilitators. Those have been edited out of the videos.
We kicked off the webinar with a welcome from What Works’ co-leaders, Professor Dan Kennedy of Northeastern’s School of Journalism and Ellen Clegg, a retired top editor at The Boston Globe and a co-founder of Brookline.News, a digital nonprofit. We provided a brief update on the nine major local- and regional-news projects that we profiled in our 2024 book, “What Works in Community News.” Spoiler alert: They’re all alive and well, though some have changed in significant ways.
Our first workshop, on “Audience Development and Engagement,” was led by Emily Turner, deputy editor of community at Boston.com. Emily was a student of Dan’s back in the day.
Our second workshop, on “AI Skills for Local News Organizations,” was led by Dr. John Wihbey, a professor of media and technology at Northeastern and the author, most recently, of “Governing Babel: The Debate over Social Media Platforms and Free Speech — and What Comes Next.”
Our keynote address featured Dan Lothian, editor-in-chief and general manager of local news at Boston’s public media organization GBH and professor of the practice in Northeastern’s School of Journalism, and Lee Hill, executive editor of GBH News. They were introduced by Professor Jonathan Kaufman, director of Northeastern’s School of Journalism.
Our third and final workshop, on “Event Planning for Building Community,” was led by award-winning veteran broadcaster Iris Adler. She is also a board member at Brookline.News, and just a week earlier she organized a successful storytelling event to benefit the news outlet at the Coolidge Corner Theatre.
Ruins of the Library of Pantainos in Athens, Greece. Photo (cc) 2018 by Michael Kogan.
Has the Internet Archive reached the end of the line? The 30-year-old nonprofit, which has saved and made searchable more than a trillion webpages, has proved itself to be of enormous value over the years.
I’ve used it to track changes in reporting, including this blog post about The New York Times’ shifting coverage of an explosion at Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City in the days after Hamas’ October 2023 terrorist attack on Israel. The Times and other news organizations initially reported that Israeli forces had bombed the hospital, but they later had to walk back that unverified claim.
Follow my Bluesky newsfeed for additional news and commentary. And please join my Patreon for just $6 a month. You’ll receive a supporters-only newsletter every Thursday.
The Internet Archive is also home to The Boston Phoenix’s online digital and print archives thanks to an agreement that it made with Northeastern University, which acquired the Phoenix’s intellectual property after the legendary alt-weekly went out of business in 2013. (Note: I was a longtime staff columnist for the Phoenix, and I helped arrange the donation to Northeastern.)
Now, though, the Internet Archive and its Wayback Machine, which reproduces web content from years past, are facing an existential threat. News organizations ranging from the Times to USA Today are inserting code into their sites that blocks the Archive from crawling their content, mainly to prevent AI companies from accessing their journalism without permission.
As Katie Knibbs reports for Wired, the irony is that USA Today recently published an important piece of investigative journalism documenting ICE detention statistics that wouldn’t have been possible without the Archive. Knibbs writes:
According to analysis by the artificial-intelligence-detection startup Originality AI, 23 major news sites are currently blocking ia_archiverbot, the web crawler commonly used by the Internet Archive for the Wayback project. The social platform Reddit is too. Other outlets are limiting the project in different ways: The Guardian does not block the crawler, but it excludes its content from the Internet Archive API and filters out articles from the Wayback Machine interface, which makes it harder for regular people to access archived versions of its articles.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is helping to lead a signature drive in support of the Archive, compares the publishers’ actions to “a newspaper publisher announcing it will no longer allow libraries to keep copies of its paper,” according to a recent EFF article by Joe Mullin, who writes:
For nearly three decades, historians, journalists, and the public have relied on the Internet Archive to preserve news sites as they appeared online. Those archived pages are often the only reliable record of how stories were originally published. In many cases, articles get edited, changed, or removed—sometimes openly, sometimes not. The Internet Archive often becomes the only source for seeing those changes. When major publishers block the Archive’s crawlers, that historical record starts to disappear.
This is not the first time the Archive has run into legal problems. One major challenge was of its own making: a project begun during the COVID pandemic to make books available for free without permission and without any compensation to publishers or authors. Not surprisingly, the Archive lost that case in a federal appeals court in 2024. As I wrote in describing that decision: “The Archive claimed that it was in compliance with copyright law because it limited e-book borrowing to correspond with physical books that it had in its collection or that was owned by one of its partner libraries. That’s not the way it works, though.”
The current threat involves the right of publishers’ to make the content available as they see fit, which they have a legal right to do. They are under no obligation to let the Internet Archive repurpose it. Ideally, they will come to understand the incalculable damage they are doing.
As EFF’s Mullin puts it: “There are real disputes over AI training that must be resolved in courts. But sacrificing the public record to fight those battles would be a profound, and possibly irreversible, mistake.”
Angela Fu of Poynter Online published a story on Thursday that’s been rocketing around media circles. Her lead: “Artificial intelligence company Nota — whose clients include organizations like The Boston Globe and the Institute for Nonprofit News — is scrapping its network of local news sites after learning that they contained dozens of instances of plagiarism.”
You should read Fu’s story in full. The gist of it is that the AI tool was supposed to scrape press releases and official information but has been grabbing news content in addition to that. “Poynter found more than 70 stories dating back to October that included reporting, writing and photography from local journalists without attribution,” she writes. “Some of the copied material came from outlets owned by Nota’s own clients.”
Earlier today, several trusted sources sent along a memo sent to the Globe’s newsroom assuring the staff that the paper was not part of the specific experiment at issue and that everyone should stop using Nota.
Here is text of the email, which is from editor Brian McGrory; Shira Center, vice president for innovation and strategic initiatives; Cynthia Needham, deputy managing editor for innovation and strategy; Matt Karolian, vice president of platforms and AI; and Heather Ciras, deputy managing editor for audience.
Poynter published a report yesterday about Nota, an AI tool used by the Globe and many other newsrooms across the country. The story said that a Nota experiment involving AI-driven hyperlocal news resulted in stories that were clearly plagiarized from other local news organizations.
The Globe was not part of this experiment, which was aimed at small counties in other states. We’ve worked with Nota on SEO, headline recommendations, related metadata, and social platform suggestions for Globe stories. The Globe’s contract with Nota prohibits it from using our journalism to train its AI model.
That said, what happened here does not fit with our values, and we are asking everyone to stop using this product while we wait for Nota to turn off the service and end our contract. We have other strong options for this work that we’re exploring.
My colleagues and I are engaged in the convoluted, ever-shifting process of figuring out how to use artificial intelligence in journalism in ways that are both productive and ethical. Somewhere between “Let students use AI to write their stories” and “We should forbid all uses of AI,” there is a reasonable approach, and we’re all trying to figure out what that is.
Our students learn from us. We learn from our students. Keep in mind, though, that we have not yet seen what you might call “AI natives” in our classrooms. Young people in their late teens and early 20s were part of the before times. In the not-too-distant future, though, we’ll start seeing students who can’t remember a world without ChatGPT, Claude and the rest.
Recently I devoted a class to AI in my graduate ethics seminar. It’s a small group of five students, one of whom is an advanced undergrad. I was surprised to learn that they are as skeptical of AI as I am.
