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.
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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.
The New Haven Independent newsroom. Photo (cc) 2021 by Dan Kennedy.
Folks who work at finding solutions to the local news crisis are understandably frustrated at what a difficult, frustrating slog it can be. Earlier this week, Elizabeth Hansen Shapiro, the former executive director of the National Trust for Local News, gave Richard J. Tofel a preview of a report she’s written for Press Forward and said, “I think the challenges now are so systemic that the only way to do responsible, impactful funding going forward is to look at system solutions rather than newsroom-based ones.”
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I’m looking forward to reading Hansen Shapiro’s report. (She’s featured in our book, “What Works in Community News,” and has been on our podcast.) And yet there really is no substitute for solving this problem one community at a time. For all the talk you hear about scale, that’s really not the way to go unless you’re talking about obvious things like finding a common tech platform so that every local news publisher doesn’t have to reinvent the wheel — or, in this case, the content management system. In the early days of the hyperlocal news movement, a group of publishers got together and formed an organization called Authentically Local. Its spot-on message: “Local Doesn’t Scale.”
On the brand-new edition of “Beat the Press with Emily Rooney,” we analyze media coverage of the war against Iran.
In other topics, we examine the implications of Paramount’s acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, which will put CNN in the hands of Trump-friendly executives Larry and David Ellison, and the failure of Bari Weiss — who may soon be running CNN in addition to CBS News — to hang on to a Jeffrey Epstein associate. We also give the hairy eyeball to AI’s ongoing encroachment into journalism and weigh in with our Rants and Raves.
Dale Anglin at the recent Knight Media Forum in Miami.
On the latest “What Works” podcast, Ellen Clegg and I talk with Dale Anglin, the inaugural executive director of Press Forward, a philanthropic effort that is dedicated to funding local news initiatives nationwide.
Before she was named as the leader of Press Forward, Anglin served as a vice president for grantmaking at the Cleveland Foundation. She also led the foundation’s journalism strategy. Then and now, she focuses on local news and information as a way to restore a sense of community.
I’ve got a Quick Take on The Baltimore Banner, one of the most prominent nonprofit digital startups. It looks like readers of The Washington Post who live in the DC area may not be deprived of local news and sports after all despite the recent deep cuts ordered by its billionaire owner, Jeff Bezos. The Banner is expanding, and it’s part of executive editor Audrey Cooper’s mission to build civic engagement through community journalism.
Ellen’s Quick Take is on a bill in New York state that attempts to put some guardrails around the use of artificial intelligence in newsrooms. Among other things, it would require disclosures and mandate supervision and fact-checking by actual human editors. It received a hearty endorsement from journalism industry unions. But there’s a lot of catching up to do to rein in the robots.
A prominent editor has unleashed a scathing attack on journalism schools for what he claims is their retrograde attitude toward artificial intelligence. Since the editor, Chris Quinn of Cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer, is invading my turf, I thought I’d take a look at what he has to say and offer some context.
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Quinn begins his recent “Letter from the Editor” column with an anecdote about a recent college graduate who turned down a job because of the way Quinn’s publications use AI. Increasingly, they ask reporters to do nothing but report, turning over their notes to be transformed into news stories by AI, with human editors looking them over to make sure the final product is accurate and coherent.
Journalism faces yet another tech-driven crisis: AI-powered Google search deprives news publishers of as much as 30% to 40% of their web traffic as users stay on Google rather than following the links. What’s more, users of other AI chatbots, such as ChatGPT and Claude, can search for clickless news as well. Now an expert on copyright and licensing has come up with a possible solution.
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Paul Gerbino, president of Creative Licensing International, writes that publishers need to move away from negotiating one-time deals with AI companies to scrape their content for training purposes. Instead, Gerbino says, they should push for a system by which they will be compensated for the use of their content on a recurring basis, whether through per-use fees or subscriptions. As Gerbino puts it:
Training is a singular, non-recurring event that offers only a front-loaded burst of revenue. It possesses no capacity to scale or recur at the level required to effectively sustain the complex and costly operation of the publishing industry….
The singular, non-negotiable strategic imperative for every publisher is to execute a complete and fundamental pivot from the outdated mindset of “sell content once” to the forward-looking, sustainable model of “monetize access forever.”
It’s a fascinating idea, although we should be cautious given that forcing Google and other platforms to pay for the news they repurpose hasn’t gone much of anywhere over the years. When such schemes have been implemented, they’ve been hampered by unexpected consequences, such as threats to remove all links to news sources. It’s not clear why Google would suddenly flip because it’s now using AI.
Gerbino acknowledges this, arguing that publishers should negotiate with the AI companies collectively, observing: “Individual publishers operating alone possess negligible leverage against the behemoths of the AI industry. Collective frameworks represent the only viable path to successful negotiation.” But that may require passage of a law so that the publishers don’t run afoul of antitrust violations.
Gerbino also says that publishers need to develop paywalls that are impervious to AI. Not all of them are.
The possibility that a substantial part of the news audience will never move beyond AI-generated results — no matter how wrong they may be — represents a significant threat to publishers, who are already dealing with the challenge of finding a path to sustainability in a post-advertising world.
Gerbino has laid out some interesting proposals on how to extract revenues from AI companies, which may represent the biggest threat to news since the internet flickered into view more than 30 years ago. It remains to be seen, though, whether his ideas will form the basis for action — or if, instead, they will simply fade into the ether.
There’s an old saying — no doubt you’ve heard it — that justice delayed is justice denied. And so it is with the news business’ longstanding lament that Google engages in monopolistic practices aimed at driving down the value of digital advertising. Gilad Edelman, writing for The Atlantic, describes it this way:
If the story of journalism’s 21st-century decline were purely a tale of technological disruption — of print dinosaurs failing to adapt to the internet — that would be painful enough for those of us who believe in the importance of a robust free press. The truth hurts even more. Big Tech platforms didn’t just out-compete media organizations for the bulk of the advertising-revenue pie. They also cheated them out of much of what was left over, and got away with it.
The Atlantic is among a number of media organizations that filed suit against Google this month. I’m kind of stunned that they are only suing now, because the issue they’ve identified goes back many years. As Charlotte Tobitt reports for the Press Gazette, the federal lawsuit was brought earlier this month by The Atlantic as well as Penske Media Corp., which owns Rolling Stone and She Media; Condé Nast, whose holdings include Advance Publications; Vox Media, owner of The Verge; and the newspaper chain McClatchy, whose papers include the Miami Herald, The Kansas City Star and The Sacramento Bee.
