On the latest “What Works” podcast, I talk with Kade Krichko, the founder of Ori magazine, a beautifully crafted premium print publication devoted to grassroots storytelling across the globe. (Ellen Clegg is recovering from knee replacement surgery but is producing behind the scenes. She’ll return to the air soon.)
Kade describes himself as a world wanderer with a knack for misadventure. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, ESPN, Vice and Outside, among other publications. He admits to loving a good story, and writes, “If the tale has a pulse, I’m listening.” Kade is a Northeastern University graduate and a part-time lecturer in the School of Journalism. He created and taught a course in Sports, Media and Digital Storytelling.
Jon Keller. Photo via WBZ-TV.
I also check in with longtime political journalist Jon Keller. Jon was recently laid off by WBZ-TV (Channel 4) after a 20-year career there. He was one of five staff members who lost their jobs as part of what appears to be a deep corporate purge by David Ellison, whose Skydance Media company bought Paramount earlier this fall. CBS is part of Paramount, and WBZ is part of CBS.
Jon is not going away, fortunately, and is still writing for MASSterList and Boston magazine. He has some sharp observations on the role of local TV news in covering state and city politics.
Later on in the podcast, I’ve got a Quick Take about the latest bad news from our tech overlords. The Columbia Journalism Review reports that the new AI-powered web browsers designed to replace Chrome and Safari are able to circumvent a news organization’s digital paywall. Not always — it depends on the technology that was used to build the paywall. But at a time when publishers are already losing traffic because of AI, this is a direct assault on the business model for journalism in the digital age.
Camden, Maine, home of the Midcoast Villager. Photo (cc) 2020 by Paul VanDerWerf.
The Midcoast Villager, an innovative weekly newspaper based in Camden, Maine, got The New York Times treatment last week. But though the Times lavished attention on the high-profile journalists who’ve been recruited to work there as well as the café it’s opened to extend public outreach, it missed entirely the Villager’s long history as a tech innovator — a history that extends all the way to the present.
The Times article and visuals, by Steven Kurutz and Cig Harvey, are certainly entertaining enough, starting with their portrayal of deputy editor Alex Seitz-Wald, who left a job covering Washington for NBC News to come to Maine. “I did an insane thing,” he tells the Times. “I left one of the last stable jobs in media and took a job in the worst sector of media — and possibly in the economy.”
Map via “The State of Local News 2025.” Click here for the interactive version.
Finding news in the annual State of Local News report from Northwestern University’ Medill School can be a challenge because, frankly, it’s always the same depressing thing: newspapers keep closing; digital startups are rising, but not by enough to fill the gap; and be sure to tune in again next year, when the situation is likely to be even worse.
Still, there are a few interesting nuggets in the latest update, which was released Monday. In particular, I was drawn to some observations in the report about rural areas, which is where news deserts tend to be concentrated. News deserts, as defined by the project’s now-retired founder, Penny Abernathy, are counties without any locally based news organizations.
As newspapers continue to close, independent startups are filling the gap. But it’s uneven at best, with most startups concentrated in urban and suburban areas. The report puts it this way:
Over the past five years, we have tracked more than 300 startups that have emerged across the country. Support for both these new startups, which have opened in almost every state, as well as existing legacy outlets has come from a surge in philanthropic investment as well as public policy initiatives. Over the past year, such efforts have boosted a wide variety of news outlets. Overall, however, philanthropic grants remain highly centralized in urban areas, and state legislation has not been widely adopted throughout the nation, leaving many outlets in more rural or less affluent areas still vulnerable.
The report also finds that fewer than 10% of digital-only news organizations are in rural counties, and that the demographics of counties that do support digital projects “tend to be more affluent, with lower rates of poverty and higher rates of educational attainment.” Of course, internet connectivity tends to lag in rural areas as well.
Google appears to be throttling AI searches related to Donald Trump’s obviously addled mental state. Jay Peters reports (sub. req.) in The Verge:
There’s been a lot of coverage of the mental acuity of both President Trump and President Biden, who are the two oldest presidents ever, so it’s reasonable to expect that people might query Google about it. The company may be worried about accurately presenting information on a sensitive subject, as AI overviews remain susceptible to delivering incorrect information. But in this case, it may also be worried about the president’s response to such information. Google agreed this week to pay $24.5 million to settle a highly questionable lawsuit about Trump’s account being banned from YouTube.
I wanted to see if I could reproduce Peters’ results, and sure enough, Google is still giving Trump special treatment, even though Peters’ embarrassing story was published two days ago. I searched “is trump showing signs of dementia” in Google’s “All” tab, which these days will generally give you an AI-generated summary before getting to the links. Instead, you get nothing but links. The same thing happened when I switched to “AI Mode.”
Next I searched for “is biden showing signs of dementia” at the “All” tab. As with Trump, I got nothing but links — no AI summary at the top. But when I switched to “AI Mode,” I got a detailed AI summary that begins:
In response to concerns and observations about President Joe Biden’s cognitive abilities, a range of opinions and reports have emerged. It’s important to note that diagnosing dementia or cognitive decline requires a formal medical assessment by qualified professionals.
I have mixed feelings about AI searches, though, like many people, I make use of them — always checking the citations to make sure I’m getting accurate information. But as Peters observes, it looks like Google is flinching.
This may be the most important story you’ll read all month. Konrad Putzier and Rachel Louise Ensign report in The Wall Street Journal (gift link) that we are losing our economic dynamism. Americans have stopped moving to different parts of the country, and they are less likely to leave their jobs to try something new.
In addition, the combination of record-low interest rates a few years ago and much higher rates now means that too many people feel like they’re locked into their home. Putzier and Ensign write:
This immobility has economic consequences for everyone. The frozen housing market means growing families can’t upgrade, empty-nesters can’t downsize and first-time buyers are all but locked out. When people can’t move for a job offer, or to a city with better job opportunities, they often earn less. When companies can’t hire people who currently live in, say, a different state, corporate productivity and profits can suffer.
This phenomenon has been building for years, although it’s gotten worse since COVID. Some of the more traditional liberal policies that Joe Biden was pursuing might have helped reverse these trends, but now Donald Trump is creating economic uncertainty with massive tax cuts for the rich and his chaotic tariff policy.
I’m one to talk. I have always lived in the Boston area, and I wouldn’t live anywhere else; my wife and I have lived in one apartment and three homes in just two communities. Over the past 45 years I’ve worked at exactly three jobs, not counting a few short-time stints when I was unemployed during the 1990 recession.
But that was a conscious choice. In the Journal article, you’ll see that a number of people interviewed would like find a better job and a different place to live, but they’re stymied by factors beyond their control.
Our country is not just spinning out of control — it’s also spinning down. We need government policies that will help restore the dynamism that defined us until recently.
An ‘abundance’ of punditry
Do we need another publication aimed at helping to define a new form of liberalism? Whether we do or not, we’re getting one. It’s called The Argument, and it sounds like it might be interesting.
Max Tani of Semafor reports that Jerusalem Demsas left The Atlantic recently to start the project, which sounds like it will be largely rooted in the “abundance” agenda promoted by writers like Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson in their book of that name. The idea is that the left has stymied innovation and growth by creating a bureaucratic and legal framework aimed more at stopping things rather than building, whether it be public transportation or housing.
Indeed, Thompson will be one of the contributors to The Argument, which is published at Substack.
Based on Demsas’ introductory video and message, it sounds like The Argument will mainly appeal to the center left in an attempt to try to craft a vision that reaches beyond not just the MAGA pestilence that has infected the body politic but also the excesses of the progressive left, which she doesn’t exactly define. That’s going to be hard given the ease with which the right caricatured Kamala Harris as a left-wing menace while she was actually espousing moderately liberal policies. Demsas writes:
We will convene not just self-described political liberals, but socialists, moderates, libertarians and center-right conservatives. I won’t agree with everyone we publish, and I doubt they all agree with everything I have said, but we will only publish people who seek truth from facts and who are excited to engage directly with their opponent’s ideas.
I can think of a whole host of reasons why The Argument might fail, or modestly succeed while fading into obscurity and irrelevance. But let’s hope that it will have a wider impact than that. Democrats have a difficult needle to thread if they are going to return to power in 2026 and ’28. A new source of ideas with broad, popular appeal would be a welcome development.
AI’s power grab
We are nearing the end, blessedly, of what’s been a brutally hot summer. I don’t know what we’d do without air conditioning, or, frankly, how we got by without it when I was growing up — and yes, heat waves were shorter and nights were cooler back in the 1960s and ’70s.
But air conditioning is powered by electricity, and we are using it at a reckless rate as the AI surge continues apace. You can’t avoid it. It’s not just a matter of consciously using it with programs like ChatGPT and Claude; now you can’t even search Google without getting an AI-generated answer at the top of your screen. I recently tested the latest version of ChatGPT by asking it to draw a photorealistic version of Bob Dylan drumming. You can see the result; but how many kilowatts did I use?
The economist Paul Krugman’s latest newsletter post is about AI and electricity, noting that AI data centers were already consuming 4.4% of U.S. electricity in 2023, and that it may rise to 12% by 2028. We need vastly more electricity-generating capacity, and yet Krugman observes that Trump has “a deep, irrational hatred for renewable energy.” He adds that many tasks being performed by brute-force AI could be turned over instead to lighter, less-energy-intensive versions; still, he observes:
It’s obvious that any attempt to make AI more energy-efficient would lead to howls from tech bros who believe that they embody humanity’s future — and these bros have bought themselves a lot of political power.
So I don’t know how this will play out. I do know that your future electricity bills depend on the answer.
Among other things, news organizations are embracing AI both for better and for worse. My own view is that there’s a lot more to dislike about AI than to like. But it’s here to stay, and we might as well try to use it in ways that are ethical and responsible. Unfortunately, we appear to be rushing headlong in the wrong direction.
Church Street Marketplace in Burlington, Vt. Photo (cc) 2017 by Kenneth C. Zirkel.
The mayor of Burlington, Vermont, has rescinded a gag order that had prevented the city’s police department from issuing press releases without the approval of her office. The contentious order was one of two reasons that the mayor, Emma Mulvaney-Stanak, was given a New England Muzzle Award earlier this year.
The original, restrictive executive order was enacted on January 10, under former Police Chief Jon Murad, who did not seek reappointment. It required all BPD press releases, including emergency alerts, to be submitted to the mayor’s office for approval before public dissemination.
As LaMarche observes, the gag order was aimed more at Murad than at the police department as a whole, and with Murad gone, there wasn’t much incentive for Mulvaney-Stanak to keep the cone of silence in place. The mayor targeted Murad for speaking out about a local man who’d had nearly 2,000 encounters with police. Among other things, Murad’s lament was reported on WBUR Radio (90.9 FM) in Boston, which couldn’t have endeared him to Mulvaney-Stanak.
What sealed the Muzzle, though, was that the mayor then called an invitation-only news conference without letting at least two outlets that had been critical of her know about it. Those outlets were Seven Days and Vermont News First. Vermont First Amendment legend Michael Donoghue, who writes for Vermont News First, told me last winter that he believed only local television newscasts had been invited.
• Good/bad/good news in Dallas. Last week I wrote that the notorious cost-cutting hedge fund Alden Global Capital was ready to swoop in and upset the pending sale of The Dallas Morning News to the Hearst chain, a privately held company known for quality regional and statewide journalism. Now Joshua Benton reports for Nieman Lab that the sale to Hearst is back on track. “This morning,” Benton wrote Monday, “the DallasNews Corporation (formerly A.H. Belo) announced that its board had ‘reviewed and rejected’ Alden’s offer. (It also added a ‘poison pill’ shareholder rights plan, just in case Alden tries anything funny.)”
• An overdue Globe update. Last week The Boston Guardian and Contrarian Boston reported that two Boston Globe journalists, along with two South End residents who were accompanying them, had been attacked while on assignment as they were reporting in the notorious Mass and Cass area of Boston. The story was subsequently picked up by Universal Hub, Hub Blog and Media Nation. But there was no mention of it in the Globe until this morning, as part of a larger story by the two journalists, reporter Niki Griswold and Barry Chin. Griswold wrote:
While reporting this story, two Globe journalists were confronted by at least three men on the Melnea Cass bike path as they toured the area on a July afternoon with [Brian] McCarter and another longtime South End resident. The men approached and threatened the group after spotting the Globephotographer taking pictures from a distance. The men, two holding hammer-like tools, followed the group, which took shelter in a nearby building.
The incident prompted Globe editor Nancy Barnes to issue a memo to the newsroom about security precautions.
• The wages of sin. Paramount wasted no time in making up for some of the $16 million it paid to Donald Trump in order to settle a bogus lawsuit the president had brought against “60 Minutes” — a settlement widely believed to pave the way for a merger with Trump-friendly Skydance Media. Last week WBZ-TV (Channel 4) in Boston announced that a number of employees had been offered buyouts, while longtime reporter Beth Germano said she’d retire and health reporter Dr. Mallika Marshall said she’d been laid off, according to Ross Cristantiello of Boston.com. “I gotta believe it has something to do with the merger,” union official Fletcher Fischer was quoted as saying. At a time when trust in the media is at an all-time low, local television news stands out as an exception. Moves like this, though, erode that trust.
• Here’s some fresh AI hell. Gannett, the country’s largest newspaper chain as well as a steady source of terrible news about layoffs, closures and other cuts, is offering buyouts to many of its journalists so that it can replace them with artificial intelligence. Sean Burch of The Verge quotes a memo from Mike Reed, who writes in his characteristically inimitable style: “Given our static revenue trends, we need to adjust our organization to effectively meet the needs of our business today and position ourselves for sustainable growth in the future as we continue to use AI and leverage automation to realize efficiencies.”
Gannett’s weeklies are pretty much gone, but it still publishes several dailies in New England, most notably The Providence Journal and the Telegram & Gazette of Worcester, as well as about 200 dailies across the country, anchored by USA Today.
Correction: Sorry for rushing this. I’ve fixed a few botched names.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
The Washington Post’s plan to bring in a plethora of outside opinion writers, edited by artificial intelligence, is being widely mocked, as it should be. But the idea is not new — at least the non-AI part.
A decade ago, the Post started publishing something called PostEverything, which the paper called “a digital daily magazine for voices from around the world.” Here’s how the 2014 rollout described it:
In PostEverything, outsiders will entertain and inform readers with fresh takes, personal essays, news analyses, and other innovative ways to tell the stories everyone is talking about — and the ones they haven’t yet heard.
PostEverything went PostNothing sometime in 2022, but now it’s back. According to Benjamin Mullin of The New York Times (gift link), the revived feature, known internally as Ripple, will comprise opinion writing from other newspapers, independent writers on Substack and, eventually, nonprofessional writers. Ripple will be digital-only and will be offered outside the Post’s paywall.
What’s hilarious is that Mullin contacted several of the partners the Post is considering, such as The Salt Lake Tribune and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and was told they’re not interested. Another potential partner was identified as Jennifer Rubin, who quit the Post over owner Jeff Bezos’ meddling and started her own publication called The Contrarian. Mullin writes: “When told that she had been under consideration at all, Ms. Rubin burst out in laughter. ‘Did they read my public resignation letter?’ she said.”
The economist Paul Krugman’s latest newsletter post is about 
As LaMarche observes, the gag order was aimed more at Murad than at the police department as a whole, and with Murad gone, there wasn’t much incentive for Mulvaney-Stanak to keep the cone of silence in place. The mayor targeted Murad for speaking out about a local man who’d had nearly 2,000 encounters with police. Among other things, Murad’s lament was reported on WBUR Radio (90.9 FM) in Boston, which couldn’t have endeared him to Mulvaney-Stanak.
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