Al Jazeera correspondent Youmna ElSayed “believes her protective equipment effectively puts a target on her back: ‘We got to the point where wearing our press vests seems like putting ourselves in danger. We’re afraid to wear them because we don’t want to label ourselves as journalists.'”

“While Google says the final shape of its AI product is far from set, publishers have seen enough to estimate that they will lose between 20% and 40% of their Google-generated traffic if anything resembling recent iterations rolls out widely. Google has said it is giving priority to sending traffic to publishers.”

“Clara Jeffery, the editor in chief of Mother Jones, will lead the combined newsroom, which will have more than 70 people.”

“‘We made several trips between The Crimson’s office and the library that night,’ said [Crimson reporter Miles] Herszenhorn. ‘We kept trying to just call it a night and spend the rest of the night at the library’—they are, after all, in the middle of finals—but ‘we wanted to keep chasing it.’ That they did: Around 4:30 a.m. Tuesday, the Crimson reporters, beating every national newspaper, scooped that Gay would stay on as president with the support of the Harvard Corporation, the university’s governing board, which had remained silent since the hearing.”

“Until now, Threads hasn’t been available to the 448 million people living in the EU, and the company has even blocked EU-based users from accessing the service via VPN. To coincide with today’s launch, Meta is giving users in the region the ability to browse Threads without needing a profile.”

“The Hannah Arendt Association wrote in a statement: ‘We find it remarkable that the public debate about understanding and condemning Hamas’s terrorist attacks on Israel and Israel’s bombing of Gaza is being blocked by boycotting a political thinker who is trying to bring knowledge, insight and sharp thinking to this debate.'”

“Punchbowl News said Thursday that it was acquiring Electo Analytics, a company that provides data to help decipher and analyze legislation…The deal is a sign of an increasingly popular approach among digital news start-ups. Instead of trying to cover the whole world and rely on advertising, the outlets are focused on narrow lanes of coverage that people are willing to pay for.”

“SmartNews was one of the few Japanese startups to crack the U.S. market — and the second ever to clear a billion-dollar valuation and reach unicorn status. But employees told Rest of World the U.S. expansion’s initial success was tempered by a chaotic product development process and [former CEO Ken] Suzuki’s own obsession with the fractures of American political life, distracting from more central business challenges.”

“One thing that’s been lauded about open source investigations is that they can be democratizing. Most people, if they want to, can learn some of these skills fairly quickly. It takes a lot of practice to get really good at them, but they’re not out of reach for most people who have any proficiency with the internet. I think the challenge, however, is the community’s growth without the safeguards in place around professional ethics. Just because you can do something in digital spaces doesn’t mean you necessarily should.”

“I think journalists and people who care deeply about equitable local information systems should care about things like broadband internet access for all (i.e. how are people going to read all of your great stories online?) and Section 230,” said Darryl Holliday, the co-founder of City Bureau and a co-author of The Roadmap for Local News. “I think it’s important that people building a future of local news organize and understand policy issues.”