Nieman Lab: The Daily Digest

Core copyright violation claim moves ahead in The Intercept’s lawsuit against OpenAI

The ruling comes after a judge dismissed similar claims filed by Raw Story and AlterNet earlier this month. By Andrew Deck.

Are Americans’ perceptions of the economy and crime broken?

This election cycle showed that our evaluations of external reality are increasingly partisan. Can the media bridge the gap? By Joshua Benton.
What We’re Reading
Vanity Fair / Natalie Korach
Reporters brace for the frenzy of a second Trump White House →
“While these reporters (and many more) will undoubtedly tap their sources to ferret information out of the White House, Trump has a habit of breaking news himself by posting on social media at inopportune times, including late at night and on weekends. [Chief White House correspondent for The New York Times Peter Baker] says that after learning from 2016, news organizations have a responsibility to ‘recognize that we’re not going to jump on every single stray voltage that comes out of his phone.'”
The Guardian / Karen Middleton
Journalists won’t be criminalized for holding some Australian government secrets after law reforms →
“[Federal attorney general] Mark Dreyfus has also agreed to repeal parts of the law that make it a criminal offense to publish any information stamped ‘protected’, ‘secret’ or ‘top secret’ – meaning actual or likely harm is determined by the content of a document, not just the label on it.”
The New Republic / The Daily Blast with Greg Sargent
Trump’s eruption of rage at The New York Times offers an unnerving hint of what’s coming →
“…in his rant, Trump demanded that the Times show obeisance to him because he won the election, perhaps providing an early glimpse of how he will seek to cow the media into submission.”
Columbia Journalism Review / Feven Merid
How Twitter turning to X changed journalism →
“’Sourcing and linking to tweets as sufficient evidence of a conversation, or a thing worth reporting on, I found even in the heyday of that ecosystem to be unproductive and limiting,’ said Shamira Ibrahim, a writer and editor at Africa Is a Country. To Ibrahim, it takes away from the practice of nurturing beats and sources in depth. ‘I think social media is always going to be part of the story, but not the whole story, and I try to engage with writers who understand that or help them get to that place.’”
CNN / Liam Reilly
The majority of social media influencers don’t verify information before sharing it, according to a new UN report →
“According to the UNESCO study, 62% of surveyed creators said they don’t vet the accuracy of content before sharing it with their followers. Roughly one-third of influencers said they shared information without checking its validity if it originated from a source that they trusted, while 37% said they verified information with a fact-checking site before circulation.”
Mongabay Environmental News / Gustavo Faleiros
Environmental journalism as the link between local and global →
“The essence of our work is to contextualize the changes in peoples’ daily lives, influenced by the rise in international oil prices or the arrival of a devastating pandemic. Extreme climatic events necessarily lead to this connection. What we saw in 2024, with events such as the mega drought in the Amazon, was proof that, like never before, an entire generation of journalists is now talking about climate change and its unprecedented impacts.”
Platformer / Casey Newton
Google keeps meddling with the web →
“With all eyes on the search giant’s dominance, and the government proposing a forced divestiture of Chrome, you’d think that Google would strive not to highlight its influence over the web.”