Nieman Lab
The Daily Digest: October 21, 2026

The Wall Street Journal’s new AI tool, “Doppler,” forecasts the issues that will shape the midterm elections

Ahead of Election Day, the tool has ingested 25 million TikTok videos and 500,000 podcasts to gain new insight into U.S. voters. By Andrew Deck.
U.K. politicians and German publishers call on regulators to pause Meta’s new terms before October 30 deadline
What we’re reading
The New York Times / Erik Wemple
Alaska’s journalists join forces to cover the midterms →

“Veteran journalists in the state have come to view competing outlets working on the same story as wasteful duplication. ‘There are so many stories in Alaska and so much here that goes uncovered, and there is absolutely no good reason why anyone should be competing at this point,’ said Nathaniel Herz, executive editor of The Anchorage Press, a monthly newspaper. ‘Resources now are such that it really does cry out for better cooperation.'”

Press Gazette / Dominic Ponsford
Hyphen, a website for British Muslims, is shutting down →

The site’s United Arab Emirates–based parent company is withdrawing funding “owing to a strategic realignment during a difficult economic period.” Hyphen launched in 2022.

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The average increase in revenue across 170 public radio stations over the past year, as a “surge of ‘rage giving’ spared public broadcasting” from deep cuts. “The question now: Will the surge in support that materialized after the rescission last beyond this year?”

(Maybe not: “An index of new donors maintained by Contributor Development Partnership showed a 16% decline in July, the first such decrease since the rescission. The fundraising partnership said quarterly growth in donations is ‘beginning to normalize’ after the rescission-driven surge.”) (Local News Initiative / Paul Farhi)

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—New York Times reporter Stuart Thompson on how he decides whether AI images and memes are newsworthy (The New York Times / Mike Abrams and Chloe Shakin)
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Twitter / Brian Stelter
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The New York Times / Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan
Trump keeps pushing to evict the press from the White House →

“Several close to [Trump] believe that moving the news media, most likely to the Eisenhower Executive Office Building across the street, may be the latest escalation in a remarkable series of moves against the news media that have already gone further than most of them expected.”

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—Media historian Charles Ponce de Leon on MS NOW's new three-hour TV newsmagazine, Connect with Jacob Soboroff. The show's segments "often garner hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube, helping the network generate more views on the platform than ABC, NBC, and CBS combined." (Columbia Journalism Review / Kyle Paoletta)
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On Substack / Zach Taylor
Substack adds podcast sponsorships →

“With dynamic ad insertion, podcasters will be able to run campaigns with their own sponsors and update ads across their back catalog without re-editing episodes…If you’d rather not find sponsors yourself, you’ll soon be able to tap into third-party sponsorship marketplaces to fill the ad breaks you mark in your episodes.”

Bloomberg / Reshmi Basu
Getty files for bankruptcy in a process that will take it private →

“The filing followed prolonged negotiations as the company wrestled with a high debt load and a shift of customers using AI-generated images instead of stock photos.”

Deadline / Jake Kanter
BBC scraps the Gen Z–focused news bulletin The Catch Up →

“The Catch Up was launched in 2022 and was pitched as an attempt to ‘bring back’ 16- to 24-year-old viewers to traditional news bulletins. Its debut coincided with BBC Three being restored to linear TV, a decision that was reversed on Tuesday.”

CNBC / Ashley Capoot
OpenAI expands ChatGPT ads to 26 more countries →

It’s now in 89 countries in total.

Elle / Véronique Hyland
Why does it feel like everyone is reading the same books? →

“I don’t know how a book becomes The Book, but I do know that when it does, everybody’s ready to talk about it. Everybody’s ready to get on the train,” Maris Kreizman says. “So it’s really not about discovery anymore. It’s about, ‘What’s the book that people are talking about and should we then cover it?’”

Book Gossip / Jasmine Vojdani
Are writers of color facing disproportionate scrutiny right now? →

“I don’t take lightly what it means to suggest that a professional writer’s work could be AI generated,” [The Atlantic’s Vauhini Vara] said. “But the incursion of corporate AI into cultural and artistic production is a matter of enormous public interest, and the Caine Prize is one of the most high-profile and prestigious literary prizes in the world. If Pangram interprets a prizewinning story as almost 100 percent AI — and all previous 25 winners of the prize as 100 percent human — it is in the public interest to raise the possibility that the Pangram analysis is correct.”

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