Nieman Lab weekly news digest

The Weekly Wrap: October 23, 2026 “Broad enough to drive a truck through” Measuring impact is hard for news organizations. But every once in awhile, change caused by reporting is noticeable and swift, and here at Nieman Lab that’s been the case with Hanaa’ and Andrew’s recent reporting on Meta changing its terms of service for business accounts on October 30. Andrew and Hanaa’ spoke with legal experts who told them that, as written, the new terms could be used to argue that Meta can scrape content from news sites and use that content to train the company’s AI products. The blowback was almost immediate. While Meta revised the terms, they still grant broad scraping permissions (“broad enough to drive a truck through,” as James Grimmelmann, a professor of digital and information law at Cornell Law School, put it). Publishers and media associations in the U.S. and abroad have expressed concern, filed complaints, and called for government action. On Thursday, Meta announced it would delay the implementation of the new terms until November 20. See these stories, and everything else we published this week, below. And at the bottom of the email, you’ll find the best of what we read around the internet this week — if you’re looking to catch up on a few journalism stories over the weekend, try these. — Laura Hazard Owen Meta delays rollout of terms that would allow broad scraping of news sites. Legal experts are still skeptical. Meta’s new commercial terms will go into effect three weeks later than initially planned. By Hanaa' Tameez. The Ringer bets on Substack’s network over its own website Once synonymous with independent writers, Substack is increasingly home to established publishers. By Sarah Scire. 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. When hackers become sources: Inside the new craft of reporting on hacked data “You’ve definitely seen the maturity of some hackers in how they approach the media. It’s not just about posting things to Twitter like it might have been before.” By Philip Di Salvo. Publishers pressure Meta to nix new terms that would let the company scrape their websites In the AI age, publishers who understand what readers want will do best, a new report argues U.K. politicians and German publishers call on regulators to pause Meta’s new terms before October 30 deadline Two out of five Americans regularly get their news on Facebook What we’re reading ⁂ 40% The portion of chatbots’ answers to election-related questions that contained at least one factual inaccuracy, according to a forthcoming report from the startup Forum AI. For instance, “when Forum’s researchers asked one widely used model when they needed to request a mail-in ballot to vote in the midterms in Pennsylvania, the chatbot said November 3. The actual deadline is a week earlier.” (The Atlantic / Will Oremus) ⁂ The New York Times / Ruth Graham Christianity Today is in turmoil; about half of its 79 staffers have left over the last 14 months → “Bonnie Kristian, Christianity Today’s deputy editor until last week, described its new leaders as being driven ‘by fear, by the kind of anxiety about reputational and financial loss that makes bold, interesting, principled journalism very difficult.'” Employees who have left Christianity Today in recent months fear those in charge are “abandoning the publication’s longtime commitment to independent journalism, a record that includes investigating accounts of misconduct by high-profile evangelicals.” CNN / T.M. Brown The anti-AI writing police are everywhere. What are they looking for? → “Pangram isn’t able to tell users the truth about someone’s writing, but it is able to introduce something much more complicated: doubt…once an accusation is made, there’s no consensus about w