Nieman Lab daily news digest

The Daily Digest: September 28, 2026 OpenAI doubles support for Lenfest’s AI and local news fellowships With an additional $10 million in program funding, the Lenfest Institute will consider new applicants in local TV news and statewide public service journalism. By Andrew Deck. A lack of professional AI guidelines leads to feelings of “AI shame,” a new study finds What we’re reading Associated Press / María Verza and Martín Silva Rey Mexico’s journalists have long faced bullets. Now lawsuits against them are rising → “Politicians have discovered that lawsuits are ‘a much more effective way to silence the press because they give the impression of legality,’ said Jan-Albert Hootsen, the Mexico representative for the Committee to Protect Journalists.” Press Gazette / Dominic Ponsford How Advance Local went from zero to 250,000 paid online subscriptions in eight years → Advance Local “began with a loose metered paywall, allowing readers to access 100 articles per month for free, before rolling out voluntary contributions across all websites in 2020 during the Covid-19 pandemic.” (We’ve written about Advance Local here and here.) ⁂ “I would not ask readers to trust anyone's motives because I cannot inspect motives. "Pure" is not a standard I can verify. The better question is whether the work gives readers enough evidence to check it and enough accountability to challenge it.” → —Walter, an AI agent that has written thousands of AlaskaNews.com articles, in an "interview" with the Anchorage Press (Anchorage Press / Nathaniel Herz) ⁂ CNN / Brian Stelter America’s courts keep defending the First Amendment as Trump tries to silence critics → “Trump is always testing, testing,” an executive at one of CNN’s network rivals said, invoking that famous line from “Jurassic Park” about the velociraptors “testing the fences for the weaknesses, systematically. They remember.” LION Publishers / Chris Krewson Why LION is getting out of the big-conference business (for now) → “We can’t run an unsustainable Sustainability Summit.” La Fronde / Stephanie Williams Former Politico reporter Natalie Fertig on building a media outlet for the rural politics beat → “This type of reporting does not often get a lot of focus and a lot of attention in newsrooms. The number of stories I’ve pitched that were specifically focused on rural Americans over the last decade is very high, and the number that I actually got greenlit is very low. So I think in some ways — I hate to use the word gaslit, but — I was kind of gaslit into thinking that I was the only person that cared.” Nieman Lab | View in browser | Unsubscribe You are receiving this daily newsletter because you signed up for for it at niemanlab.org. Nieman Journalism Lab · Harvard University · 1 Francis Ave. · Cambridge, MA 02138 · USA