Nieman Lab daily news digest

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. ⁂ 44% 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) ⁂ “My golden rule is that readers need to benefit from learning about it in some way. We don’t usually just debunk.” → —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) ⁂ Twitter / Brian Stelter → ⁂ 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.” ⁂ “It doesn’t surprise me that cable news broadcasters wanting to remain relevant are embracing the newsmagazine format.” → —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) ⁂ 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.” InvestigateWest / Wilson Criscione and Daisy Zavala Magaña As nonprofit takeover looms, Spokesman-Review union rebukes plan to keep its embattled editor → Previously. 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