With an average of 10 local newspapers closing each month, joining the thousands that have met that fate already, conditions out there are grim. Largely in response, more than 6,000 nonprofit foundations have made major investments in local news initiatives, totaling some half a billion dollars or more in direct funding for journalism.
As a result, the number of U.S. nonprofit news organizations has been growing by double-digit percentages year-over-year, with an estimated 550 such organizations in operation.
It’s fair to question whether this is sustainable. But in the meantime, at least, what’s not to like about this arrangement — this major push to subsidize local journalism at a time when the for-profit model for it is rapidly vanishing?
Behind the scenes, it seems, there are cracks in the foundation, ones that appear to call for greater scrutiny to understand how sustainable and effective this model truly is moving forward.
As described in an ethnographic study published recently in Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, Jocelyn McKinnon-Crowley of the University of Memphis spent four months in late 2023 and early 2024 embedded in a four-person nonprofit newsroom in a midsized Rust Belt city, and also interviewed news workers at seven other nonprofit outlets. She focused on the question of labor: What is the impact of this type of journalism on the work and the workers involved?
Her main finding is blunt: “The emphasis on funding, on money, and on organizational concerns has become the top priority for individuals working for nonprofit news entities.” And, as journalists “busy themselves” with these administrative chores and organizational imperatives — to keep grant money coming in, to keep funders happy, etc. — it not only comes at the expense of the journalism product but also extracts a heavy toll of unpaid labor from the news workers involved.
The situation, McKinnon-Crowley writes, “leads to a double worker exploitation where journalists feel morally obligated to do good work as journalists and to do good work for a morally just (nonprofit) organization.”
This exploitation, she says, is perpetuated by the nature of nonprofit reliance, as foundations often “take decision-making power away from journalists and the institution of journalism.” A clear example of this, she says, is the grant-making process, which can require an undue level of administrative burden and can force journalists to put the priorities and interests of funders ahead of those of the community.
The result, she contends, is a pernicious cycle:
“Human versus AI news anchors: A survey study on audience satisfaction and the emotional connection.” By Yuan Ji, in Journalism. China has been one of the world’s leading laboratories for AI news anchors. The experiment began in earnest in 2018, when the Xinhua News Agency introduced a virtual news presenter capable of delivering news around the clock. The pitch was simple: AI could provide a tireless, endlessly replicable alternative to a human anchor.Nearly a decade into that experiment, however, audiences don’t seem ready to trade in the humans.
That’s the finding that stands out from a new study of 343 Chinese news consumers by researcher Yuan Ji. The study examined how audiences perceive AI anchors, including their engagement, emotional connection, and satisfaction compared with human anchors.
The numbers tell a fairly clear story. Only 4.96% of respondents said they found AI anchors very engaging. Another 25.07% said they were somewhat engaging. So nearly three-quarters of respondents did not describe AI anchors as engaging in either of those ways.
The satisfaction gap is even more pronounced. Just 5.25% said they were more satisfied with AI anchors than with human anchors. Another 24.78% said they were equally satisfied.
That means roughly seven in 10 respondents did not report being equally or more satisfied with AI anchors.
For news organizations, the finding raises an important question: What happens when technology solves a problem that audiences don’t necessarily think needs solving?
AI anchors offer obvious efficiencies. They can work continuously, be reproduced across broadcasts and locations, and potentially reduce the costs associated with producing and presenting routine news. But those advantages matter less if audiences don’t find the result engaging or satisfying.
That’s an important consideration for journalists as AI moves deeper into news production. The technology is getting better at mimicking the mechanics of journalism. But journalism is more than mechanics. As Yuan Ji found, audiences also respond to the people delivering the news — and to the sense of connection, credibility, and human presence those people provide.
The finding doesn’t mean AI won’t change journalism. It does suggest that news organizations should think beyond what AI can do and consider what audiences actually value. Efficiency may be one reason to use an AI anchor, but efficiency alone doesn’t guarantee engagement or satisfaction.
For now, the numbers offer some good news for human journalists in television. AI may be ready for the news desk, but audiences, at least for now, still seem to want a person sitting behind it.
“Government-funded watchdog journalism? Analyzing Canadian media workers’ self-perceptions of independence under the local journalism initiative.” By Chris Arsenault, in Journalism Practice. Government funding might seem like an obvious threat to journalistic independence. But Canadian journalists who receive public money say it hasn’t interfered with their work. Instead, many still point to advertisers as the bigger threat.
This new study explores the journalists working under Canada’s Local Journalism Initiative, a federal program that has provided more than $128 million since 2019 to support hundreds of reporting positions at news organizations across the country.
Researcher Chris Arsenault interviewed 22 journalists whose positions are supported by the program. What they said complicates the familiar concern in journalism, that accepting government money inevitably makes it harder for reporters to hold power to account.
The journalists certainly recognized the optics. Many worried that government funding could make audiences question their independence or create the appearance of a conflict. But none said the funding had actually changed what they could report. None could point to a story they had avoided or softened because of the government support. And none could identify a source who had treated them differently because their salary was publicly funded.
When journalists described actual threats to their independence, they were more likely to talk about advertisers.
Several reporters recalled situations in which advertisers had made it more difficult to scrutinize local businesses, organizations or other powerful figures. For these journalists, commercial pressure wasn’t an abstract concern about appearances — it was something they had experienced in their newsrooms.
That distinction is worth considering in an industry where the traditional business model has collapsed in many local communities. Journalists may understandably worry about accepting money from the government. But if the alternative is a newsroom with fewer reporters, fewer resources, and greater dependence on advertisers, public funding may sometimes give journalists more room to do independent reporting, not less.
The journalists weren’t convinced the funding program could fix the larger financial problems facing local news, however. Many saw it as temporary help rather than a long-term solution.
The findings suggest journalists may need to think differently about where threats to independence actually come from — whether from a dependence on government or advertising or some other source. Public funding may not eliminate the challenges facing local journalism, but it seems positioned to give reporters the resources and freedom to do work that commercial pressures have sometimes made harder.
“‘This is how journalism has always been done’: White neutrality, newsroom norms, and an AI intervention in source diversification.” By Gavin Adamson, Asmaa Malik, Shari Okeke, and Jisele Bailey-Hay, in Journalism.
Adding AI to the newsroom does not necessarily help journalists find better sources in the moment. In a new study of Canadian journalists, the technology was more useful as a mirror, helping reporters look back at their coverage and see whose voices they routinely include — and whose they don’t.
Researchers interviewed 12 journalists at a mid-sized Canadian daily and demonstrated an AI tool designed to track the types of sources appearing in news stories. The tool categorizes sources into groups such as politicians, authorities, experts, organizations, and people speaking from personal experience.
The journalists generally supported more inclusive sourcing. They saw it as important to accurate, fair and accountable journalism. But they also described why it can be difficult to put that ideal into practice.
Time pressure, unsurprisingly, was a major obstacle. Reporters working on deadline often turn to sources they know they can reach quickly, including government officials, police, academic experts, and other institutional voices. Finding people outside those established networks takes time, particularly in newsrooms that have fewer reporters and less time for relationship-building.
The result can be a heavy reliance on white and official sources, with the same voices and institutions appearing repeatedly in the news even when journalists recognize that their coverage would benefit from a broader range of perspectives.
In this study, the AI tool was found to do little to change that during the reporting process. The journalists did not envision using it to tell them whom to call for a story or to help them find a source before deadline. Instead, they saw value in using it afterward, reviewing individual stories or larger collections of coverage to identify patterns in their sourcing.
That makes the technology less of a reporting assistant and more of a feedback mechanism. It could help a reporter or editor notice, for example, how often official sources appear in their coverage or how rarely people with direct experience of an issue are quoted.
That kind of reflection could matter if newsrooms use it as part of their regular editorial conversations. The technology can make patterns visible that are otherwise easy to overlook amid the daily rush of producing the news.
But seeing a problem is not the same as fixing it. An AI system can identify who appeared in a story. It cannot build relationships with communities, earn the trust of unfamiliar sources, or give reporters more time to do the work.
Overall, AI can help newsrooms see their sourcing habits more clearly, but it cannot, at present, create the conditions necessary to change them. If source diversity is going to become a sustained part of journalism, it will require newsroom expectations and resources to support it, not simply another piece of technology.
“Stuck between democracy and a layoff: Connecting journalists’ personal disillusionment to overall normative press evaluations.” By Alexis Haskell, in Journalism Practice.
Many journalists enter the profession believing they can make a difference. They expect to inform the public, explain complicated issues, give people a voice, and contribute to democracy. This new study suggests that when those expectations collide with the realities of working in journalism, journalists can become disillusioned with more than their own jobs.
Alexis Haskell surveyed 695 U.S. journalists and found that disillusionment is a measurable experience among American journalists. The concept is different from burnout, the researcher argues. Burnout describes exhaustion and being overwhelmed by work. Disillusionment describes a deeper break between what journalists expected their careers to be and what they actually experienced.
On average, the journalists surveyed were more disillusioned than not. Haskell measured the concept through their feelings about their work, their expectations for the profession and their sense of purpose.
That disillusionment was also reflected in how journalists viewed journalism as a whole. Those who were more disillusioned were more likely to give the press lower marks for five of six democratic roles examined by the study. They were less positive about journalism’s ability to inform, analyze, provide a forum for public discussion, foster social empathy, and mobilize audiences.
The strongest relationships were found in analysis and the public forum. More disillusioned journalists were particularly likely to believe the press was failing to help people understand complicated issues or provide space for public conversation.
There was one exception: Disillusionment was not related to journalists’ evaluations of investigative journalism.
Haskell suggests that investigative work may occupy a different place in journalism’s professional culture. It is highly prestigious, frequently celebrated through major awards and often associated with individual achievement. The other roles are more directly tied to journalism’s service to audiences and communities.
That difference gets at what makes disillusionment important. Journalists who are disillusioned aren’t necessarily saying they can no longer do good journalism. They may instead be questioning whether journalism, as a profession, is accomplishing what they believed it was supposed to accomplish.
The finding connects the personal experience of working in journalism with a broader assessment of the field. When journalists encounter low wages, layoffs, shrinking staffs, and other pressures, the consequences may extend beyond their own careers.
They may begin to lose faith not just in the job, but in journalism’s ability to fulfill the public purpose that drew them to it in the first place.
