Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging. At such a critical moment in US history, we need reporters on the ground. Your donation allows us to keep sending journalists to speak to both sides of the story.
Journalism under Trump 2.0 is becoming an increasingly oxymoronic prospect. Even as the industry continues to shrink at depressingly fast speeds and reporting loses ground to social media and AI slop, it remains a profession full of people who want to do real journalism-to tell the stories and share the perspectives that the powerful don't want told. (Everything else is public relations, as the hacky axiom goes.)
As AI rapidly reshapes the media landscape, Poynter is helping people understand how the technology works and how it should be used responsibly. Through practical AI training, ethical guidance and media literacy programs, Poynter's work supports transparent, trustworthy adoption as the technology continues to evolve. The Poynter Institute has hosted two summits on AI, ethics and journalism that have established guidelines to encourage responsible innovation and minimize risk of damage to newsrooms' reputations.
Shirley combines two of the foundational modes of live-streaming circa 2025-the man-on-the-street interview and the thrill-seeking adventure into an unknown and ostensibly dangerous place, whether the Mongolian Steppe or a tent encampment in Philadelphia-to produce a roughly hour-long narrative. He adopts the role of a guy who simply wants to know more about a problem, going from day-care center to day-care center in Minnesota and asking the people who work there, all of whom are of Somali origin, if they're the ones stealing taxpayer money.
From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging.
In the mid-90s, I was working as an admin assistant on the listings magazine of the London Evening Standard, and was about to be fired. OK, I wasn't that good at the job, but I was also done with it. It was on my mind that I needed an actual job, one that you could describe to someone: I'm an X.
From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging.
From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging.
From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging.
To cover an execution in Florida, John Koch, a 76-year-old radio correspondent, spends exactly $56.73. This is when, to save gas, he drives along rural roads from his home in the northern part of the peninsula to the state prison near Starke (about 62 miles south) without accelerating his old Honda above 43 mphabout 1,600 revolutions per minute. Koch has documented every execution in the state for the past 37 years.
During the 1959 session of the Louisiana state legislature, Governor Earl Long, the less famous younger brother of Senator Huey Long, "went off his rocker," as the tickled writer A. J. Liebling recounted in this magazine, adding, "The papers reported that he had cursed and hollered at the legislators, saying things that so embarrassed his wife, Miz Blanche, and his relatives that they had packed him off to Texas in a National Guard plane to get his brains repaired in an asylum."
More recently, reporters have requested user-exported data from TikTok and OpenAI to answer key questions about how tech users interact and what they're shown. User-exported data contains detailed and well-formatted data based on each user's history, and is likely an artifact of compliance to data privacy laws in Europe and California. Importantly, this data allows reporters to report on real behavior on tech platforms, as opposed to creating fictitious accounts and mimicking user behavior.
In the last weeks of 2025, as I write this prediction, my social media feeds are awash with a new set of pronouncements about the death of photographic truth. As a historian of photography, I'm familiar with obituaries of this sort, which tend to circulate in popular media at moments when new photographic or image-editing technologies arrive on the scene that force us to reevaluate photography's capacity to represent reality accurately.
There was an explosion right near me, you may have heard, he said in a calm, New Zealand-accented voice moments after the loud boom of a missile strike rattled across the airwaves. As he continued to speak air-raid sirens blared in the background. I think that took out the telecommunications center, he said of another explosion. They are hitting the center of the city.
that incentivizes stories designed to polarize rather than illuminate. This flattening doesn't just distort our work; it enables erasure and makes authoritarianism's job easier. Authoritarianism thrives on main-character energy. It needs a hero story - a single person to valorize, platform, co-opt, discredit, or remove. Journalism has leaned hard into these toxic individualistic tropes, perpetuating a form of narrative kingmaking that creates a momentum of inevitability that feels impossible to escape.