Changes are coming to Sahan Journal — a mark of the award-winning digital newsroom’s success and its lasting impact on the media ecosystem in Minneapolis and St. Paul. Mukhtar Ibrahim, the pioneering founder, is stepping down as founding publisher and CEO. After building a robust, award-winning nonprofit news site covering immigrant communities, Ibrahim announced in the fall of 2023 that he is ready to make way for new leadership. His desire to spend more time with his family also factored into his decision. He and his wife, Aisha Elmi, welcomed a son in the summer of 2023. They are also paren ..read more

A widely used window into Facebook is closing for good. Meta had already disbanded the team behind the social monitoring tool CrowdTangle and prevented new users from signing up. On Thursday, users were told CrowdTangle will no longer be available after August 14, 2024. The free tool allowed newsrooms and journalists to follow trends and public engagement across Facebook. When Facebook acquired CrowdTangle in 2016, Facebook said: “Publishers around the world turn to CrowdTangle to surface stories that matter, measure their social performance and identify influencers. We are excited to work wit ..read more

The largest newspaper chain in the United States has an ongoing business relationship with a company linked to a sprawling network of over a thousand “pink slime” publications — sites that profess to be local but have no local staff and do not disclose funding they’ve received from political sources. A Gannett spokesperson confirmed the company has a contract to produce “advertorial content” sourced from Advantage Informatics, a blandly named company founded by Brian Timpone, a conservative businessman and former TV reporter based out of Chicago. (Timpone’s name may be familiar to readers who ..read more

Plenty of talk in newsrooms these days might be about how to navigate new technologies like artificial intelligence — but one string of Colorado newspapers is jazzed about a decidedly retro development. The National Trust for Local News, a nonprofit that has been buying newspapers in multiple states and investing in their modernization, has gone a step further in its mission to help sustain local news. The group recently purchased a used printing press from Canada, and is set to transport it in the coming weeks from the state of Washington to a rented facility in a warehouse district in Denver ..read more

Former employees of Mexico’s now-defunct state news agency, Notimex, launched the Mexican Association of Information (AMEXI) last Thursday as a new news outlet covering the country’s deepest challenges, according to an announcement posted on Twitter. #ULTIMAHORA A más de dos meses de concretarse el cierre de #Notimex por instrucción del presidente @lopezobrador_, este #8M surge la nueva Agencia Mexicana de Información (@Amexi_noticias), creada por extrabajadores de la extinta Agencia de Noticias del Estado Mexicano. pic.twitter.com/TNxPGOXjX9 — AMEXI (@Amexi_noticias) March 7, 2024 “One of ..read more

Journalists can now identify Spanish-language deepfake audio using a new tool called VerificAudio launched Tuesday, according to an announcement from Prisa Media. “In a new disinformation ecosystem where cloned voices are now almost imperceptible and in 2024 50% of the population will vote, today we are launching an application project from #IA to #audio: VerificAudio, a tool to detect Audio deepfakes,” Ana Ormaechea, Prisa Radio’s chief digital officer tweeted. En un nuevo ecosistema de desinformación donde las voces clonadas son ya casi imperceptibles y en 2024 vota el 50% de la población ..read more

The British royals — they’re just like you and me! They get nervous before a big speech, they occasionally fall for quacks, and they’re not great at Photoshop. At least that’s the latest in a series of wouldyabelieveit claims that have pushed conspiracy talk squarely into the online mainstream. Let’s recap — though Ellie Hall’s piece Thursday did a far better job of that than I will. Princess Catherine — a.k.a. Kate Middleton, future Queen of England, symbol of the royal family’s future — was last verifiably seen in public in December. Since then, she has spent time several weeks hospital ..read more

Five of the 45 finalists in this year’s Pulitzer Prizes for journalism disclosed using AI in the process of researching, reporting, or telling their submissions, according to Pulitzer Prize administrator Marjorie Miller. It’s the first time the awards, which received around 1,200 submissions this year, required entrants to disclose AI usage. The Pulitzer Board only added this requirement to the journalism category. (The list of finalists is not yet public. It will be announced, along with the winners, on May 8, 2024.) Miller, who sits on the 18-person Pulitzer board, said the board started dis ..read more

The Online News Association will end some programming, including its long-running Student Newsroom and Innovation Lab, for financial reasons. For 20 years, the newsroom was “a signature component of ONA’s annual conference” that brought together hand-picked student journalists and experienced mentors to create coverage and experiment with digital journalism tools. The newsroom had been sponsored by the Knight Foundation, Microsoft’s Democracy Forward, TEGNA Foundation, and Canva in the past. “ONA is not immune to the challenges facing journalism. The industry continues to contract, and th ..read more

Ed. note: When I realized I was in no fewer than four separate group chats discussing Kate Middleton’s almost complete disappearance from the public eye, I turned to Ellie Hall to help me figure things out. Ellie, who’s currently a freelance journalist, was senior reporter and official royal correspondent for BuzzFeed News from 2013 until the newsroom shut down in April 2023. The first part of this story is a Q&A, where I spoke with Ellie about royal reporting, social media, Kensington Palace PR strategy, and how a digitally connected world has made the official press apparatus of the roy ..read more