A federal judge extended a block on enforcement Monday of an Ohio law that would require children under 16 to get parental consent to use social media apps as a legal challenge proceeds. more

February 13, 2024 - The CEO of ChatGPT-maker OpenAI said Tuesday that the dangers that keep him awake at night regarding artificial intelligence are the “very subtle societal misalignments” that could make the systems wreak havoc. more

Facing issues of cost and staffing, newspapers are shutting down their carrier force and shifting to all-postal delivery. more

The Deseret News launched a free monthly compendium of its best journalism in September. It’s been profitable since October. more

Press Forward has announced that Dale R. Anglin will serve as the inaugural director of the growing coalition of local and national funders committed to investing more than $500 million to strengthen communities, democracy and local news. more

February 12, 2024 - Uncertainty in the news industry, hype around AI, and hope for better business models and new revenue streams have all helped to drive news organizations to adopt AI technology, a new report from the Tow Center of Digital Journalism at Columbia University finds. more

Greedy financiers and monopolistic tech giants are only part of the problem for local journalism. There’s another, more beguiling threat to America’s press system and the civic literacy and engagement it supports. That’s the enormous wave of streaming video cresting over our lives, pressing us to screens for many of our waking hours. more

The Times Union (Albany, New York) has launched a new and expanded newsletter devoted to New York State government and politics under a name familiar to local readers: Capitol Confidential. more

Gannett | USA TODAY Network have announced the addition of Marci Moss as dedicated chief data privacy officer, as they further strengthen their data protection framework. Safeguarding the information entrusted to publications like Gannett by clients, partners, users and employees is more critical than ever, and Moss will be dedicated to prioritizing the importance of data protection, privacy and regulation. more

Wisconsin legislators are trying again to help save its local news industry. I hope residents badger them to get it done this year. The latest effort is a suite of bills to support news outlets, subscribers and early-career journalists. Rep. Jimmy Anderson modeled them on proposals in Congress and other states. It helps that his first job, in his teens, was delivering newspapers. more

When 2,529 people were offered a free subscription to their local newspapers, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and the Philadelphia Inquirer, only 44 accepted — less than 2 percent — according to an academic study set to be published this year in the American Journal of Political Science.  more

Russian leader Vladimir Putin said a prisoner exchange would probably lead to the release of Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, but he declined to give a time frame for the deal and said Gershkovich was caught committing espionage in Russia. more

Will Lester, a longtime reporter and editor for The Associated Press who played a critical role in the news organization’s 2000 election-night decision not to call the presidential race, died Wednesday, Feb. 7. He was 71. more

CNHI, parent company of The Daily Star in Oneonta, New York, announced Thursday, Feb. 8, that Valerie Secor has been promoted to publisher of the newspaper. more

February 8, 2024 - Google is joining Microsoft, Meta and Adobe in supporting a standard for labeling media that can describe who created an image or video, when and how it was created, and the credibility of its source, the company announced Feb. 8. more

Those who get news on social media name a variety of things that they like about it, including convenience, speed and the element of social interaction. But some social media news consumers also express concerns about news there being inaccurate, low quality and politically biased. more

February 8, 2024 - Drawing on 134 interviews with news workers at 35 news organizations in the United States, the United Kingdom and Germany and 36 international experts from industry, academia, technology and policy, this report examines the use of AI across editorial, commercial and technological domains with an eye to the structural implications of AI in news organizations for the public arena. more

A reporter for a weekly Kansas newspaper that police raided last year filed a federal lawsuit Tuesday against its hometown and local officials, saying the raid caused her physical and mental health problems. more

February 7, 2023 - Public notice legislation introduced so far in 2024 suggests state legislatures are growing increasingly comfortable having news websites serve as an alternative source of official notice. And that comfort seems to have cooled their ardor for moving notices from newspapers to government websites. more

February 6, 2024 - Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, said Tuesday it is ramping up its capability to detect and label images generated by artificial intelligence (AI) ahead of elections in the U.S. and abroad. more