Puzzles and games have always been central to the newspaper experience, but no media company has had as much success mining that obsession digitally as The New York Times. Games are so popular at the Times they’ve become one of four main pillars bundled to keep subscribers paying each month, along with The Athletic, Cooking and Wirecutter, their consumer review website. more

In the wake of the Revolutionary War and the birth of the United States, founding fathers like Thomas Jefferson and James Madison agreed that securing and growing a free press was essential to the country’s future. So in 1792, then-President George Washington signed into law a sweeping act that created the postal service and subsidized the delivery of newspapers. This lesson of government support of the news industry is extremely relevant today, as communities across the country continue to lose local news sources at an alarming rate. more

It’s easy to understand why some news organizations would make it difficult to cancel subscriptions. Churn is churn; even angry readers with a subscription still hand over their hard-earned money. But, there is a real price to pay for displaying such short-sighted contempt for your readers. more

When Pulitzer Prize-winner Steve Sack decided to retire last year after four decades at The Minneapolis Star Tribune, Opinion Editor Scott Gillespie decided to buck industry trends and announced he had an opinion position to fill: editorial cartoonist. The Star Tribune may be an outlier in an industry that no longer appears to value the work of editorial cartoonists. more

Advance Local's Alabama Media Group recently announced the end of the print editions for their three newspapers: The Birmingham News, The Huntsville Times and Mobile’s Press-Register. However, even though the presses have stopped, the newsrooms have grown in size. In this month's "News Media Today," E&P's Rob Tornoe takes a look at how an "all in" digital strategy seems to be working for Advance in Alabama and could be a model worth replicating. more

Working remotely in the COVID era has led to a host of unexpected benefits for journalists. But one of the major downsides has been spending less time with colleagues talking shop. Here are a handful of fun apps and tools that Rob Tornoe uses in his reporting. He hopes you find them useful, possibly even making an assignment or two that much easier. more

Teddy bears on the moon. A cat wearing VR headsets. Homer Simpson in “The Blair Witch Project.” It’s time for journalists to have a serious discussion about how good artificial intelligence has become at creating an image for just about any idea imaginable. more

For more than two-thirds of journalists in the U.S., Twitter is their go-to social media site for work. According to a recent Pew Research Center survey, journalists use Twitter more often than Facebook, and they use it more than Instagram, LinkedIn and YouTube combined. Thanks to Elon Musk’s chaotic takeover of the popular social media site, that relationship is suddenly in jeopardy. more

For the better part of 10 years, journalists have been told that paywalls are the future to funding a sustainable newsroom. Free is out, the funnel is in and pageviews matter a lot less than subscription conversions. What if there is another way? Well, journalists in Chicago are putting that to the test. more

Many local reporters across the country have been forced to deal with an increasingly alarming trend in our media ecosystem — the nationalization of news led by outlets like Fox News, which often grab local stories, strip them of their context, and use them to push political agendas or conspiracy theories aimed at keeping their viewers angry. That anger trickles back down into communities, infects local politics and forces reporters at small news outlets already stretched thin to grapple with larger issues of misinformation and polarization. more

Should I tell my daughter why we’re getting a divorce? Is it bad that my wife doesn’t want to spend time with my mother? Should I remain friends with my ex-boyfriend if I still love him? When Washington Post readers have questions, they turn to Carolyn Hax. She has written the newspaper’s daily advice column for 25 years and is syndicated to over 100 newspapers nationwide. more

How reporters cover the first few hours and days of politically-charged events like the FBI's search of Mar-a-Lago is vital to properly informing local and national readers. The subjects will obviously be different. But as New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen suggests, reports should be mindful of the distinction between the properly political and the unduly politicized. more

While Twitter remains a powerful tool for journalism, especially when it comes to breaking news, the audience for our reporting on Twitter is shockingly small. According to a recent Pew Research Center survey, just 13% of adults in the U.S. regularly get their news from Twitter, trailing both Facebook and YouTube. So, if just a fraction of adults regularly use Twitter to consume news, who is actually using the platform? more

It’s always been tough to convince editors to try a new comic strip, especially when it means killing a feature some segment of the audience has grown to love. That tension has only gotten worse in recent years, as cost-cutting deepened the risk-averse approach most newspapers take with their comics section. Unfortunately, like the newspapers they serve, syndicates feel the impact of journalism's digital transformation from printed pages to pixels on a screen. more

In an era of rampant misinformation, journalists tend to focus on the bad players, like social media companies that care more about their bottom line than the wrong information that washes over their platforms. But we tend to do a lousy job at focusing on our own biases, which can unintentionally lead us to misrepresent facts, provide incorrect or incomplete reporting, and create the perception of misinformation we’re all trying so hard to combat. more

In May, Insider won a Pulitzer Prize, joining a small group of digital-only news organizations awarded journalism’s top prize. But like Politico back in 2012, the recognition came in an unlikely category for an online news organization — cartooning. more

One-time Pulitzer Prize finalist David Fitzsimmons has been drawing six cartoons a week about his sun-soaked corner of the country for the Arizona Daily Star since 1986. Avoiding the fate of many of his contemporaries, Fitzsimmons has managed to remain a vital part of his newspaper and the community for the past 35 years and only recently decided at the age of 66 to begin to slow things down and go part-time. more

One thing that seems certain is that COVID-19 will remain an important story that continues to evolve and touch just about everyone in the community you cover. So how should local reporters be framing and reporting on an ever-present virus most readers are sick of hearing about? more

One great thing about covering the media for a living is getting to nerd out with fellow journalists about interesting tools they use in their reporting. Here are a handful of apps and gadgets (along with one hack and a fun game) I hope can make some part of your job a tad bit easier. more

As crazy as it seems, we’re only a couple of months away from entering the third year of the coronavirus pandemic, and newsrooms across the country remain in flux amid the threat of variants and breakthrough cases. And hybrid models involving a mix of remote and office work appears to be the new reality for today's news publishers. A recent survey states only 9% of news organizations plan to force all their employees to return to the office as they did pre-pandemic. more