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The former host of S-Town has a new subject to investigate: Journalism
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Articles by Joshua Benton

Joshua Benton founded Nieman Lab in 2008 and served as its director until 2020; he is now the Lab’s senior writer. Before spending a year at Harvard as a 2008 Nieman Fellow, he spent a decade in newspapers, mostly at The Dallas Morning News. His reports on cheating on standardized tests in the Texas public schools led to the permanent shutdown of a school district and won the Philip Meyer Journalism Award from Investigative Reporters and Editors. He has reported from a dozen foreign countries, been a Pew Fellow in International Journalism, and three times been a finalist for the Livingston Award for International Reporting. Before Dallas, he was a reporter and occasional rock critic for The Toledo Blade. He wrote his first HTML in January 1994.
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It has a much better chance of success than CNN+ ever did. But it still has to convince people its work is distinctive enough to break out the credit card.
Partisanship, conspiratorial thinking, and IRL connections make for a potent mix — on both the left and the right.
From defunding NPR and PBS to kicking reporters out of the White House, it’s an array of conservative priorities and Trumpian retreads.
After finding success — and a Pulitzer Prize — in Santa Cruz, Lookout aims to replicate its model in Oregon. “All of these playbooks are at least partially written. You sometimes hear people say, ‘Nobody’s figured it out yet.’ But this is all about execution.”
“Elections, it seems, amplify the influence of partisanship on the perception of truth.”
Google — which planned to block third-party cookies in 2022, then 2023, then 2024, then 2025 — now says it won’t block them after all. A big win for adtech, but what about publishers?
The New York Times and the Washington Post compete with meme accounts for the chance to be first with a big headline.