Joshua Benton | Nieman Journalism Lab

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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February 8, 2023

Is the future about one all-knowing AI or many? The new app Poe gets you ready to chat with them all

Poe lets you use ChatGPT alongside a new rival named Claude — which seems to work better in important ways.

February 7, 2023

Google now wants to answer your questions without links and with AI. Where does that leave publishers?

A dozen years ago, Eric Schmidt forecast the AI pivot that’s playing out this week. And the questions it prompts — around the link economy, fair use, and aggregation — are more real than ever.

January 30, 2023

This report sees journalistic “bias” less as partisanship and more as relying on too-comfortable habits

“The first step is to accept that broad impartiality brings a stronger obligation to look.”

January 23, 2023

Twitter will soon let news outlets lay visual claim to their staffers’ accounts. Should they?

Your employer’s logo might soon be attached to every tweet you make — for better or for worse.

January 23, 2023

Where did all the new podcasts go?

The number of new podcasts launched fell by nearly 80% between 2020 and 2022 — and seems to keep dropping. Has podcasting moved from gold rush to mature market?

January 10, 2023

Good news: Misinformation isn’t as powerful as feared! Bad news: Neither is information.

To people who publish facts, it’s appealing to think of them as powerful. But people’s belief systems go a lot deeper than facts.

November 15, 2022

What’s the best way to deal with a flood of misinformation? Maybe it’s time for some deliberate ignorance

“It is only by ignoring the torrent of low-quality information that people can focus on applying critical search skills to the remaining now-manageable pool of potentially relevant information.”

October 31, 2022

LION’s Local Journalism Awards show the potential of the next generation of nonprofit news outlets

The recent boom of local nonprofit news organizations is proving their model can serve smaller markets, too.

October 24, 2022

This political era has nearly killed off newspaper endorsements for president

In 2016, U.S. newspapers were nearly unanimous in rejecting Donald Trump. Blowback from his supporters didn’t change their opinions — it only made them keep quiet about it.

October 11, 2022

Do news organizations call racist things racist now? It’s still a mixed bag

Saying Democrats want to give African Americans money as thanks for all the crimes they’ve committed against white people — is that racist? Or still just “racially charged”?

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