White House received more than 7,400 “new media” requests within 24 hours →

Nieman Storyboard is the Nieman Foundation’s online publication “showcasing exceptional narrative journalism and nonfiction storytelling.” (Welcome to Nieman, Mark!)

The cover shot “seems to purposefully reference Kubrick’s The Shining.”

“It’s a striking pair of incidents — not because The Onion is trying to pull a fast one on its workers or readers, but because it illustrates just how deeply AI content has already permeated the media ecosystem, working its way into the efforts even of creatives explicitly trying to avoid it.”

“Among the 52 publishers on the list are Slow Boring by Vox co-founder Matthew Yglesias, Mehdi Hasan’s Zeteo, The Good in Us by Donald Trump’s niece Mary Trump and Tipping Point Prophecy Update, a Christian newsletter about the forthcoming end of the world.” —SS

“The new game will officially launch on Sunday, February 9 [during the Super Bowl] … Local fans in Philadelphia and Kansas City — plus Buffalo and Washington, D.C. — will be encouraged to play the game live during halftime with a quick ‘game break’ within the broadcast.” It’s a variation on Connections, which the Times said was the most-searched game on Google with “tens of millions of daily players” last year.

“Elizabeth Hansen Shapiro co-founded the trust in 2021 and has served as chief executive officer since its inception. The first papers acquired by the trust were a suite of weeklies in Colorado, but Shapiro has overseen the nonprofit’s expansion to two other states – Georgia and Maine – with the goal of helping preserve community journalism during a time of sharply declining advertising revenue.” Read more about the National Trust for Local News here.

The U.K. government announced an extra £32.6m for the BBC World Service in November. “But the BBC said that despite this ‘welcome uplift,’ previous licence-fee freezes, global inflation ‘and the need for ongoing digital and technological upkeep have meant savings are necessary.'”

“Shares in Trump Media & Technology Group, owner of Trump’s Truth Social platform, jumped 15% during pre-market trading after it announced the launch of Truth.Fi, a financial technology brand Truth.Fi, in a brief statement.” —SS

“These changes mean that there will be a reduction in the number of bureau chiefs who were part of the Life & Work coverage area,” Wall Street Journal editor in chief Emma Tucker wrote on Tuesday. “I acknowledge this is a difficult time for those who are directly affected.”

“If I knew then that influencer reach is as random and erratic as legacy news org social reach … I’d form this as more of an experiment and diversify both influencer and topic area differently.” —SS

“When we launched Bookshop.org, the vision was to support local bookstores in their battle against Amazon and other online retailers,” Andy Hunter, founder and CEO of Bookshop.org, said in an announcement. “This launch represents our commitment to keeping bookstores afloat.”

The “three-year, general operating, and flexible support grants” will go to 15 news organizations.

“Like many Americans, I spent yesterday trying to process the new reality we’ve suddenly found ourselves in. One where I am aware that something is happening, but largely unable to actually figure out the specifics. And throughout the day a loop emerged. I would see a claim on a social platform like X or Bluesky, like SNAP benefits being affected by the freeze (it seems like they wouldn’t have been), try to verify it, and only get days-old Newsweek stories and a bunch of aggregation from Indian newspapers that have figured out how to game American search traffic like The Hindustan Times and The Times Of India.”

“But just because the winds have changed does not mean we can now take freedom of the press for granted. In politics and business, it is easy to stand for free speech for your own side, but once given the power to censor, it is tempting to use it. President Trump campaigned on supporting free speech but has filed lawsuits against news outlets whose election coverage he didn’t like, raising questions about how consistent that support will be now that he’s in office.”

“Amid the hype, researchers from the cloud security firm Wiz published findings on Wednesday that show that DeepSeek left one of its critical databases exposed on the internet, leaking system logs, user prompt submissions, and even users’ API authentication tokens—totaling more than 1 million records—to anyone who came across the database.”