Laura Hazard Owen

Suncoast Searchlight Board Of Directors Response To Recent Concerns Over Use Of AI - Suncoast Searchlight November 25, 2025 Recently, after Suncoast Searchlight reporters raised concerns about the use of AI in editing, the Board of Directors worked with staff and management to review how AI has been used...

the board has published an update that does not seem to address the reporters' actual concerns suncoastsearchlight.org/board-direct...

they also say, "We will have a public-facing policy governing the use of AI in research and writing before the end of the year."

it's harder than using a password bc you have to click out then go back!
i was wondering if they're trying to cut down on password sharing or?

so many news sites are making you log in with an email + a 6-digit code sent to your email and this is not less annoying?

"A lot of people have been hurt over this strike financially [and] emotionally. I want to make sure that has its due. But we’re going to have to work through that very quickly and get back to work."

by @sarahscire.com

Florida nonprofit news reporters ask board to investigate their editor’s AI use Suncoast Searchlight’s four reporters told the board their editor-in-chief was using AI editing tools and inserting hallucinations into drafts. The next day, one of the reporters was fired.

3 unusual things about this story:

*it's a nonprofit investigative news site we're talking about

*high-profile media execs/journalists on the board

*1 of the journalists who reported was fired less than a day after letter sent to board

by @andrewdeck.bsky.social

Florida nonprofit news reporters ask board to investigate their editor’s AI use Suncoast Searchlight’s four reporters told the board their editor-in-chief was using AI editing tools and inserting hallucinations into drafts. The next day, one of the reporters was fired.

An editor at Suncoast Searchlight, an investigative outlet, inserted AI hallucinated quotes into stories and after reporters sent a letter to the publication’s board, the editor fired one of the reporters.

www.niemanlab.org/2025/11/flor...

Florida nonprofit news reporters ask board to investigate their editor’s AI use Suncoast Searchlight’s four reporters told the board their editor-in-chief was using AI editing tools and inserting hallucinations into drafts. The next day, one of the reporters was fired.

"This was not the first hallucinated quote [the EIC] introduced into a reporter’s story draft." www.niemanlab.org/2025/11/flor...

Florida nonprofit news reporters ask board to investigate their editor’s AI use Suncoast Searchlight’s four reporters told the board their editor-in-chief was using AI editing tools and inserting hallucinations into drafts. The next day, one of the reporters was fired.

Suncoast Searchlight's four reporters told the board their editor-in-chief was inserting hallucinations into drafts. The next day, one of the reporters was fired.

by @andrewdeck.bsky.social

The cute yellow Old Farmer’s Almanac isn’t the one shutting down "There are TWO. This is not The OLD Farmer's Almanac that has been around since 1792. Everything is fine. Just chill guys"

wrote a psa

The cute yellow Old Farmer’s Almanac isn’t the one shutting down "There are TWO. This is not The OLD Farmer's Almanac that has been around since 1792. Everything is fine. Just chill guys"

you're welcome! www.niemanlab.org/2025/11/the-...

i guess the funny thing here is there are actually two 200-plus-year-old farmer's almanacs that publish secret-formula weather forecasts

apnews.com/article/farm...

The Old Farmer’s Almanac—234 Years and Still Going Strong Wondering if The Old Farmer’s Almanac is discontinued? It’s still publishing and growing, with trusted forecasts, tools, and seasonal guidance since 1792. Learn more and see what's new.

phew I was wrong! (and deletd post)
the OLD farmers almanac which i think is the one we're both talking about lives on: www.almanac.com/old-farmers-...

The Old Farmer’s Almanac—234 Years and Still Going Strong Wondering if The Old Farmer’s Almanac is discontinued? It’s still publishing and growing, with trusted forecasts, tools, and seasonal guidance since 1792. Learn more and see what's new.

WAIT I WAS WRONG
The *Old* Farmer's Almanac, the yellow one (that hung on a nail in my grandparents' bathroom) is NOT shutting down.

The Farmer's Almanac, which um...I have no feelings about really...is the one shutting down

phew

www.almanac.com/old-farmers-...

#104, Two times I didn't argue with the guy Two tales for ya.

a little story about tony's chocolonely illberightback.substack.com/p/104-two-ti...

Great article. Archiving the internet is such a difficult thing without much of a financial motive, too. But reliance on a single entity has blown up in our faces so many times in the past.

The Wayback Machine’s snapshots of news homepages plummet after a “breakdown” in archiving projects Between May and October 2025, homepage snapshots fell by 87% across 100 news publications.

NEW: @andrewdeck.bsky.social and I found the @waybackmachine.bsky.social has been archiving news homepages less frequently for the past 5 months.

The result: an 87% drop in homepage snapshots across 100 news outlets during a very newsy year. www.niemanlab.org/2025/10/the-...

The Wayback Machine’s snapshots of news homepages plummet after a “breakdown” in archiving projects Between May and October 2025, homepage snapshots fell by 87% across 100 news publications.

We looked into the frequency of article page archiving but weren't able to confirm it across our entire data set.

Homepages are important, though. "Crawling that initial page is critical to being able to archive and store the article page," Prof. Matthew Weber, who researches @archive.org, told us.

The Wayback Machine’s snapshots of news homepages plummet after a “breakdown” in archiving projects Between May and October 2025, homepage snapshots fell by 87% across 100 news publications.

The indexing delay we documented is > 5 months long. Graham said there are 'various operational reasons' for this delay, namely “resource allocation,” but otherwise declined to specify.

www.niemanlab.org/2025/10/the-...

Wayback Machine director Mark Graham told Nieman Lab that there was “a breakdown in some specific archiving projects in May that caused less archives to be created for some sites."

He said article pages aren't affected. He also said some of the missing snapshots will become available in time.

It's not just news sites; snapshots of government homepages are also affected

Nieman Lab analyzed the homepage URLs of 100 news sites (including the top 50 English language sites, top international news sites, and local news sites) and found an 87% decline in snapshots in the last 5 months of this year. Here are just a few examples

The Wayback Machine’s snapshots of news homepages plummet after a “breakdown” in archiving projects Between May and October 2025, homepage snapshots fell by 87% across 100 news publications.

For the past few months, the Wayback Machine has been showing many fewer snapshots of news publishers' homepages than it used to. Something happened on May 16, but what?

@hanaatameez.bsky.social and @andrewdeck.bsky.social investigate

www.niemanlab.org/2025/10/the-...

AI-generated news sites spout viral slop from forgotten URLs A new generation of content farms are harnessing AI to spin out clickbait — and they’re getting help from Google.

Me and my "forgotten URL" for my old Google Glass website are mentioned in this article.

I sold the domain a year or two ago. Made the mistake of not taking down the content first. New owners have turned it into an AI slop-fest.

www.niemanlab.org/2025/10/ai-g...

AI-generated news sites spout viral slop from forgotten URLs A new generation of content farms are harnessing AI to spin out clickbait — and they’re getting help from Google.

...and boy do they love the icelandic 36-hour workweek + chinese weapons www.niemanlab.org/2025/10/ai-g...

Bari Weiss’s CBS News and MSNBC both just laid out their new journalistic principles — and they’re fascinatingly different Lot of news coming out of the networks this morning: Bari Weiss, founder of the pro-Israel, anti-woke Free Press, has sold the four-year-old news site to CBS parent company Paramount for a reported $1...

bari weiss's cbs: "america"/"american," focus is "journalism" not the journalists themselves, doesn't dwell on standards, speed-focused, "uses all of the tools of the digital era"

newly independent msnbc: focus on journalists themselves, ethics, freedom of speech/1st Amendment, "the world," AI-wary

Trump wants to knock prescription drug ads off of your TV (and billions out of news companies’ pockets) While it has merit as a policy measure, it's the latest in a brutal series of administration actions that have hurt journalism.

do read the fine print

www.niemanlab.org/2025/09/trum...

From reckoning to retreat: Journalism’s DEI efforts are in decline Diversity-related newsroom jobs haven't totally disappeared — but they also haven't stuck.

. @hanaatameez.bsky.social puts data behind journalism's DEI vibe shift. From # of jobs posted, to products launched then shut down, to exhibiting at conferences — the racial reckoning is in retreat.

www.niemanlab.org/2025/09/from...

These public radio stations have built online audiences that’ll help them survive federal cuts They may have been born on the airwaves, but these public media stations compete on the web as well. Here's our first monthly ranking of the top 25 local public media websites in the United States.

As a former homepage and engagement editor for NPR, I found @joshuabenton.com's latest Nieman Lab piece from their rankings of media (first local newspapers, then nonprofit news sites) takes a look at the top 25 local public media sites very insightful about the challenges ahead.

Nonprofit news sites are built to generate impact — but these are also generating audiences In markets large and small, these nonprofit news organizations are achieving traffic numbers that many commercial outlets would envy. Here's our first monthly ranking of the top 25 nonprofit news site...

New by me —>

These are the 25 largest nonprofit news sites in the U.S. by web traffic.

Some you’d expect (like @propublica.org), others you might not (@ncronline.bsky.social, @sciencenews.bsky.social, @lapublicpress.bsky.social, @notusreports.bsky.social)

www.niemanlab.org/2025/07/nonp...

6AM City acquires Good Daily’s network of more than 350 AI-generated local newsletters 6AM City will continue to operate its "core" newsletters with human editors, but will treat Good Daily’s AI-generated newsletters as "seed markets."

"We're planting a seed in these cities."

www.niemanlab.org/2025/07/good...