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Stories of interest
C-SPAN Is Embedding Multimedia Journalists in Election Battlegrounds
By Ken Klein
PetaPixel
C-SPAN likes the adjective “unfiltered.” Before Trump II was sworn in, C-SPAN refreshed its logo with the tagline “Democracy Unfiltered.”
As 2026 midterm elections heat up, C-SPAN is sending young multimedia journalists to battleground states to shoot and share unfiltered video.
“The initiative addresses a growing gap in local political journalism… many voters and communities across the country remain without consistent, on-the-ground video coverage of their competitive House, Senate, and governor races,” C-SPAN said on June 29.
“Many local newsrooms lack staffing with video resources to cover campaigns events, limiting voters’ ability to see and hear candidates directly. C-SPAN is stepping in to help fill that gap.”
C-SPAN plans to air this unfiltered video nationally across its platforms and share it at no cost to local, nonprofit, and independent media outlets.
Read more here. Shared by Doug Pizac.
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New York resident sues ICE on free speech grounds over critical email sent to its former head
By Patrick Whittle
The Associated Press
An upstate New York resident sued U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement for sending federal officers to his house with a warning over an email he sent to the agency’s one-time head.
David Streever, who is a U.S. citizen, was on a trip to Finland when two officers showed up to his Rochester home in June and presented his wife with a warning notice informing him that the email he sent months earlier was considered a threat, his attorneys said. Streever sent the email in January to Todd Lyons, then the acting director of ICE, after an immigration officer fatally shot Minneapolis resident Renee Good during an anti-ICE demonstration.
In the email, Streever called Lyons “a monstrous human being” who “will never know peace.” He said the agency violated his First Amendment rights in a lawsuit filed Monday in Washington D.C.
Streever is one of at least two residents of upstate New York who was served with a federal warning in June in the wake of criticizing ICE online. The Philadelphia-based Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression is representing Streever, and said it filed the lawsuit because Streever’s right to free expression was violated.
Read more here. Shared by Doug Pizac.
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A message about the importance of the free press
By Poynter
Eugene C. Patterson fought Nazis as a tank platoon leader in World War II. He fought for civil rights as a crusading editor at The Atlanta Constitution in the 1960s. He fought for high standards and ethical journalism in all his roles as a newspaper editor, including as CEO and chairman of the St. Petersburg Times and chairman of its owner, the Poynter Institute, from 1978-88.
He wrote these words, which in 1984 were published in a book by the Society for Professional Journalists. We offer them today as we celebrate America’s 250th birthday and the values on which it the country was founded.
Read more here. Shared by Doug Pizac.
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Wikipedia Is Battling for the Soul of the Internet
By Tiffany Hsu
The New York Times
Wikipedia is in peril.
In a world where trust in truth is crumbling, the grande dame of collective online fact-gathering is under threat on every front. The MAGA right, with Elon Musk at the fore, is slinging accusations of political bias and antisemitism and has even questioned the site’s nonprofit status. Artificial intelligence is raiding the encyclopedia’s resources and draining attention. Repressive governments have hauled its volunteer editors into penal colonies.
In Wikipedia’s 25-year history, it has never had to fight this hard.
The organization that supports the site, the Wikimedia Foundation, is increasing its lobbying budget and advertising in Times Square. It is charging companies like Google and Meta that gobble up the encyclopedia’s 65 million articles, and throttling access for certain scrapers. And it is expanding its human rights team to better protect volunteers against rising harassment, surveillance and retaliation.
For an organization that holds neutrality as a cardinal rule, it is a lot of conflict, requiring Wikimedia to go on the offensive — diplomatically, of course.
Read more here. Shared by Doug Pizac.
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Steve Kroft on reporting for Stars and Stripes in Vietnam
By Steve Kroft
CBS News
In this web exclusive, former "60 Minutes" correspondent Steve Kroft talks with CBS News national security correspondent David Martin about his start in journalism as a reporter for Stars and Stripes, the Pentagon's newspaper for members of the military, and how his early days covering the war in Vietnam influenced his career at CBS.
Watch video here. Shared by Doug Pizac.
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The battle over Stars and Stripes
By CBS News
Stars and Stripes, the newspaper for the American military, is part of the Department of Defense, but has long taken pride in its editorial independence. Under the Trump administration, however, the Pentagon's chief spokesman has vowed to rid the paper of "woke distractions," and the deputy secretary of defense has imposed restrictions on what it can publish (including banning news stories by the Associated Press). CBS News national defense correspondent David Martin reports on fears that a source of independent news for the military could be turned into what the paper's former ombudsman (who was fired after writing a column critical of Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth) calls "a public affairs propaganda machine."
Watch video here. Shared by Doug Pizac.
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Conservative fight against license renewals for ABC stations heats up
By Jeremy Barr
The Guardian
A group of prominent conservative organizations has petitioned the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to deny license renewal requests from the eight local television stations owned and operated by ABC, accusing the network of political, racial and sexual bias and supporting the Chinese communist party.
The petitions come after the commission, led by Trump appointee Brendan Carr, took the nearly unprecedented step of requiring the network, a frequent recipient of attacks from Donald Trump, to apply several years early to maintain its ability to broadcast in markets around the country.
While Carr has said the early license renewal process stems from an FCC investigation into ABC’s diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) efforts, petitioners are free to include a variety of grievances against the network and concerns about whether ABC is operating in the public interest.
The petitions – part of an open process that allows anyone to argue that ABC is not fit to hold publicly owned television licenses – came from groups like the Center for American Rights, which has played a significant role during Carr’s tenure atop the FCC agency as an initiator of complaints against major broadcast television networks.
Read more here. Shared by Dennis Conrad, Doug Pizac.
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Who Counts?
By Jem Bartholomew
Columbia Journalism Review
At 12:37pm EST on June 25, Jodie Ginsberg, the chief executive of the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), announced that the organization was reexamining the names in its database of journalists killed in the Israel-Gaza war. “CPJ condemns in no uncertain terms the misrepresentation of combatants as journalists or media workers—or the misuse of ‘Press’ insignia. Such actions endanger every single individual journalist legitimately trying to report,” she said in a statement. “We are conducting a full review of the names on our lists to confirm that no one who was actively engaged in combat is listed in our data.” Ginsberg also pointed out that “in-person verification by researchers from outside Gaza has been impossible” because, as Gerry Shih wrote for CJR’s recent Access Issue, since the war began, Israel has barred international correspondents and press advocates from reporting independently in the territory.
Four hours later, at 4:47pm, Jacob Weisberg—the chair of CPJ’s board of directors and a cofounder of Pushkin Industries—emailed the board with an update on a parallel but distinct plan to reconsider who counts as a member of the press. He wrote, according to emails I have reviewed, that he’d established a “special task force to reexamine the question of ‘Who is a Journalist?’” He told board members: “This inquiry is not limited to Gaza, and will address questions about our protection of journalists affiliated with the non-military wings of identified terrorist organizations as well as journalists engaged in official propaganda or disinformation.” He said that nine people had already agreed to work on the task force, and that they would share their recommendation with the board at the next scheduled meeting, in October. (In response to interview requests, Weisberg referred to public statements and said that he was “not going to comment on the board’s internal discussions or processes.”)
The pair of announcements, one public and the other intended to be private, quickly set off a widespread debate about whether one of the world’s most influential press advocacy groups was caving to political pressure.
Read more here. Shared by Doug Pizac.
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Local newspapers’ AI lawsuit is a righteous battle
By Brian Dudley
The Seattle Times
It’s hard to keep track of everyone suing AI companies for stealing their work.
Those gleaming AI platforms, the costliest computer systems ever built, are peddling more stolen goods than a seedy pawnshop.
The new lawsuit was filed by 35 publishers operating around 400 small, community newspapers. It joins a train of related cases, including The New York Times’, before the same federal judge in New York.
A key issue is whether AI training was “fair use” of newspaper content.
Read more here. Shared by Doug Pizac.
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Beyond news deserts: How Village Media is proving local journalism can still grow
By Editor and Publisher
For years, the conversation around local news has centered on decline. News deserts continue to expand, newsroom staffs shrink, and many publishers wonder whether sustainable growth is still possible. But Village Media has spent more than a decade building a very different story. What began with a single digital-first community news site has grown into a network of profitable local operations by focusing on audience reach, deep community engagement and diversified advertising revenue.
Founder and CEO Jeff Elgie said the company’s beginnings were rooted in recognizing where audiences had already migrated. After acquiring SaultToday.com, he quickly realized “it was very clear that this was where the audience was going,” adding that “there had to be a business model that would work long-term.”
That early success caught the attention of Richard Gingras, former Google executive and now Village Media’s board chair. Gingras recalled first learning about the company when Elgie testified before a Canadian parliamentary committee. “He said that he was in five markets and he was profitable,” Gingras said. “My eyes lit up.” Having worked with publishers around the world, Gingras said Village Media stood out because it wasn’t trying to recreate yesterday’s newspaper business. Instead, “Jeff was looking at how the market changed,” and the company continues “looking at the environment, how people are behaving, how people are interacting with sources of information, and how do we respond to that.”
Read more here. Shared by Doug Pizac.
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