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Stories of interest
CNN, MS NOW, Politico say they’ve notified Trump they’re suing over denied White House access
By JOCELYN NOVECK
The Associated Press
NEW YORK (AP) — CNN, MS NOW and Politico said Monday they’ve notified President Donald Trump’s administration that they’re filing a lawsuit over being denied White House access.
The three outlets made the announcement in a joint statement posted on X, two days after their reporters were blocked from the White House and prevented from doing their jobs. The reporters’ entry badges were disabled on Saturday, a day after Trump had suddenly announced he was barring the outlets because of reporting he found to be “fake news.”
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment early Monday.
The actions were a clear escalation of Trump’s long-running efforts — in the courts and through administrative action — to restrict news coverage by journalists he finds objectionable, and were the latest test of First Amendment protections in the United States.
White House reporters from the two cable networks — Betsy Klein of CNN and Akayla Gardner of MS NOW — went live to report they’d been turned away, their press badges deactivated, when arriving for their jobs at the White House. Soon after, Politico said its White House reporter Cheyenne Haslett was also denied entry and had her badge confiscated.
“This morning, we notified the government that we are filing a lawsuit today to protect our First Amendment rights and defend the principle that the government does not decide what the press reports or publishes,” the outlets said in a joint statement posted early Monday on X. “Without notice or process, the White House revoked our journalists’ credentials because it objected to our reporting. Left unchallenged, this threatens press freedom and the public’s right to independent journalism free from government interference.”
Read more here. Shared by Adolphe Bernotas, Richard Chady.
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Jury convicts woman of negligent homicide in death of reporter covering Super Bowl in New Orleans
By JACK BROOK
The Associated Press
NEW ORLEANS (AP) — A Louisiana jury convicted a woman of negligent homicide on Thursday in the death of a Telemundo television reporter who had been visiting New Orleans to cover the Super Bowl, according to the Jefferson Parish district attorney’s office.
Danette Colbert, 49, was also convicted of racketeering, as was her accomplice, 35-year-old Rickey White, according to Paul Purpura, a spokesperson for the district attorney’s office. Racketeering carries up to a 50-year sentence in Louisiana.
The two had spent years carrying out a criminal enterprise that drew in victims in the city’s historic French Quarter with the promise of sex, then used drugs to knock them out and drain their bank accounts using stolen cards and phones, according to prosecutors.
Colbert was the last person seen leaving the room of Adan Manzano, a 27-year-old reporter and anchor for Telemundo based in Kansas City, Missouri, who was found dead in his hotel room Feb. 5 in the New Orleans suburb of Kenner days before the Super Bowl last year.
Read more here. Shared by Richard Chady.
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Meet the photographer who lives at the top of Mount Fuji
By Ayaka McGill
The Associated Press
A Japanese photographer lives in a Shinto shrine at the top of the country’s most famous mountain. Megumi Ueda calls Mount Fuji home during the climbing seasons and updates the world on sunrises, sunsets and weather conditions above the clouds on her social media posts.
Watch video here. Shared by Doug Pizac.
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Lawsuit says Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceXAI and Google made illegal agreement on AI slowdown
By Kaitlyn Huamani
The Associated Press
A new lawsuit claims Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceXAI and Google made an illegal deal to slow the pace of their respective AI development.
The lawsuit, which was filed Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, argues that the leading AI companies violated antitrust laws when they agreed to coordinate slowdown efforts, and that doing so would reduce the value consumers get for paid AI subscriptions.
The coordination largely took place on Sept. 12, the lawsuit argues, when Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay urging for industrywide cooperation on decelerating advancements in favor of enhanced safety measures. That same day, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, SpaceXAI CEO Elon Musk and Google DeepMind’s co-founder and chair Demis Hassabis each publicly responded to Amodei’s proposals in agreement.
But the lawsuit also alleges that the coordination began to take shape months earlier. It points to a statement from July 2026 that high-ranking employees from several of the leading AI labs signed that acknowledged the “intense competitive pressure not to unilaterally slow” development. That statement called on the government to support a global effort to slow automated AI development.
Read more here. Shared by Doug Pizac.
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Michelle - A tribute.
Dave Barry - My wife, Michelle Kaufman, is a sportswriter. When she tells people what she does for a living, they almost always tell her how much fun it must be.
“That must be so much fun!” they say. “You get to go to all the games!”
Which is true! She has gone to SO many games. She covered 14 Olympics (seven summer, seven winter) and nine World Cups (seven men’s, two women’s). She has covered Super Bowls, World Series, NBA finals, tennis majors, auto racing, golf and more, much more, thousands of matches and games, often with front-row seats. So that has to be fun, right?
Not really! Don’t get me wrong: Sportswriting is an exciting job. But “fun” is not the word I would use. Consider this little slice of Michelle’s career:
It’s April 1, 2023, and she’s in Houston’s NRG Stadium to cover the Final Four in the NCAA men’s college basketball tournament. There are 75,000 people (me among them) packing the stands, and it’s very loud, fans yelling, bands playing, cheerleaders cheering. Michelle is in the middle of all the noise, sitting courtside, so close to the game that at one point she has to swat away an errant basketball to keep it from hitting her laptop computer.
On the court, Florida Atlantic University is playing San Diego State in the first semifinal game. The Miami Herald editors want Michelle’s story “at the buzzer” -- immediately after the game ends.
Read more here. Shared by Michael Rubin.
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After losing their Voice of America jobs, journalists pitch their second acts
By Scott Nover
The Washington Post
Kasim Kashgar is a prominent Uyghur dissident, an international journalist, a soon-to-be memoirist. But this summer, sitting in a classroom at American University in Washington, D.C., he could have been easily mistaken for an everyday business student.
Kashgar was by all measures a success in China: As a university student he ranked highly in national English speaking competitions and went on to start a language training school in the city of Ürümqi in northwest China. But he fled amid the country’s deadly mass detentions of the Uyghurs — a Muslim ethnic minority — which many observers have called a genocide.
He told his wife on a May 2017 flight out of the country with their toddler that they wouldn’t be returning home.
Once in the United States, he applied for political asylum — a lengthy process — and after receiving his work permit, delivered pizzas for Domino’s in Northern Virginia and drove for Lyft.
In late 2018, Kashgar was hired by Voice of America as its first and only Uyghur reporter, starting later in May 2019. He wrote under a pen name, Asim Kashgarian, for fear of China’s retribution against him and his family. He received political asylum in late 2022 and decided early the next year to begin publishing under his real name.
At VOA, he reported on China’s ethnic minorities — mostly the plight of the Uyghurs, but also Mongolians and Tibetans — and published in English, Mandarin Chinese and the Uyghur language. He knew that by publishing at VOA, the Chinese authorities would “pay attention.”
But that same government that granted him asylum later fired him. In March 2025, Kashgar and more than 1,000 colleagues — including fellow asylum holders — were fired or prevented from working by the Trump administration.
Kashgar is one of roughly 35 journalists in the first cohort of the Freedom Media Innovation Lab, a program launched this year by American University’s Kogod School of Business to help former VOA staffers build sustainable media ventures of their own.
Read more here. Shared by Doug Pizac.
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California Cracks Down on Influencers’ Undisclosed Political Ads
By Ken Bensinger
The New York Times
TEGov. Gavin Newsom of California signed legislation on Saturday that will penalize social media influencers who do not properly disclose paid political content posted on the internet.
The state has required the disclosures for paid posts about state- and local-level campaigns since 2023, but until now, content creators couldn’t be fined or prosecuted if they failed to comply. Now, California campaign finance regulators are empowered to impose fines on influencers of up to $5,000 for each violation or to refer those violations to law enforcement as potential misdemeanors.
Politicians and advocacy groups are increasingly turning to influencers as a way to reach younger, more online audiences and, in some cases, are paying them for their support. But unlike traditional campaign advertising on television or billboards, there are no federal requirements to disclose payments for social media posts.
Texas also mandates the disclosure of paid political content online, and lawmakers in Congress as well as in other states, including New York, are considering similar regulations. The California law was one of 13 bills focused on social media and elections that Mr. Newsom, a Democrat, signed as a package on Saturday.XT
Read more here. Shared by Doug Pizac.
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Assad regime planned US journalist's kidnap for weeks, BBC finds
By Josh Baker and Sara Obeidat
BBC
US journalist Austin Tice, who disappeared in Syria in 2012, was kidnapped in a calculated operation which was more than a month in the planning, the BBC can reveal.
A member of the group which detained Tice has also claimed the abduction was sanctioned by Syria's leader at the time, President Bashar al-Assad.
Tice was seen getting into a car with a driver he knew and trusted. For years, many assumed they had stumbled upon a government checkpoint, and that the abduction of the journalist had been opportunistic.
But we have uncovered evidence that, in fact, his disappearance was anything but chance.
In a new BBC podcast: Where is Austin Tice? Series 3 of I'm Not A Monster Presents, we reveal the findings of a years-long investigation into what happened to Tice, who had been reporting on Syria's civil war at the time.
His case has been followed closely by international media and cited by successive US presidents.
Read more here. Shared by Doug Pizac.
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Images of Trump kissing Natalie Harp went viral. They’re AI-generated fakes.
By Scott Nover and Miriam Waldvogel
The Washington Post
Images purporting to show President Donald Trump kissing White House aide Natalie Harp on a golf course ricocheted about social media this week, amassing millions of views across online platforms.
They were fakes — circulated with no clear origin and bearing telltale visual signs such as strangely distorted human hands — that were whipped up using generative artificial intelligence tools, according to a Washington Post analysis using AI detection tools from ChatGPT-maker OpenAI and Google. (The Washington Post has a content partnership with OpenAI.)
Two versions of the smooching scene — one clear and one blurry — first surfaced online Monday, according to reverse-image searches conducted by The Post on Google and the website TinEye.
Read more here. Shared by Doug Pizac.
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This AI agent has written thousands of Alaska news articles. We interviewed it.
By Nathaniel Herz
Anchorage Press
In the past 24 hours, the website AlaskaNews.com has featured stories on city spending on housing for people experiencing homelessness in the Western Alaska hub town of Bethel; on limits on crab harvests in the Bering Sea; and on a proposed underwater data center off the Kenai Peninsula.
Since its inception earlier this year, Alaska News says it’s published more than 4,500 stories.
But the site has no flesh-and-blood reporters. Overseen by a human editor, Cale Green, Alaska News instead employs a team of AI agents that scoop up public documents, videos and announcements and uses them as a basis for stories.
The project is the brainchild of five Alaskans.
Read more here. Shared by Doug Pizac.
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Good news: Half consume local news daily. Bad news: Only 14% will pay for it.
By Mike Blinder
Editor and Publisher
For the third consecutive year, researchers at Northwestern University's Medill School have surveyed how people in one of America's most diverse media markets consume local news. The result is a growing body of research that many news leaders now view as a bellwether for national trends. This year's findings paint a complicated picture: Americans continue to value local journalism, but convincing them to financially support it remains one of the industry's greatest challenges.
One of the survey's most encouraging findings is that local news continues to play a meaningful role in people's lives. More than half of respondents said they consume local news every day, while 85% engage with it at least weekly. Yet those encouraging audience numbers stand in stark contrast to consumers' willingness to financially support local journalism.
Read more here. Shared by Doug Pizac.
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Atlanta Journal-Constitution Eliminates 5 Executive Roles in Leadership Shake-Up
By A.J. Katz
The Wrap
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution is eliminating five senior executive roles in what its publisher called the “first step” toward a streamlined operating model for 2027.
The Cox-owned publication is parting ways with Chief Financial and Strategy Officer Sharmi Gandhi, Chief Marketing Officer Amie Green, Chief Operating Officer Erin Malone, Head of Content Development and Production Samantha Stamler and Head of People Lindsey Robbins, according to an internal memo obtained by TheWrap.
Read more here. Shared by Doug Pizac.
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Pete Hegseth Rages at WaPo Over Report That More U.S. Troops Died in Iran War Than Pentagon Disclosed: ‘DISGUSTING and FAKE’
By Kathryn Wilkens
Mediaite
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth lashed out at The Washington Post on Friday over its report that more U.S. service members have died in the Middle East since the Iran war began than the Pentagon has publicly disclosed, blasting the story as “DISGUSTING and FAKE.”
Just hours earlier, the Post’s Noah Robertson, Tara Copp, Warren P. Strobel and Alex Horton, citing six “officials familiar with the Defense Department’s internal casualty accounting data,” reported: Five of the officials said there have been at least 22 military fatalities — four more than what appears in the Pentagon’s public database, known as the Defense Casualty Analysis System, or DCAS.
“This is DISGUSTING and FAKE. A complete LIE,” wrote Hegseth on X. “Shame on the Washington Post — they’re worse than Iranian state media.”
Read more here. Shared by Doug Pizac.
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Five independent climate journalists are teaming up with a “pop-up newsroom”
By Neel Dhanesha
Nieman Lab
Going independent usually means losing the collaboration that comes from working in a newsroom. Journalists operating on their own don’t have access to editors or colleagues to work through stories, unless they decide to hire some on their own. But a new team-up from five climate journalists aims to pave a different path.
“Betting the House” is a “pop-up newsroom” that consists of Emily Atkin, of the climate newsletter HEATED; Rachel Ramirez, a former CNN climate reporter who now writes a newsletter called The Confluence; Chase Cain, formerly of NBC and now the creator of the YouTube channel Chase What Matters; Ben Tracy, previously a climate reporter and CBS and now a video producer at Climate Central; and Tracy Wholf, who now runs the company WereWHOLF Media after being laid off from her job as coordinating producer of CBS’s climate team.
The project received support to cover reporting costs from Covering Climate Now, an organization founded by Columbia Journalism Review and The Nation in association with The Guardian and WNYC in 2019 to support climate journalism.
Read more here. Shared by Doug Pizac.
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