The stakes could not be higher with more than 36,000 dead, 83,000 wounded, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, and nearly two million Palestinians displaced within the 41-kilometer-long strip of land. In late March, a U.N. report said famine is imminent in northern Gaza, where 70% of the population is already suffering with “catastrophic” food shortages due to difficulties in aid deliveries getting past the border. Since then, the situation has gotten worse, according to World Health Organization officials, who say that children under five are going full days without eating anything. (The U.N. has called on the Israeli government, which has restricted the flow of humanitarian aid since Oct. 7, to allow more shipments into Gaza.) According to the WHO, Gaza’s healthcare system has been “systematically dismantled.” Only a few of Gaza’s 36 hospitals are partially functioning, making healthcare practically inaccessible. 

The BBC began airing Lifeline programs in 1994, when a new Kinyarwanda-language service began in response to the Rwandan genocide. Since then, Lifeline broadcasts were launched for the 2008 cyclone in Myanmar, the 2010 Haiti earthquakes, the 2013 Syrian refugee crisis in Lebanon, the 2014 Ebola epidemic in West Africa, and the 2017 drought in Somalia. Most recently, the BBC World Service launched Lifeline services in Sudan during the ongoing civil war and Ukraine following the war with Russia. 

Ibrahaim Abdelbaki is the editor of the BBC Lifeline Service in Gaza. He is based in London and manages the Gaza Lifeline teams in London, Cairo, a correspondent in Doha, and a small group of contributors in Gaza. Previously, he was the BBC Sudan Lifeline program editor. He spoke to Nieman Reports about the Lifeline Service’s operation during the Israel-Hamas war, navigating a conflict zone without safe areas, working around internet blackouts, and gathering firsthand accounts of Gazan civilians. This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity. 

Tell us about the kinds of information you are sharing with the people of Gaza.

Each episode includes a military presence update in Gaza. We also provide updates on humanitarian efforts underway, medical service availability, shelter availability, incoming aid being delivered to Gaza, and so on, with some tips that could help people be safer.

One essential part of our program is to give people tips on how to deal with wounds, how to deal with fractures, how to help people under debris when there is no way for the paramedics to reach the area so that they might tell others. So we are trying to help on multiple levels.

We also share firsthand accounts of the people of Gaza from all parts of the strip, telling their stories. For example, they are telling us about their repeated displacement, their fears, their grief about the loss of their beloved ones, their reactions to aid drops, their accounts about their return to their destroyed old houses under the Israeli bombardment. They talk us through everything they feel and face in Gaza during the war.

What are the main challenges you’ve encountered in setting up the BBC Gaza Lifeline service? 

The situation in Gaza is very dire, especially at the humanitarian level, with about 2 million people displaced and hundreds of thousands of people suffering from starvation, famine, and diseases. Most of the people in Gaza have been on the move since Oct. 7. 

We are trying hard to be aligned with our policies, deadlines, our ethics and at the same time, we’re trying to minimize our reaction as human beings. I can say honestly that I have been through so much coverage through the years since 2003. I’ve covered the Arab Spring and many wars, like in Iraq, and what is happening now in Gaza is absolutely unprecedented.

One of the most difficult aspects was assembling a team with the necessary experience and expertise to handle a Lifeline program. A Lifeline program is different from a current affairs program. It requires a specific format with distinctive content. But despite these challenges, we were able to assemble a new team in less than a week. This new team consists of some freelancers who previously worked in our last Lifeline [program] in Sudan, which lasted about six months. 

Most of the team knew the ins and outs of the Lifeline problem. But one major challenge is the frequent interruption of phone and internet connection. Initially, this was a significant hurdle. But over time, both journalists and the local population have adapted to the situation. For example, many journalists now utilize eSIM cards, which remain unaffected by such interruptions. Some individuals [in Gaza] residing very close to a different border can have an internet signal. 

How are people responding to your broadcasts? 

At the local level, people in Gaza can listen to our program on medium waves as well as on FM. Through our partners, Radio Bethlehem 2000 and Voice of All Lebanon, the FM range covers Gaza, West Bank, Western Jordan, and Lebanon. Given the circumstances in Gaza, there is no way to get stats. We measure the reach and impact through direct contact with civilians in Gaza, including journalists who gave us a positive reaction and response to our output. 

When it was announced that the BBC was launching a lifeline radio service to address the situation in Gaza, numerous international aid organizations, including the ICRC [International Committee of the Red Cross], OCHA, UNRWA, and others, reached out directly to explore opportunities of cooperating and collaborating. They recognize the importance in providing accurate, reliable and firsthand information to the people in Gaza, to help with their safety, which is our main objective. Since then, we have been in regular communication with [those agencies] and their workers, featuring their representatives on our program on a daily basis.

How are you assessing risk and safety when it comes to your team members who are on the ground in Gaza? 

Previously, we relied on our correspondent who was stationed there to provide us with military updates. [Before he was evacuated to Doha] his presence and his posting were constantly monitored, and subjected to ongoing risk assessments by our security experts. However, we also rely on journalists who have sought refuge in various shelters, living in schools and hospitals among other displaced people [for information]. We can confirm their real-time locations, and get information from doctors, paramedics, and civil workers. 

How long are you planning on running the Lifeline service in Gaza? 

I want this project to continue for as long as possible because the ongoing situation in Gaza will not end soon. Even though the war will stop or end, the humanitarian situation in Gaza will be dire for a very long time. 

Casa Xochiquetzal’s mission is to provide food, lodging, medical care, mental health support, and education for women who made their living in the sex trade. I had never heard of such a shelter before. It prompted me to think deeply about what happens to sex workers when they age. And I found that documenting the lives of these women incorporated many of the issues I care about: women’s rights, violence against women, vulnerable groups, and the invisibility of the elderly. 

First opened in 2006, Casa Xochiquetzal is a joint effort between the Mexico City municipal government, which provides the building and food, and an NGO created by prominent women intellectuals and artists that fundraises to provide the remaining necessities. It’s the only shelter of its kind in Latin America. Over the past 18 years, more than 250 women have received support, which often begins by getting them a government-issued ID – the starting point for claiming one’s legal rights and benefits. Some of the women who stay at Casa Xochiquetzal learn a new trade like making jewelry or bread, or start a small business like selling sweets and cigarettes in the streets near the shelter. Others remain in the sex trade.

I wanted to know more about the women at Casa Xochiquetzal, so I decided to return to the shelter on my own. I wanted to hear how these women survived such a difficult life in a place where corruption is rampant, in a society built around machismo, and where even if prostitution is tolerated, many of the women still face arrest. Most of these women are not here by choice but by circumstance. Some were abused at a young age and ran away from home. One woman told me she was abandoned by her family, and another was sold by her mother in exchange for a television. They all have tragic stories.

In this picture, Canela, the woman on the left, and Norma lean on each other during a moment of levity and peace. I wanted to capture their friendship. Canela, who has lived at Casa Xochiquetzal since the shelter opened its doors, became a sex worker at the age of 13 after losing her mother. She married an alcoholic, who died six years into their marriage. Norma was assaulted by a priest and ran away from home at the age of 14 to escape an abusive brother, working as a nanny at first. She had her first child two years later and eventually got her name tattooed on her arm so she could be identified if she died alone. The women met on the streets while they were working and became friends, looking out for one another — an unusual dynamic because most sex workers are competing with each other for business. When I took this photo, they both recalled how Canela used to take care of Norma after she’d been partying. 

Thanks to Casa Xochiquetzal, these women escaped a fate that they once feared: dying on the streets, alone and anonymous, only to be buried in an unmarked grave.  

I photographed the women of Casa Xochiquetzal over the course of a decade. In that time, I learned so much from them about standing up for yourself, tolerance, and resilience. My hope is to dispel some of the prejudices and highlight the discrimination these women face — and to make visible a group of vulnerable people who are often unseen by society at large.

This would add to what has been a devastating time for journalism jobs. Publishers cut nearly 2,700 positions in 2023, and the cuts continued into this year. Vice reporters posted that their website might go dark within the next day. Stories spread detailing confused editors telling their teams they weren’t sure what management might do next. Freelancers posted instructions for saving pages as PDFs. 

Graham’s work involves creating and keeping archives of websites. So, in the middle of our call, I brought up the rumors about VICE. 

“I wrote it down, I’m on it,” he said. After we hung up, I saw the news: VICE would stop publishing to its site. Later, Graham told me his team “initiated some specific one-off archiving efforts” on the VICE website and other channels like YouTube, to save their articles and videos. This is on top of an extensive amount of archiving that’s already been done and continues to be done as part of the Internet Archive’s operations. “The fact is we have been archiving VICE all along,” Graham wrote. A visitor to the Wayback Machine can browse through thousands of snapshots of the VICE website, going back years, seeing the site as it was at various moments in time. Had the owners of the site shut it down completely, the Internet Archive would be the best — but incomplete — record of years of digital journalism. 

The situation with VICE is increasingly common — not just the loss of journalists’ jobs, but the imperiling of archives at their source. When the short-lived news site The Messenger ran out of money this year, all of its story URLs redirected to a static page. The day after the VICE announcement, the owners of DCist, a local news outlet I wrote and edited for, announced it would shut down. A redirect on the website made all of DCist’s past stories inaccessible, until outcry from current and former staff (including me), readers, and several elected officials spurred management to keep the dormant site online for at least one year.

“Pretty much every place I’ve ever worked has dissolved,” says Morgan Baskin, who worked at DCist and previously at VICE. “Every time I publish a story I’m particularly proud of, I immediately PDF it just knowing how quickly things change.” 

The closure of news sites underscores just how fragile the history of digital journalism is. Archiving wasn’t perfect in the analog days, but publishers held onto back issues for history and for reference. Baskin remembers a storage room in the Washington City Paper’s offices that held a copy of every past issue. “Somehow that is the safest and most comprehensible I’ve seen of somebody attempting to preserve the history of a publication,” she says.  

Few publishers actively maintain archives of their digital-born news. A 2021 study from the Reynolds Journalism Institute at the University of Missouri found that while no one was deleting their work, only seven were actively preserving everything. Most newsrooms — even those in strong financial shape — relied on their content management system (CMS) to keep stories online in perpetuity, “which is not a best practice by any means,” says Edward McCain, digital curator at Reynolds. This kind of preservation isn’t often reliable. A new CMS or a server upgrade can break links or knock years of history into the digital dustbin. Sometimes stories simply become unreadable or inaccessible as browsers and other tools for creating and viewing content evolve. “The whole first wave of news applications and data journalism was built in Flash. … All of that’s been lost, basically,” says Katherine Boss, librarian for journalism and media, culture, and communication at New York University.  

“It’s not that somebody’s out there trying to get rid of the content,” McCain says. “It just happens as a function of some of the systems we developed.” 

Whether they’re created by accident or not, holes in the record create openings for bad actors. A cottage industry has sprung up to buy the URLs linked to in news articles and fill them with ads. If a site closes down, its domain name can go up for sale to the highest bidder. Years after it shuttered, The Hairpin, a website led by women writers, resurfaced as a clickbait farm populated by AI-written articles.^⁠ Feminist essays, humor pieces, and writing from Jia Tolentino, Jazmine Hughes, and other notable journalists have been replaced by stories like “Celebrities All Have Little Real Teeth Under Their Big Fake Teeth.”  

Beyond broken links and scams, not having a record of digital journalism “is a direct threat to our democracy,” McCain says. In 2015, when Donald Trump was campaigning for president, he claimed to have seen thousands of people celebrating in New Jersey on Sept. 11, 2001 as the World Trade Center towers collapsed. Fact checkers debunked his claim by scanning local news archives. A record of reporting can be the answer to disinformation and a vital tool for accountability. “We’re not just talking at a national level, but we’re talking about things like, the city council had issued these bonds for a water treatment facility and made certain promises and made certain projections. Did that work out? Do we know the details of what was told to us five years ago?” McCain says. “That’s important stuff.” 

In the weeks after DCist’s closure, Washingtonians shared memories of their favorite stories on social media (they couldn’t share links). There were investigations, including some into DCist’s owner WAMU, and years of day-to-day coverage of the city government — a beat that has seen fewer writers dedicated to it from other outlets. Many of the memories, though, were the features, the small slice-of-life stories. “There were stories about people’s pet ducks wandering around the wharf … and the cherry blossoms and just all the little things that, over time tell the story of a place,” Baskin says. This is the power of having years of local journalism available to a community. It’s “a cumulative effect of all of these tiny stories that independently don’t seem that important, but braided together, become so significant.” 

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A site doesn’t have to shutter for information to be lost in the routine operation of modern newsrooms. Live blogs are a standard way of covering breaking news, but updates can be overwritten and disappear forever. Social media posts are often buried by algorithms and could be deleted by the platform. Many of the dashboards that newsrooms built to track Covid-19 cases have vanished. Other times, they sit frozen at the last update. Home pages change without a record of what stories were on top, and often these homepages are customized based on user behavior, so no one sees exactly the same page anyway. In much of the country, a person can visit their local library and see what the newspaper reported in their town 100 years ago. But if they want to see how their community dealt with the pandemic two years ago, they’ll need to piece it together from a variety of sources, and there will still be gaps.

“The condition of the modern web is to be constantly disappearing. And so, in order to fight against that, you have to be not just hoping for your work to remain, but … actively working day in and day out and making choices to preserve and to protect,” says Adrienne LaFrance, executive editor of The Atlantic. (In 2015, LaFrance wrote a piece about how a Pulitzer-winning investigation from the Rocky Mountain News had vanished from the internet).  

The work of digital preservation is increasingly complicated, especially compared to archiving print. In 2022, The Atlantic announced that all of its archives were available online — every issue of the magazine dating to 1857 was readable for subscribers. The magazine did this by digitizing the text of each story and loading it into their CMS. For readability, the articles are presented the same way a story published today would be. For context, each article contains a link to a PDF showing how it looked when it first ran in print, so a subscriber can see what an article written during the Civil War looked like upon publication — including what ads ran next to it and how it was formatted.  

Every digital story The Atlantic has published is online, too, but readers can’t necessarily see them as they looked when they were first published. In 2021, for example, the magazine stopped using the software that had powered and formatted its blogs in a section called Notes. The magazine kept the text from the posts, but their appearance changed with the technology. “We don’t render pages in those former layouts anymore,” says Carson Trobich, executive director of product for The Atlantic. “It would be impossible for just a casual web browser to go and see them literally in the context when it was originally published.” Each Notes post now features a message saying the page looks different from when it was first published. “We can’t anticipate what some current or future reader might be searching for in our archive, so we want to give them all of the context they might need to understand what has changed,” LaFrance says. To accurately render Notes would require The Atlantic to maintain software in perpetuity. But even then, web browsers and the devices that run them change, making it even more difficult to preserve the experience of using a website.  

Saving digital news is an ever-changing proposition. If an analog archive is like a bookshelf, then a digital archive is “like a greenhouse of living plants,” says Evan Sandhaus, vice president of engineering at The Atlantic and former executive director of technology at The New York Times, where he was on the team that built TimesMachine, a searchable archive of Times stories. The technology behind TimesMachine makes it possible to search for and link to words and stories inside of scans of original Times pages. It’s a vast archive with millions of pages and mountains of metadata about each page powering this interactivity. At the heart of it are images of original newspapers, which are ink on paper. An archive of digital-born news would need to work differently. Not every story was made to display the same way. Some were programmed with style sheets and code that browsers no longer support, or that render differently on new devices. Digital archives “require somebody or some team to make sure that the software is still running, is still properly serving traffic, and is still compatible with the crop of browsers that are on the market,” Sandhaus says. 

The level of preservation required isn’t something small newsrooms are generally equipped to do. Perhaps the greatest challenge the internet brought to archiving news, greater than any technological shift, is one of resources — few outlets in today’s media business have the money to keep an archivist on staff, or even a full-time web developer who can make sure links don’t break. It’s difficult enough to keep journalists paid, and keeping their work organized and archived online in perpetuity is an expense many outlets can’t afford.

“I think pinning our hopes on the publishers to solve the problems [of archiving] has clearly failed,” says Ben Welsh, news applications editor at Reuters and a self-proclaimed amateur archivist. Welsh doesn’t work in archiving at Reuters, but he has a history of preserving journalism. He organized the preservation group Past Pages, whose projects include the News Homepage Archive, a record of millions of screenshots of news homepages from 2012 through 2018, hosted at the Internet Archive. “The hope [for archiving] lies in outside efforts,” Welsh adds. Those include the Internet Archive, which uses an array of software to crawl thousands of pages — news and otherwise — and saves snapshots. Often, the archive has multiple snapshots of the same page, and comparing them offers a glimpse at how a story or a site has changed over time. 

“They’re doing the Lord’s work there,” Boss says. In addition to the general crawling it does of sites, the Internet Archive hosts the records of Gawker, which shut down after a lawsuit, and Apple Daily, a Hong Kong newspaper that shut down in 2021 after the Chinese government raided its offices and arrested its editor and chief executive officer. It also holds archives of sites that haven’t been imperiled by governments or wealthy enemies, but by the vagaries of the market and the uncertainty of the industry. The Internet Archive offers a subscription service for publishers who want to maintain extensive archives, and the homepage has a “Save Page Now” button for any visitors who want to make sure the Wayback Machine holds a snapshot of a specific URL — something any journalist can do with their own work. But not everything can be so easily saved.  

“Some of the technologies that drive web pages are less archivable than others,” the Wayback Machine’s Graham says. This includes interactives, such as certain JavaScript-coded visualizations, that often pull information from multiple servers. This puts archivists in a race against technology; when a new way of coding websites to display information comes along, so must a way to preserve it. On a call with Ilya Kreymer, founder of the Web Recorder Project, he shows me Browsertrix Cloud, one of the open-source archiving tools WebRecorder has released. He tells it to crawl NPR’s website, and soon, the dashboard begins filling with thumbnails of NPR stories from that day. “What it’s doing is it’s loading each page in the browser, it’s automating browsers in the cloud, and it’s archiving everything that’s loaded on that page, all the elements, all the JavaScript,” Kreymer says. Once it’s done, it produces a portable file that can be saved or sent around, and that effectively emulates the website, showing it exactly how it was — allowing users to use the page as it was originally published, using the interactive features and playing most embedded media. This is called a high-fidelity crawl.  

These types of tools are making it possible to save work that might otherwise be lost, but they still face challenges as web technology progresses and makes the pages that need to be saved more complex and the crawling process more difficult. “As soon as we find a way to fix one particular thing, there’s this other new thing that the web can now do,” Kreymer says. On the NPR crawl Kreymer made during our interview, the cookie options pop-up appears on each page, slowing down the process. These are the kind of hurdles that tools are getting better at clearing, but that still present problems for external archiving. Paywalls are another challenge because an automated crawler doesn’t have login information. Newer tools can use an archivist’s login to save paywalled pages, the way a library might save its own copies of a newspaper it subscribed to, but this raises questions of copyright if the pages are made public. “Generally speaking, paywalls are — what’s the right word? — are the enemy of archiving. Is the word anathema, is that an appropriate word to use here?” Graham says, noting that he understands the need for sites to operate as businesses. But he’d still like to ensure the work is being saved in a repository like the Internet Archive. “If I had a hope, or a dream, at this point, it would be a compromise, where we would at least be archiving the title, the URL, and an abstract and related metadata for all news, even if it was paywalled.” Other sites, like Facebook, actively prohibit archive crawls, making preservation of news outlets’ posts on those platforms more of a challenge.  

Some of these problems would be solved if newsrooms took a more active role in their archives — not only allowing archive crawls, but using tools to readily preserve pages, then making those pages available. While any individual journalist can make a PDF of their work or even save a high-fidelity crawl, these files aren’t of much public value if they’re not accessible. “I simply cannot fathom a world in which it’s not the responsibility of publication owners to preserve the work of that outlet,” Baskin says. “If you’re not interested in preserving history, get out of the business of journalism.” It’s not clear what will happen to the DCist’s stories after the website is shuttered. The DC Public Library has expressed interest in holding them. And WAMU is owned by American University, which itself holds the papers of journalists like Ed Bliss, a producer and editor at CBS News who worked with Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite, but no definitive plans have been announced.  

Archiving doesn’t have to be as costly or as time-consuming to a newsroom as it may seem. Besides the increasingly advanced and automated tools for archiving, there is outside help. Boss notes that libraries and archives have long played a role in preserving news. (It’s not as if all that microfilm came directly from newspapers.) “We have the mandate, we have the resources, we have the human resources,” she says, suggesting that newsrooms could appoint someone to coordinate with a university or library to make sure work is being saved. Some European countries, Boss notes, have laws that require publishers to save their sites — even paywalled sites — for the national library.  

All of this could stop the journalism being produced today from vanishing. But still, a lot of articles have already been lost. After scanning the NPR site, Kreymer showed me a crawl he made of my personal website. As we went through the scan, I saw Browsertrix was saving everything — every link, video, and audio embed. But, when it got to my portfolio, some of the links led to 404 pages — file not found. Later, I decided to replace these links with snapshots from the Wayback Machine, provided those sites had been crawled. Fortunately, they had been, if not, there would be no way to recover them. Even the most powerful archiving tool can’t save what isn’t there. 

Last November, motivated by a desire to better understand the root causes of this intractable conflict from a Palestinian perspective, I spent two weeks visiting all 13 camps in Jordan, documenting the life and stories of Palestinian refugees living there. The photo essay that I produced was published as a portfolio in the year-end issue of The New York Times Magazine. 

These refugee camps look different today than when they were established by the United Nations. Over the past several decades, the flappy tents in dusty empty fields evolved into homes with mud walls with zinc roofs and later into concrete buildings built along narrow alleys. Today, all but three of the camps continue to be administered by the United Nations Relief and Work Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNWRA), the agency created to help those “who lost both home and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 War.” Many of the camps resemble concrete jungles attached to towns and cities across Jordan, in some instances making it hard to delineate where the camp ends and the city begins.

Such is the case of the Talbieh Camp where I took this photograph. Established in 1968, Talbieh is located about 35 kilometers south of Amman. According to UNWRA, the camp currently houses about 10,600 people. The narrow alley’s between the houses in the camp were full of life. Children on their way from school balanced plates of hummus to take home for lunch, while old men and women sat in front of their homes drinking tea. The doors of most homes were left open, and in some streets, chickens could be seen coming in and out of houses under curtains separating the living spaces from the street. 

Off one of the camp alleyways, the distant sound of children playing caught my attention so I walked toward it. In a makeshift playground surrounded by walls covered in spray-painted notices of houses for sale, a group of children was jumping rope and playing soccer. One of the boys noticed me and decided to show off his flexibility by performing a perfect leg split, while the girls giggled in the foreground. These children were born in the camp as refugees, and so were most of their parents. This scene to me represented the multi-generational dimension of the Palestinian experience in Jordan. 

As I made my way through the camp many people invited me into their homes for tea and a chat. Old men were curious about where I was from, and they were eager to share their family stories and faint memories of life in Palestine. In most of the homes the television was on, showing around-the-clock news about the horrors in Gaza. Old family photos were framed on the walls, grainy photographs of grandfathers and great-grandfathers in full Arab regalia, taken in their homes in Palestine. Their testimonies hinted at a common experience in the camp, that of being trapped in indefinite exile, and the lingering psychological effects of living as a refugee, which were magnified by the powerlessness they felt while watching the events in Gaza from afar.

There was a certain continuity of experiences between these refugee communities in Jordan, and their brethren in Gaza and the West Bank, one marked by decades of displacement and loss. But I also found these camps filled with life and energy. Men gathered in coffee shops to play cards, children went to school, and the smell of fresh bread filled the air near the bakeries across the camp. It was in stark contrast to the death and destruction in the images that have come to define the conflict in Gaza.

Newspapers once routinely weighed in with unsigned columns on the myriad issues facing their communities, from school funding to local development to endorsements in local political races. The newspaper’s institutional voice could be predictable, staid, and self-serving. But it could also offer moral clarity and shape public opinion, as Pulitzer Prize-winning editorials on prison reform, income inequality, racial relations, and the environment have over the past several decades.

The demise of the Virginia award is a trivial symptom of a more complex and serious malady. As another presidential election looms, the traditional newspaper editorial is withering — another casualty of the same forces that have gutted basic news reporting. The tone was set by Gannett, the nation’s largest newspaper chain, which began to eliminate local editorials from its more than 300 daily and weekly newspapers two years ago. “Readers don’t want us to tell them what to think,” a panel of Gannett editors wrote in an internal presentation endorsing the cutback. “They don’t believe we have the expertise to tell anyone what to think on most issues.”

Gannett’s opinion on the value of staff opinions appears to be widely shared. Two decades ago, The Hartford Courant, the nation’s oldest continuously published newspaper, employed 30 people to produce its daily editorials, op-eds and letters to the editor, according to Stephen Busemeyer, who formerly oversaw the Courant’s opinion pages. When Busemeyer left to join the non-profit Connecticut Mirror in 2020, he was the section’s last full-time employee. Similarly, The Roanoke Times once had six editorial writers, said Dwayne Yancey, who served as its editorial-page editor for seven years. Like Busemeyer, Yancey was the last man standing in the department when he resigned in 2021 to become co-founder and executive editor of a non-profit start-up, the Cardinal News.

Lee Enterprises, owner of the nation’s third largest newspaper chain, began curtailing local editorials around the same time as Gannett. In their place, the company distributed to its papers standardized editorial pages consisting of commentary from national columnists and its editorial board. The change might have been a boon for those seeking yet another opinion about presidential politics, Congress, and international affairs, but it did little for commentary about events occurring down the street from Lee’s 77 daily newspapers. One of the syndicated columns Lee distributed to its papers earlier this year lamented the decline of local journalism and urged more support for it, an irony given the company’s cuts. (Lee didn’t respond to a request for comment.)

Gannett has justified its retrenchment by pointing to reader surveys indicating that local editorials have been among its newspapers’ least-read articles. It also has said many readers had trouble distinguishing between routine news reporting and editorial commentary, especially when an editorial was published online, unmoored from a traditional opinion section. Rather than offering staff-written editorials, Gannett now sees its role as “convening conversations” among community members, said Michael McCarter, Gannett’s opinion editor, in a statement.

That approach, however, all but eliminates a newspaper’s own voice, and signals a retreat from its direct engagement in community affairs, a historic change. Newspaper editorials predate America itself. Colonial newspapers inveighed for and against rebellion; a pamphleteer named Thomas Paine galvanized the independence movement by beginning his lengthy series of editorials this way: “These are the times that try men’s souls.” 

In a hyperpolarized environment, in which readers increasingly seek opinions that reinforce their biases, newspapers can still serve as authoritative, credible, and dispassionate voices, particularly on topics too small to attract the attention of cable news or partisan websites, says Yancey. “I have no special insight into presidential politics,” he said, “but I do know about state and local issues. How many places are there to get an informed perspective on a zoning issue?” 

Or about city finances? Or a teachers’ strike? Or countless other community controversies? Rather than dictating what readers ought to think, as Gannett’s editors wrote in 2022, the best editorials parse complicated issues and provide what Busemeyer calls “a clear path through the thicket.”

Among the countless unsigned columns Busemeyer wrote for the Courant, one of the most significant, he said, was an editorial in 2018 urging a local congresswoman, Elizabeth Esty, to resign over her handling of allegations of sexual harassment by her chief of staff. Esty didn’t take the paper’s advice, but her decision not to seek reelection after three terms suggested the editorial had nonetheless resonated. That a local paper called for her resignation “really meant something,” Busemeyer said. 

Busemeyer reflects on what’s lost as editorials disappear. “We lose the spirit that lurks behind every news story, the idea that something ought to be done about this,” he said. 

Without a credible and informed watchdog, one with a long and deep investment in the community’s well-being, Busemeyer says, what’s being lost is an authoritative voice that can say, how dare you?

This is just one of many tactics used by newsmakers to block the press. A new report called “Shut Out: Strategies for good journalism when sources dismiss the press,” authored by Fernanda Camarena, a longtime journalist and Poynter Institute faculty member, and Mel Grau, Poynter’s director of program management, collects anecdotes from reporters who are up against an increasingly evasive posture toward the media such as physically barring reporters from legislative chambers, stalling on or denying public records requests, and literally running away from reporters. 

The report offers strategies for journalists to hold power to account despite these conditions, including building new source relationships, sharing resources with other newsrooms, and increasing transparency with their audiences so they understand that the news organization couldn’t get access and why. 

With these approaches, reporters can reclaim some of the power that’s been lost in an increasingly hostile environment toward the media.

Camarena and Grau spoke to Nieman Reports about how to continue providing the public with the news it needs — and innovating, not retreating — in the face of obstacles. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

What is being “shut out” and what tactics do newsmakers use to do it?

Camarena: When we think about people not willing to speak with the media, immediately what comes to mind is the “no comment” or “not available.” But what I found incredibly fascinating is the [other] tactics that go into shutting down. The tactics of geography: Ron DeSantis has taken his press conferences outside of the circle of reporters that would probably hold him more accountable than other news organizations. 

Grau: [Shut out] happens across the board: We’re talking school boards, police departments, mayors, federal agencies. We’re talking politicians, celebrities, sports people. With our resources shrinking, with [less] staff, not as much money to travel, not as many experienced beat reporters, the people we’re covering are taking advantage of those weaknesses or even the lack of trust in media. [Politicians] are hosting their public meetings virtually so there’s no Q&A session. They’re hosting surprise public meetings that they don’t tell anyone about. 

Even people who’ve been in the business for 20 years are saying, “I’ve never experienced this level of silence [and] denial.”

What personal reporting experiences motivate you to work on these issues?

Camarena: I started as a local reporter [for Telemundo] in El Paso and the community there is 90% Spanish speaking. I was outside City Hall and I remember trying to get an interview with this [politician], and I knew that he spoke Spanish and he just wouldn’t give me the answer in that language. Because he knew that I was going to question him. He literally ran, and I remember chasing him and saying, “You need to respond to our community.” The [politicians] understood that by not speaking the language they will not be held accountable. 

What are your options when you’re shut out?

Camarena: When someone shuts you out, we think that’s the end of it. But I think if we change our perspective on how we take on that push back, and we make it part of the story, you actually end up with the story about the shut out. If you are not providing nuance into that shutdown, you’re not holding [sources] accountable. Actually, you’re giving them a free pass.

A lack of answer is … the beginning of [a story] that will take you to talk with more people, build on sources, [and] get in touch with your community by putting it out there.

Grau: If you’re focused on access only, you’re gonna hit a wall literally because all the doors are shut. [But] if you reframe that as, “How do I hold this person or that entity accountable?” — that opens up a couple other avenues. You can maybe get a little more creative in that way. In the report, we talk a lot about community sourcing or ground up sourcing. Spending a lot of resources and time rebuilding, and in some cases, building the relationships anew.

One of [Miami Herald reporter Mary Ellen Klas’] tactics when she wasn’t able to make it to a press conference that popped up across the state [was] she would tweet [something] like, “Here are all the questions I would ask if I were there.” And she would tag the journalists who were there and [convey to] her audience, “These are the things that you deserve to know that now you don’t get to know because this news conference is happening over here.”

How can newsrooms team up to get the access they need?

Grau: Joining a consortium to collectively sue for [public] records — people have done that. Maybe it’s a travel budget that is shared and you send your political reporter to that event and they create a press pool. We also talked about covering the statehouse in New York: There’s the gaggle right after the press conference that’s not televised. So if you’re recording it, you can send out the recording of the Q&A to the association members. Everyone might pick up a different story from that.

Camarena: The best journalism is done through collaboration. In this collectiveness, you pretty much quadrupled or doubled your source list. And you troubleshoot things; you share resources [for] lawsuits. People think that collaboration is sharing your numbers and your audience so that means you don’t have enough. [But] you don’t lose by serving your community to your best capacity. 

How will the next generation of journalists fare when facing these issues?

Grau: Our goal with a lot of [Poynter] programs is to provide that layer of mentorship [for new journalists] that can address a lot of journalism fundamentals questions: Here’s how you make that phone call. Here’s how you structure a FOIA request. 

Ukrainian AP video journalist Mstyslav Chernov and his colleagues photographer Evgeniy Maloletka and field producer Vasilisa Stepanenko were in the city as it was surrounded by Russian troops and recorded the destruction. Before escaping to safety themselves, they sent dispatches for the rest of the world to witness the digging of mass graves, targeting of shelters, and bombing of a maternity hospital. The footage, narrated by Chernov, became “20 Days in Mariupol,” which was made in partnership with Chernov, Derl McCrudden, AP’s vice president of global news, and Michelle Mizner, an editor and producer with Frontline. The film won the 2024 Academy Award for best documentary feature. 

In March, Aronson-Rath spoke to Nieman fellows about how she shaped the footage of “20 Days in Mariupol,” the power of telling a story from a reporter’s perspective, and why she fought for PBS to allow Frontline documentaries to be viewed for free on YouTube. Edited excerpts: 

On the genesis of the film

We, like all of you probably, were seeing the maternity ward images coming out of Ukraine. We were doing a big film with the AP at the time on alleged war crimes that aired last fall. We had a major effort underway in Ukraine right away with The Associated Press. We had a team in the country within about seven or eight days. That’s adjacent and parallel to what was happening in Mariupol. We weren’t in Mariupol, obviously, but we were right across the border, trying to get on the ground there with the people who were investigating war crimes. 

We were with the AP when we started to hear the inside story of the team that was in Mariupol. But we didn’t know who they were. They got out, and they told us that they got out with more footage than what was seen on the news. We met with Mstyslav the day after he got out of Mariupol. He was in an undisclosed location; it was over Zoom. He told me that he started to think he had a documentary film about three or four days into the siege. So he started to shoot it that way. 

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It took [some time] for us to get a hold of [the footage] because he was still in Ukraine. And we started to review the rushes really quickly. We said yes right away because I thought, even if it was a short film, their story of what they did, and what they documented was enough for Frontline. [We wanted] anything we could get from our reporters’ point of view. We thought it would be a short until we saw the footage — then we realized, there’s something bigger here. 

On narrating the film

It took a while to convince Mstyslav to be the voice of the film. That was a dance because he didn’t really want the story to be about the journalists. He really wanted to center the Ukrainian people who were killed and suffered. We know this city is still under occupation.

Michelle Mizner [editor and co-producer of the film] said something that really struck me, which is that as she was watching the footage multiple times — and she was talking to Mstyslav all day long — that his voice was helping her watch this. It just became clear we needed him to tell us the story as opposed to just being on our own watching it. 

I will say because he’s so remarkable that every one of those words are his words, even if we helped him find those words. He’s very clear on what he wanted to say and what he didn’t want to say. He has a very strong voice, he has a very strong point of view, and that’s what makes him such a great filmmaker. But he took our help and that’s what editors do. So I think that was really for me like a joy to see him find his voice. 

On the documentary’s impact

I think the most important thing about this film is that it’s a record that can’t be erased of what happened in Mariupol. Full stop. And if you look at the efforts right now with disinformation and misinformation, if they hadn’t documented what happened in Mariupol, we wouldn’t know what actually happened, because people who create disinformation and lies are very clever. So for me, boots on the ground, actual reporters in the field, documenting what actually happened is our job. 

And then another question is, what does it really do for the world? Is it going to change the trajectory of the war? I don’t know. I will tell you that this film in particular — the conversations we had around it at the State Department, [they were] in the European Parliament coming up in April — I do think it’s kind of broken through at a different level, where influential people are actually watching it. But I can’t tell you whether that’s going to change anything for Ukraine, other than just to make sure that we have a record of what happened there. 

On winning the Oscar

It was a really emotional moment. [It was the] first Ukrainian Oscar — that’s actually what struck me the most about being there with [the team] and witnessing their achievement. It’s [Frontline’s] first Oscar, too. We’re in the journalism space, but we are also a nonprofit, so we don’t have the budget that a lot of the platforms have, or other big TV documentary series have, so it’s really hard for us to play in that space. And a lot of earned media attention takes boots on the ground for all of us, especially Mstyslav. So, I was proud of the effort. I was psyched that nonprofit journalism was on the Oscar stage. 

On the importance of keeping documentaries in front of a paywall

I have seen a hunger for documentaries that is cross-generational in the time that I’ve been at Frontline, and that has been because we’re in front of a paywall. I believe that the reason that people don’t really watch documentaries is because you have to pay for them, or you have to be subscribing to something. What I’ve seen in the streaming world is that our films are seen by younger generations, people in their 20s and 30s. And frankly, they don’t ever come to PBS and they never did. There is this idea that you would kind of like “age into” to PBS. I don’t accept that. I believe our films should be in front of the paywall for all people, regardless of geography, age, race, or anything like that. 

I think there’s a benefit to saying nonprofit media should be in the public interest and should be free. I really believe it. I know it’s earnest. But then we see massive audiences for some of our films — especially the corporate accountability films, like our Amazon film, films on Facebook, the power of big oil. For those films, millions of people come.

I found myself brainstorming ways to accomplish this task. As a foreign woman, gaining access to restricted work sites or all-male accommodations seemed challenging, if not impossible. And, I wanted to break away from the “victim narrative” — depicting somber images of marginalized communities — and instead create a more hopeful way to tell their stories.

It was during this time of reflection that I crossed paths with Khalid Albaih, my next-door neighbor, who had also been thinking along the same lines. A renowned political cartoonist, Khalid is a Sudanese native raised within the cultural milieu of Qatar. He observed how the fabric of Doha society had changed over time, with the influx of migrants working at a furious pace to create the infrastructure for the 2022 FIFA World Cup.

Khalid had conceived the idea of photographing workers on Fridays, their day off. During the rest of the week, they don overalls and uniforms, but on Fridays, they gather along the Corniche, Doha’s vibrant waterfront, for fresh air and time with their friends, expressing themselves through their fashion. I collaborated with Khalid to create a strong visual language for the project. We launched “Doha Fashion Fridays” in 2016.

The intention of “Doha Fashion Fridays” is to challenge stereotypes about migrant workers and go beyond the stories that flatten them into invisible, faceless statistics. We want to show them as individuals with hopes, dreams, and aspirations — to learn more about their backgrounds, the nature of their work, their experiences in Qatar, their lives back home, and their plans for the future. We want to hear from them in their own words — and to see how they express themselves through their personal style.

One day we met a group of very well-dressed young Ethiopian men, all of them in suits and bowties. Ali Tulu, a 25-year-old, was wearing an all-white suit. He looked particularly happy and was beaming. We found out that it was his wedding day, and he had just had his nikkah ceremony over a phone call. His bride was back home in his village in Ethiopia. It would have been too expensive to fly back for the wedding. Instead, he was celebrating the day with his friends on the Corniche. I felt honored to be his official wedding photographer and shared the photos with him to send back home. These are the kinds of stories we’ve had the privilege to tell. 

Over the next few years, Khalid and I would head to the Corniche on Fridays (skipping the brutal summer months) to meet more interesting characters and learn their stories. Khalid speaks Arabic, and I speak Hindi and a smattering of other South Asian languages. Between the two of us we’re able to communicate with almost everyone. It would always move me to meet women who were working as nannies here in Doha, while having left their own children behind to be raised by other family members. 

We’ve made hundreds of photographs and created a body of work that brings together people from Nepal, South Sudan, Pakistan, Nigeria, and Kenya, working in construction, restaurants, education, and childcare, to name just a few industries. We share the images via our Instagram channel @dohafashionfridays because we wanted to reach the widest possible audience. Our work has traveled to St. Petersburg, Russia, as part of the “Contemporary Art Qatar” show and to New York City for another show called “Kafala: Migrant Labor in the Arabian Peninsula.” We are now working on a book about the photographs with the same goal we started with — to create more dialogue around migrant culture in the region.

ChatGPT will tell you that the news is factual, includes language variation and cultural awareness, comprises complex sentence structures, includes quotes that convey real-world conversations, excels at summarization and condensation, and can help a model improve information retrieval. In fact, the news is so valuable to this endeavor that it makes up half of the top 10 sites incorporated into one of Google’s datasets that is being used to train some of the most popular large language models, according to a recent analysis. That includes content that was put behind paywalls with the intention of being restricted to paid users. 

This is the issue at the heart of recent lawsuits filed by The New York Times, The Intercept, Raw Story, Getty, and AlterNet against OpenAI, Microsoft, Stability AI, and others for using vast troves of their articles and images to train ChatGPT and other generative AI products and services. OpenAI and the other companies building the new generation of AI tools did not ask permission to use these stories and aren’t compensating the news organizations for their work but instead are arguing that their actions are covered by the fair use doctrine. But as we watch the fight between news organizations and Big Tech and the rules around AI unfold, we should be looking to policymakers to set the rules and ensure a level playing field so that journalism survives and thrives in the transition to AI. This is not only an imperative for the embattled news industry but also for democracy more broadly.

Indeed, journalism is still reeling from the social media age when Google and Facebook, now Meta, exploited their dominance and starved news outlets of digital advertising revenues. At a Senate hearing on AI and the future of journalism in January lawmakers and experts were aligned on their criticism of Big Tech’s role in imperiling local news. “It is literally eating away at the lifeblood of our democracy,” warned Sen. Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat from Connecticut, who chaired the bipartisan hearing. 

And now their generative AI tools are being built with “stolen goods” as Roger Lynch, CEO of Condé Nast, testified. The hearing highlighted a rare show of bipartisan agreement that fair use should not apply to the way that large language models and giant tech companies have hoovered up content without permission or compensation. 

The battle over whether or not scraping content for use in Large Language Models (LLMs), the machine learning algorithms that can understand and generate human-sounding language, is fair use is just starting, but we can take lessons on what not to do from how the news media and policymakers handled the rise of social media giants.

Journalism must not get locked into the current version of how search, content summarization, dissemination, and digital advertising work. The news industry can’t afford to give away content and must establish the value journalism provides to AI systems and other products. Yet, access to human created, high-quality content that is a relatively accurate and timely portrayal of reality, like journalism, is an important input for machine learning models. 

Journalism adds value in many ways, not just the vast amounts of data it could provide to train LLMs. Training and updating models with higher-quality data can help minimize bias within the models and is key to making sure that AI search, summarization, and content generation isn’t informed by mis- or disinformation.  (This is done through a process called grounding, which connects the AI’s outputs with specific data sources and retrieval augmented generation, which allows the model to access related and hopefully highly-authoritative information outside of its training data.) Without journalism, they will be more susceptible to problems like “hallucinations” — essentially incorrect answers made up by AI — and manipulated, outdated, or irrelevant information. (The Washington Post found, for example, that training sets already include several media outlets that rank low on NewsGuard’s independent scale for trustworthiness or which are backed by a foreign country, including Russia’s propaganda arm RT.) 

Publishers and journalists should work collectively to understand how different types of journalism — like local, watchdog, and trade journalism — provide utility throughout the AI value chain, since this will be essential to developing business models for the next era of journalism.

But even more importantly, policymakers need to ensure that news publishers are on an even playing field with the tech platforms that have come to provide the necessary infrastructure for contemporary journalism. Bespoke, secretive deals with the largest or most influential news outlets are not a replacement for public policy and will not rescue local news from the precarity created by corporations who skirt the law and enjoy dominant market power. 

The current crisis facing journalism is partly a result of regulatory frameworks that privilege tech platforms over the press and give the former unfettered power to set the rules. U.S. policymakers allowed a handful of companies to develop a powerful, extractive business model based on surveillance advertising that relies on vast troves of data that only they have access to along with AdTech infrastructure that they developed and control. This data has given them an advantage in AI development, which further reinforces their dominance. 

Regulators also permitted these same firms to dominate search and social media, and thus access to audiences. The Federal Trade Commission did not prevent hundreds of mergers or acquisitions by Big Tech that killed off potential alternatives and cemented their status as critical infrastructure of the information ecosystem. From setting publishing protocols (such as Facebook’s Instant Articles or Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages) to the tools and services journalists use to do their jobs, including email, web hosting, messaging, archiving, cloud services, and cybersecurity services (like Google’s Project Galileo), there is no escaping Big Tech. Artificial intelligence intensifies this dynamic.

Our laws and regulations have not caught up with this reality. Unlike the communication technologies of prior eras, today’s tech corporations enjoy unprecedented exemptions from libel law and non-discrimination requirements and privacy constraints. Unlike news organizations, platforms are exempted from liability for what they allow to be published thanks to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which generally shields them from legal accountability for third-party content. And unlike operators of other information communication technologies, like telephone companies or broadcasters, they can decide who they want to kick off or amplify on their services regardless of rationale, transparency, or fairness. This includes blocking news entirely, as Meta did in Canada and Google has done in California, rather than paying for using the content. And as we’re seeing with AI, they claim rights that are unparalleled in scope to use copyright-protected material under the guise of fair use.

Given the fact that these tech monopolies form the backbone of the modern media system and have leveraged journalism to help build the value of their massive enterprises, policymakers need to ensure that news organizations are appropriately compensated and corporations play fair. Ideally, regulators would take steps to break up monopolies like Apple, Amazon, Google, and Meta and enact meaningful privacy legislation that would prohibit the mass surveillance relied on by the digital advertising industry. Antitrust legislation that promotes competition in AdTech, app stores, and digital marketplaces — several bipartisan bills like the American Innovation and Choice Online Act and the Advertising Middlemen Endangering Rigorous Internet Competition Accountability Act are currently working their way through Congress — would be another welcome step, if one that is long overdue.

Artificial intelligence has both hastened the need for these policy prescriptions and added the need for new ones. Policymakers should clarify that taking journalism to develop AI without compensation is not fair use, pass legislation to enable publishers to negotiate with these giant tech corporations on equal footing, and impose data transparency requirement to ensure they have the information they need to make this determination. Fair compensation legislation like the Australia’s News Media Bargaining Code, Canada’s Online News Act and the proposed federal Journalism Competition and Preservation Act and its state-level equivalents would be a good first step. But they should be amended to include scraping and crawling for AI and transparency mandates for large language models.

The FTC should continue to pursue antitrust cases against tech monopolies and impose meaningful penalties, like requiring that companies delete models and algorithms developed based on  unlawfully obtained user data. The New York Times lawsuit against OpenAI seeks the destruction of LLMs trained on its work, and the FTC should consider similar remedies for companies that violate data privacy and antitrust laws.

Large publishers are forging ahead with voluntary agreements in the absence of legal regulatory clarity. But this leaves out smaller and local publishers and could undermine efforts to develop business model alternatives as opposed to one-off licensing opportunities. 

Ad hoc approaches, however, risk worsening the compounding crises caused by the decline of local news and the scourge of disinformation. We are already seeing the proliferation of election related disinformation in the U.S. and around the world, from AI robocalls impersonating President Joe Biden to deepfakes of Moldovan candidates making false claims about alignment with Russia.

Renegotiating the relationship between tech platforms and the news industry must be a fundamental part of the efforts to support journalism and help news organizations adapt to the generative AI era. With an upcoming U.S. presidential election and more than 60 key elections taking place over the next year around the world, policymakers and the news industry are starting to confront the existential threat that the demise of journalism poses democracy. Their efforts can’t come too soon, as the risk of repeating the failures of the social media age in the era of AI will have devastating consequences.    

News started to trickle in. Record rains. Rumors of landslides. Floods engulfing villages. 

I prepared my equipment and started charging drone batteries. I knew that as soon as the rain stopped, I would need to go to the mountains.

My social media feeds were awash with random pictures and videos. Broken roads and bridges. Buried cars. Houses swept away. Typhoon Doksuri was, according to Reuters, a “record-breaking rainfall” and one of the “worst storms in 140 years.” Because of the damage, I knew that traveling by bicycle would be the only way for me to reach some of the worst affected areas, which were about 30 kilometers from where I lived. The air was intensely humid, and the streets had turned to mud. I had to stop at points to carry my bike through the debris. 

“I can’t quite believe it. I’ve never seen the river as full as it is today.” I said these words into my GoPro, as I tried to convey my intense surprise at what I was seeing while passing by the Yongding River in west Beijing. The river, normally a quiet and meandering stretch of water, was now an angry torrent. Churning waves carried large trees, along with pieces of small buildings. I stood and watched in awe. 

I found my way to Tanzhesi Village, a quiet rural hamlet I had visited many times before, famous for its local Buddhist temple – a structure that dates back almost 1700 years. As I launched my drone, the live feed revealed the utter destruction. What had once been small and peaceful streams through the village had turned into a deluge strong enough to pick up whole cars like lightweight children’s toys. Homes were reduced to rubble. Residents stood in the river’s shallows like stunned fish.

I flew the drone across the broken landscape and tried to capture the destruction. The floods had washed out the main road that ran through the village, so I looked for figures in my frame that I could capture in order to provide some scale to the damage. In this image, villagers looked around, seemingly lost in their own neighborhood. Where they stood was once a busy main road through the village. Now, it resembled a riverbed.

Having covered the climate crisis for almost 20 years, I have seen some of the worst impacts affecting our fast-changing world. Sea-level rise in Indonesia, forest fires in Cambodia, drought in India. Just a few of the crises I had covered. But this was the first time I had witnessed such devastation in a place that I called home.

By focusing on the destruction in the aftermath of the floods in Beijing, especially destroyed and damaged cars and structures, I hope it elicits a pause in the viewer to reflect on the consequences of extreme weather in the age of the climate crisis. Nature does not care about us. It does not care about our inventions of convenience. It will continue to toss us aside as the crisis intensifies. The drone allowed me to convey this message in a unique way.