#journalism

#journalism

From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging.

In the mid-90s, I was working as an admin assistant on the listings magazine of the London Evening Standard, and was about to be fired. OK, I wasn't that good at the job, but I was also done with it. It was on my mind that I needed an actual job, one that you could describe to someone: I'm an X.

From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging.

From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging.

From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging.

To cover an execution in Florida, John Koch, a 76-year-old radio correspondent, spends exactly $56.73. This is when, to save gas, he drives along rural roads from his home in the northern part of the peninsula to the state prison near Starke (about 62 miles south) without accelerating his old Honda above 43 mphabout 1,600 revolutions per minute. Koch has documented every execution in the state for the past 37 years.

During the 1959 session of the Louisiana state legislature, Governor Earl Long, the less famous younger brother of Senator Huey Long, "went off his rocker," as the tickled writer A. J. Liebling recounted in this magazine, adding, "The papers reported that he had cursed and hollered at the legislators, saying things that so embarrassed his wife, Miz Blanche, and his relatives that they had packed him off to Texas in a National Guard plane to get his brains repaired in an asylum."

More recently, reporters have requested user-exported data from TikTok and OpenAI to answer key questions about how tech users interact and what they're shown. User-exported data contains detailed and well-formatted data based on each user's history, and is likely an artifact of compliance to data privacy laws in Europe and California. Importantly, this data allows reporters to report on real behavior on tech platforms, as opposed to creating fictitious accounts and mimicking user behavior.

In the last weeks of 2025, as I write this prediction, my social media feeds are awash with a new set of pronouncements about the death of photographic truth. As a historian of photography, I'm familiar with obituaries of this sort, which tend to circulate in popular media at moments when new photographic or image-editing technologies arrive on the scene that force us to reevaluate photography's capacity to represent reality accurately.

There was an explosion right near me, you may have heard, he said in a calm, New Zealand-accented voice moments after the loud boom of a missile strike rattled across the airwaves. As he continued to speak air-raid sirens blared in the background. I think that took out the telecommunications center, he said of another explosion. They are hitting the center of the city.

that incentivizes stories designed to polarize rather than illuminate. This flattening doesn't just distort our work; it enables erasure and makes authoritarianism's job easier. Authoritarianism thrives on main-character energy. It needs a hero story - a single person to valorize, platform, co-opt, discredit, or remove. Journalism has leaned hard into these toxic individualistic tropes, perpetuating a form of narrative kingmaking that creates a momentum of inevitability that feels impossible to escape.

As AI takes over routine tasks, journalists will shift from producing stories to diagnosing what communities actually need. The core value of the newsroom becomes interpretation, clarity, and emotional intelligence - not volume. In an AI world, the differentiator is journalists who realize that the scent of the human is already one of the most precious gifts they can offer their readers.

As 2026 approaches, journalism finds itself in a dangerous kind of forgetfulness. Hard-won truths grow quieter by the day; the racial reckoning that once roared through newsrooms now echoes faintly beneath a tightening political silence. In that hush, the future of news hinges upon one assignment - remembering what power hopes we forget. And so we enter a moment of transformation.

For more than a decade, social media didn't just serve Black communities, immigrant communities, and young people - these communities built social media into the global force it became. They were the early adopters, the culture-makers, the organizers, the storytellers. Hyperlocal newsrooms were born on Facebook groups. WhatsApp became a lifeline for immigrant families. Instagram fed cultural reporting. Twitter shaped political journalism in real time.

From the city's new leadership, to the Golden State Valkyries' record-breaking first season, to urban coyotes, news coverage of San Francisco captures the intricacies of a city that is a cornerstone of culture, commerce, and politics on the West Coast. Knight and Lagos will discuss her breadth of work and what's unique about the San Francisco beat through her own unique, smart and captivating lens.

Almost a decade ago I decided to quit my well-paid job in advertising in order to pursue a precarious career in freelance journalism. The merits of that decision are up for debate but the real stupidity is in how I quit my job: I wrote a rather cringeworthy column for the Guardian about my meaningless job in advertising and publicly proclaimed that I'd decided to quit.

I remember the first time a source humiliated me in public. I was walking down a busy hallway at police headquarters in Spokane, Washington, when the chief stormed out of the executive offices and, at the top of his lungs, told me that my newspaper was a piece of excrement, that I was a crappy reporter and that everybody in the department thought I was a joke.