What a subpoena to a news organization actually sets in motion
A subpoena is a legal order, not an accusation. Here is what happens inside a newsroom after one arrives, and what readers can reasonably infer.
Colin Reyes · September 14, 2026How advertising agencies decide where a media dollar actually lands
From brand budget to media plan to insertion order, the fees and incentives along the agency chain explain why news publishers often receive the last and smallest share.
Gabriela Montoya · September 13, 2026
What the FTC's consent decrees with platforms actually require
A consent decree binds a company to court-supervised conduct for decades, and the Facebook order of 2019 shows both the reach and the limits of the instrument.
Aleksandr Komarov · August 28, 2026
Section 230 is twenty-six words, and most of the debate skips them
The provision's protection and its limits both live in the exact statutory text, which is shorter than almost any headline written about it.
Alexandria Lucas · August 26, 2026
What does an FTC consent decree actually require a platform to do?
The government's most common tool for disciplining a tech platform after a privacy failure is not the fine — it is a multi-year compliance regime, and Meta's own record shows how much can still go wrong inside one.
Alexandria Lucas · August 20, 2026
How press freedom indexes measure the U.S. — and what they can and cannot tell you
America's decline in the global rankings is real, driven by documented attacks on journalists and legal pressure, but the scores aggregate methodology and perception in ways readers should discount precisely.
Alexandria Lucas · July 23, 2026Media literacy is becoming state law — and curriculum fights follow it in
A dozen-plus states now require K-12 media literacy instruction, a rare bipartisan information-policy achievement whose implementation is being shaped by the same polarization it aims to treat.
Alexandria Lucas · June 30, 2026The rules against taxpayer-funded propaganda exist — and mostly aren't enforced
From the 1951 publicity statute to video news release scandals, the law bars agencies from lobbying the public with public money, but nobody is assigned to catch them at it.
Alexandria Lucas · June 7, 2026
The numbers news publishers actually manage subscriptions by
Churn, ARPU and conversion-to-paid discipline quarterly reporting at subscriber-driven outlets, and the metrics that flatter them — pageviews and newsletter signups — are not among them.
Gabriela Montoya · January 31, 2026Communication
More in Communication →
How Community Notes decides which fact-checks the public actually sees
A note doesn't go public because a majority of raters like it — it goes public only when people who usually disagree agree it helps, a design choice now shaping correction systems on both X and Meta's apps.
Gabriela Montoya · August 18, 2026
How political ad-transparency libraries work — and where two still fall short
Meta and TikTok both publish searchable archives of political and social-issue ads. The European Commission's preliminary finding that both give researchers only partial or unreliable data shows what these tools promise and where the promise breaks down.
Gabriela Montoya · August 12, 2026
How television technology quietly redesigned political debating
From the 1960 Kennedy-Nixon cameras to the mute button of 2020, every debate format change tracks a broadcast capability — and the current format negotiation is the first one platforms, not networks, will run.
Gabriela Montoya · July 27, 2026
Why presidents stopped asking networks for prime time
The Oval Office address once commanded the Big Three networks simultaneously; today the same speech reaches a fraction of that audience, and the White House's incentive is to skip the request entirely.
Gabriela Montoya · July 5, 2026Economics
More in Economics →
Cloudflare's crawler deadline puts a price on AI's use of news
A September 15 default that blocks mixed-use AI crawlers turns publisher content into a metered, billable resource — but leaves Google's existing search advantage untouched.
Khalid Okonkwo · August 14, 2026
Classifieds were newspapers' invisible profit engine — their loss broke the model
Small text ads once delivered a third or more of newspaper revenue at near-perfect margin, and the two-line listing's migration to vertical platforms took the industry's most profitable product with it.
Khalid Okonkwo · August 1, 2026Sports rights broke the cable bundle — and are now breaking for their new buyers
Live sport propped up pay television for a decade while its fees tripled; streaming platforms inherited the escalation and discovered the same arithmetic the cable companies were fleeing.
Khalid Okonkwo · July 9, 2026How American public media is actually funded — and why its federal line is politically exposed
Federal money flows through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting as two-year advance appropriations, deliberately insulated and deliberately contested — and it is a minority of the system's money.
Khalid Okonkwo · June 16, 2026Media News
More in Media News →
Ireland's data regulator fined TikTok €345 million over children's accounts
The September 2023 decision targeted public-by-default settings for under-18s, and its remedy is design change rather than a payment alone.
Colin Reyes · August 24, 2026
What the EU's content-moderation database actually discloses, and what it doesn't
The DSA Transparency Database logs every platform takedown across the bloc in near-real time. Researchers say its categories are too vague to show what's really being removed.
Colin Reyes · August 16, 2026AI citations now exist at scale — and the referral math still doesn't work
Zero-click searches reached 68 percent in early 2026 while AI referrals stay under one percent of publisher pageviews: the citation is becoming real, and the click is not coming back.
Colin Reyes · August 5, 2026TikTok became a mainstream news source while newsrooms were arguing about it
Pew now counts 43 percent of under-30 Americans regularly getting news on TikTok — up from 9 percent in 2020 — with the platform's influencer economy doing the explaining.
Colin Reyes · July 14, 2026Business News
More in Business News →
What federal law actually requires of a political ad's disclaimer
A 2026 FEC rule sets the legal floor for who must be named as an ad's payor online — and platform policies like Google's verification system go well beyond it, with their own gaps.
Aleksandr Komarov · August 22, 2026
Perplexity's answer to publishers: revenue share instead of lawsuits
While OpenAI struck flat-fee licensing deals, Perplexity built a per-use revenue-sharing program — a different theory of the publisher relationship, still unproven at scale.
Aleksandr Komarov · August 10, 2026Why platform transparency reports don't actually let you compare platforms
Meta, TikTok and YouTube each publish detailed content-moderation numbers, but their headline metrics measure different things, and no regulator currently requires a shared standard.
Aleksandr Komarov · August 10, 2026MSN's long goodbye shows how aggregation economics die
Microsoft built one of the largest news audiences on earth without employing reporters, then spent a decade dismantling it — a case study in what happens when traffic is infrastructure you rent rather than own.
Aleksandr Komarov · July 18, 2026