Econ major reality check: courses, careers, and pay
What the degree actually asks of you, where graduates really land, and how to test the salary promise before you commit.
Gabriela Montoya · September 30, 2026Media News Watch
The whistleblower process explained: what the law protects, and what it costs
Going public with evidence of wrongdoing is a legal pathway with real rules — and real personal risk. Here is how the process actually works.
Colin Reyes · September 29, 2026
Supply chains explained: how a product reaches your shelf, and where the chain breaks
Following one product from factory to warehouse to checkout shows how much has to go right — and which links fail first.
Colin Reyes · September 27, 2026
Communication styles at work: find yours and learn to bridge the gaps
Most workplace friction is not about the message. It is about the style carrying it.
Gabriela Montoya · September 25, 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, 2026How 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, 2026
How libel suits against news outlets actually get resolved
Most defamation cases against publishers never reach a jury. The pleading rules, the actual-malice hurdle, and settlement math explain why.
Colin Reyes · September 17, 2026Communication
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Crisis communications: what companies actually do when things break
A crisis communication plan is not a press release. It is a decision structure for the first hours, when a company knows the least and says the most.
Gabriela Montoya · September 20, 2026
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, 2026Economics
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What is economics? The discipline defined simply
Scarcity and incentives explain most of what economists study — from the price of coffee to the fate of a newsroom.
Gabriela Montoya · September 24, 2026
How 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, 2026Cloudflare'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, 2026Classifieds 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, 2026Media News
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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, 2026
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, 2026What 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, 2026Business News
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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
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, 2026Perplexity'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, 2026