☀️ Happy Thursday! The Briefing is your guide to the world of news and information. Sign up here!
In today’s email:
- Featured story: A look at Illinois’ new program giving tax credits to local news outlets
- New from Pew Research Center: Americans’ complicated relationship with news
- In other news: Washington Post publisher steps down after layoffs
- Looking ahead: TikTok announces new ‘Local Feed’ based on users’ location
- Chart of the week: Americans’ confidence in journalists
🔥 Featured story
A report released last week looks at the first year of Illinois’ Local Journalism Sustainability Tax Incentive Program, which created the country’s first refundable tax credits to support local journalism jobs. In its first year, this new policy structure awarded over $4 million in tax credits to support 260 local journalist jobs at several types of local news outlets across the state.
The vast majority of Americans (85%) said in a 2024 Pew Research Center survey that they had not paid for local news in the past year, and a new Center study found that just 8% of U.S. adults say individual Americans have a responsibility to pay for news.
The new survey asked Americans how they think U.S. news organizations should make money. Adults in the U.S. are most likely to say the main way news organizations should make money is through advertising or sponsorships (45%). A much smaller share (10%) say it should be government funding. Democrats are modestly more likely than Republicans to say news organizations’ main source of revenue should be government funding (14% vs. 7%).
🚨 New from Pew Research Center
Americans today describe a complicated relationship with the news. Most say being informed is essential for civic life – especially voting – yet many feel overwhelmed, skeptical and selective about how they engage with information, according to a new Pew Research Center study from the Pew-Knight Initiative.
Among the key findings:
- Americans are evenly split between those who mostly get news because they are seeking it out and those who mostly let news find them. And about half of U.S. adults say they can stay informed even if they don’t actively follow the news.
- Many have adjusted their news habits: Two-thirds say they have stopped getting news from a specific source, and six-in-ten say they have reduced their overall news intake.
- Americans have far more confidence in their own ability to check the accuracy of a news story than in other people’s ability to do so.
📌 In other news
- Washington Post publisher Will Lewis steps down after major layoffs last week
- Senators debate future of local TV news amid Nexstar-Tegna merger discussions and Trump’s endorsement of the deal
- Hong Kong media leader Jimmy Lai sentenced to 20 years in prison
- Federal Trade Commission raises concerns about accusations that Apple News suppresses right-wing content
- A look at The New York Times’ tool that tracks the “manosphere”
- Local efforts to rescue the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette stall
- Courier, left-leaning news group, expands to nine more states
- With changes to USPS, subscribers are seeing delays in newspaper deliveries
📅 Looking ahead
TikTok has begun offering an optional “Local Feed” in the U.S. The new feature, which requires users to opt in to precise location sharing, will display content such as local news, events or restaurants based on the user’s current location.
Americans are increasingly getting local news from social media. About a quarter of U.S. adults (23%) say they prefer to get their local news via social media, according to a 2024 Center survey, an increase from 15% who said this in 2018.
📊 Chart of the week
This week’s chart is from a new Center analysis of Americans’ confidence in journalists to act in the best interests of the public. Fewer than half of U.S. adults say they have a great deal (6%) or a fair amount (37%) of confidence in journalists to act in the public’s best interests, compared with more than half who say they have not too much confidence (40%) or no confidence at all (17%). Republicans are much less likely than Democrats to express confidence in journalists.
👋 That’s all for this week.
The Briefing is compiled by Pew Research Center staff, including Naomi Forman-Katz, Christopher St. Aubin, Luxuan Wang, Emily Tomasik, Joanne Haner, and Sawyer Reed. It is edited by Michael Lipka and copy edited by David Kent.
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