☀️ Happy Thursday! The Briefing is your guide to the world of news and information. Sign up here!
In today’s email:
- Featured story: Hungary election result signals changes to media landscape
- New from Pew Research Center: Key facts about local news
- In other news: NPR gets $113 million from two donors
- Looking ahead: The Economist begins to showcase its journalists
- Chart of the week: Growing share of Americans think their local news outlets aren’t doing well financially
🔥 Featured story
After unseating Viktor Orbán as Hungary’s prime minister with an election victory this week, Péter Magyar vowed to suspend the country’s state-run media as part of wider anti-corruption efforts.
Orbán’s right-wing Fidesz party had taken control of much of the media and messaging during his 16 years in power. In a recent appearance on a state-run radio station, Magyar said that “every Hungarian deserves a public media that broadcasts the truth.”
In a 2024 survey on views of press freedom around the world, 24% of Hungarians said the media were completely free to report the news in their country, while 38% said they were somewhat free and 37% said they were not very or not at all free. Meanwhile, an overwhelming majority said that it is very (67%) or somewhat (25%) important that the media are able to report the news without state or government censorship in Hungary.
🚨 New from Pew Research Center
This week, we released a new fact sheet from the Pew-Knight Initiative looking at Americans’ experiences with local news.
Among the key findings:
- Attention to local news has declined overall since 2016, mirroring trends in attention to national news.
- The vast majority of Americans (88%) say they have not paid or given money to a local news source in the past year.
- While 80% of U.S. adults say that local news outlets are at least somewhat important to the well-being of their local community, the share who say they are extremely or very important declined from 44% in 2024 to 34% in 2025.
📌 In other news
- NPR gets $113 million from two donors
- Pittsburgh Post-Gazette will not shut down after being acquired by nonprofit owner of Baltimore Banner
- Judge dismisses Trump’s defamation lawsuit against The Wall Street Journal over Epstein letter
- BBC plans to cut up to 2,000 jobs
- TMZ launches D.C. bureau to cover politicians
- Mediaite suspends founding editor after Status uncovers fabricated reporting
- Spanish-language TV outlet Telemundo rises in popularity
- Journalist Ahmed Shihab-Eldin detained in Kuwait after sharing Iran war videos
- New startup Objection aims to use AI to verify news stories
📅 Looking ahead
For more than a century, journalists for The Economist have not had their names published with their work, keeping their identities a mystery to their audience. But the London-based magazine is starting to change, and is planning to roll out videos featuring its writers conducting interviews and discussing policy.
The shift seems to reflect some of the modern expectations people have for news providers. For example, a large majority of Americans (82%) say it is important that the people they get news from display “authenticity” in their work, according to a 2025 Center survey of U.S. adults. And while 70% say it is extremely or very important that the people they get news from have deep knowledge of the topics they cover, far fewer (31%) say it is as important for them to be employed by a news organization.
📊 Chart of the week
This week’s chart comes from the new Pew-Knight Initiative fact sheet on local news.
A majority of U.S. adults (57%) think their local news outlets are doing well financially, but this is down from the 71% who said the same in 2018. An increasing share say these outlets are not doing well financially – 39% in 2025, up from 24% who said the same in 2018.
👋 That’s all for this week.
The Briefing is compiled by Pew Research Center staff, including Naomi Forman-Katz, Christopher St. Aubin, Joanne Haner, and Sawyer Reed. It is edited by Michael Lipka and copy edited by David Kent.
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