Digest | Week of May 5, 2025

A Refreshing Candor

In this week's edition of Laurels and Darts, Bill Grueskin celebrates the explicit transparency at the heart of Reuters's recent Pete Hegseth scoop. Relying on a number of unnamed sources, the Reuters coverage acknowledged inconsistencies across conflicting accounts and the limits of their own breaking news reporting. The result: a "level of candor [that] didn’t diminish the story’s credibility. It strengthened it."

Announcing the 2025-2026 Knight-Wallace Journalism Fellows

This year's fellowship features four new awards designed to "revitalize local news in the Great Lakes region, strengthen reporting tied to data and social science research, and support arts journalism and criticism."

Swing state journalists were trained to avoid the worst kinds of political coverage. Did it work?

In the lead-up to the 2022 midterm elections, a coalition of journalism groups trained 45 journalists in 21 “intensive” sessions over nine months. Afterwards the groups behind the Democracy SOS trainings — Solutions Journalism Network, Hearken, and Trusting News — wanted, quite reasonably, to know: Well, did any of it work? Read their new report assessing the efficacy of these interventions here.

Intro to AI for Journalists: Workshop at the National Press Club

The half-day workshop held in-person in Washington DC will cover ways journalists are already incorporating AI tools into their daily work habits as well as discussion of ethical considerations journalists should make when using this technology.