Editor’s note: API’s senior vice president, Samantha Ragland, has been named interim executive director of the organization while our board of trustees conducts a national search to replace CEO Michael Bolden. Read more here. 

Iced out

Local journalists who in the past might have operated in conflict situations with a presumption of safety can no longer do so, First Amendment experts told Kelly Kimball in an article for Poynter.

That means newsrooms need safety training that was previously “not on the radar” of local journalists, Bruce Shapiro, executive director of the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma, told Kimball.

Investigative reporter Lexis-Olivier Ray experienced this when covering ICE protests for L.A. Taco, a local news organization profiled in The Washington Post last week. During the protests, law enforcement shot at him and other journalists with pepper balls, Ray told Yvonne Condes, saying “there was a complete disregard that we were press.”

In New York, officers threatened the press and took photos of their press credentials “in what could only be described as an intimidation tactic,” Dean Moses wrote for amNewYork.

This is all part of a larger pattern in which reporters covering ICE are increasingly under attack, writes Caitlin Vogus for the Freedom of the Press Foundation. The latest, she notes, is the Trump administration’s threat against CNN for reporting on an app called ICEBlock that alerts people when ICE agents are in their area.

  • Related: The fight for a free press in the U.S. is growing urgent (Editor & Publisher)

News In Focus
Headlines, resources and events aligned with API’s four areas of focus.

Civic Discourse & Democracy

>> An elderly lawmaker’s staff keeps walking back things she tells reporters. Should they keep quoting her? (Politico)

The difficulty of covering politicians who say things that their staffers need to later clarify or pull back is illustrated in the case of Eleanor Holmes Norton, the longtime DC Delegate to Congress, writes Michael Schaffer. The dilemma is “an ongoing private conversation among reporters,” Schaffer writes, but there is no consensus on how to handle it. “Every reporter has a story about this,” said former CNN producer Kristin Wilson, who concludes that “we have pulled punches.”

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Culture & Inclusion

>> New from API: Experiments don’t always go according to plan. Here’s how to keep projects on track. (Better News) 

Small experiments can be leveraged into big changes for newsrooms. Yet sometimes the unpredictable can throw you off course. There are ways to ensure that those unforeseen changes — a key personnel departure, for example — don’t knock you off track. Four news leaders who’ve been through such change offer ways to design experiments that are flexible enough to adapt to whatever gets thrown your way.

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Community Engagement & Trust

>> Thousands saw a story that two girls were rescued from a tree in the Texas flood. It was fake. (Poynter)

A local news organization’s now-retracted story about how two girls had been found alive in a tree near the town of Comfort, Texas after the state’s devastating floods is a cautionary tale about the need for vigilance during emotionally charged news events, write Loreben Tuquero and Angela Fu. “Like everyone, we wanted this story to be true, but it’s a classic tale of misinformation that consumes all of us during a natural disaster,” Louis Amestoy, editor of The Kerr County Lead, wrote in his retraction note.

>> API in the News: Social influencers can bridge the gap between journalism, local audiences (INMA)

API’s Sam Ragland spoke with Amalie Nash of INMA about our efforts to help newsrooms with influencer collaborations. One important takeaway from this work, she said, is that there is no “one size fits all” approach. A national or international newsroom might approach influencer partnerships as an audience reach play, for example, while a local news outlet might see them as a way to connect and build trust with the community.

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Revenue & Resilience

>> Harvard Business Review ‘bets big’ on $700 a year subscription tier (Press Gazette)

The Harvard Business Review is betting that top executives will pay a premium for a new subscription product specifically designed for the C-suite. The offering includes a weekly newsletter, a “skills masterclass,” live and virtual events and a “playbook” feature that the project’s leader, Adi Ignatius, sees as a key attraction. “People just like to kind of watch the game tape and see how others have handled things,” he told Charlotte Tobitt.

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What else you need to know

🧐 Times Mamdani article using hacked documents from white supremacist draws outcry (CJR)

🧟 Inside the media’s traffic apocalypse (New York Magazine)

✒️ Here’s what 300+ publications pay freelancers (Freelancing with Tim)

✂️ Bloomberg editor-in-chief John Micklethwait announced a major newsroom reorganization/cuts (Semafor’s Max Tani on X)