[CLICK] FOR MORE DETAILS (Wednesday, Nov. 18)

The Midterms and What Comes Next:

Maggie Haberman in Conversation with Molly Jong-Fast

The Midterms and What Next:

Maggie Haberman in Conversation with Molly Jong-Fast

Join us on Wednesday, Nov. 18, for a riveting, insightful conversation with two of today’s sharpest political journalists, Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times’ White House Correspondent Maggie Haberman and MS Now and NYTimes Opinion writer Molly Jong-Fast. They will dissect the results of the midterm elections and what they portend for a “regime change,” which is also the title of Haberman’s and co-author Jonathan Swan's new best-seller: "Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump."

[MORE] and to reserve

9/11 + 25 Years: What Have the Media Learned?

What Could We Do Better?

Three award-winning journalists who reported on the 9/11 attacks reflected on the tragedy and its lasting impact at the Silurians Oct. 14 luncheon.

Panel discussion with four men seated on stage, CNN “Breaking News” graphic in background and YouTube play icon overlay

Magazine page with multiple small author headshots and article columns, plus a larger portrait inset in the top right.

Janny Scott on PBS:

[Scott:] "You're bumbling into some stranger's life at an incredibly difficult time, you're a stranger over the phone calling out of the blue and asking them to talk in detail,..about a person who has just died."

Book cover for After Ground Zero by Mike Kelly, showing a city skyline and a man in a blue shirt with a red tie.

Mike Kelly on USA Today

[Kelly] "I wanted to take the reader inside the towers, inside the firehouses, inside the hearts and minds of the firefighters, the police officers who responded."

CNN live breaking news: smoke rises from World Trade Center towers after attack; “America under attack” banner.

Allan Dodds Frank live on CNN:

[Dodds-Frank:] "The street's filled with smoke. Like a fire, a forest fire, roaring down a canyon...Downtown Manhattan is covered with thick white ash and building material"

The panel was moderated by George Polk Award-winner and veteran New York City reporter and editor Martin Gottlieb

Pulitzer Prize-winner Kai Bird on Roy Cohn's dark journey from Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump

Every book needs a title, and Kai Bird knew his back when the pitch itself was a tough sell. “It was hard to persuade publishers in 2022 that Roy Cohn was a significant historical figure,” he said.

This sounds almost quaint, coming from the Pulitzer Prize-winning coauthor of American Prometheus, the inspiration for the movie, Oppenheimer.

Rather than an insignificant figure, Bird described Roy Cohn as the "connective tissue" linking two eras of American politics, a theme indeed captured by the bestseller's title, American Scoundrel: Roy Cohn's Dark Journey from Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump.

Bird and researcher/coauthor Susan Goldmark were in conversation with the Silurian's own David Margolick, a veteran journalist and author, who also shared his own experiences covering Roy Cohn.

[MORE]

News Media News

CNN warns Trump White House: Restore Air Force One access or face further legal action

Read Pew Center Research

Meta’s new commercial terms will allow the scraping of news sites, legal experts say

Read Nieman Labs story

Woman in a navy blazer and sunglasses standing outdoors in front of a white wall.

Katie Zacharia Is Out After 5 Days as White House Press Secretary

Read NYT Story [paywall]

Recent Guests/Speakers

Kai Bird & Suan Goldmark

Kai Bird and Susan Goldmark on Roy Cohn's dark path from Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump

Kai Bird & Suan Goldmark

Chuck Scarborough

Chuck Scarborough, 2026 Lifetime Achievement Award

Chuck Scarborough

Graydon Carter

Graydon Carter chats and laughs (a lot), with Ken Auletta

Graydon Carter

Kai Bird & Suan Goldmark

Kai Bird and Susan Goldmark on Roy Cohn's dark path from Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump

Kai Bird & Suan Goldmark

Chuck Scarborough

Chuck Scarborough, 2026 Lifetime Achievement Award

Chuck Scarborough

[More] Silurians Speaker/Event Videos

Journalism and AI

Love it or fear it, Artificial Intelligence is rapidly being integrated in newsrooms around the world. Here you will find links to articles, clips and videos that will be updated from time to time to help better understand this accelerating trend.

Tech Companies’ Staff Knew Their AI Tools Posed ‘Existential Threat’ to Publishers

Read WSJ Story [paywall]

New York Times tests out AI-generated search summaries

Read Semafor Story

New York Times journalism costs $2bn a year. AI reads it for nothing

Read PPC Land Story

New York Post launches "Hamilton" AI chatbot

Read Axios Story

A new book looks at how AI is rewiring the newsroom, for better and worse

Read Nieman Lab Story

Google Was a Lifeline for Publishers. Now Some Are Thinking of Cutting It Off.

Read WSJ story [paywall]

Reuters Editor Warns AI Poses ‘Existential’ Threat to Journalism

Read Reuters Story

The next AI debate is unfolding within the news organization itself

Read Story in Editor & Publisher

News outlets urge a judge to sanction OpenAI in a high-stakes AI copyright fight

Read AP Story

How AI Is Changing Journalism and Media in 2026 — What Nobody Is Telling You

Read Medium Story

Nearly 400 local newspapers sue OpenAI, Microsoft over alleged copyright theft

Read NJ Globe Story

How to Run a News Company in the Age of Polarization and A.I. Slop

Read NYTimes Story [paywall]

NY Times publisher warns A.I. companies are violating settled law and urges news organizations to stand up for their rights>

A.G. Sulzberger: A.I companies "are consolidating their outsize control over our data and our attention. At the same time, they are failing to embrace a core responsibility that comes with this power — to ensure the public has access to trustworthy news and information."

Read Sulzberger Comments [paywall]

Future Newsrooms Study 2026: A global benchmark of how newsrooms are changing, what they are prioritising and where they are going next

Future Newsrooms Study 2026 examines how newsrooms are shaping their editorial strategy and positioning themselves for the future in response to shifts in audience behaviour and rapid technological developments.

Read FT Strategies Report

Exclusive: McClathcy Newspaper executives tell journalists to accept AI or face ruin

The company behind some of the country’s largest local newspaper brands — including the Miami Herald, The Kansas City Star and The Sacramento Bee—touted a flood of AI-generated content as a key to solving their business woesand pleaded with skeptical journalists to get on board

Read in SAN [limited paywall]

Who’s suing AI and who’s signing: CNN latest to sue Perplexity

Updated list (as of May 29, 2026) of news outlets suing or signing AI firms: New York Times and Chicago Tribune sue Perplexity and Google signs non-licensing AI deals.

Read Press Gazette Article

EXTRA! EXTRA! AI Just Wrote This Headline.

Asked for a humorous headline about artificial intelligence and journalism. ChatGPT suggested the above.AI has a sense of humor. Just how smart is it?

Read Oxford Free Press Story

Fighting the Machine

Journalists across the United States are fighting for contracts that address AI use: “We don’t want it to be done in our name, literally.

Read Columbia Journalism Review

Where Does Publishing’s A.I. Problem Leave Authors and Readers?

Major publishing houses risk unwittingly putting out books generated with A.I. tools. Authors and readers are frustrated, nervous and grasping for solutions.

Read NY Times Story [paywall]

"Tested ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude on the Iran war — and one AI fed fake news."

To stress-test three of the leading models — Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini — Tom's Guide designed seven prompts centered on a rapidly evolving, high-stakes scenario: the March 2026 US-Israeli strikes on Iran.

Read Tom's Guide Review

AI company set out to fix news deserts. Instead, it copied local journalists’ work

Nota shut down its news sites after Axios and Poynter found dozens of plagiarized quotes, phrases and photos

Read Poynter Story

An AI Upheaval Is Coming for Media. This Journalist Is Already All In.

A Fortune editor has cranked out more than 600 stories using the technology; ‘this won’t be seen as some people’s idea of journalism’

Read WSJ Story [paywall]

Can AI Save Local News?

The Philadelphia Inquirer hadn’t written much about suburbs like Lower Merion, Pa., and Cherry Hill, N.J. for years. Now it is revisiting those communities—with an assist from AI.

Read WSJ Stroy [paywall]

News Corp, Meta in AI Content Licensing Deal Worth Up to $50 Million a Year

The "size of the Meta deal reflects the increasing value technology companies are placing on the news content that has helped train their AI models."

Read WSJ story [paywall]

Growing more complex by the day: How should journalists govern use of AI in their products?

The news industry is hurtling toward a future where artificial intelligence plays a major role — grappling with questions about how much the technology is used, what consumers should be told about it, whether anything can be done for the journalists who will be left behind.

Read AP Analysis

A.I. Is Giving You a Personalized Internet, but You Have No Say in It

The relentless addition of artificial intelligence in popular apps raises questions about what’s at stake. The answer: the future of the internet and its lifeblood, digital advertising.

Read NY Times Story [paywall]

Opinon: As the AI arms race ramps up, we can’t let big tech control access to information

The AI arms race involves expansive, profit-driven information appropriation. Tech giants scrape data on an industrial scale—books, journalism, academic papers, art, music— often without consent, compensation or transparency

Read Opion in SF Chronicle

Inside an AI start-up’s plan to scan and dispose of millions of books

Court filings reveal how AI companies raced to obtain more books to feed chatbots, including by buying, scanning and disposing of millions of titles.

Read WashiPost Story [paywall]

Publishers prepare to be “squeezed” by AI and creators in 2026

Newsrooms will prioritize on-the-ground reporting, YouTube, and something called “liquid content” this year, according to a global survey of news executives.

Read Neiman Labs Article

Hearst’s Tim O’Rourke on the future of AI in journalism

For Tim O’Rourke, VP of Editorial Innovation and AI Strategy at Hearst Newspapers, challenge isn’t using AI, it’s integrating it responsibly so it enhances journalism rather than replaces it.

Read interview on Storybench

How will AI reshape the news in 2026? Forecasts by 17 experts from around the world

As the news industry enters a crucial year, here are the thoughts of experts from BBC, WSJ, Scroll, NPO, SZ, Semafor, the New York Times and other newsrooms

Read Reuters Institute Story

Opinion: news outlets that got AI right in 2025 — and the ones that got it very, very wrong

“Move fast and break things” versus “seek truth and minimize harm” has always been an easy choice in journalism...To survive, newsrooms have to experiment, take risks and push boundaries — but do it without breaking things that separate us from the slop: humanity and trust."

Read Poynter Institute Opinion

The Architects of AI Are TIME’s 2025 Person of the Year

The story of how AI changed our world in 2025, in new and exciting and sometimes frightening ways. The story of how tech titans grabbed the wheel of history,reshaping the information landscape, the climate, and our livelihoods.

Read Story in Time

Report: Washington Post’s AI-generated podcasts rife with errors, fictional quotes

The Washington Post’s top standards editor Thursday decried “frustrating” errors in its new AI-generated personalized podcasts, whose launch has been met with distress by its journalists.

Read Semafor Story

New York Times sues Perplexity AI for 'illegal' copying of content

Times lawsuit joins more than 40 cases filed by media outlets around the country, including The Chicago Tribune, Dow Jones, owner of The Wall Street Journal, The New York Post.

Read Reuters Story

Meta strikes multiple AI deals with news publishers

Meta announced it has struck AI agreements with news publishers, including USA Today, People, CNN, Fox News, The Daily Caller, Washington Examiner and Le Monde,

Read CNBC Story

The deepfake dilemma: When you can’t trust your eyes

From political ads to viral clips, AI-altered videos are eroding media trust — and current detection tools aren’t keeping up

Read Story in E&P

The Company Quietly Funneling Paywalled Articles to AI Developers

“You shouldn’t have put your content on the internet if you didn’t want it to be on the internet,” Common Crawl’s executive director says.

Read story in The Atlantic [paywall]

A.I. Sweeps Through Newsrooms, but Is It a Journalist or a Tool?

Traditional news organizations increasingly use tools from companies like OpenAI and Google to streamline work that used to take hours. many journalists have also been left to wonder: Will A.I. replace journalism jobs — or, rather, which jobs?

Read NY Times Story [paywall]

NAB Survey:Americans Want AI Guardrails to Protect Local Journalism

An overwhelming 77% support Congress passing a law that would make it illegal for AI to steal or reproduce journalism and local news stories that are published online without permission or compensation.

Read National Assoc. of Broadcasters Survey

Can AI marketplaces save publishing’s future?

Platforms like TollBit, ProRata, Cloudflare and Perplexity are testing models to pay for content before ad dollars vanish

Read Editor & Publisher Article

BBC study shows AI misrepresent news content 45% of the time

The distortions and erros "endangers public trust. When people don’t know what to trust, they end up trusting nothing at all, and that can deter democratic participation."

Read BBC story

Most journalists use AI; few newsrooms have policies

Reuters Foundation recommends 3 steps:

Step #1: Identify your AI tools

Step #2: Map the risks and solutions

Step #3: Integrate AI guidelines into your editorial policies.

Read E&P Article

Start spreading the news: AI has a place in media

Generative AI’s true value emerges when matched to newsroom needs — from community news curation to public meeting transcripts and AI-powered newsletter expansion

Read E&P Article

Opinion: AI’s Copyright War Could Be Its Undoing. Only the US Can End It.

The battle over how AI is built — and who gets paid along the way — must be resolved to benefit both art and technology.

Read Bloomgberg Opinion [paywall]

Reddit Is Winning the AI Game

Since the site struck licensing deals with Google and OpenAI, its traffic—and its importance to legacy media outlets—has surged.

Read Article in CJR

News publishers split on AI: E&P survey reveals both promise and peril

Debates continue to swirl around when and how to leverage AI tools, which tools best support the workflow, how codes of ethics should apply, and when to be transparent about AI usage.

Read Editor & Publisher Article

Publishers with AI licensing deals have seven times the clickthrough rate. But deals leave small outlets out in the cold.

AI gatekeepers’ discretionary deal-making, which currently largely locks out all but large, premium, English-language titles, will be a key determinant of success as AI adoption and diffusion continues to accelerate.

Read Story in Press Gazette

Relatively few Americans are getting news from AI chatbots like ChatGPT

While use of AI Chatbots is growing, only about one-in-ten U.S. adults say they get news often (2%) or sometimes (7%) from AI chatbots like ChatGPT or Gemini.

Read Pew Research Study

AI -killing-the-Web: The-Economist

AI is killing the web. Can anything save it?

Read Story in The Economist [paywall]

Judge approves $1.5 billion settlement over Anthropic's alleged use of pirated books

A federal judge on Thursday approved a $1.5 billion settlement between artificial intelligence company Anthropic and authors who allege nearly half a million books had been illegally pirated to train chatbots

Read Story on CBS

The Economist's AI Game Plan

How does a 182-year-old global magazine stay ahead in the age of generative AI? Podcast with Senior Editor for AI Initiatives at The Economist.

Podcast on Newsroom Robots (subscription optional)

OpenAI admits AI hallucinations are mathematically inevitable, not just engineering flaws

In a landmark study, OpenAI researchers reveal that large language models will always produce plausible but false outputs, even with perfect data, due to fundamental statistical and computational limits.

Read Report in Computerworld

Rolling Stone Publisher Sues Google Over AI Summaries

Penske Media alleges artificial-intelligence-generated answers steal its content and have reduced traffic and revenue for its sites

Read WSJ article [paywall]

The AI Doomers Are Losing the Argument

As AI advances and the incentives to release products grow, safety research on superintelligence is playing catch-up.

"Weekend Essay on Bloomberg [paywall]

A Complete List of Publishers and Their AI Licensing Deals (as of Sept. 1, 2025)

Despite lawsuits and charges of intellectual theft, many publications attempted to adapt to this change through striking licensing deals with AI firms.

Read FutureWeek Story

Existential crisis: how Google's shift to AI has upended the online news model

Google has always felt like it would always be there for publishers. Now the one constant in digital publishing is undergoing a transformation that may completely change the landscape.

Read The Guardian Story

Why The Baltimore Times sees AI as a friend, not a threat

At a time when many newsrooms fear artificial intelligence, The Baltimore Times is leaning in.

Listen to Keep It Local podcast

Gender gap in who uses AI. Recent study finds usage tilts heavily toward men.

Authors of a recent study looked at generative AI adoption globally and found a pronounced gap in men's and women's usage of AI, both professionally and in everyday life.

Read story in WS Journal [paywall]

I Wanted a Team of Rivals to Give Me Advice. So I Turned to AI.

By creating a group of virtual experts, each with a unique personality and specialty, I got more feedback than I ever could in real life. AI can assemble a virtual team of experts to provide diverse perspectives on problems, helping users overcome self-doubt.

Read story in WS Journal [paywall]

Can AI help local journalists cover 169 towns? A Connecticut out is working to find out

In Connecticut, where news is often made in municipal meetings, the nonprofit Connecticut Mirror beat reporters can't make it to all 169 different towns,The outlet is exploring whether AI tools can generate leads and get material from those meetings to reporters.

Read Poynter Report

AI startup Perplexity Is Launching a New Revenue-Share Model for news articles used in its search results.

Perplexity says it expects to pay publishers from a $42.5 million revenue pool initially, and to increase that amount over time, The money will be distributed when its AI assistant or search engine uses a news article to fulfill a task or answer a search request.

Read story in WS Journal paywall

SHORT VIDEO: AI news videos blur line between real and fake reports

7-minute video from NBC News shows how hyper-realistic AI-generated news videos are flooding social media, making it harder to tell real reports from fakes. Experts warn the technology spreading misinformation before it's verified, raising new concerns about trust in what we see online.

CLICK to view video

SHORT VIDEO: How the New York Times uses AI in its investigations | AI and the Future of News 2025

In this 5-minute video, Dylan Freedman, a New York Times Machine Learning Engineer and Journalist, show how the newspaper is using AI tools to help in investigative reporting research. Freedman appeared in conjunction with the Reuters Institute.

CLICK to view video

AI-powered search tools threaten the survival of the online news industry

With AI-powered tools now summarising articles directly within search results, users are less inclined to visit the original news sources, threatening both advertising revenue and subscription-based models that publishers rely on for survival.

Read story on TechEDT

The good, the bad, and the completely made-up: Newsrooms on wrestling accurate answers out of AI

For many, AI and journalism remain an unholy marriage. Can a machine really atomize the entire journalistic process down into database-friendly chunks and vectors? What gets lost in the process of summarization?

Read Nieman Lab Study

Amazon to Pay New York Times at Least $20 Million a Year in AI Deal

Terms of the multiyear deal, which haven't previously been disclosed, offer a window into how publishers and AI companies are valuing news content in midst of seismic changes in how consumers seek information online. The annual payment amounts to nearly 1% of the Times's 2024 revenue.

Read WSJ Story paywall

[CLICK] Journalism & AI Archive

81st Annual Silurians Awards Honor Excellence in Journalism in Tri-State Area

Fifteen categories covering print, broadcast and online news are recognized.

By Michael S. Serrill

“They haven’t given us food, they haven’t given us medicine. We’re cold. There are people who’ve been here for 10, 15 days. We’re just waiting.”

Silurians Press Club brochure on a table for the 81st Annual Excellence in Journalism Awards Dinner

CLICK to View Video of Awards Dinner

That’s a quote from an inmate held last summer in the detention center for captured immigrants at 26 Federal Plaza in Manhattan. He was speaking on one of two videos smuggled out of the center and obtained by The City Reporter, the probing online news outlet, (formerly The City), which provides some of the best reporting on every municipal topic.

[MORE] FOR AWARDS DETAILS & WINNERS

Whether you’re publishing a book, article, Substack, stepping back into the classroom, or taking on new challenges, share your recent endeavors with your fellow Silurians.

Barry Newman

At The Wall Street Journal, Barry Newman, like every Silurian, reported stories that didn’t make the paper. His style was “novelistic,” but he never made anything up—until now. What else could Newman do with the stories he never wrote? He wrote them.

Book Page

Helen Jonsen

This Kaleidoscope Career: Empowering Women to Build Unconventional Careers and Redefine Success, published by De Gruyter Brill — the framework for every woman ready to find her throughline and own boldly whatever comes next. Real women. Real Stories. Released Sept. 2026.

My website

Mike Kelly

My latest book, "After Ground Zero: Everyday Americans and the Unhealed Scars of 9/11," will be published August. 20 by Bloomsbury. The book traces the lives of two dozen ordinary people in the aftermath of America's deadliest terrorist attack.

My website

CLICK HERE and fill out the Silurians Press Club Brag Sheet