Joshua Benton
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joshuabenton.com
Joshua Benton
@joshuabenton.com
12K followers 2.5K following 700 posts
21st-century media and the 19th-c American South. Founded and ran @niemanlab.org at @harvard.edu for 12 yrs; now the senior writer there. Cajun, dad of two, husband of one. Journalist with a history problem. Also: @theatlantic.com, @washingtonpost.com, etc
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joshuabenton.com
The strangest thing to me about this piece — on detecting cheating-via-AI — is its central conceit that writing about a 1800 slave rebellion "from a Marxist perspective" is some wild, nutty idea that could only originate in ChatGPT

www.huffpost.com/entry/histor...
November 25, 2025 at 9:20 PM
joshuabenton.com
If any of you wanted to spend $200 to buy me Steve Albini’s screenprint of Jay Ryan’s “Let’s Eat Ice Cream and Dismantle White Supremacy” (2019), I promise I wouldn’t be mad

www.stevealbiniscloset.com/stuff/p/jay-...
October 10, 2025 at 8:40 PM
joshuabenton.com
June 11: GOP Sen. Marsha Blackburn introduces a bill to defund NPR and PBS because of their "left-wing propaganda" and "radical leftist gender ideology."

October 7: The news industry's main trade group gives Blackburn its "Support Journalism Champion Award."

Just shameless.
October 9, 2025 at 12:29 PM
joshuabenton.com
With this document just filed with the SEC, 140 years of control (and 99 years of ownership) of @dallasnews.com by the Dealey-Decherd-Moroney family has come to an end.

Family patriarch Robert Decherd "no longer beneficially owns any shares."

investor.dallasnewscorp.com/static-files...
September 25, 2025 at 5:57 PM
joshuabenton.com
This is that rare case of a headline that would benefit from a hashtag symbol to clarify #MeToo ≠ "me too"
September 23, 2025 at 11:34 AM
joshuabenton.com
tired: "news avoiders"

wired: “news minimalists"
Affective polarization and political (dis)trust: Investigating their interconnection and the moderating role of (social) media use Annelien Van Remoortere iD' and Rens Vliegenthart iD Wageningen University and Research, The Netherlands Abstract This article investigates the interplay between political trust and affective polarization during the 2023 Dutch parliamentary elections and how this interplay is moderated by (social) media use. We hypothesize a reciprocal relationship, where trust influences affective polarization and vice versa. This interaction may intensify in election campaigns. Using a cross-lagged panel model on a panel wave survey conducted during the 2023 Dutch parliamentary election campaign, we analyze trust and polarization dynamics across five distinct media user types, including quality media users, social media users, and news minimalists. Findings indicate that higher political trust leads to lower affective polarization; however, polarization does not significantly impact trust. Importantly, quality media users show no connection between trust and polarization. In contrast, social media users exhibit less stable levels of political trust, highlighting the potential volatility of trust among this group during campaigns. Our findings emphasize media's moderating role in shaping political attitudes.
September 9, 2025 at 7:26 PM
joshuabenton.com
I just want to get this on the record:

The large half-circle windows in the "Toledo Truth-Teller" newsroom in Peacock's "The Paper" are 100% a reference to the identical windows in the @toledonews.bsky.social newsroom, on the 3rd floor of the Toledo Blade Building.
September 4, 2025 at 8:38 PM
joshuabenton.com
What a dumb framing of a federal court declaring Trump's obviously illegal tariffs illegal — positioning *Trump* as the source of stability and obeying the law as the agent of chaos that could screw things up!

www.axios.com/2025/08/29/t...
August 29, 2025 at 10:16 PM
joshuabenton.com
Meanwhile, @dallasnews.com is sticking to the argument that if Decherd doesn't want to sell, a sale is impossible, so Alden will just need to find another corpse to scavenge.

investor.dallasnewscorp.com/node/15141/h...
August 19, 2025 at 1:21 PM
joshuabenton.com
Alden Global Capital has raised its bid for @dallasnews.com by another buck — now $18.50/share vs. Hearst's $15.

But again, as long as Robert Decherd says no — and I don't see him changing his mind — the DMN should be saved from the Alden guillotine.

www.sec.gov/Archives/edg...
August 19, 2025 at 1:21 PM
joshuabenton.com
By “jumping” he meant “riding across the roofs of,” by “jet-powered” he meant “could be made to emit sparks,” and by “riding” he meant “falling off of.”

(Story here by future Pulitzer winner Madeleine Blais.)
August 18, 2025 at 11:49 AM
joshuabenton.com
First media coverage of Penn & Teller (then performing as 2/3 of the “Asparagus Valley Cultural Society”), November 1975.

The stunt: Penn jumping over five 1976 Volkswagen Rabbits on a jet-powered unicycle named the Asparajet.
August 18, 2025 at 11:49 AM
joshuabenton.com
GPT-5 is so amazing it can make 52.8 higher than 69.1 on a bar chart

It can even make 69.1 and 30.8 THE SAME SIZE
August 7, 2025 at 5:08 PM
joshuabenton.com
I kept waiting for the *wink* of an "of course, we all know this is bullshit" graf — the absolute minimum required in a story like this — but nope, it's just 800 words of gullibility.

They led their morning newsletter with this!

www.dallasnews.com/business/202...
July 31, 2025 at 2:20 PM
joshuabenton.com
If you call me to talk about Alden Global Capital, I will not hold back.

www.dallasobserver.com/news/vulture...
Just two weeks ago, things were looking somewhat, maybe, more positive for the News as word broke that Hearst, the media company with a giant footprint in Texas as owner of the Austin American-Statesman, Houston Chronicle, San Antonio ExpressNews and Beaumont Enterprise, among others, was offering $14 per share for Dallas News Corp. (Full disclosure: I worked for the San Antonio paper many, many years ago, and my wife is a former copy editor for the Morning News.) The Morning News wrote that Hearst's offer "was 319% more than the July 9 closing price of $4.39. That puts the value of the company, Texas' oldest continually operating company, at $74.9 million." Then word broke Thursday that Alden, owner of The Chicago Tribune, Boston Herald and San Jose Mercury News, among many others, was offering $16.50 per share, or "roughly $88 million," according to The New York Times. We spoke with Joshua Benton, founder and former director of the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard and a former News reporter, about the competition and who we should root for. It wasn't even close. Alden Global Capital's "entire business model is wrecking newspapers and just sucking the blood out of them till they die," he said. Whoa, don't hold back, Josh.
July 23, 2025 at 10:53 PM
joshuabenton.com
It’s extra hurtful when your own damned website doesn’t think you’re a human.
July 16, 2025 at 2:54 PM
joshuabenton.com
Any “senior” journalist who — in 2025! — still thinks about newsroom decisionmaking in terms of “Hey, if people are criticizing a story, it must have been the right to publish it!” either has learned nothing from the past decade, has brain worms, or both.

www.semafor.com/article/07/0...
Despite some public criticism and internal grumbling, the paper's leadership has continued to back the piece. One person familiar with the editorial process noted that the Times' senior editors were aligned on whether to publish the piece, which was read and greenlit by multiple top editors before its publication. Others on staff that spoke with Semafor on the condition of anonymity said the reaction to the piece showed why it was important to tackle it. "The fact that this story engendered all the conversation and debate that it has feels like all the evidence you need that this was a legit line of reporting," one senior reporter told Semafor.
July 7, 2025 at 2:01 PM
joshuabenton.com
Anyone worried about AI achieving sentience and self-awareness should be relieved it won’t happen in The Browser Company's Dia anytime soon
July 2, 2025 at 2:44 PM
joshuabenton.com
How the zone of active conflicts across Africa grew between Q1 2021 to Q4 2024

www.maplecroft.com/products-and...
June 26, 2025 at 12:37 PM
joshuabenton.com
It’s nice that geese decided to announce their plans to humans this year — no surprise gaggles

pitchfork.com/news/geese-a...
Geese Announce North American Tour
June 24, 2025 at 11:42 AM
joshuabenton.com
There are now only 3 OpenAI models in the 20 most used at @openrouter.bsky.social — and they’re only at Nos. 11, 13, and 19.

Google has 8 (including Nos. 1, 3, 7, 8, 9)
Anthropic has 2 (at Nos. 2 and 5)
DeepSeek has 4 (incl. Nos. 4, 6, and 10)
Mistral 1 (No. 12)
Meta 1 (No. 17)
xAI 1 (No. 18)
June 18, 2025 at 8:06 PM
joshuabenton.com
We all know that @newyorker.com only did a big story on the lives on Hollywood intimacy coordinators so they could blow past their annual dieresis quota early in the year

(62 ö’s in there!)

www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...
How I Learned to Become an Intimacy Coördinator At a sex-choreography workshop, a writer learned about Instant Chemistry exercises, penis pouches, and nudity riders to train for Hollywood’s most controversial job. By Jennifer Wilson June 9, 2025
June 9, 2025 at 12:33 PM
joshuabenton.com
As I confirmed when I ran the data through Numbers.
June 7, 2025 at 10:38 PM
joshuabenton.com
I regret to say only Grok 3 got the data right.
June 7, 2025 at 10:38 PM
joshuabenton.com
Next was ChatGPT 4o. Given the same data, it determined that every American public radio station is at 88.1, 88.3, or 88.7 — except for one lone 88.9 and one weirdo over at 107.7.

Asked twice to try again, it presented the same made-up date each time. The bars were thicker the third time, though.
June 7, 2025 at 10:38 PM