Brier Dudley is editor of The Seattle Times Save the Free Press public service initiative, which reports on the local journalism crisis and advocates for solutions. Dudley has been with the Times since 1998 and was a member of its editorial board for five years. He spent 14 years covering Microsoft and the technology industry, including nine years writing a tech column, and has won numerous regional and national journalism awards.
Articles by or about Brier Dudley
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If they were stealing jewels or pirating movies, AI companies might be prosecuted. But they face few consequences for ripping off news publishers, using copyrighted work and rarely providing even attribution. This pilferage is documented by an “AI news audit” released Monday by Canadian researchers at McGill University in Montreal. It found AI models to be quite knowledgeable about current news stories. But in queries involving web searches, they provided no source attribution in 82%...
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A new report, commissioned by funders of local news, offers provocative suggestions for saving the industry. It includes some sharp observations. They should be valuable to the national philanthropies, allied as a group called Press Forward, that in 2023 pledged more than $500 million to help save local journalism. The more research the better, because saving local news is a big, complicated problem. But I suggest Press Forward and other donors don’t rely too much...
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New Mexico is poised to become the latest state to save local newsroom jobs through policies approved by its Legislature. The Land of Enchantment offers another model for states that believe local journalism is essential to their civic health and want to help their news industries survive and grow. While the vast majority of Americans trust and appreciate local news, only a few states so far have enacted tax credits and other measures to help news...
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It took a few weeks but a Christmas miracle is coming true near the Canadian border, in Washington’s Whatcom County. The Northern Light, a weekly newspaper serving more than 10,000 households in Blaine and Birch Bay, was saved by a remarkably generous gift over the holidays. It was about to close until the family owners decided, after a last-minute conversation, to donate their business to a fledgling nonprofit newspaper operator. Publication paused briefly but resumes...
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Saving local journalism isn’t always straightforward, as a turnabout in Oregon demonstrates. Two newspapers in Linn County just about failed after they were sold to a former employee. But veteran owners and community support jolted them back to life this month. I wrote in November that selling local newspapers to employees should be an option for owners who might otherwise shut them down or sell to parsimonious chains. The goal is to preserve independent newspapers, which...
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Publisher Les Zaitz spent three years trying to save his pride and joy. His Malheur Enterprise weekly newspaper on Oregon’s eastern border had an acclaimed reputation for hard-hitting investigative reporting. To keep it open, Zaitz was willing to make a deal. He even offered to train his successor to smooth the transition. Eventually, his patience ran out. Unable to lure a new owner to rural Malheur County, Zaitz took the excruciating step of closing The...
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It’s not as hilarious as “The Office” but the spinoff series “The Paper” often hits its mark, painfully. That was my take after watching several episodes of the new show, debuting Thursday on NBCUniversal’s Peacock, about a struggling Midwest newspaper. Like “The Office,” it’s a deadpan workplace documentary. The setup is that Dunder Mifflin, the setting of “The Office,” was sold to a corporation that owns the fictional Toledo Truth Teller newspaper. The newspaper’s skeleton...
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Further evidence that we’re living in a bizarro world, where wrong is right and down is up, came in a recent Pew Research Center survey. It found a shockingly large number of Americans don’t strongly believe journalists should hold public figures accountable, by calling out false and misleading information. Did they skip civics and history lessons? Are people so fatigued by awful national and global news, they don’t care anymore? Or maybe this is just...
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On election nights, there should be electricity in a newsroom — and pizza bought by the editor. Yet on the evening of Aug. 5, the night of a busy primary in Skamania County, the lights were out at the county’s only local newspaper. The Skamania County Pioneer’s storefront office, a few blocks from the courthouse in Stevenson, is now a bookstore. There are old papers in back, and the store collects subscription payments. But the...
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Local newspapers have an intriguing new ally in their quest to get paid by AI firms hoovering their stories and putting their future at risk. Matthew Prince, CEO of San Francisco-based Cloudflare, believes his company has a tool that may solve this dilemma for both news publishers and tech firms. Prince has skin in the game beyond Cloudflare. He and his wife, Tatiana, own The Park Record, an award-winning newspaper in his hometown of Park...
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Cuts to Oregon’s newspaper industry continue this month with the closure of two newspapers east of Portland. Cuts to Oregon’s newspaper industry continue this month with the closure of two newspapers east of Portland. I wonder if Oregon legislators regret not passing Senate Bill 686 in June. The legislation would have required tech giants profiting from news to pay $122 million a year to local news outlets, with payments allocated based on the number of journalists...
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Public broadcasters are glued to their screens this week, watching Congress move toward eliminating their funding as requested by President Donald Trump. “I actually have a link to the Senate floor so I usually have that on the background,” Cara Williams Fry, general manager of Pullman-based Northwest Public Broadcasting, told me on Tuesday. Clawing back the $1.1 billion already promised to public broadcasters will have a ripple effect across the local news industry. It does...
policy |
An Oregon policy that could have created a model for saving local journalism died in Legislature, amid another round of newsroom layoffs in the state. An Oregon proposal that would have saved newsroom jobs and revived its ailing local-news industry died on Tuesday. Oregon was poised to set a precedent and become the first state requiring tech giants to fairly compensate publishers for the value local news ads to their online platforms. But a slim majority...
Projects Brier Dudley has worked on.