This is a dangerous season for journalism. Legendary newspapers are being gutted by careless owners, foreign correspondents fired while still in war zones, local papers shut down entirely. Into the tumult come two new books that focus on some of the most pathbreaking journalists of the 1930s and '40s. These reporters, all women, broke social norms to chronicle the seismic years they were living through. When read together, Mark Braude's The Typewriter and the Guillotine and Julia Cooke's Starry and Restless prompt an obvious question: Why women' In other words, what is the value of looking at the history of journalism through this gendered prism' For starters: Women were handed nothing. In many cases, when they were interested in doing serious, international stories'say, reporting on a war'they had to tell editors that they happened to be going anyway, Cooke writes, and ask: Should they send some articles' These women's lack of access led to a resourcefulness that animated their subjects as well as their style. They also avoided the insularity of the boys' club from which they were excluded, an inner circle whose chumminess helped breed dangerous misinformation. From 1917 to 1920, for instance, The New York Times proclaimed the imminent collapse of Communism in the newly formed Soviet Union more than 90 times. 'Over drinks as often as in briefing rooms, reporters (mostly men) had taken other men's word for it,' Cooke writes in Starry and Restless....

Online influencers, through their postings on Instagram, Threads, TikTok and elsewhere, have created an exuberant universe of news and commentary that often outruns mainstream media in reach and even impact. They work the same waterfront as journalism and public relations, but their relationship with those mainstay practices built around fact and advocacy is an uneasy one. For the past month, social media has been ablaze with postings about a provocative story alleging improper political influence among left-leaning online commentators. Headlined 'A Dark Money Group is Secretly Funding High-Profile Democratic Influencers,' it ran in Wired, the San Francisco-based magazine that specializes in tech, and was written by Taylor Lorenz, a high-profile reporter who has built a stormy career of tech coverage for outlets including The Washington Post, The New York Times and The Atlantic. The 3,600-word article focused on Chorus, described as a secretive arm of the Sixteen Thirty Fund, whose wide-ranging support for progressive causes totals more than US$100 million a year. Starting in spring 2025, Lorenz reported, Chorus quietly recruited and supported a coterie of liberal political influencers, with monthly stipends of anywhere from $250 to $8,000....

In September 2025, podcaster Pablo Torre published an investigation alleging that the NBA's Los Angeles Clippers may have used a side deal to skirt the league's strict salary cap rules. His reporting, aired on multiple episodes of 'Pablo Torre Finds Out,' focused on star forward Kawhi Leonard. Leonard, one of the NBA's most sought-after free agents, signed a four-year, US$176 million contract renewal with the Clippers during the 2021-22 off-season ' the maximum allowed under league rules at the time. But Torre reported that in early 2022, Leonard's LLC, KL2 Aspire, signed a cash and equity deal amounting to roughly $50 million through a brand sponsorship with Aspiration, a now-bankrupt financial technology startup that marketed itself as a climate-friendly bank. Torre highlighted how the sponsorship coincided with major investments in Aspiration by Clippers owner Steve Ballmer and another team investor. The arrangement, Torre suggested, looked less like a conventional endorsement deal and more like a 'no-show' side payment that could have helped the Clippers keep their star without technically violating the salary cap....

Victor K. McElheny, the celebrated journalist and author who founded MIT's Knight Science Journalism Program more than 40 years ago and served for 15 years as its director, died on July 14 in Lexington, Massachusetts, after a brief illness. He was 89. Born in Boston and raised in Poughkeepsie, New York, McElheny's storied journalism career spanned seven decades, during which he wrote for several of the nation's leading newspapers and magazines, penned three critically acclaimed books, and produced groundbreaking coverage of national stories ranging from the Apollo moon landing to the sequencing of the human genome. He is remembered as a steadfast champion of science journalism who eloquently made the case for the profession's importance in society and worked tirelessly to help the field ' and its practitioners ' thrive. 'Victor was a pioneering science journalist, at publications that included The Charlotte Observer, Science, and The New York Times, and an author of note, especially for his biographies of scientific luminaries from Edwin Land to James Watson,' says Deborah Blum, who now heads the MIT program McElheny founded. 'Yet, he still found time in 1983 to create the Knight Science Journalism Program, to fight for it, find funding for it, and to build it into what it is today.'...