The old adage used to be that anything on the internet stays. But freelancers who have lost large chunks of their work on digital news sites that have shuttered or changed ownership, or faced the effects of link rot, know that’s not quite true.

Preserving journalism about how newsrooms are facing threats to their reporters’ existence and to the field at large is incredibly important — both for history and for early-career journalists who are working to chronicle it. So I’m happy to say The Objective is participating in the Today’s News for Tomorrow program to make sure our site’s stories are on the record (and stored in at least three different places).

The current landscape is also part of the reason for the resurgence of print. For the folks in Chicagoland and Illinois: A new print magazine about the Chicago journalism and media scene is on the way, and you can pitch to it.

Writer of the Chicago Media Journal, journalist Igor Studenkov, has been continuing the legacy of the now-defunct Chicago Journalism Review in covering journalism goings-on across the city and state. He’s aiming to publish a trial issue of the magazine before the end of the year and is looking for stories “about print and digital media that fly under the radar …  about experiences of working in the media (and not just as a journalist) and new and innovative things that are happening … [or] pieces about the history of Chicago media, and journalism-related photo essays.”

And in case you missed our latest piece: Reporter Charlie Bloomer covers an effort to boycott the New York Times, called by the Trans News Network over the paper’s coverage of trans people. It’s the second boycott of the paper called in the past two years — the first by Writers Against the War on Gaza.

Read on for more, and find an abbreviated version of our media links on Instagram each week. (Here’s an example from last week.)

—James Salanga

📓 Chicago once used to have its own version of the Columbia Journalism Review in print every month. Though journalist Igor Studenkov makes no promises about repeating the same cadence, he’s launching a trial print magazine issue of his Chicagoland media news publication, the Chicago Media Journal. Freelancers with journalism stories about Chicagoland, including Kendall and DeKalb counties, southeast Wisconsin, and northwest Indiana, or Illinois at large, are invited to pitch; pay is $125 per piece.

🔍 Under the Trump administration, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security is using an arcane subpoena provision focused on customs duties and taxes (19 USC 1509) to obtain records from journalists and nonprofits. Organizations like Freedom of the Press Foundation have cautioned that these DHS summons can cost millions of dollars to contest, and could require journalists to break source confidentiality. It was under one such summon that the DHS acquired six months of Minneapolis journalist Georgia Fort’s phone records.

🤝 Some union news: Forbes journalists won their first contract! It necessitates a $68.5k salary floor and editorial firewall protections that create a strong boundary between editorial and business sides of the newsroom — an increasing problem for the business magazine.

📰 FOLLOW-UP: After the Wall Street Journal unapologetically published an AI-generated op-ed last week, Nieman Lab checked in with opinion editors across local newspapers about their policy for opinion pieces partially or wholly created by generative AI. Across the board, while not all those who commented had a policy, editors said their priority is for human-written work and would not want to publish AI-generated op-eds.

📺 After Abdul El-Sayed won the Democratic Senate nomination for Michigan against an opponent who had record-breaking super PAC donations, he’s facing a new challenge: CBS News. The media company, now led by Bari Weiss and owned by David Ellison, has shifted right in its coverage of American politics and last week implied El-Sayed disrespected (downplayed? justified?) 9/11 victims in an article.

🥗 FOLLOW-UP: Buffet Magazine is born anew after “trials and tribulations” (read: being sued by Condé Nast over a defunct trademark for Gourmet Magazine). “We also believe that the buffet, in all its bounty, captures some of the spirit of this magazine.” New issues from the outlet will now come from [email protected].

✍  We really can’t improve on it, so The Objective is reprinting Tom Ley’s Defector headline in its entirety: “Seattle Times Dipshit Quits Because His Editors Were Smart Enough To Spike His Stupid Columns.” A Seattle Times columnist was initially going to write about a protest in support of anti-trans athlete Sophie Cunningham, but instead wrote an article on his own views on trans people in sports, and reprinted it on his Substack, along with noting this wasn’t his first column that was spiked: others included a column on whether or not the U.S. Women’s soccer team “were really the victims of discrimination in their equal-pay lawsuit” and cancel culture as a whole. From Ley’s perspective: “Quitting in a huff over these columns being spiked? Brother, you should have been bringing your editors muffins every day for how well they were covering for you.”

Have a story you think we should include in this section of next week’s newsletter? Let us know here or by responding to this email.

This issue is by Marlee Baldridge and James Salanga. Thanks for reading. We’ll have more for you next week.

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