Media Hat: July’s fine print

Hello there! If you’re one of the many people who are new here, welcome.

Each month, we round up tools, ideas, and behind-the-scenes insights to help journalists who wear many “hats”: reporters, editors, producers, creators, and everything in between.

Up your sleeve

Tools and tricks you can put to work right away

Real-time wildfire alerts, straight to Telegram
We built Fire News Alerts Greece, a Telegram channel where updates are posted automatically whenever a wildfire starts or gets downgraded. A simple pipeline (Google Apps Script, plus some help from Claude, and Google Sheets) runs, pulls data from the Hellenic Fire Service, and turns public information into something newsrooms can actually use. Join the channel & read how it works.

📌 Good for: digital news stuff, envrironmental reporters, data journalists, journalists covering Greece 

Digging through U.S. federal court records
If you’ve ever tried to search PACER (the U.S. federal courts’ filing system) and wanted to throw your laptop across the room, this one’s for you. CourtWatch News, a team The Washington Post once called “the masters of PACER”, just launched The Research Desk, offering training, docket monitoring, and custom research into federal court filings. Handy even if you’re reporting on American courts from outside the U.S. 👉Learn more

📌 Good for: investigative reporters, legal affairs journalists, data journalists

Turn your readers into news-players
NewsGamer lets you build a newsgame, where readers step into a role (a mayor, an editor, a CEO) and make choices that shape how a real news story plays out and with no coding needed. Pick a topic, fill in a template, and you’ve got an interactive way to help people actually feel their way through a complex political or economic issue instead of just reading about it. 👉 Try it

👉 If this is new to you, journalist Anna Thulin also wrote a good report on gamification worth reading first.

📌 Good for: investigative reporters, developers, engagement editors

Making international justice archives searchable
Judgments from the ICC, the Yugoslavia and Rwanda tribunals, Nuremberg, Colombia’s JEP, and other tribunals are all public but hard to actually find your way through. Impact Litigation Lab built AI guides for 16 of these courts, with one rule: the AI can’t cite from memory, only real documents it actually found. Useful if you need to check a ruling or track down a judgment fast, and it’s free. 👉 Explore the project & here’s the GitHub link

📌 Good for: human rights researchers, fact-checkers, archivists

Behind the scenes

Research, explainers & deeper context to help you connect the dots

Which apps know too much about you
Holafly‘s research team looked at Apple App Store privacy labels to see which apps collect the most data, and how much of it’s tied to your identity. Meta’s apps (Threads, Instagram, Facebook) top the list at 21 data points each and they are all linked to you directly. TikTok, Uber, and even ChatGPT aren’t far behind. Worth keeping around next time you’re writing about privacy or surveillance. 👉 Read the full breakdown

Which news sources do AI systems actually show you?
Media and Journalism Research Center‘s AI Information Map tests ten major AI systems (ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and others) across ten countries, to see which media outlets get cited and which quietly disappear. Findings are live for Romania and Hungary, with more countries coming.
👉 Explore the project

Community Spotlight

New voices, bold experiments, and big ideas from the field

A new gathering for newsrooms
This October in Chicago, the NPA Summit (from the News Product Alliance) brings together product, audience, tech, revenue, and editorial people around the idea of building AI into everyday newsroom work instead of treating it as a one-off experiment. First sessions include workshops on agentic news experiences and conversational tools for newsroom decisions. 👉 Explore the program

Three podcasts to keep you company this month
Podcast Review‘s picks this month lean into summer travel. Paper Trail turns ProPublica‘s investigative reporting into standalone, commute-length episodes hosted by Jessica Lussenhop. Beyond the Shore, from Michigan Public and NPR, tours the Great Lakes, a solid family road-trip pick. And What to Carry, What to Burn follows adventurer Blair Braverman‘s wilderness survival stories, good company for a long flight. 👉 Listen here

Let’s chat!

If something here sparks a thought, we’d love to hear it. And if you want to pass this Media Hat along to someone who might enjoy it, thank you! That’s how this little community grows.

See you next month!