Notable links: July 17, 2026

Most Fridays, I share a handful of pieces that caught my eye at the intersection of technology, media, and society.

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Mamdani invests in tech capacity to “solve real problems”

There’s a lot that newsrooms can learn from Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral administration in New York City. His latest announcement is the Public Interest Technology (PIT) Crew, a set of dynamic, cross-disciplinary digital teams that will solve problems across the city using a rapid, human-centered approach.

As Pamela Herd notes here, this is a shift from contracting out to building internal capacity:

“Traditionally, the conventional wisdom since the 1990s and before was that governments could buy tech products like an off-the-shelf product. This led to a massive turn to contracting out, which was great for consultants but bad for government capacity. The outsourced approach often cost too much, delivering too little and too late.

[…] What people who know tech and government have been screaming for years is that building good tech needs in-house capacity, even when you are using contractors. It requires the government owning the design, development and delivery of technology, relying on rapid iteration to fix problems in a way that is impossible when contractors are running things.”

This dynamic is also highly prevalent in newsrooms, resulting in the same problems. If you rely too heavily on buying existing technology or working with outside contractors, you are building operational, functional, and intellectual dependencies on those organizations. You import their values and ways of working, which in the case of some vendors may be catastrophic in itself, but you also put yourself on their timelines and make yourself subject to their feature priorities and interests. And that’s before you consider security and trust profiles, which may radically differ between newsrooms and the vendors that serve them.

New York City isn’t alone; other governments are beginning to shift from outsourcing back to internally owned technology. The article links to a report explaining Colorado’s move back to internally-run IT, which states the issue plainly:

“There is an alignment problem: the issue is not effort, but that we have organized around internal structures rather than outcomes, and that misalignment has made excellent work harder.”

Mamdani’s PIT Crew sounds a lot like how a product team should work: directed groups of experts rapidly prototyping solutions to concretely defined problems anchored in real people’s needs. By doing it internally, he can make sure these solutions are built exactly the way the city needs, build institutional capacity and knowledge, and, theoretically at least, do it far more cheaply in the long run.

As these sorts of civic measures succeed, I think (or, perhaps, I hope) we’ll see more newsrooms translate those outcomes to their own businesses and begin to understand that they need to prioritize technical capacity too. All the same reasons apply here.

Of course, most newsrooms don’t have the budget of the New York City Mayor’s office. I think the solution to that is third entities: non-profit organizations that exist to provide shared technical capacity across newsrooms, based on newsroom needs, that behave as if they were part of newsroom teams. Think of it as a kind of PIT Crew for news, operated independently but in deep collaboration with newsrooms. By using a radically open source approach, newsrooms can pool resources together and solve shared technical problems more easily, on their terms and according to their values.

While there are always places for startups and tech platforms, the idea that the tech industry can always serve needs better than building institutional capacity is fundamentally broken; it’s also fundamentally right-wing. I’m delighted to see the New York City Mayor’s office move in a more productive direction. I hope it becomes an example for everyone.

We are not alone

I was delighted to be included in this roundup by Adiel Kaplan, the Program Director at the Tow-Knight Center for Journalism Futures at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY.

As Adiel says:

“Having a say in what the future of news looks like will likely require not just that collaboration across newsrooms, but also outside them, with other institutions that want to shape a future with informed communities at its center — which is, after all, the mission. Right?

[…] It will also require a different way of thinking about our role in this ecosystem, beyond creating content and distributing it. It might mean getting more involved in building technology, or joining forces in new ways with government-funded institutions.”

This is exciting to me: I’ve been saying for a while now that news needs to get more involved in building technology. My flippant line is that news treats technology as something that happens to it, like an asteroid — but it’s actually a creative work, like an article. Although many newsrooms are too small to build a strong capacity in themselves, it’s perfectly possible for news as an industry to build capacity and create the technology that is unique to its use cases on its terms. So I think it’s a very good thing that news institutions are talking about this need.

The people listed in the article are exceptional. I’m just happy to be on the list in such fine company. Don’t sleep on any of them; I feel most connected to Ivan Sigal’s ambitious and vital work at the Modal Foundation and what Trei Brundrett is building (in collaboration with Blaine Cook and others) at New_ Public. But these are all worthy endeavors: the Library Newsroom Project is a genius on-the-ground effort to create local newsrooms based in every public library in the US, and Sannuta Raghu’s news atoms embed meaning and provenance in natural language articles. All are promising.

We need to move forward. There are certainly more people who could have been added to such a list; my hope is that if one were written a year from now, it would be exponentially longer. Let’s innovate.

White House Directed Patel to Oversee Investigation Involving Times Reporting

The White House personally directed FBI Director Kash Patel to issue subpoenas to journalists reporting on the President’s new Qatari-gifted Air Force One.

“The White House’s deep involvement in the case came after officials said that President Trump was enraged about the coverage of the Qatari-donated plane, which The Times reported Thursday lacks the same defensive countermeasures of the previous Air Force One.”

These subpoenas were delivered by hand to some of the reporters at home, echoing the FBI’s raid of a Washington Post engagement reporter’s home earlier this year. In both cases, it’s highly likely that these were attempts to discover who leaked information to their respective newsrooms.

There’s lots to say about first amendment issues here, and commentators like Dan Kennedy at Media Nation have pertinent thoughts. It’s clear that journalism is under attack by the administration, and they rescinded rules that protected journalists in leak investigations last year. The US Press Freedom Tracker is a sobering read. But it’s also important to take a moment to talk about the technology side of this story.

When the administration wants to issue a subpoena to a newsroom, it has a few avenues available to it. The first is to issue it directly to the newsroom or to its reporters, as they did here. In some ways, this is the best outcome: then the newsroom knows about the subpoena and can actively fight it in court.

The other avenue is to subpoena the newsroom’s service providers. If source information is stored unencrypted on a service like Google Workspace, the administration could subpoena Google. If a gag order is added — which might well happen if it’s a criminal subpoena or labeled a matter of national security — then the newsroom would never find out and have the chance to fight it. This is true even if the service provider nominally promises to notify the newsrooms about subpoenas: a gag order is a gag order.

Larger newsrooms have strong data security practices for this reason: they know to create policies and architectures which force subpoenas to come through them. But not every newsroom has the capacity to build a strong security strategy. Which means for every story we hear about that involves these newsrooms, there may be many more that took place in secret.

The Freedom of the Press Foundation maintains digital security resources and runs training for newsrooms and specific advice about source protection. The EFF also has some great resources. More resources are out there. But there is more of a need than ever for every newsroom to make sure they have access to someone who can advise them on digital security both holistically and on a case-by-case basis. Not every newsroom can afford a permanent member of staff, but finding access to some kind of resource is vital.

Likewise, journalism funders should focus on providing access to experts, understanding that these issues are existential for the organizations they fund. Not only is this an attack on press freedoms, but it’s also an attack on trust. Every newsroom can do its reporting because sources feel safe to reach out to it; if their safety is in question, they may be less likely to leak, and we may be less likely to read the stories that help us make good democratic decisions. That’s what the administration seems to be banking on.

Trump dismantled a federal climate website. These women rebuilt it.

This shouldn’t have been necessary, but is still wonderful to see. Climate.gov had been the go-to resource for climate data, but it went offline when the Trump Administration radically cut NOAA’s funding. At that point:

“[Rebecca] Lindsey joined forces with former NOAA employees Anna Eshelman, and Mary Lindsey, her older sister, to become the core team behind the deactivated site’s successor, Climate.us, preserving over 15 years of key climate data and resources. The trove features key maps, educational materials and climate indicator reports, including the now-deleted Fifth National Climate Assessment, the government’s most comprehensive analysis of climate change that was at risk of being lost to the public.”

This is possible because US government data is public domain by law. Had it not been available under a permissive license, the administration’s act of vandalism would have meant the data was gone for good. But because it was, the datasets can find a new home.

It’s a joy to use. Check out the climate dashboard, which tracks numbers like the total area of the Arctic Ocean that was at least 15% ice-covered each September. It also hosts a set of resources for teaching climate and energy. The dataset gallery includes crucial information like the NOAA’s archive of oral histories from people whose lives were affected by climate change.

But it’s also precarious. The whole thing relies on donations to keep it afloat, which is really what tax dollars are for. Still, for the moment it’s wonderful to see people pick up the slack when government is no longer doing its job. In the absence of government support, archives like this are works of journalism in themselves: ways to help us make stronger decisions. They deserve stronger support, and ultimately, we all deserve the restoration of such important government infrastructure.

A Leak of San Francisco Police Drone Footage Exposes the New Reality of Urban Surveillance

I’m not sure I agree with this article’s implication that the problem with SFPD’s drone policing was that it accidentally leaked the data.

““There’s a certain trust given to the police to use these things correctly,” says Curry. “When you're watching a drone feed live, you can look into dozens of different apartments, you can see police zooming in on people, you can see arrests. The fact that all of this was exposed feels like a really big issue from a privacy perspective.””

I’d humbly submit that the privacy problem exists regardless of whether the footage was leaked or not: this is ubiquitous surveillance of a city’s citizens from above. That footage can be analyzed, both by humans and software, to track people and target them for any reason. There is very little oversight, and because the police department is using a private company to run it, the teams there presumably have access to an enormous amount of private footage.

The thing is, none of this actually makes us safer. As the ACLU of Northern California points out in its Seeing Through Surveillance report:

“The evidence is clear that while surveillance has increased exponentially, public safety has not. On the contrary, surveillance systems often make people less safe, especially for groups that have historically been in the government’s crosshairs. Modern surveillance technology makes it possible for the government to track who we are, where we go, what we do, and who we know. It fuels high-tech profiling and perpetuates systems of biased policing. It facilitates deportations, chills speech, and imperils the rights of activists, religious minorities, and people who need reproductive and gender-affirming care.”

Most importantly, it doesn’t actually help. As the report points out, the city of San Francisco itself learned that adding cameras to its highest-crime neighborhoods had no impact on crime. Regardless, it added more funding to the program and voted to remove oversight in 2023. The result is more money spent, less privacy, with no impact on public safety. And now we know that the footage is being accidentally leaked, the privacy footprint is obviously even worse.

In a world that is becoming markedly more authoritarian, it’s unconscionable that supposedly permissive cities would add more surveillance. It doesn’t work, it misuses funds that could be spent helping the vulnerable, and it’s data that could be used for undemocratic purposes. It needs to stop — and to do that, we need to apply pressure to our elected representatives and raise awareness of how backwards it is.