Study Hall

The media industry is at a crossroads. As AI writing tools have flooded the market, writers are feeling increasingly anxious about what comes next. Since its founding, Study Hall has prioritized the needs of freelancers. Especially during this era of heightened uncertainty, we believe it is essential to have an open and honest discussion about how technology is changing our professions.

I thought I had found the perfect story. While Googling around one day, I discovered a group of architects and engineers in a southern European city working to reduce urban heat by reprogramming ancient infrastructure, such as centuries-old aqueducts. Little had been written recently about the effort. As a science journalist based in the Netherlands, I was immediately intrigued.

With so much uncertainty in the media industry, it’s always useful to pick up a new skill and pay attention to the sectors that are growing. According to Pew Research Center, podcast listenership continues to increase. Younger generations, in particular, are gravitating toward the medium to get their news. But making the switch from written journalism to podcasting can be difficult.

← Back to Home For Reader’s Digest, William Antonelli spoke with “experts to come up with a list of ways to tell whether a photo or video is AI-generated. It also includes tips on how to avoid seeing AI-generated media altogether… although the method may be too extreme for most!” For Reader’s Digest, William Antonelli spoke with “experts to come up with a list of ways to tell whether a photo or video is AI-generated.

In May 2026, independent investigative reporter and longtime Study Hall member Yael Grauer, alongside a team of full-time reporters at the Associated Press, won a Pulitzer Prize for international reporting. “It was pretty surreal,” she said on the latest episode of the Study Hall podcast.

The Scoop by Erin Van Der Meer. Grand Central Publisher, 320 pages. 2026. The latest episode of Serial is playing in your wired earbuds. You just moved from Kips Bay to somewhere called East Williamsburg. You’ll try that new place Sweetgreen for lunch, sit down with the Gawker link everyone’s been circulating — something about failing the Ice Bucket Challenge. No, this is not hell; you’re just working in digital media in the year 2014.

When Pitchfork was acquired by Condé Nast in 2015, then-director of editorial operations Brandon Stosuy decided that this new direction would provide fewer opportunities for the kind of work that felt meaningful to him. It seemed “like suddenly things were going to change a lot. The magazine was going to leave our little warehouse in Greenpoint.” Ten years ago, Stosuy met Yancey Strickler, then-CEO of the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter, at a coffee shop in Greenpoint.

The founders of the New York Review of Finance (NYRF) are not in the business of offering investment tips. They are not CFAs; they do not clock late nights at banks or funds. Lest there be any confusion, the print-only publication’s cheeky tagline-cum-disclaimer, which appears on the front page of its first two issues, reads, “This is not financial advice.” But if you’re looking to start a scrappy newsprint magazine, the trio can share what worked for them: Go to magazine league softball games.

If you’re worried about young straight men’s place in literary production, or young white men’s, or young straight white American men’s; or if the question bedeviling you is why men don’t read, or read less than women but more than sometimes reported, or read performatively; or if, say, you want to know about the unspoken presupposition of cissexuality in discussions of dick-swaggering texts and the anxieties about measuring up that those texts express: there are essays and articles for you.