The Desert Sun’s Parent Company Again Does Something Terrible; R.I.P. Jackie the Bald Eagle–Coachella Valley Independent’s Indy Digest: Aug. 10, 2026

Indy Digest: Aug. 10, 2026

USA Today Co. (formerly known as Gannett), the parent company of The Desert Sun, is awful.

It has been awful for decades. In 2009, Gannett newspaper division chief Bob Dickey famously went to Arizona to tell the staff of the Tucson Citizen that the newspaper was being shuttered, and that everyone was losing their jobs—and then he headed straight to Palm Springs to play in a golf tournament, which had an entry fee of $12,000 to $25,000.

I could go on and on with stories about USA Today Co.’s Gannett’s inherent awfulness over the years—but instead, I’ll just share the latest.

Last week, Nieman Lab reported:

USA Today Co. has made a deal with software company Palantir to analyze and monetize user behavior, the company announced on Thursday.

In its Q2 earnings call Thursday morning, USA Today Co. chairman and CEO Mike Reed told investors he expects the partnership to “strengthen how we collect, connect and activate audience data to drive more effective and faster monetization across our platform.”

“Every visit, every session, and every moment of attention creates a signal,” Reed said. “When we connect those signals, they become actionable intelligence that allows us to engage users more effectively and monetize those relationships faster and at much greater value. The work our team is doing with Palantir is a direct extension of this strategy. We are applying Palantir’s AI-powered platform to one of the largest opportunities in front of us, converting the sheer scale of our audience into known, orchestrated first-party relationships, because that is what turns our reach into sustainable, higher value revenue.”

Palantir, as you may recall, has made myriad headlines for also being awful.

As Wired magazine reported in April:

It took just a few months of President Donald Trump’s second term for Palantir employees to question their company’s commitments to civil liberties. Last fall, Palantir seemed to become the technological backbone of Trump’s immigration enforcement machinery, providing software identifying, tracking, and helping deport immigrants on behalf of the Department of Homeland Security, when current and former employees started ringing the alarm.

Around that time, two former employees reconnected by phone. Right as they picked up the call, one of them asked, “Are you tracking Palantir’s descent into fascism?”

“That was their greeting,” the other former employee says. “There’s this feeling not of ‘Oh, this is unpopular and hard,’ but ‘This feels wrong.’”

Palantir was founded—with initial venture capital investment from the CIA—at a moment of national consensus following the September 11, 2001, attacks, when many saw fighting terrorism abroad as the most critical mission facing the U.S. The company, which was cofounded by tech billionaire Peter Thiel, sells software that acts as a high-powered data aggregation and analysis tool powering everything from private businesses to the U.S. military’s targeting systems.

For the past 20 years, employees could accept the intense external criticism and awkward conversations with family and friends about working for a company named after J. R. R. Tolkien’s corrupting all-seeing orb. But a year into Trump’s second term, as Palantir deepens its relationship with an administration that many workers fear is wreaking havoc at home, employees are finally raising these concerns internally, as the U.S.’s war on immigrants, war in Iran, and even company-released manifestos has forced them to rethink the role they play in it all.

An aside about USA Today Co. CEO Mike Reed: At a time when his newspapers are making cut after cut after cut, he continues to make an insane salary. In 2025, he made $4,085,499, according to a company proxy statement.

While USA Today Co. is a terrible company with an overpaid CEO who doesn’t seem to care one whit about news, the people who work at the company’s newspapers are generally underpaid, hard-working souls who care deeply about news and the communities in which they live. Such is the case with the reporters, editors and other staffers at The Desert Sun.

Therefore, it is no surprise that those employees are speaking out about this Palantir partnership. Earlier today, the unionized newsrooms within USA Today Co.—including the locals represented by the Desert Sun News Guild—released a statement calling on the company to end the Palantir partnership. Here are the first four paragraphs of that statement:

We, USA TODAY CO. (formerly Gannett) workers represented by The NewsGuild-CWA, were shocked to learn that our company has partnered with Palantir. While USA TODAY CO. CEO Mike Reed championed this partnership as a way to drive revenue, we believe it threatens to undermine trust in our news outlets and raises serious questions about the data security of our readers.

We have significant ethical issues with Palantir, whose artificial intelligence (A.I.) software has been used to advance widespread surveillance and power immigration crackdowns. Not only does partnering with Palantir, a major player in the news we cover, create an inherent conflict of interest, but it fails the journalists who have been assaulted and falsely arrested while covering immigration enforcement actions and protests. 

USA TODAY CO. has provided minimal details about this partnership and the parameters of its agreement with Palantir. We have serious concerns and questions about how readers’ personal information and data will be used under this partnership and how their data would be protected. Without answers, how can journalists encourage readers to subscribe to our news outlets?

Our commitment to upholding First Amendment principles to serve the democratic process is in direct contrast with a company like Palantir, whose cofounder, Peter Thiel, once said freedom and democracy were not compatible, and whose technologies have been tied to human rights abuses and surveillance activities. 

I hope Reed and co. heed this powerful statement. But given USA Today Co. has proven time and again in recent years that the company’s only real priority is “monetization,” this statement will almost certainly be ignored.

—Jimmy Boegle

More News

• As multiple people commented on social media when this story broke earlier today: Children are going to die because of this. The Washington Post (gift link) reports: “President Donald Trump on Monday signed an executive order that called for cutting the number of recommended childhood vaccines, spacing out those shots and making other changes that would upend decades of federal guidance on vaccines for children. Speaking in the Oval Office, the president reiterated his long-held claim that childhood vaccines have led to a rise in U.S. autism cases, an idea that outside researchers have largely debunked. Trump also mused on the current number of childhood vaccines and said reducing their frequency was ‘common sense.’ ‘Large amounts—like vats—of vaccine are currently pumped into your child’s body,’ Trump said in the Oval Office, flanked by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and other administration officials. He claimed that his administration’s recommendations would reduce the amount of vaccine administered to children by 80 percent at a given medical visit. Under Trump’s plan, vaccines against 11 diseases—including measles, mumps, rubella, polio and whooping cough—would be recommended for all children, down from 18 diseases under the current childhood vaccine schedule. Trump’s order also calls for breaking up the combined measles, mumps and rubella vaccine into three separate shots, among other changes intended to space out immunizations.”

• Our partners at Calmatters report on a textbook example of how lobbying and big money rule the California Legislature: “For six years, Californians have been able to shake up a craft cocktail at home using alcohol delivered to their doorstep. Now, it’s last call for the distillery deliveries, unless lawmakers intervene by the end of this month. That’s unlikely, thanks to opposition from California’s wine industry, Teamsters union truck drivers and corporate alcohol wholesalers and distributors. The influential, well-funded groups lobbied the Legislature behind closed doors this year to block legislation that would have made permanent pandemic-era rules that allowed craft distillers to ship spirits directly to their customers. During the pandemic lockdowns, Gov. Gavin Newsom issued an executive order that allowed craft distillers to ship spirits to their customers’ homes. In the years since, lawmakers passed temporary laws allowing craft distillers—defined as those that produce up to 150,000 gallons a year—to keep shipping their spirits. The latest extension expires Dec. 31. ‘I don’t have a lot of hope that we’re going to be able to salvage this,’ said Folsom Republican Assemblymember Josh Hoover. He tried unsuccessfully this year to amend one of his bills to let small distillers continue shipping directly to their customers.”

• The West is on fire. Check out the map embedded with this Associated Press story. Yikes! A snippet of the story: “Wildfires burning across the western U.S. and Canada on Sunday left some residents keeping a wary eye out for possible evacuation orders while others already forced to flee their homes waited to see what would be left on their return. In western Canada, over 20,000 people were forced to flee communities along Okanagan Lake in British Columbia over the weekend as a fast-moving wildfire destroyed homes and dozens had to be rescued by aircraft. In the U.S., crews in Washington that have been fighting three wildfires that began burning in the Spokane area for over a week continued cleanup near containment lines. Laurie Allen left her home in Nine Mile Falls, a community north of Spokane, last weekend, fleeing with her husband, dog and two kittens as a wildfire burned a short distance away. The roads into her neighborhood were still closed Sunday but she said she’d learned from a friend that while covered in ashes, her house and others nearby were intact.”

• Could AI ease the air-traffic controller shortage, while making air travel safer and more efficient? NPR reports: “On a typical day, Alaska Airlines operates roughly 1,500 flights, most of them guided by a team of dispatchers on the sixth floor of an office building near the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport known as ‘The Hub.’ The dispatchers sit in a big open room, surrounded by as many as five flat-screen monitors that display real-time information on air traffic, weather, upper-level wind patterns and more. It’s a lot to process. But these dispatchers are getting some help from a software tool called Flyways AI. … The FAA wants to use technology—including artificial intelligence—to make the nation’s airspace more efficient. And Flyways offers a glimpse of how that might look in practice. … Alaska says it’s saving tens of thousands of hours in the air and roughly a million gallons of fuel per year because of Flyways. The system works by basically crunching data on air traffic, wind, weather and other factors to anticipate what is going to happen during flight before it does.”

• Is America finally taking extraterrestrials seriously? Time magazine asks that exact question, and makes the case that the answer is yes: “After decades of secrecy, stigma, and sometimes silliness—like the conspiratorial tales about recovered spacecraft and alien remains at a place known as Area 51 in Nevada—the government has at long last begun taking things seriously. What used to be called UFOs and now go by the more decorous handle of UAPs—or unidentified anomalous phenomena—are being given the full investigatory treatment. Congressional hearings into the origins of the sightings were held in 2022 and 2023. In 2022, the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) was established ‘to detect, identify and attribute objects of interest.’ In December 2023, then President Joe Biden signed into law the Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Disclosure Act, requiring the collection, review, and public disclosure of all sightings and encounters. On June 12, capturing the global hunger for answers to the UAP mystery, director Steven Spielberg—who has long had a sort of seismographic sense of the popular mood—released his latest film, Disclosure Day, in which a government cover-up of extraterrestrial visitations is exposed. … At about the same time, the White House established the UAP Science Advisory Council, a body led by Harvard astrophysicist and cosmologist Avi Loeb to study the national-security risks posed by UAPs.“

• And finally … Jackie, one of the Big Bear-area bald eagles who became famous and beloved, died earlier today. How famous was she? So famous that even The New York Times published an obituary (gift link): “Jackie, who hatched in the spring of 2012, has shared a nest with her mate Shadow since he showed up in the summer of 2018 and refused to leave, pushing out her then-partner, named Mr. B. In the wild, bald eagles can live 25 years or longer. The introduction of a livestream more than a decade ago helped Jackie and her family become online sensations, capturing the nest she shares with Shadow atop a 120-foot-tall Jeffrey pine tree in Big Bear Valley, a lakeside recreation area in Southern California. Together, Jackie and Shadow have fledged six eaglets, most recently Sandy and Luna. According to Facebook posts from Friends of Big Bear Valley, the nonprofit organization that operates the camera, Sandy and Luna have not been seen on the camera in the area since July 23, a sign they may have fled the nest.”

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