Our Top Posts of 2025

Looking back on 2025, our readers loved posts that offered tools and tips to make their stressful jobs easier. The top posts of the year varied, including verification tools to help navigate the explosion of AI-generated online content, newsletters that help journalists stay caught up on the industry, AP Style reminders for timely topics and stress relief tips.

Here are the year’s top 15 Beyond Bylines articles:

1. 20 Helpful Verification Tools for Journalists

As journalists continued their work in 2025 to adapt to AI tools in the newsroom and determine if content found online was actually created by humans, it wasn’t a surprise to see this post top the list. The verification tools in the post help with a range of tasks, including fact-checking, reverse image searches, location verification and deepfake detection.

2. 19 Great Journalism and Media Newsletters to Start Reading

There are numerous excellent newsletters focused on journalism and the media industry. These are just a few favorites to add to your inbox, covering job openings, podcasting, digital media and more.

3. 7 Organization Hacks Every Journalist Can Use

Getting organized at the beginning of a new year is always a popular topic, and our readers loved this list of “battle-tested strategies to keep you sane when everything else is chaos.”

4. How Journalists Can Manage Stress With the 5 R’s

Saying 2025 was a stressful year for reporters is an understatement. This post breaks down tips and tricks for helping journalists proactively understand their stressors to help minimize the effects and cope more effectively.

5. Here’s Our 2025 Gift Guide for Journalists and Bloggers

Published just a few weeks ago, our annual gift guide jumped to the top 5 of the most-viewed posts list with its blend of practical and fun gift ideas for the writer in your life.

6. AP Style: Spring Reminders for Journalists and Bloggers

Our quarterly AP Style roundups are always among the most popular posts of the year. In our spring edition, we covered the rules for writing about seasons, April Fools’ Day, and hot topics like Gulf of America vs. Gulf of Mexico, tariffs, and immigration.

7. A 2025 Sports Calendar for Journalists

To help journalists navigate and plan around the moments that would dominate the sporting conversation in 2025, we compiled this guide to the year’s biggest events and the developing stories to keep tabs on, including the Winter X Games, March Madness, the Kentucky Derby, Little League World Series and the Games of the Future. Stay tuned for the 2026 sports calendar, which will be published in January!

8. AP Style Rules for Back-to-School, Football Season and More

The fall AP Style post covered a range of timely topics that were likely to pop up in journalists’ stories. Is it syllabuses or syllabi? When should you use Hispanic vs. Hispanic American vs. Latino? Is it playoff or play off? Read the post to find out!

9. 8 Bad Writing Habits to Stop and How to Fix Them

“Many resolutions revolve around the addition of something (more exercise, more self-care, more travel), but the removal of something (like a bad writing habit) from our routines can be just as impactful.” This post provides tips for turning around bad habits that are preventing you from producing your best work.

10. 12 Tools for Journalists to Help With Your Daily Tasks

Sometimes, a simple list of tools to help in your day-to-day is just the content you’re looking for. That was definitely the case with this post, which offered tools to help journalists with a variety of tasks, from research to deepfake detection, project organization, video creation, portfolio management and more.

11. 3,000 Journalists Told Us How They’re Using AI, Social Media and More

Cision’s 2025 State of the Media Report was published in the spring, and in this post, we broke down several of the main takeaways for journalists. One question in the survey found that 53% of journalists are using generative AI tools like ChatGPT in their work, while 14% plan to start. How will that number change in the 2026 survey? Stay tuned!

12. 7 Ways Journalists are Leveraging Social Media in Their Work

Another breakdown of findings from Cision’s annual report, this post revealed “how journalists are strategically using social media to not only publish their work but also to find stories, connect with audiences and uphold the highest standards of journalistic integrity.”

13. 5 Ghostly Mistakes That Can Haunt Your First Draft

First drafts can be tough, and some common mistakes (think a lack of audience focus or a jumbled, messy structure) can be worse than others. In October, our team provided a breakdown of those missteps and provided ways to fix them.

14. 12 Back-to-School Must-Haves for Journalism Students

“When people think about journalism, most think a computer and a cup of coffee are all you need to get a good story in the books. But there’s still a bit more required to help you put your best writing forward.” This post, originally published in 2024 and updated in 2025, offers several tools to help journalism students stay organized and produce strong stories.

15. How to Build Your Brand as a Freelancer

Freelancing is a growing sector in the broader media landscape, but the transition to freelancing can be overwhelming and knowing where to start can be difficult. In this post, we cover a few crucial steps to help new or returning freelancers set themselves up for success.

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