SANTA CLARA, Calif. (AP) — San Francisco 49ers receiver Jauan Jennings returned to practice Monday for the first time in more than a month in a sign that he will be ready to start the season.
Jennings left practice early with a calf injury on July 27 and hadn't been on the field for an official practice with the team since then. Jennings was also seeking a new contract, but has apparently returned to the field without that in place as the team prepares for the opener on Sunday at Seattle.
“Obviously have all hands on deck, having the guys that we plan to be here, having them there in Week 1, it's definitely going to help,” star left tackle Trent Williams said. “We’re going to need it, going into the toughest environment in the league. No real warmup to it.”
Jennings is entering the final year of a two-year, $15.4 million contract and is seeking a long-term extension before the regular season after coming off the best season of this career. That contract signed in 2024 included escalators that increased his pay by $3.5 million this season.
Jennings had been seeking a new long-term extension and had requested a trade but the team held firm and now has Jennings back in the fold.
“When players are going through stuff like that, you just kind of let them go through it with the team,” Williams said. “I think everybody in their career is going to have a standoff or battle of some sort. I just try to not worry about it and let the two parties work it out. Obviously, Jauan is a hell of a player, one of the best players on the team. So having him out there is really important. But there’s a business side to it.”
Jennings, a seventh-round pick in 2020, emerged last season as one of Brock Purdy’s most trusted options at wide receiver after having 77 catches for 975 yards and six TDs.
With Deebo Samuel having been traded to Washington and Brandon Aiyuk out at least the first month recovering from knee surgery, the Niners had been counting on Jennings to team with 2024 first-round pick Ricky Pearsall as the starters early this season.
The Niners also have recently acquired Skyy Moore in the mix along with Russell Gage, who returned to practice Monday after missing time with a minor knee injury.
San Francisco also signed Marquez Valdes-Scantling to the practice squad last week after he was cut by Seattle and is expected to make him active for the opener against the Seahawks.
Rookie Jordan Watkins remains sidelined with a high ankle sprain but was doing work on the side Monday.
Watkins was the only member of the 53-man roster not in uniform at the start of practice. Starting right guard Dominick Puni returned for the first time since injuring his knee in an exhibition game against Las Vegas on Aug. 16.
Defensive linemen Yetur Gross-Matos also took part in his first practice of the summer after being activated last week from the physically unable to perform list with a knee injury.
Defensive tackle Kalia Davis was also back after missing time last week.
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FILE - San Francisco 49ers wide receiver Jauan Jennings (15) against the Arizona Cardinals during the first half of an NFL football game, Sunday, Jan. 5, 2025, in Glendale, Ariz. (AP Photo/Rick Scuteri,File)
The Pentagon said Thursday that it is changing the independent military newspaper Stars and Stripes so it concentrates on “reporting for our warfighters” and no longer includes “woke distractions.”
That message, in a social media post from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's spokesman, is short on specifics and does not mention the news outlet's legacy of independence from government and military leadership. It comes a day after The Washington Post reported that applicants for jobs at Stars and Stripes were being asked what they would do to support President Donald Trump's policies.
Stars and Stripes traces its lineage to the Civil War and has reported news about the military either in its newspaper or online steadily since World War II, largely to an audience of service members stationed overseas. Roughly half of its budget comes from the Pentagon and its staff members are considered Defense Department employees.
The outlet's mission statement emphasizes that it is “editorially independent of interference from outside its own editorial chain-of-command” and that it is unique among news organizations tied to the Defense Department in being “governed by the principles of the First Amendment.”
Congress established that independence in the 1990s after instances of military leadership getting involved in editorial decisions. During Trump's first term in 2020, Defense Secretary Mark Esper tried to eliminate government funding for Stars and Stripes — to effectively shut it down — before he was overruled by the president.
Hegseth's spokesman, Sean Parnell, said on X Thursday that the Pentagon “is returning Stars and Stripes to its original mission: reporting for our warfighters.” He said the department will “refocus its content away from woke distractions.”
“Stars and Stripes will be custom tailored to our warfighters,” Parnell wrote. “It will focus on warfighting, weapons systems, fitness, lethality, survivability and ALL THINGS MILITARY. No more repurposed DC gossip columns; no more Associated Press reprints.”
Parnell did not return a message seeking details. The Daily Wire reported, after speaking a Pentagon spokeswoman, that the plan is to have all Stars and Stripes content written by active-duty service members. Currently, Congress has mandated that the publication's publisher and top editor be civilians, said Max Lederer, its publisher.
The Pentagon also said that half of the outlet's content would be generated by the Defense Department, and that it would no longer publish material from The Associated Press or Reuters news services.
Also Thursday, the Pentagon issued a statement in the Federal Register that it would eliminate some 1990s era directives that governed how Stars and Stripes operates. Lederer said it's not clear what that would mean for the outlet's operations, or whether the Defense Department has the authority to do so without congressional authorization.
The publisher said he believes that Stars and Stripes is valued by the military community precisely because of its independence as a news organization. He said no one at the Pentagon has communicated to him what it wants from Stars and Stripes; he first learned of its intentions from reading Parnell's social media post.
“This will either destroy the value of the organization or significantly reduce its value,” Lederer said.
Jacqueline Smith, the outlet's ombudsman, said Stars and Stripes reports on matters important to service members and their families — not just weapons systems or war strategy — and she's detected nothing “woke” about its reporting.
“I think it's very important that Stars and Stripes maintains its editorial independence, which is the basis of its credibility,” Smith said. A longtime newspaper editor in Connecticut, Smith's role was created by Congress three decades ago and she reports to the House Armed Services Committee.
It's the latest move by the Trump administration to impose restrictions on journalists. Most reporters from legacy news outlets have left the Pentagon rather than to agree to new rules imposed by Hegseth that they feel would give him too much control over what they report and write. The New York Times has sued to overturn the regulations.
Trump has also sought to shut down government-funded outlets like Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty that report independent news about the world in countries overseas.
Also this week, the administration raided the home of a Washington Post journalist as part of an investigation into a contractor accused of stealing government secrets, a move many journalists interpreted as a form of intimidation.
The Post reported that applicants to Stars and Stripes were being asked how they would advance Trump's executive orders and policy priorities in the role. They were asked to identify one or two orders or initiatives that were significant to them. That raised questions about whether it was appropriate for a journalist to be given what is, in effect, a loyalty test.
Smith said it was the government's Office of Personnel Management — not the newspaper — that was responsible for the question on job applications and said it was consistent with what was being asked of applicants for other government jobs.
But she said it was not something that should be asked of journalists. “The loyalty is to the truth, not the administration,” she said.
David Bauder writes about the intersection of media and entertainment for the AP. Follow him at http://x.com/dbauder and https://bsky.app/profile/dbauder.bsky.social.
US soldier Sgt. John Hubbuch of Versailles, Ky., one of the members of NATO led-peacekeeping forces in Bosnia reads Stars and Stripes newspaper on Sunday Feb. 14, 1999. (AP Photo/Amel Emric, File)
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth stands outside the Pentagon during a welcome ceremony for Japanese Defense Minister Shinjirō Koizumi at the Pentagon, Thursday, Jan. 15, 2026 in Washington. (AP Photo/Kevin Wolf/)
FILE - A GI with the U.S. 25th division reads Stars and Stripes newspaper at Cu Chi, South Vietnam on Sept. 10, 1969. (AP Photo/Mark Godfrey)
