Wednesday, March 22, 2023 |
| The Messenger, which aims to “rekindle your passion for media,” is acquiring Grid. By Laura Hazard Owen. |
The Boston Globe steps back from The Emancipator after two years helping the racial justice outlet launch What We’re ReadingWSJ / Keach Hagey, Alexandra Bruell, Tom Dotan, and Miles Kruppa
Publishers prepare for showdown with Microsoft and Google over AI tools →“’We have valuable content that’s being used constantly to generate revenue for others off the backs of investments that we make, that requires real human work, and that has to be compensated,’ said Danielle Coffey, executive vice president and general counsel of the News Media Alliance.”BuzzFeed News / Chris Stokel-Walker
Midjourney has banned “arrested” prompts after a journalist created viral AI images of Donald Trump →Eliot Higgins, founder of open-source investigative journalism website Bellingcat, used the AI image generator Midjourney to generate what it would look like if Trump were swept up by police on the streets of New York outside of a building that looks eerily like Trump Tower, how his children would react, and what his life would be like in jail.Poynter / Kristen Hare
“Tips From Dead People” brings life lessons from obituaries to TikTok →They can be irreverent, like Travis, “cause of death: pure stubbornness.” They can be funny, like Renay, who “didn’t cook, she didn’t clean, and she was lousy with money, too. Here’s what Renay was great at: dying her red roots, weekly manicures, dirty jokes, pier fishing, rolling joints and buying dirty magazines.”The Verge / James Vincent
The rushed launch of AI chatbots from Google and Microsoft will degrade the web’s info ecosystem →“Right now, if you ask Microsoft’s Bing chatbot if Google’s Bard chatbot has been shut down, it says yes, citing as evidence a news article that discusses a tweet in which a user asked Bard when it would be shut down and Bard said it already had, itself citing a comment from Hacker News in which someone joked about this happening, and someone else used ChatGPT to write fake news coverage about the event.”POLITICO / Goli Sheikholeslami and John Harris
Francesca Barber will leave The New York Times to become Politico’s first executive director of global newsroom strategy →“We will build one transatlantic POLITICO by defining how our teams – in the US and Europe – will operate as a single company, how we will come together to bring our readers what no other newsroom can do, and how we will present ourselves as one brand and mean one thing to the outside world. Francesca is eminently qualified to help us achieve the last, and perhaps most ambitious of these priorities—building one transatlantic POLITICO. “CNN / Hannah Rabinowitz
A white supremacist leader has been arrested for threatening to kill a journalist reporting on the organization →Nicholas Welker, who also goes by “King ov Wrath” and “ilovehate5150,” was the leader of the Feuerkrieg Division. The journalist and news organization were not named in court filings.Digiday / Seb Joseph
The New York Times bets on games to meet its goal of 15 million subscribers by 2027 →The more subscribers play multiple games at The New York Times, the better the retention rate tends to be. “The next level for us is to push this strategy forward and have a sort of metagame that’s going to keep someone engaged for a long period of time as well as give them bragging rights and that sense that they’re improving their mind and skills with the game.”CBS News / Ahmed Shawkat and Haitham Moussa
The Iraqi journalist who threw shoes at George W. Bush says his only regret is he “only had two shoes” →“Al-Zaidi says he didn’t throw his shoes in a moment of uncontrolled anger, but that he had actually been waiting for just such an opportunity since the beginning of the U.S.-led invasion. He said Bush had suggested that the Iraqi people would welcome U.S. forces with flowers, which left him looking for an adequate reply.”WBUR / Yasmin Amer
New England Public Media cuts 20% of its staff →NEPM financial statements from fiscal years 2021 and 2022 show a deficit that has grown to nearly $4.7 million, a little more than a third of the company’s annual operating expenses in 2022. The job cuts will affect 17 people. Bloomberg / Ashley Carman
Spotify promised $100 million to promote diversity after a Joe Rogan controversy. It’s spent less than 10% after one year. →“The initiative got off to a slow start hiring staff and has suffered from shifting priorities, according to people familiar with the effort … Another Spotify fund aimed at promoting diversity in podcasts suffered after that business was hit by layoffs last year”Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism / Kirsten Eddy, Amy Ross Arguedas, Mitali Mukherjee, and Rasmus Kleis Nielsen
The percentage of people of color in the general population remains higher than among top news editors →“Overall, 23% of the 81 top editors across the 100 brands covered are people of color, despite the fact that, on average, 44% of the general population across all five countries are people of color … In Brazil and Germany, as in 2022, none of the outlets in our sample have a person of color as top editor. In the UK, 6% of those in top editorial positions are people of color. In the US, the percentage of top editors of color remained the same as in 2022, at 33%.”Deadline / David Robb
Hundreds of Hearst Magazines Media staffers plan to walkout this week →The half-day action is scheduled to begin on Thursday afternoon. The guild represents some 500 of the publishing giant’s editorial, video, design and photo staff at more than 25 brands including Esquire, Cosmopolitan, Harper’s Bazaar, Town & Country, Good Housekeeping, Popular Mechanics, Car & Driver, Oprah Daily, Seventeen, Elle, Redbook and Woman’s Day.
Nieman Lab / Fuego
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