Monday, August 7, 2023 |
| Readers “have to see this again and again and again, I think, before you really make an impact.” By Sophie Culpepper. |
What We’re ReadingIntelligencer / Nayeema Raza
Blakeney Schick listened so you could too →“She had a knack for hearing the lacuna of exposition in an episode and filling that void with a piece of audio recorded in a different location with different room tone and somehow making it match…and doing much, much more to educate your mind and ease your ears. Mixers remarked that her ears were more attuned than those of many audio engineers.”Financial Times / Laura Pitel and Olaf Storbeck
Holger Friedrich, the German newspaper owner who says stay away from journalists →“The 56-year-old tech millionaire entered the newspaper business alongside his wife Silke in 2019 to rescue a struggling Berlin daily with a rich history. Under his ownership, Berliner Zeitung’s financial bleeding has stopped and online readership has swelled. But its proprietor has become entangled in a string of controversies.”Financial Times / Robin Wigglesworth
Financial information is a huge business. Financial news? Not so much →“The latest report from Burton Taylor estimates that the financial-information industry generated $37.3bn of revenues in 2022….financial news only generated $1.7bn of revenues last year. In other words: News has easily been the slowest-growing part of the broader industry over the past five years, despite all the attention it generates (find someone who loves you as much as journalists love writing about other journalists).”Meduza
Apple removed (and then restored) Meduza’s flagship news podcast from its apps, after Kremlin requests for a takedown →“… earlier this summer Meduza learned about a complaint submitted to Apple by the Russian state censorship authority Roskomnadzor (RKN). Claiming that Meduza had violated the law, RKN demanded that Apple remove ‘What Happened’ from its servers. Another independent Russian news outlet, Holod Media, was also reported by RKN to Apple for alleged ‘violations.’ Holod’s show is also currently unavailable from Apple Podcasts.”The Verge / Richard Lawler
In a shocking turn of events, Twitter/X didn’t send out its revenue-sharing payments on schedule →“In between replies to parodies of his own account, tweets about the SpaceX Starship, The Boring Company, and other posts, Elon Musk tweeted a few times about the delay and noted the Twitter Blue program is now calling itself ‘X Premium.'”Rest of World / Nilesh Christopher
The YouTube-video-thumbnail-making industry, a thing that exists, is also worried about AI →“For YouTubers, thumbnails are serious business, as they can make or break a video’s reach. Top creators such as MrBeast test up to 20 different thumbnail variations on a single video, paying designers a reported $10,000 for a single video. This has spawned a microeconomy of freelance YouTube thumbnails artists around the world, who hone their design skills to attract clicks.”The Guardian / Dan Milmo
Meta will now have to ask its EU users for permission to show them targeted advertising →“If they do this in the way they are obliged to in law, no one will ever say yes to all of the things they are doing. You can say no to some of the toxic elements of Meta’s business and still enjoy the service.”The Washington Post / Paul Farhi
She paid a fortune for her town’s paper. Years of turmoil followed. →“When Wendy P. McCaw swept in to buy the venerable Santa Barbara News-Press in 2000, the community rejoiced. A local resident, not a distant conglomerate…But it didn’t take long for McCaw, a reclusive billionaire then in her late 40s, to become a headline-grabbing character in her own right.”Center for Cooperative Media / Joe Amditis
AI-generated news has arrived in New Jersey →“LocalLens, launched by Allendale School Board member Mat Hernandez, claims to use Large Language Model (LLM) technology and government records to automatically generate coverage of local government. The site says the point of LocalLens is to increase the visibility of local government activities, serving as a starting point for journalists.”The New York Times / Seth Kugel and Stephen Hiltner
A new frontier for travel scammers: AI-generated guidebooks →“When [an Amazon-ordered book on France] arrived, Ms. Kolsky was disappointed by its vague descriptions, repetitive text and lack of itineraries. “It seemed like the guy just went on the internet, copied a whole bunch of information from Wikipedia and just pasted it in,” she said. She returned it and left a scathing one-star review.”The Guardian / Imran Ahmed
“When we held up a mirror to Elon Musk’s Twitter/X, he tried to sue us into silence” →“It started with childish name-calling on Twitter two weeks ago, when Elon Musk called my organization ‘evil’ and me personally a ‘rat.’ It has since escalated to a lawsuit filed against the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), which I founded and run, in a California court last week.”Semafor / Max Tani
The New York Times is investigating its Baghdad bureau chief →“Three people with knowledge of the situation told Semafor that Jane Arraf was put on leave earlier this year amid an investigation by the paper into whether she misused the bureau’s funds. Two people with knowledge of the situation said that among the issues the Times examined was Arraf’s decision to pay non-US journalists over the paper’s $150 a day limit, a cap that has prompted grumbling in at the Times’ foreign bureaus in recent years, including at its office in Baghdad.”Geekwire / Thomas Wilde
The owner of Dungeons & Dragons is banning AI-generated art from its products →“We are revising our process and updating our artist guidelines to make clear that artists must refrain from using AI art generation as part of their art creation process for developing D&D art.”The Guardian / Hephzibah Anderson
The BBC’s Fergal Keane: “The breakdowns get harder to recover from each time” →“The most interesting feedback is from other foreign correspondents, who’ll say: ‘I’ve gone through this.’ There is a lot of talk about PTSD across the news industry, but when you’re in the middle of it, it’s a damn lonely place. It would be really beneficial if more foreign correspondents had tough but compassionate conversations with themselves and others who are going through the same thing.”The Guardian / Jon Henley
Fears for France’s Sunday paper over an editor with far-right ties →“‘We didn’t win,’ said Antoine Malo, a roving foreign correspondent at the Journal du Dimanche (JDD) and member of its editorial association. ‘We didn’t stop him, and now there’s a mass exodus. But the bigger fight will go on — from outside.'”
Nieman Lab / Fuego
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