Monday, June 24, 2024 |
| “Ultimately, what we’re fighting for is the right to freelance.” By Christina Couch. |
What We’re ReadingColumbia Journalism Review / Paul Farhi
When they won’t even say “no comment” →“Nonresponses are rife, and growing rapidly. A Nexis database search of hundreds of news sources for the term ‘did not respond to a request for comment’ returned 728 mentions in May 2014. The same search for May 2019 produced 1,590 hits. In May of this year, the number had grown to 3,616, indicating a fivefold increase in ten years.”404 Media / Jason Koebler
Has Facebook stopped trying? →“Facebook has been overrun with AI spam and scams. Experts say Facebook has stopped asking them for help.”The New York Times / James B. Stewart and Benjamin Mullin
The future of streaming (according to the moguls figuring it out) →The Times talked to media moguls and executives big and small to figure out what the media landscape could look like in the near future. The Golden Age of streaming, it seems, is over — especially for the customers who were lured in with the promise of low prices and large media libraries. Poynter / Elizabeth Djinis
As philanthropy spends big to fight news deserts, 3 frontline news outlets share what they need →“These organizations are revolutionizing journalism at every level: how they are funded, how they write their stories and even how they generate them. They have thrown out the ‘we’re doing it this way because that’s how we’ve always done it’ mentality.”WIRED / Tim Marchman
Perplexity plagiarized our story about how Perplexity is a bullshit machine →“After we published the story, I prompted three leading chatbots to tell me about the story. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude generated text offering hypotheses about the story’s subject but noted that they had no access to the article. The Perplexity chatbot produced a six-paragraph, 287-word text closely summarizing the conclusions of the story and the evidence used to reach them.”The Atlantic / Anne Applebaum
Readers don’t trust dirty tricks →“The stuff that once shocked and scandalized us is now all over the internet, available for free. X, Facebook, Telegram, and YouTube have taken anger, emotion, and partisanship to levels no newspaper will ever match. AI-driven social-media campaigns will go even further. The tabloidization of everything is all around us already. That market is saturated. We don’t need The Washington Post’s contribution as well.”The Verge / Kevin Nguyen
What Game of Thrones did to the media →“People have joked that the BuzzFeed watermelon is the perfect metaphor for journalism in the Facebook Live era. But in hindsight, I think the watermelon got off easy.”Bloomberg / Lucas Shaw
BuzzFeed is struggling to sell the owner of “Hot Ones” →“BuzzFeed’s bankers at UBS Group AG are running a formal sale process and initially asked for more than $70 million…The clock is ticking. BuzzFeed has more than $100 million in debt, and holders can ask to be paid back in December. BuzzFeed doesn’t have that kind of cash and, after years of losing money, shares have declined 95% since it went public in 2021.”Public Source / Sue Kerr
My dad’s death showed me newspaper obituaries are also dying →“I did the math after a P-G employee sent me a rate sheet. By my estimate, the obituary I wanted to run would have cost more than $600, including funeral home fees, for a one-day notice.”O'Reilly / Tim O’Reilly
How to fix AI’s “original sin” →“What is missing is a more generalized infrastructure for detecting content ownership and providing compensation in a general purpose way. This is one of the great business opportunities of the next few years, awaiting the kind of breakthrough that pay-per-click search advertising brought to the World Wide Web.”
Nieman Lab / Fuego
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