Thursday, February 6, 2025 |
| The DeepSeek hype cycle is in full force, but can the chatbot attribute sources more accurately than its competitors? By Andrew Deck. |
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| Now even a paid subscription is tantamount to bribery for some. By Joshua Benton. |
What We’re ReadingThe Verge / Emma Roth
Researchers trained an OpenAI rival in half an hour for less than $50 →“The researchers based s1 on Qwen2.5, an open-source model from Alibaba Cloud. They initially started with a pool of 59,000 questions to train the model on, but found that the larger data set didn’t offer ‘substantial gains’ over a whittled-down set of just 1,000. The researchers say they trained the model on just 16 Nvidia H100 GPUs.”New York / Charlotte Klein
It’s a good time to be The Bulwark →“The Bulwark had its first profitable year in 2024 owing to a combination of paid Substack subscribers, podcast advertising, and YouTube monetization. The Substack, which currently has 76,000 paid subscribers, continues to grow at a rapid clip…Meanwhile, the company’s investment in YouTube content has paid off, bringing in between $150,000 to $300,000 a month.”CTV News / Rachel Aiello
Canada’s government is advertising on Facebook again →“Canada’s advertising suspension on Facebook and Instagram dates back to July 2023, after Meta decided to pull Canadian news from its platforms. Meta did so in response to the Online News Act, which sought to force digital giants to pay media outlets for content that is shared, previewed or otherwise repurposed on their platforms.”Press Gazette / Charlotte Tobitt
At Le Monde, digital subscriber revenue will pay for the newsroom within two years →“The French daily newspaper and online newsbrand ended 2024 with 660,000 subscribers, of which 580,000 were digital…it has in the past two years put effort into international English-language expansion which [CEO Louis] Dreyfus told Press Gazette has reached 12,000 subscribers…Dreyfus told Press Gazette that when he joined Le Monde 14 years ago, it had 310 staff journalists and that today it has more than 560.”Press Gazette / Dominic Ponsford
How the Financial Times quadrupled its email subscribers (“the biggest driver of reader engagement”) in four years →“…they were really being used solely as an engagement tool and as part of our loyalty strategy. But we’ve started using them more for acquisition as well and had a lot of success with that…I would say our most successful newsletters are the big personality newsletters that our readers really value. The metrics for those are not traffic to the site or traffic at all. They are read in your inbox, with amazing bespoke exclusive content.”The Washington Post / Annabelle Timsit
CBS releases Harris interview materials amid Trump, FCC pressure →“Robert Jensen, an emeritus professor of journalism at the University of Texas at Austin, told The Post…that Trump’s lawsuit was ‘an attempt to undermine the credibility of not only Harris and not only of CBS News, but of all traditional mainstream legacy media.'”Columbia Journalism Review / Barbara Starr
The reshuffling of the Pentagon press corps is a warning →“According to the memo, The New York Times, NBC, NPR, and Politico are all being evicted from their dedicated workspaces inside the Pentagon’s ‘correspondents’ corridor.’ In their place will be three reliably conservative outlets — Breitbart News, One America News Network, and the New York Post — as well as the liberal HuffPost. (A spokesperson for HuffPost, which does not have a dedicated Pentagon reporter and did not request to be added, told NBC News that the publication is prepared to deliver ‘hard-hitting coverage.’)”The Washington Post / Jeremy Barr
Presidential daughter-in-law Lara Trump will have her own show in Fox News →“The show, which will debut Feb. 22, will ‘focus on the return of common sense to all corners of American life’ and ‘will feature big picture analysis and interviews with thought leaders,’ according to a press release issued by the network. No family member this close to a sitting president has simultaneously hosted a cable TV news show.”Variety / Gene Maddaus
The foreman of that CNN jury was ready to grant $100 million in punitive damages →“‘The message the jury wanted to send was to not only CNN but to all media that the general public is fed up with fake news and partial truths,’ she said in response to written questions. ‘Reporting must be unbiased, true, and complete.'”Press Gazette / Bron Maher
Nearly a third of all New York Times subscribers don’t pay for its news product →“Of those 10.8 million subscribers, 3.5 million (or 32%) subscribed only to either its Games, Cooking, Wirecutter, Audio or The Athletic products. Another 1.9 million had a conventional news-only digital subscription that provides access past the nytimes.com paywall and a further 5.4 million had either an ‘All Access’ bundled subscription, which buys access to all the Times’ products, or some other mix of NYT subscriptions.”The Wall Street Journal / Melissa Korn and Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg
The war over what makes for “harmful” reading material is heating up →“A group of major U.S. publishers, along with authors, parents, teachers and a public library, are now suing [Idaho] to try to reverse the purge — which has included ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ and ‘The Perks of Being a Wallflower,’ among others — and overturn the law, known as HB 710.”The Verge / Jess Weatherbed
Google is the latest AI maker to add “reasoning” to its models →“Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking will be available in the model dropdown options on the desktop and mobile app starting today, alongside another, more agentic, version of the model that can ‘interact with apps like YouTube, Search, and Google Maps,’ according to Google. It was introduced in December 2024 and is expected to compete with other so-called reasoning Al models like OpenAl’s 01 and DeepSeek’s R1.”The Wall Street Journal / Suzanne Vranica and Jessica Toonkel
OpenAI is set to air its first Super Bowl ad on Sunday →At the going rate of
$8 million, OpenAI will probably spend more for 30 seconds than the $6 million China’s DeepSeek says it spent developing its entire
R1 model.Press Gazette / Charlotte Tobitt
Tortoise Media appoints co-CEOs from both sides of its Observer acquisition →“Emma Sullivan helped to lead the deal as Tortoise managing director, and Richard Furness was chief strategy and business development officer at Guardian Media Group.”The Verge / Mia Sato
A reviews site embroiled in AI scandal is back from the dead →“Many of the [Reviewed] articles promising ‘the best’ products of 2025 are, in fact, old stories retrofitted with new, timely headlines. An article for the best patio heaters, for example, indicates the story was actually last updated two years ago in January 2023 and written by a staff member who no longer works at Reviewed.”
Nieman Lab / Fuego
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