Thursday, June 6, 2024 |
| Ozy’s Instagram account is calling for supporters to pack the courtroom as “Justice Watchers.” By Joshua Benton. |
Farewell to Climate Nexus, an inbox stalwart What We’re ReadingNPR / David Folkenflik
The Washington Post’s publisher tried to kill a story about allegations against him. It wasn’t the first time. →“In several conversations, [Washington Post publisher and CEO Will] Lewis repeatedly — and heatedly — offered to give me an exclusive interview about the Post’s future, as long as I dropped the story about the allegations … That first interview appears to have gone to Puck’s Dylan Byers.”The Boston Globe / Aidan Ryan
Doris Burke has come a long way from her days at Providence. Now, she’s on the cusp of history →“Burke, 58, will make history this week as the first woman to call a championship telecast in a major American men’s sports league.”FIPP / Pierre de Villiers
How Harvard Business Review is leaning into generative AI →HBR believes AI will help the media industry enter an age of hyper-personalization. The 102-year-old publication is also working on a chatbot to help readers “get ahead in their careers.” (Publications including /www.niemanlab.org/2024/02/san-francisco-chronicle-tries-an-ai-chatbot-er-chowbot-for-food-recs/">San Francisco Chronicle have also debuted chatbots.) AP News / Mike Catalini
New Jersey adopts public records overhaul but critics say it tightens access to documents →“The new law also ends a requirement for towns to pay attorneys’ fees in court cases they lose over records requests. The last provision could make it prohibitively expensive for members of the public and news reporters to challenge local and state governments in court, according to the bill’s opponents, including civil rights groups, the state’s press association and dozens of others who testified at committee hearings this year.”Chronicle / Stephanie M. Lee
Has the famed misinformation researcher Joan Donovan been spreading misinformation? →“A series of events in a suspicious order, a handful of well-connected people: This was what Donovan’s allegation boiled down to.” Financial Times / Daniel Thomas
Mill Media to target London as Evening Standard closes daily editions →“The group, using funds raised last year from investors including CNN boss Mark Thompson and economist Diane Coyle, is aiming to double the size of its operations by the end of the year.”Press Gazette / Charlotte Tobitt
Facebook deleting local news posts and labelling them as spam →“Bearing in mind we’re publishing 6,500 stories a year, most of them go to Facebook, so we’re probably doing ten to 15, maybe sometimes 15 to 20 stories a day to Facebook, and it happened to be a general election post that was taken down.”WIRED / Samanth Subramanian
How to lead an army of digital sleuths in the age of AI →Eliot Higgins, Bellingcat founder: “When a lot of people think about AI, they think, ‘Oh, it’s going to fool people into believing stuff that’s not true.’ But what it’s really doing is giving people permission to not believe stuff that is true. Because they can say, ‘Oh, that’s an AI-generated image. AI can generate anything now: video, audio, the entire war zone re-created.’ They will use it as an excuse. It’s just easy for them to say.”The New York Times / Ben Mullin and Katie Robertson
Clash over phone hacking article preceded exit of Washington Post editor →“Sally Buzbee, the editor, informed Mr. Lewis that the newsroom planned to cover a judge’s scheduled ruling in a long-running British legal case brought by Prince Harry and others against some of Rupert Murdoch’s tabloids, the people said. As part of the ruling, the judge was expected to say whether the plaintiffs could add Mr. Lewis’s name to a list of executives who they argued were involved in a plan to conceal evidence of hacking at the newspapers. Mr. Lewis told Ms. Buzbee the case involving him did not merit coverage, the people said.”Poynter / Kelly McBride
AP Stylebook’s new chapter on crime is a glimpse into the future →“The chapter instructs journalists to be wary of police reports, especially early ones. And while it stops short of admonishing newsrooms for past behavior, it does say, ‘Accounts by police, especially in the hours just after a crime, are very incomplete and can be inaccurate, whether about specific details or about motivations behind the crime.'”The Guardian / Amanda Meade
Channel Ten running “premium” ads for gas lobby that appear part of news bulletin, senators told →“Channel Ten has been accused of blurring the lines between news and advertising by running commercials for the natural gas industry that appear to be part of the network’s prime-time news bulletins.”The New York Times / Kashmir Hill and Tiffany Hsu
The life, death, and rebirth of an AI-generated news outlet →“During the two years that BNN was active, it had the veneer of a legitimate news service, claiming a worldwide roster of ‘seasoned’ journalists and 10 million monthly visitors, surpassing the The Chicago Tribune’s self-reported audience … A closer look, however, would have revealed that individual journalists at BNN published lengthy stories as often as multiple times a minute, writing in generic prose familiar to anyone who has tinkered with the AI chatbot ChatGPT.”Press Gazette / Charlotte Tobitt
New Zealand’s Stuff has “abandoned” the traditional inverted pyramid structure for contentious stories →Stuff.co.nz also introduced a sentiment tracker, which found it’s not “just kittens and sports” that make people happy — “really good analysis” does too.
Nieman Lab / Fuego
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