Monday, July 29, 2024 |
| Are prediction markets “the best tool we have to fight back against bullshit, clickbait, and propaganda” — or “just a euphemism for online gambling”? By Laura Hazard Owen. |
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| “I think the level of corruption and dysfunction and organized crime has grown. It’s much harder to decide — given our limited resources — where we put our efforts.” By Kate Bartlett. |
Most Americans follow local political news — but few are satisfied with the coverage they get, a Pew report finds What We’re ReadingThe Financial Times / George Hammond
AI start-up Anthropic accused of “egregious” data scraping →“Matt Barrie, the chief executive of Freelancer.com accused the San Francisco-based company of being ‘the most aggressive scraper by far’ of his portal for freelancers, which has millions of daily visits. Other web publishers have echoed Barrie’s concerns that Anthropic is swarming their sites and ignoring their instructions to stop collecting their content to train its models. Freelancer.com received 3.5 million visits from an Anthropic-linked web ‘crawler’ in the space of four hours, according to data shared with the Financial Times. That makes Anthropic ‘probably about five times the volume of the number two’ AI crawler, Barrie said.”Press Gazette / Bron Maher
Mail Online, The Independent, the Daily Mirror and the Daily Express roll out “consent or pay” walls in the UK →“Mail Online, The Independent and the websites of the Daily Mirror and Daily Express have begun requiring readers to pay for access if they do not consent to third-party cookies. The development makes them the first major UK publishers to roll out the ‘consent or pay’ approach to website monetisation that has already been adopted by many news businesses in Germany.”Bloomberg / Jake Rudnitsky
YouTube is being throttled in Russia in the latest attack on Western-owned social media →“Youtube download speeds on computers will be slowed by around 40% this week and 70% by the end of next week…Russia forced out several foreign social media and internet companies after the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, characterizing the effort as a campaign to uphold its digital sovereignty. YouTube has been one of the few to remain, despite the blocking of platforms including Facebook, X and Instagram, in part because there was no clear domestic alternative at the time.”The Information / Sahil Patel
Pinterest and LinkedIn team up with publishers to sell ads →“Last month Microsoft’s LinkedIn launched the beta phase of a new program, LinkedIn Wire, through which news and finance publishers such as Bloomberg, Dow Jones, Reuters and Yahoo Finance can sell ads in front of the videos they distribute on LinkedIn. While publishers split the revenue with LinkedIn, they are solely responsible for the ad sales, although LinkedIn is exploring a joint selling arrangement.”Semafor / Max Tani
A more media-friendly Kamala Harris runs for president →“Since early 2022, the vice president has worked to develop better and more personal relationships with parts of the news media that set the agenda for Washington. Publicly, she’s become the more accessible alternative to her stage-managed boss, sitting for on-the-record media interviews with numerous outlets. Privately, she’s been more willing to mix it up with journalists assigned to cover her. She’s invited a parade of prominent television anchors and media executives to dine with her at the Naval Observatory, given personal tours of her garden to journalists from diverse backgrounds, and shaped trips to do media appearances with the outlets serving Democratic-leaning groups the White House refers to as ‘coalition media.'”The Wall Street Journal / Georgia Wells and Sadie Gurman
TikTok collected U.S. users’ views on gun control, abortion and religion according to the Justice Department →“The Justice Department said it based its conclusions about TikTok tracking sensitive views on the discovery of a software tool that lets U.S. employees of TikTok and ByteDance, also based in China, collect user information based on a user’s content, including their views on subjects such as gun control, abortion and religion. Intelligence reporting further demonstrates that ByteDance and TikTok Global have taken action in response to PRC demands to censor content outside of China.”The New York Times / Kate Conger
How do you solve a problem like Elon? →“Internal documents obtained by The New York Times show that, in the second quarter of this year, X earned $114 million in revenue in the United States, a 25 percent decline from the first quarter and a 53 percent decline from the previous year.”The Wall Street Journal / Anne Steele
A few blockbuster podcasts are making all the money →“Podcasting is turning into an industry of megastars who command the most money and the biggest audiences. There are still nearly 450,000 active shows that have published recent episodes, according to Podcast Industry Insights. But the top 25 podcasts reach nearly half of U.S. weekly listeners, according to Edison Research. The top talents have tours, merchandise and multiyear deals in the nine figures. Big advertisers want in.”The Assembly / John Railey
Confessions of a journalist →“Three decades ago, I wrote a factually correct article that failed to convey the greater truth about who committed a sensational murder. I wasn’t the only person who conformed to the prosecution’s faulty narrative.”
Nieman Lab / Fuego
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