Nieman Lab: The Daily Digest

Time is a flat circle, print edition: The Guardian has brought its Long Read franchise back to actual paper

Now on firmer financial ground, the U.K. newspaper seems more aware of its strengths — and of the strengths of the print medium. By Joshua Benton.
“Good blogs are good for business,” and other lessons from Defector’s third year
Knight Foundation names longtime Gannett exec next president and CEO
What We’re Reading
The Washington Post / Dan Stillman
Why your weather forecasts may soon become more accurate →
“Google DeepMind’s AI model, named ‘GraphCast,’ was trained on nearly 40 years of historical data and can make a 10-day forecast at six-hour intervals for locations spread around the globe in less than a minute on a computer the size of a small box. It takes a traditional model an hour or more on a supercomputer the size of a school bus to accomplish the same feat.”
Wall Street Journal / Alexandra Bruell
Insider will change its name back to Business Insider as co-founder steps down as CEO →
“Henry Blodget, one of the early pioneers of digital media, is stepping down as chief executive of Insider, a publication he co-founded more than 15 years ago. The move comes as Insider, now a unit of German publishing giant Axel Springer, is changing its name back to Business Insider as part of an effort to focus on business and technology news instead of trying to be a generalist publication.”
Center for Countering Digital Hate / Ana Guzman Ortiz
X hasn’t removed reported posts with antisemitism, anti-Muslim hate, and anti-Palestinian hate →
“Researchers find that X continued to host 98% of 200 posts reported to them by researchers which promoted antisemitism, Islamophobia, anti-Palestinian hate, or other hate speech.”
Substack / Matt Karolian
Newsletter winter is coming →
“If your newsroom is staffing up newsletters, put the damn newsletters on the front page of your site.”
NPR / Mary Louise Kelly, Erika Ryan, and Kat Lonsdorf
NPR journalists were interviewing a Palestinian farmer in the West Bank. Then the drone and soldiers appeared. →
“We stop and announce ourselves: ‘Media. Press.’ They’re clearly unhappy with us. Some have their faces covered with balaclavas. Soon about a dozen people in uniform are gathering around us – all of them carrying large assault-style guns.”
Defector / Alex Sujong Laughlin
Who is giving Carlos Watson money now? →
“The founder of Ozy Media, the digital news-turned-video and events company that collapsed in 2021 following fraud allegations, is now circulating petitions, and raising money under the claim that the federal government’s investigation into his mismanagement of Ozy Media is racially motivated.”
A Media Operator / Jacob Cohen Donnelly
Will G/O Media be dead soon? →
“The only way a network like G/O Media works is if it has an unbelievable amount of scale. Traffic is the name of the game. The thesis when G/O Media was formed in 2019 likely doesn’t exist today.”
Middle East Eye / Azad Essa
Why Palestinian journalists aren’t valued by their Western colleagues →
“The lack of care, concern, or frankly, outrage over the murder of Palestinian journalists is inextricably linked to their very dehumanization by the same Western media, today, yesterday and for decades prior.”
International Press Institute
How conspiracy groups in Spain worked to undermine Maldita’s media literacy bus tour project →
“The report reveals how coordination among these conspiracy groups on Telegram hindered the organic reach of Maldita’s media literacy initiative, analyzes the disinformation narratives used to discredit Maldita.es’s work, and exposes some of the key actors who encouraged these actions and the channels used to spread narratives and actions against the organization in Spain.”
International News Media Association / Rohit Supekar
How The New York Times uses machine learning to create a smarter paywall →
“This strategy allows us to tune the level of friction based on our business goals and, at the same time, smartly target users so we can obtain a lift in engagement and conversion rate compared to a purely random policy.”
Reuters / Kevin Liffey
Russia has pardoned a man who was convicted of murdering journalist Anna Politkovskaya, in return for fighting in Ukraine →
“Politkovskaya was shot dead outside her flat in Moscow in 2006, triggering an outcry in the West and underlining the growing dangers of reporting in Russia as Putin gradually clamped down on independent media. Sergei Khadzhikurbanov, a former law enforcement officer, was sentenced to 20 years in prison in 2014 for organizing the killing.”
Futurism / Maggie Harrison
AI companies are running out of training data →
“As it stands, the most practical solution for this looming problem — save for the advent of mass human content farms, where we lowly carbon-based creatures click and clack away to feed the endless data thirst of our robot overlords — may actually be through data partnerships.”
Página 12 / Pablo Esteban
ChatGPT still doesn’t understand Spanish →
A recent study by the Polytechnic University of Madrid analyzed 90,000 Spanish words and found that ChatGPT ignored 20% of them. Of the 80% of words it did recognize, it interpreted 5% of those words incorrectly.
Bloomberg / Davey Alba
YouTube will require disclosures on videos that include generative AI →
“The policy update, which will go into effect sometime in the new year, could apply to videos that use generative AI tools to realistically depict events that never happened, or show people saying or doing something they didn’t actually do.”
CNN / Alli Rosenbloom
USA Today hires Caché McClay as its first-ever Beyoncé reporter →
“In the role, which grew widespread attention when the job was posted in September, McClay will cover the ‘Cuff It’ singer’s ‘complex business and entertainment empire,’ as well as Beyoncé’s fanbase, known as the ‘BeyHive,’ and her influence on fashion, music and culture.
Columbia Journalism Review / Jon Allsop
David Cameron is back. Will the aughts spin come back with him? →
“Cameron courted newspaper publishers and editors and was particularly close to those associated with Murdoch, who reportedly found Cameron slick but nonetheless backed him; The Sun, a Murdoch tabloid of mythic influence (in every sense of that term), switched allegiance from Labour to the Conservatives, starting in 2009.”