Intelligencer / Nayeema Raza
Blakeney Schick listened so you could too →“She had a knack for hearing the lacuna of exposition in an episode and filling that void with a piece of audio recorded in a different location with different room tone and somehow making it match…and doing much, much more to educate your mind and ease your ears. Mixers remarked that her ears were more attuned than those of many audio engineers.”
Financial Times / Laura Pitel and Olaf Storbeck
Holger Friedrich, the German newspaper owner who says stay away from journalists →“The 56-year-old tech millionaire entered the newspaper business alongside his wife Silke in 2019 to rescue a struggling Berlin daily with a rich history. Under his ownership, Berliner Zeitung’s financial bleeding has stopped and online readership has swelled. But its proprietor has become entangled in a string of controversies.”
Financial Times / Robin Wigglesworth
Financial information is a huge business. Financial news? Not so much →“The latest report from Burton Taylor estimates that the financial-information industry generated $37.3bn of revenues in 2022….financial news only generated $1.7bn of revenues last year. In other words: News has easily been the slowest-growing part of the broader industry over the past five years, despite all the attention it generates (find someone who loves you as much as journalists love writing about other journalists).”
The Verge / Richard Lawler
Rest of World / Nilesh Christopher
The YouTube-video-thumbnail-making industry, a thing that exists, is also worried about AI →“For YouTubers, thumbnails are serious business, as they can make or break a video’s reach. Top creators such as MrBeast test up to 20 different thumbnail variations on a single video, paying designers a reported $10,000 for a single video. This has spawned a microeconomy of freelance YouTube thumbnails artists around the world, who hone their design skills to attract clicks.”
The Washington Post / Paul Farhi
She paid a fortune for her town’s paper. Years of turmoil followed. →“When Wendy P. McCaw swept in to buy the venerable Santa Barbara News-Press in 2000, the community rejoiced. A local resident, not a distant conglomerate…But it didn’t take long for McCaw, a reclusive billionaire then in her late 40s, to become a headline-grabbing character in her own right.”
Center for Cooperative Media / Joe Amditis
AI-generated news has arrived in New Jersey →“LocalLens, launched by Allendale School Board member Mat Hernandez, claims to use Large Language Model (LLM) technology and government records to automatically generate coverage of local government. The site says the point of LocalLens is to increase the visibility of local government activities, serving as a starting point for journalists.”
The New York Times / Seth Kugel and Stephen Hiltner
A new frontier for travel scammers: AI-generated guidebooks →“When [an Amazon-ordered book on France] arrived, Ms. Kolsky was disappointed by its vague descriptions, repetitive text and lack of itineraries. “It seemed like the guy just went on the internet, copied a whole bunch of information from Wikipedia and just pasted it in,” she said. She returned it and left a scathing one-star review.”
The Guardian / Imran Ahmed
The Guardian / Hephzibah Anderson
The BBC’s Fergal Keane: “The breakdowns get harder to recover from each time” →“The most interesting feedback is from other foreign correspondents, who’ll say: ‘I’ve gone through this.’ There is a lot of talk about PTSD across the news industry, but when you’re in the middle of it, it’s a damn lonely place. It would be really beneficial if more foreign correspondents had tough but compassionate conversations with themselves and others who are going through the same thing.”
The Guardian / Jon Henley