Thursday, September 12, 2024 |
| The Archival Producers Alliance’s new generative AI guardrails put audience transparency first. By Andrew Deck. |
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| “With each region we visited, the audience from that region grew, and they have continued to follow us to this day.” By Lex Doig. |
What We’re ReadingThe New York Times Company
The New York Times establishes a Vietnam bureau for the first time since 1975 →“We are thrilled to announce that we are re-establishing a bureau in Vietnam, and that Damien Cave will take on the exciting mission of leading it…The Times’s return to Vietnam is a sign of Asia’s rise as an important economic and political power center.”Bloomberg / A.J. Bauer
Trump wants ABC’s broadcast license revoked. That’s ironic. →“His call for federal censorship of a broadcaster for merely correcting his blatant falsehoods may offer insights into how the budding authoritarian plans to govern if he is allowed to return to the Oval Office. But as a historian of conservative news, I am also struck by what this episode reveals about the distorted memories of Trump and his supporters — regarding their movement’s relationship to both the FCC and to ABC.”Mather Economics / Peter Doucette and Matt Lindsay
For U.S. newspapers, new digital subscriptions outnumber print 2-to-1 — but print still generates almost 75% of their revenue →“Traditionally, publishers have relied on aggressive print pricing to counter declining advertising revenues. However, there’s been a noticeable shift toward more conservative strategies in recent years, bringing the concept of the ‘print runway’ to the forefront. Decision-makers are now focused on how they can sustain print revenue while reducing costs and funding their digital transformation.”The Verge / Kevin Nguyen
This hot new Broadway thriller is all about…content moderation →“I was really fascinated at this idea that to do the most passive brain rot-y activity of scrolling mindlessly on my phone, there was a real human labor cost and that these spiritual and physical and scientific laws of equivalence still apply to the internet.”Baekdal / Thomas Baekdal
The affiliate revenue market for publishers isn’t what it used to be →“Why would any publisher think that filling the internet with low-quality product recommendations, monetized by affiliate links, for which you have to rely on Google search for the majority of your traffic, was ever going to work?…Ecommerce platforms are getting tired of the massive amount of low-quality affiliate traffic they are getting, and are taking their own steps to only pay for clicks that directly contribute to real sales in a meaningful way.”The Verge / Emma Roth
Google can now use AI to make fake podcasts out of your research documents →“The experimental feature lives within NotebookLM, the AI note-taking app Google launched last year, and will have AI hosts ‘summarize your material, make connections between topics, and banter back and forth.'”The Wall Street Journal / Jessica Toonkel, Amol Sharma, Alex Frangos, Katherine Sayre, and Keach Hagey
The family rift driving Rupert Murdoch to redo his “irrevocable” trust →“Rupert was moved to act, in part, because he worried James and his sisters would align to block Lachlan’s management of the companies, people close to the Murdochs said. He told people he was concerned that James, who has been critical of Fox News — especially since the aftermath of the 2020 election — would moderate the channel’s content, undermining its appeal to conservative audiences.”The Independent / Amy-Clare Martin
U.K. counter-terrorism police are investigating the sudden death of a 32-year-old Telegraph journalist who’d drawn Russia’s ire →“David Knowles, 32, who worked on the successful weekday podcast ‘Ukraine: The Latest,’ died while on holiday in Gibraltar on Sunday after suffering a suspected cardiac arrest…His podcast on the Russia-Ukraine war was described as a runaway success with almost 100 million downloads. Mr. Knowles was last year added to a list of people banned from entering Russia, alongside many other U.K. journalists because of their work covering the conflict.”Twitter / Forbes Union
Forbes’ union has voted “no confidence” in the company’s top execs →“We do not believe you maintain a workplace where staff can build long-term careers, nor have you protected essential standards of editorial integrity…management’s refusal to implement stronger oversight over the contributor network — over the objections of staff members — frequently leads to situations where unvetted articles from contributors create outrage from readers and cause damage to the company’s image as a trusted news brand.”Press Gazette / Charlotte Tobitt
It’s increasingly “accept cookies or pay us money” for U.K. news sites →“Among U.K. publishers, The Times has put the highest price on opting out of sharing data, at £6.99 per month, ahead of News U.K. stablemate The Sun’s ‘Pay to Reject’ offering on £4.99. Next is The Independent’s ‘Independent Ad-Free’ on £4, Mail Online’s ‘Mail Essential’ on £2.70, and Reach national websites the Mirror and Express with ‘Privacy Plus’ at £1.99 each.”Taylor Lorenz's Newsletter
Why is Instagram Reels so unhinged? →“You’d think that a social media algorithm would focus on the things that you like and serve you as much of that content as possible. TikTok and YouTube seem to have mastered this concept, but there’s one place online where the conventional rules of social media don’t seem to apply: Instagram Reels.”The Verge / Wes Davis
ESPN’s AI-generated recaps of women’s soccer matches are already missing the point →“Jones points to Luis Paez-Pumar’s column for Defector, where he writes that ESPN is ‘feeding existing soccer and lacrosse journalists’ work into a machine aimed at making them obsolete’ rather than hiring them to do this work.”LION Publishers / Hayley Milloy and Samantha Matsumoto
Meet the winners of the 2024 LION Sustainability Awards →9 Millones, Altavoz Lab, Block Club Chicago, Borderless Magazine, Camille Padilla Dalmau, Canopy Atlanta, CivicLex, El Tímpano, Johnson County Post, MLK50, Planet Detroit, Red Bank Green, Santa Cruz Local, Spotlight PA, Technical.ly, The Appeal, the Investigative Journalism Foundation, The Pulp, and The Reporting Project.The Verge / Wes Davis
Miss the cached pages in Google search results? The Wayback Machine is coming to take their place →“You can get to the results by clicking the three dots next to a specific link in the results, then click ‘More about this page’ to get to a link to the Wayback Machine page, the post says.”The Wall Street Journal / Stuart Condie
The CEO of Australian media giant Nine is resigning amid an internal investigation →“The broadcaster, streamer, and publisher is waiting on a report that it commissioned into alleged inappropriate behavior by senior staff, and its response to the allegations. Nine expects to receive the report in October, [CEO Mike] Sneesby said on Thursday.”Semafor / Ben Smith and Liz Hoffman
The publisher of the New York Sun is bidding for The Telegraph →“Dovid Efune, publisher of the New York Sun, made his pitch Wednesday to RedBird IMI, the Abu Dhabi-backed fund that has been forced by the British government to unload the publication over concerns over foreign influence in the domestic press.”Press Gazette / Bron Maher
U.K. startup Mill Media is leaving Substack for Ghost →“‘I want to spend as much of our money as possible on journalists,’ [founder Joshi] Herrmann said. ‘We are going to save a lot of money by publishing on Ghost and using custom websites rather than Substack, and that’s important for us because we’re not a media giant, we need to spend our income carefully.'”TechCrunch / Sarah Perez
Bluesky catches up to Twitter with native support for video →“Each post on Bluesky can contain one video, which can also include attached subtitles. Users will be limited to uploading 25 videos or 10GB of video per day as the feature first launches, though these limits may be adjusted over time, Bluesky says.”The Verge / Elizabeth Lopatto
The end of the XOXO festival feels like a funeral for an earlier internet →“It was like we had all gathered over the body of a specific period on the internet to pay our respects… At the time, the idea was that the internet would make it possible for people to make a living without the compromises made by corporate culture.”The Guardian / Jane Martinson
Why the BBC laying off one journalist matters — for U.K. media and democracy →“For the past seven years, [Kate] Lamble has covered the Grenfell Tower inquiry — listening to hours and hours of often heartbreaking testimony — until last week, two days after the inquiry published its final report, when she announced she had been made redundant and would be leaving the BBC.”NPR / Dara Kerr
How Memphis became a battleground over Elon Musk’s xAI supercomputer →“The project has moved at breakneck speed and has been cloaked in mystery and secrecy. Musk has yet to make a public appearance, and officials from the local utility who were briefed on the project signed nondisclosure agreements, according to the utility’s spokeswoman. The NDAs were first reported by Forbes. The news dropped on Memphis in a press conference in June that was announced with little notice and caught members of the City Council, environmental agencies and the community off guard.”
Nieman Lab / Fuego
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