“Nonresponses are rife, and growing rapidly. A Nexis database search of hundreds of news sources for the term ‘did not respond to a request for comment’ returned 728 mentions in May 2014. The same search for May 2019 produced 1,590 hits. In May of this year, the number had grown to 3,616, indicating a fivefold increase in ten years.”

“Facebook has been overrun with AI spam and scams. Experts say Facebook has stopped asking them for help.”

The Times talked to media moguls and executives big and small to figure out what the media landscape could look like in the near future. The Golden Age of streaming, it seems, is over — especially for the customers who were lured in with the promise of low prices and large media libraries.

“These organizations are revolutionizing journalism at every level: how they are funded, how they write their stories and even how they generate them. They have thrown out the ‘we’re doing it this way because that’s how we’ve always done it’ mentality.”

“After we published the story, I prompted three leading chatbots to tell me about the story. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude generated text offering hypotheses about the story’s subject but noted that they had no access to the article. The Perplexity chatbot produced a six-paragraph, 287-word text closely summarizing the conclusions of the story and the evidence used to reach them.”

“The stuff that once shocked and scandalized us is now all over the internet, available for free. X, Facebook, Telegram, and YouTube have taken anger, emotion, and partisanship to levels no newspaper will ever match. AI-driven social-media campaigns will go even further. The tabloidization of everything is all around us already. That market is saturated. We don’t need The Washington Post’s contribution as well.”

“People have joked that the BuzzFeed watermelon is the perfect metaphor for journalism in the Facebook Live era. But in hindsight, I think the watermelon got off easy.”

“BuzzFeed’s bankers at UBS Group AG are running a formal sale process and initially asked for more than $70 million…The clock is ticking. BuzzFeed has more than $100 million in debt, and holders can ask to be paid back in December. BuzzFeed doesn’t have that kind of cash and, after years of losing money, shares have declined 95% since it went public in 2021.”

“I did the math after a P-G employee sent me a rate sheet. By my estimate, the obituary I wanted to run would have cost more than $600, including funeral home fees, for a one-day notice.”

“What is missing is a more generalized infrastructure for detecting content ownership and providing compensation in a general purpose way. This is one of the great business opportunities of the next few years, awaiting the kind of breakthrough that pay-per-click search advertising brought to the World Wide Web.”