“‘We’re in a time of information abundance,’ says Brian Moritz, a sports media researcher at St. Bonaventure University. ‘But actual journalists—the people who hold systems and power structures accountable—they’re being totally phased out.'”

“A core part of [Nick] Thompson’s strategy was to figure out how much readers would be willing to pay for a subscription. He ended up raising subscription prices by more than 50%, and made it harder for people to read stories without paying … Subscriptions now account for two-thirds of revenue, compared with a little less than half when Thompson took the helm.”

“I think there’s a bit too much of a public narrative that frustration with [New York Times columnist] Kevin Roose’ tweets is why Meta turned their back on CrowdTangle. I think the truth is that Facebook is moving out of news entirely.”

“Out of concerns that Politico is losing its edge, the untested leadership team is pushing staffers harder. Some journalists see it as the sharpening and discipline Politico has been lacking; others, as micromanagement bogging down a newsroom built on speed” … “‘You can’t “win the day,”‘ one staffer says, referring to the philosophy that governed Politico’s early years, ‘if you haven’t won the newsroom.'”

“For all the people using Google to find important and hard-to-access scientific information, orders of magnitude more are using it to find their email inbox, get to Walmart’s website, or remember who was president before Hoover. And then there’s my favorite fact of all: that a vast number of people every year go to Google and type ‘google’ into the search box. We mostly talk about Google as a research tool, but in reality, it’s asked to do anything and everything you can think of, billions of times a day. The real question in front of all these would-be Google killers, then, is not how well they can find information. It’s how well they can do everything Google does.”

“I saw this over and over again, journalists posting tributes, who were then killed themselves soon after. And a tribute goes up for them. And then the pattern continues.”

“A journalist first selects a ‘seed’ source like a city council, parks department, local school, etc. they plan to cover. With a link from that single source — whether that’s a press release, 500-page report, or even a tweet — Google’s generative AI software produces a first draft of the story, complete with a lede, nut graf, quotes, and the rest…The idea is that a journalist can add to that draft with reporting and fact-checking and eventually publish a full story.”

“The surprisingly readable 88-page complaint is a very relatable litany of all the annoying things Apple has done to you and me…You can almost forget this is a lawsuit and not just the compiled observations of a single very motivated poster in The Verge comments section — until you get to page 57.”

“Instagram rolled out the change in February, announcing in a blog that the platform doesn’t ‘want to proactively recommend political content from accounts you don’t follow.’ That post confirmed that Meta ‘won’t proactively recommend content about politics on recommendation surfaces across Instagram and Threads,’ so that those platforms can remain ‘a great experience for everyone.'”