“The day after Swift announced her book, David Shelley, the CEO of Hachette, one of the ‘Big Five’ book publishers, said something at the Frankfurt Book Fair that got far less attention…Best sellers, established tentpoles of the industry, were now ‘icing on the cake,’ he explained. The book industry still welcomes the hype and sales that a star can bring, but more and more, publishers also rely on what they already have: generations’ worth of older titles — what they call the backlist.”

“Beginning this week, the Verge will charge $7/month or $50/year for comprehensive access to the site as well as the already-paywalled newsletters Command Line and Notepad. Some content and the publication’s homepage, which was redesigned in 2022 to resemble a social feed, will remain free. The Verge is Vox Media’s third major subscription push behind New York and Vox, which launched a membership program earlier this year.”

“These appointees are rarely, if ever, referred to as conspiracy theorists or extremists, even though that is precisely what they are…Some journalists might argue that it is not the duty of a news organization to make such statements. But there are plenty of times when news outlets use blunt language to defend Constitutional principles. News organizations regularly argue before courts the importance of the First Amendment and issue scathing statements when such rights are violated, whether abroad or at home. So why not be as clear in stories?”

“Typically, pasting an exact quote into a traditional search engine like Google or Bing returns either a visual indication that the search engine has located the source — bolded text that matches your search — or a message that informs you there are no results…Eager to please, [ChatGPT] would sooner conjure a response out of thin air than admit it could not access an answer. In total, ChatGPT returned partially or entirely incorrect responses on a hundred and fifty-three occasions, though it only acknowledged an inability to accurately respond to a query seven times.”

“While [the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project] has consistently disclosed that it accepts some money from governments, including the United States, the full extent of the financing has not previously been revealed…The work of OCCRP, often in collaboration with other newsrooms around the world, has been deeply impressive journalistically and at times they have done reporting at odds with U.S. national interests…But the extent to which it has been backed by the U.S. government has caused consternation among would-be or former partners.”

“The volume of these things is immense…search engines like Google will say they check the content of ads to ensure they’re safe, but the thing is that attackers are using ad delivery networks and can redirect the URL after the ad is paid for.”

“It’s the first time all of a country’s major news publishers [including the Toronto Star, Metroland Media, Postmedia, The Globe and Mail, The Canadian Press, and CBC] have come together in litigation against OpenAI…’Journalism is in the public interest. OpenAI using other companies’ journalism for their own commercial gain is not. It’s illegal,’ said a joint statement from the media organizations.”

“This type of affiliate content also creates a symbiotic relationship between many publications that do sincere, hard-hitting reporting on Amazon and its myriad labor and environmental abuses and Amazon, the company perpetrating those abuses. Amazon is not the only website offering affiliate deals, but it is the biggest. Websites that do great reporting on consumerism and right to repair also often end up making a few bucks by pushing new gadgets.”

“Woods, now 53, ‘has provided evidence that he is living an upright life’ and deserves to be recognized for ‘the work he has done to transform himself,’ Newsom said in announcing the pardon.” In the time since former governor Jerry Brown commuted his sentence in 2018, Ear Hustle has been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and expanded to a second space in a women’s prison.

“It’s the best time — everyone is high as a kite on happiness…My idea, my concept that I go in with, is that the people are the parade” – Sarah Maslin Nir, a metro reporter who has volunteered to cover the parade for the last 12 years.