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— Laura Hazard Owen
Swing state journalists were trained to avoid the worst kinds of political coverage. Did it work?“None of this transformed content really matters much if newsrooms can’t get it in front of all kinds of audience groups.” By Sarah Scire. |
“After spending the better part of the past two years grading AI-generated papers, Troy Jollimore, a poet, philosopher, and Cal State Chico ethics professor, has concerns. ‘Massive numbers of students are going to emerge from university with degrees, and into the workforce, who are essentially illiterate,’ he said. ‘Both in the literal sense and in the sense of being historically illiterate and having no knowledge of their own culture, much less anyone else’s.’”
The New York Times / Jessica TestaIs Dear Media’s podcast network the “manosphere” for women? →“Its nearly 100 shows are as freewheeling and chummy as those in the ‘manosphere,’ similarly hosted by comedians and content creators. Except here, Joe Rogan’s alpha masculinity and Logan Paul’s unabashed idiocy are swapped for girlboss confidence and therapy speak. Gone, too, is the overt conservatism that now blankets the manosphere — but not all of its ideas…There is a do-your-own-research ethos, already familiar to those who follow ‘MAHA’ or even Goop. But here, it is slid between dating diaries and reality-television recaps.”
The Cut / Ellen O'Connell WhittetA close read of TikTok’s first papal conclave →“Nothing is more responsive than social media, where as soon as something exists, it can be aestheticized, turned into a fandom, and flattened into a TikTok trend. And the conclave — by design — is dripping with iconography and mystique. It’s the kind of visual drama that begs to be screengrabbed, edited, and reinterpreted.”
The New York Times / Benjamin MullinTrump administration kills grant for PBS children’s shows →“The abrupt cancellation of the grant program, called Ready To Learn, resulted in a loss of $23 million that would have gone to children’s educational shows and games…The Ready To Learn grant, which is administered by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and allocated to PBS and local stations, has historically funded well-known children’s programs, including ‘Sesame Street,’ ‘Reading Rainbow’ and ‘Clifford the Big Red Dog.’ The five-year grant was set to expire at the end of September.”
The Washington Post / Scott Nover and Jada YuanThe Associated Press won’t change “Napalm Girl” photo credit →“Staff of the wire service spent the past year investigating claims that Ut was not responsible for the image — formally titled ‘The Terror of War’ — which won him a Pulitzer Prize in 1973. The AP came to its decision that Ut should retain his credit because of a lack of conclusive evidence that the credit should change.”
404 Media / Matthew GaultThe AI slop presidency →“This has become the Slop Presidency, and AI-generated images are the perfect artistic medium for the Trump presidency. They’re impulsively created, grotesque, and low-effort…AI allows his team to create media that would never exist otherwise, a particularly useful tool for a President and administration that has a hostile relationship with reality.”
The Atlantic / Sarah YagerHow the most remote community in America gets its mail →“Mail delivery in Supai involves a feat of logistics, horsemanship, and carefully placed hooves. It is slow and drudging work—starting at 3 a.m., when Chamberlain rises to feed the pack string, and continuing to sundown as fences are fixed and horseshoes are replaced—that belies an era of instant delivery, optimized everything, and ‘government efficiency.’ It also offers a glimpse into what the Postal Service can mean for rural America, at a moment when the agency’s future is uncertain.”
Futurism / Maggie Harrison DupréScammers stole the website for Emerson college’s student radio station and started running it as a zombie AI farm →“As frustrating as it’s been, the phony site is the perfect foil for WECB, and the ideal of college radio writ large. The zombie WECB is an SEO front for braindead, profit-driven clickbait; at their core, the co-editors emphasized, the real WECB and Milk Crate are a space for community-building between peers, and the rewards of messy, dedicated, and thoroughly human creativity.”
NPR / David FolkenflikKari Lake says OAN’s far-right coverage will fuel Voice of America →“Kari Lake providing One America News Network to our global audiences makes a mockery of the agency’s history of independent non-partisan journalism.” – Grant Turner, former U.S. Agency for Global Media Chief Financial Officer.
Status / Oliver DarcyThe Daily Dot’s Doom →“Last month, on April 10, staffers inside The Daily Dot noticed something strange happening in their traffic dashboard. It wasn’t the usual ebb and flow of internet readership—the kind of minor volatility that might accompany a slow news week. It was an outright collapse…As the numbers cratered, The Daily Dot’s engineers tried everything they could, deploying technical fixes that they hoped would remedy the crisis. But no fix reversed the trend. The traffic had simply vanished.”
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