Wednesday, January 15, 2025 |
| “I get the challenges small startups face trying to fill this void of local news. So this is our little attempt to support them in our Conversation way.” By Joshua Benton. |
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| For decades, the narrative about state government reporting has been almost entirely negative — but our new research suggests a turnaround. By Matthew Powers. |
OpenAI will fund four Axios Local newsrooms as part of a broader partnership focused on “juicing local news” What We’re ReadingWired / Kate Knibbs
That sports news story you clicked on could be AI slop →“At a moment when trust in media has plummeted and many news outlets have seen revenue decline, this type of slop content mill ring is a double whammy. It pollutes the information ecosystem with junk and stolen writing, and it siphons off programmatic advertising revenue from legitimate content producers.”X / Ben Mullin
More than 400 Washington Post journalists send plea to owner Jeff Bezos to intervene at the paper →“This goes far beyond the issue of the presidential endorsement, which we recognize as the owner’s prerogative.” Press Gazette / Dominic Ponsford
New digital daily newspaper for London set to launch →“The team behind London Daily Digital say they plan to launch the title next month (February) as
a website and a page-turning daily digital edition. It is also planned for the title to have a monthly print edition priced at £5 with a run of 100,000 copies.”TechCrunch / Kyle Wiggers
Google inks deal with the Associated Press to bring more real-time info to Gemini →“Jaffer Zaidi, Google’s VP of global news partnerships,
said that the goal is to ‘further enhance the usefulness of results’ in the Gemini experience.”The New Yorker / Doreen St. Félix
Blake Lively, Justin Baldoni, and the collapse of the Hollywood #MeToo era →“The late 2010s genre of #MeToo reportage cannot thrive on today’s volatile internet. Information is misinformation and vice versa. Victims are offenders and offenders are victims. The word that comes up again and again in all the internet litigation of Lively v. Baldoni is ‘narrative.’ Abuse seems to be far from anyone’s mind.”Platformer / Casey Newton
Meta just flipped the switch that prevents misinformation from spreading in the United States →“When the company announced on Jan. 7 that it would end its fact-checking partnerships, the company also instructed teams responsible for ranking content in the company’s apps to stop penalizing misinformation, according to sources and an internal document obtained by Platformer. The result is that the sort of viral hoaxes that ran roughshod over the platform during the 2016 US presidential election — ‘Pope Francis endorses Trump,’ Pizzagate, and all the rest — are now just as eligible for free amplification on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads as true stories.”Rest of World / Kinling Lo and Viola Zhou
U.S. TikTokers flock to Xiaohongshu (“RedNote”), baffling and bonding with Chinese users →“Xiaohongshu’s censorship system is likely being greatly challenged, Eric Liu, a former content moderator for Weibo and currently a U.S.-based editor with
China Digital Times, told Rest of World. ‘The fact that Americans are using Xiaohongshu is already [stepping] on the red line,’ Liu said. ‘This is something that will not be able to last because Americans don’t practice self-censorship.'”The Guardian / Joanna Partridge
Meta to fire thousands of staff as Zuckerberg warns of “intense year” →“Meta employed 72,000 people globally at the end of September, according to its latest financial report, meaning that 3,600 workers could be affected by the planned cuts. The company plans to hire new people to fill the roles later in the year.”The Verge / Mia Sato
Social media platforms are not built for this →“Questions like ‘Where are the shelters?’ ‘Should I evacuate?’ and ‘Where can I get a mask and other supplies?’ are left unanswered in favor of frightening first-person reports. And who can blame Los Angeles-area residents? That’s what you’re supposed to do on TikTok. What they can’t do is share a link to mutual aid resources or to a news story about vital, up-to-date evacuation information.”The New York Times / Matthew Goldstein and Kate Conger
S.E.C. sues Elon Musk over securities violations →“The S.E.C. contends that in buying Twitter in 2022, Mr. Musk violated securities laws by amassing a large stock position in the social media company without filing the proper notification. The complaint said he had waited 11 days before filing the required disclosure with the S.E.C.”Los Angeles Times / Noah Goldberg
He posted videos of the start of the Palisades fire. Then the internet blamed him. →“The five men, including Beni Oren, a 24-year-old who runs a glamping business, were the first to spot the Palisades fire in its earliest stages….The next day he posted the videos on X and TikTok. They quickly went viral and over the next few days, Oren and his friends became the targets of internet detectives who found it suspicious that the men carrying backpacks were so close to the origin of the fire.”
Nieman Lab / Fuego
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