“Caloroga Shark’s other founder, Mark Francis, says that when he read about the explosions in Lebanon, he started to have questions about how they were executed. ‘It had the spirit of a really intriguing story,’ Francis says, ‘so I put the idea into Claude, which spat out an outline of a story.’ The team then quickly wrote a script and ‘put it back into the AI for even more massaging.’ Once the script was at a good place, Caloroga Shark fed it into Audiosonic and ElevenLabs for narration, created some podcast art with Ideogram, and used ChatGPT and Claude to create the episode descriptions.”

The Economist Group already had to cancel a cancer conference in Brussels, and two more conferences are in jeopardy as health experts are starting to pull out after a report showed that Economist Impact, which creates paid editorial coverage, has multimillion dollar contracts with Philip Morris International, Japan Tobacco International, and British American Tobacco.

“It’s not a totally novel thing for them to sort of blur the lines between covert and overt.”

“The city’s District Court on Thursday announced the sentencing of Chung Pui-kuen and Patrick Lam, top editors at the now-shuttered Stand News. They were found guilty last month of taking part in a ‘conspiracy to publish and reproduce seditious publications’ for posting articles the court found to have seditious intentions…Chung’s punishment was close to the offense’s maximum penalty of two years in jail, while Lam received a term that allowed him to be freed immediately.”

“When the law comes into effect next year, it will ban digital storefronts from using terms like ‘buy’ or ‘purchase,’ unless they inform customers that they’re not getting unrestricted access to whatever they’re buying. Storefronts will have to tell customers they’re getting a license that can be revoked as well as provide a list of all the restrictions that come along with it. Companies that break the rule could be fined for false advertising.”

“In early October, CNN will begin experimenting with charging some readers for digital access as part of a bid to shore up its business as cable television erodes industrywide…The subscription wall is one of the first major business initiatives from Mark Thompson, CNN’s chairman and chief executive, who joined the network nearly a year ago.”

“One potential reason that figure is so high is because this year is an election year, [Matt Albasi, a data journalist at Muck Rack, which conducted the survey] said. Newsrooms are putting resources towards covering the election, and that energy shift affects all desks…The journalists surveyed reported that their primary sources of stress include their workload, salary and the expectation that they always be ‘on.’ Nearly two-thirds of respondents said they work more than 40 hours a week, and the vast majority, or 80%, said they work outside regular business hours at least once a week.”

“Lowe’s salary, which was in excess of seven figures annually, was the biggest factor in ESPN’s decision, according to sources briefed on the terms of his contract … ESPN’s NBA coverage is in a state of transition with the surprise retirement of insider Adrian Wojnarowski.”