Thursday, December 12, 2024 | “Once the goal is no longer to recreate news organizations as they existed in the past, but rather to ensure that reliable news and information flows — that there is a place in people’s lives for deliberation and debate — then possibility blossoms.” By Heather Chaplin. |
| “Insurgents succeed because they know exactly what they are fighting against.” By Saba Long. |
| “The bold headline grabs your attention, and then becomes a gateway to deeper exploration and understanding.” By Kawandeep Virdee. |
| “There are good comments sections online, but they’re never an accident.” By Scott Lamb. |
| “If hospital and prison chaplaincy work taught me anything, it’s that, unfortunately, crisis is a precursor to this kind of change.” By Andrea Faye Hart. |
| “This election was decided in no small part by voters who believed a number of false things about the candidates and the country. The Fourth Estate has failed.” By Carrie Brown. |
| “We don’t need to sustain our astonishment or tap into our own panic and worry every time he says or does something heretofore unfathomable. (After all, it’s all fathomable now?)” By Hillary Frey. |
| “Journalists who were and remain rightfully skeptical of AI and its impact on our profession — from eliminating jobs to adding to the public’s souring on our trustworthiness — are starting to build stuff. Good stuff.” By Retha Hill. |
| “There is a single crisis in journalism, and from it all other problems emanate: money.” By S. Mitra Kalita. |
| “AI-driven accessibility isn’t only better product design but also good business.” By Chitranshu Tewari. |
| “Websites aren’t where audiences or advertisers are increasingly investing their time or budgets. The patterns in traffic and ad dollars say as much.” By Jonathan Hunt. |
| “The best, most rigorous journalism in the world is powerless to effect change unless it reaches and is trusted by the wider public — however profitable it may be to serve a niche, hyper-engaged subset of the public.” By Benjamin Toff. |
| “In our increasingly complex world, to really think about the future of news, we have to think across disciplines: technology platforms, youth trends, global public health, and civic institutions.” By AX Mina. |
| “Rather than worrying about AI taking away jobs or isolating us further in society, the best media products will help us connect and be more human.” By Burt Herman. |
| “Much like the state-controlled media systems of the late Soviet Union, the mainstream media has become the nomenklatura of our era — privileged, insular, and increasingly out of touch with the realities of the populations they claim to serve.” By Izabella Kaminska. |
| “Journalists will continue to need to be more thoughtful and report news not like a season of ‘Survivor: City Hall’ but on the larger issues with longer-term effects.” By Katie Honan. |
| “We need to seek out these journalist-adjacent actors who share the same goal as many newsrooms of delivering actionable, trustworthy news and information to people.” By Sharon Moshavi. |
| “It grieves me to predict that even the newsrooms who say they want to serve all Americans won’t do any of this. At best, they will mostly continue to ignore the problem. At worst, some journalists will blame the audience.” By Jonathan Stray. |
What We’re ReadingThe Verge / Nilay Patel
YouTube quietly made some of its web embeds worse, including ours →“Somewhat straightforwardly, YouTube has chosen to degrade the user experience of the embedded player publishers like Vox Media use, and the only way to get that link back is by using a slightly different player that pays us less and YouTube more.”The New Yorker / Kyle Chayka
The year creators took over →“
The attention economy has dominated the Internet for more than a decade now, but never before have its protagonists felt so central to American life–or had such direct access to the levers of power.”Axios / Sara Fischer
Time unveils new AI chatbot →“The Time AI chatbot allows users to ask questions about the story, summarize it into digestible bits of different lengths, translate the text into different languages, or play audio versions of the copy. It can translate the article into German, Spanish, French, Russian, Ukrainian and Mandarin. In addition to the 2024 Person of the Year story about President-elect Donald Trump, the new chatbot has also been prepared to answer questions about the previous three years’ winners — Taylor Swift, Volodymyr Zelensky and Elon Musk.”Medill Local News Initiative / Mark Caro
Can Massachusetts hyperlocal startups reconnect communities to the news – and each other? →“These startups in Brookline and Marblehead and Newton and Needham and Concord—these are wealthy communities, by and large. You don’t see it in the gateway cities like Lawrence and Lowell and Chelsea—’gateway city’ being defined as a mid-size urban area that was once an industrial hub and is coming back. So that’s an issue. You also don’t see it in rural towns. It’s tough. It’s harder when you don’t have an NPR-like donor base.”The Verge / Kylie Robison
Inside the launch – and future – of ChatGPT →“We’ve gotten pretty sidetracked by just making the chatbot great, but really, it’s not what we meant to build. We meant to build something much more useful than that.”MIT Technology Review / Melissa Heikkilä
Bluesky has an impersonator problem →“Both accounts were eventually deleted, but not before trying to get me to set up a crypto wallet and a ‘cloud mining pool’ account. Knight and Marx confirmed to us that these accounts did not belong to them, and that they have been fighting impersonator accounts of themselves for weeks.”The Wrap / Raquel 'Rocky' Harris
New York Times Tech Guild reaches tentative 3-year deal one month after ending strike →“The agreement stands as the first for the Times Tech Guild, the largest union of tech workers with collective bargaining rights in the country, which represents nearly 6,000 media workers and two other units at The New York Times.”Status / Oliver Darcy
CNN’s déjà view →“Officially, correspondents have been told that the strategy is aimed at freeing them up to do more reporting throughout the day…That said, staffers inside the network very much harbor suspicions that leadership is actually on the hunt for areas in the business to cut costs, particularly with painful layoffs on the horizon.”Substack / Richard J. Tofel
Newsrooms are playing Russian roulette with libel insurance →“Most crucial, and often overlooked, is whether the insurance company retains the power to settle your case over your objection if doing so makes sense in dollar terms. If they have that latitude, they can choose, for instance, to pay to end a case to save on the costs of litigation even when the story in question was true.”Report for America
Report for America announces expansion of model with $20 million investment from Knight Foundation →“This funding will provide career-making opportunities and salary support to 500 journalists. They’ll join the 658 corps members who have served in 371 newsrooms in every state, Puerto Rico, Guam and Washington, D.C. since placements began in 2018.”The New York Times / Minho Kim
Trump chooses Kari Lake to lead Voice of America →“‘Let’s defund the press,’ Lake said during one of her rallies. She is set to sit atop an organization with a nearly $300 million budget and more than 2,000 employees, broadcasting in nearly 50 languages to a weekly audience of more than 326 million people.”Columbia Journalism Review / Feven Merid
A new local news nonprofit rises in Tulsa →“‘The potential impact cannot be underrated,’ said Gary Lee, the Eagle’s current editor, of the cash influx. The paper has struggled with revenue in recent years. Its full-time staff only includes Lee, with the rest of the paper put together by a network of freelance contributors. The new structure, Lee said, ‘will allow us to survive.'”Business Insider / Peter Kafka
BuzzFeed survives by selling “Hot Ones” to George Soros →“BuzzFeed has sold First We Feast/Hot Ones to what it’s calling a consortium ‘led by an affiliate of Soros Fund Management LLC’ for $82.5 million in cash.”The Washington Post / Laura Wagner
A reporter covered United Healthcare. TMZ thought he might be a killer. →“In the audio of the call, the TMZ reporter says that they had received information saying that ‘Sean Morrow of More Perfect Union is the killer.’ ‘That’s very strange,’ Morrow replies. ‘I am a reporter who covers health issues.'”Substack / One Thing
The new rules of media →“Average consumers are less obsessed with newsiness than the media industry tends to think. Evergreen content is good, whatever is interesting is good, even if it’s ‘old.’ Non-newsy newsletters are replacing the racks of undated magazines at the grocery store checkout and they’re probably making more money than you are. (See also the true crime boom: Who cares if it’s not a recent murder?)”
Nieman Lab / Fuego
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