Thursday, January 30, 2025 |
| “If you want something out of your crappy news company, you’re going to have to go fight for it yourself out on the picket line.” By Hanaa' Tameez. |
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| “People are tired of the political news cycle in Spain. It’s non-stop. It’s four big things a day. It’s crazy. And that’s something that doesn’t benefit news consumption. People are overwhelmed.” By Marina Adami. |
What We’re ReadingNew York Times / Benjamin Mullin and David McCabe
FCC chair Brendan Carr has ordered an investigation into NPR and PBS stations →“Carr told Katherine Maher, NPR’s chief executive, and Paula Kerger, PBS’s chief executive, about the investigation in a letter on Wednesday. Carr, who was appointed by President Trump, said the investigation would focus on the stations’ practice of airing sponsorships.” Nieman Lab previously wrote about
Brendan Carr and
the sections of Project 2025 he authored.NPR / Bobby Allyn
Meta will pay Trump $25 million to settle lawsuit over Facebook and Instagram suspensions →“Meta’s legal team had said Trump was suspended for violating policies against inciting violence [in the wake of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol] … The Meta payout is the second to Trump in recent months. In December, ABC news agreed to pay $15 million to Donald Trump to settle a lawsuit over coverage of E. Jean Carroll.” The Guardian / Tim Adams
“Our job is to be truthful, not neutral”: Christiane Amanpour on Trump, tech, and fighting for the truth →“She has two conversational modes, she says, fixing me with her gaze before we start. One includes a certain amount of umming and ahhing. The other, reserved for when the cameras are rolling, allows for no hint of hesitation or doubt. I suggest maybe chatty Christiane will be good. She smiles and does her level best, though in an hour in which she umms maybe twice, I can only imagine what it is like to sit opposite her when she is in full combat mode.”The Verge / Jay Peters
Bluesky now has 30 million users →Nice — but not quite
Threads’ 320 million monthly actives and 1 million daily signups.Meta
Mark Zuckerberg: “I’m excited this year to get back to some OG Facebook” →“Facebook is used by more than 3 billion monthly actives and we’re focused on growing its cultural influence.”The Guardian / Amanda Meade
Australians who get most of their news from commercial media are more likely to believe in climate conspiracy theories →“Just 8% of those who believe the human-induced climate crisis was a conspiracy used public radio and television as their main source of news.”NewsGuard / Macrina Wang, Charlene Lin, and McKenzie Sadeghi
In a NewsGuard test, DeepSeek debunked probably false claims only 17 percent of the time →“NewsGuard found that with news-related prompts, DeepSeek repeated false claims 30 percent of the time and provided non-answers 53 percent of the time…NewsGuard’s December 2024 audit on the 10 leading chatbots (OpenAI’s ChatGPT-4o, You.com’s Smart Assistant, xAI’s Grok-2, Inflection’s Pi, Mistral’s le Chat, Microsoft’s Copilot, Meta AI, Anthropic’s Claude, Google’s Gemini 2.0, and Perplexity’s answer engine) found that they had an average fail rate of 62 percent. DeepSeek’s fail rate places the chatbot as tied for 10th of the 11 models tested.”Bloomberg / Kurt Wagner
Elon Musk blames Don Lemon’s “invasive and charged interview” of him with canceling his $1.5 million partnership deal →“That interview didn’t go well, and Lemon pushed Musk on several topics including questions about his personal drug use. Musk, who grew visibly irritated during the conversation, ended the partnership within a day of the interview, Lemon claimed. Musk later suggested that his issue was with the show’s format, which ‘was basically just “CNN, but on social media,”‘ he wrote.”404 Media / Jason Koebler
OpenAI furious DeepSeek might have stolen all the data OpenAI stole from us →“This is all to say that, if OpenAl argues that it is legal for the company to train on whatever it wants for whatever reason it wants, then it stands to reason that it doesn’t have much of a leg to stand on when competitors use common strategies used in the world of machine learning to make their own models. But of course, it is going with the argument that it must ‘protect [its] IP.'”Deadline / Jill Goldsmith
A new bill from Rep. Zoe Lofgren would require ISPs to block piracy sites →“After working for over a year with the tech, film, and television industries, she said, ‘we’ve arrived at a proposal that has a remedy for copyright infringers located overseas that does not disrupt the free internet except for the infringers.'”MediaPost / Ray Schultz
Carpenter Media Group continues to buy up small local newspapers across the U.S. →“The acquisition, terms of which were not disclosed, includes The Salem News, Phelps County Focus, Pulaski County Weekly along with their websites and social media, Action Graphics Sign Company, magazines and special publications and the company’s commercial printing operation.”Bloomberg / Aisha Counts
The NFL, seeking younger audiences, is loosening who can use its official footage on YouTube (a bit) →“The program, called Access Pass for Legends, will permit former players such as Brandon Marshall and Carolina Panthers quarterback Cam Newton to use game highlights and video footage from the Super Bowl, NFL Draft and other events on their YouTube Channels. It allows them to keep a share of the advertising revenue that’s generated from the posts.”The Wall Street Journal / Suzanne Vranica and Patience Haggin
Meta’s free-speech shift made it clear to advertisers: “Brand safety” is out of vogue →“For the better part of a decade, the dialogue between Meta and Madison Avenue has moved in one direction: The company pledged to do more and more to combat hate speech and misinformation on Facebook and Instagram, responding to grievances from brands as well as broader social and political pressures. Now, a new cultural moment has arrived, punctuated by Donald Trump’s return to the White House, and Meta’s executives are carrying an unmistakably different message: Some things we used to remove will now be allowed.”The Kyiv Independent / Olga Rudenko
Trump’s foreign aid freeze has stranded independent media in Ukraine →“For years, foreign government grants have been the lifeblood of Ukraine’s independent media.”WIRED / Lily Hay Newman and Matt Burgess
Security researchers found AI platform DeepSeek exposed internal data and chat prompts →“Amid the hype, researchers from the cloud security firm Wiz published findings on Wednesday that show that DeepSeek left one of its critical databases exposed on the internet, leaking system logs, user prompt submissions, and even users’ API authentication tokens—totaling more than 1 million records—to anyone who came across the database.”
Nieman Lab / Fuego
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