“Newsletter platforms such as Substack have become a thriving vehicle for writers operating independently of traditional publishing companies, and marketers trying to reach online consumers outside of hard news and social media have taken note. But the landscape looks nothing like the sleek, automated world of media buying that they’re used to. The marketplace is full of one-off deals managed by writers on Google Docs, much like the early days of influencer marketing and podcast ads when advertisers worked directly with creators.”

“It’s much more likely that AI-generated search is going to generate text taken directly from one particular source in the output, and that’s much less likely to be a fair use. I mean, it could be — but the risky area is that it’s much more likely to be competing with the original source material. If instead of directing people to a New York Times story, I give them my AI prompt that uses RAG to take the text straight out of that New York Times story, that does seem like a substitution that could harm the New York Times. Legal risk is greater for the AI company.”

“On Thursday, the company said that it would eliminate about 200 jobs focused on CNN’s traditional TV operations, and add about the same number for new digital roles like data scientists and product engineers. CNN is aiming to hire 100 of those people in the first half of the year … CNN has begun increasing the number of vertical videos and eventually plans to publish 50 to 100 of these videos per day. Executives have been encouraged by the results so far, with video engagement — a key metric at CNN — up by 20 percent last year.”

“A Milwaukee TV weather forecaster has been dropped by her station one day after she criticized Elon Musk on social media for his straight-arm gesture that many have likened to a Nazi salute … On Tuesday, conservative radio host Dan O’Donnell sharply criticized Kuffel for her two Instagram posts, accusing her of ‘spreading the lie that Elon Musk was giving a Nazi salute’ during the presidential inauguration.”

“L. Brent Bozell III, founder of the conservative watchdog group Media Research Center, is Donald Trump‘s choice to lead the U.S. Agency for Global Media, the agency that oversees U.S. broadcast entities like Voice of America and Radio Free Europe … Bozell’s son, Leo Brent Bozell, was among those pardoned this week by Trump for their roles in storming the Capitol on January 6, 2021.”

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“Pakistan’s lower house of parliament on Thursday passed a controversial bill that will give the government sweeping controls on social media, including sending users to prison for spreading disinformation. The bill was quickly passed after lawmakers from the opposition party of imprisoned former Prime Minister Imran Khan staged a walkout to denounce the law. Critics say the government is seeking to further suppress freedom of speech.”

“A pseudonymous coder has created and released an open source ‘tar pit’ to indefinitely trap AI training web crawlers in an infinitely, randomly-generating series of pages to waste their time and computing power. The program, called Nepenthes after the genus of carnivorous pitcher plants which trap and consume their prey, can be deployed by webpage owners to protect their own content from being scraped or can be deployed ‘offensively’ as a honeypot trap to waste AI companies’ resources.”