Thursday, June 27, 2024 |
| Nieman Lab’s tests show ChatGPT is directing users to broken URLs for at least 10 publications with OpenAI licensing deals. By Andrew Deck. |
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| “The best reader is the one who reads you a lot.” By Hanaa' Tameez. |
What We’re ReadingThe Objective / Alexis Allison
An NYC editor bullied reporters for years. Then he was promoted. →“Across a dozen interviews from 2021 to 2023, The Objective spoke with nine reporters who worked with [Michael] Hinman during his five-year tenure as editor of The [Riverdale] Press. They spoke of panic attacks, insomnia, and isolation from partners and friends.”Axios / Sara Fischer
Time strikes licensing deal with OpenAI →“The deal gives OpenAl access to Time’s archives from the last 101 years to train its large language models and use for responses to user queries in its consumer-facing products, such as ChatGPT, according to a statement Time provided to Axios.”The New York Times / Katie Robertson
Sewell Chan named editor of Columbia Journalism Review →“I want CJR to be a voice for working journalists who face existential challenges — from hedge fund owners to authoritarian leaders to online harassment — and to explain to the public why fact-based news is more important than ever.”The Atlantic / Brian Stelter
How much of the chaos at The Washington Post is Jeff Bezos’ fault? →“He has kept his hands off the Post’s news coverage, even when it dinged Amazon, even when it stung him personally. But some staffers now believe that he was too hands-off for his and the paper’s own good — his attention elsewhere while the executives he’d selected flailed. It’s clear in retrospect that the Post’s business operations needed more inspiration and more accountability. All of the runway Bezos gave the Post did not produce sustained profitability.”The Daily Beast / Harry Lambert
Ex-U.K. prime minister Gordon Brown has requested a new criminal investigation into News Corp’s destruction of evidence under Will Lewis →“In an implausible twist, Lewis told detectives that the emails had indeed been deleted, but for good reason: in order to foil a plot to steal Brooks’ emails orchestrated by Gordon Brown, Britain’s Labour prime minister from 2007 to 2010. That sensational allegation, which none of the police officers believed when they heard it, was only made public last month.”Forbes / Rashi Shrivastava
Garbage in, garbage out: Perplexity spreads misinformation from spammy AI blog posts →“On average, Perplexity users only need to enter three prompts before they encounter an AI-generated source, according to the study, in which over 100 prompts were tested. ‘Perplexity is only as good as its sources,’ GPTZero CEO Edward Tian said. ‘If the sources are AI hallucinations, then the output is too.'”Vanity Fair / Jon Allsop
The moral panic around the “British invasion” of U.S. newsrooms →“Indeed, plenty of coverage of Lewis and Winnett has compared US and UK journalistic standards in the present tense even though much of it relates to things that happened 15 or more years ago. This is not to excuse either man for ever having allegedly based stories on fraudulently obtained records. But British media culture is not static.”CNBC / Alex Sherman
YouTube is winning on big screens too, accounting for 10% of all TV viewing in the U.S. →“‘We’re not talking about your mobile phone, your laptop…but on the biggest screen in the house, the TV,’ said LightShed media analyst Rich Greenfield. ‘Every [media] executive has to be paying attention.'”The Guardian / Sam Levine
Far-right site Gateway Pundit to answer claims of “bankruptcy abuse” in hearing →“Jim Hoft, the founder of the site, has implied he filed bankruptcy as a litigation tactic to delay a defamation case against his company by Shaye Moss and Ruby Freeman, two Georgia poll workers who the company allegedly spread false information about after the 2020 presidential election.”New York / Kevin T. Dugan
Sandy Hook families are fighting over what do with Infowars →“One group…wants the company to go into bankruptcy and then be sold off by a court-appointed trustee. It’s a solution that would end Infowars but wouldn’t necessarily stop Jones from taking his rants elsewhere. A group of families who filed suit in Texas wants to go another route: take control of his company’s assets and sell them off. In this scenario, Infowars and Jones could still broadcast, but the deal could increase how much the families get paid, at least in the short term.”The Wall Street Journal / Anne Steele and Alexandra Bruell
Report: The New York Times will move most of its podcasts behind a paywall →“The publisher is exploring making only the three most recent episodes of ‘The Daily’ available to nonsubscribers, and making new episodes of its ‘Serial’ show exclusive to subscribers for an initial period. The plans are still evolving and might change.”The Washington Post / Jeremy Barr
The presidential debate that could make or break CNN →“A new format — with no live audience and tight control over the candidates’ microphones — could create a new model for presidential debates. Or it could backfire.”The Verge / Jordan Pearson
The RIAA versus AI, explained →“These lawsuits, which are spearheaded by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), tackle music rather than the written word. But like The New York Times’ lawsuit against OpenAI, they pose a question that could reshape the tech landscape as we know it: can AI firms simply take whatever they want, turn it into a product worth billions, and claim it was fair use?”Digiday / Krystal Scanlon
Inside Linda Yaccarino’s first 12-months as Elon Musk’s appointed CEO →“It’s a stark reminder that Yaccarino’s success often hinges on the whims of her boss.”Press Gazette / Clara Aberneithie
Mind the London news gap: The boroughs which have little coverage of local government →“South East London appears the least covered, with Greenwich, Lewisham, Bexley and Bromley having one news outlet each. Hammersmith and Fulham, and Sutton were identified as the only London boroughs with no media outlet providing frequent coverage of council matters. Their populations were 183,200 and 209,600 respectively, according to the 2021 census.”Press Gazette / Charlotte Tobitt
What happened when British GQ stopped trying to “feed the algorithm” →“…lots of short-form news, a lot of quick fashion news, all of which was still within GQ’s world but from an audience perspective wasn’t really serving us long term. It meant that we had a lot of churn, a lot of people coming in for that quickfire content and then leaving again without really accessing the broader spectrum of what we do as a brand. So we really made a conscious decision to slow things down, not necessarily feed the news cycle.”
Nieman Lab / Fuego
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