Elon Musk can change what he calls Twitter — but can he change what everyone else calls it?

Monday, July 31, 2023

Elon Musk can change what he calls Twitter — but can he change what everyone else calls it? It now says “X” on the website (you know, the one that’s still at, um, twitter.com). But to the news media and much of the outside world, the name of the old bird platform is still Twitter. By Joshua Benton.

Pittsburgh laments The Incline’s descent An online Pittsburgh newsroom’s last remaining journalist says goodbye, as the city’s media landscape sputters. By Brian Conway.

What We’re ReadingThe New York Times / Sheera Frenkel and Ryan MacTwitter threatens legal action against a nonprofit that has researched its problems with hate speech →“Imran Ahmed, the chief executive of Center for Countering Digital Hate, said, ‘Elon Musk’s actions represent a brazen attempt to silence honest criticism and independent research.’ He added that Mr. Musk wanted to ‘stem the tide of negative stories and rebuild his relationship with advertisers.'”Semafor / Max Tani2024 will be the fragmentation election →“The campaign for the American presidency is playing out across an unprecedented, fragmented new media landscape and leaving campaigns, voters, and political observers alike struggling to figure out what exactly is going on…Meanwhile over in TV-land, executives are contemplating a previously unthinkable question about the ultimate political TV prize, a debate: If Donald Trump doesn’t show up, will anyone watch?”Press Gazette / Aisha MajidSwedish daily Aftonbladet says people spend more time reading articles with AI-generated summaries →“According to [deputy editor Martin] Schori, the findings surprised the newsroom, which initially thought the findings were a mistake. Instead, Schori explained that since readers get a more general understanding of an article upfront, they are more likely to go on and read the whole text.”The Washington Post / Lisa BonosMeet the student who helped boot the president of Stanford →“How did it all happen? Through a helpful tip from a friend, a dogged but careful reporting process, and a childhood — surrounded by his parents’ endeavors in journalism — that prepared him for the pace and heat of a big story.”Vanity Fair / Charlotte KleinVariety’s “battle over CNN” feature has set off a full-on media brawl →“‘It is stunning to read a piece that is so patently and aggressively false,’ [Jeff Zucker spokesperson Risa] Heller said in a statement to Vanity Fair. ‘On numerous occasions, we made it clear to the reporter and her editors that they were planning to publish countless anecdotes and alleged incidents that never happened. They did so anyway.'”Nikkei Asia / Neeta LalAI news anchors are shaking up India’s media landscape →“The phenomenon is mirrored in other Asian markets, from China to Southeast Asia, where artificial anchors are starting to change the face of news broadcasting…AI offers a particularly powerful tool for reaching audiences in a country like India, where hundreds of languages are spoken……the nation’s first AI news anchor, Sana [has] reported the weather and co-anchored programs with other journalists in 75 languages.”The Wall Street Journal / Deepa Seetharaman and Keach HageyOutcry against AI companies grows over who controls the internet’s content →“News publishers have called the unlicensed use of their content a copyright violation. Some — including Wall Street Journal parent News Corp, Dotdash Meredith owner IAC and publishers of the New Yorker, Rolling Stone and Politico — have discussed with tech companies exploring ways they might be paid for the use of their content in AI training, according to people familiar with the matter.”The Verge / David PierceHow a start-up built the search engine of the future — and then died →“In a way, the brief flicker of Neeva’s existence tells everything you need to know about the last 20 years of search-engine supremacy. Building a search engine is hard. Building one better than Google is even harder. But if you want to beat Google, a better search engine is only the very beginning. And it only gets harder from there.”Press Gazette / Charlotte TobittHow publishers are experimenting with Meta’s Twitter rival Threads →“The Guardian’s posts appear to be largely different from its Twitter posts, with a mixture of questions to the audience and longer sells above story links and videos — for example, one post about the dangers to dogs of puppy yoga also appeared on both Instagram and Tiktok. It has posted more regularly than many other publishers, but still much less than its activity on Twitter.”The New York Times / Nicole SperlingA judge has dismissed Trump’s $475 million defamation suit against CNN →Because of course. “The lawsuit said that the network’s use of the phrase ‘the big lie’ in reference to Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election was tantamount to comparing him to Adolf Hitler and Nazism.”The Verge / Alex CranzThreads is going to get DMs →“…four short-term priorities: helping users build their lists of people to follow, improving the algorithms that decide what users see, giving users a way to see posts only from people they follow, and figuring out how to let people message each other.”The Verge / Alex CranzBarnes & Noble is reinventing itself, but not its e-readers →“When you’re trying to rebrand your company as indie and cool you can’t show up with the Nook. While most e-readers are slim, with small bezels and sleek exteriors, the E-Ink part of the Nook line up looks like it stumbled out of 2012. Looking at it I feel the urge to ask the Glowlight 4 who the president is.”The Verge / Alex CranzJuly 29: “Never mind, tweets should be called posts now” →July 6: “Just call them tweets.”The New York Times / Yiwen LuWhat happened when 15 of Twitter’s top celebrities joined Threads →“Of the celebrities we followed, Wiz Khalifa was the most active on Threads by far, publishing original posts and sharing other people’s messages and replies…But the rapper’s activity on Threads gradually declined…Starting on July 16, he ramped up on Twitter, sometimes posting more than 10 times a day. He is still more active on Threads, but has begun publishing similar content on both platforms.”Variety / Brian SteinbergESPN is testing an all-female SportsCenter in a bid to spotlight women’s sports →“Big sports-media outlets have given the bulk of their attention to games dominated by male athletes and owners. As streaming-video disrupts the traditional economics of entertainment, however, some media companies are putting a new focus on female sports, hoping that these games can draw bigger crowds — and the money that would presumably come with them.”The Verge / Emilia DavidChatGPT actually can’t tell if something was written by ChatGPT, it turns out →“OpenAI shuttered a tool that was supposed to tell human writing from AI due to a low accuracy rate…OpenAI fully admitted the classifier was never very good at catching AI-generated text and warned that it could spit out false positives, aka human-written text tagged as AI-generated.”Twitter / Ed YongEd Yong is leaving The Atlantic →“I’m really proud of the work I did here. Hagfish. Lichens. Endlings. Source diversity. 60+ pandemic pieces. Long COVID especially. More important than the awards, I know this work helped people, and it changed my understanding of what journalism can do & whom it should serve.”Notes from a Small Press / Anne TrubekBook publishing didn’t used to be better →“‘Authors made more money in the past!’ is faulty logic. Maybe a few, disproportionally privileged, did. But most made less, and even more never received any access to traditional publishing due to discrimination and the industry’s reliance on networking.”

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