Tuesday, November 12, 2024 |
| Sometimes it’s healthy to do something you love less, and differently. By Laura Hazard Owen. |
The New York Times tech guild’s election-week strike is over, without a contract What We’re ReadingThe Verge / David Pierce
Particle is a new app using AI to organize and summarize the news →“Particle is a nice-looking and extremely information-dense app, and in my experience as a beta tester it has been a pretty useful way to get a quick overview of big issues. It’s also full of the same ideas that so many other companies have tried and failed.”Washington Post / Jeff Stein, Drew Harwell, and Jacob Bogage
President-elect Donald Trump is expected to try to halt a TikTok ban →“The video-sharing app faces a January deadline to find a new owner not based in China or lose access to U.S. users, under a law passed in April with bipartisan support.”Axios / Sara Fischer
Substack reportedly raises $10 million in new funding →“Participants in the new $10 million round include [Omeed] Malik, whose investment fund 1789 Capital also backed Tucker Carlson’s new media venture, alongside Substack writer [Nate] Silver, Rocket Money CEO Haroon Mokhtarzada, Zynga CEO Mark Pincus, and AngelList co-founder Naval Ravikant.”The New Republic / Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling
Alex Jones’s media empire is literally being auctioned out from under him →“On Tuesday, the virulent conspiracy theorist — who lost a $1.5 billion case for claiming that the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre that claimed the lives of 20 first graders and six adults was a hoax — announced that his right-wing media empire, InfoWars, was being staged for a federal auction.”Wired / Paresh Dave
The Ecosia and Qwant search engines are teaming up to take on Google →“The for-profit joint venture, dubbed European Search Perspective and located in Paris, could allow the small companies and any others that decide to join up to reduce their reliance on Google and Bing and serve results that are better tailored to their companies’ missions and Europeans’ tastes…Developing an index—identifying all the websites out on the internet and making their contents searchable—is no trivial task. Doing it better than Google, which has honed its approach over decades, is even more daunting.”The Guardian / Angelique Chrisafis
French news titles sue X over allegedly running their content without payment →“The joint action against the company run by the US billionaire Elon Musk is being led by several daily newspapers – Le Figaro, Les Echos, Le Parisien and Le Monde…France has been fighting for years to protect the publishing rights and revenue of its press and news agencies against what it terms the domination of powerful tech companies that share news content or show news stories in web searches.”User Mag / Taylor Lorenz
Meta’s Threads is “overrun” with liberal election fraud conspiracies →“The rampant election fraud conspiracies on Threads show how Meta’s efforts to downrank and minimize journalistic content on the app have helped to create a vacuum in which misinformation thrives unchecked and users are unable to find reliable, accurately reported news. The conspiracies also show how many self-described liberals have grown increasingly conspiratorial and unable to distinguish fact from fiction in a chaotic and broken information ecosystem.”Semafor / Max Tani and David Weigel
The old media grapples with its new limits →“Trump’s victory isn’t a result of a failure by news outlets to sufficiently hold him accountable. The real answer is one that is a lot more uncomfortable to grapple with: The national news media is more limited in its reach and influence than ever in the modern era…The coverage itself is also likely to change as legacy news organizations end internal arguments about ‘normalizing’ Trump, and acknowledge that his victories were not a fluke but a sign of a political realignment in America.”Aftermath / Luke Plunkett
G/O media cuts Kotaku to the bone as more writers are laid off →“G/O Media’s management is once again punishing workers for its own bad decisions”, Managing Editor Carolyn Petit wrote on Bluesky. “Management mandated that some writers stick to ‘service’ posts, and now that the numbers aren’t panning out (surprise, surprise!), two of those writers have been laid off. Cruel and misguided.”The New York Times / Benjamin Mullin
Nicholas Carlson is starting a video-oriented media company →“The new company, Dynamo, is betting big on the growing popularity of video on platforms such as YouTube, TikTok and LinkedIn. It will produce ‘cinematic’ video stories for those platforms, Mr. Carlson [a former top editor at Business Insider] said, focusing on business journalism for a core group of strivers that he calls ‘dynamos’…he is quick to assert that his new company has more in common with Mr. Beast, the mega-popular YouTube star, than it does with Facebook Watch, a video service that was shuttered after struggling for years.”
Nieman Lab / Fuego
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