Thursday, September 7, 2023 |
| The Press Forward coalition, led by the MacArthur Foundation, has pledged to invest $500 million in revitalizing local news over the next five years while working to raise more. By Sophie Culpepper. |
What We’re ReadingRest of World / Andrew Deck
Rest of World tested ChatGPT in Bengali, Kurdish, and Tamil. It failed. →“Many of these languages are what artificial intelligence researchers call ‘low-resource.’ AI language models are largely trained on data scraped from the internet. While languages like Bengali are some of those most spoken in the world, they are less represented online, so there is less digitized text available to train models tailored to them.”The Verge / Barbara Krasnoff
Indie publishers are scrambling after Amazon ended its periodicals program →“Subscribers…could not be contacted directly and redirected to other subscription methods because ‘none of us know who these subscribers are.’ Because they were subscribing through a third party: Amazon.”What I'm Reading / Phil Lewis
The new Black press →“Outlets like the Kansas City Defender, Capital B, MLK50: Justice Through Journalism, The Black Wall Street Times, The Emancipator, Hammer & Hope, The Grio, Scalawag Magazine and more are using social media to grow their audiences and share their stories. They pay homage to the old Black press, which captured the fight for civil rights, equality, and the everyday lives of Black people, accurately and fairly.”Associated Press / Grant Peck
A Myanmar journalist gets a 20-year sentence for reporting on cyclone’s aftermath, news site says →“The conviction of Sai Zaw Thaike is the latest assault on press freedom and journalists by the country’s military-installed government, which has cracked down heavily on independent media. At least 13 media outlets, including Myanmar Now, have had their media licenses revoked and at least 156 journalists were arrested, about 50 of whom remain detained, according to the local monitoring group Detained Journalists Information. Nearly half of those still in custody have been convicted and sentenced.”Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism / Marina Adami
A WhatsApp course taught older Spaniards to spot misinformation. New research suggests it worked (to an extent) →“U.S.-based initiative MediaWise and Spanish news outlet Newtral built and delivered the course to a Spanish audience. Then researchers from the University of Navarra studied the impact of the course in a sample group of over-50s in Spain. They found that those who took the course were more successful in identifying the news as true or false than the members of a control group.”News/Media Alliance / Staff
Several international news and publisher associations endorse Global Principles on AI →Endorsers include News Publishers’ Association, European Newspaper Publishers’ Association, News Media Canada, Korean Association of Newspapers, Colombian News Media Association, World Association of News Publishers, and several others.Forbes / Peter Suciu
Social media is filling the post-disaster reporting void in Maui →“The role social media plays really well in situations such as Maui is to pick up where traditional media leaves off,” said Susan Campbell, distinguished lecturer in the Department of Communication, Film and Media Studies at the University of New Haven, and advisor to The Charger Bulletin.Columbia Journalism Review / Mathew Ingram
Elon Musk wants to blame someone else for Twitter’s decline. This week, it’s the ADL. →“Whatever Musk thinks about the ‘woke mind virus,’ the available evidence suggests that he is desperately searching for scapegoats on whom he can blame the death spiral of a platform whose acquisition, as [Walter] Isaacson reports, was not clearly thought through.”The Atlantic / Kaitlyn Tiffany
How telling people to die became normal →“This logic—by which a person can treat everyone around them as so many bits of evidence in some grand conflict—is more characteristic of online life than offline life. But that doesn’t mean that it’s as simple as blaming social media or the algorithm or even the posters and influencer-hustlers who stir up trouble.”The Washington Post / Terrence McCoy
In U.S., most UFO documentation is classified. Not so in other countries. →“In the United States, the matter of unidentified aerial phenomena has often been treated as a closely guarded government secret. Meanwhile, in Brazil and much of South America, there has been a more relaxed attitude toward the inexplicable, the public’s right to know and the limits of scientific explanation.”The Verge / David Pierce
Sunday Ticket is bringing the NFL to YouTube – and YouTube to the NFL →“There are plenty of other things you can do on Sunday Ticket other than just watch games. Each game will have a real-time highlight reel available through Shorts, for example, so you can catch up on what you missed before jumping into live action…But YouTube’s real chance to shine in its first year of Sunday Ticket is a simple one: letting people watch multiple games at the same time.”Medill Local News Initiative / Rick Reger
New Medill survey shows higher-than-expected news engagement among young people →“The survey also shows the continued influence of social media on teen news consumption. Roughly a quarter of all surveyed teens said they engaged with news on YouTube (37%), TikTok (35%) or Instagram (33%) on a daily or weekly basis, though the sources of that news remain in question.”The Verge / Emilia David
Gizmodo shuts down Spanish-language news site in favor of AI translations →“Matías S. Zavia, a writer at Gizmodo en Español, posted that the publication was shut down on August 29th and that it would now publish automatically translated articles. Gizmodo en Español previously had a small staff who wrote original stories and created Spanish-language adaptations of pieces from the English-language Gizmodo.”International News Media Association / Jodie Hopperton
Snoop Dogg and Gwyneth Paltrow reading you the news? Artifact tests synthetic voices →And if you want to listen to Snoop read to you at 4.5x speed, you can do that too.
Nieman Lab / Fuego
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