Wednesday, October 30, 2024 |
| “We need to better understand what people mean when they say ‘safety.’” By Sophie Culpepper. |
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| The Philadelphia Inquirer had its best week for new subscriptions ever and The Guardian U.S. broke its single-day fundraising record — twice. By Sarah Scire. |
What We’re ReadingColumbia Journalism Review / CJR Staff
Campaign Notebook: Foreign reporters on covering the Americanest election imaginable →“As the season builds to a fever pitch, correspondents from around the world are traveling across the US to try to explain how it all works: to enlighten readers who might not be able to understand why Donald Trump remains a contender, or why Kamala Harris owns a gun.”The Atlantic / Xochitl Gonzalez
Trump pays the price for insulting Puerto Rico →“After Trump’s rally, Bad Bunny shared a segment of Harris’s Puerto Rico video to his 45.7 million Instagram followers several times. Specifically, he selected the segment in which Harris says, ‘There’s so much at stake in this election for Puerto Rican voters and for Puerto Rico,’ and where she reminds people of Trump throwing paper towels to island residents after the hurricane.”404 Media / Jason Koebler
Elon Musk-funded PAC supercharges “Progress 2028” Democrat impersonation ad campaign →“The campaign,
called Progress 2028, is designed to look like it is the Democratic version of Project 2025 and lists a set of policies that the group says Harris would enact if elected president. In actuality, the entire scheme is being orchestrated and promoted by an Elon Musk-funded group called Building America’s Future, which registered to operate ‘Progress 2028’
as a ‘fictitious name’ under the PAC.”Notes from Poland / Agata Pyka
Polish broadcaster shuts down AI-run radio station after a week following backlash →“From the beginning, this project was conceived as a voice in the debate on the opportunities and threats posed by the development of artificial intelligence,” editor-in-chief Marcin Pulit explained. “This was the goal of the radio experiment…and it has succeeded.”Columbia Journalism Review / Steven Waldman
Jeff Bezos should donate the Washington Post to a charity →“Here’s how it could work. A foundation or public charity would be created to house the Washington Post, just as Lenfest did in creating the Lenfest Institute for Journalism to be the home of the Philadelphia Inquirer. It would have an independent board, committed to its mission of public service journalism and independence. Bezos would add another donation (perhaps $100 million, the equivalent of what the paper has reportedly been losing each year) to create an endowment aimed at forever ensuring the newspaper’s excellence.”The Guardian / Tom Dart
Alexi Lalas keeps tweeting Maga propaganda. Does it matter? →“One of the reasons a lot of major sports personalities don’t [talk politics] is because you are a very general market, and do you really want to have to take 50% of the people that see you and fight them, or alienate them or make them uncomfortable with you? Sports, traditionally, I feel it was neutral ground. That’s increasingly changed.”The New Yorker / Kyle Chayka
The banality of online recommendation culture →“This recent surge of human-curated guidance is both a reaction against and an extension of the tyranny of algorithmic recommendations, which in the course of the past decade have taken over our digital platforms.”The Washington Post / Jeremy Barr
Will TV viewers trust network election calls? Chris Stirewalt hopes so. →“I guess I would say the time to decide when you want to kill a deer is before you go hunting. When you set out to call races, you just call them. And if you think too much about what the consequences will be or who will like what you do or dislike what you do, you would end up paralyzed.”Factchequeado / Emily Elena Dugdale, Rina Palta, and Rafael Olavarría
Al models are incorrectly answering election-related questions more often in Spanish →“Using AI testing software and methodology designed by the AI Democracy Projects, we asked the same 25 election questions in both languages, and found that 52 percent of the responses to Spanish queries contained inaccurate information compared to 43 percent of responses to queries in English.”Star-Ledger / NJ.com staff
New Jersey’s largest paper will kill its print edition in 2025 →“The [Newark] Star-Ledger will cease publishing a print newspaper and will close its Montville production facility in February 2025 … In addition, Advance Local, which owns NJ Advance Media and NJ.com, announced that it is ending print publication of dailies The Times of Trenton and the South Jersey Times, as well as the weekly Hunterdon County Democrat.”The Wall Street Journal / Jack Gillum, Alexa Corse, and Adrienne Tong
The X algorithm feeds users political content — whether they want it or not →“New X users with interests in topics such as crafts, sports and cooking are being blanketed with political content and fed a steady diet of posts that lean toward Donald Trump and that sow doubt about the integrity of the Nov. 5 election, a Wall Street Journal analysis found.”
Nieman Lab / Fuego
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