Monday, November 25, 2024 |
| The creator of Sill says “the death of the link” has had disastrous consequences for journalism, art, and the web. His free social media tool entered public beta on Friday. By Sarah Scire. |
What We’re ReadingBusiness Insider / Jyoti Mann
Expect a paid pro version of Bluesky next month →“The company plans to launch a paid subscription model by the end of this year, which will include features such as customizable aesthetics, avatar frames, and more video uploads or high-resolution images.” (Bluesky Blue?)CNN / Brian Stelter
Multiple liberal billionaires have inquired about buying MSNBC →“The inbound interest was reassuring, one of the sources said, since it showed that oppositional figures like [Elon] Musk (who famously bought Twitter to blow it up) would not be the only potential suitors.”Mediaite / David Gilmour
Elon Musk says he’s throttling tweets with links in them because they’re “lazy” →“While the rationale appears to be a bid to increase user engagement within X’s ecosystem and discourage users from leaving the platform, the revelation renews scrutiny of Musk’s past use of the technology to settle personal scores or manage narratives.”The Nutgraf / Chatwan Mongkol
At Good Morning Indian Country, Native student journalists shape the narrative →“Streaming primarily on Facebook and YouTube, its mission is rooted in ‘narrative sovereignty’ — the belief that Indigenous communities should control how their stories, histories and cultures are portrayed in media.”Reporters Without Borders
At least 15 news outlets have faced legal threats after reporting on Indian cybersecurity giant Appin →“Whether based in the US, Switzerland, France or India, any media outlet investigating the ‘ethical hacking’ of Appin, a company co-founded by Indian investor Rajat Khare, can expect letters demanding they retract their publication at best, and legal prosecution at worst. This type of pushback on journalism is not uncommon, yet the scale, impact and systematic nature of these letters and lawsuits are astonishing.”Nieman Reports / Marc Fisher
A look at The Baltimore Sun after its acquisition by Sinclair executive chairman David Smith →“‘There’s nobody at The Sun who doesn’t have resumés out,’ says David Zurawik, The Sun’s former media writer and now a media studies professor at Goucher College. ‘What’s left of The Sun will die.'”The Washington Post / Elahe Izadi
The latest news? Not right now, thanks. →“It’s not clear how widespread this ‘turn off the news’ movement is. For one, there is general news fatigue that predated the election. And it’s too early to tell whether news publishers are seeing drop-offs in their audiences. While many saw their post-election-week ratings and audiences down in 2024 compared with 2020, that could pick back up as the transition progresses and Trump takes office.”The Jerusalem Post / Eliav Breuer
Israeli government imposes sanctions on Haaretz, cutting all ties and pulling advertising →“It is unacceptable for the publisher of an official newspaper in the State of Israel to call for sanctions against it and support the state’s enemies in the midst of a war, while international bodies harm the legitimacy of the State of Israel, its right to self-defense, and actually impose sanctions, including criminal sanctions, against it and against its leaders.”TechCrunch / Maxwell Zeff
Texas is investigating whether it’s illegal not to advertise on Elon Musk’s social media platform →“‘Nothing changes the simple fact that GARM was, at every step, voluntary and pro-competitive,’ said WFA spokesperson Will Gilroy in an email to TechCrunch. ‘WFA will continue to fight these allegations and we are confident that the US judicial system will find in our favour.'”Nature / S. Shyam Sundar et al.
Most people share articles on social media without reading them first →“Here we analyzed over 35 million public Facebook posts with uniform resource locators shared between 2017 and 2020, and discovered that such ‘shares without clicks’ (SwoCs) constitute around 75% of forwarded links. Extreme and user-aligned political content received more SwoCs, with partisans engaging in it more than politically neutral users.”The Washington Post / Manuel Roig-Franzia
Inside an American reporter’s Russian prison ordeal (not that one) →“She’s back at RFE/RL now, advocating for wrongfully detained journalists — like she’d once been. She’s been through the nightmare, and the words still come out clear.”The Verge / Jay Peters
Bluesky has a real shot at becoming the next big place to get the pulse of the internet →“Part of the interest in Bluesky is that it looks and feels like a better version of Twitter. But with Bluesky, it also feels like you can control your experience in the app. That isn’t always the case with Threads, where Meta makes the rules about what shows up in the algorithmic feed that it constantly pushes at you.”Salon / Alex Galbraith
Defunding NPR is on Marjorie Taylor Greene’s to-do list →“‘It’s all over,’ Greene said of supposed government waste. ‘We’ll be looking at everything from government-funded media programs like NPR that spread nothing but Democrat propaganda…all kinds of programs that don’t help the American people.'”Reynolds Journalism Institute / Martina Guzmán
Verdad is a new free tool to investigate misinformation on Spanish-language radio →“For the past five weeks, VERDAD has recorded 40 Spanish language radio stations in the states of Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Nevada, Michigan, Georgia, and North Carolina, as well as states with large Latino populations like Texas and Florida. It records and highlights possible conspiracy theories, misinformation, and disinformation about the LGBTQ community, immigration, abortion, reproductive rights, voter suppression, and more.”The Atlantic / Ali Breland
The right has a Bluesky problem →“Liberals and the left do not need the right to be online in the way that the right needs liberals and the left. The nature of reactionary politics demands constant confrontations—literal reactions—to the left…The more liberals leave X, the less value it offers to the right, both in terms of cultural relevance and in opportunities for trolling.”The Guardian / Killian Fox
Jeff Jarvis on how to make a better internet: Demote the geeks →“Printers were all-important at the beginning, they made every decision, and then they were just hired to do an industrial job. Radio, similarly, was a kind of mysterious technology until it wasn’t, and I think the same will be true of the internet and, eventually, AI. With AI, I think that, ironically — and unintentionally — it’s the geeks demoting themselves. I’m not a coder but I can now have a computer do what I want it to do without coders.”Financial Times / Hannah Murphy
Donald Trump’s return sends shivers through the anti-misinformation world →“‘I think it will be just a tsunami of critiques and witch hunts,’ said Megan Squire, the deputy director for data analytics at the Southern Poverty Law Center. ‘I suspect some people in academia where you get to choose your research will self-censor or soften their research, or shift their application area.'”The Verge / Alex Heath
Is AI hitting a wall? →“That was the prevailing theme from this week’s Cerebral Valley AI Summit in San Francisco — a gathering of about 350 CEOs, engineers, and investors in the Al industry that I attended on Wednesday.”The Washington Post / Aaron Gregg
SiriusXM made it too hard for subscribers to cancel, a judge rules →“New York Supreme Court Justice Lyle Frank concluded in a Thursday ruling that the company allowed subscribers to sign up through an easy Web-based form, while it routed cancellations through a phone-based customer service system.”The Guardian / Tim Adams
Let’s revel in Bluesky’s promised land and kid ourselves it will never get like X →“And, of course, the newbies, inevitably myself included, reveled in the latest online promised land, a place where things would be done differently — with kindness and respect — without quite acknowledging the fact that, as yet, no platform which confuses a venture capitalist’s favorite metrics — scale! reach! influence! — with something that anyone might, say, care about, has yet avoided a descent into banal or shouty extremes.”Press Gazette / Bron Maher
A U.K. Muslim news site is quitting a regulator for religious reasons →“5Pillars, which has been under Impress regulation since 2018, said the body ‘is run by what we perceive to be liberals whose values are not compatible with Islamic norms.'”Press Gazette / Bron Maher
The Daily Mail’s owner has invested in a “publisher-friendly” generative AI start-up →“The business hopes to provide a solution to publishers who don’t want to be left behind should consumers move toward generative AI-powered search, but who have been burned by other AI companies who have ingested their content to create their large language models without providing any compensation.”Bloomberg / Ashley Carman
Tired of recycled guests, some prominent podcast hosts are shifting away from interviews →“No more book launching-episodes.”The Verge / Mia Sato
Google is cracking down on sites publishing “parasite SEO” content →“An example of parasite SEO content is a news blog that publishes online shopping coupon codes in a hidden part of its website or an educational site publishing unrelated affiliate marketing content. In March, Google announced it would crack down on this kind of ‘site reputation abuse,’ and now it’s making it clear that it doesn’t matter if the publisher created the content themselves or outsourced it — it’s a search policy violation regardless.”LAist / Julia Barajas
These college students are pursuing journalism in spite of, well, everything →“I’m gonna be out there, fighting.”
Nieman Lab / Fuego
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