“Somewhat straightforwardly, YouTube has chosen to degrade the user experience of the embedded player publishers like Vox Media use, and the only way to get that link back is by using a slightly different player that pays us less and YouTube more.”

“The attention economy has dominated the Internet for more than a decade now, but never before have its protagonists felt so central to American life–or had such direct access to the levers of power.”

“The Time AI chatbot allows users to ask questions about the story, summarize it into digestible bits of different lengths, translate the text into different languages, or play audio versions of the copy. It can translate the article into German, Spanish, French, Russian, Ukrainian and Mandarin. In addition to the 2024 Person of the Year story about President-elect Donald Trump, the new chatbot has also been prepared to answer questions about the previous three years’ winners — Taylor Swift, Volodymyr Zelensky and Elon Musk.”

“These startups in Brookline and Marblehead and Newton and Needham and Concord—these are wealthy communities, by and large. You don’t see it in the gateway cities like Lawrence and Lowell and Chelsea—’gateway city’ being defined as a mid-size urban area that was once an industrial hub and is coming back. So that’s an issue. You also don’t see it in rural towns. It’s tough. It’s harder when you don’t have an NPR-like donor base.”

“We’ve gotten pretty sidetracked by just making the chatbot great, but really, it’s not what we meant to build. We meant to build something much more useful than that.”

“Both accounts were eventually deleted, but not before trying to get me to set up a crypto wallet and a ‘cloud mining pool’ account. Knight and Marx confirmed to us that these accounts did not belong to them, and that they have been fighting impersonator accounts of themselves for weeks.”

“The agreement stands as the first for the Times Tech Guild, the largest union of tech workers with collective bargaining rights in the country, which represents nearly 6,000 media workers and two other units at The New York Times.”

“Officially, correspondents have been told that the strategy is aimed at freeing them up to do more reporting throughout the day…That said, staffers inside the network very much harbor suspicions that leadership is actually on the hunt for areas in the business to cut costs, particularly with painful layoffs on the horizon.”

“Most crucial, and often overlooked, is whether the insurance company retains the power to settle your case over your objection if doing so makes sense in dollar terms. If they have that latitude, they can choose, for instance, to pay to end a case to save on the costs of litigation even when the story in question was true.”

“This funding will provide career-making opportunities and salary support to 500 journalists. They’ll join the 658 corps members who have served in 371 newsrooms in every state, Puerto Rico, Guam and Washington, D.C. since placements began in 2018.”

“‘Let’s defund the press,’ Lake said during one of her rallies. She is set to sit atop an organization with a nearly $300 million budget and more than 2,000 employees, broadcasting in nearly 50 languages to a weekly audience of more than 326 million people.”

“‘The potential impact cannot be underrated,’ said Gary Lee, the Eagle’s current editor, of the cash influx. The paper has struggled with revenue in recent years. Its full-time staff only includes Lee, with the rest of the paper put together by a network of freelance contributors. The new structure, Lee said, ‘will allow us to survive.'”

“BuzzFeed has sold First We Feast/Hot Ones to what it’s calling a consortium ‘led by an affiliate of Soros Fund Management LLC’ for $82.5 million in cash.”

“In the audio of the call, the TMZ reporter says that they had received information saying that ‘Sean Morrow of More Perfect Union is the killer.’ ‘That’s very strange,’ Morrow replies. ‘I am a reporter who covers health issues.'”

“Average consumers are less obsessed with newsiness than the media industry tends to think. Evergreen content is good, whatever is interesting is good, even if it’s ‘old.’ Non-newsy newsletters are replacing the racks of undated magazines at the grocery store checkout and they’re probably making more money than you are. (See also the true crime boom: Who cares if it’s not a recent murder?)”