Thursday, February 15, 2024 |
| “When you end up in an extreme situation, you can’t think properly. In a virtual situation, you realize how you would feel and you can imagine the kind of decisions you will make. It works with your emotions.” By Laura Oliver. |
What We’re ReadingWired / Steven Levy
OpenAI’s Sora turns AI prompts into photorealistic videos →“The most startling of Sora’s capabilities are those that it has not been trained for. Powered by a version of the diffusion model used by OpenAI’s Dalle-3 image generator as well as the transformer-based engine of GPT-4, Sora does not merely churn out videos that fulfill the demands of the prompts, but does so in a way that shows an emergent grasp of cinematic grammar.”Committee to Protect Journalists
Israel-Gaza war propelled journalist killings to near-record high →“CPJ’s report documents the highest number of deaths recorded by the organization since 2015—a stark indicator of the unprecedented number of journalists and media workers killed in the Israel-Gaza war. The vast majority (72) were Palestinian journalists killed in Israeli attacks on Gaza. In contrast, outside of that conflict, a total of 22 journalists and media workers were killed in 18 nations.”TheWrap / Natalie Korach
The Intercept lays off 15 staffers, including editor in chief →“The Intercept, a nonprofit investigative news outlet, is laying off 15 staffers including Editor-in-Chief Roger Hodge. Layoffs were announced in an internal memo sent to staffers on Thursday, obtained by the
New York Times.”Press Gazette / Bron Maher
“Miraculous” Substack-based Ankler Media eyes $10m annual revenue next year →“We’re not a scale operation. We’re not trying to create stories to answer the Google search of ‘what time does the Superbowl start tonight’. We’re not sending you these hollow email blasts telling you that Taylor Swift has arrived.”The Washington Post / Drew Harwell
Truth Social merger deal wins key approval, a victory for Trump →Trump Media is “a money-losing company that generates less than $5 million per year,” said Jay Ritter, a finance professor at the University of Florida. Digital World, he said, is in his view “a classic meme stock, whose price is totally unrelated to the underlying fundamentals.”Financial Times / Daniel Thomas
Independent in talks to take control of BuzzFeed and HuffPost in UK →“The multiyear strategic partnership is a symbolic moment for the sector, with the almost 40-year-old British media group taking charge of the local operations of a start-up once seen as the future of the industry and known for its combination of easily shared listicles and candy-coloured emojis.”TechCrunch / Aisha Malik
YouTube now lets you integrate music videos into your Shorts →“Given that YouTube has something that TikTok doesn’t, which is a vast library of official music videos, it makes sense for the platform to leverage it to advance its short-form video ambitions. The move is especially significant as it comes a few weeks after Universal Music Group pulled its song catalog from TikTok, removing the ability for users to add music from popular artists like Taylor Swift, Billie Eilish and Ariana Grande in their videos.”Rest of World / Damilare Dosunmu
How an African streaming service dethroned Netflix →“Showmax has overtaken Netflix amid intense competition brewing in Africa’s video streaming industry, where global firms, major telecoms, and several country-specific apps are fighting for consumers’ bucks.”The Verge / Emma Roth
Meta is passing on the Apple tax for boosted posts to advertisers →“Meta is one of the many companies that has waged criticism against Apple and its new policies in recent months. After introducing a 27 percent tax on alternative payment methods in the US, Apple also announced plans to start allowing developers in the European Union to have their apps exist on alternative app stores, as long as they pay a brand-new ‘Core Technology Fee.'”The New York Times / Tiffany Hsu
Chinese influence campaign pushes disunity before U.S. election, study says →“One post on X that said ‘American partisan divisions’ had an image showing President Biden and former President Donald J. Trump aggressively crossing fiery spears under this text: ‘INFIGHTING INTENSIFIES.’ Other images featured the two men facing off, cracks in the White House or the Statue of Liberty, and terminology like ‘CIVIL WAR,’ ‘INTERNAL STRIFE’ and ‘THE COLLAPSE OF AMERICAN DEMOCRACY.'”Reuters / Foo Yun Chee
TikTok to ramp up fight against fake news, covert influence ahead of EU elections →“ByteDance-owned social media platform TikTok said on Wednesday it will ramp up its fight against fake news and covert influence operations in the run-up to European Parliament elections in June with a local language app in all 27 countries.”Columbia Journalism Review / Mathew Ingram
Threads: You can have political content but you will have to work for it →“What remains to be seen is whether Meta’s decision to de-emphasize politics will stunt the service’s growth or lead to the departure of some of its early users and fans.”Substack / Richard J. Tofel
What will work like cooking and games if you aren’t The New York Times? →“In Marfa, a town of fewer than 2000 in West Texas, Max Kabat, the newish owner of the 98 year-old weekly Big Bend Sentinel, has opened
The Sentinel, a coffee shop and event space. In Atlanta, where Andrew Morse has been publisher of the Journal-Constitution for a bit over 13 months, one of the shared interests beyond the newspaper itself that he and his team have identified is Black culture, which is embodied in the publication itself in a section (and newsletter) denominated
Unapologetically ATL, of which a new version is coming shortly and from which new products are being developed.” (See:
Aiming for 500,000 subscribers by 2026, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution takes a big swing on growth.)The New York Times / Kevin Roose
The year AI chatbots were tamed →“My column [about a rogue AI] was probably the most consequential thing I’ll ever write — both in terms of the attention it got (wall-to-wall news coverage, mentions in congressional hearings, even a craft beer named Sydney Loves Kevin) and how the trajectory of A.I. development changed … I even heard that engineers at one tech company listed ‘don’t break up Kevin Roose’s marriage’ as their top priority for a coming A.I. release.”
Nieman Lab / Fuego
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