Open discourse retrenches
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Monday, December 19, 2022
 | Open discourse retrenches“The ‘Substackization’ of celebrity journalists removes these voices from the larger conversation and makes them more narrowly available to a paying audience made up of superfans.” By Jessica Clark. |
 | Finding new ways to reach news avoiders“Let’s make it harder to avoid the news and a whole lot easier to get caught up.” By Brian Stelter. |
 | Video editing will help people understand the media they consume“People will have a tougher time discerning fact from fiction moving forward, and one remedy is understanding video editing.” By Jarrad Henderson. |
 | Journalism doubles down on user needs“If we continue to study just the tiny portion of a person's day that they spend consuming journalism, we will miss innumerable opportunities to weave ourselves into people's lives.” By Ariel Zirulnick. |
 | Smart newsrooms will prioritize board development“Many leaders focus their board efforts on traditional fundraising, audits, and budget approvals, but they miss opportunities to have their boards be true partners.” By Sumi Aggarwal Annie Chabel. |
 | ChatGPT and the future of trust“We will see ChatGPT and tools like it used in adversarial ways that are intended to undermine trust in information environments, pushing people away from public discourse to increasingly homogenous communities.” By Janet Haven. |
 | Toward a new poetics of journalism“Journalists as anthropologists, social scientists, forensic experts, and poets leave a discoverable trace for those want to understand where they've come from. Let's be generous with what we leave for them.” By Sue Schardt. |
 | The news about the news is bad. I’m optimistic.“Listening gives us insight into what people want to see less of: Opinion content. Heavy, glitzy crime stories. National news.” By Don Day. |
What We’re Reading
MIT Technology Review / Eileen Guo
A Roomba recorded revealing videos. How did screenshots end up on Facebook? →
“The 15 images shared with MIT Technology Review are just a tiny slice of a sweeping data ecosystem. iRobot has said that it has shared over 2 million images with Scale AI and an unknown quantity more with other data annotation platforms; the company has confirmed that Scale is just one of the data annotators it has used.”
The New Yorker / Louisa Thomas
Grant Wahl helped to make soccer (and the women’s game in particular) mainstream in America →
“Wahl regarded women's soccer as a priority long before the team's own federation—and perhaps even some of its players—recognized that the women deserved the same kind of coverage as the men.”
New York Times / James B. Stewart
CNN’s chief executive Chris Licht has had a rough start →
“With Fox News and MSNBC having already staked out the right and left ends of the political spectrum, attracting the middle (what Mr. Licht referred to as ‘normal’ people) has proved elusive.”
CNN / Brian Fung
Twitter walked back its controversial new policy banning links to other social platforms →
“Following an immense backlash against the policy, Twitter removed the blog post that had outlined which rival sites users would be prohibited from tweeting links to, including Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon and Truth Social.”
Bloomberg / Eric Fan, Rachael Dottle, and Kurt Wagner
Twitter's fact-checking system, Community Notes, doesn’t address lies that are “divisive” →
“The data shows that approximately 96% of all fact-checking notes contributed by the Twitter community didn't pass through to public view. That means to date, more than 30,000 notes have gone undisplayed on Twitter for failing to meet the algorithm's broad-consensus requirements, according to a Bloomberg analysis of Twitter's data.”
Vulture / Shawn McCreesh
These magazines ran on nepotism babies →
“At a time when magazines were still seen as glamorous and culture defining, New York editors and publishers could do a solid for a powerful friend by giving their offspring an internship or assistant job. It's hard to imagine actual celebrities or socialites wanting to work for a magazine now — but in the '90s and aughts, three outlets were more notorious than others for hiring their kids.”
Semafor / Max Tani
Bezos appears to lose interest in The Washington Post as its tech ambitions wither →
“In the years immediately after his acquisition, Bezos was deeply engaged with this idea, wondering how the Post could recreate the experience of the physical newspaper in the digital age, people familiar with his management said. He was also particularly focused on improving the user experience, and increasing the paper's international footprint and presence. The business's mission is now far murkier.”
NPR.org / David Folkenflik
In Alabama and Florida, power company money flowed to news sites that attacked their critics →
“Matrix LLC sought to ensure much coverage was secretly driven by the priorities of its clients. Payments flowed as the utilities in Florida and Alabama fought efforts to incorporate more clean energy in electric grids — a fight they are still waging …. The sites include Yellowhammer, The Alabama Political Reporter, Alabama Today, The Capitolist, Florida Politics, and the now-defunct Sunshine State News.”
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