Ben Werdmuller helps leaders at newsrooms, non-profits, and mission-driven organizations to navigate their biggest technology challenges.
NotableLinks
"What we’re sharing today is the result of applying our lessons learned from running a company with transparent salaries for a decade." I've been following Buffer's open salaries initiative since the beginning; this is a great update. An open salary system is smart
NotableLinks
The 19th News Network is "a collective of national, regional and local publishers seeking to advance racial and gender equity in politics and policy journalism." Partners include USA Today, the Texas Tribune, Teen Vogue, The Nation, and Ms. Magazine. Partners get early access to 19th stories, which they
NotableLinks
A robocall used a deepfake of Joe Biden's voice to encourage New Hampshire voters to stay home. "It's important that you save your vote for the November election." It's not a perfect deepfake, but it doesn't necessarily need to be
NotableLinks
Roughly a third of revenue for the Guardian - a firmly British paper - now comes from US readers. The Guardian is free for everyone to read online. There's the promise that paying readers see fewer calls to donate, but the real value proposition is the knowledge that you'
NotableLinks
"NYT is using the open source Ruffle as their Flash emulator. I hope other news outlets follow. It’s great to see my favorite visualizations working again." A lovely way to keep interactive archives alive. A little-known, but perhaps obvious, fact about newsrooms is that a lot
NotableLinks
I hadn't caught that the US's first high-speed railway is going to be built by Network Rail, which runs Britain's railway infrastructure. The San Francisco to Los Angeles route will take under three hours; right now it takes nine hours and thirty minutes.
NotableLinks
"His definition of strength was power, influence, money and his network of important people. [...] I wondered for many years, how all of this could have happened. How people like my grandpa turned into monsters and people around him watched or turned into monsters with him. The last years made
NotableLinks
"Despite their idealist manifesto and their Bill of Rights, I don’t believe they could ever truly be in partnership with their community once they were taking large amounts of venture funding." This is a key challenge with social networks that try and work with a different model:
NotableLinks
"We can conclude that higher-ranked pages are on average more optimized, more monetized with affiliate marketing, and they show signs of lower text quality." SEO as an industry has made search engines much worse to use. People are essentially spamming the web, which undermines the signals search
NotableLinks
"Consumer Reports found that a total of 186,892 companies sent data about them to [Facebook]. On average, each participant in the study had their data sent to Facebook by 2,230 companies. That number varied significantly, with some panelists’ data listing over 7,000 companies providing their data.
NotableLinks
"They just take it. Whatever they want." A poignant and infuriating reflection on generative AI, from the creator of Cat and Girl. #AI [Link]
NotableLinks
The entire podcast industry's numbers were juiced by a quirk of how Apple Podcasts and other podcasting apps work. The actual number of listeners were far lower - as revealed when Apple Podcasts made a big update last September. "For instance, The Daily and Dateline both publicly touted