Werd I/O

[Elahe Izadi at The Washington Post]

I adore The 19th. It's making big moves, and that's good news for everyone.

"What [Emily] Ramshaw and fellow co-founder Amanda Zamora started in January 2020 — a newsroom with just one reporter and no website — has grown into a digital operation that has raised nearly $60 million and employs 55 people. And in a sign of its growing ambitions, the 19th has now hired veteran news executive LaSharah Bunting, CEO of the Online News Association, as its first vice president, a role created to build up the 19th’s fundraising and budget operations."

It's also grown an endowment, which allows it to have a safety net and continue to grow and experiment. The ambition for the endowment to underwrite the newsroom's operations is meaningful: this would represent a fund designed to allow reporting on gender, politics, and policy to be undertaken sustainably. I don't know of any other similar fund in media.

Not mentioned here but extremely relevant: the amazing work Alexandra Smith, its Chief Strategy Officer, has been doing to redefine how to think about audience and reach on a fragmented web.

These are all signs of a forward-thinking newsroom that isn't content to simply accept the status quo - and, crucially, plans to stick around.

#Media

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[Heather Bryant]

Arguing that it's harder to just be a human online, Heather Bryant has published an online participation disclaimer:

"The following disclaimer applies to participation in discourse as it relates to my individual experience as a human being in a global online community and the collective communication occurring therein. This disclaimer is intended to acknowledge the complexities, challenges and sometimes human incompatibility with discourse occurring at potentially global scale."

Honestly, this disclaimer feels universal: it's something that I would feel comfortable posting on my own site or linking to. It's both very complete and a little bit sad: these things should be commonly understood. In some ways, these clauses are obvious. But by naming them, Heather is making a statement about what it means to participate in online discourse, and what the experience of that actually is for her.

It's worth reflecting on everything here, but in particular the "some things for some people" and "spheres of relevance" sections hit home for me. It's a commonly-held nerd fallacy (forgive me for using that term) that everything is for everyone, and that everything is relevant for comment. The conversational equivalent of inviting people from multiple facets of your life to the same party and assuming it'll all go great.

It's worth asking: if you had such a disclaimer, would it be any different? What do you wish was commonly understood?

#Media

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[The 404 Media team]

"In the last year, we learned that the technical infrastructure exists now for even non-technical journalists to build a sustainable site that can receive money from subscribers. [...] If you are a journalist reading this thinking about going out on their own: the tech is there for you to do so with very little know-how needed."

404 Media has been a new shining light in technology journalism. That it's worked out for them, having invested a thousand dollars each at the outset, is delightful.

And then there's this:

"The biggest challenge that we face is discoverability. To the extent possible, we don’t want to have to rely on social media algorithms, search engines that don’t index us properly and which are increasingly shoving AI answers into their homepages, and an internet ecosystem that is increasingly polluted by low-quality AI spam."

So to counter that, they're building community. Which just so happens to be what every single newsroom should also be doing.

Here's to another year of 404.

#Media

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[Open Society Foundations]

"In February 2024, the Open Society Foundations issued a call for applications for a convening in which selected participants would share their visions of an AI-mediated future."

I thought this, from the concluding observations, was telling:

"Participants were generally reluctant or unable to articulate exactly how AI might transform the information ecosystem. [...] Relatively few submitted scenarios described an AI-driven transformation in specific detail, and it was clear that many participants who were convinced that AI would fundamentally restructure the information ecosystem also had no specific point of view on how that might occur."

In other words, while many people in journalism see that this set of technologies may transform their industry, and are potentially excited or terrified that it will, they have no idea how that will happen. This is the very definition of hype: one can imagine people proclaiming that blockchain, or push notifications, or RealMedia, or WebTV might do the same.

It's not that there are no uses for AI (just like it's not that there are no uses for blockchain). It will find its way into end-user applications, underpin newsroom tools, and power data-driven newsroom investigations, without a doubt. But the hype far exceeds that, and will eventually, inevitably, deflate.

In the meantime, journalists are not as worried about the technologies themselves as who controls them:

"Throughout the application process and workshop discussions, it became clear that much of the conversation was not actually about AI, nor about journalism, nor about the current or future information ecosystem, but instead about power. It was clear that power, and the potential for transfers of power from one group to another, was the explicit or implicit subject of many of the submitted scenarios as well as the five final scenarios that were distilled from the workshop."

Technologists, in turn, were blind to these power dynamics, while simultaneously predicting more dramatic changes. There's a fundamental truth here: it's ultimately about money, and who controls the platforms that allow readers to read about the world around them.

Same as it ever was: that's been the struggle on the web since its inception. AI just shifts the discussion to a new set of platforms.

#AI

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[Alexander Saeedy and Dana Mattioli at The Wall Street Journal]

"The $13 billion that Elon Musk borrowed to buy Twitter has turned into the worst merger-finance deal for banks since the 2008-09 financial crisis."

"[...] The banks haven’t been able to offload the debt without incurring major losses—largely because of X’s weak financial performance—leaving the loans stuck on their balance sheets, or “hung” in industry jargon. The resulting write-downs have hobbled the banks’ loan books and, in one case, was a factor that crimped compensation for a bank’s merger department, according to people involved with the deal."

Let that sink in.

It's not like this was unpredictable: it was obvious that Elon Musk was not going to turn Twitter into a roaring success. While Twitter was, at its heart, a media company, Musk's direction has been a muddle of three sometimes-competing priorities: his long-held desire to create X, an "everything" app; his desire to build his own brand in an effort to boost his own equity and therefore wealth, sometimes in ways that got him in trouble with the SEC; and his desire to influence global politics.

There's no three-dimensional chess being played here; this likely isn't an intentional plan by Musk to write off the debt. It's simply narcissistic mismanagement, and one has to wonder how this will affect his businesses at Tesla and SpaceX in the longer term. There will come a time when shareholders declare that enough is enough - although given that they approved his ludicrous pay deal, perhaps that time isn't coming soon.

#Technology

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[Anuj Ahooja and Sean Tilley at We Distribute]

"Starting today, Flipboard will let users search for and follow accounts from across the Fediverse from the comfort of their own dashboards. [...] This new feature isn’t just limited to Mastodon or PixelFed, but includes Threads profiles that opted in to Fediverse Sharing, such as MKBHD, Molly Jong-Fast, and Nilay Patel. You won’t need to have a Threads account to cross this boundary, but will still be able to see what your favorite creators are up to. This is a neat way of letting people dip their toes into the wider network, without needing to fully commit to it on day one."

This is the power of the open social web: you can follow someone who's publishing on social network A from social network B, and interact with them as if they were on the same network. Everyone can choose which social platforms that fit them best without having to sacrifice reach or the ability to follow people they care about.

Flipboard has been a leader in this space, and this is a major step forward. It, Threads, Mastodon, Ghost, Micro.blog and others are pushing the social web forward by embracing these standards - and there's a lot more to come. No company and no developer needs to ask anyone permission to join the network; they can opt to support the protocols and - boom! - they're in.

Every media company and every individual publisher should be jumping on this. I could not be more excited about the possibilities.

#Fediverse

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[Dan Kennedy at Media Nation]

"Four years ago, Boston lawyer and journalist James Barron wrote that the Watergate break-in may well have been an attempt to steal documents from Democratic Party headquarters showing that Nixon had taken $549,000 from the Greek government in order to help finance his 1968 campaign."

Dan Kennedy argues that there are parallels here with the story, reported a year ago, that Donald Trump might have partially funded his 2016 election campaign with an illegal contribution from the Egyptian government.

It does seem strange that the story hasn't been followed up on by either the press or the Democratic Party. What sticks out to me about Dan's commentary, though, is this:

"What makes a story stick is repetition — and without prominent Democrats coming out every day and giving journalists something to report on, it quickly withers away."

Should that be true? I'd hope that the press could find their own leads. Otherwise it, in effect, becomes a press release driven industry. I'm not disputing that it probably is true in reality, but I'd hope for a better dynamic.

#Democracy

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[Bill Grueskin in Columbia Journalism Review]

"What’s most important is that a disruptive start-up not be placed at the mercy of the old organization—which might see the upstart as a competitive threat and attempt to have it shut down or cause it to fail."

"[...] Newsroom managers must figure out if their current staff is equipped—intellectually, emotionally, technologically—to handle the pace of change in the business."

Interesting reflections here on newsrooms that split in order to incubate future-facing innovation alongside their legacy businesses. It seems like a good idea to me, if you can afford it: a pro-innovation culture is likely to shed the bureaucracy and processes that may be present in an older business. (This isn't just true for newspapers vs "digital", whatever digital is: it's also true for businesses that are set in an older version of the web.)

The trouble is, as this article notes, that these innovative newsrooms are likely to be so successful that they end up re-merging with the main newsroom and falling under its control. At that point the culture of innovation tends to die, which is something anyone in the tech industry who watched Yahoo acquire startups in the mid-2000s will recognize clearly.

So what's the solution? I think there isn't one. It may be more effective for the innovative newsrooms to be spun off completely, so that they aren't so much parallel sides of the same organization as new organizations entirely, with a more complete ability to reinvent how they work. My guess is that this would extend far beyond new modes of content and audience engagement and extend to the experience of working itself. After all, that's exactly what happened in tech - an exploration that, depending on the organization, was often positive for tech workers. Some people in news describe tech workers as "coddled"; I'd describe it more as "free to invent".

#Media

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[Nieman Journalism Lab]

"The number of digital news startup launches has been slowing since 2022 in Europe, Latin America, and North America, according to the new Global Project Oasis report. Global Project Oasis, a research project funded by the Google News Initiative that maps digital-native news startups globally, cited economic challenges, slow growth, and political conflicts as potential reasons for the drop."

This report is in-depth and fascinating. It seems obvious to me that having more news sources with specific focuses is a really good thing, but also that ensuring that they are sustainable is crucial. Many journalistic outlets were created by journalists with business models as almost an afterthought, so as certain kinds of funding dried up they became less viable.

One thing that I really wish was present in this report: platform. What was Substack's influence here? Or Ghost's? Are these WordPress shops? How many of them were aided by Automattic's Newspack, for example? These details could also be revealing.

We need journalism that keeps us more informed, and it's not a secret that many of our incumbent outlets are not doing the job. A healthy news startup ecosystem is one way we can get to a more informed voting population and stronger democracies in our local communities, nationally, and globally.

#Media

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[Justin Elliott, Robert Faturechi and Alex Mierjeski at ProPublica]

The majority of Donald Trump's net worth is wrapped up in Truth Social's parent company Trump Media & Technology Group. If he's elected, its deals and ownership structure will present conflicts of interests - illustrated by this ProPublica investigation into its streaming TV deal:

"The deal announced by Trump Media involves a series of largely unknown small players. Trump Media’s disclosures about the deal describe a nesting doll of companies that leave many questions unanswered about its new business partners."

"The sellers include a pair of Louisiana companies: [major Republican donor James E.] Davison’s JedTec LLC along with another called WorldConnect IPTV Solutions."

JedTec's issues are relatively straightforward. For me, the bigger mystery surrounds WorldConnect IPTV, which seems to be acting as a wrapper around a UK streaming company called Perception Group. In turn, Perception's servers seem to be colocated with Hurricane Electric, a backbone provider based in Fremont.

Perception seems like a bit of a mystery operation in itself: there's very little information on its website that really illuminates if there's any new technology here at all. WorldConnect, meanwhile, seems to have spent many of its early years helping right-wing Christian TV stations reach audiences across the UK's Freeview over-the-air digital TV service and the internet at large.

It's all super-strange. There's definitely more to discover.

#Democracy

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[Bron Maher at PressGazette]

"Mail Online, The Independent and the websites of the Daily Mirror and Daily Express have begun requiring readers to pay for access if they do not consent to third-party cookies."

I believe this would have been illegal were the UK still a part of the EU. Meta is in trouble for a similar sort of scheme. Here, though, in a UK free from EU constraints, there are no such issues.

It's a terrible approach, both in terms of user privacy, and in terms of the newsrooms' own business models: the people most likely to pay to remove ads are also the wealthier people ad buyers want to reach. So not only does this create bad feeling with the reader-base as a whole, but it reduces the value of the ads. It's lose-lose. (Also: who is actually paying for the Daily Express online?)

The irony, as always, is that contextual ads which adjust themselves to the content of articles are more lucrative than targeted ads that rely on reader surveillance. The business model reason to track users is overstated. But here it is again.

#Media

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[Shiraz Shaikh on Global Network on Extremism & Technology]

"Video games and their associated platforms are vastly becoming hubs of radicalisation, extremism and recruitment by far-right extremist organisations. The development of bespoke games and modifications, often known as MODs, has given extremist organisations the ability to further spread their digital propaganda."

This is both depressing and inevitable: games are incredibly popular and share social media's ability to let people share with each other at scale. Unlike social media, some of the modes of communication directly have violent modes of expression.

Valve's apparent under-investment in trust and safety, and protections against extremism, are also partially inevitable. How do you police voice communication across disparate games? But there's more to it than that:

"In terms of the material and content available on these gaming platforms, there is evidence of far-right propaganda available in huge amounts. The materials include books, videos, documents, manifestos, memes and more. Even on other platforms apart from Steam, interviews of far-right leaders, such as Andrew Anglin, are available for users."

This seems easier to police, and should be. That this material is available says a lot about Valve's priorities.

#Technology

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[Samantha Cole at 404 Media]

"A highly-praised AI video generation tool made by multi-billion dollar company Runway was secretly trained by scraping thousands of videos from popular YouTube creators and brands, as well as pirated films."

404 Media has linked to the spreadsheet itself, which seems to be a pretty clear list of YouTube channels and individual videos.

Google is clear that this violates YouTube's rules. The team at Runway also by necessity downloaded the videos first using a third-party tool, which itself is a violation of the rules.

This is just a video version of the kinds of copyright and terms violations we've already seen copious amounts of in static media. But Google might be a stauncher defender of its rules than most - although not necessarily for principled reasons, because it, too, is in the business of training AI models on web data, and likely on YouTube content.

#AI

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[Richard J. Tofel]

"I think some of those choosing these new business leaders themselves forgot about the special nature of the news business. It won’t be enough, for instance, at least in most cases, for someone who aspires to run a news organization to recognize the importance of the role of the press in democratic governance—although that ought to be essential."

"[...] More subtly, a CEO without news experience may not grasp how large of an asset is newsroom morale, or how much sapping it may cost an enterprise. Such issues can become particularly tricky in a unionized environment— especially one in which there are no profits over which to haggle, either because the organization is a nonprofit, or because it is no longer profitable."

Dick Tofel was the founding general manager of ProPublica, and generally knows a thing or two about the news business.

There's a line to walk here: there's certainly risk, as Tofel describes, of picking a news CEO who is not familiar with the news business. At the same time, as I've previously lamented, the industry needs an injection of new, outside ideas. It's certainly true that the CEO must deeply understand how news works, but they also can't be to afraid to change some of those dynamics - as long as they're cognizant of the position and responsibility that journalism holds in a democracy.

Any CEO needs to be very aware of organizational culture and morale. Many news CEOs are hyper-focused on their journalism (which is good!) at the expense of thinking too deeply about culture (which is bad). Hopefully any good incoming CEO would be an expert at building culture, although most of us know that this often isn't the case.

It's complicated, in other words. But journalism is at least as important as it's ever been, and getting news leadership right is crucial.

#Media

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[Sarah Perez at TechCrunch]

"Newsletter platform and Substack rival Ghost announced earlier this year that it would join the fediverse, the open social network of interconnected servers that includes apps like Mastodon, Pixelfed, PeerTube, Flipboard and, more recently, Instagram Threads, among others. Now, it has made good on that promise — with its own newsletter as a start."

I'm certain that this is a large part of the future of how information will be disseminated on the internet - and how publishers will run subscription programs. Subscribers who use the fediverse see the benefit of rich content that they can reshare and comment on; publishers get to understand a lot more about their subscribers than they would from the web or email newsletters.

Ghost's reader will certainly be augmented by other, standalone readers that work a bit like Apple News. Its fediverse publishing capabilities will be followed by other content management systems. Notably, Automattic has been working on fediverse integration, for example, and Flipboard has been doing amazing work in this area.

I'm also convinced there's room for another fediverse-compatible social network that handles both long and short-form content in a similar way to Substack's articles and Notes. If someone else doesn't build that, I will.

#Fediverse

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[Vanessa Thorpe in The Guardian]

“Art is about reaching out. So I think it’s wrong to allow one strata of society to have the most access.”

This is an older article, but it resonated with me so much that I wanted to share it immediately.

This is so important, and a sign of what we've lost:

“I went [to art school] because the government of the day paid for me to go and I didn’t have to pay them back. There was a thrusting society then, a society that tried to improve itself. Yes, of course, it cost money. But so what? It allowed people from any kind of background to learn about Shakespeare, or Vermeer.”

A culture where only the rich are afforded the space, training, and platform to make art is missing the voices that make it special.

The same goes for other spaces: newsrooms where only the wealthy can serve as journalists cannot accurately represent the people who depend on it. Technology without class diversity is myopic. Above all else, a culture of rich people is boring as hell.

Art school - like all school - should be free and available to everyone. It's tragic that it's not. We all lose out, regardless of our background.

#Culture

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[Molly White]

"I fear that media outlets and other websites, in attempting to "protect" their material from AI scrapers, will go too far in the anti-human direction."

I've been struggling with this.

I'm not in favor of the 404 Media approach, which is to stick an auth wall in front of your content, forcing everyone to register before they can load your article. That isn't a great experience for anyone, and I don't think it's sustainable for a publisher in the long run.

At the same time, I think it's fair to try and prevent some bot access at the moment. Adding AI agents to your robots.txt - although, as recent news has shown, perhaps not as effective a move as it might be - seems like the right call to me.

Clearly an AI agent isn't a human. For ad hoc queries - where an agent is retrieving content from a website in direct response to a user query - it clearly is acting on behalf of a human. Is it a browser, then? Maybe? If it is, we should just let it through.

It's accessing articles as training data that I really take issue with (as well as the subterfuge of not always advertising what it is when it accesses a site). In these cases, content is copied into a corpus in a manner that's outside of its licensing, without the author's knowledge. That sucks - not because I'm in favor of DRM, but because often the people whose work is being taken are living on a shoestring, and the software is run by very large corporations who will make a fortune.

But yes: I don't think auth walls, CAPTCHAs, paywalls, or any added friction between content and audience are a good idea. These things make the web worse for everybody.

Molly's post is in response to an original by Manu Moreale, which is also worth reading.

#AI

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"Governed by an independent board of directors, the 501(c)3 charitable organization will help AP sustain, augment and grow journalism and services for the industry, as well as help fund other entities that share a commitment to state and local news."

Fascinating! And much needed.

I'm curious to learn how this fits into other fundraising efforts, like the $500M Press Forward initiative for local news that was announced last year.

I do also have a question about whether all this centralized philanthropy is sustainable. What happens to these newsrooms if the foundation dollars go away? Are they incentivized to find their own business and fundraising models, or does this create a kind of dependence that might be harmful in the long run?

My hope, of course, is that these efforts are the shot in the arm that journalism needs, and that the newsrooms which receive this funding will be sustainable and enduring. It's certainly lovely to see the support.

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