Werd I/O

"In order to be able to choose their own browser, people must be free to download it, easily set it to default and to continue using it – all without interference from the operating system. Windows users do not currently enjoy this freedom of choice."

What's interesting to me is that this is very similar to the tactics that got Microsoft into hot anti-trust water a few decades ago. And here it is again: research that shows Microsoft is prioritizing its Edge browser in Windows. New browser, same dark pattern. #Technology

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"Limiting average global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, above preindustrial levels has been the gold standard for climate action since at least the 2015 Paris Agreement. A new scientific study published in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Climate Change, however, suggests that the world unknowingly passed this benchmark back in 2020."

Not so great, but what's cool here is how they determined this: by analyzing strontium to calcium ratios in a species of sea sponge that lives for hundreds of years. Previously we'd only been able to determine ocean temperatures starting in 1850, when the industrial revolution was already underway.

This new analysis suggests that the pre-industrial oceans were cooler than had been previously understood, meaning we may be 20 years further along the global warming curve than we'd known. Even more reason to take dramatic action now. #Climate

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"If your position is that public money will irrevocably taint journalism but the biggest companies in America buying ads will not, I submit that you have not thought about this issue very deeply."

I don't know how I feel about a publicly-funded media, although I couldn't be a bigger fan of independent public media entities like the BBC and Channel 4. What I do think is that we're a long way from a US government administration that will actually do that and guarantee freedom from interference.

"Today, I am just trying to make a singular, clarifying point: We need to build a large, continual public funding stream for journalism not because it is an easy task, but because it is the only way. Stop looking for magical alternative solutions."

This, on the other hand, may turn out to be true. #Media

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"As social traffic collapses and Google makes ominous AI-powered sounds about search, publishers across the board have started to reemphasize their websites as destinations, and that means there are a lot of new ideas about what makes websites valuable again." A lot of which look like blogging.

Semafor Signals, described in this piece, may be AI-augmented, but it really comes down to a collection of links that form an umbrella story, with some context from an editor to link it all together.

What's groundbreaking here is the newsroom tool used to produce it, not the product itself. And that's where AI - and a lot of other technology - becomes more interesting. Not as a way to replace journalists or churn out content at speed, but as a way to give them more information to work with in order to produce work (written and created by humans) that might not have been possible otherwise. #Media

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"The only way to predict the future is to control it." An interesting idea that powers a book that has a lot to say about 21st century oligarchy and our relationship to technology. There's one conclusion that hits home particularly hard; I can't describe it without spoiling the story, but I'm glad it's there.

If I have a criticism, it's that the author has so many ideas to share that they sometimes burst the seams of the thriller that forms this novel's page-turning center. But I enjoyed every minute, nodding along and wondering what was going to happen next. #Fiction

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During Meta's earnings call, Mark Zuckerberg said that Facebook and Instagram data is used to train the company's AI models.

“On Facebook and Instagram, there are hundreds of billions of publicly shared images and tens of billions of public videos, which we estimate is greater than the Common Crawl dataset and people share large numbers of public text posts in comments across our services as well.”

He's playing to win: one unstated competitive advantage is that Meta actually has the legal right to use training data generated on its own services. It's probably not something most users are aware of, but by posting content there, they grant the company rights to use it. If OpenAI falls afoul of copyright law, Meta's tech has a path forward.

It's a jarring thought, though. I'm certainly not keen on a generative model being trained on my son's face, for example. I'm curious how many users will feel the same way. #AI

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"If you’ve spent any time in journalism, it’s completely wild to think about what a small team of smart, hungry journalists and editors could do with $50 million. It’s enough to staff a team of hard-nosed ProPublica-esque journalists for the better part of the next decade."

While we're here, might I suggest donating to ProPublica so those hard-nosed journalists can stick around to do exactly that? #Media

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A lovely interview with Winnie Lim, whose deeply human, beautifully-written blog is one of my absolute must-reads.

This spoke to me, except substitute Oxford for Singapore: "I felt very alienated and lonely as a young person in the 1990s. It was incredible to discover the internet and know there is an entire world out there, that there are actually many people living diverse lives that were not visible or encouraged in Singapore."

Winnie and I both worked at Medium at different times, and yet both have a very strong own-your-own-domain philosophy. Her blogging story is really similar to mine, even if the content of her blog is very much her own.

Just a complete pleasure to read. #Culture

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"OpenAI’s GPT-4 only gave people a slight advantage over the regular internet when it came to researching bioweapons, according to a study the company conducted itself." Uh, great?

"On top of that, the students who used GPT-4 were nearly as proficient as the expert group on some of the tasks. The researchers also noticed that GPT-4 brought the student cohort’s answers up to the “expert’s baseline” for two of the tasks in particular: magnification and formulation." Um, splendid?

"However, the study’s authors later state in a footnote that, overall, GPT-4 gave all participants a “statistically significant” advantage in total accuracy." Ah, superb? #AI

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"It should be obvious that any technology prone to making up facts is a bad fit for journalism, but the Associated Press, the American Journalism Project, and Axel Springer have all inked partnerships with OpenAI."

The conversation about AI at the Online News Association conference last year was so jarring to me that I was angry about it for a month. As Tyler Fisher says here, it presents existential risk to the news industry - and beyond that, following a FOMO-driven hype cycle rather than building things based on what your community actually needs is a recipe for failure.

As Tyler says: "Instead of trying to compete, journalism must reject the scale-driven paradigm in favor of deeper connection and community." This is the only real path forward for journalism. Honestly, it's the only real path forward for the web, and for a great many industries that live on it. #AI

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Josh Marshall on The Messenger: "It really is like if you were on a parachute jump and some cocky idiot just jumped out of the plane with no chute saying he had it covered and, obviously, plummeted to the ground and died."

Beyond the well-deserved snark, this is actually a great breakdown of what went wrong here, and why businesses like The Messenger don't work anymore. The scale-advertising-social equation is obsolete.

Forgive me if it sounds like I'm banging some sort of drum, but you really do need to build deeper relationships through community, get to know the people you're serving, and build something that meets their unmet needs incredibly well. A content farm ain't it. #Media

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Transport for London have redesigned the Tube map in concentric circles as part of a promotional partnership with a phone company. Just one of the many, many ways public transit is desperately grasping for funds all over the world.

Here in Philly, SEPTA is working to rename stations based on corporate sponsorships. The Tube actually did this once before already, renaming Bond Street to Burberry Street for London fashion week. That (as well as these new maps, presumably) was temporary; these are permanent.

I don't blame transit authorities for trying to make up for budget shortfalls however they can. But it's also sad. Public transit is an important public good; it's a real shame that we can't seem to fully fund it from the public purse. The point is not for transit to be profitable, it's to provide real infrastructure that lifts everybody up. #Society

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"Research has shown that the more readers know about our reporters, the more likely they are to understand the rigors of our journalistic process and trust the results." So the NYT enhanced its journalist profiles to make them more human.

People trust people, not brands. The design makes sense: it deepens the relationship between a reader and the journalist whose work they're interacting with.

I think these are just the first steps of that humanization, though. Newsrooms need to transition from thinking about "audience" to "community": a one-way broadcast relationship to the kind of two-way conversation the internet was built for. #Media

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A really great piece about blameless postmortems and how the psychological safety to tell the truth leads to fewer mistakes and - in the case of the aviation industry - fewer lives lost.

"It’s often much more productive to ask why than to ask who. [...] A just organizational culture recognizes that a high level of operational safety can be achieved only when the root causes of human error are examined; who made a mistake is far less important than why it was made."

Exactly! #Business

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Simon Willison called this, and it makes sense: the George Carlin AI special was human-written, because that's the only way it could possibly have happened.

It's a parlor trick; a bit. It's also a kind of advertising for AI: even as you're horrified at the idea of creating a kind of resurrected George Carlin against his will, you've accepted that idea that it was technically possibly. It isn't.

Unfortunately for the folks behind the special, it's still harmful to Carlin's legacy, and putting his name on it in order to gain attention is still a problem. We'll see how the lawsuit shakes out. #AI

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Joe Sacco, the graphic journalist who wrote Palestine, Footnotes in Gaza, and Safe Area Gorazde, has started a new series, The War on Gaza.

It's accompanied by this statement from Fantagraphics:

"We want to state clearly and emphatically that we stand with the innocent people of Gaza. At the same time, we emphatically condemn the massacre of innocent Israeli civilians by Hamas on October 7 as a war crime and acknowledge with deep regret the grief and trauma Jewish people are enduring in its aftermath; but this barbarous act does not warrant Israel to commit its own war crime and to inflict exponentially greater grief and trauma in return." #Culture

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"In order to combat the fracturing of social media platforms, a Google discoverability crisis fueled by AI generated spam and AI-fueled SEO, and a media business environment that is in utter freefall, we need to be able to reach our readers directly using a platform that we own and control."

For every publisher right now, email seems to be the only option. This is the first time I've seen this argument about AI scraping: usually the need to own your own relationship comes down to avoiding the thrash of different social media business models, which I've written about plenty of times before.

This idea that putting your content out there for free will only lead to it being rewritten by AI and repurposed by spam blogs could be the death of the open web. This is particularly true in light of Google's apparent refusal to downgrade machine-written content.

The idea is simple and awful: these spam sites rewrite human-written articles in an effort to capture search engine clicks themselves, instead of the people they stole from. They run ads against this spam. Because it's all machine-written, they can do it at scale.

Even if you don't agree that the web needs to be intrinsically protected (hi, we're enemies now), it seems obvious to me that incentives should be aligned towards publishing unique, useful information rather than superficially grabbing clicks through AI-driven SEO spam. I don't know what's going on inside the search engine businesses, but they need to consider what's going to be good for their businesses in the long term. This isn't it. #AI

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Honestly, what a lovely thing: a nonprofit newsroom doing important things for news, media, and democracy, for the right reasons - with a women-led, diverse team. And thriving.

60% of the team is BIPOC; nearly 40% is LGBTQ+. And that diversity allows them to tell the sorts of stories that many other newsrooms struggle to reach.

And this allows those stories and perspectives to spread far and wide: "Our free distribution model led our stories to be republished hundreds of times, in national outlets like the PBS NewsHour and HuffPost; local outlets like MinnPost and Connecticut Mirror; and community- and issue-specific outlets like Capital B News and Inside Climate News."

I was once a member of the team; now I'm a cheerleader. I want to see much more of this kind of newsroom - and this newsroom in particular - in the future. #Media

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"In 2018, the indie women’s website The Hairpin stopped publishing, along with its sister site The Awl. This year, The Hairpin has been Frankensteined back into existence and stuffed with slapdash AI-generated articles designed to attract search engine traffic."

This is one of the worst kinds of AI-generated spam: a real, much-missed website has been purchased and spun into an LLM fever dream. It's now just a part of a Serbian DJ's thousands-deep portfolio of spam sites.

But the point made in the article about succession planning is really important. Media properties should be thoughtful about what happens to their domains once they've outlived their usefulness - even if the owner has shuttered completely. Otherwise anyone can scoop up the domain and abuse the goodwill built by its former owner for any purpose they like.

This is particularly true for journalism publishers. I recommend that they never let their domains expire for this reason, even if they've fully fallen out of use. You never know who might pick them up and abuse the trust of their community. #AI

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"Proposed legislation would prevent trans people from being able to update driver’s licenses, hold public office, use public restrooms, or take shelter from domestic violence unless they do so according to their sex assigned at birth."

I'm grateful, as ever, for The 19th's (and, specifically, Orion Rummler's) reporting here, digging into the details and impact of this proposed legislation.

One ray of light: "The ACLU and other civil rights groups are tracking a lot of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation this year, and expect another record-shattering year. However, advocates want the community to remember that although a record number of anti-trans bills were introduced last year, the majority of anti-trans bills — hundreds of them — never passed into law." #Society

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"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 for all the reasons listed here: most importantly, it eliminates person-by-person bias.

Systemic inequalities between certain job functions, particularly with respect to gendered work, aren't completely addressed here given the system's reliance on market salaries, but I liked the way they adjusted their customer service salaries when they realized how important they were to the business.

The initiative is also a great way to signal an open culture to the world, and this post is thoughtful and thorough. I wish it was more standard. #Business

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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 can republish on their own sites, and partner stories will be featured on The 19th (and on each other's site).

The whole thing is made possible because of Creative Commons licensing: every story is released under a CC license and made available to republish as easily as possible. But it's made viable and vibrant by a dedicated editor who works to connect partners together and help identify stories to co-report. I think it's brilliant. #Media

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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 - for call recipients who don't understand what's happening, it has the potential to be enough to move the needle.

It's not clear that this is the first time that this has happened, but it certainly won't be the last. It's also not clear how this might be prevented except to block robocalls entirely (and even then, one can imagine using a live agent with a deepfaked voice, so that every call would be different). #AI

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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're supporting the journalism itself.

What this piece doesn't really discuss is the content of that journalism, and how it might appeal to US readers who want to go beyond an American lens. North American op-ed authors like Robert Reich and Naomi Klein say a lot about its lean - a left-wing positioning that it's hard to get from a mainstream US paper. #Media

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"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 of the interactive features you see embedded in articles and on news websites are just static webpages. Upgrading these can be painful if they've used out of date JS libraries and so on, to the extent that sometimes they just aren't ever changed.

I like the idea of using web components with a central newsroom-specific library to get around this. In this case, a newsroom could update individual components and have all static interactive pages that use them update at the same time, without necessarily having to rebuild the page itself. #Technology

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