Notable links: June 26, 2026

Most Fridays, I share a handful of pieces that caught my eye at the intersection of technology, media, and society.

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Before we begin this week's roundup, I want to express my condolences to the friends and family of Om Malik, who we sadly lost this week. Om was one of the most important voices in blogging, tech journalism, and then the wider industry. So many people in tech have a story about him that highlights his conscience, thoughtfulness, and kindness. He will be missed.

Journalism's logical fallacy

Journalism is in crisis, and it’s really easy (and lazy) to say that making a technology or process tweak will fix it: we just need to use AI to fill capacity gaps, or build stronger comments into our site, or we need a better business or distribution model.

None of those things address the underlying question of why we need journalism, why it’s important, and what it should be. By addressing innovation at the edges, newsrooms are avoiding the hard, existential work of revisiting their core value to begin with. But it’s only by understanding that core value that they will actually reset their relationships with audiences, build greater trust and loyalty, and pull themselves out of the rut they find themselves in.

Shirish Kulkarni’s findings from listening projects in Wales — with multiple dramatically different demographics — contradict a lot of the narratives newsrooms have been telling themselves. For example:

“The second finding challenges one of the journalism industry’s most comfortable premises: that audiences – particularly marginalised communities – are news-illiterate and need to be educated. The opposite is true. In fact, the communities we work with are forensically sharp about media – often more so than the industry insiders who talk about them.”

This mirrors something you often hear from mission-driven tech projects: “we just need to educate the user”. Usually the opposite is true: you need to educate yourself about the user and give them the thing they actually need. And in the case of journalism, at least as a finding of this research, the need turns out to be pretty simple:

“They want help making good decisions. For themselves, their families, their communities. Not drama, not outrage, not the next breaking story. Practical, trustworthy, usable information that helps them navigate their lives.”

It’s important, once again, to separate the work of news — breaking headlines, emergent facts — from journalism’s work to provide context and meaning. The first is a commodity; the second is both inherently community-driven and has always been more valuable.

Here I want to bang an old drum: newsrooms like to talk about audience strategies, not community strategies. It’s a meaningful difference that Shirish highlights well. The first implies an ivory tower broadcast approach: “we just need to reach people”. The second is an active relationship between a newsroom and the people it serves; a two-way conversation that requires trust and understanding on both sides.

The internet has always been a conversation. We’ve had the ability to build relationship-centric news organizations for 30 years, but most remain stubbornly set in a print mindset. This kind of research makes it clear how important that shift is, but, like Shirish, I don’t believe most existing newsrooms will evolve to actually meet this need. They can’t: the immediate commercial pressure is severe, and changing the model requires changing highly-ingrained cultural norms and assumptions that have been inherited from print. And in the midst of that panic, they’re jumping into bed with companies (AI vendors, proprietary social media platforms) that intermediate their relationships with their communities in exchange for some short-term wins.

So their outlook is not rosy. Instead, I think we’ll see new newsrooms emerge that reinvent what journalism is, are unafraid to build real, lasting, two-way relationships with the people they’re trying to serve, and eat everybody else’s lunch.

Empower others

Another superb post from Corey Ford:

“There's a simple diagnostic for any organization: Are your leaders focused on accumulating control, or on empowering the people around them?

Too many people in positions of power are overly focused on themselves. They hoard decisions. They micromanage. They grab power. And the people around them suffer for it. Those employees wait for direction instead of taking initiative. They bring problems instead of solutions. They ask "now what?" instead of saying "here's what I think we should do.””

He goes on to describe bus factor, the question of what happens if you’re hit by a bus. (My colleague Adam Hirsch recently offered “lottery factor”, reframing the question to be about what happens when someone wins the lottery and goes away to live the life of their dreams, which is more fun to think about.) Could your organization live without you?

The only way to build an organization that can live without you is to devolve decision-making — and the only way to do that is to create the conditions to make devolved decision-making a safe norm. Corey’s been building on that idea in his recent posts, and I enthusiastically co-sign. I’ve taken “surround yourself with people who are better than you” to heart: the Director of Product Engineering, and Director of IT and Security, who both report to me, fit that description exactly and we’re all better off for it.

When we examine situations where this doesn’t happen, it’s worth considering incentives. If you’re a founder or top-level leader who is building a sustainable organization in good faith, these principles are obviously, straightforwardly a good idea. If, on the other hand, you’re not in that position, and you’re worried about your own standing in the organization, you might feel like it’s a good idea to entrench your own power and decision-making. I think that’s short-sighted: you’re there to support the organization, and hiring an amazing team, as long as you support them well, can only make you look good.

At various tech companies in particular, I’ve also encountered people who don’t want power to be devolved to them: they want to be given a plan and to follow it. I don’t think that’s realistic in most smaller companies, and even in larger ones autonomy, insight, and decision-making ability are prized. It’s a thing to hire for. When you want to devolve decision-making, you hire people who can make great decisions. When you want to entrench your own power and micro-manage, you hire followers. These are different paths. I can only recommend the former.

This, from Corey, is absolutely vital:

“Real empowerment means saying: "That's not what I would have done. But you own the decision. Here's what I'm thinking about. Here are the questions I'd want you to consider. But ultimately, it's yours.””

Nobody will ever do it your way. If you want them to follow your lead exactly, you’re not devolving power. If you want them to be genuinely empowered, you need to not just accept that they do things their way, but embrace it — while also being transparent about your own thinking and principles, and setting norms mantras that help people navigate what’s important for the team.

He’s got a lot to say about that. As always, his full post, and the underlying series, are required reading.

It is trivially easy to use Reddit to manipulate AI search, research suggests

All good fun:

“A tiny snippet of user-generated text as short as 13 words long is often enough to manipulate the AI agents that power tools like ChatGPT and Google’s AI search, new research shows. The study suggests that it is trivially easy for brands to inject promotional content on sites like Reddit, Quora, and Wikipedia with the end goal of poisoning or manipulating the output of AI tools.”

So not only do we need to worry about AI-generated slop polluting our social spaces, we also have to worry about people who want to influence the output of the AI-generated slop polluting them, too. There’s a whole industry of companies trying to improve their clients’ coverage in AI results, just as there were for search engine results. And all of them will be spamming the crap out of our public communities and collaborative websites.

As 404 Media points out, this poses a real question for moderators in those spaces. How can they possible stem the tide? It’s not clear that this is even possible. Which means, inevitably, that the signal vs noise ratio in those spaces will decline, leading to a decline in usership of those spaces overall, and a retreat for most people into private group chats and uncrawlable communities.

To put it simply:

“Poisoning LLM results is basically just as easy as doing targeted posting on highly relevant subreddits to the industry or company you’re trying to promote, phrasing the comment to align with popular LLM queries, and attempting to evade moderation for as long as possible.”

Guarding against bot-driven spam is a relatively simpler problem. In contrast, this content will often be insidiously human: cunningly designed to try to provide value while also hiding a paid agenda. In some ways, it’s all the same as it ever was, but the volume of the junk is only going to keep increasing.

Of course, the silver lining is that eventually these sources will become unusable for AI training too. Then, finally, maybe everyone will go away.

Texas anti-ICE protesters convicted of terrorism charges sentenced to at least 50 years in prison

This is a litmus test for the freedom to protest in the United States:

“A group of Texas protesters convicted of terrorism charges received unusually harsh sentences of at least 50 years in prison on Tuesday in a closely watched case that was widely seen as a test case of the Trump administration’s efforts to crack down on dissent.”

Let’s be clear: a few of the protesters were out of bounds. One fired an AR-15 at the police, which goes beyond legitimate protest into inciting violence (and maybe even deliberate provocation). I would never condone that kind of activity. None of us should.

But these sentences far outstrip anything that’s been given to anyone on the right wing: the leader of the Proud Boys, as this article notes, was sentenced to 22 years in prison. One protester wasn’t even present, but was sentenced to 30 years for moving some zines:

“The ninth defendant, Daniel Sanchez-Estrada was not at the protest, but was convicted of corruptly concealing a document or record after prosecutors said he moved leftwing zines and other materials at the request of Rueda, his wife, after she was arrested. Sanchez-Estrada was sentenced to 30 years in prison on Tuesday.”

Many of the protesters had guns and were part of a gun club. They all possessed them legally. I personally wish there was not a right to bear arms and think that their ubiquitous presence in America makes everyone less safe, but the right to own them is enshrined in the Second Amendment. Instead, other “evidence” was used to infer that they planned violence, including this specific argument that should give everyone pause:

“[…] including their decision to communicate and auto-delete messages on Signal, an encrypted messaging platform widely used among activists, journalists and other citizens wary of government surveillance.”

Collectively, the justice department argued that these convictions are proof that anti-fascists are terrorists, which should also give us pause. The precedent here is obviously very dangerous for freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and democracy in America.