Notable links: October 16, 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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Two 23-year-olds used AI to create a daily audio briefing. It’s now the top news app in Argentina.

I think there are several notable things about this story.

The first, most obvious one is that two 23 year olds were able to create a news app that rose to become the top-ranked news app in their country, using AI. There is no way they would have been able to build this with the time, team, and resources at their disposal otherwise. From an engagement perspective, this is a bona-fide AI-in-journalism-distribution success story.

The second is that it’s not a success story for incumbent newsrooms. Clearly, a short, personalized news briefing is something people wanted; every existing newsroom could have built it, at least using their own content, but they didn’t. The gap they left meant that two newcomers could come in with very few resources and gain an audience off the back of existing journalists’ work. The app credits stories in audio and leaves citations in the chat, but my guess is that most people aren’t looking at their screens as they listen to their audio briefing. Very few people will click through; I think these listens won’t translate to pageviews or subscriptions.

The third is that outsiders are clearly much more free to build experiments than existing newsrooms. The latter have the weight of their brands and existing revenue operations to consider. Most outsiders have none of that: nobody expects anything from them, so they’re free to experiment. Most experiments will fail, but some may succeed. Left alone, this represents intermediation that could undermine the connection between newsrooms and their communities. But there’s an opportunity to partner more deeply and represent newsroom needs in the app. And then consider how they can foster an ecosystem with more experimentation, not less.

Election Night 2026

This prototype from Graze is pretty cool.

Graze, of course, allows you to create new Bluesky feeds. People have created feeds for news, sports, politics — anything you like. But they’ve mostly been consumed within the Bluesky experience itself.

Its midterms dashboard is something different. Here, you can view discussion of candidate races based on the races you care about, determined by who you’re already following. Because newsrooms, pundits, and politically active individuals are posting across the network, and because the network itself is based on a permissionless protocol that is open to analysis, Graze can show you what’s happening as well as the mood of the conversation in real time.

It’s all cited, so links point to newsrooms’s own accounts and websites. And it’s genuinely live.

Young People and the Future of Free Expression

Worth paying attention to:

“New Knight Foundation-Ipsos research among young adults and high school students points to a generation that strongly values free speech as a democratic principle, but is less confident about exercising it without consequences.”

Workplaces and classrooms feel the least free, but it’s good to hear that home is generally a space where they feel more free.

What’s surprising, and a bit worrying, is that AI chatbots are also one of the spaces where they feel free — and, in fact, 48% of high school aged respondents that used AI chatbots said they felt more free to speak to them than the people in their lives. Those conversations might feel like intimate spaces, private to them; in reality, they may be available to their vendors for analysis and even training. People from low income backgrounds felt this more than most. Young people worry about conflict: they hold back because of peer censorship and the fear of being judged. The perception is that the AI won’t judge them. In a world where chatbots have been linked to self-harm and suicide in young people, that’s quite dangerous.

The other findings here dovetail together to paint a pretty bleak picture. White and wealthier people feel more able to exercise their freedom of speech without consequence, and that number plummets to just 28% of Black respondents. Only around a half of college aged respondents felt like other democratic rights like voting were secure.

So we find ourselves in a world where people don’t feel free to express themselves — except to AI chatbots that happen to be produced by some of the tech companies who have directly contributed to this underlying authoritarianism. It’s obvious how those conversations could be compromised, and there are certainly betrayals to come — but more than that, it’s just sad that young people don’t feel they can speak and share with each other.

Why We’re Banning AI

The headline here is a bit of a misnomer. Current Affairs stresses that it’s not against technical innovation, but:

“[…] we need, first, to ensure that technologies are a tool used by workers to help them, rather than a tool used to replace workers. And, second, we need to make sure that readers aren’t being fed things that look like people’s genuine thoughts and creative expression but are in fact the product of disembodied mathematical formulas.”

The result is something that seems entirely reasonable to me: journalists are free to use AI in the course of their work, but may not write or illustrate their pieces with it. This ensures that they remain in control of the work published under their bylines, while allowing them to take advantage of automation when it can serve their process.

The side effects entirely benefit Current Affairs. Readers can trust that the work they read is produced by real people who have applied editorial judgment; the publication is also structurally incapable of publishing articles at a high volume or speed, forcing them to focus on quality rather than impressions. Journalists also know that their jobs are safer than they might be in an organization that doesn’t see a problem downsizing its newsroom in favor of predictive models.

The piece runs down the effects generative AI have had on creative industries, and touches on the fallacy of using Milton Friedman economics in mission-driven spaces. But the most important thing the piece has to say is: we will produce better journalism this way. I tend to agree. And what’s exciting is that it’s baked into their contract with their workforce — there’s no way to back out.

Design Your One-on-Ones

I like this approach to 1:1s from Corey Ford. Although some very high-profile founders have said that they don’t do or even like them, I think they’re a vital way to maintain a relationship with your team, make sure they’re well-served, and keep things running smoothly. But it’s also very easy to get caught into a reactive pattern — or, worse, just turn them into tactical status reports.

The trick, like all meetings, is to take the time to design them and have a well-defined agenda ahead of time. I also like Corey’s thoughts on cadence here: an hour every two weeks feels like the right rhythm to be able to make room for depth. And the one-on-one gift exchange makes for important punctuation that turns 360-degree feedback into a habit rather than something that drives anxiety and asymmetries.

What I’d add to Corey’s advice here is to space them out. Back-to-back 1:1s don’t give you the opportunity to reflect on what’s been said, take appropriate actions, or follow through on commitments, and they may get lost. As he suggests in another of his pieces: go slow to go fast. Take the time to set the relationship, take the time to design the meeting, take the time to work on the right things.