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"The way we raise the money at The Guardian is different than any place I’ve ever been. This is truly a jointly owned responsibility among the business side and editorial." Every non-profit newsroom needs to move their center of gravity from large contributions to smaller, distributed
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I shared this with my team and one of them said they had to check that I didn't write it. This is exactly how I think about (and ask my team to think about) rooting software development in human needs. "All the elements of a good story
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"The key to effective engineering leadership lies in figuring out which scenarios are worth deliberately defying conventional logic, and when to simply follow the rules." Lots of good food for thought here. I've definitely been guilty of some of the anti-patterns here - particularly trying to
I don’t think it’s possible to morally support the ongoing bombardment of Gaza, but that’s too weak a statement. What’s happening there seems to be — based on what I’ve read through the news, what I’ve seen in video, the stories that have been sent
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"While young Taiwanese users discuss everything from relationships to celebrity gossip on Threads, the app has gradually become a gathering space for progressives, who favor independence from China to defend the island’s democracy." Threads has an official stance of not promoting political use. This is an example,
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On answering programming questions: "We found that 52 percent of ChatGPT answers contain misinformation, 77 percent of the answers are more verbose than human answers, and 78 percent of the answers suffer from different degrees of inconsistency to human answers." To be fair, I do expect AI answers
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Nos is running a "journalism accelerator", which onboards independent journalists and publications onto Nostr with guaranteed promotion and 1:1 help. Nostr is a different kind of open network, in the sense that it's decentralized rather than federated. Famously, Jack Dorsey defected there from Bluesky, in
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"At least two digital media companies are exploring the fediverse as a way to take more control over their referral traffic and onsite audience engagement." The Verge and 404 Media will both support ActivityPub (a protocol, not a "plugin", as the article calls it) and plug
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"It’s simply too early to get into bed with the companies that trained their models on professional content without permission and have no compelling case for how they will help build the news business." This piece ends on the most important point: nobody is coming to save
If I was a nefarious software company, here’s how I might be thinking: AI functionality tends to require that data is sent to a centralized service for processing. This is often data that is not being shared online in any other way that is easily available for analysis: existential
I’m enamored with Matt Webb’s unoffice hours: a way to chat with him about anything, without needing to email him first, for 30 minutes. As Matt says: I loved those open conversations over coffee in the Before Times. There’s an ostensible reason to connect, so you talk
In saving news, culture is key.