Werd I/O

"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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"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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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 The scale-advertising-social equation is obsolete.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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"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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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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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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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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The entire podcast industry's numbers were juiced by a quirk of how Apple Podcasts and other podcasting apps work. The actual number of listeners were far lower - as revealed when Apple Podcasts made a big update last September.

"For instance, The Daily and Dateline both publicly touted reaching over a billion total downloads. But representatives for these shows would not say if those numbers or other impressive daily or weekly download stats are still accurate."

Spoiler: they're not, and a lot of media companies are having to rapidly recalibrate how they report their numbers - many of whom could probably have been more openly honest about their popularity to begin with. #Media

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It's feeling more and more like Substack will be toast if they don't significantly walk back their policy on Nazis. (And honestly, at this point, even if they did, who would want to be associated with it?)

"This was never about the fate of a few publications: it was about whether Substack would publicly commit to proactively removing pro-Nazi material. Up to the moment I published on Tuesday, I believed that the company planned to do this. But I no longer do."

Casey Newton discusses why Platformer is leaving Substack, bringing its paid subscribers with it, and why he selected Ghost (which really is an excellent choice).

As with Citation Needed and Garbage Day, I'm delighted to resubscribe at their new homes. #Media

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The headline here is a little misleading, because it should end: "... but not proactively, and with no changes to our content policy."

Substack seems to want to have its cake and eat it: to offer content deals, promote writers, and shape its writer community, but also be treated as a neutral utility rather than a platform with its own editorial policy, content goals, and community management.

I don't think it should have that ability. Either it's a neutral utility - which is an impossibility because of its obvious community curation, but also because of rules imposed on it at the payment layer - or it's a platform. It can't be both. And because it can't be the former, the company needs to take real responsibility for its actions, rather than pin itself to this clearly cynical policy dressed up as principles. #Media

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Molly White, who has been one of the most important voices on technology and society, has moved her newsletter from Substack to Ghost because of the Nazi problem.

As she points out:

"To be very clear, we're talking about Substacks that are using swastikas, sonnenrads, and photos of Hitler in their branding, and publishing screeds about "white genocide" and other things I'd frankly rather not reprint. There are certainly conversations that can be had about content moderation and the difficulty of defining exactly where to draw the line between acceptable and unacceptable content, but the Substacks identified in the open letter and in The Atlantic piece were nowhere close to any reasonable line."

I have resubscribed. #Media

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"Until Substack, I was not aware of any major US consumer internet platform that stated it would not remove or even demonetize Nazi accounts. Even in a polarized world, there remains broad agreement that the slaughter of 6 million Jews during the Holocaust was an atrocity. The Nazis did not commit the only atrocity in history, but a platform that declines to remove their supporters is telling you something important about itself."

I'm one of the people who canceled their Platformer membership - not because I don't appreciate Casey Newton's great work, but because I don't want to support a platform that behaves in this way. I'm hopeful that he'll relocate and that I can subscribe again - or that Substack will recant. #Media

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"Of course there will be examples of AI-generated misinformation, bots, and deepfakes during various elections next year. But the key question is how politicians will be using these tools."

This is it: misinformation and disinformation threats are not some nameless force. Sure, there are people out there who will gamify outrage for profit, regardless of truthfulness - but that's always been true. The real harm is conducted by people with power. It's a human, societal problem, not something that can be fixed with technology.

The best fix? Great journalism that speaks truth to power and actually calls politicians out - both on their claims and on their truthless strategies. #Media

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Some said it would never happen: Mickey Mouse is in the public domain. Or, at least, the very earliest version of him is.

As the BBC points out: "It means creatives like cartoonists can now rework and use the earliest versions of Mickey and Minnie." Disney warns that it'll still protect its copyright on more modern versions, so artists will need to be really creative - but I expect to see some pretty subversive work over the next year. #Media

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"I’d do this even if no one read it. Blogging, for me, is the perfect format. No restrictions when it comes to length or brevity: a post can be a considered and meticulously composed 3,000-word essay, or a spurted splat of speculation or whimsy. No rules about structure or consistency of tone. A blogpost can be half-baked and barely proved: I feel zero responsibility to “do my research” before pontificating. Purely for my own pleasure, I do often go deep. But it’s nearer the truth to say that some posts are outcomes of rambles across the archives of the internet, byproducts of the odd information trawled up and the lateral connections created."

Blogging, to me, epitomizes a lot of the promise of the web. I love it too. And I have no plans to stop.

(An outdated format, though? How dare you!) #Media

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I enjoyed Get Back and They Shall Not Grow Old, but what's obvious to me after reading this piece is that these upscaled films will look as outdated in 20 years as CGI from 2003 does today. They'll look like cartoons. Not without value, but nothing close to the intended naturalism.

While I think there's still some value in pieces like those two - anything that makes the past more real so we can learn from it more closely works for me, even if it's not going to be as effective a few decades from now - I'm less excited by upscaled True Lies. Give me the imperfect film grain I remember from my childhood. #Media

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I have so much respect for what everyone at The 19th does. It has one of the best work cultures I've ever encountered, and Amanda is a huge part of that. I'm deeply glad to have worked their and to have worked with her.

The things she talks about here are lessons that can and should be learned by newsrooms, but also by organizations across industries.

And I hope they are. Everyone deserves to work in an inclusive, responsible, transparent, empathetic workplace with a strong culture of care. It shouldn't be down to one non-profit newsroom to do this; it should be everywhere. #Media

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This hits the nail on the head:

"No one chasing money in media ever chased Twitter. But anyone chasing power found themselves irresistibly drawn to the platform. And eventually, the platform started to actually deliver that power in ways that continue to reverberate around the world."

I do bristle at the use of Trump and Bernie Sanders as equivalent extremes presented here: one is a fascist demagogue who threatens to undermine American (and perhaps global) democracy, and the other would like people to have healthcare and not die from poverty.

Still, this is why Twitter was important, why it's being missed, and why it was important that it eventually died (albeit not in the way that it actually did). It was about power and influence, wrapped in a dangerous context collapse.

I believe conversation should be democratized: anyone should be able to message the President, or the CEO of Apple, or whichever person is normally behind layers of security and PR and plexiglass. But perhaps not for the benefit of someone else's company, and not in a way that is so fundamentally against the public interest. #Media

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No surprise that Black consumers favor local papers that are more reflective of their communities (vs national outlets, which still skew white and male).

"Black news organizations — and also Black reporters at mainstream outlets — understand the local issues better and are less likely to engage in tired tropes and racist stereotypes than national journalists."

One of the most important things we can do to foster trust in media is to hire diverse newsrooms that are more representative of the communities we serve. Surely that's obvious? And yet, journalism as a whole still suffers from the same old diversity issues. #Media

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Spoiler alert: no. This concept been tried before, more than once, and will fail again. Jim McKelvey seems to understand why advertising is broken - but not necessarily how to align users and publishers.

This quote from a publisher says it all for me: “Honestly, I’m not that invested in knowledge about what he’s doing. I’ve seen the pitch and most everyone says the same thing: ‘He’s a bit arrogant. He’s been very successful.’ It costs nothing to say ‘sure, go ahead,’ and if it works, we’ll most likely be in.'”

And this one: “To be honest, we do not know enough about the tech integration to know how it will work. At this time, we are signed up for the test and will participate.” #Media

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The most frustrating thing about this is that it's some of the exact same stuff that writers were striking for in the US. While that industrial action seems to have come to a satisfactory conclusion, it looks like American companies are creating similarly exploitative arrangements in areas not covered by WGA agreements.

We live in a global world, connected to a global internet, and agreements need to cross borders and jurisdictions. Perhaps we need a Creative Commons style organization for streaming writers agreements? #Media

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An instructive look at what independent local news outlets are doing in the face of a tragedy that is part of a rapidly-rising trend. Upshot: their journalism is far more accessible than the local "big" paper.

Independent local news is undergoing a renaissance, but to do it well requires a thorough rethinking of what local news even is. First-class internet products are very different to old-school papers, and the former is what is generally needed to succeed. The prerequisites are a deep understanding of your community's needs, a product mindset, and truly great journalism.

The story itself is awful, of course. A disturbing part of the rising hate we're seeing everywhere. Real, in-depth coverage that isn't just there to feed advertising pageviews helps us to understand it - as well as how we might stand up to it. #Media

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I'm pretty shocked that people are sharing Osama bin Laden's letter because they agree with it. Mostly because it is absolutely rife with antisemitic tropes.

This is one of the most dangerous aspects of the place we're in: the conflict in Gaza is leading to people unironically internalizing straight antisemitism. Which is really hard because what's happening in Gaza is awful - but anti-semitism is not at all the right lesson to be drawn from it. Of course it's not.

This kind of thing makes me more than a little fearful of what the next few years hold. #Media

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I just don't think advertising is an appropriate way to support this kind of journalism - or, potentially, any kind. This is more evidence, but it's also worth knowing that the private equity firm that owns G/O Media has not been a good steward.

Non-profits and worker-owned co-operatives aren't just more aligned ways to run this kind of organization, but I strongly suspect they last longer, too.

There is, of course, always the possibility that advertising is an excuse, and the owners didn't want to support a feminist publication. #Media

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On models for journalism:

"I wonder if the big problem is that we focused on scale when we should have been focused on nailing down the audience. If we focused on millions when we should have focused on building ourselves a liveable wage. And if we put too much of an emphasis on global at the cost of local."

Yes! This! Exactly! News was seduced by the exponential VC model that should have been limited to certain kinds of hardware and software. And in the process - as well as through some legacy ivory tower thinking - it chose not to dig deep and figure out exactly who it was serving.

I still say modern newsrooms should use the word "community" instead of "audience". It's a two-way relationship. And building relationships does not scale. #Media

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