Werd I/O

A fascinating discussion of how authorship has changed, and what the demands of new authors from publishing houses really are.

In the old days, an author was someone who created a work. Today, they have to be a brand.

But it also turns out that unionization has a big part to play: many writers moonlight in the entertainment industry, where they can get healthcare and other benefits, all due to the WGA. #Media

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I'm really hopeful for this new generation of worker-owned media outlets. It's a promising model, and obviously hugely empowering.

What will be disempowering is if they start to disappear. So let's support them with our full voices. If you're into video games, check this out, and maybe consider supporting them? #Media

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These numbers are amazing to me. The Daily Mail publishes around 1640 articles every weekday. BBC News, in contrast, which has lots of local newsrooms, "only" publishes around 226 in total.

The Daily Mail, in other words, is a content farm. It's also the largest news publisher on TikTok and one of the largest on the web.

It's famous in Britain for its center right stance and a-bit-upmarket tabloid positioning. I wonder if that reputation translates in the US and beyond? #Media

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"Like so many rich media executives (see: Politico owner and CEO Mathias Döpfner), Finkelstein’s incapable of seeing most of the fatal flaws in modern U.S. journalism, whether it’s the inherent class, race and gender biases in most newsrooms, the steady erosion of trust caused by feckless “both sides” or “view from nowhere” reporting, or the underlying flaws with the ad-engagement models that now prop up — and violently derail — efforts to educate and inform the public."

This is not wrong. And you could see this implosion coming a mile off. It's just impressive to see it happen so quickly. #Media

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If tech companies are going to be credible content producers, they need to be able to erect a firewall between business and editorial. Contrast Apple trying to force Jon Stewart’s hand on China and AI here with John Oliver’s obviously free hand on his show over on Max.

I hope Stewart finds a new home for his work, and that other commentators notice what Apple did here. There are clearly better homes for them. #Media

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A smart reaction from Bluesky to Threads basically saying they won't do anything for journalists. (Of course, Mastodon also does this very well.) #Media

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One organization I know audited their social media use and learned that Twitter had their worst effort:reward ratio. This seems to support that finding. #Media

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"Prosecutions for public corruption are more likely in U.S. communities served by a nonprofit news outlet, a relatively new business model that often aims to fill the void left by shuttered traditional local newspapers." Journalism in the public interest works. #Media

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This is still a widely-held sentiment. What do we need to build for this not to be true? #Media

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"What makes this news more interesting is the fact that the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) has abandoned its Threads account but is still maintaining its self-hosted Mastodon accounts online." #Media

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"Website business models that depended on clicks from social media are now broken." It was always a good idea to own your own relationships with your audience, but there's never been a better time than now. #Media

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Notable to see a newspaper run an ad campaign that genuinely competes with another one. Kind of a bold move in a world where the whole market is declining. #Media

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Amanda is absolutely fearless and I was privileged to work with her. As co-founder of The 19th, she was an absolutely core part of what it became: both a strategist and culture instigator. What she does next will certainly change media; I'll be cheerleading. #Media

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"I don’t think I’ve seen someone walk through their process for writing a blog post, though." I love this breakdown! Tracy's structured process shows up in the quality of her posts. I love the thoughtfulness here. #Media

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This: "The prevalence of “news deserts” has apparently led some to think it’s normal for neighborhood news outlets to function as lapdogs rather than watchdogs." The purpose of journalism is to investigate in the public interest. #Media

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I think this is the right impulse: people tend to follow and trust individual journalists, not publications. Building out profiles and establishing more personal relationships helps build that trust. #Media

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"Web analytics sits in the awkward space between empirical analysis and relationship building, failing at both, distracting from the real job to be done: making connections, in whatever form that means for our project." #Media

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The open access movement is an important way academics can fight back against predatory publishers for the good of human knowledge everywhere - but the publishers are still out there, grifting. #Media

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I've lived in the US for twelve years, and at no point have I even been tempted by traditional cable. Every time I encounter it, I wonder why people want it. It's a substandard, obsolete product. So this is no surprise. #Media

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Services like this become single points of failure with outsize power over the journalism industry. It's a bad idea. No one entity should be the arbiter of bias in news or where a buyer should put their money. For one thing, who watches that entity's own inevitable bias? And if you're offering AI as a bias-free solution, you've already lost. #Media

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Lovely! #Media

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I couldn’t be less of a fan of the current Republican Party but I hate this. The White House should not be sending letters to the media encouraging them to do anything. That’s not the sort of relationship we need our journalistic media to have. #Media

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Snoop Dogg gimmick aside, this is actually pretty neat, and useful. I'd also like the opposite: sometimes I want to read podcasts. Different contexts demand different media; I wish content itself could be more adaptable. #Media

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Two thirds of the political content people consume come from non-news sites. And most of the news content people read is not overtly political. Instead, it's mostly coming from entertainment - which has no ethical need to report factually. #Media

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“Fundamentally: Klein is a leftist, Wolf was a liberal. The classic leftist distinction goes: leftists want to abolish a system where 150 white men run the world; liberals want to replace half of those 150 with women, queers and people of color.” #Media

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