Local news is crucial to democracy, and it's disappearing — according to a new book by Steven Brill, excerpted in @Semafor, approximately twenty-two hundred papers and their websites went out of business between 2005 and 2021. That's created a vacuum into which "pink-slime" sites have poured. Brill writes about these sites that present themselves as legitimate publishers but are created to boost specific candidates and secretly financed by partisan funders, Democrats and Republicans alike.
Looks like my old workplace is turning into another media shitshow. Editor Sally Buzzbee was shit-canned on a Sunday night and a WSJ dude who's pals with the reich-wing publisher is now in charge.
A friend of mine who was a science editor at the Post recently left after just 18 months. Abandon ship...
while i'm almost impressed by otter.ai's hall of fame level #enshittification, i'm still outraged that they more than doubled the monthly price for the same services & i now need to find a solid offline non-subscription #transcription app. recommendations (besides macwhisper), anyone?
"Some stories carry echoes of 'Mississippi appendectomies' of the mid-20th century, in which Black women would go in for a different procedure and wake up to learn that their uterus had been removed."
There was no evidence against them other than the word of this one undercover narcotics officer who never wore a wire, never had a second officer to corroborate, no drugs recovered during the roundup of these suspects. And so then the question became, “Were these cases even legitimate to begin with?” https://www.texasobserver.org/the-interview-nate-blakeslee-tulia/
The overwhelming attention that the #Trump case has gotten in #Japan media (and probably most #Asia media) compared to the #Taiwan protests is a bit ridiculous.
The latter, IMO, is far more important the the region.
It’s #NewstodonFriday — such a shame it’s been a slow news week! Just to refresh your memories, this is a day to feature work from newsrooms with an active presence in the #Fediverse. If you like what you see in the (long!) thread below, follow the profiles and boost their stories. If you’re a journo or newsroom that we don’t know about or if there’s a newsroom you’d love to put on our radar, please let us know in the comments below.
#AI#GenerativeAI#Media#Journalism#News: "The promise of working alongside AI companies is easy to grasp. Publishers will get some money—Thompson would not disclose the financial elements of the partnership—and perhaps even contribute to AI models that are higher-quality or more accurate. Moreover, The Atlantic’s Product team will develop its own AI tools using OpenAI’s technology through a new experimental website called Atlantic Labs. Visitors will have to opt in to using any applications developed there. (Vox is doing something similar through a separate partnership with the company.)
But it’s just as easy to see the potential problems. So far, generative AI has not resulted in a healthier internet. Arguably quite the opposite. Consider that in recent days, Google has aggressively pushed an “AI Overview” tool in its Search product, presenting answers written by generative AI atop the usual list of links. The bot has suggested that users eat rocks or put glue in their pizza sauce when prompted in certain ways. ChatGPT and other OpenAI products may perform better than Google’s, but relying on them is still a gamble. Generative-AI programs are known to “hallucinate.” They operate according to directions in black-box algorithms. And they work by making inferences based on huge data sets containing a mix of high-quality material and utter junk. Imagine a situation in which a chatbot falsely attributes made-up ideas to journalists. Will readers make the effort to check? Who could be harmed?"
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution sent out a memo to its staff and freelancers this week, banning them from making any public comment regarding the War in Gaza:
"Our operating principles also say you may support human rights with limitations."
What do you mean by "human rights with limitations"?
Israeli military recovers bodies of 7 hostages and pulls out of Jabalia area of Gaza due to widespread public outrage!!
Israeli forces have ended combat operations in the Jabalia area of north Gaza after destroying more than 10 kilometres of tunnels during days of intense fighting that included over 200 airstrikes.
This yearly celebration informs the public on the dangers of using tobacco, the business practices of tobacco companies, what WHO is doing to fight the tobacco epidemic, and what people around the world can do to claim their right to health and healthy living and to protect future generations.
Due to acute shortage of water in Delhi, government has imposed 2k fine for wasting water! Demand for water has peaked due to extreme weather conditions.
Was just looking at a California Fruit & Vegetable Magazine "story" about UC Davis ending its licensing agreement with Eurosemillas. At the bottom of the story, it's attributed to Bill Kisliuk, UC Davis. I think I know what happened here...
UC Davis, like other UCs, has a huge "Strategic Communications" dept, staffed with ex-journalists who feed stories to news media, who usually publish UC Davis' words verbatim and not as a quote in a well-researched story.
This is one of many experiments we can do to find a sustainable community supported model for journalism. Meta has both embraced and sabotaged journalism in such a way that we have so few outlets in comparison to a decade ago. Today we need a new model. And we’re figuring out how to make it work by building it, together, open source, open protocol.