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?
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...
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.
The Epoch Times is under investigation for money laundering, but the site's role in spreading anti-trans misinformation has gone unmentioned in mainstream coverage of the case.
An Epoch Times link that showed up in a story for the Atlantic is a particularly clear example of the laundering process on trans stories that goes fringe right -> far right -> mainstream.
This month, Anime Herald is hosting a subscription drive. We'll donating to The Trevor Project in a dollar-for-dollar match for everything we raise this month through Patreon and Ko-fi (up to $800), so you can support independent anime journalism and help LGBTQIA+ youth at the same time. 💖
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.
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/
"A shocking act of violence attracted international attention and split the town over questions of truth and justice. Grand Marais is still trying to piece itself back together."
"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."
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.
#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?"