Media News You Need to Know
What publishers should really be concerned about with ChatGPT; Amazing FT -- and other reporting on Ukraine; No wonder News Corp is worried about Fox case; and a bumper edition given delays on my side
Generative AI search will challenge all news publishers
Last edition I mentioned I was working on something about publishers and generative AI, the most obvious example being ChatGPT and its offshoots. It is here now on the INMA.org website since I do a project for INMA.
Photograph: Peter Bale
What I didn’t know, stupidly, when I wrote that, was that the list of websites that ChatGPT has ingested to create this monster is known and posted on the developer site GitHub, ironically (in a sense) owned by Microsoft which has also invested in the ChatGPT creator Open AI and embedded ChatGPT into its Bing search engine.
It is an astounding list of almost every media and content site that matters. Open AI is being a little disingenuous to my mind by saying that it hadn’t breached the terms and conditions of those sites by scraping them in other interests of “research”. However, and I am not a lawyer of course, but I can see the non-profit Open AI doing research but once that moves to the commercial side of Open AI licensing then really, WTF.
Publishers whine too much about this sort of thing but in this case, they would have an argument if they really had grasped what had gone on which I don’t think enough of them have done yet. I say this believing that great things will emerge from all of this but publishers need to be careful not to lose all over again.
Here is one other small part of that post I did which may help those of us who aren’t as totally enmeshed in this whole discussion as we might be. We all need help.
And, here’s a not-too-bad piece from The Press Gazette on the revenue implications for publishers. In my view they may complain about Google but that will be as nothing compared to the watching their content devoured and no traffic returned.
Charles Moore interview: ‘Journalism’s a pretty rackety trade, isn’t it?’
Charles has to be one of the most self-regarding and pompous figures in British media, which is saying something. On the other hand, he is irritatingly on the money sometimes. His level of entitlement is off the scale, arise Lord Moore.
“I’m not a massive consumer of magazines. I used to enjoy Horse and Hound. But that’s become much more interested in things like dressage and not enough in hunting,” is a genuine quote from the piece. Weirdly, I don’t think he is being ironic.
They risk it all to cover war in Ukraine. Are people still watching?
Journalists have been killed and injured in the Ukraine conflict, particularly local Ukrainian reporters, camerapeople, and fixers as is so often the way. People may criticise media and journalists but I am familiar with the courage it takes to go to places like that — including when it is your home — and salute those who do it. In my experience the key motivation is to bear witness, to explain what is really happening. I can also say that people like the CNN people on the spot are excellent reporters, as are so many in this report from The Washington Post. I was also moved by this extraordinary photographic essay on the Ukrainian side of the frontline from New York Times photographer Tyler Hicks. True grit and courage.
The pen and the sword in Ukraine in The New European is a great example of the work of local reporters in this case an exile now on the frontline as a soldier.
How Putin blundered into Ukraine — then doubled down is a remarkable piece of reporting by the Financial Times, especially Moscow correspondent Max Seddon, which gives the deepest insight I’ve yet seen into the thinking around the invasion of Ukraine. Not a media story then but a great story by a strong media player. It includes, the most wonderful quote, attributed to Sergei Lavrov and talking about Putin: “He has three advisers,” Lavrov replied, according to the oligarch. “Ivan the Terrible. Peter the Great. And Catherine the Great.”
More media stories worth reading
The scale of local news destruction in Gannett’s markets is astonishing, a self-explanatory and pretty extraordinary story from NiemanLab on the historic and ongoing erosion of local reporting resources at a major US publisher.
Fox News Edits Out Trump Saying He Might’ve Let Russia ‘Take Over’ Parts of Ukraine is a pretty self-explanatory headline in The Daily Beast about the network that is already reeling from the shitshow of its commentators swallowing Trump lies about a stolen election and their dissembling and the discomfort of Rupert Murdoch being exposed in depositions for the $1.6 billion defamation case by Dominion Systems. Fox is making specious claims the case is a threat to the First Amendment.
“I have never seen a defamation case with such overwhelming proof that the defendant admitted in writing that it was making up fake information in order to increase its viewership and its revenues,” Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe told The Guardian. “Fox and its producers and performers were lying as part of their business model.”
Reporting Ukraine 90 years ago: the Welsh journalist who helped uncover Stalin’s genocide, by my mate Richard Sambrook in The Conversation is an excellent piece on Gareth Jones, the plucky Welsh reporter, who braved Stalin and much else to report on the deliberate famine imposed on Ukrainian peasants in the 1930s. His reporting also inspired a not bad movie called Mr Jones.
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Wonderful work, Peter! informative, interesting, solid, well written - many thanks for sharing!
Thank you. Informative, wide-ranging and authoritative.
It might be good to note where there's a paywall on your links.