Latest - Media News You Need to Know
Generative AI search is changing our world; WTF is it?; Bertelsmann kills many of its magazines -- many more will follow; BBC chairman on tenuous ground, or not...
Generative AI - standby for a piece from me — and in the meantime…
ChatGPT, the current version of a series of large language model-based artificial intelligence chatbots, is now inside an experimental version of the Microsoft Bing search engine and the results are amazing, awful, and alarming all at once.
I have a piece coming shortly on the INMA.org site which is a bit of a primer on the problems the growth of search engines powered by generative AI may pose — and I hope it goes a bit further than the classic “it’s going to take journalist’s (my) job.” However, they have first dibs so I will share it when it’s published there. To whet your appetite, however, here is a collection of must-read pieces on the topic:
AI Search Is a Disaster, is an uncharitable but worthy read by The Atlantic’s Matteo Wong. It is good on why the existing versions can be alarming and pose risks but it isn’t so strong on how quickly the technology can be expected to improve.
A Conversation With Bing’s Chatbot Left Me Deeply Unsettled, by Kevin Roose of The New York Times is more than spooky and raises some interesting questions when we know that bots or those of ill will can already get us to reveal more or do more or rile us up more than we would wish on other platforms. I can also recommend the recent podcast Roose and his co-host from The Platformer, Casey Newton, did on this subject, complete with interviews with the Open AI Chief Executive Sam Altman and Microsoft Chief Technology Officer Kevin Scott. If you can bear listening to the number of “likes” and “right?” then it is a truly informative podcast.
Until Victory…Havana (Photograph: Peter Bale)
Bertelsmann subsidiary to end, sell dozens of magazines
There’s a hideous inevitability to this and one which I have had some relatively recent personal engagement with: magazines are stuffed, or are they? It seems to me that exhausted and unimaginative publishing companies are sometimes trashing magazines that with the right care and maybe new owners could thrive.
I know it is more complicated than this but in simple terms: magazines sell either on subscription or discretion. The discretional purchases depend on covers and placement in newsagents, or those cool booths on Las Ramblas. They have to find a way to move online effectively and use the beauty of magazines - the quality of writing, focus on audience, imagery, quality of design, quality of advertising (you may have others, if so please tell me as I am thinking about buying a magazine).
It seems to me that New York Magazine, The Atlantic, and The New Yorker, may have made that transition effectively. The fact the Atlantic is now more or less owned by a wealthy philanthropist helps, and Conde Nast is to some extent philanthropy. I struggle to think, at this moment, of a great online-only magazine that survived. Yes, I know The Economist is a magazine but it calls itself a newspaper, even though it is now a set of excellent podcasts with a startlingly good iPhone app attached.
If Bertelsmann can’t be bothered making these titles work who can? Bauer has been shown not to give a damn about its far-flung empire. Conde Nast has been patient and tended its magazine garden with incredibly expensive compost and editors.
I suspect there will be niche sites and excellent applications — and even paper versions that are “specials” — that fill some of this space because let’s also admit that many magazines are execrable and hard to differentiate from each other on supermarket stands — especially where they might have to pay to be displayed.
Story+Cover+Advertising+Photography+Utility=Relevance/Need/Want is the formula now and it doesn’t appear to be working.
Revealed: the hacking and disinformation team meddling in elections, another excellent collaboration from The Guardian and other investigative journalism publishers associated with the French non-profit Forbidden Stories.
Like the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, with I had a connection, these collaborative outfits are showing they have the reach, confidentiality, technology, and resources to devote to really hard investigations.
It is a worrying story of media and social media manipulation for nefarious means that are hard to identify and act as a direct attack on the principles inherent in journalism. Without leaks I doubt this story would ever have been told and it is notable that a French TV station has already suspended a star anchor over it.
The Arab world’s rulers have turned journalists into courtiers, is an excellent story from The Economist — kind of peripherally related to the kinds of people who’d use the service of the Israeli hackers and the Israeli creators of the Pegasus spying app — on the hollowing out of critical or even observant media in the Middle East.
One of the interesting elements in the article is the risk of joint ventures and partnerships in the Middle East with Bloomberg, Sky News, and others which could lead to a coopting of those brands and perhaps make it harder for them to run critical stories on platforms outside the region.
The BBC chairman Richard Sharp should be on shaky ground having not disclosed his use of connections to introduce former Prime Minister Boris Johnson to someone — a distant relative of Johnson’s which made it easier to avoid full disclosure — while he was being interviewed for the role at the top of the public broadcaster.
However, Guardian columnist and expert in the how the corridors of the British elite work, (Sir) Simon Jenkins, wrote in a deliciously class-conscious and I assume slightly tongue in cheek though it’s hard to tell with him, column suggesting that precisely Sharp’s impeccable connections were what the BBC needed right now.
“Assuming he survives, his reputation will depend on his defending the corporation to the death against its enemies – particularly those on the right. He was a friend of Johnson, was Rishi Sunak’s boss at Goldman Sachs, and has given generously to the Tory party. He is perfectly cast as the champion in high places the BBC needs,” Jenkins wrote of the all-too-close-for-comfort connections.
Recommended reads:
How the $500 billion attention industry really works, is an article and podcast on the New York Times’ Ezra Klein show in which former Google artificial intelligence expert and author Tim Hwang describes how our attention is sought, bought, and sold.
A New Paradigm for Global Journalism: Press Freedom and Public Interest, is an extensive study with some readable executive summaries on the dilemmas facing journalism worldwide from technology, competition, and restrictions on free speech. This version is inside the Columbia Journalism Review and the report is based on work by the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia.
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Tom Scott has a very informative video on youtube about his experience with chat gbt and its potential