Media News You Need to Know
Murdochs pull back from defamation cases; the ChatGPT revolution; BuzzFeed turns off its once-great news feed; Twitter end verification and opts for dictatorship.
Lachlan Murdoch pulls back from silly defamation case after Fox settlement
Lachlan Murdoch had an attack of good sense and withdrew his defamation claim against tiny Australian new site Crikey a few days after Fox News settled the Dominion Voting Systems case in the United States.
It was always a faintly ridiculous case in which Lachlan focused on a rather generic reference to “Murdoch” — not him specifically — as an “unindicted co-conspirator” with Donald Trump over the January 6 attack on the US Capitol.
As so often in these cases where rich men pull back from stupid claims, Murdoch said he was certain he would have won the case and didn’t want Crikey to be able to use an ongoing legal case to promote itself. Oh yes.
Crikey saw it differently. Its owner, Private Media issues a statement calling the Murdoch claims “absurd” and describing the outcome as “a substantial victory for legitimate public interest journalism”. It said it stood by the original story.
Fox still faces massive legal jeopardy even after settling with Dominion. A second voting machine company, Smartmatic, has its own $2.7 billion claim in a New York court on a similar basis to the Dominion case over the false claims repeatedly aired on Fox that its voting machines were somehow rigged in the 2016 election.
I was surprised that Dominion didn’t secure an on-air apology from Fox as part of its settlement and it will surprise no one that Fox presenters more or less ignored the case on the day and still seem to be in jobs despite be exposed as appalling liars.
Generative AI revolution accelerates towards journalism
I’m at the International Journalism Festival in Perugia, Italy, as I write this, and the artificial intelligence revolution — driven by fast-moving generative AI tools like Open AI’s ChatGPT is a big subject as you might imagine.
A session with the head of Northwestern University Computational Journalism Lab exposed me to some of the immediate opportunities for newsrooms. One was analysing existing or proposed articles to suggest terms that would help discovery in search engines. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a critical function in all newsrooms and is moving closer to the reporting process where it should be. It turns out that ChatGPT is brilliant at suggesting SEO terms.
The other area was document analysis, for example, complex academic reports. Again, it turns out ChatGPT is rather brilliant at extracting the critical elements.
In both cases, however, it is critical that we learn how to write the best “prompts”. It seems like the best prompts are almost algorithms in themselves. This is the very simple one I wrote for that SEO set of suggestions: “Please analyse this text from the Mensagem site in Lisbon and suggest a set of keywords that could help promote it in search engine optimisation.” (I have heard it is possible that the use of “please” and “thank you” can change the response, and I say this as someone who gets mocked for saying “please” when I ask Siri questions.)
You may be aware that I do some work for INMA, the International News Media Association. INMA just published a fascinating report on the current state of generative AI and its impact on newsrooms. Given what I said higher about SEO you may also value a big report I did for INMA in December about news and search.
Here are some other recent blog posts I did for INMA:
Meta report: News publishers need Facebook more than Facebook needs news
Australian report shows Facebook drive-by news readers trust news less
Trust in New Zealand media declines as people say news increases their anxiety
Your content is driving ChatGPT
Nine reasons BuzzFeed closed its news operation
BuzzFeed finally killed off its Pulitzer Prize-winning news operation having more or less run it down for several years in favour of its listicles and entertainment.
Founder Jonah Peretti was evidently genuinely upset to have to close the news site that at times had been groundbreaking, saying he had personally decided to “overinvest” in BuzzFeed News because he loved the work it produced. BuzzFeed also owned the HuffPo site created by Ariana Huffington and built by Peretti.
I thought the former editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed, Ben Smith, put it well when he described what had happened to BuzzFeed news, telling the New York Times: “I’m proud of the work that BuzzFeed News did, but I think this moment is part of the end of a whole era of media,” said Mr. Smith, who now runs the media outlet Semafor. “It’s the end of the marriage between social media and news.”
Personally, I think the best story I recall on BuzzFeed News was a series on the mysterious deaths of Russian oligarchs in the UK. It was produced by the UK BuzzFeed team which was shut down in 2020 in a forerunner of this week’s news.
Elon never understood what the “blue tick” was about
I lost my “blue tick” verification on Twitter today along with most of the rest of the world. (Yes, I know it’s actually a white tick on a blue background.).
What is so weird about the Musk decision is that it is based on an entirely false understanding of how and why they came about and what they meant. He has talked of a class system of haves and have-nots. However, the ticks really did just validate that an account was from the person it purported to be from, especially important in the media to avoid impersonation of accounts that carry news and could move markets. Imagine a Federal Reserve reporter being impersonated to be represented as saying something about the dollar or US interest rates.
In another example of his hubris, Musk said he had personally paid for the Twitter Blue accounts which now confer the blue tick for three celebrities; William Shatner of Star Trek fame, a basketball player called LeBron James, and the author Stephen King. He really does seem to make up the rules as he goes.
That tendency towards hubris and ignoring advice or any precedent was evident in the other bizarre and clearly personal decision to identify some publicly funded media organisations like NPR and the BBC as government—funded. NPR took itself off Twitter which was a sensible move but the whole affair shows how one man is running the global town square that is Twitter.
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