While you type, the computer guesses your next word. Press tab to accept it. The more you use it, the better it gets. By computer, I mean a small AI model running entirely on your machine. Private, fast, and free of API costs. This can feel like actual magic. I've been chasing something like this...
Hi, I'm Ole Reissmann, a journalist who builds things. I'm the first Director of AI at SPIEGEL. Before that: podcasts, news product development, platform strategy. I write about AI and journalism and send a newsletter you might enjoy.
“We cannot watch as AI companies attempt to permanently dismantle the rights that give us control over the work we create. We cannot sit by as this work is used to build replacement products that undermine our ability to earn the audience and revenue necessary to continue reporting the news.” (New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger)
75 cards to help your newsroom figure out AI before someone makes a bad call: A free kit covering ethics, workflows, and use cases, developed with 15 journalists and trainers across multiple countries. (DW Akademie and MethodKit)
Four Questions with Agnes Stenbom Swedling, Nordic AI Journalism
Three Questions with Tom Hillenbrand, SciFi-Author
Three Questions with Alba Mora Roca, AJ+
Three Questions with Rignam Wangkhang, CBC
Three Questions with Shuwei Fang, Harvard-Fellow
Three Questions with Cecilia Rikap, University College London
Three Questions with Kemal Görgülü, Arte
Three Questions with Nikita Roy, Newsroom Robots
Four Question with Jaemark Tordecilla, Journalist and Advisor
Three Questions with Tess Jeffers, Wall Street Journal
Three Questions with Rubina Fillion, New York Times
UK publishers will be able to opt out of Google’s AI Overviews, per CMA, the UK competition watchdog.
Muscle memory for agents: The Printing Press. An agent-native CLI for any API, app, or site from a single prompt. The library already has 170-plus CLIs across travel, CRM, media, and more.
Three publisher coalitions have already committed to three incompatible models, and whichever one becomes the default makes the other two marginal. (Ulrike Langer, News Machines)
Tokenmaxxing
The use of as many AI tokens as possible, as fast as possible. Enabled by agentic coding tools that spawn subagents running unsupervised. Writing an essay uses around 10,000 tokens. Tokenmaxxers blow through billions a week, burning the planet along the way. Fat token budgets have become a job perk, and some rack up monthly...
Six provocations from Reuters Institute researcher Felix Simon: The low-hanging fruit of AI in journalism has been picked, human-in-the-loop is becoming a polite fiction, and “responsible AI” labels won’t fix the trust problem.
The Economist built a ChatGPT app that lets users query its Trump approval rating tracker. Maybe younger audiences will discover The Economist inside ChatGPT rather than through Google. (Andrew Deck, Nieman Lab)
Forget social sharing buttons: Hacks/Hackers rebuilt its site for crawlers and agents. “Ask AI” buttons, an MCP server, and an llms.txt file. (Burt Herman, Hacks/Hackers)
No Big Deal, Just the Most Important AI Media Conference
Three days in Copenhagen and the lingering thought: news may not be the asset we think it is. Shuwei Fang’s and David Caswell’s Signals at Scale brought together news, civil society, and academia to think from the ground up what an AI mediated news ecosystem can and should look like. “Be suspicious of solutions that...
There’s a Wired story on factchecking with AI. Don’t get me started. Ethan Mollick sums up the problems: “Running a few experiments with the free version of ChatGPT and citing work with old models, without access to web search, is not a good way to understand or communicate the nature of these systems and their flaws.”
wtf is an agent harness and how do you build it from scratch? (kamselig, Threads)
A Wall Street Journal SEO editor vibe coded a real-time stock trend tracker for his newsroom to find gaps in their coverage. It weighs 15+ data sources, covers 350+ tickers, and went from idea to rollout in a few weeks. The pitch: let journalists build their own tools. (Will Flannigan, LinkedIn)
If you want the internet to be a wondrous place for quiet, odd and poetic things, you might just have to write some HTML:
