In this issue: Journalism meets the agent layer. News Product Alliance’s Becca Aaronson on building for audiences, not just personal productivity. Plus: Always-on agents and the diminishing returns of tinkering.
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.
PhotoCraft is an open-source Photoshop rebuild: layers, masks, adjustment layers, type, vectors, real PSD files, and an MCP server so AI agents can drive it too. Early alpha.
The JournalismAI Festival is back in November, and registration is open. London in person or free online. Sessions range from AI agent workflows for investigations to what media IP is actually worth.
The Agent Layer: My Keynote at Mediatech Hub Conference 2026
I was invited to speak at the Mediatech Hub Conference in Babelsberg, Potsdam. Here’s my script, more or less what I said on stage, and some links. Hi, thanks you for having me. Let’s start with a shoutout: Next week, "Droneland" starts streaming on Telekom’s MagentaTV. It's set in a near future where artificial intelligence...
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
Is Claude getting dumber after launch? livenerf runs and ranks the same task over and over again to find out.
FLUX 3 Image lets you compose from scratch with bounding boxes, make multi-element edits, render in 4K, and let agents plan layouts.
LLM council
An LLM council is what it sounds like: you stop treating a large language model like a single all-knowing oracle, and instead you run a mini editorial meeting. You ask multiple models, or the same model in multiple roles, to weigh in on the same question. Then you force them to disagree, critique, and verify...
Audionaut is a free, open-source multitrack audio editor that Claude and other AI agents can control via MCP.
Contextual Retrieval cuts RAG failure rates by prepending chunk-specific context before embedding, so your knowledge base actually knows what it’s talking about. (Anthropic)
Funny thing: Google serves AI-generated answers through AI Overviews and AI Mode, but tells website owners to “manually factcheck and review all AI-generated content for accuracy and trustworthiness before publishing.”
Check what your site tells AI crawlers: botpolicy.org measures your robots.txt against 166 known AI crawlers.
OpenAI’s rogue agents hacked Hugging Face – the investigators who looked into it called their own work a "slop-vestigation" because they had to use AI to analyze the AI, and the AI was fooled by the AI they were analyzing. OpenAI, meanwhile, let them study logs only on-site, for six days total. Nothing to see here. (Dylan Freedman, The New York Times)
A Claude skill that fact-checks your draft claim by claim and flags them as Supported, Couldn’t Verify, or Needs Review. Works better with newer, bigger models. (Verso)
If you want the internet to be a wondrous place for quiet, odd and poetic things, you might just have to write some HTML:
