I'm a journalist who builds stuff. At SPIEGEL, I launched podcasts, led teams, and shaped platform strategies. Now I'm into AI.
AI & Journalism Links
To mark ChatGPT’s third birthday, the Guardian’s Robert Booth tours Silicon Valley in search of the future: “Everyone is working all the time,” said Madhavi Sewak, a senior leader at Google DeepMind, in a recent talk. “It’s extremely intense. There doesn’t seem to be any kind of natural stopping point, and everyone is really kind of getting ground down. Even the folks who are very wealthy now … all they do is work.”
Thoughts on ChatGPT apps and why they aren’t mini versions of existing news products: “The entire premise of building a ChatGPT App is to expose capabilities, not pages. This is the existential shift for news orgs accustomed to owning the screen.” (Florent Daudens, LinkedIn)
Slop Evader: A search tool that will only return content created before ChatGPT’s first public release on November 30, 2022. (Tega Brain)
In left-leaning media outlets like n+1, resistance against AI is taking shape: “When we use generative AI, we consent to the appropriation of our intellectual property by data scrapers. We stuff the pockets of oligarchs with even more money. (…) There’s still time to disenchant AI, provincialize it, make it uncompelling and uncool.”
Three examples of AI translation at Chicago’s La Voz, The Economist, and BBC News Polska. What unfortunately isn’t mentioned: What happens to quotes that need to be translated back into their original language. (Clare Spencer, Generative AI in the Newsroom)
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Newsletter Archive
with AI For Newsrooms' Sergei Yakupov
When the CEO Says Don’t Trust the Product
with NDR's Isabel Lerch
When Curation Meets Automation
with Digital Acceleration Partners' David Chivers
AI Studies and Gotcha Headlines
with News Alchemist Mattia Peretti
Workslop, Erotica, and the Future Nobody Asked For
with foresight expert Konrad Weber
December Protocol
Attention Heads
“We don’t—we can’t—remember everything. Humans are at least as lossy as AI is, but the details we keep matter. Two people can attend a party and leave with entirely different impressions; 300 million can witness the same election and debate whether a fraud or landslide has occurred.”
Writer Jasmine Sun, January 2025
When I'm asked about resources for news products and editorial development, I'm more often than not referring to these sites:
News Product Resources
“User needs in content publishing: the slide that started it all, five years later (Dmitry Shishkin, LinkedIn)”
“Digital Innovation Playbook” verspricht einen pragmatischen Rahmen und ein Werkzeugset für Produktentwicklerinnen und Managerinnen.
Quartz, once a beacon of business journalism, is now a media zombie after being acquired by private equity (Obituray by co-founder Zach Seward)
If you want the internet to be a wondrous place for quiet, odd and poetic things, you might just have to write some HTML:
Visit Ramen.Haus. For the discerning broth enthusiast.
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