We're figuring this out. I track, test, and write about how AI is reshaping news, products, and workflows. You'll find linkposts, essays, a weekly(ish) newsletter, a glossary, and experiments. It's a bit of a mess. But so is everything right now.
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/ AI & Journalism
Local AI autocomplete for writers: Cotypist and Cotabby
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...
“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)
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)
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)
