Joanna Stern made the Wall Street Journal’s best tech videos, wrote a book and went solo, and NBC came calling before she even launched. She keeps her newsletter, her videos, her events. NBC gets a chief tech analyst. Stars have always had leverage. Most of us just aren’t stars. (Sara Fischer, Axios)

A 47-step AI tool that writes nothing: Bauer’s internal content briefing system pulls articles from competitors, looks at rankings, and identifies content gaps. The journalist still has to write the piece. “The premium is on expertise and authority. We wouldn’t ever want to do anything which dilutes that.” (John Rahim, The Media Stack)

Schibsted's Videofy is now open source: The tool pulls a published article, writes a script, matches footage, adds a voiceover, and hands editors a finished video.

Image Verification Assistant: A joint CERTH-ITI and Deutsche Welle tool for image verification, metadata analysis, and reverse image search. Alpha stage, open source.

Opening a New York Times article triggers 422 network requests and 49 MB of data. Teardown of how news sites turn hostile UX into business. (Shubham Bose)

Three roles for AI in journalism: source, colleague, assistant. A framework that’s more useful than another round of newsroom culture war. (Stephen J. Adler, Columbia Journalism Review)

The first white-collar job that AI can actually replace is the one that built the AI. Now coding is conversational. One dev is pleading with his chatbot: “Pushing code that fails pytest is unacceptable and embarrassing.” (Clive Thompson, New York Times)

Three years after pivoting to AI, BuzzFeed says there’s “substantial doubt” it can keep going. (Victor Tangermann, Futurism)

Before you download a 35 GB model and watch your laptop give up: CanIRun.ai is a reality check for the local-AI-curious. Yes, there are options for an M2 with 8 GB RAM. Llama 3.1 8B is a “tight fit”, but Qwen 3.5 2B “runs great”.

Digg is dead, again. The former front page of the internet wanted a come back, but the beta collapsed under a flood of bots. Votes and comments couldn’t be trusted. Founder Kevin Rose is back for another reboot, but the team is gutted. Meanwhile Yahoo is launching a ranked, real-time front page, minus the community.

Can you tell which passage was written by AI? This New York Times quiz is humbling either way. (Kevin Roose and Stuart A. Thompson)

Grammarly “cloned” Julia Angwin, Stephen King, and Neil deGrasse Tyson as AI editors, without asking. Angwin is now suing. The feature is gone, the apology is filed, and the AI Julia apparently gave bad advice. (Miles Klee, Wired)

34 projects, 24 contributors, 65 minutes: Hacks/Hackers held a vibe coding show & tell, and journalists shipped fact-checkers, salary surveys, power grid monitors, and a Discord clone.

An editor gets a promising pitch, starts googling, and finds a byline that exists everywhere and nowhere. A podcast episode about a scammer – and that some sources didn’t care about being faked. (Question Everything)

A young reader got so frustrated with the FT’s news product that she built her own using Claude Code. She’s paying for a subscription, she wants personalized news, and she couldn’t figure out how to get it. (Jodie Hopperton, INMA)