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)

The Independent Journalism Atlas is building a database of people doing journalism outside traditional newsrooms. It maps creators by beat, format, business model, and audience.

Scale back service journalism, evergreen content, and general news – instead, focus more on original investigations and on-the-ground reporting. That’s one response to AI. More trends for the year in Nic Newman’s Trend Report. (Reuters Institute)

“Neural Viz counts as a historic accomplishment: It is among the first pieces of AI filmmaking that truly does not suck.” (Christopher Beam, Wired) They could have chosen Zack London’s Gossip Goblin, but wdik.

On Cloudflare’s very surprising ideas about AI and the future of web publishing: “That’s my counterprosal: AI should pay for the stuff it already uses, and people should keep putting up paywalls.” (Paul Ford, Aboard)

Former Wondery exec Jeanine Wright launches Inception Point AI, flooding the zone with 5,000 AI-generated podcasts at $1 per episode. Her take: calling AI content “slop” makes you a “lazy luddite.” Sure. When your business model requires only 50 listeners per episode to turn a profit, maybe the bar isn’t exactly set at Pulitzer Prize level. (Caitlin Huston, Hollywood Reporter)

Substack surveyed 2,000 of its publishers: Male writers embrace AI (55%), women less enthralled (38%) by the so-called productivity boost.

AI-generated band “The Velvet Sundown” garners 1M+ Spotify streams, sparking debates over platform transparency and artist compensation. (Lanre Bakare, The Guardian)

Illustrator Christoph Niemann confronts his fears about AI art. (New York Times Magazine)

After killing the article, sure, why not kill the author next? This slightly unsettling essay argues that authors don’t matter that much in the first place. Rude. (David J. Gunkel, Noema)

Don’t over-control: A sci-fi author on worldbuilding and storytelling with LLMs. (Eliot Peper, Every)

FLUX.1 Kontext: The Black Forest image machine has new features. Images can now serve as input and be manipulated.

Disgruntled Substack writers ditch 10% fees for flat-rate rivals, netting 20-25% more revenue. (Digiday)

OpenAI’s latest Ghibli meme trend brazenly exploits Miyazaki’s longstanding criticism of AI. (Brian Merchant, Blood in the Machine)