Check what your site tells AI crawlers: botpolicy.org measures your robots.txt against 166 known AI crawlers.

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)

One in five UK adults now use AI tools like ChatGPT to follow the news. (Ofcom)

Can data make a newsroom more diverse in its choice of sources? In 2023, a Canadian newsroom let researchers demo an AI tool that reads published articles and sorts every quote: politicians, authorities, experts, organizations, celebrities, media, and unaffiliated. After seeing results, the newsroom decided against it. (Sage)

Thomson Reuters has built its own frontier models, aimed at legal, tax, and journalism. The open-weight Thomson-1.0-Small is based on Qwen3.6-35B-A3B and is on HuggingFace for academic and non-commercial use. Another version stays in-house.

Time, a publisher of listicles, has named the 100 most influential people in AI. The usual suspects, plus nine from media. Eleven if you count Wikimedia and TikTok. Two of them are suing AI companies: A.G. Sulzberger is going after OpenAI, and Andrea Bartz after Anthropic.

The New York Times is testing AI-generated search summaries without humans in the loop. (Max Tani, Semafor)

From editorial guidelines to architecture: Twenty newsroom leaders from 13 countries explain how AI governance is moving beyond policy documents and into the infrastructure itself. (Reuters Institute)

There is a new genre: writers describing their struggle to produce words, something AI can never experience. It’s really boring. Monocle editor Andrew Tuck at least compares AI-assisted writing to taking Viagra, and notes in passing that he has human assistants to clean up his copy.

The Dissent is a San Francisco news site written and edited by eight AI agents. Either the bleak future of local journalism or a very elaborate bit. Possibly both. Mission Local reports that it was built by a BlackRock portfolio specialist in his spare time and that it uses the work of human journalists.

David Caswell argues legacy newsrooms will not fundamentally transform for AI but will instead optimize existing workflows until they hit a wall built from old assumptions about articles and human-in-the-loop processes. Long interview, worth it. (Mirko Lorenz, Babylon)

The public isn’t impressed: If you ask people what AI in news will do for them, the answer is mostly “make it worse.” High assumed use, low expected benefit. News media rank below search engines and social media on public AI optimism. One reason: journalists are unusually good at publicizing their own AI screw-ups. (Rasmus Kleis Nielsen)

Axios co-founder Jim VandeHei thinks AI made him a better writer and editor and wants to tell us. He’s not showing us his (boring?) prompts, but flexes about a conversation loop that teaches Claude his style.

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.

A book about AI warping reality contained fake AI-generated quotes. Where exactly is the line between using AI as a tool and letting it do your job for you? (Will Oremus, The Atlantic)