The Media’s Pivot to AI Is Not Real and Not Going to Work: “”Where are the journalists who were formerly middling who are now pumping out incredible articles thanks to efficiencies granted by AI?” (Jason Koebler, 404 Media)
Tags journalism (142)
Alex Reisner reports on Silicon Valley’s “assault” on the media: “The world is changing fast, perhaps irrevocably. The institutions that comprise our country’s free press are fighting for their survival.” (The Atlantic)
AI chatbots try to get to articles behind paywalls, and they do it the same way humans would: they search the web and social media for copies and excerpts, then piece it together. The difference is they can do it way faster, which raises the question of whether these bots should be allowed to do this at all. (Henk van Ess, Digital Digging)
Are AI-driven journalists trying to reduce stories to data streams? Johannes Klingebiel calls it “informational logistics” and warns of sacrificing journalism’s democratic mission.
Tomorrow’s Publisher: An AI-powered news aggregator from HBM Advisory, promising relevant news for the media industry from trusted sources. (Ulrike Langer, News Machines)
“While journalists perfect their craft for human readers, technology companies are building parallel infrastructure for AI consumption. The risk isn’t replacement, it’s irrelevance.” (Shuwei Fang, Splice)
AI-powered news app Particle expands into Long Reads, teaming up with The Atlantic.
You shall not pass… unless you pay: Cloudflare has launched a private beta enabling customers to allow, charge, or block bot-access to their content. For it to work, bot operators such as OpenAI or Google would have to use a new protocol named Web Bot Auth and be willing to pay.
Case Study on iterative prompt evaluation and improvement: A workflow for targeted prompting to refine AI-generated newsletter headlines. (Ashlyn Wang, Generative AI in the Newsroom)
AI for Newsrooms: Sergei Yakupov has collected 93 initiatives and 58 resources. (Previously shared: Kalle Pirhonen’s spreadsheet with 90+ tools and products from around the world.)
A new report is called “No Turning Back: AI’s Growing Role in News”, but shows that newsrooms use AI cautiously, hoping for modest gains rather than disruptive transformation. (Felix Simon, Aspen Digital)
A plea for publishers to ditch their walled-garden AI approaches and embrace emerging open standards like Model Context Protocol. (Ben Werdmuller, werd.io)
The Summer of AI (Tote Bag Not Included)
If you’re trying to get anything done right now, good luck. Your emails are about to be ghosted by a wall of auto-replies. It’s summer in Europe, which means everyone’s either on a beach or aggressively pretending to read a book by the pool. Can you blame them? The world’s a mess—wars, fascism making a...
