New at Media Nation: Let's not overlook Washington Post publisher Will Lewis' "controversial" decision to pay £110,000 to a source when he was editor of The Telegraph back in 2009. #journalism
It’s #NewstodonFriday! It’s been another busy week for the many newsrooms who have an active presence in the #fediverse, and we’re highlighting their work in the thread below. If you like what you see, follow the profiles and boost their stories.
If you’re a journo or newsroom that we don’t know about or if there’s a newsroom you’d love to put on our radar, please let us know in the comments.
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#AI#GenerativeAI#Search#Perplexity#Plagiarism#Journalism#Media#News: "AI-powered search startup Perplexity appears to be plagiarizing journalists’ work through its newly launched feature, Perplexity Pages, which lets people curate content on a particular topic. Multiple posts that have been “curated” by the Perplexity team on its platform are strikingly similar to original stories from multiple publications, including Forbes, CNBC and Bloomberg. The posts, which have already gathered tens of thousands of views, do not mention the publications by name in the article text — the only attributions are small, easy-to-miss logos that link out to them.
For instance, a Perplexity aggregation of Forbes’ exclusive reporting on Eric Schmidt’s stealth drone project contains several fragments that appear to have been lifted, including a custom illustration. Over the past several months, Forbes has broken a series of stories on the former Google CEO’s secretive efforts to develop AI-guided aircraft for the battlefield, and this week reported that Schmidt had poached talent from SpaceX, Apple and Google, and has been testing his drones in the wealthy Silicon Valley town of Menlo Park." https://www.forbes.com/sites/sarahemerson/2024/06/07/buzzy-ai-search-engine-perplexity-is-directly-ripping-off-content-from-news-outlets/
The Post is forced to cover its own journalistically dubious boss, who issues traditionalists' favorite slander against critics, calling @davidfolkenflik “an activist, not a journalist.” He projects. Gift link:
Post publisher draws more scrutiny after newsroom shake-up https://wapo.st/4e8aPu5
@jeffjarvis
With NYT and now WaPo broken beyond repair, what are the options left for quality news coverage in the US? (This is not a rhetorical question.) #journalism
Think of a publisher, and there's a good chance they'll have a Flipboard account. Now, we're in the process of federating them. Publishers — like just about everyone we know — have a hard time getting their heads around the fediverse and what it means to federate your Flipboard account, so @jejord has written this blogpost. In it, she explains the fediverse, what Flipboard federation looks like, the value of our Magazine feeds, and why we think all this is important. "The fediverse is potentially the One Ecosystem to Rule Them All, and is estimated to grow to 170M users by the end of 2024," writes Jessica.
Local news is crucial to democracy, and it's disappearing — according to a new book by Steven Brill, excerpted in @Semafor, approximately twenty-two hundred papers and their websites went out of business between 2005 and 2021. That's created a vacuum into which "pink-slime" sites have poured. Brill writes about these sites that present themselves as legitimate publishers but are created to boost specific candidates and secretly financed by partisan funders, Democrats and Republicans alike.
#AI#GenerativeAI#Newsrooms#Journalism#Media#News: "As soon as we started doing interviews, my suspicions were confirmed: a lot of these guidelines were made from the top down. They were made individually by an editor-in-chief or sometimes by parent companies, without any consultation of journalists.
How can we create guidelines from the bottom up? How can we create guidelines involving journalists and all the stakeholders involved in news production? It shouldn’t surprise us that journalists are still making decisions based on their gut feeling. Even with all of these guidelines in place, journalists are still going to make decisions based on what they and their community feel it’s important.
If you impose guidelines from the top down, they are not going to be very effective because journalism is based on gut feeling. So we need to encourage newsrooms to have a conversation with their journalists and ask them about how these technologies should be put in place."
#Journalism#Media#News#OSINT#FactChecking: "Bellingcat’s trajectory tells a scathing story about the nature of truth in the 21st century. When Higgins began blogging as Brown Moses, he had no illusions about the malignancies of the internet. But along with journalists all over the world, he has discovered that the court of public opinion is broken. Hard facts have been devalued; online, everyone can present, and believe in, their own narratives, even if they’re mere tissues of lies. Along with trying to find the truth, Higgins has also been searching for places where the truth has any kind of currency and respect—where it can work as it should, empowering the weak and holding the guilty accountable.
The year ahead may be the biggest of Bellingcat’s life. In addition to tracking conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza, its analysts are being flooded with falsified artifacts from elections in the US, the UK, India, and dozens of other countries. As if that weren’t enough, there’s also the specter of artificial intelligence: still too primitive to fool Bellingcat’s experts but increasingly good enough to fool everyone else. Higgins worries that governments, social media platforms, and tech companies aren’t worrying enough and that they’ll take the danger seriously only when “there’s been a big incident where AI-generated imagery causes real harm”—in other words, when it’s too late."
Not for the first time in history, simplistic dualism is taking hold of people's minds, often rooted in religious beliefs. Is this a prelude to even more violent intolerance and — in the worst scenario — another big war? asks Argentine poet and writer Miguel Espejo.
I love it when the #maga#media bubble bursts over #fakenews but I'm always shocked at the "professional #journalism" reporting garbage #hype to begin with.
As a #journalism professor, I'm not going to defend pink slime sites, but I think it's worth noting that the empirical evidence suggests they're relatively limited in their effectiveness. 1/4
New at What Works: Suggestions welcome for our new spreadsheet tracking public access and local news in Massachusetts. Please share widely! #journalism#boston#mapoli
To understand just some of the institutional biases built into major U.S. media, look at coverage of a strong jobs report. These outlets report from an investor class view, and those biases show in how stories are framed, who's quoted and what impact gets the focus. Stock analysts and economists vs. business owners, workers, job-seekers. It's become routine, but a striking example of a US #press that serves the top of the income spectrum. #journalism
New at Media Nation: Will Lewis keeps digging and demands a bigger shovel. Jeff Bezos may see this as a public relations problem rather than a genuine ethical quandary. Well, it's a PR disaster that isn't going away as long as Lewis is in charge. #journalism
Doctor’s ‘Zero waste wedding’ video is going viral on social media, decorations are done with sugarcane and food was served on banana leaves!
A video of a bride’s efforts to reduce her carbon footprint and to have a ‘Zero waste wedding’ has gone viral. She is being appreciated for her gesture.