Legacy media needs to be able to provide this, and quickly, to stay relevant. "So, what exactly are people turning to AI chatbots for when it comes to news? Across 45 markets, asking chatbots a follow-up question is the clear front-runner, reported by 42% of users"

Sustainability is the key. "The question.. is not whether AI should have access to information. Nor is it whether innovation should continue. The question is whether the economic signals being sent by the marketplace encourage continued investment in the creation of original content."

Claude: We've made solid progress today. This is a good place to stop - want me to commit the changes and wrap up? Me: *lifts sunglasses from my sun lounger in Tuscany* No way. I'm a grinder *puts down phone and leans back*

My guess is most companies spend 90% of their budget and attention on the 10%. "Only 10 percent of the change is actually about AI and the algorithms... Twenty percent is about technology and data. The remaining 70 percent is about people and processes."

Making a CAPTCHA for desirable vs. undesirable bots sounds like fun. "[A] way for websites to generate a digital token that asserts a given browsing session is being run by a human or bot with legitimate intent, as opposed to network requests from people or software deemed abusive or improper"

The case for great journalism is a lot more than fluffy talk of democracy. "$1 invested in journalism can generate more than $100 in public savings through reclaimed funds, improved public services and reduced corruption."

Adequate Chinese performance at a much lower cost puts real pressure on Anthropic and OpenAI. "If that pressure slows revenue growth, or worse, shrinks it, the already inflated AI market faces a real stress test."

Shots fired at a "weak legacy media landscape that does little public-interest journalism" “Right now, it’s not that hard to do what others are doing because most others are not doing it,”

It's no longer a joke. the-decoder.com/claude-tag-e...

This is exactly where you need to be smart about your KPIs. Reach != conversions. "The analysis shows that as article traffic increases, subscription conversion rates fall."

Great incentive alignment for anyone in the slow, hard grind of building a subscription business. "be relentlessly transparent about what the business needs and what readers are actually funding... the obvious caveat: that message only lands if the journalism backing it is genuinely irreplaceable."

Damned if you do, damned if you don't. "They can open their archives to AI search engines and agents and chase the distribution that brings, or shut AI scraping off"

When the apocalypse hits, we'll all be cavemen getting by with primitive tools. Like ChatGPT 😓

'Pay or consent' is proving so unpopular at Nordic media giant Schibsted that it has brought in outside PR help to handle the backlash. "Our experience is that some of them are reacting based on a wrong understanding of why we are doing this, and how we handle user data." ($/DK)

This is especially true for local news. "I don't think it's ever that there's not a need or an interest in news. It is, can we sustain a business?"

I get the sales pitch. Trusted sources and revenue share may sound alluring, but aggregators are always bad news for sustainability and independence. "NewsGuard AI bills itself as 'the only chatbot that compensates every publisher for their content' through a 50-50 revenue share model."

At this rate, AI will be able to bring down governments before it can count the number of r's in strawberry. "The timeline is not years, it is months"

AI is making competent content cheap and abundant - so the value in news shifts from what you produce to who trusts you. "I think that trust will grow more important as a differentiator. So content may be commoditized, but I don't believe that connections will be commoditized."

This reads like a The Onion article. I wish it was

Kids are so smug these days. 12yo: What are you looking for? Me: My sunglasses. 12yo: The ones on your forehead? Me: ...(reluctantly)... well, yes

The Washington Post gutted a third of its staff and its local desk in February as a "data-driven" necessity. Now it's quietly rebuilding the same roles. A current staffer's verdict: "They didn't have a plan then, and they clearly don't have one now."

A Berkeley study says AI raised the grades, but not the learning - in AI-exposed courses the share of A's rose 13 points (about 30%) after ChatGPT: "a sign that AI is replacing student work rather than improving learning."

This would have been genuinely useful for me on old Twitter, rebutting statements about micropayments for news. "Users can walk the AI agent through a workflow once.... Codex turns that recording into a reusable "skill" and can then repeat the process on its own."

I generally don't subscribe to doomsday scenarios, but I am worried for Europe. "As somebody who travels to San Francisco quite a bit and talks to people there, what is happening in Europe just seemed like a slow-moving car crash to me"

So if Sturgeon's right, only one other of these 20 laws of software engineering holds true: "Sturgeon's Law: 90% of everything is crap"

Our Tuscan resort is seriously animal-friendly. Even ants get their own sports area, apparently.

Made by humans is rightly a quality badge in journalism. For now. In an Oxford/Stanford study, readers compared AI-built data stories to human originals: "of the 53 reviewers, 39 preferred Data2Story, 13 preferred the human version, and 1 (2%) calling it a tie."

Le Monde blocks every bot on sight. Now it's working out how to let its subscribers' own agents back in. I'm afraid I agree with the CTO: "I see that as part of the future of the web."

One of the world's few genuinely successful local media groups is Norwegian. A "heavy investment" in data is a key ingredient: "Amedia now has first-party data on about 2.8 million of the 5.4 million people in the country."

This is maddening. "One of the things that makes SpaceX so valuable is how valuable it is"

Recently got reminded how old I am: My all-time favorite album - King for a Day... Fool for a Lifetime - is now 31 years old. Gotta say, this makes me feel younger. And hopeful🤞

The most underused value proposition in news might be the simplest: "Support journalism that matters"

Bottom of this one suits me just fine. reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/digital-news...

A Norwegian local-media group makes its content permanently free for under-23s: "By offering free access throughout their student years until they turn 23, and then a deeply discounted product until they turn 30, we lower the threshold for them to become paying subscribers."

AI (conveniently?) cited as the primary reason for job cuts. "Artificial intelligence was cited ahead of all other job cut reasons for the third month running, with 38,579 cuts attributed to the technology — nearly 40% of the total and the highest single-month figure"

Nothing teaches a company that government overreach is leftist and bad quite like some government overreach. "Sacks and other officials... have been critical of Anthropic, accusing it of leftist political bias and fearmongering because of its advocacy for stronger regulation of the industry."

This hunt for the top spot is getting ridiculous. Twice the price for 5.7% more performance. "Opus 4.8 and 4.7 already followed the same pattern versus Opus 4.6, with steep price bumps for small gains."

Amazing: KPMG wrote a report describing the successful use of AI by businesses. But the case studies turned out to be AI hallucinations. giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/...

Would love to see a competitive European alternative to the big US and Chinese tech giants. Not overly confident, though. "Mistral positions itself as a European alternative to US providers like OpenAI and Anthropic, though it lags significantly behind them in user numbers."

Is Bluesky unable to replace prime Twitter's rich, real-time second screen experience for big sports events? "my feed has largely been a ghost town when it comes to large-scale sports. And it's not like there hasn't been the opportunity"

I have no knowledge of the specific case, but surveillance pricing as a concept is a genuinely sinister idea. "According to the complaint, since the mid-2010s, the Post has “covertly harvested [subscribers’] personal data... to determine how much more money it could extract from each Subscriber"

Key AI disagreement in the 'jobs to be done' framework: Will we hire AI to help plan the party, fix the calendar and sort the emails or is it just fancy search? "Enterprises want to do work … Consumers don't want to do work! The whole point of being a consumer is you don't want to be at work."

I wouldn't want to jump to conclusions - but the reactions to this ruling make me think most people would quite like to see tech giants held liable for made-up claims.

Four in five US nonprofit newsrooms now use AI (81%, up from 34% in 2023) - but rarely to write or edit stories: "more common uses include summarizing or transcribing meetings (60%) and data analysis (36%). Some outlets are also using AI as a fundraising tool." Nieman Lab

Court holds Google liable for false claims in AI Overviews. Seems significant. "A regular search engine just points to outside websites. But AI overviews generate 'independent, new, and substantive statements' by evaluating and combining content from various third-party sites" the-decoder

Maybe don't make tokenmaxxing a goal in itself? "Only 26 percent of companies have full visibility into their AI costs, a KPMG survey finds." https://the-decoder.com/most-companies-are-flying-blind-on-ai-spending/

The publisher-AI debate mostly circles two things: AI for (re)search, and whether it writes (part of) the text. That misses where it does the most good - the thinking, reading and digging that never shows up in the published text. Survey: How Danish media plan to use AI

Interesting look behind the scenes of Apple's AI failures. "Apple's AI crisis ultimately wasn't only about Siri the product. It was about a company that had spent decades setting the direction of the technology industry suddenly finding itself behind."

Still a few kinks to sort out before AI takes over the world. (Source: Reddit)

Well, it had a good run. Almost four years.