Why am I only discovering Stendhal now? He’s fantastic.

WPP Explores Sale Of PR Arm, Report Says

This is actually an interesting and thoughtful piece from Anthropic, and a sensible approach to what sounds like a bit of a game changing frontier model. www.anthropic.com/glasswing

Yikes… www.nytimes.com/2026/04/07/t...

When ads came to ChatGPT, users were mad — those who had been using it as an editor or therapist suddenly saw ChatGPT as vulnerable to manipulation by brands and marketers. The reality is that it was happening the whole time. I wrote about the new SEO gold rush: www.theverge.com/tech/900302/...

The reporting on OpenAI and Sam Altman I've been working on for the past year and a half, for @newyorker.com, with Andrew Marantz: www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

Trump’s new post is truly astounding. Beyond parody. Beyond belief. Can’t wait to read the history books once this man is gone.

Great piece on BuzzFeed and the state of journalism 👇🏼

When you hear "but no one uses AI" it's worth bearing in mind that's...extremely not correct. It has reached mass adoption and use way quicker than other online technologies did, contentious as it is (and forced upon us as it often is). This is from a recent Ofcom report:

The new Ofcom media use survey came out last week. This bit caught my eye. www.ofcom.org.uk/siteassets/r...

Wow 🤯

It’s 5pm on the Thursday before an Easter weekend, the sun is shining, and London’s street corners are full of drinkers 🍻

Remember to be wary, as today is the only day of the year that incorrect or misleading information is posted on the internet.

“We value your privacy”

Some personal news: I’m transitioning from CEO to a new role as Bluesky’s Chief Innovation Officer! I’m excited to welcome @toni.bsky.team as our interim CEO. More here: bsky.social/about/blog/0...

Nice website and nice narrative sovereignai.gov.uk

The death rattle of newspapers is sooo weird, a totally random PR story that someone put on a print product bought by the same number of people who live in Basingstoke, who are rapidly dying. And this will for some reason be discussed on national TV. No wonder the future is influencers.

"Brand is what's left when the substantive differences between products disappear. But making the substantive differences between products disappear is what technology naturally tends to do." Paul Graham writes about The Brand Age (though inevitably he's not a fan)... paulgraham.com/brandage.html

Realising that prediction markets are based on a simplistic and erroneous folk belief about journalism (“journalism is about accurately forecasting events”). A bit like adtech (“ads are about selling stuff immediately”).

It’s not the 2010s, dear coffee shop. Get this off your wall.

This is a remarkable map of attitudes to tech across Britain, with a stark urban-rural divide. The full data here is well worth a read: www.moreincommon.org.uk/blog/britons...

This is a remarkable story. A PR agency has bought a gaming site, fired the journalists, and replaced them with AI bots. pressgazette.co.uk/news/staff-j...

Just clocked that Trump has taken his country to war without giving a primetime address or an even a traditional press conference. Only a video on his own (!) social media platform. Legacy media totally circumvented.

great news: www.bbc.com/news/article...

An excellent paper from @felixsimon.bsky.social on why claims about the impact of generative AI on elections have been overblown (with relevance for media literacy in general) knightcolumbia.org/content/dont...

The conversation between Ezra Klein and Jack Clark of Anthropic is really good pca.st/episode/130b...

Bonkers chart from a16z: Computer & software demand clocked steady c20% contribution to US GDP growth from 2010, "until it absolutely exploded upwards in 2025. That’s a Dotcom crash amount of discontinuity, but *in the positive direction*."

Happy Stripe annual letter day to all who celebrate stripe.com/gb/annual-up...

This piece is fascinating. Amazon is encouraging the use of AI to draft its famous "six-pagers" - which undermines the whole purpose of writing the document in the first place. Writing is thinking; pressing an AI button is not. www.bigtechnology.com/p/writing-cr...

"Expedia, Qualcomm and Best Buy have begun appearing inside ChatGPT responses, a spokesperson for OpenAI told ADWEEK" www.adweek.com/media/first-...

"Journalism is better when it's backed by live markets"... 🤔

Wow, GC is winding up. The toxic curse of Mandelson and Epstein. www.ft.com/content/ad5d...

A valuable note of caution from @thebenedictevans.bsky.social on the current AI hype and SaaSacre 👇

Spotted around Shepherd’s Bush recently. Not sure what it means but I kinda like it.

@petemarcus.bsky.social just pointed me to this article which is a very thorough takedown arriving at the same conclusion: www.exponentialview.co/p/how-95-esc... The "95% fail" number is essentially meaningless

People often jump to saying online propaganda is either the work of radicalised actors, or else Russia. In practice, it’s amazing how often the answer is much simpler – someone is chasing either (a) clout, (b) money, or (c) both.

X: Britain isn’t as good as it used to be. Bluesky: America isn’t as good as it used to be. Insta: Football isn’t as good as it used to be. Threads: Music isn’t as good as it used to be. No one everyone’s so depressed, pessimistic and angry.

This morning is my first someone’s-doing-a-Teams-call-on-the-Central-Line experience

Just learned that the guy who founded Capital One is called Rich Fairbank. Talk about nominative determinism!

I get so much value out of my @londoncentric.media subscription, but the most value is the guilt-free ability to say “no thank you” to the fake charities at stations.

It used to be said that the left was far too 'online', but it seems that this is increasingly (more) so for the right nowadays.

TikTok coverage seems to have become somewhat numb to this, but worth remembering that the President simply refusing to enforce a *crystal-clear* law of Congress for over a year to instead broker a deal on his own terms, & Congress just shrugging, is very much not how this was supposed to work

Just contemplating a news article sentence that begins: "As part of his long-running plan to seize Greenland, Donald Trump says..."

Stat in @economist.com: 71% of US podcasts now have video. Interesting suggestion that video aids social sharing and discovery too. (Audio is notoriously difficult to share and seems not to be inherently viral like text/video.)

So does every generation of writers eventually feel like their job is just reminding people of things everyone used to just know

Interesting to see the logic set out in Ben H's post on a16z's new fund. The chain goes: policy --> tech --> geopolitics --> freedom. They increasingly understand the first two links as connected, and essential for underpinning the second two. You can argue against it, but that's the logic.

"In 2024, the biggest opportunity for comms was going direct... In 2025, the edge came from winning attention... In 2026, narrative alpha will come from doing real things." www.getflack.com/p/standing-out

The author of a viral Reddit thread alleging fraud at a food delivery company tried to back up his claim by sending me AI-generated documents. Today I'm publishing those documents in the hopes that it helps other reporter see what we're up against in the age of AI www.platformer.news/fake-uber-ea...

Bit of a marmalade dropper in the UK tech world newsroom.accenture.com/news/2026/ac...

This person went on a buying spree over the past 24 hours. Fresh wallet. Only existed since Dec 27th and has only bet on Venezuela-related markets. polymarket.com/@0x31a56e9E6...