An outlawed app remains in the Google and Apple app stores, and almost one in two Americans continues using an app so risky that it’s banned on military, federal and most state government workers’ phones. Huh. www.nytimes.com/2025/07/25/o...

Senate passes $9 billion in spending cuts to public broadcasting, foreign aid requested by Trump. The bill must be signed into law by midnight Friday for the proposed rescissions to kick in. If Congress doesn’t act by then, the spending stands. apnews.com/article/trum...

Love these shorts @netjmc.bsky.social produces for her podcast! Here's a snippet of our wide-ranging conversation lnkd.in/exTRQ655). In it, we focus on how people consume information today and touch on press freedom. Hope you'll find it of interest! www.youtube.com/shorts/Z8nrH...

My latest for @dcnorg.bsky.social is about why media needs to get involved in women's sports. Now. So grateful to @michellemanafy.bsky.social or letting me write about a subject I'm so passionate about and a pleasure to talk to François Godard, Danni Moore and Megan Feringa and get their insights.

Personally, I adore it when some teen or 20-something explains technology to me as if they are spoon feeding me tepid porridge www.theguardian.com/media/2025/j...

Jane and I had such an interesting conversation! Really pleased to be part of her podcast series which is focused on being an active participant in shaping the future we want. Here, we focus on the need for the media to shape the way in which AI evolves.

The Committee to Protect Journalists, the US-based press freedom charity, has directed a British law firm to set up a legal entity in the UK, in part as a precautionary measure against potential executive orders targeting American nonprofits. www.semafor.com/article/06/1...

As the LA protests stretched into their fifth day on Tuesday, social media creators have at times outnumbered the traditional press corps at rallies and played an outsize role in sharing media about what has happened on the ground -- blurring the line between reporting and advocacy.

So much this 👉 "to fully realize A.I.’s benefits, we need to find and fix the dangers before they find us...Without a clear plan for a federal response, a moratorium would give us the worst of both worlds — no ability for states to act, and no national policy as a backstop."

If ads can be personalized, how long before we get completely personalized news, created in the moment, based on what we know and what we care about - and is that a good thing or a bad thing? Some thoughts @semafor.com : www.semafor.com/article/06/0...

This is such a good read "I imagine that if we weren’t on display all the time, our friendships and interactions could be less commodified." (and less performative) "I assume that before the social internet people behaved in more authentic and idiosyncratic ways."

"The European Union would become a world leader in stopping kids from using social media under a new proposal gaining traction in Brussels."

I'm with them on this one: Almost half of young people would prefer a world without internet, UK study finds Half of 16- to 21-year-olds support ‘digital curfew’ and nearly 70% feel worse after using social media www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

👀 PR pros have discovered how to influence the chatbots: Talk to a journalist www.semafor.com/article/05/1...

Men dominate the top of the podcasting charts. But there has been a surge of podcasts made by women, for women, too. And a company called Dear Media is at the center of much of it. www.nytimes.com/2025/05/07/b...

WhAt cOuLd pOsSiBlY Go wRoNg?!?! Google Plans to Roll Out Its A.I. Chatbot to Children Under 13 The tech giant said it would make its Gemini chatbot available to children next week, and warned families in an email about the changes. www.nytimes.com/2025/05/02/t...

Good Night World

Misinformation Monday: White House Edition

Facebook allows scam ads that steal journalists’ identities to proliferate. The US tech giant profits from fraudulent adverts that steal the identities of high-profile individuals, such as reputable financial journalists, to exploit their reputations for honesty and financial expertise.

Public media defenders say rural audiences would be hit the hardest if funding was cut from NPR and PBS stations. In very remote areas without broadband access, public radio and TV are among the few sources of news and entertainment. www.nytimes.com/2025/04/14/b...

What happens to health research when ‘women’ is a banned word? Federal funding cuts are shutting down studies on Alzheimer’s care, uterine fibroids and pregnancy risks — all because they "focus on gender." 19thnews.org/2025/03/wome...

World History Encyclopedia CEO Jan van der Crabben saw his site show up in Google's AI Overviews and ChatGPT. Then traffic dropped 25%. www.bigtechnology.com/p/as-ai-take...

The President asked for input on the formulation of its AI Action Plan. You guessed it: We have thoughts

The story of a Canadian who was detained by Ice for two weeks. The brutal truth: Ice detention isn’t just a bureaucratic nightmare. It’s a business. These facilities are privately owned and run for profit and thus incentivized to keep people trapped in a nightmare limbo

Everything you say to your Echo will be sent to Amazon starting March 28. If that doesn't give you pause, remember that this device already saved kids' interactions without permission & was found to routinely have employees listen to voice samples [and watch people's videos in another incident]

UK Folk: The Guardian wants to hear from people who are changing the way they consume news and explore why and how news consumption habits are changing www.theguardian.com/media/2025/m...

A new report details that the click-through rates for AI chat bots are 95.7% lower than traditional Google search, with a referral rate of just 0.37%. tollbit.com/bots/24q4/

“When the very institutions that made American innovation possible are being systematically dismantled, it’s not a “political” story anymore. It’s a story about whether the environment that enabled all the other stories we cover will continue to exist.”

The streaming revolution has been something of a disaster for classic movies. It has, in fact, been slowly and methodically wiping the collective culture’s memory of anything made before about 1973 www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie...

"In a world that is increasingly homogenized by AI, where the information is all seeming to come from the same place and getting mixed up together and served in various ways, we have to be better than good enough."

This seems very not ok: State Department orders cancellation of media subscriptions around world Another reported memo told staff to make it a priority to cancel the Economist, New York Times, Politico, Bloomberg News, Associated Press and Reuters www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

Americans in polls report historically low levels of trust in the media. That could be because much of the press hasn’t been speaking to the concerns of their everyday lives. (cc @richardebrown.bsky.social )

Catering to rich audiences is not serving us. What would working-class media look like? It would be one where economic reporters are embedded in blue-collar communities rather than financial districts, and source networks built around people with direct experience instead of outside analysts.

Oh damn Prime actually published their failed chatgpt prompt in the description

Good morning Bluesky

"if living in the U.S. in 2025 means you can expect a criminal investigation for criticizing the government, we’re all in a whole lot of trouble.”

Most generative AI responses based on news content contain inaccuracies AI chatbots producing a "confused cocktail" of facts and opinions and current and old information, BBC research finds

Dr. Andrew Searles paper, titled "Dazed & Confused: A Large-Scale Real-World User Study of reCAPTCHAv2," found that Google's widely-used CAPTCHA system is primarily a mechanism for tracking user behavior and collecting data while providing little actual security against bots.

A note to our readers, from Politico CEO Goli Sheikholeslami and Editor-in-Chief John Harris:

Amid a slew of new efforts by Republicans to revoke funding for public broadcasters, PBS has commissioned a new poll that shows broad support for the public broadcaster from Trump voters | by @sarafischer.bsky.social www.axios.com/2025/02/04/p...

A group of major U.S. publishers, along with authors, parents, teachers and a public library, are now suing the state to try to reverse the purge—which has included “The Handmaid’s Tale” and “The Perks of Being a Wallflower,” among others—and overturn the law, known as HB 710.

@professorbutts.com here's a gift link. I try not to be online at all on the weekend so yes, I just learned this: www.nytimes.com/2025/02/01/b...

Trump Administration to Remove 4 Major News Outlets From Pentagon Office Space The New York Times, NBC News, NPR and Politico will be replaced by outlets including the right-wing site Breitbart News as part of a “new annual media rotation,” a spokesman said. www.nytimes.com/2025/02/01/b...

Just swell: DeepSeek’s new chatbot failed to provide accurate information about news and information topics 83% of the time, ranking it tied for 10th out of 11 in comparison to its leading Western competitors, a NewsGuard audit found. It debunked provably false claims only 17% of the time

"And what this really shows is that the world of AI is febrile, unpredictable and overly reactive. This a dangerous combination, and if R1 doesn’t cause a destructive meltdown of this system, it’s likely that some future launch will."

DeepSeek’s ability to compete on a fraction of the budget of OpenAI — which was recently valued at $157bn — and rivals Anthropic, Google and Meta, has raised questions about the vast sums being poured into training systems. www.ft.com/content/b98e...

This year's Edelman Trust Barramoter is out. The news about the news business remains challenging. Some key stats of interest for those in the media /news industry from the report below www.edelman.com/trust/2025/t...

...Media upheavals usually sprout from a new format or technology. We’re experiencing radical changes via the underbelly of an internet that serves increasingly niche interests, allowing people to fine-tune their media diets and sources of information.

Very useful for those considering fair use/copyright issues around AI: In an interview, celebrated intellectual property lawyer Mark Lemley elaborates on why he quit and what he makes of the AI copyright battlefield. www.wired.com/story/lawmak... via @wired.com