https://werd.io
116 posts · 63 Votes
Tech 34% · Culture 33% · Politics 22% · Writing 5% · Life 2% · Art 1%
Subscribe via RSS
Link: This Conversation Is Being Recorded. They All Are., by Katherine Bindley at the Wall Street JournalI’ve been thinking about this story for days.“A Zoom call isn’t complete without an artificial-intelligence note taker. Phones are out at meetings, capturing every word. During impromptu conversations with co-workers, someone might turn on the Granola transcription app, which can turn the interactions into one-page summaries or a list of action items. Even at bars and on dates, people are…
Link: China delivers a one-two punch to America’s AI dominance, by Robert Hart in The VergeAI models, as a product in themselves, have very little moat beyond what amounts to brand loyalty and superficial switching costs. Instead, the moat is in the enterprise services that sit around them: the deals and contracts, connectivity with enterprise systems, and quality of life features in an enterprise context.If we consider the models themselves, it’s easy to switch between them: someone could be…
Most Fridays, I share a handful of pieces that caught my eye at the intersection of technology, media, and society.Did someone forward this to you? Subscribe for free.Mamdani invests in tech capacity to “solve real problems”There’s a lot that newsrooms can learn from Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral administration in New York City. His latest announcement is the Public Interest Technology (PIT) Crew, a set of dynamic, cross-disciplinary digital teams that will solve problems across the city using a…
Link: We are not alone, by Adiel Kaplan at the Tow-Knight CenterI was delighted to be included in this roundup by Adiel Kaplan, the Program Director at the Tow-Knight Center for Journalism Futures at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY.As Adiel says:“Having a say in what the future of news looks like will likely require not just that collaboration across newsrooms, but also outside them, with other institutions that want to shape a future with informed communities at its…
Link: A Leak of San Francisco Police Drone Footage Exposes the New Reality of Urban Surveillance, by Andy Greenberg and Dhruv Mehrotra in WIREDI’m not sure I agree with this article’s implication that the problem with SFPD’s drone policing was that it accidentally leaked the data.““There’s a certain trust given to the police to use these things correctly,” says Curry. “When you're watching a drone feed live, you can look into dozens of different apartments, you can see police zooming in on…
Link: Mamdani invests in tech capacity to “solve real problems”, by Pamela Herd in Can We Still Govern?There’s a lot that newsrooms can learn from Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral administration in New York City. His latest announcement is the Public Interest Technology (PIT) Crew, a set of dynamic, cross-disciplinary digital teams that will solve problems across the city using a rapid, human-centered approach.As Pamela Herd notes here, this is a shift from contracting out to building internal…
Link: Trump dismantled a federal climate website. These women rebuilt it., by Jenae Barnes at The 19thThis shouldn’t have been necessary, but is still wonderful to see. Climate.gov had been the go-to resource for climate data, but it went offline when the Trump Administration radically cut NOAA’s funding. At that point:“[Rebecca] Lindsey joined forces with former NOAA employees Anna Eshelman, and Mary Lindsey, her older sister, to become the core team behind the deactivated site’s successor,…
Link: White House Directed Patel to Oversee Investigation Involving Times Reporting, by Devlin Barrett, Glenn Thrush, and Maggie Haberman at the New York TimesThe White House personally directed FBI Director Kash Patel to issue subpoenas to journalists reporting on the President’s new Qatari-gifted Air Force One.“The White House’s deep involvement in the case came after officials said that President Trump was enraged about the coverage of the Qatari-donated plane, which The Times reported…
Most Fridays, I share a handful of pieces that caught my eye at the intersection of technology, media, and society.Did someone forward this to you? Subscribe for free.Chicago Public Media launching community website — chicago.com — in the fallIn an increasingly AI-dominated information landscape, real trusted communities and relationships will be the way to build trust and loyalty — I’m convinced of it, and organizations like New_ Public agree. So it was exciting to see Chicago Public Media…
Link: Chicago Public Media launching community website, by Amy Yee at the Chicago Sun-TimesIn an increasingly AI-dominated information landscape, real trusted communities and relationships will be the way to build trust and loyalty — I’m convinced of it, and organizations like New_ Public agree. So it was exciting to see Chicago Public Media take a huge step towards building a community platform.The site will include Chicago-area information, civic and cultural resources, community-sourced…
Link: AI Content Is Everywhere on Social Media, Especially LinkedIn, by Max Spero at PangramThis is one of the core effects of AI: even when people are not engaging with AI-generated content directly, it’s hard to avoid. Our feeds are increasingly full of AI slop.“AI-generated content appeared across all social media platforms in our data set. The average AI rate across all scanned items was 13.8%, but specific rates varied by platform and item length. On four out of five platforms, longer…
Back in May, I signed up to host the IndieWeb Fiction Carnival, and kicked it off with a prompt: sticks and stones will break my bones.I'm incredibly late with my roundup: just as soon as I'd kicked it off, life became chaotic in a way that won't settle down until September. Which is a poor excuse, because I received some great submissions.Daniel Miller wrote Pull:The first chamber was larger than the second. Wren heard and felt the pneumatic doors close behind them and was careful to place one…
Link: Your SaaS Metrics Are A Result, Not A Strategy, by Itay Sagie in Crunchbase NewsI still subscribe to sites like Crunchbase News from my time in startup-land; although it’s been a while since I’ve run the financial side of a business, I’m interested, and I know that I’ll run one again. I see stories like this and wonder: what would it look like for a newsroom to think this way? In startups, these metrics are known top to bottom, but I’ve rarely heard business teams talk about LTV (customer…
Link: How Kalshi infects the news, by Aaron Rupar and Judd Legum in Public Notice and Popular InformationKalshi’s deals with newsrooms seem to be paying dividends for the company:“Since December CNBC has published 58 articles that do little more than advertise the existence of a Kalshi market related to a news event. […] Since April, CNBC has employed a dedicated reporter to produce these articles. CNBC also maintains a page on its website featuring Kalshi prediction markets selected by CNBC…
Link: In Geneva, the World Can Anchor AI Governance in Free Expression, by Isabelle Anzabi in Tech Policy PressI like that this is happening, will appreciate the recommendations that arise from it, and know with complete certainty that no major AI vendor will adhere to them unless they are forced:“The United Nations is convening its Global Dialogue on Artificial Intelligence Governance in Geneva July 6-7, and the stakes are high: what rights will anchor the future of how the world governs AI?…
Celebrating the 250th anniversary of a declaration that had a passage decrying slavery removed because southern states complained by eating carcinogenic mass produced meat tubes while the President tells half of us we’re evil Marxists while we swelter through a man made heat wave is incredibly American. Happy 4th!All snark aside, genuinely, I do love America. The Declaration of Independence - 250 years ago! - was genuinely important. Most places you go, the people are kind, community-minded,…
Most Fridays, I share a handful of pieces that caught my eye at the intersection of technology, media, and society.Did I miss something important? Send me an email to let me know.Did someone forward this to you? Subscribe for free.OpenAI proposes handing Trump administration 5% stakeIn order to ward off backlash against AI and curry favor with the Trump administration, Sam Altman has floated the idea of giving 5% of OpenAI to a wealth fund that pays dividends to both the government and citizens…
Link: Cascade PBS launches Local Public as standalone streaming tech company, by Matthew Keys at The DeskI’ve got some complicated feelings about this announcement from Cascade PBS:“Cascade PBS, the non-profit television station serving western Washington state, has spun out its technology division into a separate company that will help similar public broadcasters carve out their own streaming and digital identities.The new company, Local Public, will help develop streaming applications for…
Link: Journalism Has the Receipts. It Won’t Use Them., by Yoni Greenbaum in Backstory & StrategyArts organizations learned long ago to prove their economic value with hard numbers: attendance, tourism revenue, multiplier effects. News, as Yoni Greenbaum argues here, likes to cling to civic virtue and assume that the work should speak for itself.“Journalism operated on a commercial advertising revenue model for over 150 years. Publishers sold readers to advertisers, while editors fretted about…
Link: OpenAI proposes handing Trump administration 5% stake, by Cristina Criddle in the Financial TimesIn order to ward off backlash against AI and curry favor with the Trump administration, Sam Altman has floated the idea of giving 5% of OpenAI to a wealth fund that pays dividends to both the government and citizens — and that every leading AI vendor should do the same.“Sam Altman, chief executive of the ChatGPT maker, has argued that giving the public a financial stake in the company is the…
Link: Now we’re getting AI fake news complaining about how AI fake news is the death of real news, by Joshua Benton in Nieman LabA bunch of people — including, unfortunately, me — were taken in by this AI-generated newsroom earlier this week. The story was decently written and seemed to be well-cited, but it turned out to be nonsense. Ironically, it was about a would-be media empire that purchased struggling papers, fired their staff, and replaced them with AI, leading to the death of each…
Link: Companies Are Making Claude and Codex Talk Like Cavemen to Stop AI’s Soaring Costs, by Joseph Cox at 404 MediaI find this very funny:“Companies are deliberately making their AI tools speak like cavemen in an attempt to stop burning through AI tokens and curb their massive expenditure on AI, 404 Media has found. The tool turns the usually verbose outpost of LLMs like Claude Code, Codex, or Gemini into a much more to the point answer. Think less “you’re right to push back, I was wrong,” and…
Link: The Quiet Erosion of Collective Action Under Digital Surveillance, by Gina Romero in Tech Policy PressThe most important outcome of increased surveillance is a chilling effect on free speech and expression. As Gina Romero, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Rights to Freedom of Peaceful Assembly, notes here, that extends to the organizations that have been established to protect those rights:“As organizations operate under the constant assumption that they are being monitored,…
Get stories like this sent to you every Friday: Subscribe for free.Link: Emergency Mode for News, by OpenNews, NC Local, and NewspackEmergency Mode is a set of resources, tools, and training that aims to prepare small newsrooms for various disasters. It’s a co-production between OpenNews, NC Local, and Newspack. They’ve done a great job. As their about page puts it:“Emergency Mode for News equips local journalists and their newsrooms with the tools they need to respond to climate disasters.…
I’m grateful that people stop by and read my posts. I think I’m really lucky. Thank you!I love writing here, but I’d love to know how I could serve you better. So every year I ask my readers to fill in a short survey. It doesn’t take more than a minute or two.This survey will help me figure out which problems and ideas people are thinking about, which will help me figure out how helpful I can be.Click here to answer a few short questions.It’s entirely anonymous (unless you decide to leave your…
Get stories like this sent to you every Friday: Subscribe for free.Link: The Ghost Paper That Ate Alabama: How a Media Startup Killed 47 Weekly Newspapers and No One Noticed, by Elena Marchetti in The EditorialThis is a horrifying story: 47 small, local, weekly newspapers were acquired by a man with ambitions to create a new conservative media empire. He fired much of their staff and replaced them with AI — with predictable results. Subscriptions fell, there were accuracy and ethics issues, and…
Winnie Lim:“When I think about what I wish to accomplish if I knew I was going to die, apart from spending time with my loved ones I think only writing is left. It is a way of emptying myself I guess, a way of sublimating my sad existence. I wouldn’t pretend that my writing is useful, but at least it will be a window into an interior world that doesn’t exist anywhere else.”Co-signed.Eliot Peper:“Writing about whatever you’re uniquely obsessed is hardly a new approach, it’s the basis of all good…
Link: OpenAI will delay GPT-5.6 after Trump administration request, by Hayden Field in The VergeI’ve got (at least) two worries about the story that the Trump Administration halted the release of models from both Anthropic and OpenAI.Anthropic recently pulled its Fable model release in response to the government. Now it turns out that OpenAI has done something similar:“The Information reported that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told employees Wednesday in a company Q&A that it would release GPT-5.6 in…
Most Fridays, I share a handful of pieces that caught my eye at the intersection of technology, media, and society.Did I miss something important? Send me an email to let me know. Did someone forward this to you? Subscribe for free.Before we begin this week's roundup, I want to express my condolences to the friends and family of Om Malik, who we sadly lost this week. Om was one of the most important voices in blogging, tech journalism, and then the wider industry. So many people in tech have a…
Link: It Is Trivially Easy to Use Reddit to Manipulate AI Search, Research Suggests, by Jason Koebler at 404 MediaAll good fun:“A tiny snippet of user-generated text as short as 13 words long is often enough to manipulate the AI agents that power tools like ChatGPT and Google’s AI search, new research shows. The study suggests that it is trivially easy for brands to inject promotional content on sites like Reddit, Quora, and Wikipedia with the end goal of poisoning or manipulating the output of…
