The Texas Tribune’s first-ever layoffs worry the news industry

[Nieman Lab: The Daily Digest] Tuesday, August 29, 2023 [The Texas Tribune’s first-ever layoffs worry the news industry]( Frustration over a lack of transparency has been amplified by the newsroom’s status as “the gold standard of nonprofit journalism” and a role model other outlets have been encouraged to follow. By Sarah Scire. [A local WhatsApp newsletter is helping people make the most of a Spanish city]( “There’s no point in making a wonderful website or an amazing app if people aren’t going to the website or downloading the app.” By Hanaa' Tameez. What We’re Reading CNN / Oliver Darcy [Newsrooms are in a cold war with OpenAI →]( “A multitude of leading newsrooms have recently injected code into their websites that blocks OpenAI’s web crawler, GPTBot, from scanning their platforms for content.” 404 Media / Samantha Cox [AI-generated mushroom foraging books are all over Amazon →]( “Amazon has an AI-generated books problem that’s been documented by journalists for months. Many of these books are obviously gibberish designed to make money. But experts say that AI-generated foraging books, specifically, could actually kill people if they eat the wrong mushroom because a guidebook written by an AI prompt said it was safe.” Digiday / Sara Guaglione [How publishers like The Marshall Project and The Markup are testing generative AI in their newsrooms →]( “Sisi Wei, editor in chief at The Markup, said their newsroom policy is journalists are not allowed to input paragraphs into ChatGPT, out of worry that the information gets fed into the large language model without their control over where it goes and how it’s used.” Semafor / Max Tani [The Washington Post lays off staff from its tech arm Arc XP →]( “Last year, the Post declined offers to sell Arc XP, the company’s in house publishing tool and software business, saying it would instead invest $50 million in the business in 2023. But on August 22, the paper told several top marketing staffers, program managers, and product designers at Arc XP that the Post would be eliminating their roles in the coming weeks.” Columbia Journalism Review / Jon Allsop [An influential early blogging platform logs off →]( “The story of Skyblog — a blogging platform that was hugely popular among Francophone teenagers in the early to mid-2000s, and became arguably one of the first major social networks — is that of an early European tech success that was, eventually, driven into obsolescence by powerhouse American rivals.” Rest of World / Caiwei Chen [Chinese sextortion scammers are flooding Twitter →]( “Since April, after X introduced a new blue-check policy allowing users to buy verified badges, the platform has seen hundreds of newly verified Chinese sextortion accounts, according to Robin Li, founder of online safety software PureTwitter. They prey on Chinese users, harassing the community’s most prominent voices — often political dissidents and influential opinion leaders. The scammer accounts have alienated many users who had turned to the platform as a crucial news source outside of the Great Firewall.” Platformer / Casey Newton [How platforms can make our politics resilient to AI →]( “Platforms are both fragmented today than they were in 2016, more resistant to spam attacks, and more skeptical of the news. You soon may be able to generate unfathomable amounts of targeted political material, but you still have to deliver it to your target. And that’s getting harder all the time.” International News Media Association / HÃ¥vard Kristoffersen Hansen and Martin Frogner [How VG in Norway uses AI to animate re-enactments of actual events for its new true crime series →]( “At first, we had hoped to only use text-to-video (a prompt that describes what you want to generate video of). The plan was to create all our AI footage from text prompts, but due to time constraints we opted to use some stock footage and filmed some sequences to help guide the AI to where we wanted it.” Nieman Storyboard / Talia Richman [How a 9/11 narrative guided a gun violence narrative 22 years later →]( “We also had a rule: No traditional quotes, dialogue only.” Axios / Sara Fischer [TechCrunch acquires media startup StrictlyVC →]( “The deal is part of a broader effort by Yahoo under its new ownership and leadership structure to invest in a few key pillars, often through acquisitions, including news, sports, finance, mail and search.” The Washington Post / Gerrit De Vynck [AI images are getting harder to spot. Google thinks it can fix that. →]( “On Tuesday, Google announced a new tool — called SynthID — that it says could be part of the solution. The tool embeds a digital ‘watermark’ directly into the image that can’t be seen by the human eye but can be picked up by a computer that’s been trained to read it. Google said its new watermarking tech is resistant to tampering, making it a key step toward policing the spread of fake images and slowing the dissemination of disinformation.” Puck / Lauren Sherman [Karlie Kloss, print media mogul →]( “This is not Kloss’s first dip into media: She previously led a consortium of investors—including movie producer Jason Blum, Kaia Gerber, the fashionable race car driver Lewis Hamilton, and Forerunner Ventures’ Kirsten Green—who partnered with Bustle Digital Group to buy W magazine in 2020 from Marc Lotenberg, whose Twitter (er, X) profile reads, ‘Business, with a side of controversy.’” The Verge / Mia Sato [Can news outlets build a “trustworthy” AI chatbot? →]( “A group of tech outlets is attempting to incorporate generative AI into its websites, though readers won’t find a machine’s byline anytime soon. On August 1st, an AI chatbot tool was added to Macworld, PCWorld, Tech Advisor, and TechHive, promising that readers can ‘get [their] tech questions answered by AI, based only on stories and reviews by our experts.'” [Nieman Lab]( / [Fuego]( [Twitter]( / [Facebook]( [View email in browser]( [Unsubscribe]( You are receiving this daily newsletter because you signed up for for it at www.niemanlab.org. Nieman Journalism Lab Harvard University 1 Francis Ave.Cambridge, MA 02138 [Add us to your address book](