Disinformation expert Joan Donovan, who was pushed out of the Harvard Kennedy School earlier this year, is now claiming that the dean, Douglas Elmendorf, wanted her out so as not to offend Meta, whose charitable arm had pledged to give $500 million to Harvard. The university denies the charges leveled by Donovan, who is now at Boston University. Joseph Menn of The Washington Post has the story, and here is a free link.
Category: Technology Page 2 of 19
I got some great feedback on my post about using artificial intelligence to summarize a panel discussion. This is an issue I’ll continue to keep a close eye on and to experiment with. I want to surface a few comments I received and gather them together here.
- From Ed Miller, editor of The Provincetown Independent: “I was there at the Radically Rural panel discussion, and I’m not sure I would call this summary ‘shockingly good,’ Dan. It is pretty good, but it completely misses the most important point in Victoria Bouloubasis’s presentation, which is that the Iowa poultry plant workers’ organizing efforts mostly failed to persuade local officials to help them.” OK, I guess I could have said “shockingly coherent” rather than “shockingly good.”
- From Tom Johnson: “Any idea what it means to ’empower stereotypes’? Some species sure would help.” Johnson is referring to a section of the summary that says, “The story aimed to empower and defy stereotypes surrounding immigrant communities, contrasting with typical narratives of victimization.” I would agree that ChatGPT is no A.J. Liebling, but overall I thought we got the drift.
- From Rebecca Rainey, writing on Threads: “Worth noting: The summaries are incredibly boring. I would much rather read your reporting and light analysis, which would tell me what matters most in the grand scheme of things.” My response is that such summaries would be more for internal newsroom use than for public consumption. The next step is to take such a summary and see if ChatGPT can transform it into a news story. I’ll be looking for a suitable event sometime in the near future.
Meanwhile, OpenAI, the company that rolled out ChatGPT a year ago, is in utter turmoil. Co-founder Sam Altman was fired over the weekend and is now moving to Microsoft. The speculation is that the OpenAI board wanted to proceed more slowly and was concerned that Altman was too dismissive of AI’s potential dangers. Presumably Microsoft will let him pick up the pace, so overall this is not good news.
Be sure to see this follow-up.
Strictly as an experiment, I produced an AI-generated summary of a panel discussion that took place in September at the Radically Rural conference in Keene, New Hampshire. Titled “How’d They Do That? Groundbreaking Journalism,” the panel was moderated by Jack Rooney, managing editor for audience development at The Keene Sentinel, which co-sponsored the event along with the Hannah Grimes Center for Entrepreneurship.
The hour-long panel featured Victoria Bouloubasis, a filmmaker who showed part of her Emmy-nominated documentary, “Rising Up in the Heartland: Latino Workers Fight for Pandemic Relief,” and discussed it; Samantha Hogan, an investigative reporter with The Maine Monitor, who talked about her reporting on the state’s public defense system for the indigent; and Adam Ganucheau, editor-in-chief of Mississippi Today, who described his news organization’s Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting into the Backchannel scandal, which encompassed figures ranging from former Gov. Phil Bryant to former NFL quarterback Brett Favre.
A note on methodology: I took some real chances with this. I captured the audio using Otter.ai, a transcription service that uses artificial intelligence. Then I fed each of the three parts of the panel discussion into ChatGPT and asked it to produce 400-word summaries. I left out the audience Q&A that followed the panel. Let me stipulate for the record that I did not watch the video except for a few brief clips, and I skimmed quickly through the Otter transcript, which was 7,000 words long. I don’t recommend this as sound journalistic practice, but, as I said, I was experimenting. What I did not try to do was ask ChatGPT to generate a news story; I’ll try that another time.
What appears below, produced entirely by ChatGPT, looks shockingly good. I just hope that it’s an accurate and useful summary.
***
Victoria Bouloubasis, an Emmy-nominated journalist and filmmaker, based in Durham, North Carolina, shared insights into her work and a specific project during a panel discussion. Here’s a summary of the key points:
- Journalist’s Background: Victoria Bouloubasis is an experienced journalist with a focus on dispelling myths about the global South. Her career, primarily in community journalism, spans 15 years, emphasizing labor rights, healthcare, and language access in North Carolina’s agricultural and food industries. Growing up in the South, she covers labor issues, especially concerning first-generation Americans and their families in Latin America.
- Coverage of Rural Communities: Bouloubasis delves into the complexities of covering rural communities, particularly in North Carolina, known for its prominence in pork and tobacco production. She highlights the evolving demographics, with a shift from primarily Mexican to more Central American and Indigenous communities. Language diversity adds complexity to her reporting, as many interviewed speak languages other than Spanish.
- Project Overview: The discussed project, an Emmy-nominated piece for Univision, originally focused on long COVID’s impact on poultry plant workers. However, Bouloubasis shifted the narrative after discovering a grassroots organizing story among immigrant workers in Iowa. The story aimed to empower and defy stereotypes surrounding immigrant communities, contrasting with typical narratives of victimization.
- Challenges Faced: The challenges in the project included last-minute changes to the story focus and navigating language barriers during interviews. Bouloubasis emphasizes the importance of terminology, noting the shifting dynamics of minority-majority populations in small towns. The story showcased the struggles of immigrant workers, demanding pandemic relief funds for essential workers who didn’t receive stimulus checks due to eligibility criteria.
- Community Perspectives: Bouloubasis highlights the discomfort and confusion of local officials who couldn’t understand Spanish, providing a unique perspective on the challenges faced by non-English speakers. The mayor’s lack of understanding of the struggles faced by undocumented immigrants, particularly in receiving stimulus checks, became a focal point in the story.
- Positive Outcomes: Despite the challenges, Bouloubasis expresses pride in the project’s recognition at the Emmys, emphasizing its hopeful and empowering narrative. The immigrant community in Iowa successfully distributed federal pandemic relief aid to meatpacking and farm workers, showcasing the impact of grassroots organizing.
- Inspiration from the Community: Bouloubasis commends the courage of immigrant workers who put themselves at risk by publicly acknowledging their undocumented status. The project seeks to elevate their voices and bring attention to social determinants of health, emphasizing the importance of dialogue and understanding in journalism.
This summary captures Victoria Bouloubasis’s insights into her journalism career, the challenges of covering immigrant communities, and the impact of her Emmy-nominated project, which sheds light on the struggles and resilience of rural immigrant workers.
***
Samantha Hogan, investigative reporter with The Maine Monitor, shared insights into her work, focusing on Maine’s indigent public defense system. Here’s a summary of the key points:
- Reporter’s Background: Samantha Hogan, an investigative reporter, joined The Maine Monitor in 2019, specializing in court system reporting. Her work, supported by Report for America, delves into Maine’s troubled indigent public defense system.
- Maine’s Demographics: Maine, with a predominantly white population, faces economic disparities rather than racial issues. The community includes both lifelong residents and seasonal “snowbirds.” Hogan decided to investigate how individuals unable to afford lawyers were represented in the state.
- Indigent Public Defense System Issues: Hogan discovered issues within Maine’s indigent public defense system, where private defense lawyers were contracted without proper oversight. Unlike most states, Maine lacked a statewide public defender system, relying on contracts with private lawyers. Some lawyers had criminal convictions and professional misconduct violations.
- Investigative Approach: A whistleblower alerted Hogan to problems in the indigent defense system. She initiated a data-driven investigation, utilizing public records requests and analyzing billing data. Hogan revealed instances of lawyers billing implausible hours and identified disciplinary issues among contracted lawyers.
- Scandalous Cases and Red Flags: Hogan uncovered cases where lawyers with serious criminal convictions or professional misconduct allegations were contracted for public defense. The investigation raised red flags, such as lawyers billing excessive hours and serious ethical violations within the system.
- Impact and Legal Consequences: The investigative report led to significant consequences, including a government watchdog verifying Hogan’s findings. The Maine Commission on Indigent Legal Services faced a civil lawsuit, acknowledging negligent misrepresentation of billing by an attorney. The ACLU filed a lawsuit against the state, citing an ineffective public defense system.
- Persistence and Impactful Journalism: Hogan’s relentless pursuit of public records, court filings, and data analysis turned anecdotal evidence into hard numbers. The investigative reporting became a pivotal factor in legal actions against the flawed public defense system. The ACLU lawsuit, citing Hogan’s work, puts the spotlight on the need for a functional public defense system in Maine. (1)
- Ongoing Legal Battles: Hogan highlighted ongoing legal battles, including the ACLU lawsuit, indicating that the impact of investigative journalism extends beyond immediate results. The story, a four-year project, continues to evolve, emphasizing the importance of persistent reporting and its contribution to systemic change.
Samantha Hogan’s work exemplifies the power of investigative journalism in exposing systemic flaws, holding institutions accountable, and driving legal actions to address critical issues within the indigent public defense system in Maine.
***
Adam Ganucheau, editor-in-chief of Mississippi Today, shared insights into the impactful investigative journalism that led to winning a Pulitzer Prize for the Backchannel investigation. Here’s a summary of the key points:
- Introduction: Adam expressed his gratitude to be on stage with fellow journalists and introduced Adam Ganucheau, editor-in-chief of Mississippi Today. Ganucheau oversees Mississippi’s largest newsroom, focusing on stories relevant to everyday Mississippians.
- Mississippi’s Communities: Ganucheau highlighted the diversity of Mississippi’s communities, dispelling monolithic views. He emphasized the shared dreams and goals of Mississippians across different backgrounds, beliefs, and economic statuses. The challenge lies in providing equal access and opportunities for these dreams, especially in a state facing numerous problems.
- Mississippi Today’s Role: Mississippi Today, a nonprofit newsroom launched in 2016, positions itself between everyday Mississippians and decision-makers. With a team of about 15, mostly Mississippi natives deeply connected to their community, the newsroom aims to bridge the gap by listening to people’s struggles, reporting on their concerns, and holding decision-makers accountable.
- The Backchannel Investigation: The focus shifted to the Backchannel investigation, which earned a Pulitzer Prize in 2022. The investigation began with reporter Anna Wolfe’s exploration of poverty in Mississippi. She discovered that federal funds, intended for the state’s poorest residents, were being diverted to nonprofit programs with little accountability. (2)
- Welfare Spending Anomalies: Wolfe delved into the anomalies in welfare spending, revealing that Mississippi approved less than 1% of applications for cash assistance. The investigation exposed a shift in funds from direct cash assistance to nonprofit initiatives with questionable accounting. Wolfe’s collaboration with the state auditor ultimately led to six arrests, including the welfare agency director.
- Role of Former Governor: The investigation extended to the role of the former governor in redirecting federal funds and changing the philosophy behind poverty assistance programs. Wolfe spent years probing the governor’s involvement, culminating in a seven-part series titled “The Backchannel.”
- Impactful Visuals and Reporting: Mississippi Today used charts and visuals to illustrate the impact of welfare spending changes over time. They scrutinized the former governor’s philosophy shift and its effects on assistance programs. The investigation revealed instances like wealthy individuals, including NFL quarterback Brett Favre, receiving welfare funds. (3)
- Series Conclusion and Everyday Stories: The series aimed to provide accountability to state leaders while keeping the stories of everyday Mississippians at the forefront. Ganucheau highlighted the series’ conclusion in December 2022, where they circled back to the people who inspired the investigation. Everyday Mississippians, like Daniel Thomas, shared their experiences, expressing gratitude for the reporting but emphasizing the lack of tangible help.
- Journalistic Mission: Ganucheau underscored that Mississippi Today’s mission is not driven by awards or notoriety but by a commitment to helping everyday people better understand their situations and hold decision-makers accountable.
The Backchannel investigation exemplifies the impactful role of investigative journalism in bringing systemic issues to light, holding those in power accountable, and giving a voice to those affected by government decisions.
Notes
- Did someone say “lawsuit”? When I saw that word in the ChatGPT summary, I decided I’d better check it out. The verdict? It’s true.
-
Although I had already provided Otter, and thus ChatGPT, with the correct names of the panelists, ChatGPT was on its own with Anna Wolfe — and it spelled her name correctly.
-
ChatGPT got Brett Favre’s name right, too. I did not, and I had to scroll back to the introduction to fix it.
Old-school blogger. Image via Wikimedia Commons.
I’ve been blogging since 2002, which makes me something of an expert on how the medium has changed over time. I’ve been thinking lately about some subtle changes I want to make to Media Nation now that social media has become an annoying afterthought rather than a primary means by which we distribute our work.
My approach before the rise of social media was to write some longish posts and some really short posts, the latter so that I could link to items I wanted to call people’s attention to. If you take a look at another early blogger who’s still at it, Glenn “Instapundit” Reynolds, you’ll see that he still does it that way. My own practice, though, was to stop writing very short posts at Media Nation — after all, that’s what Twitter was for. And if I had something a little bit longer that hadn’t quite congealed, I’d publish that at Facebook.
These days, when I write a more fully developed post, I’m promoting it at Threads, Bluesky, Mastodon, X/Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, which seems kind of ridiculous. If anything, it’s an incentive not to write. But I’m also rediscovering the utility of posting short items here. After all, there are nearly 2,300 readers who’ve signed up to receive new posts by email, and many of them may not even be on social media. (Email delivery of Media Nation is free, and it’s not the same as becoming a supporter for $5 a month, which of course you are encouraged to do.)
I find that I haven’t quite returned to the old days of writing one-liners à la Reynolds. Still, I’ve written a few brief updates recently aimed at calling your attention to one thing, such as this, this and this. And though I’m talking specifically about blogging, which seems kind of old-fashioned, it could pertain to newsletters, too. Newsletters tend to be long, but many include Twitter-like quickies at the bottom, which strikes me increasingly as a good idea.
When I was reporting on the early years of The Washington Post’s revival under Jeff Bezos for my book “The Return of the Moguls,” the Post was publishing every one of its stories on Facebook. They talked about a “barbell” and trying to entice readers on the Facebook side of the barbell into migrating across and becoming a paying customer on the Post side. Those days are long gone.
Charlie Warzel wrote a piece for The Atlantic the other day warning that social media is no longer working for news distribution, mainly because Facebook has de-emphasized news and Twitter has fallen into a toxic cesspool. Well, social is no longer working for self-published news and commentary either. Those of us who have kept up our independent presence through a blog or a newsletter should think of how we’re going to leverage that advantage.
The New York Times today reports on the U.S. Justice Department’s antitrust case against Google. The federal trial is scheduled to get under way next Tuesday.
The lawsuit, according to the Times’ David McCabe and Cecilia Kang, revolves around accusations that Google monopolizes search by paying off the likes of Apple and Mozilla to make Google their default search engine. But I think a group of newspaper publishers are pursuing a more interesting antitrust case against Google (and Facebook), charging that Google’s control of every aspect of online advertising technology has allowed the giant platform to drive down ad prices and leave media organizations on the sidelines.
Facebook is part of the suit because the publishers claim that Google and Facebook have colluded in order to keep Facebook from setting up its own competing ad system. Separately, Gannett has sued Google, but not Facebook, over the same issues.
Photo (cc) 2014 by MHS Wildcat
Six years ago, The Washington Post announced that it would begin producing stories about high school football games using artificial intelligence. The expanded use of Heliograf, the Post’s “in-house automated storytelling technology,” would allow the news organization “to cover all Washington, D.C.-area high school football games every week,” according to a press release. The press release linked to an example of such coverage — a mundane article that begins:
The Yorktown Patriots triumphed over the visiting Wilson Tigers in a close game on Thursday, 20-14.
The game began with a scoreless first quarter.
In the second quarter, The Patriots’ Paul Dalzell was the first to put points on the board with a two-yard touchdown reception off a pass from quarterback William Porter.
Yet now, with AI tools having improved considerably, Gannett is running into trouble for doing exactly the same thing. Writing for Axios Columbus, Tyler Buchanan reports that The Columbus Dispatch had suspended AI-generated local sports coverage after the tool, LedeAI, came in for criticism and mockery. As Buchanan observes, one such article “was blasted on social media for its robotic style, lack of player names and use of awkward phrases like ‘close encounter of the athletic kind.’”
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Has AI gone backwards since 2017? Obviously not. So what went wrong? It’s hard to say, but it could be that the generative AI tools that started becoming available late last year, with ChatGPT in the forefront, are more finicky than the blunt instrument developed by the Post some years back. In theory, generative AI can write a more natural-sounding story than the robotic prose produced by Heliograf and its ilk. In practice, if an AI tool like LedeAI is trained on a corpus of material loaded with clichés, then the output is going to be less than stellar.
Clare Duffy of CNN found that Gannett’s use of AI was not limited to Columbus. Other outlets that ran LedeAI-generated sports stories included the Courier Journal of Louisville, Kentucky; AZ Central; Florida Today, and the Journal Sentinel of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Duffy reported that one story, before it was revised, included this Grantland Rice-quality gem: “The Worthington Christian [[WINNING_TEAM_MASCOT]] defeated the Westerville North [[LOSING_TEAM_MASCOT]] 2-1 in an Ohio boys soccer game on Saturday.”
There’s another dynamic that needs to be considered as well. The Washington Post, a regional newspaper under the Graham family, repositioned itself as a national digital news organization after Amazon founder Jeff Bezos bought it in 2013. Regional coverage is secondary to its mission, and if it weren’t covering high school football games with AI, then it wouldn’t be covering them at all.
By contrast, you’d think that high school sports would be central to the mission at Gannett’s local and regional dailies. Turning such coverage over to AI and then not bothering to check what they were publishing is exactly the sort of move you’d expect from the bottom-line-obsessed chain, though it obviously falls short of its obligation to the communities it serves.
Poynter media columnist Tom Jones, a former sportswriter, raises another issue worth pondering — the elimination of an important training ground for aspiring sports journalists:
There is still a contentious debate about how publishers should use AI. Obviously, journalists will be (and should be) upset if AI is being used to replace human beings to cover events. As someone who started his career covering high school football, I can tell you that invaluable lessons learned under the Friday night lights laid the foundation for covering events such as the Olympics and Stanley Cup finals and college football national championships in the years after that.
At a moment when AI is the hottest of topics in journalistic circles, Gannett’s botched experiment demonstrated that there is no substitute for actual reporters.
By the way, I asked ChatGPT to write a six- to eight-word headline for this post. The result: “AI-Generated Sports Coverage Faces Scrutiny: What Went Wrong?” Not bad, but lacking the specificity I was looking for.
Mark Zuckerberg may soon have reason to regret pushing Threads out the door before it was ready. Lindsey Choo reports for The Wall Street Journal (free link, I think; apologies if it doesn’t work) that user engagement has fallen by 70% since its July 7 peak.
No doubt Zuckerberg wanted to take advantage of Elon Musk’s Fourth of July weekend freakout, when he limited the number of posts you could read on Twitter (especially if you weren’t a paid subscriber), cut off access to individual tweets for non-members (thus blowing up our news feed at What Works), and killed off classic TweetDeck in favor of a new, lesser update.
But Threads is frustrating to use. The biggest problem is that you can only access it on a mobile device. Also missing: a reverse-chrono tab of accounts you follow, thus clogging up your feed with brands and celebrities you don’t care about, as well as no lists and no hashtags.
Mastodon has been my first stop since Musk took over Twitter last fall, but its decentralized nature presents problems of its own. It’s difficult to find what you’re looking for, there are parts of the unfortunately named Fediverse that are invisible to you, and most of the people and accounts I need to follow just aren’t there. Bluesky is still invitation-only and has had problems of its own.
I realize this is of little interest to most people, but for those of us whose work depends on social media to some degree, it’s been an interesting — and frustrating — nine months.
Although Mastodon is my preferred Twitter alternative, there’s every indication that Threads is going to emerge as the closest thing we get to a true Twitter replacement. It’s missing a lot — browser access, a reverse-chronological feed of your followers, and lists, to name just a few. I can really do without the celebrities and brands that Threads is pushing. But it’s already got mass appeal, a precious commodity that it’s not likely to relinquish.
There are reports that Mark Zuckerberg and company rushed this out the door before it was ready in order to take advantage of Elon Musk’s meltdown last weekend. Musk rewarded Zuckerberg by sending him a cease-and-desist order — precious publicity for an app that is taking off. As I said yesterday, you only get one chance to make a good first impression, but I suspect users will give Zuckerberg some time to get it right.
In addition to Twitter, I suspect the big loser in this may be Bluesky, started by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey. I finally scored an invitation earlier this week and have been playing around. I like it. But Dorsey has got to regret the leisurely pace he’s taken.
For now, I’m posting mainly to Mastodon because I want to, Twitter because I have to, and Bluesky and Threads because I’m checking them out. I’ve given up on Post. (If you’re reading this on the Media Nation website, my social media feeds are in the right-hand rail.) But it wouldn’t surprise me if this quickly devolves into a war between Twitter and Threads, with everyone else reduced to spectator status.
Photo (cc) 2011 by J E Theriot
They say you only get one chance to make a good first impression. If that’s true, then Mark Zuckerberg missed that chance with the debut of Threads. There’s no browser access, so you’re stuck using your phone. You can’t switch to a reverse-chronological non-algorithmic feed of accounts you follow. Even Elon Musk still lets you do that at Twitter. No lists.
The whole thing, teeming with brands and celebrities you’re not interested in, feels very commercial in a forced-joviality, trying-too-hard way. These things can be fixed unless Zuck thinks they’re features rather than bugs. For now, though … not great.