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Yes, The Washington Post is in crisis, but its declining print circulation numbers are meaningless

*The washingtonpost.com homepage for Dec. 20, 1996, via the Internet Archive.*

It’s been 30 years since newspapers began migrating to the web, and some observers are still obsessing over print circulation figures.

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Take, for a recent example, The Washington Post. Vince Morris of Washington City Paper reported last week that Metro, Sports and Style are going to be merged into one print section on most days, depriving residents of the DC area of a standalone section comprising local news. Morris called the announcement “grim,” even though he noted that executive editor Matt Murray said in a memo to readers that the move will not mean less coverage. Morris also writes:

According to data provided to City Paper by the Alliance for Audited Media, the Post’s paid average daily circulation is now down to just 97,000, with roughly 160,000 on Sundays. That’s a fraction of the 250,000 average daily circulation five years ago, when the Post was one of the largest newspapers in the country by circulation.

Piling on is Andy Meek of Forbes, who writes of those print numbers: “To put that in perspective: 97,000 is the sort of figure you’d expect to see from a mid-size regional paper like The Minnesota Star Tribune or The Seattle Times. Not from a globally recognized newsroom with multiple Pulitzers to its name.”

Now, it’s true that paid print has held up much better at The New York Times (244,000 on weekdays, 606,000 on Sundays) and The Wall Street Journal (449,000 on weekdays, 506,000 for its weekend edition). But print has long since ceased to matter. The Times, after all, has 11 million digital-only subscribers and the Journal has around 4 million.

And therein lies the true crisis for The Washington Post.

As Morris writes, the Post stopped reporting its paid digital circulation some time ago. Last fall, when owner Jeff Bezos began taking a wrecking ball to the paper’s opinion section by killing a planned endorsement of Kamala Harris just before the election, paid digital was thought to be around 2.5 million. About 200,000 vanished overnight. And who knows what it is today after further damage caused by high-profile resignations such as that of Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Ann Telnaes and Bezos’ announcement that he planned to transform the opinion pages into some sort of cheerleading free-market hellhole.

Bezos’ ethically challenged publisher, Will Lewis, has had exactly one good idea since he was hired in late 2023: to start a premium newsletter of local and regional coverage for readers who live in Washington and its suburbs. But if that’s ever been mentioned again, word of it somehow escaped me.

The Washington Post is in deep, deep trouble. After 10 years of sterling sterling stewardship, Bezos has transformed himself into the owner from hell, damaging the reputation of a still-great news organization that he did so much to build up.

Evidence of the destruction is all around. But you won’t find it in the paper’s irrelevant print circulation numbers.

Will Trump’s war halt Iran’s nuclear ambitions or lead to disaster? A roundup of smart commentary.

*The late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, left, and Iran’s current supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Photo of mural in the city of Qom (cc) 2013 by David Stanley.*

I think the most rational response to President Trump’s bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities is to hang back a bit — that is, to acknowledge that he’s the wrong leader to do this, that he was more likely acting on ego and personal pique than out of any strategic vision, but that it’s too soon to tell whether this will be a disaster or might actually accomplish some good.

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One starting point is that Iran shouldn’t be allowed to possess nuclear weapons. Another starting point is to understand that what led to this really is all Trump’s fault. President Barack Obama painstakingly negotiated an agreement with Iran that significantly slowed Iran’s race to get a nuclear bomb, and Trump undid that in his first term for no discernible reason other than to disrespect Obama.

Continue reading “Will Trump’s war halt Iran’s nuclear ambitions or lead to disaster? A roundup of smart commentary.”

Pew media study confirms that polarization is mainly a right-wing phenomenon

*Pew’s “News Media Tracker.” Click on the image to access the interactive version.*

Surveys in which people are asked whether they trust the media invariably come to two conclusions: (1) Despite findings that show widespread distrust, people actually do trust the news sources they use; and (2) Democrats avail themselves of a far wider range of sources than do Republicans.

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Those verities were reconfirmed by a study published earlier this month by the Pew Research Center. Titled “The Political Gap in Americans’ News Sources,” the researchers found that a majority of Republicans and Republican “leaners” rely on Fox News, with smaller percentages also consuming other right-wing sources such as Breitbart, the Tucker Carlson Network and Joe Rogan’s podcast.

Democrats and Democratic leaners, meanwhile, get their news from a variety of mainstream sources such as The New York Times, NPR, the three big broadcast networks, CNN and MSNBC, with some delving into The Atlantic, The Guardian and Axios.

Interestingly, more Democrats (16%) than Republicans (12%) rely on The Wall Street Journal, which is owned by the Murdoch family. The Journal’s opinion section is extremely conservative but increasingly unsympathetic to President Trump’s agenda on tariffs and other economic issues, while its news pages are superb.

One aspect of the Pew report that I found fascinating was an interactive graphic called the “News Media Tracker,” which shows how popular and trusted 30 media outlets are with Democrats and Republicans as well as with different age groups. I don’t see any way of embedding it, but you can access it by clicking here or on the graphic above. It’s a fantastic tool, though it would be even better if you could track party affiliation and age group; as it’s set up, you have to choose one or other other.

The phenomenon that Pew tracks is sometimes called “asymmetric polarization,” meaning that our deeply polarized political culture is more a consequence of Republicans moving far to the right than it is of Democrats moving left — although that has happened too.

In 2017 I wrote about a similar study for GBH News. The study, which was published by the Columbia Journalism Review, was based on social-media sharing habits rather than a survey, so Breitbart actually did much better among Republicans than Fox News, whose website was wretched back then. (It looks a little better now.)

The challenge is that Fox and its ilk are purveyors of weaponized propaganda, cheerleading for Trump rather than reporting the news fairly and truthfully. Mainstream outlets, for all their many faults, are dedicated to reporting the truth, verifying their facts and correcting their mistakes.

Thus we end up with asymmetric news coverage as well, in which the mainstream reports critically on Republicans and Democrats while the right-wing outlets are critical only of Democrats. It’s a huge factor in understanding our broken politics.

How Sahan Journal is using AI to streamline its operations; plus, more on search, and screening pitches

Cynthia Tu of Sahan Journal. Photo (cc) 2025 by Lev Gringauz / MinnPost

Like it or not (and my own feelings are mixed), artificial intelligence is being used by news organizations, and there’s no turning back. The big question is how.

The worst possible use of AI is to write stories, especially without sufficient human intervention to make sure that what’s being spit out is accurate. Somewhat more defensible is using it to write headlines, summaries and social-media posts — again, with actual editors checking it over. The most promising, though, is using it to streamline certain internal operations that no one has the time to do.

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That’s what’s happening at Sahan Journal, a 6-year-old digital nonprofit that covers immigrants and communities of color in Minnesota. It’s one of the projects that Ellen Clegg profile in our book, “What Works in Community News.” And according to Lev Gringauz of MinnPost (one of the original nonprofit news pioneers), the Journal has embarked on a project to streamline some of its news and business functions with AI. (I learned about Gringauz’s story in Nieman Lab, where it was republished.)

Bolstered with $220,000 in grant money from the American Journalism Project and OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, the Journal has employed AI to help with such tasks as processing financial data of the state’s charter schools, generating story summaries for Instagram, and adding audio to some articles.

The real value, though, has come in bolstering the revenue side, as the Journal has experimented with using AI to retool its media kit and to understand its audience better, such as “pulling up how much of Sahan Journal’s audience cares about public transportation.”

“We’re less enthusiastic, more skeptical, about using AI to generate editorial content,” Cynthia Tu, the Journal’s data journalist and AI specialist, told Gringauz. Even on internal tasks, though, AI has proved to be a less than reliable partner, hallucinating data despite Tu explicitly giving it commands not to scour the broader internet.

And as Gringauz observes, OpenAI is bleeding money. How much of a commitment makes sense given that Sahan Journal may be building systems on top of a platform that may cease to exist at some point?

Two other AI-related notes:

➤ Quality matters. In his newsletter Second Rough Draft, Richard J. Tofel has some useful thoughts on the panic over Google’s AI search engine, which has been described as representing an existential threat to news organizations since it will deprive them of click-throughs to their websites.

Tofel writes that clickbait will be harmed more than high-quality journalism, noting that The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal have been hurt less than HuffPost, Business Insider and The Washington Post. “If there is one overriding lesson of publishing in the digital age,” Tofel writes, “it remains that distinctive content remains the most unassailable, the least vulnerable.”

Though Tofel doesn’t say so, I think there’s a lesson for local news publishers as well: hyperlocal journalism should be far less affected by AI search than national outlets, especially for those organizations that emphasize building a relationship with their communities.

➤ Here’s the pitch. Caleb Okereke, a Ph.D. student at Northeastern, is using AI to screen pitches for his digital publication Minority Africa. He writes that “we are receiving 10x more pitches than we did in our early days after launch,” adding: “With a lean editorial team, we faced a challenge familiar to many digital publications: how do you maintain depth, fairness, and attention when the volume scales but the staff doesn’t?”

He and his colleagues have built a customized tool called Iraka (which means “voice” in the Rutooro language) and put it to the test. As he writes, it’s far from perfect, though it’s getting better.

“As of now, editors are using Iraka individually to provide a first-pass on submissions, testing its utility alongside regular human review,” Okereke reports. “Every pitch is still manually read, and no editorial decisions are made solely based on the model’s output. This staged integration allows us to observe how the tool fits into existing workflows without disrupting the editorial process.”

Thugs assault U.S. senator for asking a question; plus, showdown for public media, and an odd omission

This morning I feel like anyone who comments on media and politics ought to say something about Thursday’s unprovoked assault on U.S. Sen. Alex Padilla. But I’m at a loss for words. I assume you’ve seen it; if you haven’t, here it is (gift link), along with a detailed New York Times account.

Federal agents are seen dragging the California Democrat from a room where Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem was holding a news conference, forcing him to the floor and handcuffing him. He was soon released and was not charged, but this is what an authoritarianism takeover looks like.

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I was interested that Noem at least had the presence of mind to lie, falsely claiming that Padilla had “lunged” toward the stage and didn’t identify himself. All you have to do is watch the video to see the truth. All he was trying to do was ask a question. And, of course, Republicans, including House Speaker Mike Johnson, have picked up on her lies. Heather Cox Richardson writes:

While much focus has been on the assault itself, what Noem was saying before Padilla spoke out is crucially important. “We are not going away,” she said. “We are staying here to liberate this city from the socialists and the burdensome leadership that this governor and that this mayor have placed on this country and what they have tried to insert into the city.”

In other words, the Trump administration is vowing to get rid of the democratically elected government of California by using military force. That threat is the definition of a coup. It suggests MAGA considers any political victory but their own to be illegitimate and considers themselves justified in removing those governmental officials with violence: a continuation of the attempt of January 6, 2021, to overturn the results of a presidential election.

Finally, I am never going to mention Noem without reminding you that she bragged about shooting her dog and her goat.

Public media’s last stand

I had hoped that President Trump’s plunge in the polls might stiffen the spines of House Republicans enough that they would not vote to defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which provides some of the revenues for PBS and NPR. No such luck.

As NPR reports, the House voted on Thursday to eliminate $1.1 billion in previously appropriated money that was supposed to fund CPB for the next two years. Another $8.3 billion was cut from international-aid programs. The measure passed, 214 to 212, with every Democrat and four Republicans voting against it.

So now it’s on to the Senate, where the Republican majority is slightly less right-wing than the House’s. At this point, though, all bets are off.

A curious omission

There is so much going on, nearly all of it bad, that I’m going to have to leave most of it aside. But I do want to mention that on Thursday I listened to Ezra Klein’s New York Times interview (you can subscribe to “The Ezra Klein Show for free at all the usual podcast haunts) with former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert, who has accused the Netanyahu government of committing war crimes in Gaza.

It was a long, fascinating conversation. Yet there was scarcely a mention of Iran’s nuclear-weapons program and none at all of the possibility that Israel would soon act to destroy it — something that definitely had been in the news lately.

And now Israel has attacked Iran. In retrospect, it seems like a lost opportunity.

ABC goes too far in pushing out Terry Moran; plus, Google’s AI assault, and Jay Rosen moves on

*Terry Moran, right, interviews Donald Trump in April 2025. Public domain photo by Joyce N. Boghosian via the White House.*

How to behave on social media has bedeviled journalists and confounded editors for years. Marty Baron clashed with reporters Wesley Lowery and Felicia Sonmez over their provocative Twitter comments back when he was executive editor of The Washington Post, and those are just two well-known examples.

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The latest journalist to run afoul of his news organization’s social-media standards is Terry Moran, who was, until Tuesday, employed by ABC News. Moran was suspended on Sunday after he tweeted that White House official Stephen Miller and President Trump is each a “world-class hater.” The tweet is now gone, but I’ve included an image. On Tuesday, Moran’s employer announced that they were parting company with him, as NPR media reporter David Folkenflik writes.

I think ABC was right to suspend Moran but wrong to get rid of him, and that media critic Margaret Sullivan got the nuances perfectly when she wrote this for her newsletter, American Crisis:

I’m amazed that Moran posted what he did. It’s well outside the bounds of what straight-news reporters do. It’s more than just calling a lie a lie, or identifying a statement as racist — all of which I think is necessary. Moran is not a pundit or a columnist or any other kind of opinion journalist….

I would hate to see Moran — with his worthy career at ABC News, where he’s been for almost 30 years — lose his job over this. I hope that the honchos at ABC let a brief suspension serve its purpose, and put him back to work.

Unfortunately, this is ABC News, whose corporate owner, Disney, disgraced itself earlier this year by paying $15 million to settle a libel suit brought by Trump over a minor, non-substantive error: George Stephanopoulos said on the air that Trump had been found “liable for rape” in a civil case brought by E. Jean Carroll when, in fact, he’d been found liable for sexual abuse. The federal judge in the Carroll case even said in a ruling that the jury had found Trump “raped” Carroll in the ordinary meaning of the term. But Disney couldn’t wait to prostrate itself before our authoritarian ruler.

So when Moran violated ABC News’ social-media policy, as the organization claimed, he no doubt knew he could expect no mercy.

Continue reading “ABC goes too far in pushing out Terry Moran; plus, Google’s AI assault, and Jay Rosen moves on”

Journalists covering the unrest in LA are being obstructed, assaulted and injured

You may have seen the video. Lauren Tomasi of 9News in Australia is doing a standup in the middle of a Los Angeles street. Behind her, some distance away, are uniformed police officers. She tells viewers that “the situation has now rapidly deteriorated. The LAPD moving in on horseback, firing rubber bullets at protesters, moving them on through the heart of LA.”

She flinches briefly as another rubber bullet is fired. Then another — and she’s hit in the leg, crying out in pain and bending over. The camera moves away from her and we hear a male voice asking, “You OK?”

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Tomasi went live after the incident and doesn’t appear to be much worse for the wear. She was lucky. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, law enforcment officers have assaulted, obstructed and injured a number of reporters who are covering the unrest in Los Angeles touched off by an ICE raid at a Home Depot on Friday. The CPJ writes:

Law enforcement in Los Angeles, California, shot non-lethal rounds that struck multiple reporters while they covered protests that began on Friday, June 6, and escalated over the weekend following immigration raids. More than 20 others were reported to have been assaulted or obstructed.

And though Tomasi didn’t appear to be seriously hurt, rubber bullets can cause severe injuries. CPJ reports that Nick Stern, a British freelance photojournalist, underwent emergency surgery for injuries caused by a plastic bullet that struck him in the leg. The CPJ notes: “Stern told the BBC that he was wearing a press card around his neck and carrying his camera when he was shot.”

Is law enforcement targeting journalists? “Tomasi, holding a microphone and talking into a camera, was clearly a journalist,” writes Poynter media columnist Tom Jones. But as you can see from the video of Tomasi, she had embedded herself with a large swath of protesters. It’s possible that the police were firing at the protesters and she just happened to be in harm’s way.

The more important question is this: Why were officers firing at a crowd of what appeared to be peaceful demonstrators?

By the way, the “more than 20” number cited by CPJ is up to 37 as I write this, according to a database being maintained by journalist Adam Rose. There are some harrowing reports of journalists’ being taken to the hospital and being struck in the head and in the eye. CNN’s Erin Burnett is quoted as saying, “The officers are also pushing us … They knew we’re media. They were just as happy to push me as to push anybody else.”

“We are greatly concerned by the reports of law enforcement officers’ shooting non-lethal rounds at reporters covering protests in Los Angeles. Any attempt to discourage or silence media coverage by intimidating or injuring journalists should not be tolerated,” said CPJ executive Katherine Jacobsen. “It is incumbent upon authorities to respect the media’s role of documenting issues of public interest.”

AI roundup: The WashPost eyes robot-edited op-ed pieces, while Chicago and Philly execs speak out

*Jeff Bezos. Painting (cc) 2017 by thierry ehrmann*

The Washington Post’s plan to bring in a plethora of outside opinion writers, edited by artificial intelligence, is being widely mocked, as it should be. But the idea is not new — at least the non-AI part.

A decade ago, the Post started publishing something called PostEverything, which the paper called “a digital daily magazine for voices from around the world.” Here’s how the 2014 rollout described it:

In PostEverything, outsiders will entertain and inform readers with fresh takes, personal essays, news analyses, and other innovative ways to tell the stories everyone is talking about — and the ones they haven’t yet heard.

PostEverything went PostNothing sometime in 2022, but now it’s back. According to Benjamin Mullin of The New York Times (gift link), the revived feature, known internally as Ripple, will comprise opinion writing from other newspapers, independent writers on Substack and, eventually, nonprofessional writers. Ripple will be digital-only and will be offered outside the Post’s paywall.

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What’s hilarious is that Mullin contacted several of the partners the Post is considering, such as The Salt Lake Tribune and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and was told they’re not interested. Another potential partner was identified as Jennifer Rubin, who quit the Post over owner Jeff Bezos’ meddling and started her own publication called The Contrarian. Mullin writes: “When told that she had been under consideration at all, Ms. Rubin burst out in laughter. ‘Did they read my public resignation letter?’ she said.”

Continue reading “AI roundup: The WashPost eyes robot-edited op-ed pieces, while Chicago and Philly execs speak out”

AI embarrassment aside, Business Insider faces huge challenges in the post-SEO environment

*Former masters of the universe Henry Blodget, founder of Business Insider, and Nick Denton, founder of Gawker. Photo (cc) 2012 by the Financial Times.*

There was a time when Business Insider’s digital strategy was among the most widely admired and emulated in publishing. But that was then.

Last week, the outlet announced it was laying off 21% of its staff and doubling down on artificial intelligence, a sign of how drastically the business model for digital news has changed over the past few years. I’ll get back to that. But first, an AI-related embarrassment.

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On Sunday, Semafor media reporter Max Tani revealed that, last May, Business Insider management distributed to staff members a list of books it recommended so that its employees could learn about the vision and best practices of leading figures in business and technology. The list included such classics as “Jensen Huang: the Founder of Nvidia,” “Simply Target: A CEO’s Lessons in a Turbulent Time and Transforming an Iconic Brand” and “The Costco Experience: An Unofficial Survivor’s Guide.”

As it turned out, those books and several others either don’t exist or have slightly different titles and were written by authors other than the ones cited in what managers called “Beacon Books.” In all likelihood, Tani reports, the book titles were generated by AI. At least Business Insider didn’t recommend them to readers, as two daily newspapers did recently with a list of summer books generated by a third-party publisher.

Business Insider is owned by Axel Springer, a German-based conglomerate that also owns Politico and Morning Brew, neither of which faces layoffs, according to Corbin Bolies of The Daily Beast.

Henry Blodget founded Business Insider in 2007, and the publication quickly established itself as a success in the world of SEO, or search engine optimization. In 2016, I interviewed The Washington Post’s then-chief technologist, Shailesh Prakash, for my book “The Return of the Moguls.” He told me that BI was one of several outlets the Post studied to see how it used a variety of factors to get its journalism in front of as many eyeballs as possible. Here’s part of what he said:

We have built our own crawlers, so we have crawlers go and crawl a bunch of other sites — USA Today, New York Times, Business Insider — and we go and grab their content and bring it in-house, strip out all the branding, only have the headline, image and a blurb, and put it in front of 500-plus users every month as a test. And the question that’s asked is, “Would you read this story?” And you don’t know whether it’s a Business Insider story or a Washington Post story or a Huffington Post story or a USA Today story. All you see is an image, a headline and blurb. And based on the results of that, we compare our content to these different sites. Are we better than The Huffington Post in politics content for women? Are we better than Business Insider in business content for men?

Back then, Business Insider and HuffPost were offering their journalism for free and paying for it by building huge audiences and selling them advertisers. The Times and The Washington Post were in the early stages of building their paywall strategy.

Eventually, the free model collapsed as Google drove the value of digital advertising through the floor. Today, HuffPost is a greatly diminished outlet owned by BuzzFeed, which itself is a shadow of what it used to be. And Business Insider has a paywall.

Now, I have nothing against for-profit news organizations charging for their journalism. But who would take out a paid subscription to Business Insider? That’s not a comment about the quality. But readers are dealing with subscription fatigue, and even the most hardcore news junkies might pay for one national paper (perhaps The Wall Street Journal in the case of BI’s target audience), one regional paper and a few newsletters.

BI isn’t going to make the cut for more than a handful of readers.

There’s an additional factor. BI still relies on Google to attract readers who might be enticed into buying a subscription — and now a Google search gives you an AI-generated result. There’s no need to click through, even though the AI summary might prove to be wildly inaccurate.

In an interview with Andy Meek of Forbes, Blodget said he was “very sad” to learn about the layoffs at BI, and he offered his thoughts on how digital publishers can survive in the current environment. “Direct distribution and subscriptions,” he said. “That model will support thousands of excellent publications, big and small. And audio and video are still growing as we move from TV/radio to digital.”

But Business Insider already has a paywall and newsletters. At best, the publication faces a smaller, less ambitious future. And turning over some of what it produces to AI is not going to help it maintain a relationship of trust with its readers.

Feds indict alleged ringleader in NHPR harassment case; plus, public media lawsuits, and trouble for Musk

Photo from the Middlesex County district attorney’s office via NHPR

It’s been a major loose end in a frightening story about harassment and threats directed at journalists.

Four men have been sentenced to federal prison for carrying out a campaign of terror against New Hampshire Public Radio journalist Lauren Chooljian, her parents and her editor, Dan Barrick. All four appeared to be motivated by Chooljian’s reporting on Eric Spofford, the founder of several addiction treatment centers, who, according to Chooljian’s reporting, had engaged in sexual abuse and harassment.

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Yet Spofford denied any involvment and was not charged. He even turned around and sued Chooljian and NHPR for libel, a suit that was dismissed by a New Hampshire state judge.

Now, according to a story by WBUR and posted at NHPR, federal authorities are charging Spofford with orchestrating a conspiracy to vandalize the homes of Chooljian, her parents and Barrick — vandalism that included threatening and offensive graffiti. The story says in part:

Prosecutors say Spofford paid his close friend, Eric Labarge, $20,000 in two installments to vandalize the homes in 2022. Spofford allegedly provided the addresses and specific instructions on what to do. Labarge then found three others to carry out the attacks.

Spofford reportedly lives in Salem, New Hampshire, and in Miami. He was arrested Friday and will be arraigned in U.S. District Court in Boston on Monday. According to a press release from the U.S. attorney’s office, Spofford, 40, was indicted by a grand jury on four counts of conspiracy and stalking. If he’s found guilty, he could face a prison sentence of up to five years and a fine of up to $250,000 on each of the four counts.

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