Over the weekend I turned on Google ads, and they were so overwhelming that I’ve turned them off. If you’re seeing them now, no worries — they’re supposed to disappear in an hour or so. They may be back, but only if I can figure out how to tone them down.
Gannett’s failed attempt to cover school sports with AI raises eyebrows and questions
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.’”
Please become a supporter of this free source of news and commentary for $5 a month. Just click here.
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.
Still more on the saga of the Marion County Record
The Washington Post has published an excellent all-known-facts piece on the police raid against the Marion County Record. Reporters Jonathan O’Connell, Paul Farhi and Sofia Andrade pull together all the various threads of this saga — the Record’s investigation into Police Chief Gideon Cody’s past, the question of whether the paper may have broken the law in accessing a local restaurateur’s driving history, and the Record’s reputation for hard-hitting journalism in a community where that’s not always popular. Here’s a free link.
Kansas publisher tells SPJ: ‘We might even report a little more aggressively because of this’
What is the role of a community newspaper? Is it to be loved? Or is it to hold the local power structure to account?
Maybe it’s a little bit of both, according to Eric Meyer, publisher and editor of the Marion County Record, the Kansas weekly that was recently subjected to a police raid on its office, on the home Meyer shared with his mother, retired Record publisher Joan Meyer, and the city’s vice mayor. Joan Meyer, 98, died the day after the raid, possibly due to stress stemming from the assault on her home.
Authorities, who apparently broke federal law in conducting the raid without first obtaining a subpoena, were supposedly seeking documents that it claimed the Record had illegally downloaded from a state website. The Record says it was on solid legal ground, and a state prosecutor ordered that the documents be returned to the paper. But the Record was also reporting on allegations of sexual harassment by Police Chief Gideon Cody in his previous job at the Kansas City Police Department, which may have been the real motivation the raid.
Please consider supporting this free source of news and commentary for $5 a month. Just click here.
Meyer, Record reporter Deb Gruver and Gabe Rottman, a lawyer with the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, which put together a letter signed by news organizations and press-freedom organizations, spoke last week at a virtual event organized by the New England chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists, moderated by SPJ national president Claire Regan. You can watch the entire conversation above, but here are some edited and condensed highlights.
Eric Meyer
On a home security video that shows Joan Meyer yelling at the officers who’d invaded her home, getting up in their faces and calling two of them “assholes”: “If you watch the video clip, you would say that’s a formidable woman. And she was also a very kind and gentle person who loved to help people and everything else. But she saw an injustice and she was angry about it.”
On Cody’s motives in ordering the raid: “The chief motivation is that Deb Gruver had information about him from his former co-workers that indicated he probably was somebody you wouldn’t want to have hired. To our discredit, we did not run the story [until after the raid]. We never could get anyone named on the record. This is a guy who went from Kansas City, Missouri, earning $110,000 a year, supervising dozens of people, to Marion, Kansas, supervising two people and earning $60,000 a year. You don’t usually take a $50,000-a-year pay cut, and a huge reduction in supervision, one year before you could have retired from the Kansas City Police Department. So there’s a lot of suspicion here.”
On reports such as this one in The New York Times that some people in Marion thought the Record was overly negative in its coverage: “If negative things happen, you’re going to have a lot of negative news in the paper. It is a little difficult because you have to live in the community. And I’ve been accused of trying to kill the town — that I came back here to kill the town. Well, what newspaper owner would ever want to kill the town that their newspaper is in? It just doesn’t make any sense.”
Deb Gruver
On having her cellphone physically taken from her and being forced to stand outside in the heat while officers searched the Record’s office: “I poked my head in and said, ‘Hey, it’s hot out here.’ And we’re sweating. And I’m not feeling very well. And he [one of the officers] said, ‘Yeah, you don’t look very good.’ So I said, ‘In the bottom drawer, there should be some bubbly water or whatever. Can you find it? I’d like to get something to drink.’ And it takes 20 minutes for him to get permission from Chief Cody to do that. I’m 56. I have hot flashes. My blood sugar was down because I hadn’t had anything to eat. There was no compassion shown at all. They were just enjoying that little bit of tiny power that they thought they had for a minute. And I despise him [Cody] now. I mean, I didn’t like him from the get-go. But I’m afraid of him. I’ll be honest, I’m afraid of him. I think that he is capable of doing something far worse to me. And I don’t feel great about being anywhere where he’s going to be.”
Gabe Rottman
On how unusual the raid on the Record was: “It’s kind of an odd case where the underlying facts are slightly immaterial, in the sense that these raids are so exceptionally rare that we don’t even track them. I can think of maybe four or five incidents that are possibly similar. Unless it was a journalist at the newspaper who was involved in criminal activity, unrelated to news, this just doesn’t happen. There’s a federal law in place, the Privacy Protection Act, which limits searches. There is no subpoena-first rule when you’re talking about reporting. You can only get it if you’ve got probable cause that the target committed a crime, and the crime can’t be related to news-gathering, with exceptions for national security leaks and a couple of others, neither of which are applicable here.”
Eric Meyer
On what’s next for the Record: “We’re going to publish the newspaper, and we’re going to still report the news. We might even report a little more aggressively because of this. I like to tell our staff, ‘We’re not competing with Facebook, we’re not even competing with another publication. We’re competing with Netflix. We’ve got to have something that is worth somebody’s time to read.’ And we’ve tried to do that. Our average website visit lasts about 10 and a half minutes, which, if you talk to most of the people who record such things, is a pretty phenomenal number. It’s better than The New York Times gets. And we try to give you something good solid that you can sit down with and enjoy reading.”
Hiking the Blue Hills
Great hike in the Blue Hills today led by Marc Hurwitz, our intrepid Appalachian Mountain Club guide. I hadn’t been there since I was a Cub Scout leader, and trust me, that was a very long time ago.
Leave a comment | Read comments
Two RI weeklies shut down
Two weekly newspapers in Rhode Island are shutting their doors, citing a decline in advertising revenue, according to Boston Globe reporter Amanda Milkovits (I’m quoted). The Coventry Courier and The Chariho Times are both owned by Rhode Island Suburban Newspapers, which also owns several dailies in the state — including The Call of Woonsocket, which I wrote about earlier this week.
Jazz at the MFA
Absolutely fantastic concert Thursday evening in the MFA courtyard by George W. Russell Jr. and his band. The music ranged from Ellington and Coltrane to Russell’s own compositions and showed impressive range and depth. The musicians were all first-rate; bassist Wes Wirth was particularly impressive. All except Wirth are on the faculty at the Berklee Colege of Music. And what a great venue for music.
Judge takes steps to ensure Everett’s mayor will be able to collect in his libel suit
Earlier this year I shared an astonishing story from Boston magazine about the Everett Leader Herald, which is being sued for libel by Everett Mayor Carlo DeMaria. According to Boston reporter Gretchen Voss, the paper’s editor and publisher, Josh Resnick, admitted in a deposition that he’d faked key interviews and concocted evidence in accusing DeMaria of corruption and sexual abuse.
Now Adam Gaffin of Universal Hub writes that Middlesex Superior Court Judge William Bloomer is so certain DeMaria will win that he’s frozen properties belonging to Resnek and the paper’s owners, Matthew and Andrew Philbin, so that the mayor will be able to collect damages estimated at $850,000. Bloomer wrote that DeMaria “has demonstrated a likelihood that he will recover judgment, including interest and costs.”
Candidates gang up on Ramaswamy because they just can’t stand his smug arrogance
Entertainment was hard to come by at Wednesday night’s Republican presidential debate. But to the extent that there was anything to savor, it came in the form of the attacks on Vivek Ramaswamy at the hands of Mike Pence, Nikki Haley and Chris Christie. What they needed to accomplish was to bury what was left of Ron DeSantis. Instead, they were so enraged by Ramaswamy that they focused their fire on him.
Ramaswamy was glib, smug, rude and arrogant. He also mouthed far-right talking points in a way that would do Donald Trump proud, coming out foursquare for everything bad, from coal to Russia. Although all eight candidates tried to duck a question about climate change (Haley was a wishy-washy exception), only Ramaswamy declared it to be a “hoax.” He alone would cut off U.S. aid to Ukraine, though DeSantis was heading in that direction.
Did Ramaswamy help or hurt himself? Who knows? I thought New York Times columnist David French put it well: “Everything I dislike about him, MAGA loves, and he looked more like Trump’s heir than DeSantis did.” Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo called Ramaswamy a “cocky little shit,” which wasn’t quite accurate: he’s actually pretty tall.
In case Ramaswamy is new to you, you might want to check out this profile in The New Yorker, written by Sheelah Kolhatkar. Ramaswamy, who made his fortune in biotech, has moved to the extreme right in recent years, something that hasn’t exactly endeared him to those who were once close to him. Kolhatkar writes:
I asked Ramaswamy if his burgeoning reputation as a conservative firebrand had taken a personal toll. He chose his words carefully. A family member no longer spoke to him, and he’d been ghosted by a close friend. Although he’d forged new relationships with conservatives, none of the connections had turned into friendships. “I feel like the public advocacy, or whatever you call what I’ve been doing in the last couple of years, has eroded more friendships than new friendships made up for it,” he said.
Being shunned because of your principles is one thing. Being shunned because of ambition is something else.
So who won? I thought the big winner was President Biden. Trump, too, I imagine, since he continues to dominate the Republican field and did not take part in Wednesday’s free-for-all. Other than that, I’d say Pence was the winner, sort of; he managed to get credit for standing up to Trump on Jan. 6 without being booed too loudly, as Chris Christie was, and he came across as a normal candidate — that is, if your idea of normal is an extremist who wants a nationwide ban on abortion. Another Times columnist, Ross Douthat, said of Pence’s performance: “Moral clarity, debating chops, a message frozen in amber in 1985 and a visceral hatred for Vivek Ramaswamy: It won’t get him the nomination but it made for some of the better theater of the night.” James Pindell of The Boston Globe gave Pence an A-plus.
A lot of people thought Haley did well, too. She projected as independent and even somewhat moderate, criticizing Trump for running up the debt. You’d think might hurt her chances of being chosen as Trump’s running mate, but she’s proven over and over that she’ll be whatever she thinks she needs to be.
A devastating portrayal of Elon Musk raises serious questions about capitalism run amok
Elon Musk gets the Ronan Farrow treatment in the current issue of The New Yorker. Although much of the ground covered in Farrow’s 5,500-word profile is familiar, the cumulative effect is devastating. Musk comes across as an out-of-control egomaniac with scant regard for safety at SpaceX and Tesla, his grandiosity fed by what may be his overindulgence in ketamine, described by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration as “a dissociative anesthetic that has some hallucinogenic effects.” Emotionally abused by his father, Musk has now been disowned by his daughter, who’s come out as transgender even as Elon has indulged anti-trans hate-mongering on the Platform Formerly Known as Twitter.
Farrow also offers new details about the U.S. government’s utter dependence on Starlink, Musk’s satellite internet network, which powers the Ukrainian military’s communications in its war with Russia (as well as Musk’s sucking up to Russian President Vladimir Putin), and on his rocket company, which is the sole means NASA has at the moment for launching its own satellites. The overarching picture that emerges is not just a portrait of a multi-billionaire who has way too much power, but of a culture so enamored of unfettered capitalism that it has forfeited the means to rein him in.
“There is only one thing worse than a government monopoly. And that is a private monopoly that the government is dependent on,” former NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine told Farrow. “I do worry that we have put all of our eggs into one basket, and it’s the SpaceX basket.” The same could be said of Starlink’s role in Ukraine’s war for survival or, for that matter, Musk’s opening up Twitter to disinformation about everything from COVID to election denialism.
As I was listening to the audio version of Farrow’s story, I was also thinking back to a podcast I heard a few months ago in which tech journalist Kara Swisher interviewed Walter Isaacson, who is writing a biography of Musk. Isaacson is widely respected, and I admired his biography of the late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. Yet he came across as weirdly obsequious in talking about Musk, even going so far as to take seriously Musk’s ambitions to turn Twitter into an “everything app” that would handle your financial transactions and who knows what else. Swisher, to her credit, wasn’t having any of it.
Maybe Isaacson was bluffing so that Musk wouldn’t cut off access or trash his book before it comes out (it’s scheduled for Sept. 12). I hope it turns out to be as tough-minded as his Jobs bio. In any event, Farrow has set a high bar.