Tag: artificial intelligence

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.

What’s the Colorado angle in the NPR lawsuit?; plus, a Muzzle for Quincy’s mayor, and an AI LOL

Kevin Dale, executive editor of Colorado Public Radio. Photo (cc) 2021 by Dan Kennedy.

I haven’t seen any explanation for why three public radio outlets in Colorado joined NPR in suing the Trump administration over its threat to defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. I’m glad they did, but it seems to me that all 246 member stations ought to sign on, including GBH and WBUR in Boston.

The Colorado entities, according to Ben Markus of Colorado Public Radio, are CPR (which reaches 80% of the state through a network of transmitters and translators), Aspen Public Radio and KSUT Public Radio of Ignacio, a Native American station that serves the Southern Ute Tribe.

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When I was in Colorado several years ago to interview people for the book that Ellen Clegg and I wrote, “What Works in Community News,” CPR was perhaps the largest news organization in the state, with a staff of 65 journalists. (I say “perhaps” because executive editor Kevin Dale thought one or two television stations might be bigger.) Some cuts were made last year as business challenges hit a number of public broadcasting outlets as well as NPR itself.

The basis of the lawsuit, writes NPR media reporter David Folkenflik, is that CPB is an independent, private nonprofit that is funded by Congress. The suit claims that the president has no right to rescind any money through an executive order; only Congress can do that. Moreover, the suit contends that this is pure viewpoint discrimination, as demonstrated by Trump’s own words — that NPR and PBS, which also relies on CPB funding, present “biased and partisan news coverage.”

Continue reading “What’s the Colorado angle in the NPR lawsuit?; plus, a Muzzle for Quincy’s mayor, and an AI LOL”

That AI-generated list of fake books was published by a Hearst subsidiary, 404 Media reports

Illustration — of course! — by ChatGPT

We now know more about the AI-generated slop that was published in the Chicago Sun-Times and The Philadelphia Inquirer.

According to Jason Koebler of 404 Media, the 64-page summer guide called “Heat Index” was produced by King Features, part of the Hearst chain. As Koebler reported earlier, a freelancer named Marco Buscaglia used AI to write a guide to summer books. He admitted that he did not check his work, and it turned out that most of the books don’t exist.

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Marina Dunbar reports in The Guardian that other articles in “Heat Index” may also contain AI hallucinations, including one on food and another on gardening. The Sun-Times addressed the fiasco on Tuesday but put its statement behind the paper’s paywall. That’s unacceptable, so here’s a link where you can find it. The paper says in part:

Our partner confirmed that a freelancer used an AI agent to write the article. This should be a learning moment for all of journalism that our work is valued because of the relationship our very real, human reporters and editors have with our audiences.

The Sun-Times statement also says that subscribers won’t be charged, that “Heat Index” is being removed from its e-paper version, and that various steps are being taken to improve transparency.

The Chicago Sun-Times News Guild issued a statement as well:

The Sun-Times Guild is aware of the third-party “summer guide” content in the Sunday, May 18 edition of the Chicago Sun-Times newspaper. This was a syndicated section produced externally without the knowledge of the members of our newsroom.

We take great pride in the union-produced journalism that goes into the respected pages of our newspaper and on our website. We’re deeply disturbed that AI-generated content was printed alongside our work. The fact that it was sixty-plus pages of this “content” is very concerning — primarily for our relationship with our audience but also for our union’s jurisdiction.

Our members go to great lengths to build trust with our sources and communities and are horrified by this slop syndication. Our readers signed up for work that has been vigorously reported and fact-checked, and we hate the idea that our own paper could spread computer- or third-party-generated misinformation. We call on Chicago Public Media management to do everything it can to prevent repeating this disaster in the future.

It’s interesting that most of the focus has been on the Sun-Times rather than the Inquirer, even though “Heat Index” appeared in the Inquirer last Thursday, three days before the Sun-Times, according to Herb Scribner of The Washington Post (gift link). Axios reported that the Inquirer’s publisher and CEO, Lisa Hughes, called the screw-up “a violation of our own internal policies and a serious breach.” Mostly, though, the focus has been on Chicago, where the mistake was first caught.

It’s worth noting, too, that the Sun-Times and the Inquirer are both owned by mission-oriented nonprofits — the Sun-Times by Chicago Public Media and the Inquirer by the Lenfest Institute. It shows that anyone can get caught up in this. And I don’t really blame editors at either paper for not checking, since “Heat Index” is outside content produced by a respected media organization.

Speaking of Hearst, we have not yet heard from them as to how this was allowed to happen. Because even if it was acceptable for the Sun-Times and the Inquirer not to edit the supplement, it certainly should have been thoroughly edited by King Features before it was sent out to client newspapers.

This is a story about the hazards of AI, but, even more, it’s a story about human failure.

How an AI-generated guide to summer books that don’t exist found its way into two newspapers

Illustration (cc) 2010 by Elfboy

Well, this is embarrassing. The Chicago Sun-Times and The Philadelphia Inquirer have been caught running an AI-generated guide to summer books that don’t exist. I saw some hilarious posts about it this morning on Bluesky, but I wanted to wait until there was news about what had happened.

Now we know. Jason Koebler reports for the tech site 404 Media that the feature was written (or, rather, not written) by someone named Marco Buscaglia as part of a 64-page summer guide. The section was not specific to the Sun-Times or the Inquirer but, rather, was intended for multiple client newspapers. “It’s supposed to be generic and national,” Buscaglia told Koebler. “We never get a list of where things ran.”

Buscaglia pleads guilty to using AI, too, saying, “I do use AI for background at times but always check out the material first. This time, I did not and I can’t believe I missed it because it’s so obvious. No excuses. On me 100% and I’m completely embarrassed.”

And now it’s being reported that The Philadelphia Inquirer ran the supplement, too.

The Chicago Sun-Times, a tabloid, merged several years ago with Chicago Public Media, creating a nonprofit hybrid that could compete with the larger Chicago Tribune, which has labored under cuts imposed by its hedge-fund owner, Alden Global Media.

The merger hasn’t gone particular well, though. In March, the Sun-Times reported that it would lose 20% of its staff under buyouts imposed by Chicago Public Media, which is dealing with its own economic woes. According to an article by Sun-Times reporter David Roeder, the cuts were aimed at eliminating 23 positions in a newsroom of 107.

As for the AI fiasco, the Sun-Times said on Bluesky: “We are looking into how this made it into print as we speak. It is not editorial content and was not created by, or approved by, the Sun-Times newsroom. We value your trust in our reporting and take this very seriously.”

If it wasn’t approved by the newsroom, that suggests it was an advertising supplement.

The triumph of hope over experience: The latest on how AI is not solving the local news crisis

Illustration produced by AI using DALL-E

This past weekend I listened to a bracingly entertaining conversation that the public radio program “On the Media” conducted with tech journalist Ed Zitron. Co-host Brooke Gladstone had billed it as a chance for Zitron to make sense out of DeepSeek, the new Chinese artificial-intelligence software that purports to do what ChatGPT and its ilk can do for a fraction of the cost — and, presumably, while using a fraction of the electric power burned by American AI companies.

But it was so much more than that. Maybe you’re familiar with Zitron. I wasn’t. As I learned, he is a caustic skeptic of American AI in general. In fact, he doesn’t even regard the large language models (LLMs) that we’ve come to think of as AI as the real thing, saying they are nothing but an error-prone scam that is attracting fast sums of venture capital but will never make any money. Here’s a taste:

The real damage that DeepSeek’s done is they’ve proven that America doesn’t really want to innovate. America doesn’t compete. There is no AI arms race. There is no real killer app to any of this. ChatGPT has 200 million weekly users. People say that’s a sign of something. Yes, that’s what happens when literally every news outlet, all the time, for two years, has been saying that ChatGPT is the biggest thing without sitting down and saying, “What does this bloody thing do and why does it matter?” “Oh, great. It helps me cheat at my college papers.”

And this:

When you actually look at the products, like OpenAI’s operator, they suck. They’re crap. They don’t work. Even now the media is still like, “Well, theoretically this could work.” They can’t. Large language models are not built for distinct tasks. They don’t do things. They are language models. If you are going to make an agent work, you have to find rules for effectively the real world, which AI has proven itself. I mean real AI, not generative AI that isn’t even autonomous is quite difficult.

As you can tell, Zitron has a Brit’s gift for vitriol, which made the program all the more compelling. Now, I am absolutely no expert in AI, but I was intrigued by Zitron’s assertion that LLMs are not AI, and that real AI is already working well in things like autonomous cars. (Really?) But given that we just can’t keep AI — excuse me, LLMs — from infesting journalism, I regarded Gladstone’s interview with Zitron as a reason to be hopeful. Maybe the robots aren’t going to take over after all.

Continue reading “The triumph of hope over experience: The latest on how AI is not solving the local news crisis”

A flick of the mutant wrist

Adam Gaffin has posted a hilarious find at Universal Hub — an AI-generated X-ray of a wrist published by The Boston Globe that has all kinds of problems, including a third forearm bone and finger bones that don’t actually connect to anything. It’s now been online since Dec. 19, and it persists despite some mockery on Bluesky as well as Adam’s post.

Playing with AI: Can Otter and ChatGPT produce a good-enough account of a podcast interview?

This post will no doubt have limited appeal, but a few readers might find it interesting. I’ve been thinking about how to produce summaries and news stories based on the podcast that Ellen Clegg and I host, “What Works: The Future of Local News.” The best way would be to pay a student to write it up. But is it also a task that could be turned over to AI?

Purely as an experiment, I took our most recent podcast — an interview with Scott Brodbeck, founder and CEO of Local News Now, in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C. — and turned it over to the robots.

I started by downloading the audio and feeding it into Otter, a web-based transcription service that uses AI to guess at what the speaker might actually be saying. Once I had a transcript, I took a part of it — our conversation with Brodbeck, eliminating the introduction and other features — and fed it into ChatGPT twice, once asking it to produce a 600-word summary and then again to produce a 600-word news story. Important caveat: I did very little to clean up the transcript and did not edit what ChatGPT spit out.

The results were pretty good. I’m guessing it would have been better if I had been using a paid version of ChatGPT, but that would require, you know, money. I’d say that what AI produced would be publishable if some human-powered editing were employed to fix it up. Anyway, here are the results.

The transcript

Q: Scott, so many of the projects that we have looked at are nonprofit, and that trend seems to be accelerating. In fact, we love nonprofit news, but we also worry that there are limits to how much community journalism can be supported by philanthropy. So your project is for profit. How have you made that work? Dan, do you think for profit? Digital only, local news can thrive in other parts of the country as well. Continue reading “Playing with AI: Can Otter and ChatGPT produce a good-enough account of a podcast interview?”

Northeastern news project wins $100k grant; plus, more on the Herald, and AI hell in Melrose

We have some exciting news about one of our sister projects at Northeastern University’s School of Journalism. The Scope, a professionally edited digital publication that covers “stories of hope, justice and resilience” in Greater Boston, has received a $100,000 grant from Press Forward, a major philanthropic initiative funding local news.

“Since its launch in late 2017, The Scope has become a national leader in leveraging university resources to help solve the news desert crisis. This grant is a vote of confidence in our model,” said Professor Meg Heckman in the announcement of the grant. “Rebuilding the local information ecosystem is a big job, and we’re thrilled Press Forward sees the School of Journalism as a vital part of the solution.”

Heckman has been the guiding force behind The Scope for several years now. Joining her in putting the grant application together were the school’s director, Professor Jonathan Kaufman, and Professor Matt Carroll.

The Scope was one of 205 local news outlets that will receive $20 million in grant money, according to an announcement by Press Forward on Wednesday. Several of the projects are connected in one way or another to What Works, our project on the future of local news:

• Santa Cruz Local (California), which competes with a larger and better-known startup called Lookout Santa Cruz. Santa Cruz Local co-founder Kara Meyberg Guzman and Lookout Santa Cruz founder Ken Doctor were both interviewed for the book that Ellen Clegg and I wrote, “What Works in Community News,” as well as on our podcast, “What Works: The Future of Local News.”

• The Boston Institute for Nonprofit News, an investigative project that publishes stories on its own website as well as in other outlets. Co-founder Jason Pramas has been a guest on our podcast. Several other Boston-based outlets received grants as well: the Dorchester Reporter, a 40-year-old weekly newspaper; Boston Korea, which serves the Korean American Community in Massachusetts, Rhode Island and New Hampshire; and El Planeta, a venerable Spanish-language newspaper.

• The Maine Monitor, a digital project that covers public policy and politics. Now-retired editor David Dahl has been a guest on our podcast.

• InDepthNH, published by the New Hampshire Center for Public Interest Journalism. The site focuses on public policy and politics, and its founder, Nancy West, has been a podcast guest.

• Montclair Local (New Jersey), a hyperlocal website that is one of the projects we write about in “What Works in Community News.” In 2009, the Local merged with Baristanet, one of the original hyperlocal news startups, which I wrote about in my 2013 book, “The Wired City.”

• Eugene Weekly (Oregon), an alternative weekly that suffered a near-death experience earlier this year after a former employee embezzled tens of thousands of dollars. I wrote about that here and at our What Works website.

More on the shrinking Herald

Earlier this week I wrote about the latest paid circulation figures for the Boston Herald based on its recent filings with the U.S. Postal Service. I lamented that the numbers weren’t as complete as I would have liked because the Alliance for Audited Media was no longer providing its reports for free to journalists and researchers, as it had done in the past.

Well, it turns out that I was knocking on the wrong door. I now have recent reports for both the Herald and The Boston Globe. The AAM figures don’t significantly change what I reported about the Globe, but they do fill in some gaps for the Herald.

For March 2024, the most recent AAM report that’s available, the Herald’s average weekday paid print circulation for the previous six months was 12,272, a decline of 2,247, or nearly 15.5%, compared to its March 2023 totals. Sunday paid print circulation, according to the March 2024 report, was 15,183, down 2,690, also 15%.

As I explained earlier, AAM tallies up paid digital circulation differently from a newspaper’s internal count; among other things, AAM allows for some double-counting between print and digital. Nevertheless, its digital figures are useful for tracking trends.

In the March 2024 report, according to AAM, the Herald’s total average weekday paid digital circulation was 30,009, which actually amounts to a decrease of 2,250, or about 7%, over the previous year. Sunday paid digital in March 2024 was 29,753, down 1,952, or about 6.1%.

Needless to say, that’s not the direction that Herald executives want to be moving in — although I should note that, in its September 2024 post office filing, the Herald reported a slight rise in its seven-day digital circulation compared to the previous year.

What fresh hell is this?

The Boston suburb of Melrose is not a news desert. It has a newspaper, the Melrose Weekly News. But, like many communities, it would benefit from more news than it’s getting now, especially after Gannett shuttered the venerable Melrose Free Press in 2021.

So … artificial intelligence to the rescue? In CommonWealth Beacon, Jennifer Smith introduces us to the “Melrose Update Robocast,” which uses fake voices, male and female, to talk about local issues based on information that’s fed into it to produce an AI-generated script. (Note: Smith interviewed me for the piece, though I didn’t make the cut. I’m also on CommonWealth’s editorial advisory board.)

“In a way, what I’m talking about is an act of desperation,” “Robocast” creator Tom Catalini tells Smith.

Yet all across Massachusetts, independently operated news sites with real human beings are springing up to cover local news. Community journalism is how we connect with each other, and an AI-generated podcast can’t do that.

In Medford, where I live, we haven’t had a local news source for two years. But we do have a podcast, “Medford Bytes,” hosted by two activist residents who convene important conversations about what’s going on in the city, including a recent interview with the mayor about three contentious ballot questions that would raise taxes in order to pay for schools, road repairs and a new fire station.

That’s the sound of community members talking among themselves.

A conversation with ChatGPT, given a voice by Siri, shows AI’s promise and limitations

Mike Blinder, publisher of the trade journal Editor & Publisher and the host of its vodcast, “E&P Reports,” tried something unusual recently. He hooked up ChatGPT to Siri and conducted an interview about issues related to artificial intelligence and journalism. The result is like a smarter version of Eliza, a 1960s-vintage AI program that could carry on what seemed like a realistic conversation.

Blinder has become something of an AI evangelist, using to automate some of E&P’s editorial processes and asking ChatGPT to write bios of guests on “E&P Reports.” But AI has a long way to go in terms of carrying on an intelligent conversation that’s also spontaneous.

For instance, as you’ll hear, Blinder’s approach in interviewing ChatGPT is to lead the witness with long, information-packed questions that the chatbot can then use to scour the internet and come back with a plausible-sounding answer.

I also detected at least one error. In response to a question about the possibility that AI-powered search engines will harm news organizations by removing any incentive to click through, ChatGPT says:

When AI tools like Perplexity or Chat GPT provide detailed summaries of content without directing traffic back to the original source, it creates a real challenge for news publishers who rely on page views for ad revenue and subscriptions. I completely understand the concern.

The problem is that Perplexity actually does cite its sources, which differentiates it from ChatGPT and other competitors. It’s why I suggest to my students that Perplexity is a useful tool as long as they click through, and it’s why I use it as well.

Nevertheless, Blinder’s close encounter of the robotic kind is fun and interesting. You can watch it on YouTube or subscribe on any podcast app. Blinder’s been a guest on our “What Works” podcast about local news twice, and Ellen Clegg and I were on “E&P Reports” earlier this year to talk about our book, “What Works in Community News.”

Gannett to lay off 74 employees in Mass. as it prepares to shut down its consumer site

Gannett and USA Today headquarters in McLean, Va. Photo (cc) 2008 by Patrickneil.

Gannett is laying off 74 employees in Massachusetts — but, for once, they are not people who were producing local journalism. The layoffs, which take effect Nov. 14, are related to the company’s decision to close Cambridge-based Reviewed, a website that combines consumer advice and commerce in a manner similar to Wirecutter, which is part of The New York Times.

The pending closure and layoffs were reported Aug. 26 by Mia Sato at The Verge and came amid accusations that Reviewed published articles produced by artificial intelligence and attributed to non-existent writers. Sato wrote: “As The Verge reported last fall, the marketing firm behind the Reviewed content is the same company that was responsible for a similar dust-up at Sports Illustrated, in which remarkably similar product reviews were published and attributed to freelancers.”

Gannett denied the allegations and said the decision to shut down Reviewed was based on changes in Google’s algorithms.

Aidan Ryan of The Boston Globe quotes NewsGuild of New York president Susan DeCarava in a statement:

We are deeply troubled by Gannett’s decision to shutter Reviewed. We are concerned for the future of dozens of workers represented by The NewsGuild of New York working at Reviewed, and about the broader impact of this announcement on the media industry at large.

The layoffs were announced in advance, reports Ray Schultz of Publishers Daily, because of a Massachusetts law mandating that companies provide 60 days’ notice ahead of a mass layoff.

Earlier: