It’s a spring notebook dump
Lots of links for ya
Good morning.
Like I said, when my fiancee went out of town I basically put my head down and tried to write as many pages of fiction as I could. That kind of got me out of the rhythm of writing this ol’ newsletter here.
But I still collected plenty of links for you. And I’m sure you got your dose of media business and “state of the internet” insights elsewhere.
From my vantage point, the main media news highlights from the first half of April were:
There is a lot of fear about the havoc the ad market is going to cause for businesses this year—mainly meaning that people are expecting major layoffs to come in H2.
People are bumming about the state of Vanity Fair and big media jobs. To the latter, I can say, as John Lennon once did, “The dream is over.” You know, in that same song he also said, “God is a concept / by which we measure our pain.” I think both quotes apply here.
But that wasn’t all that happened. Below you’ll find a NOTEBOOK DUMP of plenty of relevant links to keep you in the know.
One “will AI save the news?” quote
“[T]here’s a broader sense in which ‘the news,’ as a whole, is vulnerable to summary. There’s inherently a lot of redundancy in reporting, because many outlets cover the same momentous happenings, and seek to do so from multiple angles. (Consider how many broadly similar stories about the Trump Administration’s tariffs have been published in different publications recently.) There’s value in that redundancy, as journalists compete with one another in their search for facts, and news junkies value the subtle differences among competing accounts of the same events. But vast quantities of parallel coverage also enable a reader to ask a service like Perplexity, ‘What’s happening in the news today?,’ and get a pretty well-rounded and specific answer. She can explore subjects of interest, see things from many sides, and ask questions without ever visiting the website of a human-driven news organization.
The continued spread of summarization could make human writers—with their own personalities, experiences, contexts, and insights—more valuable, both as a contrast to and a part of the A.I. ecosystem…But there’s no getting around the money problem. Even if readers value human journalists and the results they produce, will they still value the news organizations—the behind-the-scenes editors, producers, artists, and businesspeople—on which A.I. depends? It’s quite possible that, as A.I. rises, individual voices will survive while organizations die. In that case, the news could be hollowed out. We could be left with A.I.-summarized wire reports, Substacks, and not much else.”
This is from a very good New Yorker piece called “Will A.I. Save The News?” by Joshua Rothman. There’s no answers in this piece but it looks at the current state of A.I. and content creation and information curation in a nuanced way. The more time I spend using ChatGPT and building GPTs of my own to test how they can do different tasks, the more I’m convinced we have maybe 3-5 years left before how the internet functions in terms of how we get information and spend our time becomes totally different.
Links to clear out the notebook
This is a good interview with Zach Seward who is the editorial director of AI initiatives at the New York Times. Seward is also in the Rothman piece above. I really recommend reading this too.
Digiday spoke to some cherry-picked sources to talk about how much happier they are after moving off Substack. Substack has its issues but it solves so many problems for so many types of creators and small businesses that it is going to be around for a while.
Why do I think Substack will be around for a while? Because it's the perfect place to go when you inevitably lose your TV show!
The Google legal saga will drag out but the last pillar of the internet of most of our formative years is very close to falling.
Dotdash Meredith is getting into the app game with People. Dotdash is usually pretty strategic and prudent so I’m interested to see how this plays out. I may even download the app out of curiosity.
The Washington Post might try out micropayments. Man, people have been talking about this one for years. I feel like people should just embrace the Guardian model if they want to do this.
This was a good piece about how the backbone of Facebook is really the Marketplace.
As our economy suffers self-inflicted wounds, the beginnings of a class war may be starting with…the influencer class?
Yahoo hired a new CMO. They’re doing lots of things over there. Not sure what it's all going to amount to.