Tag: media

If You Trust AI, You’re Asleep. (At Least You’re Not “Woke”)

Today brought so many stories worth “notes and observations” that I thought I’d try something new – a flash newsletter of sorts, with commentary on stories that pushed my eyebrows up a bit more than usual. Each of these items is worth a full-fledged long-form piece, but it’s Friday, so let’s be brief:

Do You Trust OpenAI? Over the past two years I’ve been warning that when it comes to long promised “user agents” that work on our behalf, AI companies would inevitably adopt the big tech playbook of providing centralized services that they control, ensuring that consumers are dependent on their platforms and by extension, locked into their services. This architecture is anathema to true innovation in a modern data economy, but inevitable given the capital constraints of current AI models. Well, this morning brought news of OpenAI’s “Agent,” which purports to “take over” our computers and take action on our behalf. As I’ve asked, over and over, is this the way we want the future to unfold? Who exactly do we think OpenAI’s agent really works for? Hint: It’s not us, anymore than Facebook, Amazon, or Google ended up working for us.

Read More
3 Comments on If You Trust AI, You’re Asleep. (At Least You’re Not “Woke”)

SIGN UP FOR THE NEWSLETTER

Stay up to date on the latest from BattelleMedia.com

Nearly 30 % of All Bullsh*t Online Is Health Related

 

Every so often I have the chance to catch up with Gordon Crovitz and Steve Brill, the founders of NewsGuard. I was an advisor to their company for several years, and we keep in touch, as we share something of an obsession around the decline of journalism and the related erosion of fact-based information online. Both Crovitz and Brill have long and storied careers in “traditional” media – Brill started American Lawyer and CourtTV and authored countless pieces of long form reporting, and Crovitz was the former publisher of The Wall Street Journal.

NewsGuard launched as something of a bullshit detector during the ascendence of social media eight years ago. The company’s first product created “reliability ratings” of news and information-based websites. Not surprisingly, the company immediately became a target of the far right media ecosystem, and remains one today.

Read More
Leave a comment on Nearly 30 % of All Bullsh*t Online Is Health Related

The Standard, Part 2: “The Internet Weekly”

Fourth in a series. Previous installments: 

The Standard, Part 1 

Read More
Leave a comment on The Standard, Part 2: “The Internet Weekly”

Get Wired: The Launch (1992-93)

The launch issue of Wired.

(continuation of a previous post)

If you ever have a hit on your hands, my advice is to take notes. Living in the whirlwind of blinding success is a little like experiencing your own wedding – everyone tells you to enjoy it, to remember every detail. But decades later, all you can recall is leaving the reception, relieved that everyone seemed to have a good time. 

Read More
5 Comments on Get Wired: The Launch (1992-93)

Tech Used To Be Magical. Why Isn’t It Anymore?

I’ll ask you kindly to get the fuck off my lawn now.

I’ve been pondering something for a while now, but have held off “thinking out loud” about it because I was worried I might sound like a guy yelling at the kids to get off his lawn. But f*ck it, this is my site, and I think it’s time to air this one out: Technology isn’t delivering on the magic anymore. Instead, it feels like a burden, or worse.

For decades, digital technology delivered magical moments with a regularity that inspired evangelical devotion. For me, the very first of these moments came while using a Macintosh in 1984. Worlds opened up as that cursor tracked my hand’s manipulation of the mouse. Apple’s graphical user interface – later mimicked by Microsoft – was astonishing, captivating, and open ended. I was a kid in college, but I knew culture, business, and society would never be the same once entrepreneurs, hackers, and dreamers starting building on Apple’s innovations.

Read More
12 Comments on Tech Used To Be Magical. Why Isn’t It Anymore?

My Morning Paper

Nearly every conversation I’ve had over the past month has involved some variation of this question: What are you reading right now? The question isn’t about fiction, or even books – it’s about news. Most of my friends and colleagues are trying to avoid reading (or watching) too much of it – we all know the Trump playbook, and if he’s going to flood the zone with shit, well, best to stay out of the zone.

Yesterday I was having lunch with a fellow islander, a man whose built his career in marketing and communications. He asked the same question, and mentioned he’s been dissatisfied with the usual fare consumed by members of our tribe – the Times, the Post, the New Yorker et al – the “mainstream, liberal media” as defined by our current leaders. I agreed – and told him I’d recently cancelled my Post subscription (the whole Bezos thing is getting to be too much) and that I rarely read full Times pieces unless they’ve been forwarded to me, usually via email or text. I’ve been off Twitter for over two years, and BlueSky is better, but my feed has become a litany of complaint, which isn’t exactly helpful.

So what do you read, he asked again? I mean, really read? And that’s when it hit me: I read my inbox. Over the past decade or so, it’s become my morning (and afternoon, and evening) paper.  I want a filter between me and the media, and I wanted that filter to be made up of humans and brands that I trust. As a medium, email is tempered – I only get things I’ve opted into getting. There’s no algorithm or AI, spam gets deleted instantly, and I chose what I open, and when I open it. It’s pretty much the opposite of how our current media ecosystem works. When the newsletters from mainstream media come in, I’ll browse them, but I rarely click through. Instead, my diet consists of a lot of individuals, and a ton of niche newsletters.

Read More
2 Comments on My Morning Paper

What’s SearchGPT Really About? Moving Past the Training Data Dilemma.

This morning we awoke to one story dominating the tech news landscape: OpenAI is “expanding into search,” launching SearchGPT, a prototype that appears to be a direct competitor to Google (and Bing and Perplexity, not that they really matter). But despite the voluminous coverage, my initial take is that once the hype cycle passes – I give it a day or two – OpenAI’s true goal will emerge: fixing the optics of its approach to training data.

The company doesn’t have the resources to take on Google on its core turf. So why announce SearchGPT now? This is speculation, but I’d wager it’s because the company is in a perilous place. It built its business – one that could lose up to $5 billion this year – by scarfing up the entire Internet, mostly without permission. It’s facing a serious backlash from both established publishers and governments. In response, it’s been busy cutting deals with as many partners as it can, and this search prototype feels driven by those optics.

Read More
1 Comment on What’s SearchGPT Really About? Moving Past the Training Data Dilemma.

Wrestling With The Gray Lady

Find the Search button…

The other day my wife and I heard a report on our local public radio station that mentioned the Biden Administration’s American Climate Corps (ACC) initiative, a new program seeking to recruit 20,000 young people into jobs on the front line of the climate crisis. Modeled on Franklin Roosevelt’s Depression-Era Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), the program is a signature element of Biden’s response to what anyone with a pulse knows is the most pressing issue of our day: we’re destroying the planet through misguided economic incentives.

But despite the fact that the ACC was launched with much fanfare last Fall, my wife and I had never heard of it. We have three young adult children whose future feels in doubt because of climate change, and they’d never heard of it either – not a good sign for a program that hopes to recruit tens of thousands of people just like them. All five of us feel like we’re reasonably well informed. I mean, we read The New York Times, don’t we?

Read More
1 Comment on Wrestling With The Gray Lady

No. TV Advertising Is Not Going to Become “Performance Driven”

Remember the “year of mobile”? That was the five-year period from roughly 2007 to 2012, when industry pundits annually declared that everything was about to change because of the smart phone. Mobile eventually did come to dominate the marketing landscape, but the shift took far longer than anyone expected.

I’m starting to think we’re in a similar cycle with streaming – only the transition from cable to digital television has taken far longer, and has been far, far messier.  I recall editing the February, 1994 cover story for Wired, in which we asked – thirty years ago! – if advertising as we knew it was finally dead. We opened that piece with a futuristic scenario in which advertising had changed completely:

Read More
Leave a comment on No. TV Advertising Is Not Going to Become “Performance Driven”

The Messenger Deserved Its Demise. Its Staff? Not So Much

Well that didn’t go well.

I predicted the death of Jimmy Finkelstein’s The Messenger as soon as I read about its impending launch back in March of last year. At the time I had just soft-landed The Recount and was licking three decades of wounds related to launching, running, selling and shuttering digital media startups. And lo! Here was a guy claiming he was going to solve all of digital media’s woes with…what exactly? “Polyperspectivity”?! (No, really, that’s what they called their approach to news coverage.) And a business model ripped from the pages of Business Insider, circa 2012? I was already shaking my head, but then I read this:

“Richard Beckman, a former president of The Hill and Condé Nast who will be The Messenger’s president, said in an interview that the company planned to generate more than $100 million in revenue next year, primarily through advertising and events, with profitability expected that year.”

Read More
Leave a comment on The Messenger Deserved Its Demise. Its Staff? Not So Much