The A.V. Club’s AI-Generated Articles Are Copying Directly From IMDb
I’ve enjoyed human-written A/V Club articles in the past. I see no reason to seek out articles written by bots that copy existing material word-for-word and add no value. The company G/O, mentioned in the clip below, owns the A.V. Club and is behind the shift to bot-authored articles: “A/V Club [sic] licenses content from…
What It Means If You’re A ‘Paragraph Texter’
A very fluffy article that does a good job diving into an everyday thing and sharing expert opinions. While some of these sources are simply random people, others have specialized skills and training that makes their opinions newsworthy enough to provide some substance to a not-exactly-hard-news story. Some of us just can’t get our thoughts…
UNC student newspaper goes viral for coverage of campus shooting
As Emmy Martin was locked down Monday afternoon on the UNC-Chapel Hill campus, with police searching nearby for an “armed and dangerous person,” she was simultaneously terrified and clear-headed. Her “pulse through the roof,” she already had identified her escape route. But as the editor-in-chief of The Daily Tar Heel, she also was reporting and…
‘New York Times’ considers legal action against OpenAI as copyright tensions swirl
Be careful of the parts of news stories that rely on ifs and coulds and maybes. Having said that, this is fascinating exploration of what’s at stake. It’s a fact that OpenAI’s business model involved training its large-language model on copyrighted material, without acquiring legal permission to do so, and without any mechanism to share…
Media Bias Chart version 11, Aug 2023 — Journalism sorted by bias (Left / Center / Right), reliability (Fact vs Fabrication) and medium (Web/Text, Video/TV, and Audio/Podcast/Radio) (Ad Fontes Media)
Whether a source is biased towards the left or right is not as important as to whether the story depends on facts and fact-dense analysis (best), fact-supported and fair opinions (okay), or taunts, propaganda, and fabrications (fringe stuff that’s harmful to our civic well-being). This version of the Ad Fontes chart shifts the AP a…
Police stage ‘chilling’ raid on Marion County newspaper, seizing computers, records and cellphones
The Marion County Record reported that restaurant owner Kari Newell kicked their staff out of a public forum last week. When a third party told the paper that same restaurant owner had a DUI conviction that could have affected her eligibility to get a liquor license, the paper chose not to run the story. “We…
My meeting was cancelled, so I spent the morning assembling a cabinet for a Little Free Library & student publications display by the elevator near my office. #Humanities @eye.contact.shu @setonianonline
Influencers overtaking journalists as news source: report
TikTok influencers and celebrities are increasingly taking over from journalists as the main source of news for young people, according to a report published Wednesday by the Britain-based Reuters Institute. The figures were based on interviews with some 94,000 people across 46 countries, conducted for the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, part of…
Proofreading matters. (For the record, Blanche actually said, “We most certainly enter a plea of not guilty.”)
I make mistakes on my blog all the time. But I’m not CNN. (Check out the line under the photo.) Yes, that’s right… that blue box is missing an important word.
Not sure whether I should be proud or embarrassed…
As part of a journalism lesson about brand names, I just wrote this sentence: The term “Winnebago Vista” is a rollicking road trip for the ear, and no oath was ever minced with more tangy intensity than we find in the fricative phonemes of “Cheez-It.” I’ll probably murder that darling tomorrow, but right now I’m…
Frisbee is a brand name, but how newsworthy is that?
What would you do? Today I wrote 192 lines of ChoiceScript code to address this journalism lesson.
Making a journalism game to teach myself ChoiceScript
Me: (Making a journalism game to teach myself ChoiceScript.)
Nobody:
Me: Maybe I should add a “current time” display.
Nobody:
Me: And I should code up all the special cases for a.m., p.m., noon and midnight, to match AP Style.
Nobody:
Me: How long could it take?
(Six hours later….)
Media Bias Chart version 11 — Journalism sorted by bias (Left / Center / Right), reliability (Fact vs Fabrication) and medium (Web/Text, Video/TV, and Audio/Podcast/Radio) (Ad Fontes Media)
The very useful “media bias chart” is one of several useful ways to classify sources of journalism. While individual items published by any of these sources can vary considerably from the general location depicted in this chart, the takeaway message is that journalism can still be valid and useful even if it has a slant,…
Headlines matter. Were they migrants, people who happened to be at a migrant center, pedestrians, or manslaughter victims?
Do the headlines encourage empathy, or do they “other” the victims of crime? (Click to zoom in.)
Requiem for the Newsroom
When I worked at a radio news station in the late 80s, when I was about 20, I would often saunter into the newsroom a half hour before my shift started, so that I could sit down with a sandwich and a bottle of apple juice, and page through the newsroom’s copies of The Washington…
AP Style tips on “neurodiversity”
National Mall site approved for memorial to fallen journalists
Federal officials have approved a site on the National Mall for the capital’s first memorial dedicated to journalists who have died while reporting the news and to the role of the free press in a democracy, the foundation planning the project announced Monday. The Fallen Journalists Memorial will be located on a third-of-an-acre parcel in…
Here’s to the grim-based photojournalist who saved my bacon ~35 years ago
Here’s to you, grim-faced photojournalist who waited just long enough to make sure 20-year-old me learned an important lesson, before saving me from the consequences of my own poor planning. Every day on the job, I’m trying to pay it forward. In 1989, I was an intern in a crowd of media professionals covering…
NPR quits Twitter after being falsely labeled as ‘state-affiliated media’
NPR will no longer post fresh content to its 52 official Twitter feeds, becoming the first major news organization to go silent on the social media platform. In explaining its decision, NPR cited Twitter’s decision to first label the network “state-affiliated media,” the same term it uses for propaganda outlets in Russia, China and other…