✉️
This article was originally published in Medians' 10 Links newsletter, sent every other Monday at 2pm. Sign up here!
- PLATFORMS (Medians) — Faced with the volatility of social media, could Reddit offer a solution? News organizations are strengthening their presence there, and the platform is courting them, launching new tools for media outlets, for example. While the opportunity might be interesting, beware of depending on yet another tech firm that claims to love journalism.
- AI (Gina Chua) — Can AI edit articles? Gina Chua, editor-in-chief at Semafor, describes how she designed three bots to assist her: one tests the strength of the angle, another handles structure and pacing, and the last tracks contradictions and clunky passages. A reflection on the role of editing and copy editors — which goes far beyond simple spell-checking — in the age of automation.
- AI (Reuters Institute) — Some promised that AI would free journalists from time-consuming tasks; a recent Reuters Institute study seems to suggest the opposite:
P.S. To learn more about the impact of AI in the workplace, you can read the work of Juan Sebastián Carbonell or Matteo Pasquinelli who demonstrate how it can contribute to degrading working conditions rather than improving them.
- PLATFORMS (TechCrunch) — In recent years, platforms for independent creators (like Substack) have gradually adopted the social media model… along with the addictive mechanisms that come with it. Beehiiv claims to stand out, describing itself as a tool provider that offers more control. But beware seductive pitches: independence remains limited with proprietary tools.
- INTERNET (The Verge) — Facing a standardized and optimized internet, indie web is making a comeback: handcrafted websites, sometimes weird, imperfect, but deeply personal. More than a nostalgic aesthetic, it's a rejection of algorithms, AI, and platform logic in favor of tight-knit communities. No SEO or optimized mobile version, but a desire to build your own little corner of the web.
- INDEPENDENCE (Médor) — A gagging procedure, designed to intimidate and exhaust them: this is how Médor describes the complaint filed in 2019 by Socfin (held by the Bolloré group and Hubert Fabri) following the publication of an investigation about it. Six years of proceedings that resulted in a dismissal, not a word from Socfin, but a significant impact on the media outlet's finances.
- LOCAL MEDIA (Library Newsroom Project) — Making libraries a vast network of local, participatory micro-media: that's the idea behind the Library Newsroom Project in the United States. In Brooklyn, the initiative gave rise to the Sunset Park Sun, a newsletter co-produced with residents in local libraries, blending neighborhood history, civic investigations, and profiles of local businesses.
- DISINFORMATION (The Bureau of Investigative Journalism) — $300,000: that's the sum an influencer claims to have earned by running Facebook pages spreading racist, anti-immigration and Islamophobic videos generated by AI. His target: British retirees. A formula he sells through online courses, accelerating the creation of these pages and groups.
- TOOLS (Slop Evader) — The proliferation of AI-generated content is enough to make anyone paranoid. This plugin offers a solution: it lets you browse a "pre-AI" web by filtering out everything published after November 2022, when ChatGPT launched. Radical, sure, but terribly effective for escaping "slop" (mediocre drivel).
- FORMAT (DOCTYPE) — Do you remember those magazines from the 80s-90s that offered code to type in to get a mini-game or software? DOCTYPE takes up this concept by offering to transcribe HTML from a small paper magazine (no PDF to avoid copy-paste). A way to explore physical distribution of digital tools and (re)learn programming differently.
