Posts in Journalism (20 found)
Jim Nielsen 3 weeks ago

My Om Malik Story

If you have’t heard, Om Malik passed away . People are sharing stories of their graceful encounters with him. This one is mine. Back at the beginning of 2021, I set a goal to write 72 blog posts . I was puttering along, publishing whatever came to mind, mostly figuring that nobody was reading any of it. But that was ok. The process was therapeutic and it helped clarify my professional thinking, so I kept going. One day on Twitter I got a DM from someone with the handle . “I don’t know who this is,” I thought, “but damn that is a great handle!” Then I peaked at the follower count: over 1 million! “WTF? Who is this???” I thought. I’d never — then or since — been contacted by someone with such a high profile online. How was I even on this person’s radar? I continued on to his message: Jim I wanted to thank you for your blog. I am neither a developer or a designer but appreciate the web, the open web and in general normal, common sense writing from experts. I have quietly enjoyed your work — and hope you hit the target of 72 posts in 2021. My highly selfish ask, as I know it will feed my brain good important stuff. Have a wonderful weekend and a great writing year I was flabbergasted. Who was this person with such a high follower count saying such kind words and I’d never heard of him? I quickly went to Google. He had his own Wikipedia . “Om Malik…tech writer…founded Gigaom!” Ah-ha! I knew Gigaom the company/blog . It shaped a lot of my early exposure to the tech beat. I devoured it. I can still picture the logo in my head! Now I knew the man behind it. Knowledge unlocked! I thanked him graciously for taking the time to send a message whose importance seemed incredibly lopsided in my favor. I quote his message here because I still think about it on occasion. His words then (as well as later ones ) continue to lift me up on days when I feel like an imposter. They remind me of the power of a small act of kindness, even within such a vast world wide web. I still think about his words. I still think about him . I’m sure many will for some time. And that is a legacy. Reply via: Email · Mastodon · Bluesky

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DHH 4 weeks ago

The Rape of Britain

Rupert Lowe, member of the British Parliament and leader of the Restore Britain party, released The Rape Gang Inquiry yesterday. It details the industrial-scale sexual atrocities committed by predominantly Pakistani Muslims against mostly White British girls in the United Kingdom over decades. It's the stuff of nightmares.  In fact, it's so grim, so vile, and so dark that I can't in good conscience recommend reading the graphic details directly (even just a summary of the accounts is traumatizing). But at the same time, you can't look away either. The report estimates that 250,000 British girls have been victims of these rape gangs over the decades. It's an unimaginable scale of horrors. The closest comparison to these accounts is the atrocities committed during times of war, but somehow this seems worse: The terror did not come as a result of losing an armed conflict, but aided and abetted by the national institutions sworn to serve and protect. From the report: Police forces ignored repeated reports, criminalised victims instead of perpetrators, destroyed evidence, and allowed known rapists to walk free on bail.  Social care services undermined protective parents, placed children in trafficking hubs inside children’s homes, closed cases despite clear indicators of exploitation, and retaliated against whistleblowers.  The NHS recorded genital injuries, multiple sexually transmitted infections in children as young as 13, pregnancies caused by rape, and suicide attempts, yet discharged victims back to their abusers without safeguarding referrals or trauma care.  Schools observed older men collecting girls at the gates, heard disclosures of rape on school premises, and responded by excluding victims rather than protecting them.  Taxi licensing authorities renewed permits for drivers who formed the logistical backbone of the networks and collapsed in the face of organised protests when basic safety measures were proposed. But that's the collective, general assignment of complicity. The specific examples are so much worse. I promise I won't haunt you with more, but here's just one example from the report: When Fiona's mother called the police to report her daughter missing and mentioned a history of abuse by Asian men, the call handler told her: “You can’t describe them as Asian men because that’s racist. You should just be glad your child is being taught a different culture.” On one occasion, a police officer returned Fiona to the house where the abuse was occurring and told the men to “have fun with her.” On another occasion, police instructed the abusers that if they could persuade Fiona to sign herself out of care, the police would stop bothering them. Now let me touch on two related topics. First, the BBC reported yesterday that trust in traditional media is plummeting in many places, but the fall in Britain has been particularly steep:  The research published on Tuesday suggests that public trust worldwide is at 37%, three points down on this time last year. In the UK, it has fallen by five points to 30% - 20 points lower than 10 years ago. So in 2016, half of Brits had trust in traditional media, like the BBC. Now that's down to 30%. Grim. So imagine my surprise when I couldn't find a single mention of The Rape Gang Inquiry on the BBC's news site from neither yesterday nor today. You don't have to be Sherlock Holmes to deduce a connection between narrative-driven coverage (and absence of it!) and lower trust.  Second is how the UK wants to track everyone's social media use under the guise of restricting access to those under 16. Which requires every adult to verify they're of age by providing a digital ID, passport, or credit card. Thus ending any hope of anonymity online. All wrapped in Protect The Children dressing. So a state that not only failed to prevent these sexual atrocities, but in many cases abetted the horrors, now wants to end anonymity online to "protect children", so it can prosecute even more regime critics? The same country that leads the world with 12,000 yearly arrests for online speech already? It's painfully on the nose. It's tragic what the Brits have had and continue to endure. They deserve so much better. Especially these abused children detailed in Lowe's report. And making them wait much longer is a dangerous cocktail.

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Heather Burns 1 months ago

The Nerve of this woman

Scan your eyeballs, think of the children: how Britain sells surveillance as safety I wrote for The Nerve about the past fortnight in UK tech policy. I know a lot of people expected me to have a lot of things to say about what’s happened, but here’s the thing: aside from that article, there is […]

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Dan Moore! 1 months ago

AI Can’t Care

I saw one post recently discussing how AI can’t substitute for judgment . There are many others if you search. And they all make an interesting argument. But to me what feels more true is that AI can’t substitute for caring . AI doesn’t care if the answer’s right or wrong. It doesn’t care if you were led down a rabbit hole only to find a dead end. It doesn’t care if a reader wasted their time or got a response that doesn’t actually address their question or need. However, AI is good at giving feedback, checking details, and letting you create more quickly. AI should be used to help you draft but never publish. Use AI as a thought partner, a research assistant, someone who can help give you synonyms, reword a tough passage, review your work; but never take something AI creates and just publish it. Why? AI can’t care. But caring about your reader is the root of communication. You can feel it when someone doesn’t care about their audience. We’ve all seen those LinkedIn posts full of emojis, or blog posts that have a smell that screams AI. That doesn’t mean the concepts explored are useless. It doesn’t indicate that the poster is incorrect. It doesn’t mean the post is not going to get engagement. A post that AI creates may get seen or shared. But it also devalues the reader. When someone does this, it means they don’t give a damn. They don’t care enough to realize what they’re putting out there is not valuing their readers’ time. Why would you pay attention to someone who doesn’t care about your time? Everyone who reads something online, whether they scan it or read it deeply, is giving you the precious gift of their time. Even oil we can make more of . But not time. So use AI as a tool to help you move faster. But don’t forget to care about what you publish. That means carefully reviewing AI output to ensure correctness. Otherwise you’re burning your reader’s trust.

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Tara's Website 1 months ago

Spring 2026 updates

Spring 2026 updates Servus from … a random hotel. I’m sitting cross-legged on the bed in my pyjamas, laptop on my legs. Mx Liebe is sitting beside me, a reminder that he is part of my portable home. I glance outside the window. The sun is starting to set, that small daily proof that the days are getting longer. Outside there is a large walled lorry park, all its lights turned on: a safe place for drivers to spend the night before entering their final destination.

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Justin Duke 1 months ago

Network

It is perhaps embarrassing to admit that I had never seen Network , and this year — its fiftieth anniversary — felt as good a time as any, especially considering how intimately familiar I already was with the film's plot, its two capstone monologues, and its general influence on culture and, if not journalism itself, then the lens through which we view journalism. And now, having watched it and spent a few days really chewing on what I thought and what I think it means, I have arrived at an idiosyncratic answer: Institutions, even the ones we revere, will be consumed by forces greater than human understanding. And in so doing, they also consume anyone who has devoted themself fully to those institutions. The film opens with Howard Beale becoming a childless widower whose sole identity is suddenly that of his news broadcast. Max Schumacher's fall from grace coincides with an off-screen decision not to go with his wife to Seattle to visit his pregnant daughter — instead staying behind in New York to work the news. Paddy Chayefsky himself, for all his great work, was a tyrant with an anger management problem: an absent husband and an absent father. There is only one character in this film who conducts herself with anything approaching grace and dignity: Beatrice Straight, playing Max's wife, who won her Oscar for a five-minute monologue and then is never seen from again. It is easy and natural to declare Beale and Jensen's rants as prophetic — they are great bits of writing performed radically well — but they are performances by madmen, meant to persuade and to dazzle. Straight is the one whose message is worth keeping close to our heart: Then get out, go to a hotel, go anywhere you want, go live with her, but don't come back! Because after twenty-five years of building a home and raising a family and all the senseless pain we've inflicted on each other, I'll be damned if I'll just stand here and let you tell me you love somebody else! [...] Is that what's left for me? Is that my share? She gets the great winter passion, and I get the dotage? Am I supposed to sit at home knitting and purling till you slink back like a penitent drunk? I'm your wife, damn it! If you can't work up a winter passion for me, then the least I require is respect and allegiance! I'm hurt! Don't you understand that? I'm hurt badly! And the most fascinating choice made by the film is the decision not to end with Max's renunciation of Diana — to treat him slinking back sheepishly to his wife and family like the resolution of a B-plot rather than a salvation. As great as the final two scenes of the film are, they reveal that the rot Chayefsky depicts in his film's universe has spread to him as well. Because as soon as a character leaves the newsroom, they are nobody at all to him.

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A Room of My Own 2 months ago

Rediscovering Physical Journaling and Creative Pursuits

It’s been over a month since my last blog post. I had decided to step away for a bit and focus on the physical world around me, as I felt like I was living too much inside my digital artifacts. And once you step away from writing for a while, it slowly becomes easier and easier not to write anything at all. Every now and then I’ll come across a topic and think, this would make a good blog post , and then immediately stop myself from writing it. Part of that is probably the thought of, who actually cares what I write anyway? But every so often I get a lovely email from someone who read one of my posts and resonated with it, or someone signs my guestbook, which I always appreciate. And then I remember that while it’s a small community, there are people out there who relate to what I write in the same way I relate to what others write. I also stepped away from my RSS feed for a while. I subscribe to a lot of personal blogs, and I needed a break from that too, so I deleted my RSS reader from my phone. A few weeks ago, though, I reinstalled it and slowly started catching up with some of my favourite bloggers. I really admire people who blog regularly. I think it helps with formulating thoughts and making sense of things over time. But one unexpectedly good outcome of stepping back from digital spaces was rediscovering paper journaling. I’ve always journaled, literally ever since I learned how to write. Last year, though, I experimented with voice journaling using an app called Untold. I actually enjoyed it quite a lot. It was easy to put my headphones on while driving to or from work and just dump my thoughts into the app. The recordings stayed there, and the app would surface patterns and reflections over time. One thing it did particularly well was reminding me about things I’d said weeks earlier. It would notice recurring themes and say things like, “You mentioned this was one of the most important factors for your wellbeing.” In my case, it kept circling back to something that feels embarrassingly superficial but is clearly important to me - feeling comfortable within a weight range that feels acceptable to me. I hadn’t even realised how often I talked about it until the app pointed it out. There were genuinely useful insights in there. But there was also a lot of AI slop. At one point my daughter, who is nine, joined me while I was recording. I jokingly said something like, “My daughter doesn’t need me anymore,” and she immediately replied, “How dare you? I always need you.” After that, the app became obsessed with this interaction. It kept bringing it up in these deeply earnest reflections like: “How did you feel when your daughter strongly expressed her need for you?” We still laugh and joke about it. What I eventually realised, though, is that speaking thoughts into an app does not affect my wellbeing in the same way writing on paper does. So during this little “detox” period, I started carrying around a composition notebook again. I journal in it several times a week, and also whenever I’m upset or need to untangle something in my head. I’m already halfway through it. And honestly, it’s done wonders for me. At the same time, I think I’ve finally reached a point where I’m comfortable with my overall journaling system. I now treat Day One as my single source of truth. Everything eventually ends up there in some form. I freely journal on paper without worrying about digitising things immediately. Then at the end of each month, I scan the handwritten entries into their corresponding dates in Day One. ▶︎ Sidenote on PDFs in Day One I tag those entries as “paper journal” and leave them attached to the relevant dates so they’ll pop up in “On This Day” memories years from now. Day One has basically become the archive of my life. Photos, voice notes, things my kids said, books I’ve read, emails I want to keep, random memories - it all goes there eventually. At the end of every month I also export both the JSON and PDF versions for backup. It took a long time to get to this point. I’d been struggling with a journaling project where I scanned all my journal entries from the past five years - the journals that are here with me in New Zealand. A lot of my other journals are back home in Bosnia, from a time when I journaled far more than I do now. That will be a big project for someday, and I’m still not sure I’ll tackle it. But I have the last five years sorted, and I’m gradually gathering the courage to let those paper journals go now that they’re safely scanned and backed up. It was a big project, and I resented myself a little for the compulsion to do it at all. But something that came out of my time away was a realization: even though none of these things make any difference to anyone but me, they are my creative outlet. They are what I want to do. But as a mother and a wife working full-time, it is surprisingly difficult to justify taking time for creative pursuits that don’t obviously “produce” anything. I constantly feel the need to defend (to myself) the time I spend organising journals, building albums, preserving memories, or writing things nobody may ever read. Which brings me to the actual reason I wanted to write this post. I’ve started working on my novel again. A few years ago I finished a draft and paid for a professional manuscript assessment. The assessor gave me detailed chapter-by-chapter feedback: what worked, what didn’t, what needed restructuring, and what was already strong. I remember reading the assessment excitedly and importing all the notes into Dabble Writer (the writing app I moved to after Scrivener, though that’s probably a post for another time.) I organised everything carefully, set it all up properly… and then abandoned it completely. That was almost four years ago. Two weeks ago I opened the project again. And this time I want to approach it differently. I want to stop treating creative work as something indulgent that needs to be earned after every practical responsibility has been fulfilled. I want to keep journaling the way I do now, keep feeding things into my “single source of truth,” and stop overthinking whether any of it is productive enough to deserve my time. I’ll end this post with a quote from Cheryl Richardson’s latest post - something I saved as my guiding quote for May. I’ve learned something important by not postponing joy: Nothing catastrophic happens when you make pleasure a higher priority in your daily life. Instead, it softens the edges of the day, stretches time in the most delicious way, and reminds us that life isn’t something to be earned—it’s something to be lived.

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iDiallo 2 months ago

Hi stranger

I'm at home, sitting on the kitchen table. I just took my boys to school and I'm about to start my work. I'm writing this message directly to you. And you are reading it. Hello! Isn't that funny? I've been trying to write consistently, and it gives the impression that I am this serious person with some serious insights. But no, I'm just writing. Sometimes you respond, you send a nice email, other times it's complete silence. It ends up being like an entry in a journal, for me to stumble upon at a later date and reflect: "Oh yeah, that's what I was thinking that day." My job is a 2 hour drive away, so I rent an office close by. There I can focus and clearly delineate work time from home time. I don't like working when I'm home with my family. So I have some time to talk to you. Last year, I spent some time digging through my server logs to find who is reading me. I wanted to know who you are, and why you are interested in reading me? But I can't get an answer from just reading the logs. Instead what I found is that you and most other people come here via RSS. My rough count shows that there are 10,000 of you, or at least 10,000 unique IP addresses that ping the websites whenever I write something new. There are around 2,000 people subscribed via popular RSS readers like feedbin or Feedly. 1,500 of you also subscribe via email which I have neglected this year. It's weird because this data is invisible most of the time. I forget that when I write something, anything, the odds are that someone will find it intriguing. In fact when I look deeper into the logs, I see people are referred by other blogs I never heard about. And they mention me by name, "and then Ibrahim said this or that." It feels so personal. I often forget that this is all so human. That, what we call the small web is people not just writing, but telling us something. When I have an insight, or read something interesting, I'm telling you about it. Not directly, but in an asynchronous way. You get to know or read about it on your own terms. The small web has never died, it feels like it did at some point because it has remained small. But I don't think I want it to become any bigger, or any louder. It's right where it's supposed to be. I'm breaking the 4th wall today just to say Hi. How are you? I hope you are doing well. The world is weird sometimes, but you are not invisible. I see you. I hope you are having a good day.

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Alex White's Blog 2 months ago

Photo Journal - Day 3

Life has been busy and I missed the past 2 days, but thankfully I remembered to bring the camera with me today! I snuck out in the brief calm between rain storms, don't particularly want to test how waterproof my camera is. ↑ This is the side of the building I'm coworking in today. ↑ Sometimes I really wish I had a macro lens! ↑ I love how this one turned out.

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Manuel Moreale 2 months ago

11 down, 33 more to go. Plus a cave.

We had another lovely, sunny weekend last week, and that means I walked the second of the ten segments of the 44 votive churches loop. This time around, I didn’t have to mess with the route in order to hit all the churches in one go because there were no variants. And, like last time, I was not alone. I had a friend coming with me, which is always nice. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy walking solo, but I also enjoy walking in good company. The plan was the same: meeting at the arrive, leaving my car there, driving back to the starting point and take off from there. And that’s exactly what we did. The last time we parked some 600 meters away from the actual end—because there was no parking there—so the first chunk of today’s walk is the final part of segment number 1. Clearly visible on the left, up on the hills, is the small village of Antro where we’re headed. One of the six churches we’ll visit on this walk is waiting for us right there, and it’s a good one. But first, without even realising it, we’re already at the site of the church of San Luca Evangelista (7/44). I’ll be honest with you, this is quite an uninspiring one. It’s also not in a nice location, very close to the street. I’d have completely missed it if it weren’t for my watch. And this post is sponsored by Suunto… just kidding. It is quite handy to have the whole route planned on the watch though, because it vibrates when I’m near one of the churches since are stored as POIs. No pictures of the inside since the windows were boarded and the door was locked. All of them are locked, quite annoying if you ask me. But that’s modern society for you. The church was likely first built around the year 1250, but it was for sure consecrated in 1568 by the Bishop of Cattaro, also governor of the Patriarchate of Aqui leia . We leave the first church behind us, we turn left, we cross the Natisone, and we start climbing up, heading towards Antro. The first part of this walk is not super inspiring since it’s on paved roads, but it is what it is. One day, I might attempt to make a modified version where I only walk on asphalt when absolutely necessary. Could be fun. We pass through Biacis and next to the Antro Bank Slab , an old artefact symbol of the self-government of the Friulian Slavia, developed around the end of the XI century. The path takes us behind the stone and out of the village, and we’re headed in the direction of the church of San Giacomo Apostolo (8/44) next to the “castle” of Ahrensperg. I put it in quotes because it’s more like a nice cottage with a tower than an actual castle, but the whole place is lovely, I have to say. Dual bells, like most of these churches, and I had to resist the temptation to make them ring since the ropes were dangling right there, out in the open. I can be quite the mischief, but I also don’t like to bother people, so we didn’t touch anything. Also no way to take pictures of the inside, it was way too sunny. The church dates back to the mid-12th century, and the stone we saw earlier was kept under the outside portico. Church behind us, the trail is taking us around it and the castle and up through the woods. Two unexpected sights, one after the other, are awaiting us. The first is this concrete monstrosity, which I have absolutely no clue about what it actually is. It’s a very odd-looking structure, quite tall, I’d say 15 or 20 meters tall, with three tunnels going through underneath. It’s clearly something industrial, but I have never seen something similar in my life. Plus, it’s now covered in vegetation, which makes it even harder to get a sense of what it actually is. Reminded me of Horizon Zero Dawn, if you played that game, you know what I’m talking about. The next unexpected sight was a shrine. Very neglected, it’s quite literally falling apart, with a tarp on its roof put there just to prevent water from doing even more damage. As always, it’s dedicated to Mary, which is not unusual here since the iconography of Mary is way more presente than Jesus for some reason. There are Marys everywhere in the valleys if you start paying attention to them. Up the forest we go, and we have finally reached Antro. If you suffer from OCD, don’t look at its bell tower with the off-centre clock face. It’s driving me nuts. We have some time to wait here because we have booked a tour of the caves for 11 am, and we’re way too early. So we spend some time chilling in the shade of the trees with a nice view of the village. It’s all very relaxing, and there’s a small number of people who are also waiting to go see the church and the cave. It’s now time to go, so off the path we go to reach the ticket stand. The ticket to visit the church is 8€, and there’s an app you can download that serves as a guide. But to visit the cave, you need to book a visit with a guide for 10€. On the app, you’re asked to use headphones, and yet some people were obviously blasting it on their speakers. Again, that’s society in 2026 and the main reason why I want to go live into the woods. Up the 86 steps of the old stairs we go, and we have reached the very unique church of San Giovanni Battista (9/44) nested inside the cave. The current church got rebuilt in the mid 1500 after the quakes of the beginning of the century—like many of the 44 churches—and it’s quite unique. It’s also sometimes used as a venue for events. The most fun part is that right behind the altar, you can see the cave unfolding. And it’s right behind the altar that the guided tour starts. Sadly, only the first 300 or so meters of the cave is accessible to the public, and the rest is only accessible if you’re a speleologist. The whole cave is quite big, some 4 or 5kms and there are apparently rooms that are bigger than the opening one, where the church is located. I’d love to visit it, but I think I’m too tall for this type of stuff. One fun aspect of this cave is that apparently twenty-thousands years ago it was inhabited by the ursus spelaeus , the cave bear. One less cool aspect was all the writings on the walls of the cave. Why are people so fucking obsessed with writing on everything? Also, why can’t we have nice things? Anyway, the guided visit is done, it’s now time to get back on track since we have most of the walk still in front of us. So out the cave we go and down the stair, to then take a sharp right turn and walk below the entrance of the cave. There’s a nice view of the whole area from down here. Definitely worth visiting if you’re ever in this corner of the world for some random reason. We’re almost 3 hours into this walk (even though we have spent most of the time either waiting or inside the cave), and it’s now time to gain some elevation since most of it is spread on this next chunk that will take us pretty much to the highest point of the walk and also the next church. Unsurprisingly, after some twists and turns, what do we find? Another random Virgin Mary, this time in a shell. After some more walking inside the forest, we are back on paved road for a little while. We are high enough to have a nice view of Mount Matajur, the peak that dominates the area. That is also gonna be the target of the next hike since the third chunk of this walk goes from down the valley up to that mountain. Not to the very top, but come on, there’s no way I get all the way up there, and I also don’t reach the summit. So you’ll get to see it up close soon enough. We’re now almost at the site of the church of Santo Spirito (9/44), but before we walk up the final 50 or so meters, we need to cross path with guess what? You’re right, another Virgin Mary. We’re roughly 4 hours into this walk, and the location of the church of Santo Spirito is perfect to take a break and eat something. I mean, just look how relaxing this place feels: So far, this might be my favourite location, even though the church itself is probably the ugliest one. And also the youngest. The original one was built probably before the year 1000, but then everything got destroyed during bombardments in WW2 and the current building dates back to 1949. So it’s not even a century old, and it’s in rough shape already. It’s nice to take a break and relax for a bit. It’s a lovely day, perfect weather, and there’s no rush. Plus, we have company! Ok, lunch is done, shirt is dry, it’s mostly downhill from now on, so off we go through the forest again. After a little while, we pass next to the ruins of the old Church of San Nicolò, which, if it wasn’t for my watch vibrating, I’d have completely missed because this thing is barely visible even if you are paying attention. We also stumble across whatever—or whoever—this guy is. I had to take a picture and send it to my brother since that’s his name. Through the forest, across the fields, back into the forest again, out of the forest yet again we’re now almost at the point where we can see the new location of the church of San Nicolò Vescovo (10/44). I have to say, it’s a lot easier to spot compared to the old one, which is completely covered by vegetation and in total ruin. But it’s also quite big, and I don’t know, I guess I’m more of a fan of the tiny ones hidden inside the forest. This one feels like a normal church to me. Only one church is left, and then the final descent to the end of this hike. But first, I need to stop and take a picture of something, and by now you might have an idea of what it is. And here we are, we have reached the location of the final church of today’s hike, the church of San Donato, hidden inside the forest, with its missing bell and its lovely appearance. Now, fun fact: the door has a hole in it with a cover you can swipe aside. Is this a glory hole? We’ll never know. What we do know is what’s inside it because I did peek inside that hole. What a fun experience this was! The only thing left for us to do now is to walk down the forest, take a wrong turn because the GPS messed up, do some bushwhacking, find the correct trail again, walk some more, pass next to a bunch of other Marys—there are always more Marys—cross the Natisone once again and reach our final destination. And here we are, arrived at the park where we left my car, some 7 hours and 16kms later . This was a very relaxing walk, it can easily be done in probably 3 and a half hours. But why rush when you can spend some time outside and enjoy nature? I did update the iCloud album with the new pictures, so if you want to see more from this walk, click that link. You love the outdoors and RSS. You're one of the special ones.

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A Working Library 2 months ago

The Third Reich of Dreams

In 1933, shortly after Hitler took power, Charlotte Beradt started having nightmares. Quietly, she asked friends and neighbors if they were experiencing the same, and soon began to build a collection of dreams. She was eventually able to smuggle her writing out of the country, and fled to New York, where she formed a community with other Jewish refugees. The Third Reich of Dreams was published nearly thirty years later, and records not only the dreams she collected, but her astute synthesis of the various tropes and images that recurred. Among her conclusions: totalitarianism must be named as such as soon as it appears, as soon as our dreams know of it. If we wait for it to reveal itself on its own terms, it will be too late. View this post on the web , subscribe to the newsletter , or reply via email .

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Manuel Moreale 3 months ago

JTR

This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with JTR, whose blog can be found at taonaw.com . Tired of RSS? Read this in your browser or sign up for the newsletter . People and Blogs is supported by the "One a Month" club members. If you enjoy P&B, consider becoming one for as little as 1 dollar a month. I go by JTR these days, which is based on an earlier pseudonym I picked up long ago. Sort of an alter ego I guess. I like how it rolls off the tongue, so I stuck with it. I was a writer (and a bit of a journalist) and a teacher before I found my way into IT. Today I’m a sort of manager who still writes plenty of technical documentation and attends a lot of meetings. I had a few blogs in the past, but when I started working for the medical center which I'm still working for today, 8 years ago, I decided to record my quest to learn technology in a blog. Soon after I started there, I was looking for an app to write checklists and bullet points, and I found Orgzly . It seemed minimal, and I liked that it just writes everything to text files. I had no idea what org-mode was (or Emacs for that matter), and after a few weeks with the app I was deep down in rabbit hole. So the start of my current position, along with learning Emacs and org-mode gave me a boost to start blogging what I was learning. I think it was my boss back then or one of my co-workers who didn't understand why I couldn't just use one of the many note-taking apps that were already available to us. That question, along with my reputation of always asking many of my own whenever we had meetings, had me come up with the idea that I should just call my blog “The Art of Not Asking Why,” hinting at one of my favorite books, Zen And The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. It was just organic like that. “The Art of Not Asking Why” is kind of long, so I started to abbreviate it with “TAONAW” (I pronounce it "Tao-Now"), and I liked how it sounded... so here we are.” (the name of the book should be all caps…) Today, my blog is a mix of quick thoughts and longer posts, both of which are handled well by design by Micro.blog, my blogging platform, which I’m very happy with. For short posts (300 characters or so, "tweets" and "toots" basically), I usually use my iPhone or Android. Longer posts usually start in Emacs org-mode as a draft, and then are edited by hand before I pass them through Grammarly and/or AI for typos and various checks. AI is excellent to find broken links, technical terms that I might want to expand on ( and suggest links to those), and switching back to org-mode so that my draft ends up being updated with the same post, typo and error-free (or almost free) on my blog. For screenshots, I use SnagIt , which is paid for by my job (I write plenty of technical documents). Snaggit is excellent, and I'd pay for it in a heartbeat myself if I had to. For photos, which I take with my Sony camera or iPhone, I use Apple Photos these days for light editing. I also have Darktable and Krita on my Linux desktop, both of which are free, excellent tools that are highly underrated in my opinion. They give me all the power Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom used to give me, without costing me a dime and just make me feel good to use. My posts usually come from different experiences I go through, technical or otherwise. Sometimes I look in my journal and modify an entry from there to a post, at other times I go to my old blog and import a post from there and add it to my blog with the original timeline, yet other times I got over my images and pages on my blog - there’s always something to do, beyond just writing the posts. I think that’s part of the fun. A good blog grows with you, and you learn to tell more about yourself as you progress. I used to work from coffee shops, but today I mostly blog from home. My apartment is quiet and less distracting, and the best time for me to write is in the morning (if I have enough time available), so this combination usually wins me over. I need to focus when I write, and I don’t like to get distracted, which is another reason why home is usually the best place. I absolutely love my noise-cancelling Sony WH-1000XM6 (and the WH-1000XM5 before those) headphones, which have been a life changer for me, a person who can get distracted when my neighbors from across the hall return home. My mechanical keyboard, a Kensis Freestyle Edge RGB, is about 7 years old now and I love the feel of the mechanical keys under my fingers. The ergonomic setup (it's a split keyboard) helps my wrists, and my standing desk helps my concentration further. When I write, I also listen to music: electronic or classical. Songs with lyrics usually distract me. I have two computers. A MacBook Pro M2, and a System76 thelio mira , currently running Kubuntu, which is also my gaming computer. From these two, I lean slightly toward using the Mac for my writing because I take most of my photos with my iPhone and the Micro.blog desktop app that I use is for macOS. My blog is hosted on Micro.blog, which is a hybrid of a social platform and a blogging platform in one. Micro.blog uses Hugo to build the blog and Micropub for the social network. It also syndicates to other social networks like Tumblr and Medium and plenty more that I don't use. It’s a rather unique place that follows the POSSE (Publish Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere) principles . I like the fact that I can download all of my data, which includes my posts, my media and my CSS/HTML templates, any time I wish and take them elsewhere. That’s how the web should be. When I joined Micro.blog I had to register my own domain, which I did, but these days you can also get a domain through them, and I believe you can also get a certificate through Let’s Encrypt in one go. It's a bit confusing at the start since the concepts of a social network and a blog (=website) are different aspects in our minds, but they don't have to be that separate. No. What I know today and the tools I use are the best ones for me at this point. If anything, I’d encourage myself to have learned to use Emacs much earlier and to have adhered to POSSE long ago; that would have saved me from losing work on Medium and Blogger, which are now long gone. I recommend micro.blog wholeheartedly. My plan on Micro.blog (hosting) costs $100 a year, which isn't horrible when you break it down to $8 and change per month. Micro.blog comes with many additional tools (such as hosting podcasts, encrypted notes, storing videos and more) which are worth it in my opinion. My domain costs about $30 a year. I absolutely hate how ads work on the internet today, and I will never have ads on my blog, but I believe it's OK to ask for support or, as I like to think of it, "tips." If someone likes something I wrote, they are welcome to leave a tip. I don't need it however to keep the blog going, thankfully. I don’t have a long list, and I think most of the folks I know were already covered in this series. I will highlight a few that are more active: I’d love, love to see more non-techie folks on POSE-style blogs. I’m not talking about Medium or Tumblr; these are Silos. Some exist, here and there. There used to a be a priod, back when people published on movable type and wordpress was still something new no one knew about, where I was following a diner waitress from Jersey, a fighter pilot who was a patriot in the good kind of way, and of course, there was the USS clueless (I think he’s still around, in retirement). Now, you have to be in the industry to do anything like that. I had a conversation with my partner the other day and he just shrugged. The term “silo” (he uses Tumblr) is so regular now that it’s like explaining water to a fish. And it’s a shame. Those that are different, micro.blog included, seems to require some knowledge of what, I guess, used to be common knowledge if you wanted to be online. I don’t know. Perhaps if I was still a teacher, I’d teach these internet “basics” to teens. Now that you're done reading the interview, go check the blog and subscribe to the RSS feed . If you're looking for more content, go read one of the previous 137 interviews . People and Blogs is possible because kind people support it. Annie’s blog : she often writes essays about feelings and life experiences, about once a week or so. Sal : mostly tech, here and there some other life stuff The Wandering Lensman He's professional photographer, usually an image and a short text. I like what he says about taking photos. Pluralistic from Cory Doctorow does this guy really need an intro…? I love how well-linked and resourced the daily essays are. An (the?) online privacy activist. Jack Baty Daily I lose track if this is the “real” blog or not. The guy changes blogs and platforms like we change shirts. But that’s part of the fun.

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Rik Huijzer 3 months ago

Is Jonathan Shelley A False Teacher?

Thanks to the following interaction, it seems to me Jonathan Shelly is a false teacher ![bannedpastor.jpg](/files/d46b244676374587) For example, _1 Timothy 3_, "This is a true saying, if a man desire the office of a bishop, he desireth a good work. A bishop then must be blameless, the husband of one wife, vigilant, sober, of good behaviour, given to hospitality, apt to teach; Not given to wine, no striker, not greedy of filthy lucre; but patient, not a brawler, not covetous;" Even if I was wrong on my "false teacher" claim, calling another pastor "lame" seems not to be an example of "good b...

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Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At 3 months ago

Premium: The Hater's Guide to OpenAI

Soundtrack: The Dillinger Escape Plan — Setting Fire To Sleeping Giants In what The New Yorker’s Andrew Marantz and Ronan Farrow called a “tense call” after his brief ouster from OpenAI in 2023, Sam Altman seemed unable to reckon with a “pattern of deception” across his time at the company:  No, he cannot. Sam Altman is a deeply-untrustworthy individual, and like OpenAI lives on the fringes of truth, using a complaint media to launder statements that are, for legal reasons, difficult to call “lies” but certainly resemble them. For example, back in November 2025, Altman told venture capitalist Brad Gerstner that OpenAI was doing “well more” than $13 billion in annual revenue when the company would do — and this is assuming you believe CNBC’s source — $13.1 billion for the entire year . I guarantee you that, if pressed, Altman would say that OpenAI was doing “well more than” $13 billion of annualized revenue at the time, which was likely true based on OpenAI’s stylized math, which works out as so (per The Information): This means that, per CNBC’s reporting, OpenAI barely scratched $10 billion in revenue in 2025, and that every single story about OpenAI’s revenue other than my own reporting (which came directly from Azure) massively overinflates its sales. The Information’s piece about OpenAI hitting $4.3 billion in revenue in the first half of 2025 should really say “$3.44 billion,” but even then, my own reporting suggests that OpenAI likely made a mere $2.27 billion in the first half of last year, meaning that even that $10 billion number is questionable. It’s also genuinely insane to me that more people aren’t concerned about OpenAI, not as a creator of software, but as a business entity continually misleading its partners, the media, and the general public. To put it far more bluntly, the media has failed to hold OpenAI accountable, enabling and rationalizing a company built on deception, rationalizing and normalizing ridiculous and impossible ideas just because Sam Altman said them. Let me give you a very obvious example. About a month ago, per CNBC , “...OpenAI reset spending expectations, telling investors its compute target was around $600 billion by 2030.” This is, on its face, a completely fucking insane thing to say, even if OpenAI was a profitable company. Microsoft, a company with hundreds of billions of dollars of annual revenue, has about $42 billion in quarterly operating expenses .  OpenAI cannot afford to pay these agreements. At all. Hell, I don’t think any company can! And instead of saying that, or acknowledging the problem, CNBC simply repeats the statement of “$600 billion in compute spend,” laundering Altman and OpenAI’s reputation as it did (with many of the same writers and TV hosts) with Sam Bankman-Fried . CNBC claimed mere months before the collapse of FTX that it had grown revenue by 1,000% “during the crypto craze,” with its chief executive having “ ...survived the market wreckage and still expanded his empire .” You might say “how could we possibly know?” and the answer is “read CNBC’s own reporting that said that Bankman-Fried intentionally kept FTX in the Bahamas ,” which said that Bankman-Fried had intentionally reduced his stake in Canadian finance firm Voyager ( which eventually collapsed on similar terms to FTX ) to avoid regulatory disclosures around (Bankman-Fried’s investment vehicle) Alameda’s finances. This piece was written by a reporter that has helped launder the reputation of Stargate Abilene , claiming it was “online” despite only a fraction of its capacity actually existing.  The same goes for OpenAI’s $300 billion deal with Oracle that OpenAI cannot afford and Oracle does not have the capacity to serve . These deals do not make any logical sense, the money does not exist, and the utter ridiculousness of reporting them as objective truths rather than ludicrous overpromises allowed Oracle’s stock to pump and OpenAI to continue pretending it could actually ever have hundreds of billions of dollars to spend. OpenAI now claims it makes $2 billion a month , but even then I have serious questions about how much of that is real money considering the proliferation of discounted subscriptions (such as ones that pop up when you cancel that offer you three months of discounted access to ChatGPT Plus ) and free compute deals, such as the $2500 given to Ramp customers , millions of tokens in exchange for sharing your data , the $100,000 token grants given to AI policy researchers , and the OpenAI For Startups program that appears to offer thousands (or even tens of thousands) of dollars of tokens to startups . While I don’t have proof, I would bet that OpenAI likely includes these free tokens in its revenues and then counts them as part of its billions of dollars of sales and market spend . I also think that revenue growth is a little too convenient, accelerating only to match Anthropic, which recently “hit” $30 billion in annualized revenue under suspicious circumstances . I can only imagine OpenAI will soon announce that it’s actually hit $35 billion in annualized revenue , or perhaps $40 billion in annualized revenue , and if that happens, you know that OpenAI is just making shit up.  Regardless, even if OpenAI is actually making $2 billion a month in revenue, it’s likely losing anywhere from $4 billion to $10 billion to make that revenue. Per my own reporting from last year, OpenAI spent $8.67 billion on inference to make $4.329 billion in revenue , and that’s not including training costs that I was unable to dig up — and those numbers were before OpenAI spent tens of millions of dollars in inference costs propping up its doomed Sora video generation product , or launched its Codex coding environment. In simpler terms, OpenAI’s costs have likely accelerated dramatically with its supposed revenue growth. And all of this is happening before OpenAI has to spend the majority of its capital. Oracle has, per my sources in Abilene, only managed to successfully build and generate revenue from two buildings out of the eight that are meant to be done by the end of the year, which means that OpenAI is only paying a small fraction of the final costs of one Stargate data center. Its $138 billion deal with Amazon Web Services is only in its early stages, and as I explained a few months ago in the Hater’s Guide To Microsoft , Redmond’s Remaining Performance Obligations that it expects to make revenue from in the next 12 months have remained flat for multiple quarters, meaning that OpenAI’s supposed purchase of “ an incremental $250 billion in Azure compute ” are yet to commence. In practice, this means that OpenAI’s expenses are likely to massively increase in the coming months. And while the “ $122 billion ” funding round it raised — with $35 billion of it contingent on either AGI or going public (Amazon), and $60 billion of it paid in tranches by SoftBank and NVIDIA — may seem like a lot, keep in mind that OpenAI had received $22.5 billion from SoftBank on December 31 2025 , a little under four months ago.  This suggests that either OpenAI is running out of capital, or has significant up-front commitments it needs to fulfil, requiring massive amounts of cash to be sent to Amazon, Microsoft, CoreWeave ( which it pays on net 360 terms ) and Oracle.  And if I’m honest, I think the entire goal of the funding round was to plug OpenAI’s leaky finances long enough to take it public, against the advice of CFO Sarah Friar. One under-discussed part of Farrow and Marantz’s piece was a quote about OpenAI’s overall finances, emphasis mine : As I wrote up earlier in the week , OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar does not believe, per The Information , that OpenAI is ready to go public, and is concerned about both revenue growth slowing and OpenAI’s ability to pay its bills: To make matters worse, Friar also no longer reports to Altman — and god is it strange that the CFO doesn’t report to the CEO! — and it’s actually unclear who it is she reports to at all, as her current report, Fiji Simo, has taken an indeterminately-long leave of medical absence . Friar has also, per The Information, been left out of conversations around financial planning for data center capacity. These are the big, flashing warning signs of a company with serious financial and accounting issues, run by Sam Altman, a CEO with a vastly-documented pattern of lies and deceit. Altman is sidelining his CFO, rushing the company to go public so that his investors can cash out and the larger con of OpenAI can be dumped onto public investors. And beneath the surface, the raw economics of OpenAI do not make sense. You’ll notice I haven’t talked much about OpenAI’s products yet, and that’s because I do not believe they can exist without venture capital funding them and the customers that buy them. These products only have market share as long as other parties continue to build capacity or throw money into the furnace. To explain: While OpenAI is not systemically necessary , the continued enabling and normalization of its egregious and impossible promises has created an existential threat to multiple parties named above. Its continued existence requires more money than anybody has ever raised for a company — private or public — and in the event it’s allowed to go public, I believe that both retail investors and large equity investors like SoftBank will be left holding the bag. OpenAI has a fundamental lack of focus as a business, despite how many articles have claimed over the last year that it’s working on a “SuperApp” and has some sort of renewed plan to take on whoever it is that OpenAI perceives as the competition in any given calendar month.  Everything OpenAI does is a reaction to somebody else. Its Atlas browser was a response to Perplexity’s Comet browser , its first ( of multiple! ) Code Reds in 2025 was a reaction to Google’s Gemini 3, and its rapid deployment of its Codex model and platform was to compete with Anthropic’s Claude Code . I’ve read about this company and the surrounding industry for hours a day for several years, and I can’t think of a single product that OpenAI has launched first . Even its video-generating social network app Sora was beaten to market by five days by Meta’s putrid and irrelevant “Vibes.” Actually, that’s not true. OpenAI did have one original idea in 2025 — the launch of GPT-5, a much-anticipated new model launch that included a “model router” to make it “more efficient,” except it turned out that it boofed on benchmarks and that the model router actually made it (as I reported last year) more expensive , which led to the router being retired in December 2025 .  I tend to be pretty light-hearted in what I write, but please take me seriously when I say I have genuine concerns about the dangers posed by OpenAI. I believe that OpenAI is an incredibly risky entity, not due to the power of its models or its underlying assets, but due to Sam Altman’s ability to con people and find others that will con in his stead. Those responsible for rooting out con artists — regulators, investors, and the media — have not simply failed , but actively assisted Altman in this con. Here’re the crucial elements of the con: Sam Altman is a dull, mediocre man that loves money and power. He appears to be superficially charming, but his actual skill is ingratiating himself with others and having them owe him favors, or feel somehow indebted to him otherwise. He remembers people’s names and where he met them, and is very good at emailing people, writing checks, or finding reasons for somebody else to write a check. He is not technical — he can barely code and misunderstands basic machine learning ( to quote Futurism ) — but is very good at making the noises that people want to hear, be they big scary statements that confirm their biases or massive promises of unlimited revenue that don’t really make any rational sense. While OpenAI might have started on noble terms, it has since morphed into a massive con led by the Valley’s most-notable con artist.  I realize that those who like AI might find this offensive, but what else do you call somebody who makes promises they can’t keep ($300 billion to Oracle, $200 billion of revenue by 2030), spreads nonsensical financials (promises to spend $600 billion in compute), makes announcements of deals that don’t exist (see: NVIDIA’s $100 billion funding and the entire Stargate project), and speaks in hyperbolic terms to pump the value of his stock (such as basically every time he talks about Superintelligence). Altman has taken advantage of a tech and business media that wants to see him win, a market divorced from true fundamentals, desperate venture capitalists at the end of their rope , hyperscalers that have run out of hypergrowth ideas , and multiple large companies like Oracle and SoftBank that are run by people that can’t do maths. OpenAI is a psuedo-company that can only exist with infinite resources, its software sold on lies, its infrastructure built and paid for by other parties, and its entire existence fueled by compounding layers of leverage and risk.  OpenAI has never made sense, and was only rationalized through a network of co-conspirators. OpenAI has never had a path to profitability, and never had a product that was worthy of the actual cost of selling it. The ascension of this company has only been possible as part of an exploitation of ignorance and desperation, and its collapse will be dangerous for the entire tech industry. Today I’ll explain in great detail the sheer scale of Sam Altman’s con, how it was exacted, the danger it poses to its associated parties, and how it might eventually collapse. This is the Hater’s Guide To OpenAI, or Sam Altman, Freed.  OpenAI’s ChatGPT Subscriptions are, like every LLM product, deeply unprofitable, which means that OpenAI needs constant funding to keep providing them. I have found users of OpenAI Codex who have been able to burn between $1,000 and $2,000 in the space of a week on a $200-a-month subscription, and OpenAI just reset rate limits for the second time in a month. This isn’t a real business. OpenAI’s API customers (the ones paying for access to its models) are, for the most part, venture-backed startups providing services like Cursor and Perplexity that are powered by these models. These startups are all incredibly unprofitable, requiring them to raise hundreds of millions of dollars every few months ( as is the case with Harvey , Lovable, and many other big-name AI firms), which means that a large chunk — some estimate around 27% of its revenue — is dependent on customers that stop existing the moment that venture capital slows down. OpenAI’s infrastructure partners like CoreWeave and Oracle are taking on anywhere from a few billion to over a hundred billion dollars’ worth of debt to build data centers for OpenAI, putting both companies in material jeopardy in the event of OpenAI’s failure to pay or overall collapse. 67% of CoreWeave’s 2025 revenue came from Microsoft renting capacity to rent to OpenAI , and $22 billion (32%) of of CoreWeave’s $66.8 billion in revenue backlog , which requires it to build more capacity to fill.  Oracle took on $38 billion in debt in 2025 , and is in the process of raising another $50 billion more as it lays off thousands of people , with said debt’s only purpose being building data center capacity for OpenAI. OpenAI’s lead investor SoftBank is putting its company in dire straits to fund the company, with over $60 billion invested in the company so far, existentially tying SoftBank’s overall financial health to both OpenAI’s stock price and SoftBank’s ability to continue paying (or refinancing) its loans. SoftBank took on a year-long $15 billion bridge loan in 2025 , had to sell its entire stake in NVIDIA , and expand its ARM-stock-backed margin loan to over $11 billion to give OpenAI $30 billion in 2025, and then took on another $40 billion bridge loan a few weeks ago to fund the $30 billion it promised for OpenAI’s latest funding round . Creating a halo of uncertainty around the actual efficacies of LLMs, to the point that a cult of personality grew around a technology that obfuscated its actual outcomes and efficacies to the point that it could be sold based on what it might do rather than what it actually does . Creating a halo of “genius” around Altman himself, aided by constant and vague threats of human destruction with the suggestion that only Altman could solve them. Normalizing the idea that it’s both necessary and important to let a company burn billions of dollars. Normalizing the idea that it’s okay that a company has perpetual losses, and perpetuating the idea that these losses are necessary for innovation to continue at large.

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Justin Duke 3 months ago

Write as you want to be heard

If you have ever chatted with me in real life, you know that my writing style here closely reflects my speaking manner. My writing, just like my speaking, is labyrinthine and circuitous. Like a bad DFW knockoff, I manage to digress from my digressions. Sometimes it takes me minutes at a time to find my way back to what I was trying to say. While you can debate the novelty of my writing, you cannot, in good faith, decry its earnestness . Even this post, like so many others before it, is not a laboriously manicured artifact but a rough copy edit of a transcription of a voice memo I recorded while walking my dog — the outline of which I formed in my head fifteen minutes prior as I put Lucy down to sleep. This has good parts and bad. One good part is that perhaps more than anything else, it communicates not just the topic at hand but my overall shtick : sometimes generally, sometimes fractally. And in doing so, I sacrifice — both deliberately and out of laziness — the things that make for great writing in other disciplines: brevity, concision, citation. My essays are neither terse nor focused; if the goal of a piece of writing is to communicate its ideas as succinctly and powerfully as it can, then I very rarely meet that bar. But while that is the goal of some writing, it is not the role of all. And certainly not the vast majority of mine. I write because it is fun to use language; I write because it is a form of thinking; I write in order to communicate with others — and that is ordered in descending priority, at least as it pertains to . I do not purport to ascribe my idiosyncrasies onto you; your goals and voice are different than mine; my point is just that my style fits the goals of my writing, which is to have some fun. What if you have different (i.e. normal) goals? I recommend two tactical things: I'm stealing this from my friend Harrison, who is smarter than I am: ask yourself when writing something, is the point of this piece of writing to communicate the journey or the destination? No matter what, the advice I got from a fourth grade teacher is still the best advice I've ever received — read aloud what you've written and see how it sounds. Not just to write as you speak, but to speak as you've written.

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Stratechery 3 months ago

An Interview with New York Times CEO Meredith Kopit Levien About Betting on Humans With Expertise

Listen to this post: Good morning, This week’s Stratechery Interview is with New York Times Company CEO Meredith Kopit Levien . Levien became CEO in 2020, after previously serving as Chief Operating Officer, Chief Revenue Officer, and Head of Advertising. I previously interviewed Kopit Levien in August 2022 . The New York Times editorial team always elicits strong reactions, both in the political realm and also in tech, but that’s not what this interview is about; what is indisputable is that the New York Times as a business is both incredibly interesting and incredibly successful. Over the last decade the newspaper has gone from strength to strength, building a thriving subscription business, expanding its bundle from news to Games to Sports to Cooking and more, and now — to take things full circle — has a rapidly growing advertising business. We discuss all of that in this interview, starting with the Games and Sports categories, why the bundle is about expanding the New York Times brand, and the company’s recent push into vertical video. Then we discuss what it means to be a destination site, while also using Aggregators to acquire customers. We spend time on AI, including the New York Times lawsuit against OpenAI, why Kopit Levien sees humans as the moat against AI content, and how the company is using AI on both the business and editorial sides. Finally we discuss the potential for building communities, why advertising is working, and how surviving in an Aggregator and AI world is about fighting entropy. As a reminder, all Stratechery content, including interviews, is available as a podcast; click the link at the top of this email to add Stratechery to your podcast player. On to the Interview: This interview is lightly edited for clarity. Meredith Kopit Levien, welcome back to Stratechery. MKL: Hi Ben, thanks for having me, so happy to be here. It’s hard to believe, but it has been four-and-a-half years since you last came on — I was thinking two or three years ago — nope, it’s almost half a decade. I was actually shocked that I’ve been doing interviews for that long, but apparently I’ve been doing them for like six, six-and-a-half years. MKL: You have, and I’ve listened to a lot of them! I appreciate it. Well, we already did the whole background conversation then, we both worked for the student newspaper, lots of commonality there. So let’s fast forward to the time of that interview. It was August 2022, and speaking of mind-blowing lengths of time, you had bought Wordle earlier that year, it’s hard to believe it’s been that long and then you had just purchased The Athletic . How do you feel about those acquisitions five years on? MKL: That’s such a fun place to start. We acquired both of them, if I remember correctly, within a week of each other, and I would say we feel great about both of them and both of them have exceeded our expectations in so many ways. Is Wordle the greatest media acquisition of all time? MKL: You know what I tell people? That New York Times Games is the most up-and-to-the-right thing I’ve experienced in my career in terms of just people’s attention to it and the way it kind of touched culture and still touches culture every day, and the ability for Wordle to be like a megaphone for these other incredible games that we already had that most people didn’t know about. And then what’s so amazing to me is we now have, I think 11 games — half of them are free, half of them are paid games, tens of millions of people play our games every day. And we have made the vast majority, we’ve made those games. And before Wordle and after Wordle, Wordle in and of itself is extraordinary, but before and after, we’ve made other extraordinary games, it’s so awesome. Is it a bit of like annoying that’s like everyone thinks about Wordle, “Oh, you bought Wordle”, and you’re like, “Look, we made most of these, give us more credit here!”? MKL: Listen, credit to Josh Wardle , it’s an awesome game, and it just touched culture like nothing else. But it has served us so brilliantly — it has just shined this huge light on all these other games and it’s given us a chance to prove our chops as a game studio and we just keep making hits. I am so proud of our games team, Jonathan Knight and the whole team around him, they have done such good work and they are still hard, hard at it, that team works so hard. I’m a Connections player , so Wyna Liu is my hero , but they’re all amazing and they put out really good work. Games, it’s going swimmingly, I hope we get to talk even more about it. As long as we’re here, like how has your – because we were talking a bit about, Wordle sort of came out of the blue — it was this game that popped up, you snapped it up, super smart — and we were talking in our interview about it being an in-point to the New York Times broadly. MKL: Yeah. Has that evolved as you expected or has it evolved in different ways? In the context of not just Games being a property but also it tying into the whole thing. MKL: What a great question. To answer that, let me step back for a minute and say our strategy is for the whole of the New York Times and all the different parts of the portfolio to be an essential subscription for curious people everywhere who want to understand the world and make the most of their lives. We’ve got three pillars to that, 1) be, and become even more every day, the world’s best news destination 2) have these leading lifestyle products, including Games, but also Sports, Recipes, shopping advice, that really help people do their passion more deeply or better or enjoy it even more and then put those two things together, news and the lifestyle products, in an interconnected experience so that the New York Times is incredibly relevant to you every single day, whatever is going on in the world or your world. Right. This is a point you made before, is you wanted the New York Times to not just be — sometimes the news is slow, or sometimes stuff’s happening you don’t care about, and you wanted to have other stuff for people along the way. MKL: Listen, I want to be really clear. We are first and foremost a high quality independent news journalism company, that is our mission, it is the most value-creating thing we do for society and economically, and that is by miles. And to your original question, it’s just amazing to have all these other points of introduction to people and point all these other ways to bring people into the Times ecosystem and to get them to form a habit with us. Once we do that, once we can engage them in something, our bet is that we can engage them in more and more, and there’s lots of examples of that. You mentioned you had three things, you had the news, you had the lifestyle, what was the third one? MKL: Yeah, so news, news is such a small word for such a big idea. You mentioned that sports is a lifestyle so is sports not news? Is that lifestyle? It’s kind of interesting where that fits. MKL: We do sports news, we do sports journalism, we do news journalism. But let me stay on the news thing for a minute because we’re often even trying ourselves in how we articulate it to not let it be this small idea. We do high quality, original, independent journalism, which means we are unearthing new and important information through reporting and also providing often deeply reported commentary and analysis on the really big topics that are going on in the world and also on things that just matter at the level of relevance of people’s daily lives. You could read us today for what is happening with this fragile ceasefire in Iran and you could also read us today for health advice or for what movie to go see or what restaurant people are eating in in New York City right now. News is this very broad thing at The New York Times, and we’ve got these four lifestyle products. I would say to you what we’re doing with The Athletic is absolutely journalism, often it is like news journalism, but make no mistake, and we are doing it with the rigor and the independence that The Times does. It’s journalism, but we are doing it for fans, we are doing that journalism. Right. It never occurred to me until you sort of mentioned it — it’s not wrong to say that sports is a lifestyle category. MKL: Totally. That intersection is actually kind of interesting to think about. MKL: Let me tell you something — I have an almost 15-year-old, he is an athlete, and he is a giant sports fan and when I think, “What are his lifestyle pursuits?”, when I fill out the parent statement in the school applications, first he’s a sports fan, and The Athletic is serving that fandom. Do you think there’s a bit where some of this sports journalism has been caught up in, “We are journalists”, bit and has missed the fact that people watch sports in many cases as a pastime to relax. I look forward to turning on the baseball game at night, I don’t want the perils of the world, this is supposed to be an escape. It’s also most helpful to put it in this lifestyle category because that’s actually meeting people where they are. MKL: I think that’s a great point. What I will say is The Athletic often does very hard-hitting sports journalism, it is certainly covering the important topics and the tough topics across the major leagues and teams in the United States and European football and a bunch of other things, so it is doing that, hard stop. But if you look at the multiplicity of things they’re doing and you look in a day’s time, it’s probably well over 100 stories that get published every day, an enormous amount of that is beat reporting on what happened to your team in the league that you most likely watch and it is literally meant to make you closer to the team, the fan, the game. I think all high quality information is — consumers of information want uncompromised information and so The Athletic is just like uncompromised the way The Times is uncompromised, it’s going to pursue the truth wherever it may lead, even when that’s to uncomfortable places. But the whole purpose of the broad set of things we do at The Athletic is to make you a better fan, and we know that. Whereas the purpose, and again, that does not mean we don’t do hard-hitting journalism, we absolutely do, but we are independent of anyone’s interest in that journalism but the sports fan. And for the Times, we’re not writing or producing our work for any particular audience, we’re doing it in service to the public’s interest. Is that a value of keeping The Athletic brand separate from the New York Times? MKL: We are absolutely committed to building the brand The Athletic, it was a deliberate choice, I’m very invested in that choice and we’ve still got a lot of running room to build it. I say the biggest opportunity with The Athletic is just to make more sports fans. We’re making real progress with it and let me tell you, you asked me at the beginning, “How’s it going?”, we bought a company that was losing a ton of money because they were investing into a huge sports newsroom, it’s like a giant newsroom with a little business. We said it would take some time, but then it would be accretive to the Times — it is absolutely that. We got there in many ways earlier and better than we expected and today we’ve got well over 500 journalists at The Athletic. So it’s an even bigger journalistic proposition and it’s really contributing as a business to The Times and we’re thrilled about that, and I want to say we’re only four years and a few months in, we’re just getting started on all the ways we can support fandom of the major sports. I think we were nailing the journalism thing, you’re always going to get better and better at that, they were good at it before we acquired them, we’ve helped them be even better at it, do it more robustly, do it in a more edited way and add like a layer of national, and in some cases global, sports coverage. But there’s just a lot of stuff that there’s a lot of white space in the market to serve fans deeply reported, uncompromised information and we’re going to do that. You have such a good product organization and you have the whole Games initiative, how much do you think about the prospects for games in the context of sports? Whether this be fantasy sports or sort of a whole host of like daily pick-ems — it’s interesting because there’s obviously a huge gambling angle to this but how many of those sort of offerings are possible without necessarily being gambling or whatever it might be? MKL: Yeah, great question. We think there’s real opportunity for Puzzles/Games, and Sports, we think we’re good at both of those things. We already have our first collab, I think it’s about a year old, we launched a Sports Connections puzzle , it is super fun. We did some great marketing for it with famous athletes, which was hilarious, and it’s played a lot, so people love it, and I would say that is early. We’re building out the team, we just hired a new Chief Product Officer at The Athletic , he comes following years of building communities at Facebook. We took one of the guys from the Times newsroom who’d been a leader of the Upshot, who’s incredible at building interactive work, and he’s now leading interactive work at The Athletic, so we think there’s real opportunity for that. And I’ll tell you just this week, it might even be today, I’m losing track of my dates, we are launching something called The Beast . I don’t know if you’re an NFL fan, but it is the most comprehensive guide I think that exists on the planet to the NFL draft class and it includes literally information on thousands of players who are draft hopefuls and then very deep profiles of 400 of them. Before we owned The Athletic, and actually until a year ago, we’d publish it like as a book, a physical book, it’s this like monster book because there’s so much information in it and teams use it, there’s nothing else like it. Now you’ll see as it launches this week, it’s got all these incredible interactive features now on the individual player profiles and if you’re someone, if you love an NFL team and you really care, you’re going to pay attention to The Beast. So I think we’re just getting started on features that may be games and also other things that support a fan who’s super passionate about their team. I keep interrupting you, but you mentioned three things, so we’ve got to get that third thing. What was the third thing in addition to news and lifestyle? MKL: World’s best news destination, leading lifestyle products, and put those two things together in an interconnected product experience for a bundle that makes The Times relevant for whatever is going on in your world, or the bigger world, every single day. That’s the idea. Got it. We talked a lot about bundling last time and obviously that’s really the core of your strategy, how though has that evolved in the last five years? Is this really a most people are coming in the door through these lifestyle brands and you’re bringing them to the news, whereas it used to be the other way before? I’m throwing that out there as a hypothesis, how does that actually work? MKL: I actually think the essence of it is about having this portfolio of world-class news coverage, news broadly defined, and then not just products, but these products that either are or are becoming the leaders in their category. These categories are giant spaces where tens of millions, in some cases hundreds of millions, of people spend a lot of time. It’s the fact that we have rare and valuable news coverage and lifestyle products in these huge spaces that’s really working. So to me, the word “bundle” can mean — the low common denominator version of it is, “It’s a marketing concept or merchandising concept” — in our experience, we’ve got this singular idea of being essential in meeting a lot of different kinds of information and experience needs in a person’s life. Rather than it be this idea of, “We’ve got one big important thing” — I’m going to come back to news in a minute because news is central to all of it — but you’ve got this one major hero thing and then you append a bunch of other stuff so the consumer thinks there’s some other value there, we have invested and built these products out in such a way where each thing should be deeply valuable to the person who cares about buying the right products and is going to deeply research them, and therefore they use Wirecutter. You talked about expanding the brand, is this what you mean? Where you hear “New York Times”, it’s not, of course news is always the most important, I know you’re going to say that, so I’ll say that for you. MKL: I’m going to say that again and again, because it’s true. It’s also the most economic-value creating thing we do. Right. But you want people to think that, “New York Times, that’s the best games”, or, “That’s the best cooking”. MKL: New York Times makes the best puzzles, it has the best recipes, and by the way, just advice for home cooks who want to cook, it’s where I go if I’m a sports fan, and it’s absolutely going to give me the best uncompromised shopping advice — that’s sort of the spirit of it. It’s not just a news indicator it’s like a “stamp of quality” indicator. MKL: It’s a stamp of rigor and quality, and I’m going to keep using this word, “uncompromised”. Really high quality information that’s done in an uncompromised way and therefore has value at real scale. And the “uncompromised” comes from the business model? MKL: Uncompromised comes from the idea that at our core what we do is independent journalism. You could even say every bit of it, even the games are like journalistic in that they are sort of planned in a very deliberate way and thought out. Right. They’re not randomly generated, someone is actually editing every puzzle. MKL: That’s right. Humans with expertise are making these things and in some cases harnessing technology to do that even better. It’s really working, and I want to say to you, I wouldn’t have had these words four-and-a-half years ago, but at the core what we’re trying to do in a very complex information ecosystem, really shaped and controlled by a small number of dominant tech platforms, we are trying to make news coverage and products that are so good that people seek them out and ask for them by name. A destination site . MKL: Seek them out, ask for them by name, make room in their lives. The destination site has been — there’s a few companies that I always feel very pleased about, I feel like they’re like my children in a way. MKL: Are we one of your kids? You are one of my kids! MKL: I appreciate that, we could use all the parents, we could use it. That’s why I loved that, I’ve mentioned it multiple times, but the strategy document that you guys, it’s been like a decade now — I’m like, “This is beautiful”, and I think it really was on this point of destination sites, this idea that the way around a world of Aggregators that just commoditizes everything is people have to seek you out directly. Google will say a competition is only a click away and no one seems to take that seriously, people can actually click on you and go there. MKL: My answer, we all read your Aggregation Theory and all the updates you’ve done to Aggregation Theory. The way I think about it is for more than a decade, we have had these like four D’s that we’re obsessed with. Ready? So what do I mean by that? We know we exist in an ecosystem shaped by these dominant tech platforms and so and we have to have a wide free layer for our work, we have to, otherwise you can’t bring in the next subscribers. So we are very deliberate where we can be about how we go about doing that and the idea is we need to be able to get you to sample our stuff and fall in love with it and we’ve got to give you enough time and space to make a habit of it so that ultimately you subscribe. Yeah, that’s really interesting. I was going to ask this towards the end, but that’s a good lead into it. You’ve had a big focus on video recently, and it’s super interesting – actually, I have a few questions about this. One is it’s pretty weird to go to the video tab on the desktop and all the videos are vertical. Was that very controversial? MKL: There’s video all over the site now so you’re gonna see it in a lot of places. When we say destination, we know a lot of people during the workday are reading us or watching us or listening to us on the desktop web, but we are so kind of first to that phone. Our bet is the ability to watch a video on a phone, you are going to want it in vertical and we now have a home for it in this tab. I encourage everybody, download our app, and you get the best version of what we’re doing. Download your app and make sure you register your user account and get the experience. It’s really interesting because I’ve noticed with Stratechery actually, a huge portion of my audience now is just audio, I think more than half my subscribers listen instead of read. You mentioned you mostly listen, which is fine. But as far as the reading goes, actually, I still have a huge amount of people reading on the desktop as compared to mobile. MKL: By the way, I listen when I run because all my other media time is reading. MKL: And now I’m forcing myself to watch. Right, you’ve got to dogfood it . MKL: I’m like listening to YouTube when I run. Just talking shop, is there a bit where, as you look back on the evolution of media, there’s a thing where actually it turned out that the browser ended up being a text medium, and then the phone was actually the multimedia platform? MKL: That’s such a great question, that’s so well put and I need to take that in for a minute and think about it. What I’ll say that I think that’s related to that in a web world, we needed a website that people would type in and then like pin and always be able to go back to, that worked and the Times has been very good at that. In an iOS and Android world, we need an app, and we’re very, very good at that. I would actually say to you, we’re still pretty early in really getting more and more people to use our app. Today, the majority of people who use our app are subscribers, the engagement is enormous, but it’s like mostly the people who subscribe. We have not made the app a really important place for prospects and we’re starting to do that, the Watch tab is part of that. I think it remains to be seen in a world where the Times is as preferred a brand and a source for watching as it is for reading and listening. Which, by the way, I want to say to you, those things are not going to go away, we’ve been at this for 175 years. MKL: The old media doesn’t go away, the people who do it still do it. They vary it a bit, but many of them still do it. To your point, this is a big part of your approach is you have this huge reporting base, which the medium, that’s all ones and zeros, they can write an article, and they can be on a podcast, and they can show up in video. MKL: And they can put a camera, they can literally hold a camera in front of them from somewhere on the edges of Iran and describe what they’re seeing. So I think it remains to be seen, I think the market is still kind of forming and structuring. We regard video as doing three really important things for us. One is it helps us engage the people we already have, and anything that helps us engage the people we already have is very good for business. Churn mitigation is always a win if you’re a subscription business. MKL: It’s good for business, and I would argue it’s good for journalistic impact and everything. Good for society, but very good for business. We also think there is an enormous number of people in all generations of life, but especially young people, who spend time watching, and they’re either watching news or they’re watching things that are in a zone adjacent. We are the only generation that really just maximized text, it’s been all downhill ever since. We got all the text in the world, we read it all, and then now everyone’s just watching video. MKL: I could do a whole other episode on that and fight to get my very intelligent kid to just like sit back and read and how important I think that is to brain development. But we think video will help us engage whole new audiences, that is a big bet we’re making, we’re already starting to see some of that, we are very excited about it. And then the third thing that video does for us, and I think that’s really important, I think we all know that trust in all institutions is at an all-time low, trust in media is at an all-time low, I hate the word “media” because it lumps in journalism and a bunch of other things, but trust in all of it is low. And the more we can show you the work, the more we believe you will come to understand what an independent journalistic process to pursue the truth wherever it may leave looks like. Interesting. So it’s like brand-enhancing for what you’re going for overall. MKL: Totally, and trust building. I’ll just tell you, we are much more aggressive today than we’ve been. One of the formats that we’ve scaled the most and there’s still so much room to go is just a reporter on camera describing the story. Which by the way then your production is vertical anyway so it ties right in. MKL: But there are times you go into a studio and explain something, so it doesn’t have to only be vertical, it goes a really long way. And we have made a very deliberate choice where we’ve said, we don’t particularly have a business model on TikTok or Instagram or YouTube Shorts, but we’ve got to be in those places. I wanted to ask you about that because when you think about podcasts, for example, there’s a huge push in general to be on YouTube and I think it’s pretty obvious because podcasts are incredible for audience retention. I’ve talked about for my business, all these people listening to Stratechery don’t go anywhere. Whereas people would have emails build up before that, and they’re like, “I have too many emails, I should just unsubscribe”, the problem is I get much less sharing because it’s much easier to forward an email and the podcast, you just go to the next podcast and then it’s sort of done. So you have podcasts in general going to YouTube because they feel like the algorithm is the way to acquire new users. The reason to bring this up is I go to the New York Times YouTube page right now, your last main video is from seven days ago. Your last Short is more recent, but it’s about Trump escalates threats to destroy Iran. Well, there’s been some news development since those threats. MKL: You think? Consult top of app. But the point is clearly it’s not a priority for you. How does that tie into the balance of destination site versus customer acquisition and all those sorts of things? MKL: It’s a great question. Let me start by saying our general thesis, and I’ve been here a long time now, so I’ve got enough reps to say it bears out. If we make great work that should scale because it’s unlike anything else out there, and it’s important, it will. I want to say that, that is our bet. And so I will say to you, we’re still at. That’s my bet too. MKL: I listened to enough of your work to know you think that too. It’s a really important principle that we’ve just like hit again and again and again as a business. First, we have to make like the best stuff there is, and it’s got to be done in an independent way and it’s got to be done with rigor into a high standard of quality. So the chapter we’re in now with video is very much scaling production, which is like, “What are we making?”, “What is it?”, “What is the New York Times if you can watch it?”. We are early in that and we’re going to admit that all over the place. We are, as I started to say, putting a lot of that work. The best place to experience it is come to our app, go to the website, even if you have to, you know, even if on the site, some of it is shot for vertical, best place to experience it is our destinations. But we need to be in the places where huge numbers of people are. So the work is also on TikTok and Instagram, it’s on YouTube both in short form and on YouTube, we’re starting to put our longer form stuff there. And the truth is, it’s a place where we can see, you are right, a lot of it is dictated by algorithms, but also you get a sense of what is a hit. I’m going to name a few things that are just like unequivocally hits at the New York Times as video. The Ezra Klein show was only a podcast, it’s now a video show too — that guy is so brilliant, he has such an incredible following, we are so excited about that show. Right around the time we were putting him on video, we launched, to the extent that Ezra is examining the biggest ideas on the left, Ross Douthat is examining the biggest ideas that are animating the right. Ross has been a longtime columnist at the Times, we launched a show, I think we launched the pod and video at the same time it was one of the first ones where we said, we’re going out. You say they’re going huge, are they going huge on your properties, or are they going huge on the RSS feeds and the other platforms? MKL: Out in the ecosystem. And when I say huge, we were early in all of this, they’re building audiences and growing. The Daily is huge, The Morning , we have the largest general interest news newsletter I think on the Internet in terms of readership, five or six million people open it every day. And do you see very tangible, measurable, people are finding this other platforms and coming back to the Times and subscribing? Or is this more ethereal, this is enhancing the brand, in the long run this will pay off? MKL: It’s a great question. The broad answer I’m going to give you, and I ran the subscription business for a long time, I was on top of the product organization, I was accountable for it, the thing I’m sure is that we have to make stuff that is so good that it’s worth paying for even in the presence of free and less expensive alternatives, and we also have to have many tens of millions of people who do not yet pay, who are regularly engaging with our work. We do believe we have to be sort of out there in the ecosystem — of course, you and I both know, you know, we see a receding link-based economy. Did you see that discussion between Nate Silver and Nikita Bier the other day? MKL: Oh, I haven’t seen it yet. They were talking about, because Nate Silver did some sort of article about who’s getting prominence on X and things along those lines, and one of Nikita’s pushback about The New York Times not having prominence, not just on X but on all social platforms, is you do what I do , which is we’re old and lazy and just post an article with a link and Twitter doesn’t feature links anymore. Fine, it is what it is, I have my built-in audience, it’s okay. And it’s like, well, if you actually want to grow, you have to do the whole thread thing like, “This is what’s in this article”, and at the end there’s a link. And Nikita pointed out that the New York Times does the bare minimum, it’s basically like an RSS feed for links, of course they’re not getting featured. Is that something where, I’m telling you now, you didn’t read it, you’re like, “Oh yeah, we should fix that”, or is that a, “Well, you know what? We’re not a social media company, we are a destination site, and that’s just the way it’s going to be”. MKL: It’s a fair question, I think you should regard us as first and most importantly trying to make the best stuff that can and should scale because it’s amazing. And remind me, I’m going to mention two other video shows to you that are so different. And then we are also looking to always master the evolving audience ecosystem. And I think if you followed us, it’s interesting on YouTube, we’re doing more now show by show to build audience so just like you mentioned, the New York Times channel, but like Ezra’s feed is surely updated, Ross Douthat’s feed is updated. I’ll mention these two other shows. We launched our cooking team, launched a show maybe six months ago called The Pizza Interview , we have this amazing test kitchen on the west side of Manhattan and like every major celebrity with something important to say can come on that show now, they make a pizza and they talk about their work. So the cast of Stranger Things came with the finale, Ariana Grande came. That’s a great concept. MKL: It’s amazing. And that show is building so much momentum, so different than what you would expect. It is fun, it’s really working. We’ve had a show, I don’t know if you’re a music fan, Ben, but we’ve got a music critic and a music reporter, Jon Caramanica and Joe Coscarelli, they have had a podcast on The Times for like a decade called Popcast , where they talk about music. It was sort of made at the edges of the enterprise, these guys are so talented, and we’ve just brought them to video and kind of prime time and man is that scaling. They actually did a live show at an all-company meeting with Lizzo, it was unbelievable. They’re getting everybody, it’s so, so great. What you see is we are just in the early days of saying, “How and where should we build the big audience for this?”. The Daily, which is nine years in still in the top podcasts, there is I think it’s the largest general interest news podcast, most people do not listen on The New York Times, they listen on Apple or Spotify. MKL: And you know that because of what you do for a living. So we’re open-minded about that and also pushing really hard on the companies that shape the ecosystem to make it so that great stuff can scale. Yeah, I’ve had plenty of discussions with YouTube. MKL: I’m sure we’re going to talk about that too. Well, we’ve actually gone quite long, I do need to ask you about – there’s this technology called AI you may have heard of, I do have a few questions for you on that. Just to get it out of the bag, you’re in ongoing litigation with OpenAI. Obviously, I’m sure that constrains what you can talk about to a certain extent. But sort of big picture, what’s the point of this? What do you want to accomplish? MKL: We’re in ongoing litigation, two-and-a-half years now with OpenAI and Microsoft, we’ve also sued Perplexity . Why? They stole our stuff, they used it without permission, without fair value exchange, copyright infringement and they build products that compete with us, so that’s why. Let me just say, why did the Times do this? You know, we have spent over 175 years, an enormous amount of resources on high-quality independent journalism, and I want to say this, we’re fighting here, obviously, for the Times, but for the industry writ large for high quality journalism and content creation writ large and for the public to have high quality information and content. We have made an enormous investment, we’ve been doing it for a very long time, and we have a huge number of works. Is your biggest concern the training or the output? MKL: We believe that there should be sustainable fair value exchange for our work used in any way, number one, so fair value exchange sustainably. Number two, we believe we should have control and the law says we should have control over how our work is used, and I would say those are kind of for everyone. And for the Times very specifically, by the way, we’re not just suing, we have a deal with Amazon , we choose to deal, these things are of a piece enforcement of our rights in court and dealing is all to put a stake in the ground to say high quality journalism deserves to be paid for and it should be. And, by the way, the LLMs are only going to be as good as the information that courses through them. The third bit is can we do a deal that’s consistent with our long-term strategy, which involves ultimately having direct relationships with our consumer. Do you worry about — you’ve had this huge growth in terms of these lifestyle verticals, things like recommendations, things like cooking. Some of those AI is really, really good and useful at, do you feel a threat there? Have you seen an impact there? MKL: We’re enforcing our rights in court for very specific reasons. I want to do a number of AI categories so let’s set aside the court case. Let’s just say in terms of NYT Cooking, super compelling. Also, I go to ChatGPT, I ask for a recipe and it will give me one. MKL: Totally fair question. I want to say to you first, we’re also using AI like assertively in our product. Right, my next question is how you’re actually using it. MKL: Let’s come back to that. The most important part of our strategy, and maybe to the extent there’s a theme from this conversation, is that The New York Times creates human-led high quality news journalism and all this other stuff, including recipes that are better because of the humanity, the expertise, the professional process that goes into them. And I want to say, because you asked about cooking specifically, every one of those recipes, we have 25,000 recipes and counting in a database, every one of them, human-tasted, human-tested, they’re better. People say to me all the time, “Your recipes are just better”, yes! Because professional chefs and cooks are using them and it doesn’t get published until we’ve done that. We think that’s going to have enduring value, we think in an information ecosystem where it’s harder and harder to find quality stuff, brands are going to matter more and human-made content is going to matter more. The week you filed the lawsuit, when I wrote about it, I entitled it The New York Times’ AI Opportunity . MKL: I remember what you wrote about it. In this world of everyone getting individualized content and actually that makes you more valuable, not less. MKL: Listen, society needs a shared fact base. People need high quality, uncompromised information and they need to be able to find it with ease and they need to be able to know what is true and worth their time and we think the Times and each of our portfolio brands, each of our lifestyle brands is like a signal to that. So we are obviously investing enormously into all that. Has that been validated in the numbers? MKL: Look at our business results. It’s been a strong period for our business results, I can’t tell you what will happen in the future, but I can tell you we are very, very focused on two things. One, making our products even more kind of rare and valuable at real scale to people, and we are also incredibly focused, part of how I got into this chair, we are incredibly focused on harnessing technology to make the journalism richer where it can help us do that, make our journalists able to get to more things or get to the things more deeply. We are incredibly focused on using technology, and this includes AI, to make the work more accessible. I told you earlier, I’m a runner, you can listen to almost every article now. You can’t listen to the live journalism, but everything else you can listen to in an automated voice and I think we’re on the third generation of that voice, it’s so much better. It’s still like, we’ll mispronounce one or two things, but it’s great. See, I read my own articles and I still mispronounce things, so maybe that’s actually the human component. The moment it starts pronouncing things perfectly, I’ll know it’s a robot. MKL: We we’ve been aggressive with that. Let me give you an example in the journalism that the Epstein Files , I think it was like three-and-a-half million pages, they came out like late in the day on a Friday and we’ve got a whole AI Initiatives team in the newsroom and they like built a tool to be able to comb those documents and the magic of what we were able to do from them was the fact that we could create this tool that said like, there’s all these different story angles to get to, how do you get at it with ease? And then the beat reporters and the editors who have the expertise and the kind of rigor to say, “What should the public know from this?”, it’s the combination of those things that made it awesome. I’m going to give you one more example that I just kind of said immediately, “Oh, there’s a real interesting opportunity here”. Remember the Sydney Sweeney jeans/genes thing? MKL: So the early of read on that was that the left was up in arms about this Sydney Sweeney ad and we had journalists who basically did a story using AI to comb social media to sort of say, “How did this happen?”, and what they found was it was actually construction on the right, started as a construction. Like the idea that there was kind of fury about it started as a construction on the right and then became like a bigger thing. So I think any new technology, it is our job, it is my job, to see that people are not afraid of it, and are using it in responsible and appropriate ways. We’ve just rolled out Claude Code to our product engineering team, so they can prototype faster and do all kinds of things. So The Times is not anti-AI or any other tech, we have laid a stake in the ground to say this next chapter of the ecosystem has got to be shaped in a way that allows high quality journalism organizations and other high quality creative content organizations to do their work in a way where they can earn the living they should from that work but we are certainly not anti-tech. Just to go back to this AI bit and The New York Times AI Opportunity idea. You just touched on the, This is a trusted brand, it’s validated by humans”, it’s leaning into the humanity of it. I’ve expanded that bit a little bit as well as I’ve been thinking about this thesis , and I have this concept that I’ve been thinking about called totem content , where if everyone is reading AI content, everyone’s reading different stuff. The idea of having one piece that, “Did you read the Stratechery article today?”, or whatever it might be, is actually going to be more valuable, not less. I’ve been thinking about this in the context of community, it feels like no content company has ever solved community. You have a thriving comment section, but you’re not making friends in the comment section, it’s sort of a performative bit. MKL: We’re not introducing friends to one another, not necessarily yet. If I know someone who is interested in the same sports team or is interested in Wordle or Connections or whatever it might be or is interested in a particular facet of the world and I knew who they were, there’s something there and there’s a continual trigger for us to talk about it. Where’s your thinking about this? You do this all the time, there’s lots of group chats with New York Times articles shared it, is that something, though, that you want to or you see an opportunity to lean more into? MKL: My very short answer is yes, with like a double underline. Yes, yes, yes. At the core of the mission’s role is to help society make sense of itself in a way that serves the common interest, the public interest, “common” is the main word in community. So yes, and I agree with you, I don’t think it’s been solved in any way yet by us or anybody else in the sort of publishing or journalism industry, but we’re beginning to focus on it much more earnestly. I want to say two other things. Within the news report, we do a ton of culture and lifestyle journalism, and going back a couple of years, we launched the 100 Best Books , and we launched it with a bunch of input from experts beyond the Times, but of course, all coalescing around our books experts and we launched it with a bunch of features, because it was like an inherently shareable idea, “I read these books, Ben, you should read these books, what’s on your book list?”, and then we did it for movies . We’re just at the beginning of it, I think it’s a huge opportunity, I am super interested in it. And the last thing I want to say, and it kind of brings us back to where you started with me. I will never forget, I was with my son and his friend, on the ferry to the Vineyard, and his friend was like, “Oh my gosh, I play Wordle every day and then after that, I go and I play…”, and he named four rip offs because he liked the game so much. Point being, we need to make more games, we have, we did, we’re still making more. But none of those games, you know, have like the competitors, people may play them, but like you don’t hear about them the way you hear about Wordle, they haven’t broken through. Why is that? There is one puzzle a day from a company whose brand ethos is it makes you smarter that you do with the people you love and by the way, it’s true for Wordle and Connections and Strands. Everyone’s playing the exact same puzzle. MKL: And it is a shared experience. Just to go back, you asked me about sports, fandom is a shared experience, and we’re thinking very hard about how we support that game moment in a way that I think The Athletic has a very big opportunity here. And I think in news, what we want, journalism can’t solve society’s big problems, and there are many big problems, but society’s problems cannot be solved without high quality independent journalism. So the idea of, “Can we get more people engaged with one another?”, on really big, important, weighty topics that need independent journalism, I think that’s a big idea and a big opportunity for The Times, for journalism, for the country, for the world. Has the New York Times fully crossed the Valley of Despair in terms of advertising? Part of all this was you had to like build a subscription business but now that you’re known as a subscription business, advertising is suddenly a growth opportunity instead of a decline to manage? MKL: I came to run the ad business, the woman who runs the ad business now, Joy Robins , she’s an extraordinary leader. The ad business I joke all the time is going so much better under her than it ever went many years ago. I think that we have really found a formula that works. What is that formula? MKL: We are a, and I bet, long after I’m here, we are a subscription-first business, meaning we make things that are meant to be extraordinary to consumers at great scale. So many of our ads are shown to subscribers because so much of our engagement is from subscribers and we’re obsessed, especially in a changing ecosystem, with getting the next group, the prospects, really, really, really engaged with our work and our obsession with engagement and with quality products in giant spaces that marketers want to be near, news broadly defined, but on the authority of news. Marketers want to be next to other healthy, thriving brands, and I think The Times is that today, but they also want to be in sports and they want to be next to our games, which are cultural sensations, and by the way, do you think marketers like shopping? Quality shopping and cooking, there’s so many marketers want to do stuff with that. I do think we’ve arrived, I’ve been more optimistic and excited about our ad business over the last year than I’ve been at any other point and I think given the scale that we have achieved — Ben, you and I both grew up on the web, just think about the number of page views the New York Times has, like, all that engagement. And we’ve spent half a decade, longer than that, building very sophisticated first-party data. So we’re never going to have the scale of a platform or the targetability of a platform, but we are certainly well above what I would suspect any other kind of publisher can do. That’s the question — is there anything actually generalizable from the New York Times? Like you’ve done it, you’ve won it, can anyone actually replicate this? MKL: First of all, we have not won anything, I want to say that very clearly. We have so much more to do, to grow, to make sure. Relative to basically every other newspaper, I’m going to declare you a winner. MKL: Let me tell you the few things that I think are absolutely extensible. I often say we’ve spent so much of our time wanting to make a market and then support a market for digital subscriptions to journalism, and journalism being something of value that is worth paying for. We believe that a thriving, healthy ecosystem with lots of competitors who we’re fighting every day with is actually better, it’s certainly better for society, we think it’s just better generally. And I want to say there are you, Puck, there are so many other things that have been invented since I came to The New York Times. So in some ways, there are aspects of the information ecosystem and journalism that that are thriving, certainly not local journalism, certainly not deeply reported journalism and that’s very unfortunate. The things that I think are extensible, one, when I get asked, “Why has the Times succeeded?”, if I can only give one short answer, it is we kept investing in journalism, that’s it. Good times, bad times, we kept investing in the journalism. There was something there that actually was worth paying for, one. And two, we stuck to our values. So the Times can’t be bought, the journalism is never compromised, we can’t be cowed, we can be hated in lots of places, and people know they’re still going to get our best understanding, they’re going to get the results of a pursuit of truth wherever it will lead, even when that’s to uncomfortable places. If I had to boil it down to like two short things, I’m ripping off a line from our publisher, AG Sulzberger , that I think does it so beautifully, he says, “It’s value and values”, we kept investing to make sure the product was still really valuable and then we just never let go of our values, I think that those are ideas that are extensible to everyone. The other thing I’ll say to you, and this is maybe my contribution, we clocked early on, 9 or 10 years ago, we are competing for engagement with the most powerful companies, information companies the world has ever known, who are so much richer than us, so dominant, and we’ve got to get really good at engagement. We’ve got to get really good at making people want to come back, and we’ve also believed in the power of brands as signals to get people to ask for us. I say all the time, they’ve got to ask for us by name. The New York Times, Wordle, Connections, Strands, The Athletic, Cooking, Wirecutter, people have to ask for us by name, and we’ve invested into all those things, I think those are all extensible ideas. Well that’s why I say you’re one of my idea children, destination site, I write about Aggregators and my personal strategy is to do everything the exact opposite as them because why would I want to even compete in that game? So that certainly resonates. MKL: And you have so many readers and listeners at The New York Times, we’ve been reading you as long as you have felt like a parent of us. Well, I appreciate it. You are, for the record, older than, The New York Times I should say. 175 years this year, very exciting, congratulations. MKL: (laughing) Very exciting. Can I say one thing? If we can do anything with like a 175th — Is it a birthday? Is it an anniversary? — if we can do anything in this moment, the most important thing we want to accomplish is just raising people’s consciousness for the idea of what high quality independent journalism is and does. It is human beings with a professional process and real expertise going out into the world and unearthing new information, following a very honed professional process to do so, so that the public can know what’s happening. We are spending a lot of our energy this year at 175 years old, just trying to remind people what that is and there’s so many other things you can do in media now. You know, I listen to a bunch of stuff, there’s so many things that are like adjacent to news. Oh, I appreciate it. I’m not a reporter, so I need someone to actually go out and unearth facts. MKL: But it is not that, most of it is not that and I think as local journalism has been in such dire straits for so long, and there’s so few local newspapers and fewer journalists and as people get more and more of their media diet fed to them by an algorithm that’s meant to match the things they already think and as leaders work to discredit independent journalism with all those forces going on in the world, I think the public has a — I think it’s just harder to know or remember or be conscious of the importance of the thing our journalists are doing every single day. There’s one thing, I know we’ve gone slightly long, but when you say that, what I find inspiring and why I like to talk to you and write about the New York Times is, I’m sure it’s a relief to you, I’m just completely independent of any partisanship or political angle. MKL: Totally, you’re not compromised. I find it so interesting from a business perspective and what you’re articulating there is what is inspiring is it’s a fight against entropy, where the easiest path for people and for publications is to just give in to the algorithm, as it were. And it’s kind of nice to go to YouTube and not see any of your videos there, because it’s sort of like an assertion that that’s not the path we’re going to go, and I certainly can relate to that and find that inspiring and that’s why I enjoyed talking to you. MKL: I enjoyed talking to you, this was a lot of fun, thank you. This Daily Update Interview is also available as a podcast. To receive it in your podcast player, visit Stratechery . The Daily Update is intended for a single recipient, but occasional forwarding is totally fine! If you would like to order multiple subscriptions for your team with a group discount (minimum 5), please contact me directly. Thanks for being a supporter, and have a great day! We have to be a daily habit We have to have direct relationships with people We have to be a destination and let me say to you, by destination, I mean, we do most of the economic value creation and we also give the best experience if you actually come to us in the whole of the experience. Then I say the fourth D is we only do drive-bys if they’re deliberate.

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Manuel Moreale 3 months ago

Anthony Nelzin-Santos

This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Anthony Nelzin-Santos, whose blog can be found at z1nz0l1n.com . Tired of RSS? Read this in your browser or sign up for the newsletter . People and Blogs is supported by the "One a Month" club members. If you enjoy P&B, consider becoming one for as little as 1 dollar a month. Bonjour ! I’m a militant wayfarer, budding typographer, pathological reader, slow cyclist, obsessive tinkerer, dangerous cook, amateur bookbinder, homicidal gardener, mediocre sewist, and fanatical melomaniac living in Lyon (France). I was a technology journalist and journalism teacher for sixteen years, but i now work in instructional design. In my spare time, i take photos of old storefronts to preserve a rapidly fading typographical tradition. One of these days, i’ll finally finish the typefaces i’ve been working on forever. And my novel. And the painting of the bathroom. (My wife is a saint.) I was born a few years before the web was invented and grew up at this fascinating time when everybody wanted to do something with it, but nobody knew quite what yet. We were still supposed to learn Logo and Pascal in technology class, but most of the teachers understood the importance of the web and taught us the basics of HTML and CSS. I built my first website in 2000… as a school assignment! By 2007, i was one of those insufferable tech bloggers who made enough money to feel entitled, but not enough to feel safe. (I moonlighted as a graphic designer.) When more established outlets came knocking at my door, i shut down my blog and became one of those insufferable tech journalists who make enough money to feel entitled, but not enough to feel safe. (I moonlighted as a journalism teacher.) I kept a personal blog under the “zinzolin” moniker. This shade of purple is my favourite colour, partly because it sounds a bit like my name. Over the years, it became more and more difficult to find the energy to write recreationally after having spent the day writing professionally. In 2025, feeling more than a little burnt out, i rebooted my blog and switched from French to English. Fortunately, the name is equally weird in both languages. I don’t have a process so much as a way of managing the incessant chatter in my head. I write to give myself the permission to forget, and i publish to gift myself the ability to remember. You’ll never catch me without some way to capture those little “brain itches” — a notebook, the Bloom app, a digital recorder, the back of my hand… (I wrote part of this interview as a long series of text messages to myself!) In the middle of the week, i start reviewing my notes to find a common theme or extract the strongest idea. When an incomplete thought keeps coming back, i don’t try to force it by staring at a blinking cursor. I take a long walk, and usually, i have to stop part way to write. Most of the actual blogging is done long before i sit down to properly draft my weekly note. I have this romantic notion that the more comfortable i am, the more i can edit, the worse my writing tends to get. If i could, i’d write everything longhand in a rickety train, stream-of-consciousness style, and publish the raw scans of my notebooks. You wouldn’t be able to read half of it, but i can assure you the illegible half would be Nobel-prize worthy. But then, some things only happen after a few hours of diligent editing. If i give myself enough time, i can stop transcribing my notes and start conversing with them. There’s always something worth exploring in the gap between our past and present selves – even if the past was two days ago – but that delicate work requires a conducive environment. Judging by my recent output, it looks like this environment comprises a good chair , a MacBook Air on one of those ugly lap desks, my custom international QWERTY layout , iA Writer for writing and Antidote for proofreading, cosy lighting, just the right amount of background noise, and most important of all, a pot of delicious coffee. I’ve tried pretty much every CMS and SSG under the sun, but i’ve always come back to WordPress, until Matt Mullenweg reminded us that a benevolent dictator still is a dictator . Z1NZ0L1N is now built on Ghost and hosted by Magic Pages . I used to use Tinylytics and Buttondown , but i’m now using Ghost’s integrated analytics and newsletter features. My other websites are hosted on a VPS with Infomaniak , which is also where i get my domain names, e-mail, and assorted cloud services. That’s a question i had to ask myself when i rebooted Z1NZ0L1N last year. I switched to English in a bid to better separate my professional output from my recreational output. I jettisoned most of my audience, but i found a new community around the IndieWeb Carnival and quickly rebuilt a readership on my own merits. I get excited each time i get an e-mail from someone i don’t know from a country on the other side of the globe. I wanted to find a way to publish regularly without turning Z1NZ0L1N into the umpteenth link blog. After a few experiments, i’ve settled on a weekly note that’s part “what i’m doing”, part “what the rest of the world is doing”. This is old-school blogging meets recommendation algorithms — and i love it. Some things haven’t changed, though, and will never change. I use an open-source CMS that i could host myself, not a proprietary platform that i can’t control. I designed my theme myself. I don’t play the SEO/GEO game. I pay a little less than €10/month for Magic Pages’ starter plan with the custom themes add-on. Considering that it saves me €15/month in third-party services, i’d say it’s a fair price. I pay €12/year for the domain, but i also registered a few variations, including , which was first registered in 1999! Blogging is my least expensive hobby — by far. As someone who’s worked a lot on the economics of independent publishing, i’m happily subscribed to a few news outlets and magazines. I like the idea of $1/month memberships for blogs, but in practice, i find it hard to track multiple micro-subscriptions on top of my existing (and frankly far too numerous) digital subscriptions. I wonder if we should create blogging collectives, almost like unions and coops, to collect and redistribute a single subscription in between members. In the meantime, i’ll continue not talking about my Ko-Fi page . The Forest and Ye Olde Blogroll are fantastic discovery tools. A lot of my favourite bloggers have already been featured in People and blogs : VH Belvadi, BSAG, Frank Chimero, Keenan, Piper Haywood, Nick Heer, Tom McWright, Riccardo Mori, Jim Nielsen, Kev Quirk, Arun Venkatesan, Zinzy… I’d love to see how Rob Weychert , Chris Glass , Josh Ginter or Melanie Richards would answer. Their approach to blogging couldn’t be more different, but they each informed mine in their own way. Since 2008, i’ve taken thousands of photos of old storefronts. It began as a way to inform my typographical practice, but it rapidly became an excuse to go out and pay attention – really pay attention – to the world around me. You wouldn’t believe the things i’ve discovered in side streets, the number of conversations i’ve struck after taking a picture of a once-beloved shop, and how my way of looking at the evolution of cities has entirely changed. If you’re up for a little challenge, find your own collection. It might be cool doors, weird postboxes, triangular things, every bookshop in Nova Scotia , sewer manholes, purple things, number signs… It’ll give you another perspective not only when travelling in foreign places, but also on your (not so) familiar surroundings. It doesn’t cost a penny, but it’ll pay off immensely. Now that you're done reading the interview, go check the blog and subscribe to the RSS feed . If you're looking for more content, go read one of the previous 135 interviews . People and Blogs is possible because kind people support it.

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neilzone 3 months ago

Three months of not reading the news

Three months ago, I stopped reading the news . I made a note to force myself to reflect on it, after three months, and this is that reflection. I still read lots of RSS feeds of people’s blogs. I love this. I still read industry-specific news sites (mainly law-related stuff), and other sources of information which are often the basis of news coverage (e.g. government or regulator press releases and updates). I still read local news, but wow is that a rubbish experience. I get that local news needs funding to survive, but making the product so unappetising makes selling me a subscription a very hard sell indeed. Frankly, I could probably just not read the local news and keep an eye on the local council’s roadworks website instead. I still have my 404Media subscription although, to be honest, I am a bit on the fence about it. I am not sure if I will renew it or not at this point. No slight to the quality of their journalism. What I have basically stopped doing is reading the BBC, the FT, the Guardian etc. I had not appreciated just how conditioned I was to reading the news when I had a spare moment. It took me quite a while to get used to the idea of not opening the BBC website, in particular. I did not go to the extent of blocking news sites, so this was just based on self-control / choosing not to do it. Curiously, what I found hard was that almost instinctive “fingers move to open a news site” behaviour, rather than actually missing reading the news. I had to train myself out of it, and now, it doesn’t cross my mind. I have not managed to avoid general news entirely, nor was I really intended to do so. This was about lessening my exposure, rather than doing all that I can to avoid it. I still see people posting news-related stories in the fediverse, and I just scroll on by. In some cases, I can filter by keywords, and so no If someone posts news too much (or, in particular, posts party political stuff), I either unfollow them or mute them. I’ve no temptation to click the links. Yes, and that is by design! Before, I was informed about a whole load of things, in a way, and to an extent, that I didn’t find helpful or healthy. Now, I am aware, in broad terms, of major stuff going on around the world, but I am far less familiar with the minutiae, or the endless “up to the minute” reporting. That feels like a good level of awareness for me. I am also far less exposed to stuff that I never cared about in the first place, especially “celebrity” news, of which I remain blissfully ignorant, sport, and so on. To each, their own. For now, anyway, I don’t miss reading the news. I’ve overcome that reflex of opening a news site. I have not - as far as I know, anyway, which I appreciate is quite a caveat - missed anything which, had I known about it, would have made a significant difference to anything important. I read far more books (and buying the tiny, pocketable, X4 ereader was an attempt to distract me from my phone more often, letting me read even more). So I am going to carry on with this experiment for now, and see how I get on. I can’t prove that this experiment has been good for my mental health, but it certainly feels that way. Even though I do not want to read the news, I wonder if a monthly, edited, one-or-two page kind of approach, of key / important news stories, might be welcome. Of course, there would be complexity in determining what is “key” or “important”, as that is subjective.

journalism Journalism culture Culture media Media
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