All posts by media-man

Scientists Shine Light on Materials That Remember

Optoelectronic Synapse Shows Exceptional Photoresponse for Neuromorphic Vision Like so much else in nature, the human visual system has both a complex structure and functional efficiency that is difficult for scientists to replicate. The system is both a sensor and a processor, with the eyes and the brain working together ... [continued]

The post Scientists Shine Light on Materials That Remember appeared first on CleanTechnica.

Open Letter: EU Passenger Package Is A Golden Opportunity For Rail To Reach Its Full Potential

The Youth on Track coalition presents its demands for the EU Passenger Package following the presentation of the European Commission’s set of proposals. The Youth on Track coalition, uniting youth organisations, consumer groups, and environmental NGOs, calls in an open letter to EU institutions on raising the ambition of the ... [continued]

The post Open Letter: EU Passenger Package Is A Golden Opportunity For Rail To Reach Its Full Potential appeared first on CleanTechnica.

Midday

Following fires

In normal times, Santa Rosa Island is easy to watch from our deck in Santa Barbara. But right now it's burning up, and smoke from that fire and the Sandy Fire in Simi Valley have added layers of brown to the gray marine haze that comes and goes. So here are some sources of visuals in addition to those a the links above:

Most of those are interactive and good for following developments elsewhere.

Talk me out of it. Or into something else.

I need a mic for doing podcasts and similar audio work here in my Santa Barbara office. Thing is, I'm here much less than I'm in Bloomington, which is kitted out. All I really need is a mic that's not too expensive. Currently leaning toward the Shure M7VX.

As to so many other doomed things

At our New Jersey home in the 50s and 60s, my parents expressed a relatively cosmopolitan level of taste by exclusively drinking Savarin Coffee, brewed in a percolator. The brand is long gone now, but it's interesting to see what happened to it.

More than 340 local news outlets are limiting the Internet Archive’s access to their journalism

In January, Nieman Lab broke the story that major news publishers — including The New York Times, The Guardian, and USA Today Co. — had started blocking the Internet Archive due to concerns that AI companies might scrape the nonprofit’s repositories for training data.

No news publisher has confirmed to Nieman Lab that an AI company has already scraped their content from the Wayback Machine. Still, in the five months since we published our story the number of news sites blocking the Internet Archive has continued to rise.

Overwhelmingly, these sites are local news outlets.

Our new analysis shows that more than 340 local news sites across the United States are now limiting the Internet Archive’s ability to access and preserve their stories. Many sites in our sample are owned by five of the seven largest local news publishers in the country: USA Today Co., McClatchy, Advance Local, MediaNews Group, and Tribune Publishing. The latter two are both subsidiaries of the “vulture hedge fund” Alden Global Capital.

Researchers, historians, and citizens around the world rely on the web archives of local news sites to do their work.

“Blocking the Internet Archive’s web crawlers threatens one of the most effective ways that we capture and store news content for the long term,” Edward McCain, a journalism librarian at the University of Missouri, said. “In the present we may have some workarounds, but in the long run, it weakens a vital link in primary source materials that we need to understand where we’ve been and where we want to go.”

Working journalists are among the most frequent users of the Wayback Machine’s local news archives. Over the last month, online petitions have called for news media companies to allow the Internet Archive to preserve their journalism.

“I cover news within a larger news desert in New York’s Rockland, Sullivan, and Rockland counties. This means I need to heavily rely on archival data of old news articles from now deceased, or zombie-fied, media outlets,” wrote B.J. Mendelson, the editor of The Monroe Gazette newsletter, in one recent petition signed by over 200 journalists. “Without the Internet Archive, my [work] would be incredibly difficult to do.”

In the face of publisher concerns, the Wayback Machine has highlighted its efforts to minimize abuse of its site, including implementing systems that limit bulk downloading and working with vendors like Cloudflare to monitor bot activity. “We are in conversation with many publishers and appreciate the opportunity to address their concerns,” Mark Graham, the founder of the Wayback Machine, told Nieman Lab, noting that the Internet Archive’s terms of use only permits using its collections for scholarship or research purposes.

Meredith Broussard, a data journalist and professor at New York University, said that as profit margins for news thin, it’s only become more important to news publishers to protect their intellectual property.

“This is the same fight that everybody has been having with the Internet Archive since its inception,” Broussard said. “Internet Archive is a very old-school, ‘information-should-be-free’ organization. But the people who are invested differently have different priorities. There are lots of different historical and legal and economic issues that are colliding in this situation. AI companies [are] the catalyst for the latest skirmish in a very old battle.”

Alden Global Capital is another major local news chain that has rolled out new restrictions on the Internet Archive. About 60 of those sites are owned by MediaNews Group, the Alden subsidiary that operates dailies across the country, including The Mercury News, the Denver Post, and the New York Daily News. Another seven publications are operated by Tribune Publishing, most notably the Chicago Tribune.

Alden has been criticized for aggressively acquiring U.S. newspapers and stripping them of resources for short-term profits. Alden did not respond to requests for comment.

In July 2025, Alden ran an editorial in more than 60 of its daily newspapers openly criticizing OpenAI and other AI companies that have used news content to train their models without compensation. “Securing permission from, and fairly compensating, those publishers who created this great foundation of knowledge is the right, just and American thing to do,” read the editorial. Both Alden publishers are part of the major copyright infringement suit against OpenAI and Microsoft that includes The New York Times and is currently winding its way through federal court.

Some independent local publishers, like The Baltimore Banner, are open to AI chatbots surfacing their stories without licensing deals. But they’re still concerned that a “back door” like the Wayback Machine’s might hurt their chances at being cited properly.

Last year, The Banner worked with the company DataDome to analyze crawler activity on its site. The findings were striking: about 25% of The Banner’s site traffic was coming from bots, including crawlers operated by the Internet Archive, according to Biswajit Ganguly, the chief technology officer and AI strategist at the Banner.

Based on that analysis, The Banner started blocking the Internet Archive, later adding one of its crawlers to its robots.txt file. It still lets major AI companies through, including crawlers used by ChatGPT and Claude.

As Ganguly explains it, the new restrictions on the Wayback Machine are less about negotiating licensing deals or preventing The Banner’s stories from appearing in AI products, and more about ensuring those products trace information back to The Banner instead of linking to sites that aggregate its work.

“We didn’t want the bots to be trained on our content, and then spit out answers based on the content without any kind of references, link, or attribution to our sources,” said Ganguly. “If ChatGPT finds something in the Wayback Machine…we were not sure how well it would be attributed back to us.”

He added that The Banner is still gathering information on how AI search products interact with news about the Baltimore region and the publication is open to lifting its block down the line.

“The threat is definitely not the Internet Archive,” Ganguly said. “But it’s a question of how the other actors are going to provide references or attributions and links back to the real creator of the content.”

Blocking as leverage for payment

Local publishers aren’t the only ones ramping up these efforts. Condé Nast, another arm of Advance Publications, has rolled out a coordinated effort to disallow the Internet Archive. Vogue, The New Yorker, Pitchfork, Vanity Fair, Bon Appetit, and Wired currently disallow four crawling bots from our list. (Last month, Wired covered the existential threat these blocks pose to the Internet Archive). Condé Nast did not respond to a request for comment.

The Atlantic has been working with Cloudflare to block the Internet Archive since last summer and added one of the Internet Archive’s crawlers to its robots.txt file in an update earlier this year, according to Anna Bross, The Atlantic’s SVP of communications. She said the decision is part of the outlet’s “aggressive” blocking policy.

“Our default is to block: No one should be scraping The Atlantic’s journalism without permission, regardless of the use,” Bross said.

The Atlantic’s CEO Nick Thompson commented on our January reporting in a video posted to LinkedIn in April. He said blocking the Internet Archive is important for publishers that want to maintain leverage when negotiating licensing with big AI companies.

“Because of the damages that can be done when you let all your content be scraped, because of all the leverage you lose, there will be worthy products that you previously gave your data to and now you can’t,” said Thompson.

Major international publishers have also started to block the Internet Archive, including the leading newspaper in Brazil, Folha de S.Paulo. Folha added three Internet Archive user agents to its robots.txt file in February.

“Folha believes that the sustainability of professional journalism — the very material the public record seeks to preserve — depends on protecting intellectual property,” said Sérgio Dávila, Folha’s editor-in-chief. “If AI companies wish to use this archive for training, they must enter into licensing agreements rather than rely on third-party repositories.”

Dávila noted that Folha invests in its own digital archive, Acervo Folha, which includes digitized editions of print issues going back to the paper’s founding in 1921. Access to Acervo Folha is available to paying subscribers.

What can be done?

Archiving is expensive; the technical infrastructure, storage, and expertise can be cost-prohibitive to smaller news organizations.

Before the rise of digital news, many papers maintained physical archives, often staffed with in-house librarians. Today, due to the contraction of the newspaper industry, most of those dedicated archiving roles are gone and the move to digital publishing has only complicated the issue.

A new content management system (CMS) can often lead to major archival losses. In 2024, thousands of articles vanished from the sites of the Daily Hampshire Gazette and the Greenfield Recorder in Western Massachusetts during a CMS switch. When publications close many former owners don’t want to shoulder the cost of maintaining a site. In 2022, a decade after The Hook, a Charlottesville weekly, went under, its archived site went offline, along with over 22,000 stories.

The Internet Archive is often touted as a hero of the web for taking on the Herculean task of preserving the entirety of the internet, and for stepping in when news organizations fail to preserve their own work.

In December, the Internet Archive partnered with the Poynter Institute and Investigative Reporters and Editors to train a cohort of 33 local and national news outlets on how to develop and implement an archiving strategy. The initiative, funded through a Press Forward grant, aims to train 300 newsrooms in digital preservation and in using the Internet Archive’s services by the end of 2027.

Most of the initial cohort is made up of independent and nonprofit local newsrooms, including Outlier Media, Charlottesville Tomorrow, and The 51st. Wired is the only publication in our dataset restricting Internet Archive access that is participating in the program.

As Broussard, the NYU professor, points out, while the Internet Archive is one of the few efforts to make archives free, it isn’t the only effort to archive news. News publishers have long licensed their journalism to commercial archives like ProQuest and LexisNexis, which are often available in libraries, universities, and for individual subscriptions. They’re not free, but they do exist. At least several publications in our sample appear in ProQuest databases, including the Chicago Tribune, The Baltimore Sun, Honolulu Civil Beat, and USA Today.

Economic incentives are a valid reason for publishers to want to keep their contents out of the Internet Archive, Broussard said, but news outlets should have a long-term, multifaceted preservation strategy. Even with a plan in place, the reality for many publishers is that it’s unlikely that they’ll be able to save everything.

“Every news organization, especially local news organizations, generally launch thinking, ‘we’re going to put stuff on the internet and it’s going to be there forever,’ and that’s not true,” Broussard said. “Anybody who told you the internet is forever lied.”

Photo of Internet Archive servers by Scott Beal/Laughing Squid used under a Creative Commons license.

Young Americans demand court halt Trump’s biggest rollbacks of pollution protections

Suit says administration is impinging on rights to life and liberty by worsening planet-warming and toxic pollution

Eighteen American youth are demanding that a court immediately halt the Trump administration’s repeal of the scientific finding underpinning virtually all US climate regulations.

The plaintiffs sued the Trump administration in February days after officials revoked the 2009 endangerment finding, which found that greenhouse gas pollution threatens public health and welfare. Filed in the Washington DC circuit court of appeals Venner v EPA alleges that the move infringes upon rights guaranteed by the US constitution, including to religious freedom, life and liberty.

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San Francisco turns to AI to save whales from ship strikes as deaths soar

Climate change is pushing starving grey whales to San Francisco Bay, where ship strikes led to 40% of 21 deaths

Ferries, cargo ships and tankers cut through choppy waters in the San Francisco Bay on Tuesday as a whale surfaced nearby, its spout barely visible against the white caps. Until now, whales could easily go unnoticed by mariners, but an AI-powered detection network launched this week is designed to track them day and night.

The system, called WhaleSpotter, scans the bay around the clock for whale blows and heat signatures up to 2 nautical miles away, alerting mariners to slow down or reroute when whales are nearby.

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James Murdoch buys up half of Vox Media, grabbing New York and podcasts, but leaving The Verge and SB Nation

This is May 2026 in digital media: Arguably the two most prominent digital media startups of the 2010s are both being sold — one to the former host of NBC reality show “Real People” (1979-84) and one to the primary inspiration for Kendall Roy (2018-23).

On May 11, it was standup-comic-turned-media-mogul Byron Allen acquiring a 52% share of BuzzFeed for $120 million, which he plans to use to make a…competitor to YouTube?1 Sure thing. And today, nine days later, it’s James Murdoch, son of Rupert, who is spending more than $300 million to buy most of Vox Media.

A decade ago, BuzzFeed and Vox Media were valued at $1.7 billion and $1 billion — further evidence (as if we needed any) that 2016 was another universe. Here are the Times’ Benjamin Mullin and Jessica Testa:

James Murdoch is acquiring roughly half of Vox Media, a dramatic expansion in American media for the younger son of the media mogul Rupert Murdoch. The deal includes Vox Media’s podcast network as well as New York magazine, a publication once owned by Mr. Murdoch’s father.

Mr. Murdoch, 53, emphasized that he was not looking to acquire a “daily news business” but rather wanted “longer-form, thoughtful journalism that can really speak to the culture,” he told The New York Times in an interview on Tuesday. “We want to create platforms where really amazing, talented people can come and do the best work of their lives.”

It’s a little sad that the third part of Vox Media that Murdoch is buying — Vox.com — doesn’t get mentioned in the Times story until the 10th paragraph, but that’s probably another sign of how far from 2016 we are. Here’s the corporate press release (Lupa Systems is Murdoch’s holding company):

“This acquisition aligns well with our existing holdings and investments and reflects both our interest in the forward edge of culture and our deep commitment to ambitious journalism and agenda-setting conversations,” said James Murdoch. “It will allow us to apply new tools across the businesses we are building, adding substantial production, distribution, and editorial capability to our group.”

Lupa’s acquisition of New York Magazine includes its must-read verticals, The Cut, Vulture, Intelligencer, The Strategist, Curbed, and Grub Street. Vox brings multiplatform leadership in video, text, and podcasts like Today, Explained. The Vox Media Podcast Network, home to popular shows such as Pivot with Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway, Criminal, and Where Should We Begin? with Esther Perel, has been the fastest growing business within Vox Media and will immediately put Lupa at the top of the podcast field, which now reaches 58% of Americans monthly, according to Edison Research, including two out of three people between the ages of 18 and 54.

Murdoch’s “existing holdings and investments” include the Tribeca Film Festival and Art Basel. Longtime Vox Media CEO Jim Bankoff will continue with the Murdoch-owned part of the company.

Vox Media’s collection of brands. The ones Murdoch isn’t buying are marked in red.

The parts of Vox Media that Murdoch isn’t buying — SB Nation, The Verge, Eater, The Dodo, and Popsugar — will be spun off into their own yet-to-be-named company. You might think of them as the ancien Vox Media — the blog-born sites that the company was originally built on. SB Nation (2005) and The Verge (2011) were the original two Vox Media sites. Eater (launched 2005, acquired 2013), Popsugar (launched 2006, acquired 2022), and The Dodo (launched January 2014, acquired 2022) also predate the April 2014 founding of Vox.com. Here’s the staff memo from Bankoff:

Eater, Popsugar, SB Nation, The Dodo, and The Verge are each in a strong place as distinct brands, and we have no plans to separate them. Each will continue under its current leadership, and Ryan will keep working closely with those leaders to deliver on every brand’s individual strategy. We have made real progress building a brand-led business, including a commercial structure designed to support each brand’s unique opportunity.

I confess that I have little confidence in Allen’s quixotic plans for BuzzFeed, whose business had already been poorly positioned in the years since Peak Facebook. But New York and Vox Media’s podcast network both seem to have steadier foundations and, with Bankoff and much of current management staying on, should be able to keep things going.

Maybe it’s unfair, but I can’t get my mind off of “Succession.” In Season 1, Waystar Royco — the show’s stand-in for Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp empire — acquires Vaulter, a digital media company very much of that BuzzFeed/Vox Media wave (though it was really more like Gawker Media than anything else of that era). But by Season 2, it appears the financials aren’t working out for its particular collection of verticals (and unionization is on the march), so Logan Roy orders it shut down.

Then in Season 4, the Roy kids team up to plan Vaulter’s spiritual successor, The Hundred, a digital news site whose pitch deck managed to include all the era’s most annoying media-VC-isms:

A digital hub delivering all the essential information needed to navigate the now. The world’s leading experts provide humanity’s most valuable knowledge in bespoke bite-sized parcels, designed to improve the lives of subscribers and the world in general. The antidote to the modern malaise of empty-caloried input-overload…An independent bespoke information hub with the hundred greatest top writers, experts and minds in every field from Israel-Palestine to A.I. to Michelin restaurants. It’s a one-stop info shop, with high-calorie info-snacks…It’s like a private member’s club, but for everyone. It’s like clickbait, but for smart people.

The Hundred is, according to Kendall Roy, “Substack meets Masterclass meets The Economist meets The New Yorker.” Of course, in the show, The Hundred gets quickly abandoned as an idea too. But if you were looking today at Vox Media’s properties, which ones look most like Vaulter? Probably the brands that were born in that early-2010s boom for bloggy, advertiser-friendly verticals. And which ones look most like The Hundred? Probably the brands that have elite cultural cachet (New York), news-cycle relevance (Vox.com), and expert-driven parasocial relationships (podcasts).

Look, neither of those fictional news sites is going to be a flattering comparison — it’s television, and they’re both played for laughs. But I can’t stop feeling like James Murdoch has decided to pass on Vaulter and buy The Hundred. For my money, Vox Media has been the most competently run of its peer digital media companies; while BuzzFeed and Vice had higher valuations at their peaks, the Vox Media assemblage of brands has maintained high quality and revenue diversification better than the rest — the digital Condé Nast. It’s sad to see it broken up, and I worry about a great site like The Verge being put on an ice floe on its own. But I suspect both halves of the company could have sustainable futures ahead.

Still from “Succession” S04E01 (“The Munsters”) via HBO.

  1. It’s typically not a good sign when straight news stories about your strategy are using the word “quixotic.”

#MyTerms at #CPDP2026

Iain Henderson, talking MyTerms at IIW last month. Look for him at #CPDP2026.

CPDP stands for Computers, Privacy, and Data Protection. The theme of this year’s CPDP is “Competing Visions Shared Futures.” The MyTerms future is replacing consent with contract in our online dealings with websites and digital services.

Consent is what cookie notices speciously obtain from your clicks on the forced choices that interrupt your first experience with nearly every website—and do nothing to protect your privacy or data. With MyTerms, sites and services agree to your privacy terms, rather than you to theirs. And your privacy agreements are backed by contract law, not by empty corporate promises, which always lack ways for you to monitor compliance. With MyTerms, you can do that.

So (this is important) Eric Pol of MyData Global writes this in Linkedin:

Attending #CPDP2026?
🤔 Looking forward to paradigm shifting at last towards the individual in personal privacy?
👍 Let’s talk about MyTerms, the first machine readable standard for personal privacy, IEEE 7012

3 options:

1⃣ Attend our CPDP workshop on Friday 22 June at 13.15 (link in 1st comment)
2⃣ Reach out here to the MyData Global #MyTerms champion Iain Henderson, who will be on the conference all 3 days
3⃣ Reach out to me in DM giving me your contact details, and I’ll pass them on to Iain. I will myself be on site Friday.

😄 Looking forward to building paradigm shifting solution with you!

If you’re at CPDP, find and talk to Iain. Absent that, read what he’s been writing here, I’ve been writing here, and Nitin Badjatia has been writing here.

Maybe for May: A Car-azy Forecast: How Will VinFast Hit Its 300,000 Target for 2026

Hi Zach, Here is a crazy but educationally entertaining story. Looking at how VinFast will target 300,000 here is a proposal based on educated guesses Global 2026 model UPDATE Vietnam: 110,000 – its their country, they can force their market to buy, the socialist party can literally force the market ... [continued]

The post Maybe for May: A Car-azy Forecast: How Will VinFast Hit Its 300,000 Target for 2026 appeared first on CleanTechnica.

“Scene on Radio” Podcast Presents “The News”

“Scene on Radio” Presents “The News,” A New Podcast Series Tackling Today’s Information Crisis Launching May 27

Co-Hosted by John Biewen and Chenjerai Kumanyika, the series is a 2026 Tribeca Festival Official Selection for Audio Storytelling. “Scene on Radio” is brought to listeners by the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University and PRX

Two-time Peabody Award-nominated podcast Scene on Radio from John Biewen today announced The News, a new eight-part series delving into today’s high-stakes information crisis. Acclaimed audio producer and Empire City host Chenjerai Kumanyika, a journalism professor at New York University, joins Biewen as co-host. He collaborated on two previous seasons of the show, Seeing White and The Land That Never Has Been Yet.

Scene on Radio: The News is brought to listeners in partnership with Duke University’s Kenan Institute for Ethics and Pulitzer-winning public media organization PRX. The series — a 2026 Tribeca Festival Official Selection for innovative audio storytelling — launches Wednesday, May 27 with new episodes weekly. An audio trailer is available now. The News will be released via the Scene on Radio podcast feed, free across all major podcast platforms including Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, Spotify, Overcast, and NPR One.

“Just about everyone is mad at the news media,” Biewen said. “But Chenjerai and I think there’s a lot of confusion about the real systemic roots of today’s media crises. What’s really wrong with the news? Is it what we think it is?”

Introducing Scene on Radio: The News

In today’s polarized United States, there are few shared facts. On core questions, millions of citizens don’t know what’s true, or believe things that are not. While American media has a checkered history since the nation’s founding, our current media crises are especially acute, with the stakes escalating. If we could build a media ecosystem that’s genuinely free, independent, and democratic, what would that look like? Scene on Radio: The News will probe these consequential questions and more: When we turn to the media, do we actually want the truth? Where do people get information, and how accurate is it? What is bias, and what are we to make of the pursuit of objectivity? If we could build a media ecosystem that’s genuinely free, independent, and democratic, what would that look like?

Created in 2015, past seasons of Scene on Radio have explored imperative social issues such as race, patriarchy, democracy, and capitalism — and the ways they’re rooted in systems and ideologies constructed over centuries by people with power. Each season, pivotally, seeks to offer listeners new ways forward.

The News will also feature perspectives from former editor of The New Republic, Peter Beinart, Viktor Packard of the Annenberg School for Communication’s Media, Inequality, and Change Center, and more.

About John Biewen

John Biewen is an audio documentary maker based at the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University, where he hosts and produces the Scene on Radio podcast. Scene on Radio’s 2017 series, Seeing White, and its 2020 series on American democracy, The Land That Never Has Been Yet, were each nominated for a Peabody Award. Biewen’s work has also won the Robert F. Kennedy and the Scripps Howard National Journalism Awards. Previously, Biewen reported for American Public Media and NPR News. He is co-editor of the book, Reality Radio: Telling True Stories in Sound, published by the University of North Carolina Press.

About Chenjerai Kumanyika

Chenjerai Kumanyika is a journalist, artist, and assistant professor at NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. He is the creator and host of Empire City, a podcast that explores the untold origin story of the NYPD. He is also the co-creator and co-host of Uncivil, Gimlet Media’s Peabody Award-winning podcast on the Civil War. Kumanyika’s work has been recognized with several prestigious honors including the George Foster Peabody Award (2018) and The Media Literate Media Award (NAMLE). In 2021, he received the Union of Democratic Communications’ Dallas Smythe Award for his career accomplishments and advocacy.

About PRX

Celebrating more than 20 years as a nonprofit public media company, PRX works in partnership with leading independent creators, organizations, and stations to bring meaningful audio storytelling into millions of listeners’ lives. PRX is one of the world’s top podcast publishers, public radio distributors, and audio producers, serving as an engine of innovation for public media and podcasting to help shape a vibrant future for creative and journalistic audio. Shows across PRX’s portfolio of broadcast productions, podcast partners, and its Radiotopia podcast network have received recognition from the Peabody Awards, the Tribeca Festival, the International Documentary Association, the National Magazine Awards, and the Pulitzer Prizes. Visit PRX.org for more.


“Scene on Radio” Podcast Presents “The News” was originally published in PRX Official on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.