Nieman Lab→ AI search engines fail to produce accurate citations in over 60% of tests, according to new Tow Center study
2025-03-10 Over the past year, AI chatbots have been widely criticized for how poorly they cite news publishers, and how little traffic they drive to the publishers they do cite properly. ChatGPT has often been at the center of this conversation. Last summer, I r …›
Nieman Lab→ Politico Pro wants subscribers doing “deep research” on its site, not on ChatGPT
2025-03-06 Politico Pro is a high-priced item ($12,000 or more annually!) that is targeted at a demanding audience of lobbyists, agency staffers, corporate execs, industry think-tankers, and oligarchs either real or aspiring. It attempts to give high-leverage int …›
Nieman Lab→ News unions are grappling with generative AI. Our new study shows what they’re most concerned about
2025-03-06 Generative AI hype has launched newsroom experiments around the world. Even though many of these early applications have become cautionary tales, the hype has endured for over two years since OpenAI publicly launched ChatGPT. In many ways, this is fami …›
NYT Open - Medium→ How The New York Times systematically migrated from Enzyme into React Testing Library
2025-03-03 How we navigated the shift from Enzyme to React Testing Library at The New York Times.Illustration by Iris LeiBy Felipe BuenañoAs part of our efforts to maintain and improve the functionality and performance of The New York Times core website, we r …›
Iffy.news→ WikiCredCon 2025
2025-02-11 Expanding on our Iffy.news/Veri.FYI session at WikiCredCon (February 15 2025), asking Wikimedians to consider adding domain name as data in Wikidata… Wikimedia is a wonderful source of information about the credibility of news sources. But it’s …›
BuzzMachine→ Here we go again
2025-02-06 In an endless game of lobbyists’ Whac-A-Mole, it’s a new year and here is new legislation trying to save the news. Except it’s not new. First, from Oregon, comes a rehash of bad legislation written by newspaper hedge-fund lobbyists, v …›
BuzzMachine→ The whole world is whining
2025-01-21 For 25 years now, the Edelman PR company has issued its Trust Barometer. This year, it’s all about grievances. It’s Festivus every day, the world around. Six in 10 people in the survey “hold grievances against business, government, and th …›
BuzzMachine→ How the #BrokenTimes covers the fascist oligarchy
2025-01-18 Two days to go until the fascist oligarchy comes to power in the United States and this is how our once-greatest newspaper, The New York Times, is covering what could end in the fall of American democracy. To The Times, all the world’s Trump …›
BuzzMachine→ It’s the racism, stupid
2024-11-09 Every current and common explanation for the reelection of Donald Trump — whether inflation or immigration, culture wars or campaign tactics, blaming Harris or Biden or the party — elides its true and root cause: racism. The U …›
BuzzMachine→ How Fucked Are We? Very.
2024-11-06 Nevermind every other theory or tactical complaint about what happened in this election. Kamala Harris did everything she possibly could to win. The fault is not hers. The fault is in our nation. We must come to the realization that Ameri …›
Iffy.news→ PolitiFact Scores 2024
2024-10-25 Every four years Iffy.news compiles PolitiFact-checks (with permission) to rate the veracity of political people. We convert their fact-checks into credibility scores, comparing pols, pundits, PACS, and parties …›
BuzzMachine→ The technology addiction trope
2024-10-17 Rupert Murdoch’s media have been a key source of moral panic about the internet and technology — see, for example, this from his Times declaring that phones are “dope” that imprison us all in an epidemic of addiction causing cognitive …›
NYT Open - Medium→ How The New York Times Incorporates Editorial Judgement in Algorithms to Curate Home Screen Content
2024-10-02 A look into how editorially-driven algorithms assist content curation on The New York Times home page.Illustration by Vivek ThakkerBy Zhen YangWhether on the web or the app, the home page of The New York Times is a crucial gateway, setting the stage …›
BuzzMachine→ How they have failed us
2024-09-19 It is as if the editorial department at The Washington Post woke up one morning asking, in headlines I will quote below, “What are we doing wrong?” I will start by trying to answer the question for them, The New York Times, CNN, and the res …›
BuzzMachine→ What’s become of The Times & Co.?
2024-09-11 As often as I am disappointed in and critical of them lately, I will not cancel my subscriptions to The New York Times or The Washington Post. They should be so lucky, for I will stay on their cases. I also wish to support the good reporting that stil …›
BuzzMachine→ The unprecedented grand coalition
2024-09-06 As Nicolle Wallace exclaimed on her show Friday, Liz Cheney and Dick Cheney, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders have all gathered together around a cause. That cause is democracy and its standard bearer is Kamala Harris. This is a mome …›
Source→ Product manager diary: What I learned taking an intro course in web development
2024-09-03 By Madison Karas (Photo by Pankaj Patel on Unsplash) A few months ago, I wrote in SOURCE about learning to work with development teams and software vendors as a new news product manager. My next step at the time: taking an introduction to …›
BuzzMachine→ How Murdoch makes a meme
2024-08-29 I’ve long said that Rupert Murdoch is the single most malign influence in English-speaking democracy. He executes his strategy in small ways that add up. Here is an example: how a trope is born across Murdoch’s worldwide empire. Here is the edi …›
BuzzMachine→ California’s Deal for News
2024-08-22 A deal has just been struck in California by Assembly member Buffy Wicks that averts what could have been, in my opinion, disastrous legislation written by lobbyists to benefit primarily incumbent, investor- and hedge-fund-controlled news media in …›
BuzzMachine→ Could a new day dawn at The Times?
2024-08-18 Since I’ve been constantly criticial of The Times and its coverage of the election, here is a thread from the socials in which I note a Sunday morning of positive coverage of Kamala Harris leading the paper online: Well knock me over with …›
BuzzMachine→ What ‘Press’?
2024-08-13 Margaret Sullivan — whom I greatly respect and with whom I almost always agree — wrote a Guardian column asserting that “Kamala Harris must speak to the press.” Go read it first. I disagree. That resulted in a thread on th …›
BuzzMachine→ White voters heard here
2024-07-24 On MSNBC this morning, I watched Elise Jordan’s focus groups from Green Bay, Wisconsin — the first after the nomination of Kamala Harris. I was honestly shocked that, after the start of this unprecedented presidential campaign by a Black and A …›
Transom→ Revisiting: Magical Realism in Radio
2024-07-16 I think this happens to reporters a lot. They see someone who looks interesting. They chat with them, and they think, “Hunh, maybe there’s a story here.” It happened to David Weinberg. Back in 2016 or so, David was producing a series on South Los …›
BuzzMachine→ In mass media’s death throes
2024-07-13 The New York Times et al wish Joe Biden would go gentle into that good night. I wish mass media would instead. Here is a post from a thread: In this defensive New Yorker reaction to Joe Biden (finally) criticizing the press that has been critic …›
Transom→ All Hear, July 2024
2024-07-11 Hello! Welcome (back) to All Hear, the Everything List for Audio Opportunities. I recently read a thread in UKAN — a listserv for U.K. audio producers — about people considering leaving the audio industry. It was heartbreaking to read about so many …›
Transom→ An Audio Field Trip
2024-07-02 One of my favorite past times is sending music to friends, usually a link to a song sent by text. Punk, dub, and experimental music to my friends Sven and Matthias. Avant-garde classical and electronic music to Carla… For my daughter, Gwen, I usually …›
NYT Open - Medium→ Enhancing The New York Times Web Performance with React 18
2024-06-26 How upgrading to React 18 energized The New York Times website — and how we tackled some of the challenges we faced along the way.Illustration by Ben HickeyBy Ilya GurevichAs software engineers at The New York Times, we place a high value on p …›
Transom→ Structure Interviews Like a Good Story
2024-06-17 I picked up on something Ira Glass said in the last episode of Sound School that I want to highlight here. Rather than structuring a story as a collection of arguments and ideas, structure it as a narrative, a sequence of events. This happened, then th …›
Transom→ All Hear, June 2024
2024-06-06 Hello! Hello! Welcome (back) to All Hear, the Everything List for Audio Opportunities. This month there’s a few brilliant opportunities for makers who are underrepresented in different ways — those in the Global Majority, those working in a lan …›
Transom→ Tips to Elevate Your Reporting and Storytelling from Ira Glass
2024-06-04 I started counting the number of valuable tips Ira Glass of This American Life offers on this episode of Sound School and I gave up. There were too many. Tips on writing, reporting, structure, scoring… In fact, I think this rare recording I’m featu …›
Transom→ Safety First: Recording with Actors for an LGBTQ Story in Uganda
2024-05-21 I remember thinking: Uh, oh. We hired the wrong translator. I was in Brazil, Rio de Janeiro to be exact, reporting a story on pretrial detention — a netherworld between arrest and arraignment. In Rio and many places around the world, once someone …›
Transom→ Shocking, Heartbreaking, Transformative…and Ethical?
2024-05-07 (I recommend you listen to this episode before reading this post or listening to the audio excerpt below. All of it will make much more sense.) Back in the aughts, one of my students was producing a profile of a singer songwriter. During editorial meet …›
Transom→ All Hear, May 2024
2024-05-02 Hello! Welcome (back) to All Hear, the Everything List for Audio Opportunities. In some personal news, I’m headed to New York for the first two weeks of June to host an In The Dark event at the Tribeca festival — I would love to meet some audio mak …›
Transom→ Introducing Sound Judgment
2024-04-23 Right this minute, I’m riding an Amtrak train, heading home after visiting my daughter at college. It’s supposed to be a day off. No work. I thought I’d read a book (In case you’re wondering, I packed two: Mama’s Last Hug and How the Garcia G …›
Transom→ Yohancified: Making You Didn’t See Nothin
2024-04-16 Note from Sarah Geis: This manifesto is made up of excerpts of interviews I did with fellow members of the core production team: Yohance Lacour, Bill Healy, Erisa Apantaku and Dana Brozost-Kelleher. But the podcast could not have been made without the …›
Transom→ Thanks, NPR. That Was Satisfying.
2024-04-09 During the first couple of minutes of this episode, I take NPR to task for the preponderance of two-ways on the network’s news programs. In particular, my distaste for host interviews with reporters where everything sounds so unsurprising. This is es …›
Transom→ All Hear, April 2024
2024-04-04 Hello! Welcome (back) to All Hear, the Everything List for Audio Opportunities. You might know me as an organiser of resources, but I’m an audio maker too! Last month I wrote an article for Transom, The Many Lives of “Dead Ends”, about a piece I …›
Transom→ Building A New Media Ecosystem
2024-04-02 Looking for a Signal We’ve spent the last five years using our perspective as scientists and funders not only to figure out why exceptional independent creators make the things they make, but to create an ecosystem that amplifies their signal. …›
NYT Open - Medium→ Milestones on our Journey to Standardize Experimentation at The New York Times
2024-03-26 Illustration by Henri CampeãBy Kathy YangExperimentation is an important part of product development at The New York Times — it helps us measure the impact of our changes, ship features safely, and gain insight into user behavior. Experiments …›
Transom→ The Um, A Deep Dive
2024-03-26 Dale Lumsden taught me how to cut tape — as in reel-to-reel tape. I call his teaching approach “The Lumsden Method.” The way Dale did it was this: He straightened himself up at the mic. Got his copy ready. Cleared his throat. Hit record. And …›