Content Aware media news: June 13, 2024

Spams, scams, art contests and legislatures - all in this week's Content Aware.

Published: 15:11, 13 June 2024

California dreamin’
Legislators in California have breathed life back into a plan to extract money from social and search platforms for making money off the back of news content, to inject back into journalism in the state.
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Hand over the kroner!
With impressive unity, Danish publishers gang up to send their demand for moneys to OpenAI for copyright shenanigans - a group action being viewed with interest by other non-English-writing territories.
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Spam scam thank you ma’am
Last week we hinted at a big story brewing from UKPG investigatory imperium Charlotte Tobitt, revealing indications that Facebook had started treating local news as spam. Continued digging has revealed many many more examples; how big is this really? Do send her your examples if it has happened to you.
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Sacre bleurgh!
If election fever makes you queasy trying to keep up with their dizzying claims and counterclaims, bear a thought for the harassed political reporters of France. This X thread details a breakneck three days that will have any journalist shaking their head in sympathy.
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Picture their faces
A twist on the increasingly common “AI wins art contest” story: man ejected from art competition for winning “best AI-generated picture” category with real photo.
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No skipping allowed!
Embed YouTube on your site? The video platform is testing trickery that would circumvent users’ adblockers and force-play ads which previously would have been avoided: bear it in mind if your embed view rates drop off noticeably.
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Ramble on and on
One of the longest-standing tenets of journalism training has been tuition of the inverted pyramid structure of news writing, but facts-before-background may soon turn out to be so 19th century in the world of AI generated news. This sounds to us like news reports aping the over-SEOd recipe meme which gave us 1000 words of grandma’s childhood before getting to the meat.
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Old data, new tricks
How Harvard Business Review is turning on the AI taps and using it to resurface old content.
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