Former Meta exec Nick Clegg says asking artists for use permission would “kill the AI industry in this country overnight” →

“In a statement, Media Matters President Angelo Carusone said that the Trump administration had ‘been defined by naming right-wing media figures to key posts and abusing the power of the federal government to bully political opponents and silence critics.'” —JB

“Eight years after major fashion brands and publications said they would no longer work with Terry Richardson, following a string of allegations of sexual misconduct made against the renowned fashion photographer, he now appears to be making a comeback.” —JB

“U.S.-based private investment firm Redbird Capital Partners has bought the Telegraph…Redbird said Abu Dhabi government-backed International Media Investments, which originally had the majority stake under a plan to buy Telegraph Media Group in 2023 but was stymied by the then-Conservative government stopping foreign state investment in newspapers, will take a minority investment.” —JB

The tally was 171-38. “‘Today we win a seat at the table for all tech workers at The Washington Post…Together, our union will secure stronger protections and access to benefits that will help us do our jobs better’…Last September, the Post laid off 54 people at Arc XP.” —JB

“Last week, Gov. Gavin Newsom dialed back state support for a first-in-the-nation newsroom fund in the face of a $12 billion state deficit. Then on Wednesday, Google — the lone corporate backer of the initiative — decided to lower its own tab by a third, from $15 million to $10 million for this year.” —JB

“Clunky sentences were tightened. Inelegant adjectives were cut. Powdered doughnut holes were eaten, and mini bags of Cheez-Its, too.” —JB

“The changes, announced in a two-page memo issued by Hegseth, effectively boxed credentialed reporters into one corner on one floor of the building…To walk anywhere else in the Pentagon, including past areas occupied by the joint chiefs and the press office for the joint chiefs, reporters will need to request permission and be escorted by an official, the memo said.” —JB

“In April, two weeks before it aired on PBS stations, a 90-second segment of the film in which [Art] Spiegelman referred to the president’s ‘smug and ugly mug’ was cut from the film at the behest of public-media executives…PBS has been under attack by the Trump administration since January.” —JB

Advertising is “one of the few high-margin businesses that can absorb the cost of scaling both Al and hardware. With ChatGPT, the GPT Store, and now a possible always-on device, OpenAl is steadily building an ecosystem full of engagement and signal-rich user behavior — exactly what advertisers want. And while OpenAI hasn’t said much about ads, it’s building the kind of ecosystem that rarely stay ad-free for long.” —JB

“According to two Washington Post staffers, staff have complained privately that the book publicly pitted current colleagues against each other and appeared to run afoul of the Post’s editorial guidelines around collegiality, as well as rules that restrict staff from publicly disclosing internal editorial conversations.” —JB

“Like ‘The Office,’ ‘The Paper’ is a mockumentary sitcom about an industry in trouble: this time the newspaper business…The same fictional documentary crew that followed the employees of Dunder Mifflin in Scranton, Penn. is now following those who work at The Truth Teller, a fictional newspaper in Toledo, Ohio, whose publisher is trying to revive it with the help of volunteer reporters.” —JB

“The company has also made slight changes in recent months to its diversity policies, like renaming its DEI team the ‘HR Inclusion’ team.” —JB

“‘Corporations that own news outlets should not be in the business of settling baseless lawsuits that clearly violate the First Amendment,’ Freedom of the Press Foundation director of advocacy Seth Stern said in a statement.” —JB

Reader State is a “proprietary metric tracks how frequently subscribers engage with content…[The Atlantic] defines success as a subscriber returning on several different days within a 30-day period. Those who read on at least four separate days a month tend to develop a weekly habit — a strong predictor of staying subscribed for a year.” (Related.) —JB

“When you step back it is remarkable how many big things are happening which we hear little or nothing about because people are being quiet…One consistent pattern I’ve seen in recent months is that this repressive dynamic has much more impact on elites.” —LO

“Targeting video, the copy desk, the opinion section and people who’ve worked at the company for 10 or more years.” —JB

“The seminar that Freedman teaches at Columbia Journalism School began in 1991 as something of an experiment, testing whether students could, in the course of a semester, produce a book proposal to sell and hopefully publish. The results have proved his hunch: The class has led to 113 book contracts and 95 published books, out of some 675 people who have taken it. This spring Freedman taught the course for the last time.”

“The Trump family media company plans to raise $3 billion to buy cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin, in a bet on the kind of digital assets that have been championed by the U.S. president’s administration. Trump Media & Technology Group…is behind the Truth Social app and controlled by the president’s family.” —LO

“I think more than any other company, we prioritize sending traffic to the web. No one sends traffic to the web in the way we do. I look at other companies, newer emerging companies, where they openly talk about it as something they’re not going to do. We are the only ones who make it a high priority, agonize, and so on. We’ll engage, and we’ve always engaged.”