We keep an eye out for the most interesting stories about Labby subjects: digital media, startups, the web, journalism, strategy, and more. Here’s some of what we’ve seen lately.
April 24, 2024
“Student journalism, like that of the Spectator covering the campus protests, is a critical component in the broader media landscape, particularly in situations like protests where immediate, local insight is crucial.” —
The Present Age / Parker Molloy
/ Apr 24“Companies increasingly view employees as they do external audiences: As people to be engaged with, courted, and communicated with regularly. As a result, a growing number of organizations are developing editorial content aimed specifically at internal audiences. That means content responsibilities are increasingly becoming part of internal communicators’ job descriptions.” —
Toolkits / Shareen Pathak
/ Apr 24“The divest-or-ban bill is now law, starting the clock for ByteDance to make its move. The company has an initial nine months to sort out a deal, though the president could extend that another three months if he sees progress.” —
The Verge / Lauren Feiner
/ Apr 24Chu joins the Nieman staff after a distinguished journalism career spent primarily at the Los Angeles Times. Chu has taken on a series of overseas postings for the Times, reporting from more than 30 countries while serving as bureau chief in Beijing, Rio de Janeiro, New Delhi, and London. Most recently, he served as the newsroom’s deputy news editor in London, overseeing breaking news coverage and shepherding the homepage in the middle of the Los Angeles night as well as editing correspondents in other parts of the world. —LO
April 23, 2024
“Reporters — doing the traditional thing of asking campaigns questions or giving them a chance to respond to reporting before publishing a story — are increasingly finding their emails to campaign staff, and their names and sometimes contact info, screenshotted and posted online like footage from a hidden-camera video.” —
NOTUS / Evan McMorris-Santoro and Katherine Swartz
/ Apr 23“When Columbia is sort of restricting access to press, we have an especially important job in documenting things going on, and we’ve tried to.” —SS
The Daily Beast / Corbin Bolies
/ Apr 23“As part of the buyout program, early retirement packages are being offered to employees 55 and older who have been with the organization for at least 10 continuous years, according to the email. The organization will also consider buyouts for other interested employees.” —SC
“The Washington Post is partnering with Virginia Tech’s Sanghani Center for Artificial and Data Analytics to develop the new tech. It’s a generative AI project where readers can get answers to questions, using data taken from the Post’s previous coverage. The plan is for it to be built to understand intent in user questions, rather than just relying on keywords like some other AI platforms.” —
Technical.ly / Kaela Roeder
/ Apr 23“Ghost says it’s working with Mastodon and Buttondown, another newsletter platform, on ActivityPub support. The company also says it will be working to improve its reading experience as it prepares to let people follow other fediverse authors on its platform. Importantly, the project FAQ also says that paid content ‘should work fine’ with ActivityPub as well — something no other platform has really tried yet, as far as I’m aware.” —
The Verge / Nilay Patel
/ Apr 23“Eventually, people may stop writing, stop filming, stop composing—at least for the open, public web. People will still create, but for small, select audiences, walled-off from the content-hoovering AIs. The great public commons of the web will be gone.” —
The Atlantic / Judith Donath and Bruce Schneier
/ Apr 23
