Politico announces layoffs, new product →

Congress mandates the publication’s independence, but “in recent months, applicants for positions at the publication — which reaches about 1.4 million people a day across its platforms, according to the publisher — have been asked: ‘How would you advance the President’s Executive Orders and policy priorities in this role? Identify one or two relevant Executive Orders or policy initiatives that are significant to you, and explain how you would help implement them if hired.’” —LO

Lis Smith, a Democratic communications strategist: “If you reduce these very serious issues to cruel, funny memes, you’re going to alienate a lot of people who might be there with you on an issue if you’d approached it with a little bit more maturity and humanity. But the administration is saying, cut out the humanity, cut out the maturity. Those things don’t matter. Because a viral meme — a meme that is funny or cruel — will probably spread faster than anything with nuance. They’re prioritizing speed and virality over nuance and seriousness.” —SC

“The new Premium Plus plan, which costs $199 annually, will allow sharing across one paid subscription for up to four accounts. It represents The Atlantic’s first new paywall tier since it launched digital subscriptions in 2019.” —SC

As on Reddit, users can post, comment, and upvote (or “digg”) content in various interest-based communities. The company is now under the ownership of its original founder, Kevin Rose, and Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian. —SS

“Journalists, courts, human-rights investigators, and protest movements everywhere have long depended on shared standards of proof. Today we are seeing what happens when those standards collapse. When any image can be dismissed as possibly synthetic, those in power no longer need to suppress speech. They have only to raise questions that undermine belief in a shared reality.” —SC

“If you work in software development, the future feels incredibly uncertain. Tools like Claude Code are plainly automating a lot of tasks that programmers had to do manually until quite recently, allowing nonexperts to write software and established programmers to increase their output dramatically” —LO

“As of January, Strib Varsity had accounted for 10% of new Star Tribune subscriptions and was converting readers at a three times higher rate than the main website.” —LO