Today I'm releasing a major paper on California's Journalism Preservation Act (& its federal cousin, JCPA): its weaknesses; the history of news & copyright; newspapers' long history of fighting new technologies & competitors--and alternative solutions. 1/
drive.google.com/file/d/1HHcDuU… CJPA & JCPA are the latest from a long history of efforts by the news industry to diminish fair use and extend copyright for their exclusive benefit. Their must-carry clauses also, in my opinion, violate the 1st Amendment by requiring platforms to carry their speech. 2/

"Most managers see AI as an existential threat," says @risj_oxford. That is because they think they are in the content business. In The Gutenberg Parenthesis, I argue content is a print-era notion now fully commodified. Journalism is service.
reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/news/how-media… I say here it is time to give up on old news, to stop throwing good money & effort after bad. The first step in building a new journalism is to imagine it post-content (not dependent on scale & copyright): a journalism of service, community, collaboration.
medium.com/whither-news/i…

In re copyright & AI, I've been thinking about authors. This essay says "'author' in its modern sense is a relative recent invention." A lovely quote on the book: "It does not contain thoughts; these must arise in the mind of the comprehending reader." 1/
jstor.org/stable/2738129… Christian Sigmund Krause: "I can read the contents of a book, learn, abridge, expand, teach translate it, write about it, laugh over it, find faults with it, deride it, use it poorly or well...But the one thing I should be prohibited from doing it copying or reprinting it?" 2/

I wish I could celebrate news of the departure of the single most malign influence in English-speaking democracy, Rupert Murdoch, but I fear Fox will only be worse under son Lachlan & that this is a means to solidify his power before Dad's death. 1/
bbc.com/news/business-… We have Rupert Murdoch to curse for giving us Trump, Brexit, and a right-wing news monopoly in much of Australia. I also blame him for launching media's war against the internet--because he was pissed off he failed so badly online, a story rarely told. 2/

At the dawn of computers, newsrooms thought their "content" is what made them valued, so they each needed special "systems" to "manage" it. They commodified content until it lost value; so did their CMSes.
axios.com/2023/07/18/vox… I trained the Chicago Tribune newsroom on its first CMS in '74 (I was young but yes I'm that old). They next designed their own special CMS and it was so special papers almost didn't get out & they assigned their investigative task force to investigate their own system.

I dropped everything to read A.G. Sulzberger's essay on objectivity; you should, too. It is intelligent, reasoned, candid, fair, well-written. I won't quibble with small points. One large point: I think he conflates "independence" with "objectivity." 1/
cjr.org/special_report…

https://twitter.com/PostBaron/status/1658179609253273629

Independent from what? From government and power? Absolutely. That is why access journalism can be so insidious. Independent from journalists' own business interests? Yes. That is why I find their attacks on the internet, which gives overdue hearing to many, troubling. 2/

There are so many open letters about AI, I'm starting to wonder whether AI's writing them. The latest protests AI learning from art to make art. But how has art ever been made? I'd hate to see this be a hardening of copyright's restrictions on creation. 1/
artisticinquiry.org/AI-Open-Letter The letter's language is emotional: "This is effectively the greatest art heist in history... Generative AI art is vampirical, feasting on past generations of artwork even as it sucks the lifeblood from living artists." Oh, my. 2/

In his well-told chronicle, @pierce of The Verge gets the origin story of Google AMP right like no report I've seen. And I was there at the start (in Finland!). I'm in here: 1/
theverge.com/23711172/googl… Google was and still is right about one thing: Media fucked up the web with their gawdy digital gewgaws and unbearable overdose of ads and promotions and interruptions. News media made the web as pokey, painful, and unappealing as an overdue shit. 2/

.@JoeNBC: I said I would share research on youth and social media. A family crisis intervened; apologies for the delay. Here are useful links. A long 🧵and 📸 /1

https://twitter.com/jeffjarvis/status/1639207503484407809

To start: Here's a good overview from London's @theipaper reviewing research and "misleading tactics" from Jon Haidt, Jean Twenge & John Burn-Murdoch. "A lot of the evidence is shaky and unclear." 2/
inews.co.uk/news/technolog…

Springer's Döpfner loves to play the contrarian bad boy and bad boys get in trouble....
‘I’m all for climate change’: Axel Springer CEO faces heat over leaked messages theguardian.com/world/2023/apr… The taz--Springer's bête noire--is saying 'told ya so' under the headline "the monster we made."
Die „Zeit“ veröffentlicht persönliche Nachrichten von Springer-Chef Mathias Döpfner. Die Empörung ist groß. Zu kurz kommt, wer ihn mächtig gemacht hat. taz.de/Enthuellung-ue…

As you read Marty Baron on objectivity, you'll want to reread @WesleyLowery. They are in dialog in print over the idea and execution of this journalistic McGuffin:
nytimes.com/2020/06/23/opi…
We want objective judges and doctors. Why not journalists too? 1/
washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/… Like my teacher, @jayrosen_nyu, I need time to think about what they say together. I come with many questions:
How does this debate inform or restrict covering the rise of fascism?
How does it deal with manipulation of journalism by those fascists? 2/

Good God almighty. And this:

@jswatz I wouldn't be anything other than respectful, John. Musk's purchase was long foretold; not new. And it ain't just social media. Media's failures include its own--Murdoch's bully pulpits--and mainstream media tiptoeing through a democratic disaster. @jswatz John, let me ask you a question, since you know the landscape so well: Faced with this kind of questioning/criticism of judgment, what's the discussion like inside The Times? The assumption outside is dismissal. I don't know that that's fair. I do know I miss having an ombudsman.

I am shocked that the Pelosi story is not the lead of the Times and Post this morning. Are you? We hold a number of self-referential myths in journalism: that we 'know what a story is,' that we have 'news judgment, that we are 'set the agenda,' that we are 'gatekeepers.' Judge those myths against the news judgment displayed by our top news outlets here. Punctures the myths.

Diving into @PubliusorPerish's Misinformation Nation; learning much. First, it's instructive that early newspaper publishers in America disavowed responsibility for truth--for there was no way to authenticate news--until a demand for facts in the 1770s. 1/ amazon.com/Misinformation… Second, Jordan gives considerable coverage to the importance of the letter--which I cover in my book (learning much from @rachael_scar's Writing to the World)--and its relationship with media and mediation. 2/

amazon.com/Writing-World-…

Here is the Big Bang in Chicago news media. The Tribune, its marrow having been sucked dry by wealthy egotists and hedge funds, sits alone inside its crumbling pay fort while the Sun-Times and WBEZ tear down the walls and conquer the market.
chicago.suntimes.com/news/2022/10/6… I feel quite sad for the Tribune. I started my career there, at its Chicago Today, the paper that had no tomorrow, then at the Tribune, where I was a kid assistant city editor and where I learned and taught computers (who knew where that would land me?). Since then...

Finishing two MSS, I finally have time to turn to books I've wanted to read. First: Free Speech by @Jacobmchangama, an excellent history of both speech & efforts to control it, as the subtitle says, from Socrates to Social Media. Very much recommended. 1/
basicbooks.com/titles/jacob-m… I've been studying speech from Gutenberg forward. @JMchangama paints on a much broader canvas, in culture and time. 2/

Demonizing A/B testing. Without this "social experiment" (loaded phrase) they would not know how to improve prospects for all.

LinkedIn Ran Social Experiments On 20 Million Users Over Five Years nyti.ms/3LUboKB I read the study in Science, a good-news story: People's job prospects can be enhanced through weak over strong ties. (See the net as a means of breaking the power of nepotism & old boys' networks then). This is a first large-scale study of weak ties. 2/
science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…

This is devastating--to Columbia and to the entire idea of ranking schools. "It makes no attempt to assess the quality of teaching and scholarship directly. For how could it? A good education is a subtle thing that is far too complex to be reduced to a single number." 1/

https://twitter.com/BGrueskin/status/1572997285377871874

Consider the damage US News does to American education, turning most schools into also-rans, bringing yet more inequity into school funding, skewing the goals & outcomes of higher education, creating a crash derby of college admissions. 2/

Today at @Newmarkjschool. we're holding an unconference w/3 cohorts of our @NewmarkJLeaders & guests. I was asked to open it. I thought I'd share what I have in mind as Post-it Notes. Well, what's a Post-it but a prehistoric tweet? So here are my 20 provocations about news... 1. Media forms have half-lives. Newspapers & magazines are fading. Broadcast's age is ending. Blockbuster books & movies entail ever greater risk. What might follow? What do TikTok & Wattpad portend?
medium.com/whither-news/w…

"Polarization" is a lazy, incomplete, skewed, damaging, and cowardly framing. We do not have an increase in polarization. We have an increase in authoritarianism, fascism, blatant racism, and journalistic prevarication using such words as polarization. To his credit, @JeffreyGoldberg confesses to @brianstelter that @TheAtlantic was slow to use "racist" and "liar" in re Trump but is catching up.