Ran into this the other day researching a brewery. Google AI summary referenced a glowing NYT profile of its beers. The linked article was not in fact about that brewery, but an entirely different one. Brewery I was researching has never been mentioned in the NYT. Complete invention at that point and has 'stolen' the good press from a different place and just fed the user what they wanted to see, namely a recommendation for the thing I was googling.
I don't know if you're alluding to it and I just missed the sarcasm but their comment is at least partially computer generated. Last sentence is classic bot talk coded.
It's the downfall of having zero accountability, infinite reach, and anyone can become a "citizen journalist" without credible, less biased, subject matter experts curating things as a final, fact-checking arbiter.
I'm sure they are, but I don't see how it relates to my question. Like, you wouldn't see anyone posting links to download a movie, or an app, that would otherwise require people to pay. So why is the practice so common to links here? I mean, shouldn't HN users pay for the journalism they're so eager to discuss?
Enablement of archive links is a decentralized decision made by content owners.
Shouldn't HN respect the distribution decisions of content owners? The primary link on an HN story is always the paywalled link, which offers search engine benefits to the target.
There's a long history of multi-channel distribution policy and variations in priced and non-priced benefits to content owners, from the first days of print to the ever-evolving online economy of paywalls, traffic brokers, ad brokers, content scraping and surveillance capitalism.
The idea that arts criticism is somehow 'guerilla marketing' is such a deeply cynical, HN brain take. Of course the people who make things want to get the word out about what they're doing. But The New Yorker doesn't collude with PR agencies to promote things. It's news when people make new things; that's literally the whole idea in coverage of the arts. Is it really your position that when a movie, game or book is reviewed in The New Yorker it's because some PR person told them to? Chris Bryd is a well-respected games journalist, not some industry shill. He's probably wanted to write about this topic for years, and the forthcoming game is part of what makes the profile newsworthy right now.
Anyway if you believe arts criticism is 'quite gross' and want it banned, what does that world look like? Should people who make things not be allowed to tell publications about it? Will there be a cone of silence around new games?
I get your view, read the essay years ago and we agree on the facts. I'm a journalist who gets 5-10 PR junk PR pitches a day. I don’t pitch stories from PR hacks--I pitch and write about the stuff I think is interesting and important. If I got an awesome pitch from a PR person tomorrow about something like that, why wouldn't I pursue the story?
I fully acknowledge the PR industry exists but to suggest that coverage of a beloved indie game creator by one of my industry's most respected reporters is somehow paid off or inauthentic because PR exists is such a leap. As I said earlier he's probably been trying to write about the Stanley Parable for years.
I also have firsthand experience of people I know at startups believing that their PR firm 'bought' them coverage. But if you read Paul's essay again he's careful to acknowledge that the service good PR firms are able to provide is that they can connect with journalists for stories not because of some shady undisclosed loyalty but because the PR people bring them interesting topics.
I'm not exaggerating for hyperbole: literally every single time I've ever seen a comment online of the form "why isn't the MSM talking about X", I've clicked over to the homepage of the New York Times and seen X right there.
Yeah it's unfortunate that we're in this place culturally but seems like just using the phrase suggests a lack of engagement with it so I guess it makes sense in some wacky way.
>If you write regularly and you're not using AI, you simply cannot keep up with the competition. You're out.
A very HN-centric view of the world. From my perch in journalism and publishing, elite writers absolutely loathe AI and almost uniformly agree it sucks. So to my mind the most 'competitive' spheres in writing do not use AI at all.
It doesn't matter how elite you think you are if the newspaper, magazine, or publishing company you write for can make more money from hiring people at a fraction of your cost and having them use AI to match or eclipse your professional output.
At some point the competition will be less about "does this look like the most skilled human writer wrote this?" and more about "did the AI guided by a human for a fraction of the cost of a skilled human writer output something acceptably good for people to read it between giant ads on our website / watch the TTS video on YouTube and sit through the ads and sponsors?", and I'm sorry to say, skilled human writers are at a distinct disadvantage here because they have professional standards and self respect.
So is the argument here that the New Yorker can make more money from AI slop writing overseen by low-wage overseas workers? Isn't that obviously not the case?
Anyway I think I've misunderstood the context in which we're using the word 'competition' here. My response was about attitudes toward AI from writers at the tip-top of the industry rather than profit maxxing/high-volume content farm type places.
It’s not that black and white. Maybe 1% of the top writers can take that stance and maybe even charge more for their all-human content (in a kind of vintage, handcraft kind of way) but the other 99% will have to adapt.
It’s simply more nuanced. If you’re writing a couple of articles a day to pay for your bills, what will stop you from writing actually 10 or 20 articles a day instead?
So you're saying major media companies are going to outsource their writing to people overseas using LLMs? There is more to journalism than the writing. There's also the investigative part where journalists go and talk to people, look into old records, etc.
This has become such a talking point of mine when I'm inevitably forced to explain why LLMs can't come for my job (yet). People seem baffled by the idea that reporting collects novel information about the world which hasn't been indexed/ingested at any point because it didn't exist before I did the interview or whatever it is.
They definitely try to replace part of the people this way, starting with the areas where it's the easiest, but obviously it will continue to other people as the capabilities improve. A big example is sports journalism, where lots of venues have game summaries that do not involve any human who actually saw the game, but rather software embellishing some narrative from the detailed referee scoring data. Another example is autotranslation of foreign news or rewriting press releases or summarizing company financial 'news' - most publishers will eagerly skip the labor intensive and thus expensive part where journalists go and talk to people, look into old records, etc, if they can get away with that.
i regularly (at least once a week) spot a typo or grammatical issue in a major news story. I see it in the NYTimes on occasion. I see it in local news ALL THE TIME. I swear an LLM would write better than have the idiots that are cranking out articles.
I agree with you that having elite writing skills will be useful for a long time. But the bar for proof reading seems to be quite low on average in the industry. I think you overestimate the writings skills of your average journalist.
Heh, when I see a spelling error in a news article.. I oddly feel like I can trust it more because it came from a human being. It's like a nugget of gold.
I keep hearing this sentiment on HN and IRL. As a journalist I think it misses the mark somewhat by failing to account for the value of reporting.
While some news can be generated exclusively from scraping Reddit threads or whatever, most decent journalism incorporates some form of reporting, i.e. the generation of novel information from trusted sources. Even without reporting, if you can't add to the store of knowledge in the world by writing the article, it doesn't offer any value to consumers or advertisers. That includes the the world of SEO spam. An effort has to be made to distinguish your work from the competition, or else your site isn't winning those top results.
Reddit threads are often just full of emotional responses to news already generated in this way. At some point along the line, a human has gone out and spoken to another human, forming an novel angle or argument, pursuing a line of inquiry, connected dots no one else has yet etc. That's news, not a summary of existing attitudes.
>I keep hearing this sentiment on HN and IRL. As a journalist I think it misses the mark somewhat by failing to account for the value of reporting.
There is valor added by journalists in even niche sectors. A journalist that reports on cars knows about the industry itself and can give an informed take on different developments, he might know how a car works, he might know about different trends in design, or markets, or whatever else. That is his added value.
When it comes to videogame journalism, though, they act as little more than spokespeople for corporations. They generally don't understand the product or how it works (mechanically or in terms of design), and in some cases aren't even adept at playing videogames themselves. The only thing the world would lose if no game journalist ever mentioned WoW again and the devs communicated directly with the playerbase would be the appearance of impartiality journalists give.
I am hardly a luminary of my field but if you take a look at some of my features you’ll see they are drastically different from the idea you may have in your head.
Lots of folks more accomplished than me who hit way harder. All the coverage about crunch, for instance, or sexual harassment scandals at big companies—-these are topics broken by games journos.
If your only exposure to this world is shitty SEO spam or cleverly-disguised marketing, I could see why you’d think the way you do. But there is so much good games journalism out there. I don’t recommend writing off the field like that.
> All the coverage about crunch, for instance, or sexual harassment scandals at big companies—-these are topics broken by games journos.
Sorry to be blunt but, that's not games. That's games journalists who want to be activists in their own fields. That, just as the gorillionth take on how this or that is problematic, is just people wanting to inject their politics into a hobby and it can't disappear soon enough.
I don't see that as an advantage of journalism. I see that as an evil to endure for a good that isn't there.
How is exposing malfeasance and illegal corporate activity activism?
I hate to retreat into platitudes here but good journalism shines a light in the dark, it comforts the afflicted and afflicts the comfortable, that’s kind of the name of the game.
If you’d prefer these topics go unaddressed and companies continue to take advantage of their workers or whatever, not sure we have enough in common to have real discourse on the subject. Sorry to be blunt lol.
That’s the problem, though, isn’t it? The vast majority of content that people see is low effort garbage that is pushed by media companies that are just looking to make a quick dime off of advertising revenue, and that’s very easy to do with AI.
Ad-based “news” is always going to have this problem, because getting clicks just requires getting people to the page; the quality of the content doesn’t matter nearly as much as the headline. The incentives for quality content just don’t exist in the current business model.
Paywalls obviously aren’t the solution, either, because news is nothing, now if it can’t be shared, and paywalls stop that dead. It also takes time and effort to build a brand, as you rightly stated before. The other important factor is how easy it is to lose trust in that brand, which means high stringent and transparent fact checking needs to be a part of the solution, alongside _proper_ retractions when someone _does_ get it wrong.
The only way I can imagine things improving is for independent journalists to get together to ditch the big media outlets and find some real solution to monetizing their work and keeping everyone accountable to accurate reporting. Obviously that’s much easier said than done.
> As a journalist I think it misses the mark somewhat by failing to account for the value of reporting.
At a revenue level how do you quantify that value? Unless you are a brand (TIME, Washington Post, etc) the only metrics are page views and time spent reading the article that eyeballs wander across ads.
Arguably a clear well written article may perform worse than an AI generated article that bleeds over on to a second page. Some of the most valuable content on the internet is not well written pieces on the political climate, but "OMG YOU'LL NEVER GUESS HOW THIS CHILD CELEB TURNED OUT" with a 75+ image one per page photo gallery.
How do I quantify the value of reporting? As a writer and reporter, not a finance dude, I'm really not qualified to answer that. But it's interesting you say 'unless you are a brand' because I feel like the brand is what you get from building up years and years of trust with excellent reporting.
In your second paragraph, I don't think your assertion is correct. It isn't 2008. While you were correct at one time based on trends in the industry, "OMG YOU'LL NEVER GUESS HOW THIS CHILD CELEB TURNED OUT" content never cemented itself. It had a high-water mark and that kind of thing hasn't made good money in years. The New York Times is still the most valuable brand in journalism and it's thriving against its competition. Not only other legacy brands, but let's be real, look where Buzzfeed is at today. Shitty content lost revenue-wise as well as on a moral basis. The only way to reliably make good ad revenue is to spam articles but it's not a profitable (or serious imo) way to run a journalistic enterprise. I believe paywalls/subscription models will continue to dominate while the losers fight for scraps.
> While you were correct at one time based on trends in the industry, "OMG YOU'LL NEVER GUESS HOW THIS CHILD CELEB TURNED OUT" content never cemented itself. It had a high-water mark and that kind of thing hasn't made good money in years.
The LA Times makes $380,116 per employee. Outbrain, one of the largest click farms makes $841,768 per employee. Taboola makes $784,780 per employee. Combined the latter two bring in enough revenue to equal 1/4 of the entire print media industry. That isn't even counting hybrid companies like media.net that do a combination of clickbait and traditional advertising.
Hey sorry, I thought we were talking journalism. Outbrain is an advertising/recommendation engine company right? Know zero about them but doesn’t look like they produce anything. Interesting you went with revenue per employee though because I think market cap tells a different story. They’re worth 256 million today and NYT is sitting at 6 billion. I don’t doubt clicky clicky makes money, just that brands in journalism that rely on clicky clicky don’t make as much as those that produce years and years of high-quality content.
I return to Buzzfeed because I think they’re a good example of a place that tried to do both but because they had so much low-brow clicky clicky, the brand ultimately suffered. Despite winning a Pulitzer in 2021 it really has a terrible reputation among non-industry folks who haven’t forgotten how the brand came to prominence.
That was specifically my point. You can't quantify any value gain of good journalism. Hiring a 10% better writer doesn't earn you 10% more money. I quoted the revenue per employee numbers because they highlight the fact that hiring another engineer to build better click bait farms will earn you more than hiring another writer.
Don't get me wrong, I appreciate good journalism. 90% of the world does not and they just want to be spoon fed garbage at a faster rate. Look at the most popular shows on TV for example, they aren't National Geographic documentaries, but instead trashy reality television.
As a common man someone who hates what journalism has become: I hope "AI" swiftly replaces your industry which has become a cancer and plague upon society. I would rather deal with a used car salesman than a journalist.
Journalists today only provide unnecessary exposition and emotional poetry (read: wasting my reading time) and actively cause more problems and conflicts in society than they address and resolve (sensationalism and fearmongering is what brings in the clicks and thus the money).
I have no sympathy whatsoever for such a rotten, morally devoid, worthless industry, and while I doubt "AI" will bring about any fundamental difference or improvement it will at least make the process of journalism better reflect the actual value of the final product.
In case it wasn't obvious, I didn't bother reading or even clicking on the article. Not the least because it comes from the cesspool known as Forbes, of all places.
"The prestige and unmatched reputation of Communications of the ACM is built upon a 60-year commitment to high quality editorial content"
Hmmm. Ok whatever you say folks