Earlier this month, The Washington Post debuted its first generative AI chatbot, Climate Answers. The chatbot’s promise is to take in readers’ most pressing questions about climate change science, policy, and politics, and turn out a brief summary of the Post’s reporting on that topic, with full citations and link outs to relevant stories. The chatbot pulls on years of reporting from the climate desk and was built in collaboration with the newsroom’s beat reporters. I sat down with the Post’s chief technology officer, Vineet Khosla, last week to discuss the novel product and how it fits into t ..read more

Good news or bad news? It depends. Are you an internet user who cares about privacy? An internet publisher who cares about making money? Or somewhere in between? On Monday afternoon, Google shocked the online-advertising world by saying that, actually, despite years of promises, it wouldn’t be dropping cookies from its world-dominant web browser, Chrome. If you’re not deep into the surveillance-capitalism game, here’s Richard Lawler at The Verge to explain: Google is putting the brakes on a change that would have made it more difficult to track users across different websites to serve them ta ..read more

Social media is a problem for economists. They don’t know how to value it. It has long been argued that it ought to be in the national accounts as part of gross domestic product. One 2019 study estimated Facebook alone is worth $40 to $50 per month for consumers in the United States. But that’s not what we pay. Social media isn’t charged for, and the national accounts measure only the things we pay for, no matter how significant they are in our lives and how many hours per day we spend using them. As the Australian Senate prepared to hold an inquiry into the impact of social media, economists ..read more

It’s not often that massive political news breaks on a Sunday afternoon — especially one in steamy late July, the leading edge of the Greater August vacation season. But break news Joe Biden most certainly did with this tweet announcing he would not run for reelection this fall. pic.twitter.com/RMIRvlSOYw — Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) July 21, 2024 And as always, that big news reached people in a wide variety of ways. Like from Shams Charania, whose usual big breaks involve NBA trades (“how does this impact LeBron’s legacy”). Social media has encouraged people to think that, if the news is really ..read more

After yet another day reading about audio industry layoffs and show cancellations, or listening to podcasts about layoffs and show cancellations, I sometimes wonder, “With all this great audio being given away for free, who did we think was supposed to pay for it all?” I find some consolation in the fact that that question is more than a century old. In the spring of 1924, Radio Broadcast posed it in a contest called “Who is to Pay for Broadcasting and How?”The monthly trade magazine offered a prize of $500 (more than $9,000 in today’s dollars) for “a workable plan which shall take into accoun ..read more

In the natural world, convergent evolution is when two organisms independently evolve to look or behave in very similar ways. The beloved — if endangered and chlamydia-ridden — koala evolved human-like fingerprints despite last sharing a common ancestor more than 100 million years ago. Humans are even less closely related to cephalopods and yet the octopus evolved lens-and-retina eyes remarkably similar to our own. In convergent evolution, certain features or behaviors can emerge on distant branches of the evolutionary tree if the species are in similar environments and if the adaptations help ..read more

How can local online newsrooms best reach, and keep, their audiences? That question keeps many news publishers up at night. In the inhospitable internet climate of 2024, between the ambivalence-to-antagonism of social media toward news and the looming threat of AI search decimating Google referrals, the need for alternatives to the two sources that were the foundation of traffic for most newsrooms of the 2010s is existential. (See a recent worrying stat from the nonprofit news sector: From 2022 to 2023, “the average number of unique monthly visitors declined by about one-third,” per the latest ..read more

Half a century ago, a young Stanford professor named Mark Granovetter published what would become one of the seminal papers in the field of sociology. “The Strength of Weak Ties” argued for the important of mere acquaintances — not just your friends — in the growing field of social network analysis. (It’s been cited more than 73,000 times.) Granovetter surveyed a few hundred people in the Boston area who had recently taken a new job they learned about through a contact. (It’s who you know, right?) It turned out their weak ties — people they reported seeing once a year or less — were responsibl ..read more

Vaping and doomscrolling are both addictive and both bad for you, so why not combine the two? Because look, here’s a touchscreen vape that gets news alerts. You’re still looking at Twitter to get your news? That’s cool I guess. Me? I get it on my vape pic.twitter.com/PHZi022tXf — Katie Notopoulos (@katienotopoulos) July 17, 2024 No way we got twitter on my vape pic.twitter.com/Nnaz5fp0Lt — Jimmer Fredette (@jimfredette32) July 5, 2024 The Swype 30K has a 2.01″ touchscreen and Bluetooth connection to sync with and deliver notifications from your smartphone. (It also has a Find My Phone func ..read more

Carlos Watson’s luck may have run out. The founder of Ozy — that Google-exec-impersonating, mystery-traffic-generating discoverer of people who have already been discovered — was found guilty Tuesday in his trial in Brooklyn. A jury of his peers found he had indeed engaged in a conspiracy to commit securities fraud, a conspiracy to commit wire fraud, and aggravated identity theft. He now faces up to 37 years in prison; the bail that kept him free throughout his trial has been revoked. Watson was remanded into custody after the government said he repeatedly perjured himself on the stand. U.S ..read more