This week's best things

Partnership with Axel Springer to deepen beneficial use of AI in journalism

I spotted this via Benedict Evans’s newsletter in which he says “At least half of the top 100 news sites are blocking OpenAI’s web crawler, and now Axel Springer is doing a licensing deal. Expect others to follow - but is this like TV companies a decade ago selling their shows to Netflix?”

Scale is a trap

Spotted via Storythings’ Anjali Ramachandran, this piece from Ernie Smith is a great rumination on identifying, doubling down on, and consistently delivering value for your audience.

“At the tail end of 2023, we’re starting to see the decay or active dismantling of a number of the bastions of scale that shaped the digital news experience throughout the 2010s. [...]

But I’m pretty convinced the reason these sites have struggled to meet the moment is because the model under which they were built — eyeballs at all cost, built for social media and Google search results — is no longer functional.”

This is something that the folks at Storythings have been exploring for a while now (I’ve previously linked to their ‘Broken’ series), and Katie and I have discussed on the Digital Works Podcast.

Namely, that the shifts and fragmentations in the way social media functions now means that certainties that you could rely on about how people were finding and accessing your content, no longer hold true.

“Rather than trying to hit the ceiling, find a group of 1,000 people — maybe less — that hasn’t been served and serve them extremely well.”

How Twitter died in 2023 and why X may not be far behind

A blow-by-blow account of the “death by a thousand stupid cuts” that Twitter experienced through 2023.

“Musk killed Twitter by slowly making it useless for those who relied on it for real-time information, by choking off conversations from those not willing to pay, by flooding users’ timelines with spammy blue-check sycophants and renaming the company X. He killed it by re-platforming actual Nazis and far-right trolls and Alex Jones and boosting anti-semitism so loudly the site's largest remaining advertisers and most prominent users abandoned the platform in droves. Though you can still go to www.twitter.com and see a website that vaguely resembles the thing we used to call Twitter, it’s only a dull echo of what it once was.”

To Work Well with GenAI, You Need to Learn How to Talk to It

If you’ve spent more than 10 seconds on any social media platform in the last year you will have been inundated with people promoting their wares around ‘prompt engineering’ i.e. ways in which you can instruct tools like ChatGPT to achieve better, more useful, results.

This article in the Harvard Business Review, which - caveat - is written by Jaime Teevan, who works at Microsoft, provides a more thoughtful explanation of the approach you need to take when using generative AI tools.

The tips include:

• Provide more context than you do with a person
• Use the “wisdom of the crowd”
• Rely on recognition, not recall
• Make it a conversation, not a single request
• If at first you don’t succeed, try again (a different way)

OpenAI have also released similar guidance.

In response to this, the always-excellent Rachel Coldicutt neatly cut to the heart of the issue…

As I, and many other much smarter people, have been saying - these tools are impressive but also flawed and limited.

Develop an awareness of their flaws in order to make best use of them, and nurture and maintain a healthy scepticism.

How to fight the “tyranny of small decisions”

“In 1966, the economist Alfred E. Kahn first coined the term ‘tyranny of small decisions’ in an article of the same name. Kahn used this concept to describe how a series of small, individual choices could lead to an end point no one really wanted. It’s when various discrete and minor actions string together into something not desired by the decision-makers as a whole.”

It feels like we see this play out a lot, in the cultural sector, in our politics, in society at large.

It also affects everyone individually at different points in their personal lives, and in their work.

The phrase that ruled the Indian internet in 2023

A story about virality, and about a woman called Jasmeen Kaur.

“The Oxford English Dictionary got it wrong.

“Rizz” is not the word of the year.

In India, our vote would be for a phrase: “Looking like a wow.”

This somewhat ungainly, even mildly ungrammatical sentence has been widely popular with movie stars, media moguls, market analysts, and mavericks alike. Actor Deepika Padukone popularized it, and Mukesh Ambani, Asia’s richest man, embraced it with rip-roaring laughter.

These four viral words have been impersonated, translated, adapted to reality television, and even set to music.

This week, a top minister in the Narendra Modi cabinet launched an event shouting the words into a microphone as thousands of women chanted them back.”

Discussing Skateboarding with Filmmaker Werner Herzog

Seb Chan sent me this video of Werner Herzog being interviewed by a skateboarding magazine, about skateboarding.

I love Werner Herzog.

“So many failures, it is astonishing. It doesn’t do good to his pelvis, nor to his elbows.”

The best Tina Turner tribute I’ve ever seen

Enjoy.

If you’ve seen something interesting, stick it in the comments! The algorithms are invading our lives, but the best stuff is still discovered and shared through word of mouth.

Here’s last week’s round-up