Reading list
Shortform reading
This is an incomplete list of the shortform reading (and listening and watching) I’ve been doing lately.
ChatGPT Says 404 Media Is Tech Support for Huge Corporations
Over the last few months, 404 Media has gotten dozens of clearly AI-generated story leads and tips, many of which appear to have been copy pasted directly from ChatGPT or other chatbots into an email client by a real human. Some of these tips are (or could be) of legitimate public concern and we are happy to get them and to look into them. Many, though, are not.This morning, for example, an Italian painter told me he “loses professional Meta accounts despite contradictory reinstatement email,” and said, in English, that he had “attached a nine-screenshot evidence dossier prepared on 16 October 2026.” When I emailed the painter back asking how he found me, he said “ChatGPT suggested contacting you. I was looking for journalists who investigate technology companies, particularly Meta and issues involving account suspensions and platform accountability.”
Last night, someone emailed me, Joseph, Sam, Emanuel, the Washington Post, CBS News, NBC News, The Markup, The Information, the Los Angeles Times, and the Chicago Sun Times asking for an “independent investigation” into why their Verizon cell phone service wasn’t working on their iPhone.
No, AI Written Romance Novels Are Not Inevitable
Even according to the Times’ own reporting, readers do not seem to like AI romance novels. One of the two AI critical sources quoted in the article said that she would never knowingly pick up a book written by AI. Another, an author whose work had been scraped by Anthropic to train their AI model, pointed out that flooding the zone with slop makes it much harder for real human authors to be discovered by readers.
What I found most curious was Coral Hart’s reasoning for using a pseudonym in the article. Coral Hart is a retired pen name and the source would not give any of her current pen names “because she still uses her real name for some publishing and coaching projects. She fears that revealing her A.I. use would damage her business for that work.” Huh! That’s weird!
Running a Local Paper? In This Economy?
They were journalists at major news outlets in New York and D.C. before taking big pay cuts to run the Midcoast Villager, a paper covering a rocky, coastal part of Maine.
How a British-born hobbyist blogger became one of Big Tech's punchiest critics
FCC To Install A 'Bias Monitor' At New CBS To Ensure Network Kisses Trump's Ass
And with the internet eating major broadcasters’ lunch, it’s very likely that the Ellison family paid billions of dollars for a network whose fortunes are headed to the toilet, and whose viewers are headed elsewhere. They have the potential to create a right wing propaganda bullhorn that rivals Fox News; but it’s just as likely their disastrous management turns the network of Walter Cronkite into a sad, historical footnote.
#corruption · #donald-trump · #free-press · #free-speech · #journalism
How Axios rebranded conservative ideology as objectivity
The biggest lie in media is the one that it tells about itself.
How Local Reporters Manage the Dangers of Covering Extremism
The extremism beat has gone mainstream—but in local markets, it's still intensely personal.
Billionaires Destroyed American News Media On Purpose
Earlier this week I met someone new and he asked me what I do for a living, and I said “I’m a writer,” and he said “Oh, what do you write?” This conversation happens often enough, and in virtually the same words, that I recognized right away where we were headed. I told him about Tabs and at that point although my new friend didn’t know it yet, we were already on a greased slide toward the moment where I would say: “…but these days I only write it once or twice a week, because the American news media has been systematically and intentionally destroyed by a handful of billionaires.”
They're Literally Angry at Superman for Being Nice
How James Gunn's comments about "basic human kindness" triggered a predictable right-wing media meltdown.
Substack Did Not See That Coming
Let’s set Substack’s “Nazi problem” aside for a moment. What if the bigger issue is being stranded on a collapsing platform... with a bunch of Nazis? Substack's content woes are bound up with its shaky business model in ways that are bad for all of us.