In this issue: AI-generated content goes wrong / IAC warns about AI-generated internet / Change how you write + more!
Welcome to Context Collapse, the world’s best comms newsletter. I’m Neal Ungerleider. I run Ungerleider Works and used to work as a reporter for Fast Company, write op-eds for the LA Times, and work as a senior copywriter for R/GA. This newsletter helps readers navigate the weird new world of media and gleefully ignores all the conventional wisdom about journalism, public relations, marketing, and advertising.
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“On Tuesday, The Guardian Media Group demanded that Microsoft take public responsibility for the poll, which ran next to an article about a woman found dead at a school in Australia, according to a letter obtained by Axios.
The poll, which ran within Microsoft's curated news aggregator platform Microsoft Start, asked the reader what they thought the cause was of the woman's death.”
”IAC, one of the word's largest internet holding companies, has submitted comments to the U.S. Copyright Office warning that unless the government protects copyrighted material from being used by generative AI, "the creation and publication of high-quality original content will wither and die," Axios' Sara Fischer reports.
Why it matters: IAC — which is home to Dotdash Meredith, the largest digital and print publisher in the U.S. — argues that if generative AI firms aren't forced to pay publishers for copyrighted content their algorithms are trained on and their bots recycle, the internet will become "unrecognizable" and users won't trust it.”
”You’re gonna eventually hit a speedbump or even a wall where you discover that the Way You Write is simply no longer working. Why that is, I don’t know, because again, I am not you, I don’t know your life. But it’ll happen. And when that does, you have to be willing to change it up. Change when you write. Evening to morning, morning to evening. Change where you write: stop writing in that Starbucks, or fuck, start writing in a Starbucks, write in the Starbucks bathroom, get behind the counter and write your story in latte foam, go sit with a stranger at Starbucks and steal their laptop and write your story on it. Change something. Change the font. Change the genre. Genre the POV, the tense, who the protagonist is. Change the software, ditch the software and write by hand, ditch the notebook and write by carving your story into the dirt with a tame, content-to-be-clutched live raven. If you write every day, try writing only on the weekends. If you write only on the weekends, try writing every day. Write a little every day or a lot one day. Just–you know, just fuck some shit up.
Explode it. Boom.”
”Long before the establishment of TC-to-VC, whereby TechCrunch reporters join venture capital firms, there was a robust pipeline of business journalists getting hired by hedge funds.
In most cases, these reformed wretches produced investment research. Maybe it was written better than what came from some of their new peers, but distribution remained very limited.
But now there's a new, VC-backed hedge fund that's promising to hire scores of former reporters, and publish all of their work. Even if that work doesn't result in new investments.”
”The Israeli government denied a press credential to veteran journalist Jesse Rosenfeld, who has written critically about Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s administration and about the impact of the war with Hamas on civilians for Rolling Stone magazine.
“Rolling Stone is not a news organization and we are not dealing with this gentleman, thank you,” Ron Paz, Israel’s director of foreign press, told the iconic music and culture publication on Monday.”
”TikTok is currently telling advertisers that #Israel is the top trending news-related hashtag in the U.S., as it faces pressure in the country to explain why pro-Palestinian content is so popular on its platform.
While the hashtag #Palestine goes unmentioned on TikTok’s list of trending news and entertainment tags, users globally have created more than twice the number of videos tagged #Palestine than those tagged #Israel over the last several weeks, according to the app’s own publicly available data.”
”Wired, the technology publication owned by Condé Nast, is launching a new vertical that will focus on the intersection of tech and politics, the publication's new global editorial director Katie Drummond announced Friday to staff.
Why it matters: The announcement marks the first major move by Drummond since being named the new leader of Wired in August.”
”Chinese influencers, or key opinion leaders (KOLs), particularly in the e-commerce industry, are increasingly turning to digital clones to pump out content 24/7. For some stars, like Chen, this enables them to take their content and earnings to even greater heights. But for lesser-known livestreamers, AI may put their jobs at risk, as media companies pivot towards cheaper digital stars.”
”Twitter always used to look a lot like Craigslist. It stumbled into something that a lot of people found very useful, with very strong network effects, and then it squatted on those network effects for a generation, while the tech industry moved on. Twitter, as a technology company, has been irrelevant to everything that’s going on for a decade. It was the place where we talked about what mattered, but Twitter the company didn’t matter at all - indeed it did nothing for so long that people got bored of complaining about it.”