☀️Weekstarter Links 04/01/24

Ryan's World vs The Hollywood Establishment & Why Chekov's Gun Is GenAI's Worst Enemy: CC #293

In This Issue: Ryan’s World The Movie Doesn’t Need Distributors / Why CEOs & PR Pros Like Lex Fridman & Dwarkesh Patel / Microsoft Partially Unbundling Teams / Radio Free Asia Closing Hong Kong Bureau Because Of Security Law / Generative AI And Continuity In Writing / Hollywood’s New Fantasy: A Magical, Colorblind Past / Putting AI Search Engines To The Test / The Atlantic Profitable For First Time In Years / The Ultimate Guide To PR

Photo by Madison Oren on Unsplash

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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I’ve found out that there’s something funny about this world:

You aren’t aware of the things you don’t know.

The links I feature in this newsletter are designed to help you with just that—the things you don’t know.

Especially in the PR, marketing, advertising and journalism worlds.

I hope you find these links helpful.

-Neal

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Ryan’s World The Movie Doesn’t Need Distributors: “Ryan’s World the Movie: Titan Universe Adventure will debut on Aug. 16 on more than 2,000 screens across the US. Taking a page from Taylor Swift and her concert movie, Kaji’s parents and their partners at PocketWatch Inc. will release the film without the help of a major studio. At least one of the largest theater chains has agreed to show the movie, said PocketWatch Chief Executive Officer Chris Williams.”

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Why CEOs & PR Pros Like Lex Fridman & Dwarkesh Patel: “The ideal interlocutor is someone who offers a platform — and maybe even is a tech industry insider — and isn’t a journalist. The options are expanding: In addition to Fridman, podcasters like Dwarkesh Patel also give tech leaders the chance to explain themselves in long, meandering conversations. Even Bill Gates has an interview podcast now. (Altman was one of his first guests.)”

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Microsoft Partially Unbundling Teams: “Microsoft has introduced new versions of Microsoft 365 and Office 365 subscription services that exclude its business collaboration chat offering Teams, unbundling a suite following scrutiny from the European Union regulator and complaints from rival Slack.

The move follows Microsoft agreeing to sell Office 365 suite sans Microsoft Teams offering in the EU and Switzerland last year. At the time, the software giant said it was making the changes to address the concerns raised by the European Commission.”

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Radio Free Asia Closing Hong Kong Bureau Because Of Security Law: “The president of U.S.-funded Radio Free Asia said Friday that its Hong Kong bureau has been closed because of safety concerns under a new national security law, deepening concerns about the city’s media freedoms.

Bay Fang, the president of RFA, said in a statement that it will no longer have full-time staff in Hong Kong, although it would retain its official media registration.

“Actions by Hong Kong authorities, including referring to RFA as a ‘foreign force,’ raise serious questions about our ability to operate in safety with the enactment of Article 23,” Fang said.”

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Generative AI And Continuity In Writing: “Continuity is really important for writing — in an article, in an essay, and especially in longer-form material. When we talk about Chekhov’s Gun, that’s a shorthand that means the pieces of narrative information we use early are just the start of the trail of breadcrumbs that will carry us through the story. The gun appears early and must be used later — but that’s true of so much inside our work. We introduce things that are important, that have continuity throughout the work, that appear again and again and form a kind of constellation of narrative information — and that information comes in the form of themes, motifs, motivations, descriptions, tension-building plot points, and so on. AI has literally no understanding of that. Because it doesn’t understand anything. It just sees a pile of stuff and attempts to ape the shape and colors of that stuff.”

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Hollywood’s New Fantasy: A Magical, Colorblind Past: “Storytellers are struggling with how to approach a historically white canon and a set of well-worn genres (like the period costume drama) whose characters would, in reality, be almost exclusively white. They are wary of simply omitting all the other ethnicities that are part of the modern, multiracial West, either as performers or, potentially, as viewers. Neither do they want to tell stories in which nonwhite people must always appear as servants, or victims, or issues.

The Magical Multiracial Past is one optimistic solution to this conundrum. We want to include everyone in our storytelling, but we are not always prepared to change the kinds of stories we tell. So we simply suspend disbelief; we imagine that everyone who is currently a part of our Anglophone culture has been there, a valued and equal participant, all along. Thus have all of us, from around the globe, been retconned into the history of the West.”

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Putting AI Search Engines To The Test: “The real question in front of all these would-be Google killers, then, is not how well they can find information. It’s how well they can do everything Google does. So I decided to put some of the best new AI products to the real test: I grabbed the latest list of most-Googled queries and questions according to the SEO research firm Ahrefs and plugged them into various AI tools. In some instances, I found that these language model-based bots are genuinely more useful than a page of Google results. But in most cases, I discovered exactly how hard it will be for anything — AI or otherwise — to replace Google at the center of the web.”

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The Atlantic Profitable For First Time In Years: “A core part of Thompson’s strategy was to figure out how much readers would be willing to pay for a subscription. He ended up raising subscription prices by more than 50%, and made it harder for people to read stories without paying.

Meanwhile, Editor in Chief Jeffrey Goldberg oversaw an evolving editorial approach—moving away from day-to-day news coverage and taking bigger swings on fewer, deeply reported stories that appeal to people from across the country and political spectrum. […] Subscriptions now account for two-thirds of revenue, compared with a little less than half when Thompson took the helm.”

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The Ultimate Guide To PR: “Emilie Gerber is the founder and CEO of Six Eastern, a top PR agency that’s worked with over 100 tech companies, from stealth startups to publicly traded companies. Before starting her own firm, she worked at Uber, where she led PR for the business development team and B2B programs. Prior to that, she worked at Box on product communications, with a focus on product launches and partnership announcements. In our conversation, we discuss Why, and when, getting press is worth your time, Common misconceptions about the impact press can have, The second-order effects of press, Which areas each publication (TechCrunch, Axios, The Verge, etc.) cares most about, How to craft your pitch, How to find and reach reporters, How pitching press is different from pitching customers, The effectiveness of direct communication through social media versus traditional press.”

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Work With Me. LIMITED SLOTS AVAILABLE:

I have limited openings available for B2B writing work this April. Need help with video scripts, newsletters, reports, surveys, ebooks, white papers, ghostwriting or other projects?

Email me for rates + onesheet.

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