It’s the end of work as we knew it
and I feel…

powerless to fight the technology that we pioneered
nostalgic for a world that moved on without us
after decades of paying our dues
for a payday that never came
…so yeah
not exactly fine.


The Gen X Career Meltdown — from nytimes.com by Steeven Kurutz (DSC: This is a gifted article for you)
Just when they should be at their peak, experienced workers in creative fields find that their skills are all but obsolete.

If you entered media or image-making in the ’90s — magazine publishing, newspaper journalism, photography, graphic design, advertising, music, film, TV — there’s a good chance that you are now doing something else for work. That’s because those industries have shrunk or transformed themselves radically, shutting out those whose skills were once in high demand.

“I am having conversations every day with people whose careers are sort of over,” said Chris Wilcha, a 53-year-old film and TV director in Los Angeles.

Talk with people in their late 40s and 50s who once imagined they would be able to achieve great heights — or at least a solid career while flexing their creative muscles — and you are likely to hear about the photographer whose work dried up, the designer who can’t get hired or the magazine journalist who isn’t doing much of anything.

In the wake of the influencers comes another threat, artificial intelligence, which seems likely to replace many of the remaining Gen X copywriters, photographers and designers. By 2030, ad agencies in the United States will lose 32,000 jobs, or 7.5 percent of the industry’s work force, to the technology, according to the research firm Forrester.


From DSC:
This article reminds me of how tough it is to navigate change in our lives. For me, it was often due to the fact that I was working with technologies. Being a technologist can be difficult, especially as one gets older and faces age discrimination in a variety of industries. You need to pick the right technologies and the directions that will last (for me it was email, videoconferencing, the Internet, online-based education/training, discovering/implementing instructional technologies, and becoming a futurist).

For you younger folks out there — especially students within K-16 — aim to develop a perspective and a skillset that is all about adapting to change. You will likely need to reinvent yourself and/or pick up new skills over your working years. You are most assuredly required to be a lifelong learner now. That’s why I have been pushing for school systems to be more concerned with providing more choice and control to students — so that students actually like school and enjoy learning about new things.


 

 

Cultivating Speaking and Listening Skills in the Primary Grades — from edutopia.org by Rachel Scheer
Early elementary teachers can use these strategies to help students improve their oral communication skills.

The good news? There are many engaging and effective strategies to develop these interpersonal skills, and most are easy to incorporate into daily classroom routines. I use the strategies below to directly teach, model, and practice these essential communication skills at a developmentally appropriate level: turn-taking, small group speaking and listening, whole group speaking and listening, and accountable talk.

From DSC:
I love the parts about practicing how to LISTEN. We need more of that in our communications with one another…as well as when we are praying to God.


Teaching Students About Corporate Influences in a Curriculum — from edutopia.org by Elaine Alvey
By uncovering any hidden interests in a curriculum, teachers can open important discussions about media literacy with students.

These instances underscore the need for educators to be vigilant in vetting materials, recognizing that even seemingly reputable sources can harbor hidden agendas, necessitating a robust approach to media and information literacy both for ourselves and for students.

How to Spot Corporate Influences in Your Curriculum
So, how do we, as educators, navigate this minefield? Media literacy strategies offer important tools to equip ourselves and our students to analyze information landscapes intentionally, including the curricular resources we evaluate for use in our classrooms.
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From DSC:
I would encourage you to take a look at the work my sister Sue Ellen Christian has been doing re: media literacy, news literacy, and more. She created the Wonder Media website to discuss those topics. Plus she collaborated with several other people and organizations to develop a large, professionally-done exhibit re: these important topics.
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Boosting Engagement in World Language Classes With Games — from edutopia.org by Rachelle Dené Poth
Middle school teachers can use a variety of tech and no-tech games to help students build skills in the target language.

As a world language educator, I’ve always sought innovative ways to engage my students through meaningful learning experiences as they build their language skills. One way we do this is through gameplay. The benefits of games go far beyond simply learning and increased retention of vocabulary or grammar. Games can also foster collaboration, critical thinking, creativity, and problem-solving skills, making learning fun for students.


How Administrators Can Respond—Instead of React—in Tough Situations — from edutopia.org by Jessica Cabeen
These strategies can help school leaders stay self-regulated in the middle of frustrating and stressful moments.

Conversations That Might Be Better Left for Later
Not every conversation needs to happen in the heat of the moment. Some of the most productive conversations happen after we’ve given ourselves time to regulate. Here are a few categories of conversations that might benefit from a pause:

  • Difficult feedback conversations. If emotions are running high, it might be best to wait until you can approach the discussion with clarity and empathy. A rushed or reactive conversation can shut down dialogue rather than encourage growth.
  • Conflict resolution. When two parties are upset, stepping in immediately to mediate can sometimes escalate tensions. A brief pause allows for perspective-taking and a calmer, solution-oriented approach.
  • Big-picture decisions. When stress is high, it’s easy to make decisions based on immediate pressures rather than long-term goals. Giving yourself space to step back ensures that decisions align with your leadership vision.
  • Personal or emotional responses. If you feel personally triggered by a comment, criticism, or situation, take time to process before responding. Self-awareness in these moments can prevent regretful words or actions.

So the next time frustration creeps in, take a breath. Pause before you speak, type, or react. Because more often than not, the best response isn’t the fastest one—it’s the one that comes from a place of clarity, patience, and purpose.

 

The ‘Gulf of America’ feud is about something bigger: Trump wants to control the media — from theguardian.com by Margaret Sullivan
The president punished the AP for choosing its own language, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. The press must show unity

Even more broadly, it is about Donald Trump’s wide-ranging effort to control the media and be able to spread propaganda and interfere with the flow of accurate information.

The disagreement started soon after the president decided unilaterally that the Gulf of Mexico was to be called the Gulf of America*. The executive order was one more display of Trump’s capricious and imperious way of doing things; his first month has been a relentless exercise in chaos and norm-destruction.

After the Associated Press, the global news organization, decided to stick with using the long-established name which makes sense to its international readership, the Trump White House determined that punishment was in order.

What’s happening is ugly. In the US, the government doesn’t get to dictate the language journalists use in their stories. There’s a little thing called the first amendment to the US constitution that prohibits this. But the Trump administration, as usual, has its own – often unconstitutional and sometimes illegal – ideas.

The actions against the AP are “retribution, plain and simple, and a shameful attempt to bully the press into ideological compliance”, said Tim Richardson of PEN America.

*Insert from DSC, not from The Guardian:
This was an incredibly arrogant thing to do — something a dictator who is drunk on power and wanting even more power, territory, and wealth would do.

To Mexico and to the rest of the world: Please forgive America for what we’ve become. Then pray for us. Our hearts, minds, perspectives, expectations, and behaviors need a lot of help. 

 

Wonder Tools: An investigative journalist’s favorites — from wondertools.substack.com by Jeremy Caplan and Madison Hopkins
A field guide to a reporter’s core digital tools

How do investigative journalists organize years of research, thousands of documents, and piles of notes? With toolkits like that of Madison Hopkins, whose Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting has exposed Chicago’s fatal fire safety failures and flawed surveillance programs.

Read on for Madison’s tools for managing long-term investigative projects — from her note-taking system to her workflow for tracking public records. Whether you’re a journalist or manage other kinds of projects, you’ll find multiple resources for your own work. – Jeremy

 

NVIDIA Partners With Industry Leaders to Advance Genomics, Drug Discovery and Healthcare — from nvidianews.nvidia.com
IQVIA, Illumina, Mayo Clinic and Arc Institute Harness NVIDIA AI and Accelerated Computing to Transform $10 Trillion Healthcare and Life Sciences Industry

J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference—NVIDIA today announced new partnerships to transform the $10 trillion healthcare and life sciences industry by accelerating drug discovery, enhancing genomic research and pioneering advanced healthcare services with agentic and generative AI.

The convergence of AI, accelerated computing and biological data is turning healthcare into the largest technology industry. Healthcare leaders IQVIA, Illumina and Mayo Clinic, as well as Arc Institute, are using the latest NVIDIA technologies to develop solutions that will help advance human health.

These solutions include AI agents that can speed clinical trials by reducing administrative burden, AI models that learn from biology instruments to advance drug discovery and digital pathology, and physical AI robots for surgery, patient monitoring and operations. AI agents, AI instruments and AI robots will help address the $3 trillion of operations dedicated to supporting industry growth and create an AI factory opportunity in the hundreds of billions of dollars.


AI could transform health care, but will it live up to the hype? — from sciencenews.org by Meghan Rosen and Tina Hesman Saey
The technology has the potential to improve lives, but hurdles and questions remain

True progress in transforming health care will require solutions across the political, scientific and medical sectors. But new forms of artificial intelligence have the potential to help. Innovators are racing to deploy AI technologies to make health care more effective, equitable and humane.

AI could spot cancer early, design lifesaving drugs, assist doctors in surgery and even peer into people’s futures to predict and prevent disease. The potential to help people live longer, healthier lives is vast. But physicians and researchers must overcome a legion of challenges to harness AI’s potential.


HHS publishes AI Strategic Plan, with guidance for healthcare, public health, human services — from healthcareitnews.com by Mike Miliard
The framework explores ways to spur innovation and adoption, enable more trustworthy model development, promote access and foster AI-empowered healthcare workforces.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has issued its HHS Artificial Intelligence Strategic Plan, which the agency says will “set in motion a coordinated public-private approach to improving the quality, safety, efficiency, accessibility, equitability and outcomes in health and human services through the innovative, safe, and responsible use of AI.”


How Journalism Will Adapt in the Age of AI — from bloomberg.com/ by John Micklethwait
The news business is facing its next enormous challenge. Here are eight reasons to be both optimistic and paranoid.

AI promises to get under the hood of our industry — to change the way we write and edit stories. It will challenge us, just like it is challenging other knowledge workers like lawyers, scriptwriters and accountants.

Most journalists love AI when it helps them uncover Iranian oil smuggling. Investigative journalism is not hard to sell to a newsroom. The second example is a little harder. Over the past month we have started testing AI-driven summaries for some longer stories on the Bloomberg Terminal.

The software reads the story and produces three bullet points. Customers like it — they can quickly see what any story is about. Journalists are more suspicious. Reporters worry that people will just read the summary rather than their story.

So, looking into our laboratory, what do I think will happen in the Age of AI? Here are eight predictions.


‘IT will become the HR of AI agents’, says Nvidia’s CEO: How should organisations respond? — from hrsea.economictimes.indiatimes.com by Vanshika Rastogi

Nvidia’s CEO, Jensen Huang’s recent statement “IT will become the HR of AI agents” continues to spark debate about IT’s evolving role in managing AI systems. As AI tools become integral, IT teams will take on tasks like training and optimising AI agents, blending technical and HR responsibilities. So, how should organisations respond to this transformation?

 

Introducing the 2025 Wonder Media Calendar for tweens, teens, and their families/households. Designed by Sue Ellen Christian and her students in her Global Media Literacy class (in the fall 2024 semester at Western Michigan University), the calendar’s purpose is to help people create a new year filled with skills and smart decisions about their media use. This calendar is part of the ongoing Wonder Media Library.com project that includes videos, lesson plans, games, songs and more. The website is funded by a generous grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, in partnership with Western Michigan University and the Library of Michigan.


 

 

Nieman Lab.Predictions for Journalism, 2025. — from niemanlab.org by Mira Lowe
Prediction: Journalism education leads the change we seek

In this evolving landscape, journalism educators continue to prepare their students for technological advancements and shifting consumer behaviors driving the industry. In 2025, college journalism programs will push forward and adapt to meet workforce demands, student expectations and community needs. Keep an eye on developments in these key areas:

  • Ethics and misinformation:…
  • Global perspectives:…
  • Artificial intelligence: …
  • Local news and community engagement:…
  • Diversity and belonging:…

“Training the next generation of journalists means preparing them to be global citizens.”


Why You Need a News Vacation — from davidepstein.substack.com by David Epstein
We’re not made for 24/7 feeds of catastrophe

I’ve noticed a small trend among journalists I follow — writing about their own versions of news vacations. Amanda Ripley, the author of High Conflict (who I interviewed recently), wrote in 2022 about how she stopped reading the news after two decades as a news junkie. The news, she wrote, had become too constant, and too uniformly negative with too few “solutions stories,” and left her feeling hopeless and like she had a lack of agency in the world.

I don’t think this means that we should abandon keeping up with the news. I think it would be disastrous if we all did that. (And I happen to have an extra-special place in my heart for local news.) But I think regular breaks are healthy, and helpful. As I prepare to turn in the first draft of my new book, I’m grateful that focusing on the project forced me into a few breaks from the news, and to turn to slower sources of information and wisdom. From now on, I plan to take a news vacation every year.

From DSC:
My news consumption varies throughout the days, weeks, and months. Sometimes I catch a lot of it…sometimes not much at all. I get bummed out about a lot of what’s called news these days. I call the news on TV the “Death & Dying Report.” Even the weather seems to have to be deadly if it is to qualify for coverage. Then there’s the “Who killed who report” (dating back years ago if current material is running scarce). Then there’s the “How are we going to survive this new virus or that new disease?” Etc.

It’s an agenda of fear that the networks are focused upon. Hmmm…I’ll stop there for today.

 

For Teens Online, Conspiracy Theories Are Commonplace. Media Literacy Is Not. — from edsurge.com by Nadia Tamez-Robledo

If you’re a teen, you could be exposed to conspiracy theories and a host of other pieces of misinformation as frequently as every day while scrolling through your social media feeds.

That’s according to a new study by the News Literacy Project, which also found that teens struggle with identifying false information online. This comes at a time when media literacy education isn’t available to most students, the report finds, and their ability to distinguish between objective and biased information sources is weak. The findings are based on responses from more than 1,000 teens ages 13 to 18.

“News literacy is fundamental to preparing students to become active, critically thinking members of our civic life — which should be one of the primary goals of a public education,” Kim Bowman, News Literacy Project senior research manager and author of the report, said in an email interview. “If we don’t teach young people the skills they need to evaluate information, they will be left at a civic and personal disadvantage their entire lives. News literacy instruction is as important as core subjects like reading and math.”


To help teach your students about news and media literacy, I highly recommend my sister Sue Ellen Christian’s work out at Wonder Media.

Wonder Media -- a site to teach your students about Media and News Literacy
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There you will find numerous resources for libraries, schools, families and individuals. Suggestions of books, articles, other websites, and online materials to assist you in growing your media literacy and news media literacy are also included there.

 

Open Campus is expanding incarcerated readers’ access to news about prison education — from opencampusmedia.org

Open Campus is expanding access to College Inside, its newsletter about prison education, to thousands of incarcerated readers through new partnerships with educational technology providers.

This will allow Open Campus to better serve those readers with curated content and service journalism that answers their questions about educational opportunities in prison and how to navigate barriers to accessing them. With no direct internet access, people in prison live in information deserts and often lack even basic information about higher education.

 

Anthropic Introduces Claude 3.5 Sonnet — from anthropic.com

Anthropic Introduces Claude 3.5 Sonnet

What’s new? 
  • Frontier intelligence
    Claude 3.5 Sonnet sets new industry benchmarks for graduate-level reasoning (GPQA), undergraduate-level knowledge (MMLU), and coding proficiency (HumanEval). It shows marked improvement in grasping nuance, humor, and complex instructions and is exceptional at writing high-quality content with a natural, relatable tone.
  • 2x speed
  • State-of-the-art vision
  • Introducing Artifacts—a new way to use Claude
    We’re also introducing Artifacts on claude.ai, a new feature that expands how you can interact with Claude. When you ask Claude to generate content like code snippets, text documents, or website designs, these Artifacts appear in a dedicated window alongside your conversation. This creates a dynamic workspace where you can see, edit, and build upon Claude’s creations in real-time, seamlessly integrating AI-generated content into your projects and workflows.

Train Students on AI with Claude 3.5 — from automatedteach.com by Graham Clay
I show how and compare it to GPT-4o.

  • If you teach computer science, user interface design, or anything involving web development, you can have students prompt Claude to produce web pages’ source code, see this code produced on the right side, preview it after it has compiled, and iterate through code+preview combinations.
  • If you teach economics, financial analysis, or accounting, you can have students prompt Claude to create analyses of markets or businesses, including interactive infographics, charts, or reports via React. Since it shows its work with Artifacts, your students can see how different prompts result in different statistical analyses, different representations of this information, and more.
  • If you teach subjects that produce purely textual outputs without a code intermediary, like philosophy, creative writing, or journalism, your students can compare prompting techniques, easily review their work, note common issues, and iterate drafts by comparing versions.

I see this as the first serious step towards improving the otherwise terrible user interfaces of LLMs for broad use. It may turn out to be a small change in the grand scheme of things, but it sure feels like a big improvement — especially in the pedagogical context.


And speaking of training students on AI, also see:

AI Literacy Needs to Include Preparing Students for an Unknown World — from stefanbauschard.substack.com by Stefan Bauschard
Preparing students for it is easier than educators think

Schools could enhance their curricula by incorporating debate, Model UN and mock government programs, business plan competitions, internships and apprenticeships, interdisciplinary and project-based learning initiatives, makerspaces and innovation labs, community service-learning projects, student-run businesses or non-profits, interdisciplinary problem-solving challenges, public speaking, and presentation skills courses, and design thinking workshop.

These programs foster essential skills such as recognizing and addressing complex challenges, collaboration, sound judgment, and decision-making. They also enhance students’ ability to communicate with clarity and precision, while nurturing creativity and critical thinking. By providing hands-on, real-world experiences, these initiatives bridge the gap between theoretical knowledge and practical application, preparing students more effectively for the multifaceted challenges they will face in their future academic and professional lives.

 



Addendum on 6/28/24:

Collaborate with Claude on Projects — from anthropic.com

Our vision for Claude has always been to create AI systems that work alongside people and meaningfully enhance their workflows. As a step in this direction, Claude.ai Pro and Team users can now organize their chats into Projects, bringing together curated sets of knowledge and chat activity in one place—with the ability to make their best chats with Claude viewable by teammates. With this new functionality, Claude can enable idea generation, more strategic decision-making, and exceptional results.

Projects are available on Claude.ai for all Pro and Team customers, and can be powered by Claude 3.5 Sonnet, our latest release which outperforms its peers on a wide variety of benchmarks. Each project includes a 200K context window, the equivalent of a 500-page book, so users can add all of the relevant documents, code, and insights to enhance Claude’s effectiveness.

 

NYC High School Reimagines Career & Technical Education for the 21st Century — from the74million.org by Andrew Bauld
Thomas A. Edison High School is providing students with the skills to succeed in both college and career in an unusually creative way.

From DSC:
Very interesting to see the mention of an R&D department here! Very cool.

Baker said ninth graders in the R&D department designed the essential skills rubric for their grade so that regardless of what content classes students take, they all get the same immersion into critical career skills. Student voice is now so integrated into Edison’s core that teachers work with student designers to plan their units. And he said teachers are becoming comfortable with the language of career-centered learning and essential skills while students appreciate the engagement and develop a new level of confidence.

The R&D department has grown to include teachers from every department working with students to figure out how to integrate essential skills into core academic classes. In this way, they’re applying one of the XQ Institute’s crucial Design Principles for innovative high schools: Youth Voice and Choice.
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Learners need: More voice. More choice. More control. -- this image was created by Daniel Christian


Student Enterprise: Invite Learners to Launch a Media Agency or Publication — from gettingsmart.com by Tom Vander Ark

Key Points

  • Client-connected projects have become a focal point of the Real World Learning initiative, offering students opportunities to solve real-world problems in collaboration with industry professionals.
  • Organizations like CAPS, NFTE, and Journalistic Learning facilitate community connections and professional learning opportunities, making it easier to implement client projects and entrepreneurship education.

Important trend: client projects. Work-based learning has been growing with career academies and renewed interest in CTE. Six years ago, a subset of WBL called client-connected projects became a focal point of the Real World Learning initiative in Kansas City where they are defined as authentic problems that students solve in collaboration with professionals from industry, not-for-profit, and community-based organizations….and allow students to: engage directly with employers, address real-world problems, and develop essential skills.


Portrait of a Community to Empower Learning Transformation — from gettingsmart.com by Rebecca Midles and Mason Pashia

Key Points

  • The Community Portrait approach encourages diverse voices to shape the future of education, ensuring it reflects the needs and aspirations of all stakeholders.
  • Active, representative community engagement is essential for creating meaningful and inclusive educational environments.

The Portrait of a Graduate—a collaborative effort to define what learners should know and be able to do upon graduation—has likely generated enthusiasm in your community. However, the challenge of future-ready graduates persists: How can we turn this vision into a reality within our diverse and dynamic schools, especially amid the current national political tensions and contentious curriculum debates?

The answer lies in active, inclusive community engagement. It’s about crafting a Community Portrait that reflects the rich diversity of our neighborhoods. This approach, grounded in the same principles used to design effective learning systems, seeks to cultivate deep, reciprocal relationships within the community. When young people are actively involved, the potential for meaningful change increases exponentially.


Q&A: Why Schools Must Redesign Learning to Include All Students — from edtechmagazine.com by Taashi Rowe
Systems are broken, not children, says K–12 disability advocate Lindsay E. Jones.

Although Lindsay E. Jones came from a family of educators, she didn’t expect that going to law school would steer her back into the family business. Over the years she became a staunch advocate for children with disabilities. And as mom to a son with learning disabilities and ADHD who is in high school and doing great, her advocacy is personal.

Jones previously served as president and CEO of the National Center for Learning Disabilities and was senior director for policy and advocacy at the Council for Exceptional Children. Today, she is the CEO at CAST, an organization focused on creating inclusive learning environments in K–12. EdTech: Focus on K–12 spoke with Jones about how digital transformation, artificial intelligence and visionary leaders can support inclusive learning environments.

Our brains are all as different as our fingerprints, and throughout its 40-year history, CAST has been focused on one core value: People are not broken, systems are poorly designed. And those systems are creating a barrier that holds back human innovation and learning.

 

Educators help children and teens learn how to identify fake news — from WMUK.org by Kalloli Bhatt and Sue Ellen Christian

Last year at the Kalamazoo Valley Museum, kids could learn about how misinformation is made and how to avoid it. Now the media scholar behind the exhibit is adapting it for libraries.

A new exhibit for libraries

That concern also drove the “Wonder Media” exhibit that ran through last year at the Kalamazoo Valley Museum. Sue Ellen Christian is a communications professor at Western Michigan University. The exhibit was her idea. Full disclosure: I’m a former student of Christian’s. We met in her office on campus.

“It’s really important for our entire society to think about the importance of facts and truth to a democracy,” said Christian. “And without an informed citizenry, we cannot have a healthy democracy.”

Christian recently received a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, based in Washington D.C., to adapt the Wonder Media exhibit for public libraries. It’s designed to reach middle-school-age children.

Mainly, with her grant, Christian wants to develop something for students whose schools do not have librarians anymore. The website associated with the exhibit has resources for students, teachers, and libraries.

 

From DSC:
Late last week, I ran into several items re: the state of the journalism industry in America. The bottom line is not encouraging. And this should concern every citizen who wants to see our democracy do well.

Here are some items that got me to reflect on this issue/situation:

The State of Local News — from localnewsinitiative.northwestern.edu (Northwestern University); via Ryan Craig’s Gap Letter from last week

Executive Summary (emphasis DSC)
There was both good news and bad news for local journalism this past year. The good news raised the possibility that a range of proposals and programs could begin to arrest the steep loss of local news over the past two decades and, perhaps, revive journalism in some places that have lost their news. The headlines on the bad news resoundingly conveyed the message that urgent action is needed in many venues — from boardrooms to the halls of Congress — and by many, including civic-minded organizations and entrepreneurs.

At the same time, however, the number of local news outlets continued to contract at an even steeper rate in 2023. On the current trajectory, by the end of next year, the country will have lost a third of its newspapers since 2005. Discouragingly, the growth in alternative local news sources — digital and ethnic news outlets, as well as public broadcasting — has not kept pace with what’s being lost.

Newspapers are continuing to vanish at an average rate of more than two a week.

In addition to losing almost a third of its newspapers, the country has lost almost two-thirds of its newspaper journalists — 43,000 — since 2005.


Opinion: Local news can seize the moment — from crainsdetroit.com by Sue Ellen Christian

Excerpts (emphasis DSC):

Our society isn’t short on news, we’re short on attention. How do we get honest reporting on local events and issues noticed by readers, viewers and listeners in our digital age of content saturation, misinformation and online chaos? Plus, not only are adults overall consuming less news, but many also now intentionally avoid any news and its attendant hyperbole, negativity and fear-mongering.

Local news is an oasis from the national muck. The Gallup/Knight study from last year showed that adults in the U.S. trust local news organizations two times more than national news outlets (44% to 21%), and perceive local journalists as caring more about the impact of their reporting.

For the collaborative and the nation’s many struggling local news outlets, there was this hope-giving finding: “When Americans perceive that local news organizations do not have the resources to report the news accurately and fairly, they are more likely to say they would consider paying for news in the future,” stated the report.

The future is now, people.

A healthy democracy depends on an informed citizenry. Local news is essential, and today’s financially struggling outlets need local paying subscribers.

From DSC: Also as a relevant aside:
Wonder Media
This website is dedicated to helping you learn more about how to use
the media for your purposes, and not to be used by media. Explore
the site to learn about media literacy and news media literacy
through games, videos, quizzes, and more.

 


Opinion: Stronger democracy is worth the investment — from crainsdetroit.com by Hugh Dellios

Excerpt (emphasis DSC):

By itself, philanthropy isn’t the ultimate solution. But it can be a bridge to a moment when this generation’s media entrepreneurs have had a chance to solve the puzzle of a more sustainable business model, one that serves audience needs, counts on a variety of solid revenue streams, and restores value in producing news.

A strong, free press is essential to the functioning of our society – and that’s why it’s the only private industry specifically protected by the U.S. Constitution. But unless we invest in real newsrooms, we’ll continue to see the disappearance of real reporters who ask the tough, informed questions that help forge good policy and hold our leaders accountable.

The return on that investment? A better-functioning, more stable democracy. The alternative? Maybe waking up one day without one. 


With local journalism ‘in crisis,’ Michigan newsrooms get creative to fill the gap — from crainsdetroit.com by Julie Mack

Local journalism is “in crisis,” said Tim Franklin, who heads Northwestern’s Local News Initiative and is a former top editor at the Indianapolis Star, Orlando Sentinel and Baltimore Sun.

“I equate the local news crisis to being journalism’s climate change. It’s this grinding attrition,” he said. “We’re at a real inflection point for local news in America. The question is, how are we going to get out of this?”
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“I really do believe there’s never been a better time to be a corrupt local politician because nobody is watching the henhouse,” said Sue Ellen Christian, a former Chicago Tribune reporter and now a Western Michigan University journalism professor. “There are very few local reporters now, few local news outlets with the bandwidth to pull the documents, go to obscure committee meetings — that’s where you find the story, the string that you pull that becomes a really good, important local news story.” 


 

The rise of AI fake news is creating a ‘misinformation superspreader’ — from washingtonpost.com by Pranshu Verma
AI is making it easy for anyone to create propaganda outlets, producing content that can be hard to differentiate from real news

Artificial intelligence is automating the creation of fake news, spurring an explosion of web content mimicking factual articles that instead disseminates false information about elections, wars and natural disasters.

Since May, websites hosting AI-created false articles have increased by more than 1,000 percent, ballooning from 49 sites to more than 600, according to NewsGuard, an organization that tracks misinformation.

Historically, propaganda operations have relied on armies of low-paid workers or highly coordinated intelligence organizations to build sites that appear to be legitimate. But AI is making it easy for nearly anyone — whether they are part of a spy agency or just a teenager in their basement — to create these outlets, producing content that is at times hard to differentiate from real news.


AI, and everything else — from pitch.com by Benedict Evans


Chevy Chatbots Go Rogue — from
How a customer service chatbot made a splash on social media; write your holiday cards with AI

Their AI chatbot, designed to assist customers in their vehicle search, became a social media sensation for all the wrong reasons. One user even convinced the chatbot to agree to sell a 2024 Chevy Tahoe for just one dollar!

This story is exactly why AI implementation needs to be approached strategically. Learning to use AI, also means learning to build thinking of the guardrails and boundaries.

Here’s our tips.


Rite Aid used facial recognition on shoppers, fueling harassment, FTC says — from washingtonpost.com by Drew Harwell
A landmark settlement over the pharmacy chain’s use of the surveillance technology could raise further doubts about facial recognition’s use in stores, airports and other venues

The pharmacy chain Rite Aid misused facial recognition technology in a way that subjected shoppers to unfair searches and humiliation, the Federal Trade Commission said Tuesday, part of a landmark settlement that could raise questions about the technology’s use in stores, airports and other venues nationwide.

But the chain’s “reckless” failure to adopt safeguards, coupled with the technology’s long history of inaccurate matches and racial biases, ultimately led store employees to falsely accuse shoppers of theft, leading to “embarrassment, harassment, and other harm” in front of their family members, co-workers and friends, the FTC said in a statement.


 

 

Channel 1 -- personalized gloabl news network powered by generative AI

From DSC:
Hhhhhmmmmm……not sure yet that this is a good idea. But I doubt there’s any stopping it.

 



How AI ‘sees’ the world – what happened when we trained a deep learning model to identify poverty — from theconversation.com by Ola Hall Hamid Sarmadi Thorsteinn Rögnvaldsson

Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) have created a step change in how to measure poverty and other human development indicators. Our team has used a type of AI known as a deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) to study satellite imagery and identify some types of poverty with a level of accuracy close to that of household surveys.


E.U. reaches deal on landmark AI bill, racing ahead of U.S. — from washingtonpost.com by Anthony Faiola, Cat Zakrzewski and Beatriz Ríos (behind paywall)
The regulation paves the way for what could become a global standard to classify risk, enforce transparency and financially penalize tech companies for noncompliance.

European Union officials reached a landmark deal Friday on the world’s most ambitious law to regulate artificial intelligence, paving the way for what could become a global standard to classify risk, enforce transparency and financially penalize tech companies for noncompliance.

Along these lines, also see:


 

 
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