Daily Briefing: Marginalized communities & trust in news
Good morning! And welcome to Business Side.
In today’s briefing we cover:
Marginalized communities & trust in news
News publishers in AI training data
Plus other developments across the industry
Let’s get to it.
Marginalized communities & trust in news. Reuters Institute published a study exploring how disadvantaged communities experience the news. The study builds on existing research by adding qualitative insight based on focus groups with people from marginalized communities in the US, Brazil, UK, and India.
Many study participants saw the news media as an extension of those in power, sometimes grouping politicians and journalists together. One participant said, “Rural Iowa is going to have a bad view of the media or Washington DC, when all they do is want to come here for just five seconds and then as soon as they get your vote or get whatever accomplished, then they’re out of this place.” Participants also said that journalists are often out of touch with their everyday lives.
As a result, study participants were often looking to social media to hear from people who share their backgrounds. “We resonate more to that specific news source because we find ourselves reflected there,” one participant said.
Among the report’s recommendations is a call for publications to hire more journalists from the communities they serve. Too often publications look to for talent with traditionally prestigious backgrounds, when readers would be best served by journalists with more relevant experiences.
News publishers in AI training data. A new report analyzed the websites used to train certain AI models created by Google and Facebook. It provides evidence for what many news publishers have suspected – that their content can be an important source of training data for AI. (The report doesn’t shed light on what data is used by ChatGPT, which has not released its sources and has a much larger dataset than the one in this report.)
The report ranks websites according to their usage by the model. Here are the top news publishers on the list:
New York Times (#4)
LA Times (#6)
The Guardian (#7)
Forbes (#8)
Huffington Post (#9)
Washington Post (#11)
Business Insider (#17)
Chicago Tribune (#18)
The Atlantic (#20)
Al Jazeera (#24)
The report has a search box where you can see where your own site ranks.
Publishers:
iHeartMedia is launching a network of B2B podcasts all focused on advertising and marketing.
Vox Media ad spots for Chevrolet will feature Kara Swisher driving a Chevy Bolt.
Platforms:
Safari is making it harder to use third-party services like Google Analytics.
Elon Musk tried to reassure Twitter advertisers at a Miami conference.
Spotify struck a deal to repackage creators’ audio content into videos for the platform.
Meta kicked off a round of previously announced layoffs.
Ad agency Omnicom grew 5% in Q1 and plans to hit 3-5% growth for the full year.
AI:
Stability AI is open sourcing several text generation models to compete with ChatGPT.
Some people are using AI chatbots as a form of therapy.
Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo laid out his vision for Poe as a service for accessing many different AI chatbots.
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