The Opinion That Ate the Paper
Charlotte Klein’s profile of New York Times Opinion section chief Kathleen Kingsbury is in practice a dishy snapshot of the Paper of Record’s contemporary triumphs and struggles as the one truly thriving American newspaper.
“In a world where the Times doesn’t have a ton of legacy-media competition, competition from within the house is what we’ve got, and people are just as annoyed if it’s coming from upstairs than if it’s from Washington or Los Angeles,” says one source.
The article covers that internal strife (news reporters look down at Opinion as a “factory that churns out bland 800-word ‘takes’”); the continued erosion between news, opinion and “analysis” that Opinion, with its arguable “mission creep,” has played a heavy hand in; the doubling since 2019 of the section’s staff as rival outlets backed away from columns that caused more headaches than they were worth; and colorful portraits of the eccentic personalities leading America’s top news outlet.
It’s far from a flattering picture, but one that even casual Times observers will tear into with relish.
PR Pros Have Discovered How to Influence Chatbots: Talk to a Journalist
Semafor Editor-in-Chief Ben Smith reports on an AI story that actually offers a glimmer of hope for old-fashioned journalism: PR firms have found that ChatGPT queries about their clients put a surprising weight on content sourced from struggling local news outlets and trade publications long deemed irrelevant. It’s not even close: coverage in old-line media outlets is vastly favored by bots than even viral social media content or Reddit threads.
That discovery–impermanent as it may be given shifts in sourcing algorithms–is putting spin doctors back in touch with ink-stained journalists, a major reversal in the age of brand burnishing being centered on social media.
“There’s something heartening, from the perspective of the humans in the media business, about the practice of gaming digital media becoming less technical,” Smith writes.
“But even if the LLMs find this kind of authoritative journalism valuable, and even if companies will pay to employ publicists to pitch their stories, it’s not clear where that process meets news organizations’ business models.”
Smith is right to ask how all of this could boost bottom lines at newsrooms, but we’ll take a moment to celebrate the continued importance to the PR complex of reporters whose coverage may include a barbed question or two.
Trump 2.0 is not the first time PBS has been in the crosshairs of a conservative administration, but the past few months have been unusually tough going. The president signed an executive order pulling funding from PBS and NPR over accusations of “woke” bias. And while that action is largely unenforceable, a follow-up move successfully pulled a grant that PBS used to fund children’s programming.
In an interview with the New York Times, Paula Kerger, the network’s veteran CEO, addresses the current challenges. She convincingly fights back on the claims of bias, nothing that not even 10% of PBS programming pertains to news. (Over half is for kids.) She also acknowledges the peculiarly American challenge of media outlets getting government funding to begin with compared to, say, the UK’s BBC. And she strikes an optimistic tone about how AI might help the network, and also boost childhood education.
