Great piece. I'm very curious about what a new media fiefdom, which somehow suits the underlying shifts in technology and culture, while adhering to values that we presumably hold together, like an attempt at objectivity, would look like.
How is it different than what some big online media have now? Is it supposed to make money? And if so, how? And will its money mechanism give it different incentives than the fiefdoms it attempts to replace?
Frankly, I'm not sure that an op-ed by a screenwriter is the best example of east coast reporting. Editorial pages are famously wacky, and that's kind of the point of their existence, which makes them more similar to social media stars than either side of that analogy would like to admit.
There's a widespread dissatisfaction in tech right now with MSM and with the New York Times in particular. It's understandable, because the NYT is more critical of tech than it used to be (which seems to be part of and in a feedback loop with deeper cultural misgivings), and like other media, we see partisan currents within the paper writing biased stories in the guise of journalism. But that's just part of a larger (and in my opinion, invaluable) institution, that does the hard work of gathering and checking facts everyday.
How would a new media fiefdom do that better, while covering most newsworthy events? Getting to the facts, let alone the truth, is hard, and doing it on a daily basis across many topics is much harder. Doing it in a way that makes money is harder still. I suspect that many people in tech underestimate the difficulty of manuFACTuring, so to speak, the first contact between human understanding and as yet unwritten events.
Once you know what happened, send it as a prompt to GPT-3 and you'll get a great news story written in an inverted pyramid. But GPT-3 doesn't have feet on the ground yet. Those belong to biased humans.
Great piece. I'm very curious about what a new media fiefdom, which somehow suits the underlying shifts in technology and culture, while adhering to values that we presumably hold together, like an attempt at objectivity, would look like.
How is it different than what some big online media have now? Is it supposed to make money? And if so, how? And will its money mechanism give it different incentives than the fiefdoms it attempts to replace?
Frankly, I'm not sure that an op-ed by a screenwriter is the best example of east coast reporting. Editorial pages are famously wacky, and that's kind of the point of their existence, which makes them more similar to social media stars than either side of that analogy would like to admit.
There's a widespread dissatisfaction in tech right now with MSM and with the New York Times in particular. It's understandable, because the NYT is more critical of tech than it used to be (which seems to be part of and in a feedback loop with deeper cultural misgivings), and like other media, we see partisan currents within the paper writing biased stories in the guise of journalism. But that's just part of a larger (and in my opinion, invaluable) institution, that does the hard work of gathering and checking facts everyday.
How would a new media fiefdom do that better, while covering most newsworthy events? Getting to the facts, let alone the truth, is hard, and doing it on a daily basis across many topics is much harder. Doing it in a way that makes money is harder still. I suspect that many people in tech underestimate the difficulty of manuFACTuring, so to speak, the first contact between human understanding and as yet unwritten events.
Once you know what happened, send it as a prompt to GPT-3 and you'll get a great news story written in an inverted pyramid. But GPT-3 doesn't have feet on the ground yet. Those belong to biased humans.