Your coffee reading, or the Monday linkdump

It's 2025. Do you know where your servers are?

Watching the Trump administration go to work, and its, um, tenuous relationship with legality. should have publishers thinking very carefully about where they host their sites…

Not only is it scary to have all your data available to US spying, it is also a huge risk for your business/government continuity. From now on, all our business processes can be brought to a halt with the push of a button in the US. And not only will everything then stop, will we ever get our data back? Or are we being held hostage? This is not a theoretical scenario, something like this has already happened.

This site is hosted in Amsterdam. Where's yours?

The price of Substack

This is eye-opening. Figures for an independent publication with 9,500 free subscribers and 500 paid subscribers, paying $60/year.

• If you host on Substack, Substack will take a $3k cut, and you'll end up with $27k.
• If you host on Ghost, you'll get the whole $30k, but you'll have to pay $99/month for hosting a newsletter with 10,000 subscribers, or $1,188/year.
• With this modest publication, Ghost is $1,812 cheaper.

The differences are more stark at higher levels of subscribers. The question you have to ask is: are Substack's discovery and growth mechanisms worth the extra cash?

Mill Media decided they weren't.

Is Gen Z changing social media?

Cause for hope?

But there has been a colossal sea-change in Gen Z culture since then. It’s been like turning a huge ship on the sea, slow, but there is now momentum behind its critical mass, and it doesn’t look like it’s going to change course. It is now decidedly lame to be mentally fragile, an “iPad kid”, someone who spends all their time online, who has followed the trends of trauma-dumping, and of being non-conforming. This is now “cringe”.

Interesting. This could be wishful thinking — and I'm certainly hoping it's true as my eldest approaches 13…

Some prompt assistance

A typically useful guide to writing better AI prompts, from Paul Bradshaw. If, of course, prompting AI is something you want to do…

7 prompt design techniques for generative AI every journalist should know

Tools like ChatGPT might seem to speak your language, but they actually speak a language of probability and educated guesswork. You can make yourself better understood — and get more professional r…

Online Journalism Blogpaulbradshawuk

The Audience and The AI

Interesting research into audience perception of AI:

Overall, our participants felt most comfortable with journalists using AI for brainstorming or for enriching already created media. This was followed by using AI for editing and creating. But comfort depends heavily on the specific use.

Most of our participants were comfortable with turning to AI to create icons for an infographic. But they were quite uncomfortable with the idea of an AI avatar presenting the news, for example.

I still think we should be very careful about filling our sites with AI content. Audience trust in us is fragile at the best of times. Let's not make it worse.

Generative AI in journalism, and what people think about its impact

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) has taken off at lightning speed in the past couple of years, creating disruption in many industries. Newsrooms are no exception. A new report published today finds that news audiences and journalists alike are concerned about how news organizations are – and could be – using generative AI such as chatbots, image, audio and video generators, and similar tools.

International Journalists' NetworkT.J. Thomson, Michelle Riedlinger, Phoebe Matich, and Ryan J. Thomas