Cuttings: AI in court and Telegraph trauma
AI techbro hypocrisy and troubling moves at the “for sale“ newspaper.
Tricky times at the Telegraph
Fraser Nelson, defenestrated editor of The Spectator and now Times columnist and documentary maker, has, inevitably, a Substack newsletter. And he‘s using it to explore something he has very personal experience of: a title once owned by the Barclays brothers, but which is up for sale. Not The Speccie in this instance, but The Telegraph. And he thinks cuts are bing made to make it a more attractive sales prospect:
Last week, Daily Telegraph staff found out that their editorial budget has been secretly slashed bym £5.3m (from £77m to £71.7m). This includes a £2.2m cut for editorial staff and £2.7m for other editorial costs. This was just two weeks after the House of Lords vote, and two months after Cardinale’s promise of investment.
In particular, I endorse this from Fraser:
The journalists there have been making an incredible success of the paper under the most difficult circumstances imaginable; only to find the fruits of that success should be confiscated rather than invested. It seems that RedBird have not quite worked out how crucial it is for the owner of a newspaper to have the confidence of editorial. As even Jeff Bezos has found with the Washington Post, it’s harder to manage a newspaper once such confidence is lost.
There are some incredibly talented journalists at The Telegraph right now, including some of my former students and some people who are subscribers to this very newsletter. Their use of newsletters, their pivot to a member-supported business with a strong focus on community development, have been exemplary. That deserves to be supported, not cut.
Fraser Nelson
Meanwhile, over at Press Gazette:
Calls to block the Telegraph’s acquisition over its buyer’s alleged Chinese links have been sent to the UK Government, alongside demands for an investigation into the owner.
Yikes. Trying times indeed. My sympathies to everyone there.
Alice Brooker
Trying not to laugh
Ars Technica's Ashley Belanger:
AI industry groups are urging an appeals court to block what they say is the largest copyright class action ever certified. They've warned that a single lawsuit raised by three authors over Anthropic's AI training now threatens to "financially ruin" the entire AI industry if up to 7 million claimants end up joining the litigation and forcing a settlement.
So, it's OK for AI to destroy other fields, but not OK for the people whose work they used without permission to fight back? I recognised techbro entitlement when I see it…
Ashley Belanger
There's also an interesting piece over at Unherd about the possibility that AI investment is a bubble right now:
With all that money pouring into AI, investment in the rest of the economy has begun to decline, slowing growth. That helps to explain the rapid deceleration in the US economy now underway, a marked contrast to the recent good fortune of the “Magnificent Seven” tech companies.
John Rapley
The new generation of New Labour fans
Let me make you feel old. New Labour fandom is a growing thing on, of all places, TikTok:
Many of the New Labour edit creators are aged between 17 and 21, and did not directly experience the New Labour era. Often A-level politics students, their introduction to that period of government comes from documentaries or archived footage shown in classrooms.
A reminder of my favourite maxim: “new to me” can be as important as “new” in journalism.
Priya Bharadia
Who goes MAGA?
And finally, Mike Masnick has an amusing and worrying post about the sort of people who align with authoritarian rulers, riffing on a format from the early 20th Century. He breaks down these people into categories. From one of those categories, the legacy media reporter:
He’s not quite MAGA yet, but he’s already doing their work for them. He frames voter suppression as “election integrity measures” and describes anti-trans legislation as “parental rights bills.” He gives equal weight to climate scientists and oil industry propagandists because “balance” is more important than truth.
Ouch.
Mike Masnick
