Newsletter 86: Insisting on crediting idea creators, AI can’t cite articles properly, a new business hybrid publisher, plus three people to follow and three books to read. Fight the rip-off culture I recently accepted a job to write a book chapter. The clients were expert business thinkers. The topic was a business discipline that should…
Bear with me for a little thought experiment. When a script in Hollywood appears to be lacking something crucial and the existing writers have exhausted all their creative solutions, the producer or director will sometimes bring in a “script doctor.” The script doctor is a writer who parachutes in and, based on their expert knowledge…
Let’s get this out of the way first. I know practically nothing about ice hockey. I’ve never seen a whole game live or on TV. I’m sure you hockey fans will educate me in the comments. In case you haven’t heard, something unusual happened in Saturday’s US versus Canada game of the NHL’s 4 Nations…
Few people, when deciding to work on a business book, recognize what they are really creating. A book is not just an idea made real and and powerful. It’s not just a way to spread influence and generate business. It’s a database that you can mine to power much of your work moving forward. How…
The Kansas City Chiefs weren’t the only group of people who made astoundingly bad choices in the Super Bowl. Add these folks to your list of villains: the rapper Ye (formerly called Kanye West), who hawked swastika T-shirts, and Guy Bar and Ori Bejerano of the Israeli ad agency BBDO, who appropriated celebrity images to…
What’s the difference between fair use and piracy? Fair use is when I use your content. Piracy is when you use my content. That sounds like a joke. It’s not. It’s how people behave. And if the entity alleging piracy is a large company, it’s a business model. I touched on this Wednesday. But the…
After a year of study and more than 10,000 comments, the US Copyright Office issued its second report on AI and copyright. This report attempts to address the question of when works created with AI tools can be copyrighted. (A third report, to be released later, will address the contentious issue of the legality of…
The em-dash (—) is getting a lot bad press these days. Writers overuse it, and not coincidentally, so do AI language generators. An em-dash is a perfectly reasonable piece of punctuation, but if you’re going to use it, you might need a little more detail on when and how. So here’s a tutorial on the…
Popular Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin announced that she’s leaving the Post and joining a number of other writers to start a subscription-based Substack channel called The Contrarian: Not Owned By Anybody. To me, this looks like the start of a rush towards the exits for popular newspaper writers and what will be an increasingly…