I analyzed the media industry for 20 years. Like any large industry, it’s complicated. Despite how it feels, media companies are not run on an emotional basis. Like any big business, they’re managed for profit. How media executives think What you will read below is based my experience meeting with senior executives at CBS, CNN,…
ABC, a Disney property, recently suspended the late-night host Jimmy Kimmel and took his show off the air due to pressure from the Trump administration. Some of my friends are suggesting, knee-jerk fashion, that the right reaction is to boycott Disney. But before you do that, you should understand why Disney and ABC made this…
Newsletter 111. Think twice about recycling your outrage. Plus, not sounding like an AI, how consultants stand out, three people to follow and three books to read. Welcome to the machine You had a busy week. I know. You posted on social media, and I saw it. You’re hurting, like all of us, and I…
Two recent developments are pointing the way towards a web-wide content licensing and payment trend for AI training. Two days ago, publishers including Reddit, Yahoo, Medium, Quora, Ziff-Davis and O’Reilly announced support for RSL (really simple licensing), a scheme by which site owners could include AI licensing terms in their site’s robots.txt file. Shelly Palmer’s…
If you’ve collected and analyzed survey data, the most effective thing you can do with it is to tell a story. To do that, you create a presentation or white paper that delivers the data in a way that people can follow and understand and most importantly, shows the significance of the data. The prerequisite,…
Bear with me: I’m about to tie mathematical logic to artificial intelligence. (I promise, no actual mathematical knowledge will be required.) In 1931 the brilliant mathematician Kurt Gödel pointed the apparatus of mathematics at itself. He was able to prove that in any mathematical system powerful enough to do simple arithmetic, there would always be…
Most of what you read about writers using AI has a bias. It’s filled with writers who like to shout about what they think. Social media algorithms reward the shouting, and you get one of two impressions, depending on your friends: Everyone is using AI for everything, or AI is going to cause the downfall…
Starting today, you can participate in the “AI and the Writing Profession” survey. This survey is a joint project of Gotham Ghostwriters and Bernoff.com. Dan Gerstein, the CEO of Gotham Ghostwriters, proposed this project to me and I enthusiastically agreed to become his partner in it. The web is filled with all manner of opinions…
I’ve closely tracked the impact of technology on media for more than 30 years now. The impact of AI is of a completely different character. It is orders of magnitude faster. It moves so quickly that you cannot talk about it as if it were one trend — it is 100 trends wrapped up in…