Since its launch in 2022, Perplexity has staked its claim as the generative AI disruptor of Google search. Its core product uses conversational AI to synthesize and summarize sites and news articles from the web in real time, rather than simply offering up a list of links to those sites or brief article previews. With...
The number of digital news startup launches has been slowing since 2022 in Europe, Latin America, and North America, according to the new Global Project Oasis report. Global Project Oasis, a research project funded by the Google News Initiative that maps digital-native news startups globally, cited economic challenges, slow growth, and political conflicts as potential...
Do most Americans want news about local government and politics? Do they follow news on this topic? And are they satisfied with the local political coverage they have? Those are three of the key questions a new report from the Pew-Knight Initiative, released last week, sought to answer. (The extreme CliffsNotes is “yes,” “yes,” and,...
Betting isn’t just for sports anymore. Polymarket, the cryptocurrency-based prediction market startup that hired Nate Silver as an advisor a couple weeks back, is beefing up its editorial offerings ahead of the 2024 election, Semafor noted last night. Substack users can now embed Polymarket predictions into their posts, and Polymarket has also launched its own...
During the past 30 years of South Africa’s democratic government, it’s hard to overstate the contribution and impact of investigative journalism. This is perhaps most evident in its role not just in exposing state misconduct at the highest levels, but in ensuring those responsible have faced real, significant consequences. Muckraking journalists were instrumental in exposing former President...
In the natural world, convergent evolution is when two organisms independently evolve to look or behave in very similar ways. The beloved — if endangered and chlamydia-ridden — koala evolved human-like fingerprints despite last sharing a common ancestor more than 100 million years ago. Humans are even less closely related to cephalopods and yet the...
How can local online newsrooms best reach, and keep, their audiences? That question keeps many news publishers up at night. In the inhospitable internet climate of 2024, between the ambivalence-to-antagonism of social media toward news and the looming threat of AI search decimating Google referrals, the need for alternatives to the two sources that were...
At an Australian parliamentary hearing last month, Meta once again suggested it could ban links to news on Facebook and Instagram in Australia. This would repeat the ban it enacted for more than a week in February 2021. That ban was in response to the introduction of the News Media Bargaining Code, an Australian law...