Philanthropies pledge $500 million to address crisis in US local news, finding evidence of memorized news content in GPT models, and inside the Uber Files one year later

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Philanthropies pledge $500 million to address crisis in US local news. The effort, spearheaded by the MacArthur Foundation, will give grants to support newsrooms and start-ups as concern grows over the rapid disappearance of local news outlets.

Finding evidence of memorized news content in GPT models. There’s little transparency from LLM developers about what data they used to train a model. So how might you determine if your news website’s content has been incorporated into a model like GPT-3 or 4? Nick Diakopoulos demonstrates a method that can be used to provide evidence in some cases.

Inside the Uber Files, one year later. The investigation unearthed the ride-share company’s ruthless business practices, sparking protests and inquiries worldwide. One year later, The Guardian’s Paul Lewis takes us behind the scenes.

Moving on. Jeff Jarvis “to retire”.

Labor x Tech. As part of Rest of World’s Labor x Tech Fellowship, four reporters from Zimbabwe, Vietnam, Brazil and Pakistan are spending a year covering the impact of technology on work and workers around the world. Here are the stories they’ve written so far.

Google News in Spain: the legacy of its shutdown and the impact of its reopening. What the decade-long saga of Google News shutdown and reopening in Spain has meant for publishers, readers, and the digital landscape at large.

Explainer journalism builds trust, audience at the BBC. Ros Atkins, the BBC news analysis editor, has redefined what explanatory journalism — I hesitate to call it storytelling, though his methods are certainly a model of how to tell factual stories — can be online and on television. Now he’s written a book on how to explain anything.

Why M20? To remind G20 leaders that the world’s problems can’t be solved without media freedom. Siddharth Varadarajan’s remarks to the 6 September 2023 M20 Media Freedom Summit, held online in Delhi.

Media freedom: can Brussels agree on landmark law to protect Europe’s increasingly at-risk journalists? Mounting restrictions on the press are creating a “desperate situation”, warns Věra Jourová, the EU Commissioner behind a new law aimed at safeguarding media pluralism.

National journalism funds (NFJs): a GFMD Impact discussion paper. NFJs are an instrument for providing strategic, long-term financial support to independent public interest media and media sectors and ecosystems.

URL Media secures $1m as it continues to center communities of color amid a volatile political climate and ahead of the 2024 presidential election. URL Media, a network of media organizations that serve, support and center communities of color and whose leadership and teams represent these populations, secured a $1M investment from Knight Foundation to strengthen its revenue generation, audience development and content amplification operations for its growing BIPOC network of 21 partners.

Marianna Spring: ‘The more violent the rhetoric, the more important it is I expose it’. The BBC’s first disinformation correspondent spends her time pursuing trolls and dismantling conspiracy theories. In return she is abused, slandered, threatened.

Photo credit: Nikolay Loubet on Unsplash