Content Aware media news: November 17, 2022

AI tech under legal scrutiny, reporter's rights, and "the freeest place on the internet" - all in Nov 17th's Content Aware weekly media must-reads.

Published: 12:09, 18 November 2022

Headless CMS and modern content publishing: why is it a match made in heaven?
AWS's Media Blog succinctly breaks down the old-vs-new thinking and requirements behind the mass move to headless CMS and why they make such sense for publishing and content businesses. A good piece that summarises the high level differences, made no small bit better since it happens to feature us!
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Beep boop beep - are you already reading robo-writers without knowing?
This bit was not written by a robot. Honest. They don't love puns like we do. But, AI writing algorithms are easily good enough now, that that is exactly what a robot would say to throw you humans off the scent.
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But will AI get sued into submission before it accidentally wins a Pulitzer?
A US suit relating to the use of computing code for training AI algorithms could have significant knock-on effects into how AI services in general are 'trained' to do their thing - be that writing articles, or making images - well beyond the initial named parties, which include Microsoft and GitHub.
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TikTok is where it's going at
About a quarter of under-30s in the US now regularly get their news on TikTok. Are you there? Should you be? The stat is one of What's New In Publishing's five takeaways for publishers from the 2022 Lisbon Web Summit last week.
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UK security Bill could strip journalist protection, say Editors
James Evelegh, Editor at InPublishing, outlines the Society of Editors' concerns over the lack of protection for public interest stories in an under-debate UK National Security Bill. What protection for whistleblowers, or journos blowing the lid off scandals, if they may face undefendable "national security" charges after the fact?
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And are UK internet laws also tightening to public detriment?
"The free-est place on the internet" is a title which may be under threat, as another UK online Bill works its way through the committees and chambers. It's a baby+bathwater scenario which is feared to do more harm than good.
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Comment - the old new high-value commodity for publishers
Digital publishing guru Alan Hunter observes the rise of comment as the defining attribute which separates one publisher's output from the other, as far as their audiences are concerned. If everyone has the facts, then insight comes with even greater value.
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JavaScript vs HTML - a Google crawler story
In an experiment to check Google crawl speeds of a like-for-like JavaScript page versus a HTML page, it took 9-times longer to complete the JS crawl than the HTML crawl. If you're used to dealing with WordPress you'll likely regularly scan for unwanted JavaScript bundled in with any plugins you've installed, but every site could do with a scan for it from time to time - especially when you see the difference in crawl speeds.
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How one publisher added 30m subscribers in one year!
Hold on, did we just call YouTube a publisher? Once again, if its quacks like a duck and charges a subscription fee like a duck, it should perhaps be responsible for the content on its site like a, err, publisher. It also perhaps shows the power of relentlessly just asking again and again the same "Would you like to subscribe?" question. Or people are just that fed-up with ads.
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"Canada's 'cash for news' laws need to show how they work"
Yay to Canada for placing a value on news and content. But, says writer Heidi Legg in this piece for Press Gazette, the powers that be should do a better job of showing their working in the margins.
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