'Just perfect': Man who lost everything in bushfire snags $1 million lottery win
A Queensland man whose family was left with "nothing but teacups" after losing their uninsured house to the bushfires has just had a massive turnaround in his luck.
Thanks to social media, celebrities now out-paparazzi the paparazzi. But self-surveillance comes at a steep cost MEdia Dragon
'Dangerous, misinformation': News Corp employee's fire coverage email
A News Corp employee has accused her organisation of "dangerous" bushfire coverage and misinformation about arson in an email to Australian staff.
Lsm.lv reports that “Latvian Literature” spends almost 140 000 euros publishing works abroad, as:
Latvian Literature export platform “Latvian Literature” spent 138 829 euros in 2019 translating and publishing 29 works of Latvian literature abroad
The Atlantic: “Text-generation software is already good enough to fool most people most of the time. It’s writing news stories, particularly in sports and finance. It’s talking with customers on merchant websites. It’s writing convincing op-eds on topics in the news (though there are limitations). And it’s being used to bulk up “pink-slime journalism”—websites meant to appear like legitimate local news outlets but that publish propaganda instead. There’s a record of algorithmic content pretending to be from individuals, as well. In 2017, the Federal Communications Commission had an online public-commenting period for its plans to repeal net neutrality. A staggering 22 million comments were received. Many of them—maybe half—were fake, using stolen identities. These comments were also crude; 1.3 million were generated from the same template, with some words altered to make them appear unique. They didn’t stand up to even cursory scrutiny. These efforts will only get more sophisticated. In a recent experiment, the Harvard senior Max Weiss used a text-generation program to create 1,000 comments in response to a government call on a Medicaid issue. These comments were all unique, and sounded like real people advocating for a specific policy position. They fooled the Medicaid.gov administrators, who accepted them as genuine concerns from actual human beings. This being research, Weiss subsequently identified the comments and asked for them to be removed, so that no actual policy debate would be unfairly biased. The next group to try this won’t be so honorable…”
2020 Vision
I’m not feeling particularly introspective or retrospective or reflective about 2019 and the 2010s coming to an end, at least not publicly so. I couldn’t even get it together to do a best of my media diet for 2019.
But I did want to note that with this post, I have now published kottke.org across four decades: the 90s, 00s, 10s, and now the 20s. What. The. F?! That realization has me a little bit shook. Am I in a groove or a rut? I find myself feeling both comfortable here and restless for something different. Can those things work together to our mutual benefit in the year to come? We shall see.
In the meantime, thanks to everyone for reading the site. I know from your email that some of you have been reading since the 90s, which floors me. Thanks also to those of you who have supported the site through the purchase of a membership— this site literally could not function without that support. ♥
Confirm Worst Fears of Privacy Advocates Common Dreams
Ricky Gervais Proves Pompous Hollywood Can No Longer Take a Joke,” John Nolte writes at Breitbart.com, quoting from Ali and other DNC-MSM Hollywood sycophants. “The media have literally become the Celebrity Ego Protection League. And this is why both Hollywood and the media have fallen so out of favor with the American people. Instead of informing and entertaining us, they instruct, lecture, and shame us. Instead of good-natured laughs or the passing on of information, it’s self-righteous sanctimony from humorless prigs who have deluded themselves into a sense of unearned superiority and importance to the world. God bless Gervais. His only goal was to entertain those of us watching on TV, and he knows nothing is funnier or more liberating than mocking a room full of people who can’t take a joke.”
How Social Media Killed The Paparazzi
Celebrities didn’t vanquish the paparazzi so much as figure out how to undercut them — and the publications they fueled. In the end, the solution was so straightforward. Celebrities simply became their own paparazzi, posting all manner of details and footage of their daily lives on social media, and effectively put real paparazzi out of business. – Buzzfeed News
The Age-Old Jewish Question'
Washington Post – Ghost papers and news deserts – “First they started showing up thinner than before. Then they were printed on smaller paper, with local columns replaced by more out-of-town news. Then in some places, especially rural and down-on-their-luck parts, newspapers stopped showing up altogether. Since the Internet arrived in earnest 25 years ago, almost nobody — not the savviest investment bankers, the most well-meaning editors, local entrepreneurs or generous philanthropists — has figured out a sustainable way to continue producing local news. America lost a quarter of its journalists from 2008 to 2018, the vast majority of them covering local issues, according to University of North Carolina professor Penny Muse Abernathy. Newsrooms lost at least 3,800 jobs in 2019 alone. She estimates the country has lost 2,100 newspapers since 2004, 70 of them dailies. She has begun referring to about 1,000 surviving titles as “ghost papers” because of their painfully thin staffs and reporting. She has dubbed places with few or no reporters as “news deserts.” “There is a dearth of local news at all levels,” she said.”..
The New York Times – Racial discrimination by algorithms or by people is harmful — but that’s where the similarities end. “In one study published 15 years ago, two people applied for a job. Their résumés were about as similar as two résumés can be. One person was named Jamal, the other Brendan. In a study published this year, two patients sought medical care. Both were grappling with diabetes and high blood pressure. One patient was black, the other was white. Both studies documented racial injustice: In the first, the applicant with a black-sounding name got fewer job interviews. In the second, the black patient received worse care. But they differed in one crucial respect. In the first, hiring managers made biased decisions. In the second, the culprit was a computer program. As a co-author of both studies, I see them as a lesson in contrasts. Side by side, they show the stark differences between two types of bias: human and algorithmic…”
How The Dodo Became the Warmest Fuzziest Corner of the Web -Wired – “The media empire’s heartwarming (and highly shareable) animal videos rack up 2.3 billion views each month. It might be our favorite website of the decade. “The Dodo racks up around 2.3 billion views each month with heartwarming videos about extraordinary pets (like this super-affectionate python), unlikely interspecies friendships (like this mini horse whose best friend is a goose), and animals in need of adoption by just the right human (like this sick, hairless pupper who became a floofy doggo). They have a separate YouTube channel for kids (Dora the Explorer is a sponsor), a Facebook Watch show about animals overcoming adversity, an Animal Planet show called Dodo Heroes, an IGTV series for teens about influencers and their pets, an upcomingunscripted series for Netflix Kids about an 11-year-old koala activist, and a newly inked children’s book deal with Scholastic. For a company named after a bird that is famously extinct, the Dodo is everywhere…The Dodo’s founder, Izzie Lerer, is the daughter of Ken Lerer, a well-known media executive and cofounder of The Huffington Post. Her brother, Ben, cofounded Thrillist and now runs Group Nine Media, which in 2016 became the Dodo’s parent company. When Lerer was hatching the idea for what the Dodo would become, she was a PhD student at Columbia University, studying philosophy with an emphasis on animal ethics and human-animal relationships…”