It's Tuesday: Here's a tip, don't destroy the trust your readers have in you
I mean, how hard is that, really? Issue #116
It’s a tired old trope that unfortunately still has legs: Sometime in the not so distant past, our country, the culture, the standard of decency, the styles, the service, the entertainment, the way we did business was so much better. I’ve heard this call back to “better times” throughout the entire course of my life. As a teenager, my teachers, parents, their friends and my relations harped on the terribleness of the times and my generation. As a young worker straight out of college I was told that the business world was better before I entered it. My friends and I were making it all worse. Now, of course, we have a whole political movement that’s dedicated to the past and to making the present worse.
While I’m supposed to be at the age where I start spouting off like that, I’ve never felt that things were better way back when. They were just different. Maybe it’s because I started my professional career on the newsstand side of the magazine business. During my first weeks at work I heard nothing but complaints about how terrible the business was from all of the old timers I shared office space with. Why I didn’t run for the exit immediately will have to be another story for another day.
Was journalism better twenty or thirty years ago? The magazine business? Or are have we just gotten better at noticing when things go awry? Have our standards slipped? I distinctly recall my jaw dropping to the floor of my motel room the first time I encountered the nascent Entertainment Tonight celebrity broadcast. Why were they pretending to be in a newsroom? How about all the stranger danger reporting back in the 1980’s that seems to have brought about our inability to let our children out of sights ever since? How about crime reporting? I remember launching a Weekly World News style magazine back in the ‘90’s called Crime Beat. True crime shows and podcasts have nothing on what was covered in that publication.
The news the past week about the Sports Illustrated AI fiasco is neither surprising or sad. Consider all of the other AI fiasco’s this past year. Even the mushy response from Arena management wasn’t unusual. It read like standard corporate speak. Will anyone above the mid-level pay grade take the hit for what happened?
Should this blow up in another news cycle we will, of course, see another statement that says that that is “not who we are and what was done does not represent our corporate values.”
Narrator’s Voice: “That is precisely who they are and why they are now in this jackpot.”
Look, if you break it, you own it. You hire a third party company to put “content” on your website or in your magazine, you dang well better make sure that you have procedures in place to ensure that everything they do in your name is clean, precise, honest and verifiable.
AI is very cool. It’s not the flying car, transporter, warp speed, android future we were promised, but it is still cool. But seriously, think of all the junk that is out there on the web and that’s what you’re training it on? You’re going to let it feed off of the work of others and pretend that’s not a big deal? You’re going to publish articles that are written by an AI and not do some serious human copy editing? You’re not going to tell your audience, the audience that comes to you because they trust you, that this story was written by an AI and not a live, paid, staffer?
What the ever living heck is wrong with you?
one__Sports Illustrated used AI to generate 3rd party stories
During the course of this year, well known and “respected” publishers like CNET and Gannett were caught testing live AI stories and had their reputations tarnished when it became clear that they didn’t tell anyone.
I’m not one of those whose outrage is that SI, the magazine of such notables as William Faulkner, John Updike and Bill Russell, committed this sin. Those days are long gone. No, it’s this response that kind of gets to me:
Sports Illustrated said the articles in question were created by a third-party company, AdVon Commerce, which assured the magazine that they were written and edited by humans. AdVon had its writers use a pen name, “actions we don’t condone,” Sports Illustrated said.
Then how did it happen? Why was it initially covered up?
It doesn’t matter that it was “licensed content” from an external third party company.
It was on your website. You allowed it to be published.
You broke it. You own it. ‘Fess up and fix it.
Note: Check out this interesting perspective from veteran former Sports Illustrated writer Rick Reilly.
two__A deal to purchase Forbes Magazine falls through
Twenty eight year old tech CEO Austin Russell was granted a two week extension last month to come up with the $800 million needed to complete the deal. The extension failed in the end when other investors in his group declined to honor their commitments.
Forbes is currently owned by Hong Kong investment group, Integrated Whale Media Group. The title claims a readership as high as 5 million and it’s print title reports a circulation of more than 518,000.
The deal to purchase Forbes by this investment group was controversial due to the high price and some questions about Russell’s connections to Russian oligarch Magomed Musaev, the license holder of the Russian language edition of Forbes Magazine.
three__Saveur Magazine returns to print
If you were around the magazine world back in the mid 1990’s you may recall being impressed by the launch of Saveur. It was a beautifully produced publication and remained a solid title (in my opinion, anyway) through it’s next round of owners.
The title was purchased earlier this year by editor Kat Craddock and their new model will be a combination of digital and a print magazine that will be published twice a year with a limited print run.
I like the idea of this title now being owned by the people who love its content the most. The trimmed down print order, the carefully placed distribution, the robust web presence all makes a great deal of sense.
four__Ralph Nader’s Winsted News Saved by American Business Media
Back in February of this year, Ralph Nader announced the launch of a local newspaper in his hometown of Winsted, CT. The model was odd, to say the least. A newspaper published once a month in a town that was covered by some other newspapers, and with seed money totaling $15,000.
So perhaps it’s not all that surprising to discover that the paper got into trouble and the organization that came to save it is: American Business Media, the publisher of business magazines and events. The CEO of the company has a home in the area, ties to Connecticut publishers and was quoted as saying: “I have an infrastructure that can serve this and I’m like let’s do it.”
The world needs more newspapers so let’s hope this works out.
five__More bookazines coming to a newsstand near you!
Alliance Entertainment, a wholesaler of music cds, LPs, movies, video games, and toys and collectibles is going into the magazine publishing business by launching a new banner publishing company that will produce bookazines.
Interestingly enough, it looks like Alliance has some roots in the former Source Interlink magazine publisher and wholesaler that was also in the music and movie distribution business.
This new publishing venture has already distributed three bookazines to the market covering such topics as Willie Nelson and Star Trek.
Your Moment of Magazine Zen…
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It’s the first week of what is supposed to be an easy month. I hope you don’t have too many Teams meetings and your in-box is only partly full. And, may your slack be, well, slack.
Hey, head on down to the break room. I hear there’s hot chocolate….
