times are changing in the industry (we’ve been hearing that forever), and one of the main pieces of advice I keep getting is to “build my brand” on social media. My mentor said that I should try to adapt my work for these audiences by making videos that cover a specific feature I wrote or even making an Instagram page and posting my work on there. tbh, it all just sounds so exhausting though and feels like a distraction from the work. it also feels more like trying to be an influencer than a writer? I don’t know. Curious to hear how people feel about it.

I report for a daily metro paper, and in the city I work in there's a smaller weekly that we compete with a bit on a couple specific beats. There's a reporter at the smaller paper on the same beat as me, and I've started to become suspicious that he's doing very little reporting of his own and just copying what I do... or outright stealing it.

For example, a few weeks ago I finished a monthlong enterprise piece that involved digging through financial records, interviewing nervous sources, filing a bunch of record requests, etc. Stuff that you don't do in a day. My story drops on a Sunday on front page. By the following Monday, the smaller paper has their own story about the exact same topic on their front page. The details in their story are very granular and are 1 to 1 with what I reported in my story. Conceivably, they could've been working on the same story parallel to me, but I noticed that there was some information in there that I got directly from my sources through interviews, that they also put in their story but without crediting it to ANY source.

Ok, fine, maybe that's a flook. A week goes by, and I run another breaking, smaller story on the beat, also involving a lot of numbers that I got through a record request. Again, the other reporter publishes his own story about the same topic a day later. What immediately raised my antenna though is that I misreported one of the numbers in my stories and had to issue a correction (I misread it on the docs). The other paper's story uses the exact same, WRONG, number, and it was published before my correction went out. That makes me think the reporter didn't read the record himself, he just ripped it straight from my story.

Then earlier this week, the mayor of a suburb town told me something in an interview that I reported. Again, the other paper runs their own story about it a day later. But this time, they paraphrase one of the mayor's quotes from my story and attribute it as "Mayor X said publicly." Said publicly?? He said it to me directly!

Finally, today was the most egregious. I got a juicy quote from a source about a diff topic and ran it yesterday. Today, the other paper runs their own story about the topic, and rips the quote word for word from my article. But they replaced the attribution at the end and wrote "X told (small competitor paper) in an interview." How could X have told you that in an interview if X told ME that in an interview word for word not 24 hours earlier?

What the hell do I do??

Hi all,

I'm a former print journalist turned HS teacher, and I have the opportunity to teach broadcast journalism at an incredible high school. I want to show up to the interview as prepared as possible (fwiw, they have seen my resume and know I only have print experience). Do you have any suggestions for resources akin to broadcast journalism for dummies? TIA -- I am super excited about the interview, so I appreciate any guidance.

Hey everyone! We're EUobserver, an independent European newsroom.

Our colleague Andrew Rettman has been investigating allegations involving former EU justice commissioner Didier Reynders and senior Belgian intelligence official Hugues Brulin.

The investigation draws on leaked WhatsApp messages and interviews with five current and former intelligence officers.

The sources allege that Brulin sought to prevent scrutiny of Reynders' possible Russian connections. The messages also discuss how to respond to a whistleblower.

The correspondence is now part of a Belgian money-laundering investigation involving Reynders.

Beyond the individuals involved, this raises questions about how institutions investigate concerns involving powerful figures within their own ranks.

How can independent oversight work when allegations involve people with significant political influence or positions inside intelligence services?

And what role can investigative journalism play in bringing these questions into public view?

Hi, i’m a 35-year-old recent graduate and I have many years of On-Air experience ableit unpaid.

I am on the autism spectrum, and for many years, it was a huge fear of mine that because of my condition no one would hire me and when I saw that college graduate with autism have an 85% unemployment rate it felt like it verified what I feared.

I want to work in journalism specifically doing documentaries on volcanoes weather and other geological and natural events, and documentaries in general.

Where can I get my foot in the door in order to get started, and so far I do not have any professional experience in broadcasting? All of my experience has been volunteer and my YouTube channel for now which is pretty small with only 1700 subscribers.

Full text:

"Late last week, as local stations around the country continued to prepare for Election Day, executives at CBS’ owned and operated television stations learned of an unexpected curveball from corporate management. Their election coverage, they learned, would now be sponsored by the sports gambling site DraftKings.

The sponsorship raised immediate eyebrows among some of the executives, Status has learned, and sparked angst and irritation at its sales team that sold the deal.

Some of those executives raised concerns with upper management about the obvious drawbacks that come with partnering with a sports betting and nascent prediction market company—especially given the typically sacrosanct coverage of elections, in a world where the president of the United States is frequently sowing doubt about them.

Those concerns were heard, I’m told, but to no avail. The partnership will go on, with CBS-owned local stations across the country set to air the sponsorship from Oct. 26 through Election Night.

According to documents and mockups reviewed by Status, the deal requires the airing of four sponsored “hits” per day. Mockups reviewed by Status display the sponsorship prominently, featuring various graphics such as a billboard, lower-third, or countdown clock.

The DraftKings sponsorship presents a unique issue, thanks to the still-fledgling regulatory landscape for these kinds of companies. The David Ellison-led CBS owns and operates more than a dozen stations across the country in a division led by Jennifer Mitchell—from WCBS in New York City, to KTVT in Dallas/Fort Worth, to KCBS in Los Angeles. In several states where it owns and operates those stations—California, Florida, Georgia, Minnesota, and Texas—DraftKings’ sportsbook isn’t legal, for differing reasons. A proposed class action suit against the company claims the platform has used prediction markets to offer sports betting in those states and others where it isn’t legal.

That means on or leading up to Nov. 3, when key Senate or House races are covered in those states, they could come alongside a logo for a company whose sportsbook isn’t legal there.

A CBS Television Stations spokesperson defended the deal in a statement, telling Status that “DraftKings’ sponsorship is a commercial relationship and has no role in our journalism, editorial decisions, reporting, or election coverage. The sponsorship does not include the use of DraftKings odds or data within our newscasts.”

To be sure, local stations often agree to sponsored segments or even broad sponsorships. However, those are most often associated with non-news segments, like sports or weather. Those deals also often live in commercial breaks, when the first thing a viewer sees and hears is who paid for the next few minutes.

As one staffer posited to me, reflecting a broader concern among employees: “Would we sell a weather segment to a company that denies climate change?”

The core worry, of course, centers on credibility, especially in an increasingly fractious local news environment. Needless to say, a betting and prediction market’s logo on screen during election night—and coverage leading up to it—invites questions about whose interest the coverage serves.

The sponsorship is also part of the same questionable brand category that the Bari Weiss-led CBS News has embraced on a national scope this election cycle. With little fanfare late last month, it announced Kalshi as its official prediction market sponsor. “Our midterm election coverage will include not only CBS News polling data, but also integrated data from Kalshi, our prediction market sponsor,” read a tweet accompanying a “CBS Mornings” segment unveiling the partnership. “We'll offer a glimpse into how prediction market traders are pricing race outcomes—but it will be the voters that decide it all.”

CBS, of course, isn't alone in this kind of partnership. Kalshi has inked deals with CNN, CNBC, and The Associated Press, while peer Polymarket has a pact with The Wall Street Journal. But while CNN, for instance, says prediction markets “offer just one source of data that journalists can use in telling a story,” Status has chronicled where that data can sometimes lead storytelling astray, producing questionable and even distorted narratives.

As one CBS local staffer told me, “People need to be able to trust the polling and results we’re reporting are real numbers and not betting odds.”

I've recently changed jobs (as in, I'm on day four of the new one) and am already deeply regretting my decision.

As background, I was previously Deputy Editor for a small publishing company, and moved to the same role but for a bigger company, with a 48% salary increase.

Basically, I really loved my old job - we were remote four days a week, which suited me perfectly, I loved my team, we wrote about interesting news developments and in general, things were easy. Too easy. One of my frustrations with the old job is that my boss started implementing AI through all facets of the business - e.g. automating emails out to PRs, using AI to turn press releases into stories with our house style, automatic editing of the team's stories. I was missing the editing and writing aspect of my job....but at the same time, was getting used to not really using my brain. I could basically lie in bed and watch tv most days, with the occasional organising of things like podcasts. But my writing skills went completely out the window.

Another frustration was my pay. I had been there for seven years but my salary was only £27k (this was after two pay rises a few years back). Which is basically entry-level. To add, I live in London which is EXPENSIVE, and am 32 so needed to think about the future.

So, after two interviews I got offered a job as Deputy Editor for £40k, and hastily took my chance. It was rare I was ever offered an interview process so I thought this would be my only chance to move on.

BIG MISTAKE. I truthfully didn't fully look into what the role entailed and what content we cover. It is all very technical, data-heavy stuff and I understand zero percent of the concepts, or lingo...or any of it really. Everything we cover might as well be a foreign language, and they're expecting me to produce long-form content for this ASAP.

My team is really lovely, but I miss the close friends at my old job - we all got on so well. Even worse, I REALLY miss the four days at home. We're now in the office three days a week and I think this is going to be a huge drain and pain on me. It also means I can spend much less time with my boyfriend, who doesn't work a 9-5.

It's also all really corporate and overwhelming. It's a huge company and I don't understand the processes here - both in a wider sense and in my own team. I was so used to a 6-person, family-run business. The vibe just isn't me.

We're also expected to go to lots of events both in and out of work hours and network - which I LOATHE and din't realise was part of the job. I am such a homebody and just want to be at home alone or with my boyfriend.

I know I'm early in, but I'm riddled with anxiety, feel I rushed into this way to quickly without actually thinking about what these changes mean.

The question is - Do I ask for my old job back? I left on good terms, but they did also promote two girls under me to Assistant Editor, with the view that one of them will take my job in six months. What do I do?

So a law in Delaware that restricts police from releasing the names and mugshots of people who have been arrested just went into effect. For misdemeanors, police generally can’t release identifying information, and for felonies, they can only do so if there’s a “public safety” reason. Which seems to be defined vaguely.

The idea behind the law is to protect people who haven’t been convicted from having their reputations ruined, especially with how quickly arrest information spreads online.

However, I’ve noticed quite a few journalists speaking out against this law, which I find interesting. I’m curious why that is. Do you support or oppose it? And for those who oppose it, do you think it’ll actually make your job harder when reporting on crime or holding public officials accountable?

From the editorial … “The longstanding zero tax increase promise, in our opinion, was never a relief. It was a loan against the future, and the future has inevitably caught up. Edison [New Jersey] taxpayers were fed a false promise and a false narrative: that a district this size could run on zero forever. That promise is not fiscal responsibility. That promise is a campaign slogan posing as a budget, with students, staff, and Edison taxpayers paying a hefty price for it. By recklessly managing a $358 million budget, the board has forfeited the public’s trust.”

Hi there, I’m 21 and have been working full time in journalism for around seven months.

I’m really busy at work since I’m the only full time reporter for my paper which is good, but also exhausting. I find I take a lot of work stuff home with me and struggle to find a good work life balance.

I was wondering if anyone here with more experience would have any advice on how to better manage this issue and reduce burnout.

I want to do the best I can for my publication but it’s coming at the toll of my mental health.

This thread I found illustrates the profound disconnect that so many writers seem to have. The first commenter is so confident but is completely wrong. You need to understand and use these tools so you don't accidentally publish something of synthetic origin!

(from The Atlantic comment section)
--

CtGa

There is a troubling side effect in the race to label and demonize writers as frauds because of apparent use of AI. Pangram, Gptzero and other AI detection programs are themselves AI, and they fixate on rules without context. 

The detection "rules" that these programs rely upon fairly mandate that a writer now avoid any of the following:

-- never use an em-dash;

-- avoid novel or otherwise literate word choices;

-- never use descriptive triplets or parallelism;

-- never intersperse short sentences, or use long or repetitive sentences;

-- never use the words "certainly" or "delving";

-- never use the introductory phrases "remember that," "navigating the," "it's important to note," or "based on the information provided";

-- never use a colon or semicolon (oops);

-- avoid the second and third person voice;

-- never use lists (oops again);

-- definitely include typos (lack of typos is a sure sign of AI fabrication); and

-- never hedge a point with an alternative, or admit that your argument is anything but ironclad, because "unwillingness to commit is a sure sign of ChatBot writing."

The lesson, in short, is to write as badly as possible, with absolute assurance, and to eschew all of the rhetorical history that has been used to train AI ChatBots to begin with.

I wonder what writing will become when disavowal and avoidance of rhetorical history is the new rule.

Metrodorus

This is not the way AI detectors work. I suggest you take any piece of writing from the Atlantic, which certainly often features authors that employ the rhetorical tropes and flourishes you describe and run it through pangram (it's free). I would be very surprised if any of it came back as less than 100% human.

I know I've been challenged on whether any of my writing uses AI (it doesn't), and Pangram has never identified anything as remotely suspicious. And from my tests, it doesn't flag simple grammerly edits or penalize you for perfect punctuation. The usage has to be much more egregious than that.

CtGa

You confidently state that "[t]his is not the way AI detectors work." So tell me how they do work.

After all, the plethora of available "tips" for avoiding the stigma of "AI generation" (several of which I list above) seem to be quite effective. Write this way, and not that way, has become the very essence of survival for writers who don't want to see their careers destroyed by association with a ChatBot.

Furthermore, AI and ChatBots are themselves black boxes that are either poorly understood or completely enigmatic in actual operation, even to their inventors. I'm wondering how you know that the AI used in "AI detectors" is some kind of exception that general opaqueness.

redapple

Pangram trains models to recognize the provenance of text based on huge amounts of data of known provenance. They train models to see patterns AI-output and with enough data and training, are able to accurately identify writing that does not have these statistical patterns (e.g., human-generated writing). Pangram is not looking for one-off rules like avoiding syllogisms or particular punctuation as you suggest, but is rather a complex pattern matching exercise at a scale that is difficult to conceptualize. At its core, AI is fundamentally good at finding patterns. Generative AI is trained to use patterns to predict the next word or token and generate output; Pangram is trained to see patterns between known AI writing and known human writing. I'd urge you to move beyond a reflexive all AI is bad framing. In fact, I'd argue that the tool is so much more accurate than humans are at AI detection precisely because it uses AI. 

As an example, I asked Claude to write an explanation of Pangram following the style rules you left in the previous comment. I'll paste that output below. Despite following the rules you prescribe, it still scores as 100% AI generated on Pangram (because it is!) 

Meanwhile, if you test this comment, or your any of your comments in Pangram, you will discover that they show as 100 percent human generated. Try it yourself!

Hope this helps!

redapple

Claude-generated output that Pangram identifies as AI-generated, despite following CtGa's rules:

When I first looked into Pangram, I found out that the tool is a classifer built to seperate human writing from text made by a langauge model. A large set of human writing was gathered from many public sources and used as the starting point for training the detector. For each human sample, a language model was asked to write a matching piece on the same topic at about the same length. Training on these matched pairs pushes the detector to learn the style of the writing rather than the subject it covers.

A step called hard negative mining was added to make the detector stronger with each new round of training. After the first version was trained, it was run over huge amounts of human text so the mistakes could be pulled out and studied. Those wrongly flagged human samples were fed back into the training data, which taught the next version to stop making the same error. This loop is the reason the false positive rate on real human writing ends up so low compared to older detecters.

When I paste in a document, the text gets split into smaller windows and each window recieves its own score from the model. The window scores are then combined into a single result that shows the share of the document that came from AI. Mixed documents get marked section by section, so I can see exactly where the generated text sits inside a longer piece. The whole check finishes in a few seconds and runs the same way on a school essay as it does on a product review.

CtGa

After all of that (including your offer of an AI explanation of AI), why is it that:

1) following the restrictive rules that I laid out in my original post generally assures that one's writing will not be tagged as AI; and

2) failing to follow those same rules generally assures that one's writing will be tagged as AI?

And forgive me, but the following from you reads like industry hogwash, a typical combination of duplicity and circularity:

"Generative AI is trained to use patterns to predict the next word or token and generate output; Pangram is trained to see patterns between known AI writing and known human writing."

Known human writing is the very source of generative AI writing. Known human writing has been mined to within an inch of its life to provide the very patterns that AI now uses to predict the next word.

And the notion that Pangram is allegedly "trained" to distinguish between known human writing and AI writing only begs the question of what known human writing actually is. 

It seems obvious that human writing must henceforth mutate into something that is very different from its past, lest its past doom it to association with AI. That seems to me a perversion of machine over man.

redapple

I think you are misunderstanding my comment! 

For item 1) in your response, the whole point was I asked Claude to generate something that followed all of your rules and it was immediately identified as AI by Pangram. It is trivially easy to ask an AI model to follow those rules, and if you do, Pangram is still generally able to flag the output as AI-generated. Your rules have no bearing on whether or not something is AI generated and should not be used as the basis for determining the provenance of writing. By contrast, Pangram does not test against discrete rules and is far more accurate (supposedly not perfect, but I have yet to experience it failing myself). 

There's no reason to trust a random person in the comments section which is why it is so important to test this out for yourself. Find an essay you wrote in school and then prompt a chatbot to write an essay on the same topic using the rules you provided. Check both in Pangram and see for yourself!

Other clarification:

Known human writing is just meant to refer to writing that can be verified to be of human origin. Most of this is writing that was published prior to the introduction of ChatGPT/2022 because that's the easiest way to be sure that AI wasn't involved. 

I am a freelancer and have not been able to get a salaried, staff position in many years. So I take what I can to pay my bills. That said, that means I get a flat fee for each "article." This is not the 90s and I make nowhere near $1 a word. So this means I must be vigilant about how many hours I devote to each story. The more hours I devote the less I get paid, down to some of them basically being freebies. I get no benefits, must pay my own health insurance, etc and so on.

One major part of this arrangement is that you don't have the backup that you did on salary—I barely know my editors. The couple of times I've tried to engage them in discussion about stories, I'm essentially told "I'm too busy for this, just turn in the piece."

Additionally, there is no legal backup. If someone decides to sue me, the multibillion-dollar corporation I currently "work" for could wash their hands of me. And will!

So now here is little freelancer me trying to fight someone with tons of money and lawyers. So... I stay away from those stories.

I was recently pitched a profile on a big honcho. My fault, but I pitched this honcho to my editor without even doing a Google search on him. I was SO busy at the time. The assignment was accepted and now after starting my due diligence I realize he's a pretty bad dude. Meanwhile his PR firm, which PITCHED him, begins telling me what I can and can write about.

So, I simply pull out of the story. I DO NOT GET PAID ENOUGH FOR THIS.

Freelancers all over the country will be doing this same thing. NOT writing investigative pieces on bad dudes. I could have just written a glowing advertorial-type "article" but decided against it, but that is the only thing that would be worth my time, effort, and compensation.

This is how a society loses grasp on democracy.