oatmealThe #Bezos factor… 🫣
[…] “All publications are dealing with huge amounts of traffic loss because of AI summaries,” the staffer observed. “That’s not unique to us. But we’ve responded with these totally failed fad AI products of our own, when the way every other organization that’s been successful in dealing with this has done it is through leaning into personalities.” Thanks to Bezos’s well-publicized instructions, the staffer said, “we’ve been blocked from the human approach because our leadership destroyed our brand.”
https://www.cjr.org/news/layoffs-dismantling-washington-post-bezos-murray.php
[…] “In an internal meeting with staff in May 2024, Washington Post CEO Will Lewis said the paper lost $77 million in the past year and saw a 50 percent drop in audience since 2020. He and Chief Tech Officer Vineet Khosla—formerly a senior engineering manager at Uber—said that they will have ‘AI everywhere in the newsroom.’”
[…] “Media execs are leveraging the power of high-profile legacy and digital-first brands for clicks…forcing low-paid ghostwriters to fix the SEO-optimized crud that AI tools churn out for cheap advertising dollars.” — Bender, E. M., & Hanna, A. ([2024 or 2025]). The AI con. Harper.
