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Hi all. This week we’re catching up on whole host of topics around AI and SEO, education, journalism, video, photography, and the future of the internet. We’ve also got a piece on The Atlantic's new games initiative, and finally, we’ll bid farewell to the blue screen of death.
But First…
A quick welcome to our new subscribers from PBS, Bowling Green, Alaska and Maryland Public Television! I’m happy to finally be getting back to this newsletter. I’ve been working on quite a few things over the past few weeks that will start popping up here in the next few weeks. So watch this space.
Webinars galore
And we’ve got a webinar today. A lot of you have already signed up (thank you!) but there is still time. Learning to Harness Uncertainty, a session with journalist and social critic
Maggie Jackson
, inspired by he acclaimed book Uncertain. We all know this is a very uncertain time for public media, and she’ll share you how uncertainty can actually fuel better decision-making, resilience, and creativity. You can read a more detailed description in the Webinars for You section below, or register here!
Looking back a quick thank you to all of you who attended our webinar, The 50+ Gaming Audience That You’re Overlooking. It was a good one, and worth checking out if you missed it, as this is one of the next frontiers for public media content creators.
And then, we actually are ready to give you a sneak peek of our August webinar. We’ll be joined by Creative Hustle authors Olatunde Sobomehin and sam seidel from the Stanford d.school for an energizing conversation about charting your own creative path — one that connects your gifts, goals, and the communities you care about. Whether you’re an educator, producer, or strategist, this session will offer tools and frameworks to help you think differently about ambition, values, and impact. Expect real talk, practical inspiration, and ideas you can use to reignite your own creative hustle.
We should have registration live for that next week and there’ll be a link in this newsletter (because there’ll be another exploration next week…I promise!).
Iterating on the Wrong Things
Shifting gears, I’ve been thinking a lot about how we often describe broadcast as a workflow or a product when, in reality, it acts as a governing philosophy—a top-down, one-to-many doctrine of service. This mindset still shapes how many public media organizations define their mission, design their operations, and measure success.
The problem? That worldview no longer matches the world we’re in. Audiences today expect portfolios of services—personalized, participatory, and available across platforms. They seek content that reflects their local realities, identities, and values. But instead of embracing this new logic, many public media organizations are trying to evolve out of a broadcast business without shedding the broadcast belief system that underpins it.
If you started a public media service today, you wouldn’t start with the broadcast mindset. Nonprofit newsrooms don’t. Independent creators and influencers don’t. Mission-driven startups in media and tech don’t. They begin with community, interaction, data, and user agency—not with schedule grids and centralized control.
Until we shift this mindset, we’ll keep iterating on the wrong things. Broadcast thinking isn’t just outdated—it’s a gravitational pull that distorts how we approach innovation. It keeps us focused on scaling reach instead of deepening engagement. It tells us our job is to program content, not co-create it with the people we serve. And it discourages us from exploring models that don’t flow from a transmitter or adhere to legacy notions of control.
We need a new public media doctrine. One that is bottom-up, user-first, and grounded in local relevance—not national scheduling. One that recognizes public service today is defined by adaptability, not consistency; by trust and responsiveness, not just signal reach.
It’s hard to imagine a more uncertain year for public media. In a year filled with challenges and unknowns, many of us are craving clarity, stability, and answers. But what if certainty isn’t what we need most right now? What if learning to navigate uncertainty is actually the key to moving forward? This month, instead of focusing on technical tools or platforms, we’re turning our attention to how we think, adapt, and lead in uncertain times.
Drawing on her acclaimed book Uncertain Links to an external site., journalist and social critic Maggie Jackson will explore the new scientific discoveries that are upending our outdated notions of unsureness as weakness. Productive uncertainty fuels agility, curiosity, resilience, and creativity, the skills most needed in volatile times. In this session, Maggie will explore three key modes of uncertainty-in-action for 2025, plus proven strategies for wielding unsureness to boost decision-making, team performance, and personal well-being.
Key Line: "All publishers have needed to prepare for Google Zero, the extreme case where Google traffic stops. Of course, Google Zero is an extreme scenario, yet it’s pragmatic to be prepared for disaster scenarios. 'We literally call it Google Zero,' Dotdash Meredith CEO Neil Vogel told me recently at the Media Product Forum. 'What happens if Google just stops sending traffic altogether? That’s not a doomsday plan—it’s a working scenario.'”
Why It Matters: We've already seen data that web traffic is dropping to sites across the internet. This won't hit all public media companies equally, as some of you have been more successful than others at monetizing site traffic. "Data-driven" has been a mantra of public media consultants for the better part of the last decade, and I'm not saying that is bad. But digital ground is shifting under our feet, and even if your corporate support teams aren't selling CPMs a data-drive org or department needs to be ready to explain this shift to boards (or C-suites). I'd suggest laying that groundwork now.
Key Line: "This partnership reflects a shared commitment to making reliable, factual information easier to find and engage with, especially on complex or fast-moving topics, where timely, well-sourced reporting, like that of The Post, matters most. ChatGPT will highlight The Post’s journalism across politics, global affairs, business, technology, and more, always with clear attribution and direct links to full articles so people can explore topics in greater depth and context."
Why It Matters: Again, I ask, is anyone working on a deal for public media relative to AI? I know some of you will respond that we are all fighting for our lives here. And my response is, okay, but if we survive the frying pan what does it matter when another fire is awaiting us.
Key Lines: "At the annual conference of the Colorado Press Association, I led a mix of 30 news leaders in conversations that set out to do just that. This group included managers, reporters, technologists, academics and student journalists, and they tackled the challenge of coming up with a strategic plan for newsroom use of AI...Their insights are summarized below. The tactics are specific and actionable; more importantly, the process is repeatable in any news organization. The lesson? Asking the right questions, having a participatory process and including diverse voices can generate immediate, thoughtful and impactful actions that an entire team supports. Here’s the four-step process we followed, and the takeaways that emerged."
Why It Matters: Mungeam offers a good framework for getting started with AI in your department (whether it's news or not). And getting started is the key. Honestly, it matters way less where you start, just so long as you start.
Key Line: "He said: “You have to really emotionally commit to being a subscription-first business, if that’s what you’re trying to be. I think many businesses that had a very significant advertising revenue stream have tried to hold on to that, and that’s made it harder to build a subscription business...Then you have to work out what are your areas of real differentiation. It’s a very, very competitive market out there. I come from an entertainment streaming world where you had exclusive shows and movies, and that’s how you drove differentiation.” For The Economist, he said, that differentiation comes not through news reporting, but by providing in-depth analysis in the areas it has defined as core strengths.“
Why It Matters: While we don't necessarily run a subscription model here in public media, we do get pushed in that direction by platforms like YouTube, TikTok and Substack. The bottom line is having a clear understanding of who you are as an organization and then also understanding your value proposition in the eyes of your audience. This isn't anything you have't heard before, and I'm not presenting it to you as a revelation. But it's a good touchstone idea to revisit periodically.
Key Line: "While some educators have expressed concern over being replaced by AI, AFT said it seeks to embrace the technology in a way that protects teachers' place at the head of the classroom. With this in mind, the foundation said reached out to tech companies for their assistance in developing the AI-training academy."
Why It Matters: There was a lot of chatter about AI in education at the end of the last school year. I know that AI in the classroom is not everyone's first choice, but I'd rather see trained educators at the table and receiving training from model creators (to supplement the clever hacks reported on YouTube and Substack).
Key Lines: “Key takeaways from the AI in Education Report include: Start AI conversations today. There is an urgent need to communicate clearly and openly about AI, increase AI literacy, and create usage guidelines at educational organizations. Learn how AI can help. There is a clear opportunity for AI to help educators and administrators lighten workloads, boost productivity, and improve efficiency. Explore new ways to learn with AI. Early studies demonstrate the potential of AI to improve educational experiences and learning outcomes. Prepare for the workplace of the future. Students need to build people skills and technical capacity to prepare for a world transformed by AI.”
Why It Matters: Microsoft's report provides some helpful context around the topic of AI in Education, but you obviously want to take it with a grain of salt given how deep Microsoft's investment is in AI.
Key Line: "The changes to Danish copyright law will, once approved, theoretically give people in Denmark the right to demand that online platforms remove such content if it is shared without consent. It will also cover “realistic, digitally generated imitations” of an artist’s performance without consent. Violation of the proposed rules could result in compensation for those affected. The government said the new rules would not affect parodies and satire, which would still be permitted."
Why It Matters: Europe continues to lead when it comes to ideas for protecting people against digital exploitation. Some will say that regulation like this stifles 10x innovation and is why Europeans can never lead like the USA in the AI space, to which I say, "yes, that's absolutely true. And thank goodness for Europe."
Key Line: "The launch lands at a time when AI video generation is rapidly becoming one of the most competitive corners of the generative AI landscape. Tech giants, venture-backed startups, and open-source projects are all moving fast....Midjourney’s bet appears to be on simplicity and cost-effectiveness—a “good enough” solution priced for scale—but that also means it launches without many advanced features now standard in the premium AI video tier."
Why It Matters: If for no other reason, you should click through to this article just to take a screenshot of the helpful grid mapping out the major generative video tools, their prices, and key features.
Key Line: "The good news is, some AI tools have moved well beyond gimmick territory. They're solving real-world post-production challenges: speeding up tedious tasks, improving quality, and unlocking new creative options. Here are six AI-powered tools that we have tested, tried and believe are genuinely useful for working and aspiring video editors."
Why It Matters: While most of the focus around AI video goes to generating the video, the real efficiencies can be found in editing (with fewer, though not nonexistent ethical quandaries). So it was nice to run across this post. Share it with the editor that makes you (or your organization's) work look good.
Key Line: 'When it comes to the controversial question of “training” AI models, Cameron seemed to suggest that regulators and lawyers should be more focused on the output of AI programs and tech, rather than the inputs and training data. “A lot of the a lot of the hesitation in Hollywood and entertainment in general, are issues of the source material for the training data, and who deserves what, and copyright protection and all that sort of thing. I think people are looking at it all wrong,” Cameron told Bosworth. “I’m an artist. Anybody that’s an artist, anybody that’s a human being, is a model. You’re a model already, you’ve got a three and a half pound meat computer."'
Why It Matters: The notion of focusing on the outputs makes sense to me. We do this already, especially relative to music and unintentional copying (think The Rolling Stones and k.d. lang, or Sam Smith and Tom Petty). Of course an argument against this is that the scale of AI creations make it hard to sue all the copyright infringements that could happen. But maybe that's because the law is at human scale, and we need new laws that function at AI scale.
Related: Cameron's comments triggered a 'quality over quantity' response from Netflix's Ted Sarandos, as reported by Dade Hayes in Deadline.
Also related: Moonvalley just announced an 'ethically sourced' generative video model called Marey that could be worth exploring
Key Line: "AI isn't just encroaching on modern image creation, but it is also ruining the images of old. And no, I'm not talking about poor image restoration, uncanny valley facial enhancement, or upscaling. Instead, I'm talking about our acceptance of what's real and what isn't."
Why It Matters: This is an interesting perspective. As a photographer, even when on a specific assignment, I'm most interested in capturing moments that will never happen again. Sometimes that yields a shot of which I'm proud (like the bird shots at the top and bottom of this week's exploration). But any of these shots can be generated now, so the context of the shot is more important than ever.
Key Line: "Photos produced by Indigo employ both computational photography and AI to produce what Adobe says is a natural (SLR-like) look for photos, including "special (but gentle)" treatment of subjects and skies. This look is applied when generating JPEG images and is embedded as a rendering suggestion in raw DNG files (if enabled)."
Why It Matters: Photographers know the best camera (ever) is the one you have with you. And most of us have cameras with us all the time now. Computational photography is the one area where smartphones genuinely diversify themselves from the larger sensors of DSLRs, so this app might be worth tracking as it develops. I experimented with it on a recent trip to New Mexico and found that its color representation definitely needs some tuning. I also didn’t find that it’s HDR capabilities outmatched the native capabilities of the iPhone’s camera, but I’ll keep playing with it.
But You Don't Have to Take My Word for It: Read Adobe Research's own write-up on Project Indigo here.
Key Line: 'Frontier AI models are evolving rapidly. However, each model has its own distinct strengths and weaknesses derived from its unique training data and architecture. One might excel at coding, while another excels at creative writing. Sakana AI’s researchers argue that these differences are not a bug, but a feature. “We see these biases and varied aptitudes not as limitations, but as precious resources for creating collective intelligence,” the researchers state in their blog post. They believe that just as humanity’s greatest achievements come from diverse teams, AI systems can also achieve more by working together. “By pooling their intelligence, AI systems can solve problems that are insurmountable for any single model.”'
Why It Matters: This is one of the many possible futures for how we might use AI. If you subscribe the "wisdom of crowds" theory, and I do, this makes a certain amount of intuitive sense. And it jibes with my early experiments with Chatbots. As I've said publicly, our first draft of our AI Policy was written by ChatGPT and edited by Claude. That combo gave me a great foundation to edit into the draft policy that went to NPM leadership...and saved loads of time (again, the human hours that went into the original policy - all people, all in - was about 40 hours).
Key Line: “The Atlantic has seen record subscription growth in the past several years, and now has more subscribers than at any point in its history; Games add value to those subscribers, and offer the opportunity for discovery and play for new audiences.”
Why It Matters: I know games are a hard sell in the world of public media. Many think we're broadcasters to the core, and while I'd argue that games can be tools for broadcasting a message, in reality "broadcast" means linear stories told through a television set the way they were 30-40 years ago. To these folks, games are "irrelevant" (yes, that's an actual quote). And let major publishers with whom we share television audience (e.g., Washington Week with The Atlantic) are investing heavily in other types of interactions with these audiences. So, if you believe in games as one possible future for public media, take heart.
Thanks for the round-up. Atlantic is trying to pull a move like NYT with that word game a few years back. Makes sense for engagement, branding, and interactivity./ Plus, what they will learn from the back-end data from users, their audience
General Manager at WBJC
1moGood newsletter, as always.
Executive Leader | Strategy, Operations & Creative Impact
1moThanks for the round-up. Atlantic is trying to pull a move like NYT with that word game a few years back. Makes sense for engagement, branding, and interactivity./ Plus, what they will learn from the back-end data from users, their audience