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Almost alone among the web media pioneers, the Journal went the subscription route. So, we’re going to talk to Rich Jaroslovksy, who headed the team that brought the Journal online, to see why they went that route, to learn about the path to the web and much more.

Survey of alternative business models in China online sites show how they’ve been able to minimize reliance on advertising revenue.

The secret lives of Facebook moderators in America. Casey Newton speaks with workers at Cognizant, one of Facebook's content moderation vendors.

the AI team has recognized that 100 headlines is a retention “threshold” (users that do not retain long-term tend to drop off dramatically after seeing ~100 headlines, similar to Facebook’s “10 friends” rule).

When used to simply generate new text, GPT2 is capable of writing plausible passages that match what it is given in both style and subject. It rarely shows any of the quirks that mark out previous AI systems, such as forgetting what it is writing about midway through a paragraph, or mangling the syntax of long sentences.

CJR's guide to what the major media companies own.

It's called the "citizens agenda" approach in campaign journalism. I know, dorky name. It was tried. And it worked.

How a collaborative effort to improve a popular standard devolved into one of the most contentious forks in the history of open-source software development.

uses AI to automatically remove background images from photos

Beneath the ubiquitous posters for the Shen Yun ballet is a battle between dissidents and the state over the soul of a nation, both at home and across the diaspora.

Longish profile of Apple New's contrarian, human editors.

a company researcher typed “I am meeting an investor next week,” and Smart Compose suggested “Do you want to meet him?” instead of “her”

Exhaustive comparison of Apple and Google maps comes down pretty negatively on Apple's closed ecosystem vs. Google's crowdsourced one.

Documentary about the history of Nokia

Overlay old maps onto each other to see the evolution of land

This was Facebook’s actual error: It divided total time spent watching a video not by the total number of users who spent any time watching the video (a group that would have included people “quickly scrolling past muted auto-playing video advertisements”), but instead by only the number of users who watched a video for three seconds or more. The result: “A highly misleading result that favored Facebook.”

The ambition of creative people was extinguished by office politics and bureaucracy.

The world’s most valuable company is wooing the media with a human touch and a huge audience. One thing it hasn’t delivered: money.

Another thing to keep me up at night.

The company’s lip-service defense of free speech is in practice a choice to collapse the distinction between disinformation and news-analysis. The right-wing narrative of social-media censorship is dishonest, but it has also been incredibly effective in pressuring platforms into accepting lies as opinion.

Son holds dinners every few months with the CEOs of his investments to encourage them to partner with other companies he has invested in and conduct status checks on their businesses.