thank you updog sinclair

watch this space come may 14th i suppose!

MAGAZINE INVESTIGATIVE REPORTING Consumer Reports “Consumer Reports: Protecting Food Safety in America” Paris Martineau, Lauren Kirchner, Kevin Loria, James Rogers, Tim LaPalme Rolling Stone “TikTok Is Obsessed With Talking Parrots. It’s Fueling a Global Black Market” Rene Ebersole The New York Times “Can Anyone Rescue the Trafficked Girls of L.A.’s Figueroa Street?” Emily Baumgaertner Nunn

while rushing to hit a deadline this morning i was notified my food safety reporting is a finalist for a Deadline Club award! we love to see it!

www.deadlineclub.org/2026-awards-...

Unionized ProPublica staff are on strike over AI, layoffs, and wages A key issue is protections against layoffs from AI

New: 150 unionized ProPublica workers are on strike TODAY over AI, layoff protections, wages, and more.

They're asking readers to not visit ProPublica or engage with content on other platforms. It's the first work stoppage of its kind at the newsroom.

www.theverge.com/news/908401/...

so true. there’s simply no way we could ever know that it’s bad without them doing that

i don’t understand where this expectation came from that all media must hold your hand and explicitly say “this is bad - you know this is bad right?” in order to explain why bad things are bad

listen i love to be a hater more than anyone but you’re a fucking idiot if you think the story titled “these women say women shouldn’t vote” is anything other than critical

OpenAI bought TBPN to encourage constructive conversation around the changes AI creates by helping the show grow, according to a memo sent by Fidji Simo, the OpenAI's CEO of applications. TBPN will report to Chris Lehane, OpenAI's chief global affairs officer, and will help with company communications and marketing outside of the show.

the AI bubble has officially reached the stage where they’re just doing state sponsored media now www.wsj.com/cmo-today/op...

Excellent writing advice as always from @hamiltonnolan.bsky.social

big long thread that’s worth your time

the children yearn to return to the content mines (or at least, they really should)

live laugh love select all

it’s llms all the way down

so many of my best ideas have come from some random ass detail i stumbled upon on page 74 of a seemingly boring document. or from a connection made only after going through every earnings call and quarterly report with a fine tooth comb

why would you ever deprive yourself of Doing The Work?

An AI Upheaval Is Coming for Media. This Journalist Is Already All In. AI-assisted stories accounted for nearly 20% of Fortune’s web traffic in the second half of 2025. Most are written by Nick Lichtenberg.

not to sound like a boomer, but the thing i fear the LLM generation doesn’t understand is that the strife and struggle of blank page ideation is the whole fucking point

by automating away all friction and frustration you’re ultimately kneecapping yourself www.wsj.com/business/med...

if AI gobbles up all of this work, how are entry level journalists and interns supposed to get the volume and exposure necessary to understand their strengths and push through their mistakes? i feel deeply saddened that the pipeline problem in journalism only seems to grow larger by the day

Journalist Nick Lichtenberg produced more stories in six months than any of his colleagues at Fortune delivered in a year. One Wednesday in February, he cranked out seven. "I'm a bit of a freak," Lichtenberg said. While many journalists hit the phones and cultivate source relationships, when news breaks Lichtenberg often uploads press releases or analyst notes into AI tools and prompts them to spit out articles that he can edit and publish quickly. His work involves what some view as the third rail of journalism: AI playing a leading role not just in researching, but in writing stories.

at my first real journalism job i was churning out 6+ aggregated stories a day. it was exhausting, but ultimately phenomenally instructive. there are few better ways for a first time writer to quickly get up to speed on a new beat

how are entry-level journalists supposed to get this experience now?

is this good?

Sisyphus but every day he unsubscribes from marketing and promotion emails.

Huge result here - the idea that social platforms can be defective products that cause harm is going to send shockwaves through an industry that has claimed essentially blanket protection from liability by saying everything is speech

based

many people are saying

Lemmon v. Snap concerned three boys—two 17-year-olds and a 20-year-old—who died in a high-speed car crash one May evening in 2017. Just before the crash, one of the passengers opened the Snapchat app and took a photo using a built-in filter that recorded how fast they were going: 113 miles per hour. At the time, some Snapchat users believed one of the ways to earn a special achievement on the app was by recording a speed of over 100 miles per hour using the feature, known as Speed Filter. The feature was one of many in Snapchat that in-app rewards and achievements had gamified. In 2019, the parents of two of the boys filed a lawsuit against Snap, accusing the company of negligently designing a product that incentivized young people to drive dangerously in pursuit of Snapchat achievements. For its part, Snap, the app’s parent company, mounted the same defense most internet businesses in similar circumstances do: It argued that it had Section 230 protection and asked a judge to dismiss the case. The district court hearing the case agreed to Snap’s request for a dismissal. But the plaintiffs appealed, and in 2021, the Ninth Circuit Court reversed the earlier decision. The court found that Section 230 wasn’t a viable defense in this case, noting in its decision that the suit wasn’t about user-generated content, like messages, which would fall under Section 230. Instead, the suit sought to hold the company liable for the creation of the Speed Filter itself, the court said. The lawsuit “treats Snap as a products manufacturer, accusing it of negligently designing a product (Snapchat) with a defect (the interplay between Snapchat’s reward system and the Speed Filter); thus, the duty that Snap allegedly violated sprung from its distinct capacity as a product designer.” A shiver went down Bergman’s spine as he read it, he recalled. It reminded him of Borel v. Fibreboard, a landmark 1973 product liability case that was the first successful asbestos lawsuit filed...

the first case to successfully apply this legal theory to social media firms was Lemmon v Snap, which is a wild one involving a Snapchat filter than incentivized speeding

i'm endlessly fascinated by the way the law changes and expands in response to novel products like this. even if it's a bit slow

Bergman sees parallels between asbestos and social media. Both were ubiquitous and popular products that people were unabashedly positive about for years. “I mean, asbestos was the miracle fiber. It won World War II,” he said. At that time, it was commonly used as an insulator in Navy ships and for other military applications. “Similarly, when social media came out, it was going to flatten the world and make things better.” In both cases, the initial exuberance eventually gave way to public health crises, Bergman said, pointing to the U.S. Surgeon General’s recent call for warning labels on social media due to the risks it poses to kids’ mental health. A final parallel, he said, is misconduct. “You have companies that know that their products are hurting people and making self-conscious decisions to put their profits over the safety of the people that are using them,” said Bergman. On that front, he says “the social media companies make the asbestos companies look like a bunch of Boy Scouts.” Over the last three years, the Social Media Victims Law Center has grown from a solo operation into a team of six attorneys. “I’m working harder than I’ve ever worked in my life and I’m still behind,” said Bergman.

loved learning about Borel v. Fibreboard (1973) for this story. shout out to the american museum of tort law. imo everybody should spend at least one full week of every year thinking about tort law it is so important

An Asbestos Lawyer’s New Crusade: Suing Social Media Companies In January, after members of the Senate Judiciary Committee had spent hours grilling tech CEOs about their platforms’ effects on children, Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley pounced on Meta Platforms CEO Mark ...

i profiled one of the MDL attorneys a couple years back. he literally quit his job and started a new firm because the Facebook Files childhood social media addiction details reminded him so much of the precursors to landmark asbestos litigation in the 70s

theinformation.com/go/f2b147dca6

this is a huge deal and a sign of the changing legal tides for big tech. the plaintiffs attorneys here were early adopters of a novel legal strategy that uses product liability law to sidestep tech companies' go-to defense (section 230) and hold them accountable for defective or negligent design

it's incredible the things your mind will come up with when you're behind on a deadline. i once measured and sketched out multiple intricate woodworking plans which i promptly forgot about the minute i filed

Danone to Buy Protein-Shake Maker Huel for $1.2 Billion Danone is scooping up the maker of plant-based food powders and meal-replacement drinks to bolster its nutrition portfolio.

👀 👀 www.wsj.com/business/dan...

Intelligence — AI and Humanity Announcing a new book series from Bloomsbury (and me)

Big personal news: I will be editing a new book series for Bloomsbury called Intelligence - AI and Humanity, providing writes from many disciplines the opportunity to reflect on AI and how it reflects on society. More here:
medium.com/p/d8c5d6cda6...