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Friday 12th April: LinkedIn has an AI problem
Good morning! Today’s newsletter is brought to you by Esther.
Grab a pint, and join this fine group of magazine people on May Day as we ask them how they’ve survived and thrived in this messed-up modern media landscape.
Yesterday, I went to post the Publisher Podcast Awards shortlist announcement to our LinkedIn page and was a little perturbed to see a new little button inviting me to ‘Rewrite with AI’.
I clicked it, out of curiosity, but nothing happened and the tool appeared to be broken (Esther 1 - AI 0). But I bristled at the idea firstly that AI can do a better job (which it may well be able to technically, given the amount of data it’s ingested), and secondly that the post would be reduced to the general guffy slush washing round the world’s favourite professional platform.
So this was a timely post from ExplAInable about the state of the platform: “Why can [AI] do a good job with LinkedIn content? Because its writing that is stripped of humour, of rough edges, of honesty. It’s a learned language, one we’ve all learned from the day we first had to compose an ‘offend no-one’ reply-all email.”
Some of the reporting in this is a little bizarre (Axios are far from the first to adjust strategies because of AI, and come on, we’ve ALL seen it coming). But Jim VandeHei has - correctly - identified that the real value in coming years will be on human expertise. They’re planning to build membership programmes around actual reporters, which will be really interesting to see play out.
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Swedish local media conglomerate NTM decided in autumn last year to set up newsletters based on specific interests on a local basis. Their hypothesis for the launch of their first eight newsletters was that although the target audience was relatively small, the topics were significant for those who chose to subscribe. Now, they’re scaling up to 30 weekly niched hyper-local newsletters.
I think, apart from Podcast Awards coverage, this is the first time Media Voices has been quoted in a national newspaper! Our own Chris Sutcliffe offers comment on the battle Ofcom faces to convince viewers it’s actually dealing with their concerns.
