Nick Jackson

American publishing regularly punishes women in their 50s by simply not interviewing them for new jobs in the way @saribotton.bsky.social describes here. So it’s great revenge that she launched Oldster magazine on her own, now with 70k subscribers.

An Ohio newspaper has a new star writer. It isn’t human. At the 184-year-old Cleveland Plain Dealer, a top editor’s push to let AI draft news articles is boosting traffic — and spooking staffers.

Cleveland's top newspaper is "removing writing from some reporters' workloads" by using AI to draft articles.

We dove into what drove the paper's editor to do that, how it's going and what the paper's human reporters think about it. wapo.st/4aX44e1 w/ @scottnover.bsky.social

"Baseball may have had the 20th century, but in the 21st, whether you watched it or not, 'Survivor' was America’s pastime." www.nytimes.com/2026/02/23/a...

Ziff Davis Sees Big Hit to Affiliate Revenue in Q4 Ziff Davis highlighted nine financial metrics near the top of its report on fourth quarter earnings. Seven of them decreased. Shares dropped…

We're starting to see the hits legacy media is taking to affiliate revenue streams with the rise of generative AI. Ziff Davis in Q4 saw an 18% YoY decline for its tech and shopping brands like PC Mag and CNET. www.amediaoperator.com/news/ziff-da...

A Wake for The Washington Post’s Book World Literary and cultural denizens of the nation’s capital gathered on Saturday to eulogize The Post’s scuppered Book World supplement.

"It is heartbreaking and infuriating, not only a blow to the literary world, but it leaves a further cultural void in our alarmingly eroding democracy." www.nytimes.com/2026/02/23/b...

Verge headline: If Big Tech cared about fighting AI slop, it wouldn’t be drowning us in it by Jess Weatherbed Photo illustration depicts a pig eating slop out of a bucket

The good news is that an image authentication solution already exists: it’s called C2PA. The bad news is that Instagram is already using it, and it’s not doing shit to actually help.

Read more from @zombiewretch.bsky.social: www.theverge.com/ai-artificia...

YouTube video by The Atlantic A Conversation with Martin Baron, Former Executive Editor of The Washington Post

Marty Baron says journalism writ large — both traditional newsrooms and independent reporters — are largely meeting this difficult moment, but owners are a point of vulnerability in the Trump era. That and lots more in this interview w/ @evanasmith.bsky.social: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uplo....

I guess it's a media hot take that fiction and poetry and composite characters and whatever it is that Andy Borowitz was doing for all those years have no place in journalism outlets. Because they're not journalism. They're not bad! (Well....) But they erode trust in reporting.

How an Embittered Brit Decimated the Washington Post Inside Will Lewis’s disastrous attempts to revitalize the paper.

must-read from @charlottetklein.bsky.social on the disastrous Will Lewis tenure at @washingtonpost.com nymag.com/intelligence...

Columbia Journalism Review The voice of journalism, since 1961.

In the event it's cycled out of your media diet, here's a plug for @cjr and the great work they've been doing. They're plugging a hole in industry coverage. It's not a lot of quick news and punditry; it's principled post-mortems and thoughtful, structural analysis. I love it. www.cjr.org

The Wall Looks Permanent Until It Falls On the optimism of preparation in a time of democratic decay.

"There is another America inside this one, visible in the statistics of nations that made different choices. Call it Latent America: the nation that would exist if our democracy functioned to serve the public rather than protect the already powerful." data4democracy.substack.com/p/the-wall-l...

"Philistines are always declaring that no one reads literary criticism, but the record shows that publishers systematically underestimate the popularity of book reviews."

How Jeff Bezos Brought Down the Washington Post The Amazon founder bought the paper to save it. Instead, with a mass layoff, he’s forced it into severe decline.

"Making money at journalism, you have to break rocks with a shovel. You have to love thinking about journalism to the point that it wakes you up at night with an idea, and then you have to be willing to try it." www.newyorker.com/news/annals-...

Haruki Murakami Isn’t Afraid of the Dark The author, who brought Japanese literature into the global mainstream, grapples with aging and his place in the world of letters.

One of the greats: www.nytimes.com/2026/02/08/b...

Should You Buy a Newspaper or a Yacht? Advice for Jeff Bezos

"A newspaper is a public service. If it does its job, people will have better information and better lives — difficult to quantify in monetary terms, but for a long time, we used to think that making people's lives better was important and valuable." www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/...

The Washington Post Eliminates Its Sports Department The Post is laying off or reassigning all the reporters and editors in its sports section, days before the Super Bowl and the Winter Olympics in Italy.

"An early test of the Post's new approach to sports came Wednesday night, just hours after the sports desk was eliminated. Anthony Davis ... was traded to the Washington Wizards, instantly reshaping the paper's hometown franchise. The Post ran a wire story...." www.nytimes.com/2026/02/04/b...

Every time there is a mass layoff I hope people remember that newsletters cannot save us. The Free Press started as a newsletter but came to influence as something more like a newspaper (without the journalism).

We need to somehow invest in media infrastructure, not a thousand little ladders.

Best gas masks “How did these people go out and get gas masks?” AG Bondi asked.

This is how you do it. www.theverge.com/policy/86857...

"I think that's the weird tension, where part of what makes Hunter important is not that he was just writing about bikers doing Benzedrine. He was doing Benzedrine with bikers." www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Inside the Washington Post’s Existential Meltdown “There’s no vision for why it should exist.”

"What's the plan after this? You cut however many hundreds of people to solve the fact that you're still losing lots of money. Then what?" nymag.com/intelligence...

The Song That Connects Jackson Browne, Nico and Margot Tenenbaum (Published 2024) Browne wrote “These Days” at 16. Now 75, he and some famous admirers reflect on his unexpected mainstay: “If a song is worth anything, it’s about the life of the listener.”

A forever favorite. www.nytimes.com/2024/09/12/a...

www.densediscovery.com/issues/373

How Bill Simmons Went All In | Defector The following is excerpted from a chapter of Everybody Loses: The Tumultuous Rise of American Sports Gambling, by Danny Funt. The book is available for purchase now. Bill Simmons never seemed like…

Sports media is compromised. defector.com/how-bill-sim...

Mediaite Starts a Newsletter to Summarize Media Newsletters A new daily email from Mediaite intends to cut through the cacophony of online media news.

Subscribe to the original creators and just let your email provider of choice do this for you; it’s a decent use of the AI that’s coming for your inbox, and you can strip out Mediaite’s weird reactionary politics. www.nytimes.com/2026/01/21/b...

The Stories We Most Admired in 2025: Businessweek’s Jealousy List The stories we admired most this year.

Every one of these stories is worth your time. Bloomberg's annual Jealousy List is always a great reminder of just how much quality reporting and writing is being done despite the challenges. www.bloomberg.com/features/202...

The Year That Was and Wasn’t We asked some of our favorite journalists, writers, and thinkers: What were the most important events of 2025, and what were the least?

“Until we realize CEOs are selling futures, not seeing them, we’ll keep diverting talent, capital, and political attention toward fantasies.” ← @nbj914.bsky.social on 2025 themorningnews.org/2025-the-yea...

Was using Gemini a little bit to help w/ the maintenance for my 80-gallon reef system. It keeps deleting our conversation history and replacing every prompt w/ "sensitive query." I feel guilty, like I've been trying to stock up on Sudafed at the local Walgreens or something. 🐠

Inside Donald Trump’s Attack on NASA’s Science Missions During his first year back in office, the president tried to bring America’s age of discovery to an end.

No one writes more beautifully about space than @rossandersen.bsky.social. And this has the benefit of being not just magisterial, but extremely important.

www.theatlantic.com/magazine/202...

"Secret police" is often misunderstood to mean a force that operates covertly, with all their operations secret.

But a secret police force's actions are often public. The secret part is hiding their identities, because they're breaking laws to hurt politically disfavored people, and fear reprisals.

Portrait of Brenna Henn next to an open freezer of samples.

Here's my latest contribution to the @nytimes "Lost Science" series. Brenna Henn's sweeping study of African genetics has been frozen. Gift link: nyti.ms/3Ypmm1A