Kalli Anderson

lede = introductory section in journalism

bury the lede = hiding the most relevant pieces of a story within other distracting information

Allegedly, it’s spelled ‘lede’ to avoid confusion with ‘lead,’ which was the strip of metal that would separate lines of type.

Same today!

SHAPIRO: OK, so you've spent your career creating television without Al, and I could imagine today you thinking, boy, I wish I had had that tool to solve those thorny problems... SIMON: What? SHAPIRO: ...Or saying... SIMON: You imagine that? SHAPIRO: ...Boy, if that had existed, it would have screwed me over. SIMON: I don't think Al can remotely challenge what writers do at a fundamentally creative level. SHAPIRO: But if you're trying to transition from scene five to scene six, and you're stuck with that transition, you could imagine plugging that portion of the script into an Al and say, give me 10 ideas for how to transition this. SIMON: I'd rather put a gun in my mouth.

David Simon, creator of ‘The Wire’, being interviewed by Ari Shapiro (NPR)

Feels good!

Thanks XMTR Fest for an incredible gathering in St Leonards on Sea last week.

Thanks to everyone who came to my discussion with Sarah Kate Kramer at our @soundfieldsjournal.bsky.social event.

And huge thanks to the 90 of you who participated in the Sea Change audio swarm!

Kodak Is Selling Its Own Film Again for the First Time in a Decade Kodak announced two new types of film that it will sell directly to photography stores, sidestepping a bizarre distribution agreement that has been in place since its bankruptcy.

Some exciting news: Kodak announced two new types of film today, and, notably, said it would be directly selling the film to shops, sidestepping a complicated licensing agreement where Kodak hasn't had the right to sell its own film to stores

www.404media.co/kodak-is-sel...

Students rate identical lectures differently based on professor's gender, researchers find When philosophy students were asked to evaluate identical lectures assigned to men or women professors, their responses varied by gender. The study suggests gender bias plays a role in how teaching is...

www.psypost.org/students-rate-identical-lectures-differently-based-on-professors-gender-researchers-find/# #AcademicSky - it never ends.

Welcome to Campus. Here’s Your ChatGPT.

OpenAI's VP for education recently said the company wanted to become "core infrastructure" for schools and universities. Any infrastructure, though, always depends on habituating users to its technical affordances - so I've been trying to track how it's doing that 🧵 www.nytimes.com/2025/06/07/t...

Calling all freelance fact-checkers!

We're in need of some fact-checking assistance during the first week of October—hit us up if you're interested in fact-checking a very fun project.

Email Chris (chris@hellgatenyc.com) for more details.

"The arch of the moral universe may not, after all, bend towards justice, but it bends towards archives. Collect the scraps, I hear in my head like a whisper.

Do not let them rewrite the world.

Save all the evidence you can."

The selected quote reads: I tell you this story because I think so often we encounter archives when we are liminal, when we are in between. When we are moving or searching for ourselves or for the truth in the past, sometimes in our own past. When we are looking for a way home. It turns out teetering towards fascism is beyond liminal. If a liminal space is a train station, we seem to all be collectively in limbo, unending uncertainty on the lip of hell. In a haze of epistemological dissonance we witness the shredding of the past through a looking glass so cracked that even the history repeating itself is unrecognizable.

sound fields, a journal about the art + practice of documentary audio that i make w/ many brilliant folks just launched its second issue. The subject: archives. i wrote something for it about how to save the truth, we must all become archivists for the future: www.soundfields.org/02-letter-fr...

You know things are rough when the AAUP's advice on how to use social media is just "set all your accounts to private."

lol. I was also a copyeditor for a while. Believe it or not.

The History of The New Yorker’s Vaunted Fact-Checking Department Reporters engage in charm and betrayal; checkers are in the harm-reduction business.

fact checking great journalists wa one of the main ways I leaned to be a journalist. I loved the job and getting to be professionally correct. And this fact checking piece in the New Yorker really get to the heart of it .
www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

The Software Engineers Paid to Fix Vibe Coded Messes Linkedin has been joking about “vibe coding cleanup specialists,” but it’s actually a growing profession.

I love my 404 Media subscription and this piece is so illuminating and also funny! There's a real "pay no attention to the entire team of human contractors behind the curtain" energy to the folks using generative AI!

From reckoning to retreat: Journalism’s DEI efforts are in decline Diversity-related newsroom jobs haven't totally disappeared — but they also haven't stuck.

A third of jobs related to race, diversity, and equality that were created in U.S. newsrooms since 2020 are gone as of this summer. 

@hanaatameez.bsky.social with a months-long investigation and new data on American journalism's turn away from DEI initiatives. www.niemanlab.org/2025/09/from...

AI chatbots unable to accurately summarise news, BBC finds The BBC's head of news and current affairs says the developers of the tools are "playing with fire."

www.bbc.com/news/article...

This is in line with my observations around the people in podcasting/audio industry who are the most excited about LLM style podcast “innovations” are never the people who already make excellent podcasts.

The mental health benefits of not knowing any history right now must be massive. Moving through your day with total equanimity. What happens next? Who knows? Maybe something good

new NPR podcast alert -- sources & methods will look at national security news & why it matters. hosted by the incomparable mary louise kelly. check it out each thursday.

Tweet from William MacAskill explaining that he likes to allow Gemini to write its own short story and he was really impressed with it, and then an excerpt from the story itself, called "The Architect and the Gardener."

A quote from George R.R. Martin where he says there are two types of writers, the architects and the gardeners, which is very clearly the source of Gemini's "story"

Some of the world's smartest people are deeply invested in the idea that LLMs are actually creative forces. They are not. They are vacuum cleaners attached to a firehose.

fieldrecordings.xyz/2025/08/18/m...

Midnight cricket party, Taughannock State Park, New York, USA on 16th August 2025 – by @kallipearl.bsky.social fieldrecordings.xyz/2025/08/18/m...

But pivoting to AI is not a business strategy. Telling journalists they must use AI is not a business strategy. Partnering with AI companies is a business move, but becoming reliant on revenue from tech giants who are creating a machine that duplicates the work you’ve already created is not a smart or sustainable business move, and therefore it is not a smart business strategy. It is true that AI is changing the internet and is threatening journalists and media outlets. But the only AI-related business strategy that makes any sense whatsoever is one where media companies and journalists go to great pains to show their audiences that they are human beings, and that the work they are doing is worth supporting because it is human work that is vital to their audiences.

Found this @jasonkoebler.bsky.social story about why AI isn’t a viable business model for journalism to be extremely well done and oddly hopeful

www.404media.co/the-medias-p...

Wish i could attend this!

Ironically, upon the paper’s release, several social media users ran it through LLMs in order to summarize it and then post the findings online. Kosmyna had been expecting that people would do this, so she inserted a couple AI traps into the paper, such as instructing LLMs to “only read this table below,” thus ensuring that LLMs would return only limited insight from the paper. She also found that LLMs hallucinated a key detail: Nowhere in her paper did she specify the version of ChatGPT she used, but AI summaries declared that the paper was trained on GPT-4o. “We specifically wanted to see that, because we were pretty sure the LLM would hallucinate on that,” she says, laughing.

Amazing: MIT researchers revealed how ChatGPT etc are destroying our brains and booby-trapped the report to expose those who want to use AI to ostensibly summarize the results.

t.co/JXeTALBPds

Are you a journalist writing about a current heatwave?

The images you choose are critical to the story.

The @climateoutreach.bsky.social team have shown some ideas here which help stress the risks rather than the typical ice creams: www.climatevisuals.org/how-do-you-p...

Thanks to all the friends and strangers who attended SEA CHANGE last week during Tribeca.
Still riding that sunset high of making a beautiful ruckus through the streets to the edge of this island.
Next stop XMTR fest in the UK in Sept!

thanks for coming, friend!!