Music critic Ted Goia wrote about "an ugly new marketing strategy" that’s driving us all nuts.
The goal now is merely to ANNOY. The big companies do it on purpose.
Big streaming platforms are the experts at this new marketing tool. They want you to pay for a premium, ad-free subscription. The more annoying the commercials, the more likely you are to pay.
You will pay just to get rid of the ad.
In this topsy-turvy world, the more painful the ad, the better it works. The digital platforms have studied this—YouTube has tested using up to ten unskippable ads on users.
That’s not marketing—it’s water-boarding. But they need to test these techniques. Their business model is built on optimizing the level of annoyance.
Call them dark patterns, bad marketing, whatever. It's a symptom of the broken attention economy that demands from us more than we are willing to give—attention, purchases, email address, loyalty. All of it, wholesale, and often, more.
That we’re annoyed is a good sign. We shouldn't accept these annoying tactics as the norm.
A Twitter thread on taste by Sarah Guo that explores how taste compounds in product development. Her key insight? Taste doesn't scale by accident. It scales through systems.
Now here's why taste is so essential.
In a world where AI can instantly generate a CRUD app or replicate any website, taste becomes the final differentiator. Features can be copied. Functionality can be matched. But the feeling of using something crafted with intention? That's irreplaceable.
Some good news. A team of local teenagers (ages 13 to 17) covers the Hamptons from a resident's perspective in their seasonal newspaper, The Ditch Weekly. Better yet, they’re “very profitable” according to 17-year-old chief financial officer, Charlie Stern.
Everyone thinks of it as just a rich, touristy place, but there’s so much of the past that nobody really knows about,” said Ellis, 15, who wrote an article last year about the history of Montauk’s skate park. Working on the paper, he added, “I learned so much about the town I live in.” Early issues of The Ditch Weekly, which is named for the founders’ favorite sandy hangout, contained Teddy’s review of dueling pancake houses (headline: “Battle of the Buttermilk”) and Billy’s interview with a surf shop owner. Ellis wrote a weekly roundup of mischief from police reports (headline: “Spring Shenanigans”).
This isn't just a journalistic venture or early exposure to the media business. Something about it reflects the younger generation's disenchantment with screen time.
Perhaps most ambitious of all, they hope to persuade other teenagers to put down their phones and pick up a newspaper.
Strong final sentence from an SEO expert who knows Google search inside and out.
The time to pivot to a post-Google environment is now.
Barry doesn’t mince words in his LinkedIn post. He’s saying what we’ve all been thinking.
But the message is clear. Publishers need to focus on audience strategies that exclude Google as a reliable source. The emphasis needs to be on non-Google channels, multimedia content, and direct brand traffic. In the next few years, many publishers will be unable to survive. The damage AI Mode will cause to the publishing industry will be felt for decades to come.
Also worth checking out: The Rebooting Show's Google Zero episode.
This excerpt from The Walrus makes me want to read Gabrielle Drolet's debut memoir on chronic pain, Look Ma, No Hands.
As I started writing more freelance pieces, I was, in a way, living the life I’d always wanted. I was a writer. It was my actual job. I balanced deadlines, rotating between articles and editors. I sent out more and more pitches. I worked late into the night, fuelled by instant coffee and bad music.
It wasn’t enough. The number of pitches I was landing couldn’t comfortably sustain me. And it often took ages for me to get paid for my work. A fully written article might be put on hold—it would sit and collect virtual dust, and I wouldn’t be paid until it was published. I knew I needed more consistent work. I longed for some sort of paycheque I could rely on month to month. My savings dwindled as I paid for rent, pricey physiotherapy appointments, and adaptive tools. I moved to Montreal, where the cost of living was lower, but I still struggled to get by.
Before Google established itself as “a pure search engine” startup, there was Yahoo! adding a thousand websites a day to a human-edited directory. What became known as Yahoo! Directory was eventually made irrelevant by algorithmic search. Google won and, several algorithmic shifts later, started infusing search with AI.
There’s an appetite for discovery of the web, driven by humans. This type of discovery is typically referred to as curation. But curators cull lists down to only the most essential finds. Surfers cast a wider net, and they may be better suited for the current moment. They find things, organize them, and share them with a world. They have a point of view.
The curator vs. surfer dichotomy feels off to me, but never mind that. The last two sentences are on point.
Surf, stumble upon what’s good and useful, and leave breadcrumbs for others. Share a link. Keep a blog. Grow a blogroll. Anything to surface and celebrate the best of the web. It won’t replace search, but it helps more than hurts.
A dispute between Politico management and its union could set a precedent for how journalists use AI in newsrooms.
Last year, Politico started using AI tools to generate news summaries. This year, in partnership with Y Combinator-backed startup Capitol AI, it enabled Policy Intelligent Assistance for paying subscribers.
The union says this AI rollout violates their contract and claims no notice was given. Here’s PEN union chair Ariel Wittenberg, quoted in Wired:
The company is required to give us 60 days notice of any use of new technology that will materially and substantively impact bargaining unit job duties.
And here’s Arianna Skibell, the union’s vice chair for contract enforcement:
Politico’s contract stipulates that the publication needs to use AI in a manner that follows the company’s standards of journalistic ethics. We're not against AI, but it should be held to the same ethical and style standards as our political journalists.
By now, you've heard of AI Mode, a ChatGPT-style feature inside Google search.
When Google released AI Overviews, just about everyone trying to funnel traffic from search engines noticed their site visits decline. Google’s official stance is fewer but "more qualified clicks." But the AI-generated results are all too convenient. Users get what they need and skip websites entirely. With AI Mode, users will have less reason than ever to exit Google’s interface. Rand Fishkin traced this evolution from search engine to walled garden in 2019.
One option is to play along—optimize for AI answers, match what the algorithm rewards, and wait for Google's next move.
The harsh alternative I’m considering is to rethink everything—from our reliance on (Google) search to business models built for what’s coming next.
I’m down every rabbit hole as I pack my week, telling clients about diversifying their traffic sources, reading up on AIO and AI Mode, parsing the whirlwind of updates about what all this means for digital media, installing MCP servers—you get the idea.
There’s no turning back from this. It’s not just another algorithm to adapt to. So whatever you do, don’t wait for Google.
What exactly does it mean for the web to be agentic?
AI agents dominated Google I/O and Microsoft Build 2025, heralding what tech companies call the agentic web.
It's not without its problems and I'm not sure AI can save the web. Still, I enjoyed this Decoder podcast episode with The Verge's Nilay Patel and Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott.
Here's a preview.
Patel:
Right now, most of the agentic products will literally open a website and try to scan the website and then click around on the website and then order me a sandwich. And most of those companies are like, “Don’t do that.” Their posture is, “We don’t want you to do that. We’re going to block you and maybe if you’re small enough, we’ll let you do it, but we need to have business terms that make it so that you can just take our capability and put it in your product in this way.” That problem has to be solved. I’m curious about how you would solve that problem. It sounds like you’re operating at just one step of abstraction beyond that, which is, assuming we solve the business problem, how can we make it so my agent can talk to DoorDash a much easier problem to solve, because clicking around its website has never seemed like a good solution.
Scott:
Yeah, it is brittle and look, I think actually solving the business-model problem goes hand in hand with solving the technology problem. So it’s not just about figuring out a technical way to do something, it’s about getting all of the incentives in the ecosystem aligned the right way where good things are happening for everyone. So if you have a business and you want your business to be able to transact with users via their agent, that has to make good business sense in order for you to be willing for that to happen at all. You can’t just hack your way around that and expect it to be a durable thing. Even if you can temporarily figure out some kind of technical magic to get around the brittleness of the actual technology, you also have to get rid of the brittleness in the business model.
The gist is that a syndicated summer guide (things to do, books to read, etc.) published in the Chicago Sun-Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer was filled with AI-generated fake books and misinformation.
The independent tech news site also released a podcast episode, AI Slop Summer.
Jason Koehler, author of the 404 Media story, is on Bluesky posting behind-the-scenes updates.
I spoke to the person who AI-generated the Chicago Sun-Times reading list. Says he's very embarrassed. This was part of a generic package inserted into newspapers and other publications, so likely to run elsewhere. He didn't know it'd be in Chicago Sun-Times
www.404media.co/chicago-sun-...
The Chicago Sun-Times issued a response in a Bluesky thread.
On Sunday, May 18, the print and e-paper editions of the Chicago Sun-Times included a special section titled the Heat Index: Your Guide to the Best of Summer, featuring a summer reading list that our circulation department licensed from a national content partner. 🧵
Look at the comments; one unhappy subscriber responded:
Nowhere in this “What We Are Doing” do I see a pledge to your subscribers, of which I am one, to not use AI-generated content, either in-house or from 3rd-party providers. And if a syndicator can’t make that same pledge, their content doesn’t belong in our newspaper. Not so hard, is it?
Others asked about hiring actual writers and journalists. Among them, a writer who lost her job to AI.
I’m a writer who was recently laid off from my full time job and “replaced” by AI.
Spoiler alert, AI can’t produce quality content the way humans can, and any journalist worthy of the title would never submit anything without fact checking.
Fortunately, I’m available for hire! 😊
A headline from The Atlantic asked the question on everyone's mind — AI in Newspapers. How Did This Happen? The article surfaced the many issues that plague the industry.
There are layers to this story, all of them a depressing case study. The very existence of a package like “Heat Index” is the result of a local-media industry that’s been hollowed out by the internet, plummeting advertising, private-equity firms, and a lack of investment and interest in regional newspapers. In this precarious environment, thinned-out and underpaid editorial staff under constant threat of layoffs and with few resources are forced to cut corners for publishers who are frantically trying to turn a profit in a dying industry. It stands to reason that some of these harried staffers, and any freelancers they employ, now armed with automated tools such as generative AI, would use them to stay afloat.
Another from the Nieman Lab featured Reddit comments, including one from a subscriber:
Do they use AI consistently in their work? How did the editors … not catch this?” Reddit user xxxlovelit wrote. “As a subscriber, I am livid! What is the point of subscribing to a hard copy paper if they are just going to include AI slop too!?
