Ideas that challenge / comfort / inspire
Stephen Goforth
AI models do not view all content equally. They prioritize verified, third-party information over branded content marketing. To align with this reality, your GEO strategy must prioritize getting your spokespeople and data cited in the press. A single mention in a reputable trade journal often carries more weight in an LLM’s retrieval process than a dozen optimized blog posts on your own domain. -MuckRack
Newspapers sue OpenAI, Microsoft for mass copyright infringement – Courthouse News
News sites are the new newspapers: People are abandoning them for social media – Harvard’s Nieman Lab
NewsGuard launches first AI chatbot built to deliver trusted journalism only from reliable news websites – Editor & Publisher
How to Run a News Company in the Age of Polarization and A.I. Slop – New York Times
Meet the journalists training the AI models that might replace them – Reuters
How should news organizations label their AI use for audiences? New studies suggest some answers – Harvard’s Nieman Lab
AI in J-School: How Journalism Classes Are Adapting - GovTech
In a subscription experiment, about 350 readers of a Boston news outlet are paying for AI to sit through their town meetings for them - The Boston Globe
Reuters and Time adopt bot-blocking whitelists to rein in AI crawlers – Digiday
How AI citations have changed in the last 6 months: New insights from ‘What is AI Reading?’ – MuckRack
New York Times Publisher’s A.I. Warnings - New York Times
The Economist has launched a dedicated ChatGPT app, the first of its kind by a major consumer news publication – Harvard’s Nieman Lab
The AI fight brewing inside The New York Times – The Verge
BBC World Service to launch new language offers in Hungarian and Romanian – BBC
AI and the Future of Independent Journalism – Washington Monthly
Should journalism have an industry-wide ethics policy for covering artificial intelligence? – Objective Journalism
The ethics of using AI in newsrooms: A work in progress – Seattle Times
A.I., Journalism and the Uncertain Future of the Public Square - New York Times
A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort. -Herm Albright
Multimodal AI – These AI models can take in text, images, audio, and video simultaneously and spit out answers in one of these formats. The responses are therefore richer and more contextualized.
A tool designed to respond to questions and ask follow-ups can’t help a student who doesn’t engage or know what to ask. Many ed-tech tools flounder because they haven’t solved the challenge at the center of education: How do you motivate students to experience the discomfort of learning something new? An AI tutor may be able to deliver math problems that are perfectly calibrated to a student’s level. But it can’t make the student actually do the problems. -The Atlantic
News sites are the new newspapers: People are abandoning them for social media – Nieman Lab
Brands using AI-generated influencers to promote products on social media – The Guardian
Social media’s next evolution: user-controlled algorithms with the help of AI – Tech Crunch
TikTok Shows 3x More AI Slop Than YouTube, Report Finds – Search Engine Journal
An AI flaw, which Meta said it had fixed, allowed anyone to take over accounts using a bug in the company’s new artificial intelligence software. – New York Times
TikTok scales back AI-generated video descriptions after absurd errors – BBC
Snap Is Laying Off 16% of Full-Time Staff as It Embraces A.I. – New York Times
How Fake People Became Real Influencers AI avatars are redefining influence and trust online. – The Atlantic
Social media is populist and polarising; AI may be the opposite – Financial Times
The A.I. Videos on Kids’ YouTube Feeds - New York Times
For AI Help, More College Students Ask Social Media First – Inside Higher Ed
Canada moves to regulate social media and AI chatbots – Jurist
Instagram AI chatbot tricked by hackers to give access to others' accounts – BBC
Opportunity often comes disguised in the form of misfortune — or temporary defeat.
The Five Eyes intelligence alliance (a group of spy agencies) has issued a rare joint warning that frontier AI is close to being capable of crippling governments and businesses. “The timeline is not years, it is months.” - The Guardian
When to Show Up
Wait until 10 minutes before your scheduled interview time to announce yourself. Arriving any sooner shows that you're not respectful of the time the hiring manager put aside for you. A candidate who arrived an hour early made workers uncomfortable. Companies really don't want someone camped out in their lobby.
The Interview
Signal confidence by offering a firm handshake.
Avoid looking around the room, tapping your fingers, or other nervous movements.
No matter how you're feeling, keep your personal woes out of the interview process. For example, if you were laid off, instead of lamenting the situation, you might say the experience prompted you to reassess your skills, and that's what led you here. "You want to demonstrate resilience in the face of unpredictable obstacles."
Show you've done your homework on the company by explaining how your background and track record relate to its current needs.
Find out how recent changes in the marketplace have affected the firm, its competitors and the industry overall. Read recent company press releases, annual reports, media coverage and industry blogs and consult with trusted members of your network.
Questions to be Ready to Answer
What are your positive leadership qualities?
What are your strengths and weaknesses?
Can you describe a time when you had to make a decision in a crisis?
Tell me something about you that I can’t read on your resume?
Questions to Ask
What would be your highest priority for me to accomplish?
What does success look like in this position, and how do you measure it?
How can I best contribute to the department’s goals?
What would you say are the top two personality traits someone needs to do this job well?
What improvements or changes do you hope the new candidate will bring to this position?
I know this company prides itself on X and Y, so what would you say is the most important aspect of your culture?
Do you like working here?
Is there anything that stands out to you that makes you think I might not be the right fit for this job?
What were the best things about the last person who held this position?
To whom do I report, and what does that mean in terms of authority?
Who will I be working most closely with?
Are there opportunities for professional development?
Salary
Your best bet is to wait until you're extended a job offer before talking pay.
Come prepared—having researched the average pay range for a position in case you're pressured to name your price. You might say, for example, that money isn't a primary concern for you and that you're just looking for something fair. You can try turning the tables by asking interviewers what the company has budgeted for the position.
Follow Up
After an interview, make sure to address thank-yous to the right people. Look closely for spelling and grammatical errors.
Don't stalk the interviewer. Wait at least a week before checking on your candidacy.
Leave a message if you get voicemail.
Although research shows that generative AI can help diagnose rare diseases or make sense of unusual symptoms, a recent study by Oxford scientists found that using AI did not significantly improve patients’ ability to diagnose themselves or others. Another one, led by researchers at Mount Sinai, suggested that chatbots may fail to alert users to potential medical emergencies. -The Atlantic
Our illusions can ravage us as mercilessly as violence or disease. And the illusions of others, when
they take on lives of their own, are even more dangerous. -Nicholas Christopher
AI Economics for Dummies - McSweeneys
Nvidia says AI's water challenge is largely solved - Axios
The Cloud Has Sound: The Unrelenting and Unseen Cost of A.I. Data Centers – New York Times
1.5M people use GenAI.mil, the Defense Department’s enterprise generative AI platform – Defense Scoop
Google director resigns, citing its military deals: 'Management has lost its moral compass' – Business Insider
The White House said Anthropic’s powerful AI was ‘jailbroken.’ Here’s what that means. – Washington Post
All the Money Flooding Into AI Is a Giant Warning Sign – Wall Street Journal
Anthropic is pulling its two newest AI models after a U.S. government directive – Quartz
Wall Street is raining unprecedented cash on the hyperscalers - Axios
OpenAI plots biggest ChatGPT overhaul since launch – Financial Times
Revenge of the AI bubble - Axios
The world’s mathematicians just issued a formal declaration telling AI companies to stop using their work without permission – The Next Web
Meta’s AI agent for WhatsApp Business is now available globally – Tech Crunch
Microsoft Wants to 'Make People Addicted' to its New AI Assistant, Internal Documents Reveal - 404 Media
Scientists Find Way to Supercharge Dangerous Computer ‘Worms’ With A.I. - The New York Times
OpenAI Sued by Florida’s Attorney General Over AI Harms - Wall Street Journal
Microsoft’s AI chief on the greatest game of catchup ever played – Semafor
Meta is reportedly working on an AI pendant and more smart glasses – Engadget
Anthropic Files to Go Public, Setting Stage for Huge I.P.O. - The New York Times
Imagine I tell you that a group of 30 engineers and 70 lawyers have applied for a job. I show you a single application that reveals a person who is great at math and bad with people, a person who loves Star Wars and hates public speaking, and then I ask whether it is more likely that this person is an engineer or a lawyer. What is your initial, gut reaction? What seems like the right answer?
Statistically speaking, it is more likely the applicant is a lawyer. But if you are like most people in their research, you ignored the odds when checking your gut. You tossed the numbers out the window. So what if there is a 70 percent chance this person is a lawyer? That doesn’t feel like the right answer.
That’s what a heuristic is, a simple rule that in the currency of mental processes trades accuracy for speed. A heuristic can lead to a bias, and your biases, though often correct and harmless, can be dangerous when in error, resulting in a wide variety of bad outcomes from foggy morning car crashes to unconscious prejudices in job interviews.
David McRaney writing in BoingBoing
Knowledge distillation (KD) - A machine learning technique that transfers the learnings of a large pretrained model to a smaller model. While the “student model” will mimic the predictions of the big one, it is more agile and efficient, able to make better real-time decisions than a large model. The smaller model can also more easily include in its structure “explainability” (reasoning behind the decisions). KD is often used in deep learning and particularly for deep neural networks.
NewsGuard is launching “the first AI chatbot built to deliver trusted journalism only from reliable news websites” drawing from 12,000 vetted publishers. NewsGuard will share revenues 50-50 with cited news publishers. -Editor & Publisher
Can AI Predict Satellite Failures Before They Happen? The US Air Force Wants to Find Out – Military.AI
The US Military Has Been Using Elon Musk’s Grok AI to Bomb Iran – Futurism
Pentagon boasts of using AI to write reports mandated by Congress – Ars Technica
AI Warfare Is at the Point of No Return. What Now? – Wall Street Journal
White House Approves $9 Billion for Spy Agencies to Catch Up on A.I. – New York Times
Air Force Buys New Generation of Drones Made to Strike Deep Into Enemy Territory – Wall Street Journal
Germany is launching military AI into space – Reuters
AI models are being used to predict conflict – Economist
1.5M people use GenAI.mil, the Defense Department’s enterprise generative AI platform - Defense Scoop
The Killer Robots Are Coming. The Battlefield Will Never Look the Same. – New York Times
Google director resigns, citing its military deals: 'Management has lost its moral compass' – Business Insider
Mutually Automated Destruction: The Escalating Global A.I. Arms Race – New York Times
The real danger of military AI isn’t killer robots; it’s worse human judgement – Defense One
Humans — not AI — are to blame for deadly Iran school strike, sources say – Semafor
Cascade of A.I. Fakes About War With Iran Causes Chaos Online – New York Times
Cheap drones transform global battlefield – Axios
Pentagon leverages AI in Iran strikes amid feud with Anthropic - The Washington Post
Lockheed test-flies F-35 with artificial intelligence to quickly ID unknown contacts – Breaking Defense
AIs can’t stop recommending nuclear strikes in war game simulations – New Scientist
Whistleblower says Israeli military contractor used Google's Gemini AI - The Washington Post
10 well-being questions to ask in your next job interview - AMA
38 Smart Questions to Ask in a Job Interview - Harvard Business Review
41 impressive questions to ask in a job interview - ZDnet
8 Questions To Ask An Interviewer - GlassDoor
Avoid these 9 mistakes when answering interview questions - Fast Company
Four questions you will likely get asked at a media job interview and how to avoid killing your chances with your answers - Dynamics of Writing
How to Answer Anecdotal Interview Questions - LifeHacker
How to Answer ‘Tell Me About Yourself’ - Undercover Recruiter
How to Succeed in a Virtual Interview - Indeed
Interview Questions to Ask Your Interviewer - Dave Ceddia
How ChatGPT can help people prepare for job interviews — and users say it works - Business Insider
How to Impress on Your Job Interview - UCF
How to Succeed in Your Next Job Interview - Harvard Business Review (video)
Interviewing for your next job? Avoid this common mistake - CNBC
There's a Right Answer to What's Your Greatest Weakness in a Job Interview - Inc
The Trick to Bragging in a Job Interview - Wall Street Journal
Recent empirical research suggests that AI search systems exhibit a measurable bias toward earned media. LLMs disproportionately retrieves information from journalistic sources, reputable trade publications and government data over brand content that lacks third-party validation or structured, factual framing. -Muckrack
What: This session brings structure to the process of keeping up with AI, helping you identify where AI fits and where it does not. Discover how to focus your efforts, apply AI to real challenges, and build a strategy that supports consistent, mission-driven work.
Who: Loree Lipstein, Founder and CEO, Thread Strategies; Sara LaCava Lieberman, Principle, Thread Strategies.
When: 2 pm, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: Bloomerang
What: The Academic AI Impact Study, based on in-depth interviews with library professionals across eight institutions, provides evidence on how AI is reshaping core library workflows. Join practitioners from the study as they share what changed in their day-to-day operations, why human oversight remains essential, and what library leaders should consider as they evaluate AI adoption in their own institutions.
Who: Melissa Gomis, Associate Professor of Practice, Chair, Collections Strategy & Open Scholarship, University Libraries at University of Nebraska-Lincoln; Adil Husain, Founder, The Intelligence Council and Managing Director, Emerging Strategy; Amit Niv, Head of Metadata and Process Management, Younes & Soraya Nazarian Library.
When: 11 am, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: Library Journal
What: This session will help you understand where the tools stand today and how best to implement them into your presentation work. Research, structure, design, visuals, and rehearsal -- there are AI tools for all of these facets! Along the way, we’ll also look at where human judgment still matters most.
Who: Rick Altman Director, BetterPresenting.com.
When: 12 pm, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: Training Magazine Network
What: This webinar will provide attendees with practical knowledge on collaborative election monitoring, AI-assisted verification workflows, and newsroom coordination strategies.
Who: Nelly Kalu, multi-format broadcast and investigative journalist and Product and Innovation Manager at the Center for Collaborative Investigative Journalism.
When: 12 pm, Eastern
Where: Eventbrite
Cost: Free
Sponsor: Center for Cooperative Media
What: We'll cover the basics of data centers and finding information and sources for data center investigations.
Who: Erika Owens, Pulitzer Center; Laís Martins AI Fellow; Pablo Jiménez Arandia AI Fellow.
When: 12:30 pm, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: Pulitzer Center
What: Our panel will discuss what it takes to be successful when stepping out on your own. You’ll receive practical tips from seasoned freelancers on how to court clients, craft pitches and carry out the business aspects of operating as an independent journalist. Whether you’ve been freelancing for years or you’re new to independent writing, this session is for you.
Who: Mallika Mitra, business and financial freelance journalist; Chris Morris, contributing writer at Fast Company, Inc., Moneywise and AARP; Chris Taylor, personal finance journalist; Ellen Sheng, founder and principal, Sheng Media.
When: 1 pm, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: Society for Advancing Business Editing & Writing
What: The future of fundraising is not about reaching more people, but reaching the right people. This session explores how AI enables a more focused approach, prioritizing quality over quantity. Learn how nonprofits are reducing unnecessary contact while improving revenue and strengthening trust with their communities.
Who: Tim Paris, Co-founder and CEO, Dataro.
When: 2 pm, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: Bloomerang
What: Codex can help marketing teams turn scattered context into useful deliverables your team can review, refine, and share. Join us for a practical session on where Codex can fit into marketing workflows. We’ll focus on bringing context together, shaping useful outputs, and reviewing quality before anything gets shared.
Who: Diana Stegall, Customer Education, OpenAI; Lois Newman, Customer Enablement, OpenAI; Charmaine Pek, AI Deployment, OpenAI; Jen Beltran ,AI Deployment Manager, OpenAI.
When: 2 pm, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: OpenAI Academy
Who: Marlene Harris-Taylor, American Press Institute
When: 4 pm, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: Center for Scholastic Journalism at Kent State University & and Trusting News
What: This interactive focus group will discuss the realities of AI for small businesses. We want to hear about your successes, your frustrations, and your hesitations. Your real-world feedback will directly influence future state economic initiatives and help us design the exact training, workshops, and resources small businesses need to navigate the evolving tech landscape.
Who: Brett Smith, Director, Lehigh University SBDC.
When: 11 am, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: Lehigh University Small Business Development Center
What: Strategies and practical tips for working with officials to lower the fees for open records.
Who: Kimbriell Kelly, editor-in-chief of Chicago Public Media and VP for the Fund for Investigative Journalism.
When: 12 pm, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: The Fund for Investigative Journalism
What: Become AI-literate in the concepts most immediately to impact your career so you can start the process of upskilling now and thrive in your career for years to come.
Who: Heather Mansfield, Founder of Nonprofit Tech for Good.
When: 1 pm, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: Nonprofit Tech for Good
What: Meena Das Founder, Namaste Data and the AI Equity Project
Who: Discover how to assess AI decisions through a values-driven lens and build practices that strengthen trust and guide smarter choices.
When: 2 pm, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: Bloomerang
What: We will examine why most AI initiatives stall after early adoption and what organizations must change internally to turn AI investment into real operational performance. We will share a clear framework for aligning AI initiatives with workforce readiness, role-based capability development and scalable execution. Attendees will leave with a stronger understanding of why AI strategies fail and what leading organizations are doing differently to close the gap between adoption and impact.
Who: LearnQuest managing director, Dimitri Schneiberg.
When: 1 pm, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: Training Industry
What: We will explore how a new generation of agentic AI is reshaping what’s possible for philanthropic organizations. Drawing on real‑world experience across analytics, fundraising strategy, and emerging AI capabilities, this session reframes personalization not as a manual effort, but as a scalable, outcome‑driven approach.
Who: Blackbaud experts Stephen Churchill and Carol Belair.
When: 1 pm, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: Blackbaud
What: We will discuss the legal obstacles journalists encounter when they try to obtain public records, how the attorneys of the Reporters Committee work with them to overcome those challenges, and how this affects your First Amendment Freedoms.
Who: Marisa Kabas, Independent Writer and Reporter; Adam Marshall, Director of National Litigation·Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.
When: 2 pm, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press
What: Marketing your newsroom’s work is essential to securing support, building audiences, and advancing your mission. We will help participants strengthen their elevator pitch, identify barriers to self-promotion, and find the words that clearly communicate the uniqueness and fundability of their work.
Who: Ken Schneck, Editor of The Buckeye Flame.
When: 3 pm, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: New England Newspaper & Press Association
What: This session will describe how Generative AI has been used in the mathematics teacher education in Singapore, and a glimpse into the use of Gen AI in school mathematics classroom. More importantly, he will also present an alternative paradigm of using Gen AI embedding into the problem-solving mathematics curriculum.
Who: Tin Lam TOH, Associate Professor, National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.
When: 8 pm, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: The National Academy of Sciences
What: In this session, we'll talk about the different ways Google is presenting content, and how you can make sure your pages get found. We'll cover keyword research, linking best practices, and coverage tips to help you stand out from the competition.
Who: Tyson Bird is the Editorial Product Manager at American City Business Journals.
When: 2 pm, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: $35
Sponsor: Online Media Campus
What: An exploration of the key findings from the 2026 edition of the Reuters Institute’s Digital News Report and the implications for publishers.
Who: Jim Egan, Senior Research Associate, Reuters Institute; Kevin Anderson, Director, Digital Revenue Network, WAN-IFRA London.
When: 8 am, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free to World Association of News Publishers members
Sponsor: World Association of News Publishers
The reason most people never reach their goals is that they don't define them, learn about them, or even seriously consider them as believable or achievable. – Denis Waitley
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