 ⁛ News Cooked: The Cook Political Report, which has tracked the gritty day-to-day of politics for four decades, will put its entire archive online tomorrow, offering a remarkable and nonpartisan window into modern American political history. Charlie Cook launched the publication in 1984 as a simply-printed tipsheet covering political campaigns, and it grew into a irregularly-mailed bound periodical before going digital in 2002. It’s now a solid digital business, with eight employees and some 70,000 subscribers (face value for a year’s subscription is $350), owned and operated by Cook’s protégée Amy Walter and her wife, Kathryn Hamm. The archive “tells a pretty good story about the evolution of our politics,” said Walter, a Sunday show regular who is also a political analyst for PBS NewsHour. “There’s nothing else out there like this.” — Ben  Guarding against AI: A fact-checking outlet is trying to teach artificial intelligence not to unwittingly spread fake pictures, videos, and other hoaxes about Joe Biden and Donald Trump in the leadup to the 2024 election. In an announcement first shared with Semafor, NewsGuard said this month it is rolling out a new line of services aimed at pushing back against election-related AI-generated false information, images, video, and audio. The service will attempt to ensure that foreign governments, political actors, and internet trolls cannot use AI tech to spread false information that could influence the outcome of global elections this year. “The malign actors have really begun to perfect the art of abusing not only the open internet, but also AI,” NewsGuard CEO Gordon Crovitz told Semafor. “We’re now living in an AI enhanced internet, right? And the malign actors are producing more content, more cheaply, more targeted, and more divisive and more persuasive.” — Max Left media cancels itself: Last week the thoughtful left-wing global art and politics site Guernica published a reflective essay by Joanna Chen about the experience of living in Israel after Oct. 7, trying to rebuild bridges with Palestinian peace activists, and returning to the West Bank. Immediately after her essay’s publication, much of the magazine’s staff quit, calling the piece variously Zionist, colonialist, imperialist, and eugenicist. Guernica retracted the piece on March 4 and promised that “a more fulsome explanation will follow,” which it has not. “If this is what passes for the left today, God help us,” responded Sasha Abramsky in The Nation (The Nation!), invoking Stalin and Mao. “Maybe if the magazine had a different name, say Free Speech Sucks or Too Lazy to Think the Issue Through, this behavior wouldn’t be so loathsome and hypocritical.” You can still read Chen’s essay on Archive.org. Free thinkers: Radley Balko weighs in on a couple of Free Press howlers in The Unpopulist, and finds a new orthodoxy in which, for would be “heterodox” thinkers, “the mainstream media’s lapses are part of an agenda, while their own lapses are just part of the debate.”  Not helpful: This list of reporters who Sam Bankman-Fried thought “might be helpful” is as delusional as anything else in the FTX mess. (Spoiler: Most were not “helpful.“) Also, Michael Lewis, who was helpful, placed only third!? (Also, spell Tiffany Fong’s name right!) Tough reporting environment: Even the state-run CCTV got hassled by Chinese government security when trying to report on a gas explosion outside Beijing.  Kappy’s back: “Thirteen years after kissing my checkered 43-year career at the Daily News goodbye in the first wave of layoffs, I’m returning to the scene of the grime,” Bob Kappstatter, the legendary former Bronx bureau chief (back when there was such a thing), wrote on Facebook. Things have changed at the always-dying, not-quite-dead, tabloid where I spent a very happy year in 2006. “I stand warned that the younger generation staffers require a certain management delicateness, with frequent ‘please’s’ and ‘thank you’s.’ No crusty old editor allowed. Instead, a polite ‘Perhaps your eighth paragraph might work better as the lede.‘” He’s considering hanging “a picture of the old newsroom clock over my desk. And when I hit the story send key, I can always yell ‘COP-EE!’” Further examination: Semafor reported earlier this year that leaders at the right-leaning Washington Examiner were forced to apologize to staff when a site redesign went haywire, causing stories to be attributed to the wrong authors and major scoops to disappear from the site. Months later, the site is still experiencing technical issues. Author pages for prominent guest authors like Republican Sens. Lindsey Graham and Chuck Grassley lead to error pages, while at least one op-ed written by former Vice President Mike Pence is riddled with bizarre formatting errors. — Max ⁜ TechGetting AI journalism right: Any newsroom leader thinking about how to use AI should read New York Times AI czar Zach Seward’s thoughtful advice, which highlights both crude mistakes (Sports Illustrated’s “lie on top of a lie on top of a lie”) and ways journalists have used what we now call AI for years, like Peter Aldhous’s remarkable 2017 exposé of domestic spy planes. Seward’s conclusions: With human supervision, “LLMs are useful tools for summarising text, fetching information, understanding data, and creating structure.” TikTok puns also banned: In late February, U.S. TikTok executives flew to Singapore to tell their bosses they’d dodged an attempted ban, the WSJ reports. It’s a fascinating look at how company leaders misread American politics: They believed Biden’s decision to join the app meant they were in the clear. Moderated: Can Reddit, whose decentralized power structure has saved it from the whims of billionaire owners and the broader social media apocalypse, survive as a public company? A good question, which Wired explores. (A sense of the culture: When CEO Steve Huffman tried to take a firmer hand, some staffers started referring to him as “CEO Stelon Husk.“) See you in court: Elon Musk and Don Lemon appear to be headed toward what could be a complicated legal battle following the X owner’s abrupt decision to cancel Lemon’s show on the platform before it aired. Last week, Musk texted Lemon’s agent, UTA chief Jay Sures, saying that “contract canceled.” But as Semafor first reported, Lemon hadn’t technically signed the contract. Lemon’s camp isn’t worried about that detail, noting that CEO Linda Yaccarino made Lemon’s show the cornerstone of a presentation she gave at CES earlier this year, and The New York Times reported on Wednesday that X had already begun selling ads for the show.
⁋ PublishingPlaying along: The Players’ Tribune’s model of bypassing journalists in favor of unfiltered athlete voices prefigured this era of celebrity-run production companies, even if its structure — not being owned by the athletes (other than founder Derek Jeter, at first) — didn’t. Now its parent company Minute Media may be going up for sale, two people familiar with the plans said. — Max Up for resale: Redbird IMI is “leaning” toward selling off its interest in The Telegraph after the British government said it would block foreign ownership of newspapers, the FT reported. Whether the buyers come from the old Tory establishment or the fire-breathing, Brexit-y new right will have a meaningful effect on U.K. politics. Ex-Messengers: Seven staffers from the ill-fated Messenger have landed at a similar-looking, low-profile news site called HNGN (Headlines & Global News), which has been around in some form since 2012. HNGN’s editor-in-chief is now former New York Post and Messenger editor Neil Sloan. The site seems to be playing the SEO game hard, without The Messenger’s cost structure or grand ambitions. ✰ HollywoodQuibi’s afterlife: A thriller about a nightmare rideshare passenger, “The Stranger,” has been recut from the short-lived app’s short-form, vertical approach and is being released next month as a feature film on Hulu. | 
