 ⁛ News Fabrice Coffrini/AFPRIP: Christophe Deloire, the director general of the Paris-based Reporters Without Borders (RSF), died Saturday at 53 after a battle with cancer. He’d brought urgency and passion to the increasingly dire cause of advocating for journalists around the world. At RSF, he organized the daring escape of dissident Russian journalist Marina Ovsyannikova from Moscow in 2022. “You will always remain in my heart as the person who gave me freedom,” she wrote after his death. The toll in Ukraine: “Since the beginning of the full-scale invasion, 81 media workers have been killed. 10 while carrying out journalistic activities, while 71 journalists died as a result of Russian shelling,” Tim Mak writes in The Counteroffensive. Vietnam crackdown: A top journalist criticized the government and was arrested for “abusing the rights of freedom and democracy to infringe upon the interests of the State,” among other sins — a pretty blunt way to put it. Guild grumbles: On Thursday, Semafor wrote about internal tensions within the membership of the NewsGuild over the union’s political speech, criticism of members, and the cost of union dues. In a note to members, Reuters NewsGuild unit chair Tim McLaughlin wrote that members of the Guild had “effectively lost our voice, or any power, in our own union, the NewsGuild of New York,” saying, “the fiscally irresponsible and political activist arm of our union is now firmly in control of how our dues are spent.” In response, the Guild touted widespread support for the dues increase. ⁜ Tech Saul Loeb/AFPPerplexed: The nifty AI-powered search engine Perplexity is sweeping up investigative journalism now, much to the frustration of the journalists. We asked our colleague Katyanna Quach for her take: “Copyright is dead. Technology has made it too easy to steal and reuse content, and it’s getting more difficult to fight against this type of theft. Publishers don’t have enough money to sue these companies, who just keep building products that chip away at journalism. Instead, many are jumping into bed with them to negotiate licensing deals. They are buying into the idea that everything is okay if AI cites their articles as sources and diverts traffic to their websites. But it’s not clear if this is really happening.” (Sign up for Semafor Tech for more of Katyanna’s dire warnings.) Searching for traffic: In a memo first shared with Semafor, Business Insider CEO Barbara Peng laid out the ways in which the site’s traffic had been significantly impacted by changes that Google made to its search algorithm. She said that Business Insider was actively looking to “create mutually beneficial partnerships” with Google and other artificial intelligence companies because the company’s search traffic was becoming increasingly volatile. “The way in which people find and access information is changing rapidly,” she wrote. “ChatGPT is starting to gain ground on Google’s long-standing dominance, reaching 180M users in a remarkably short amount of time. To its credit, Google is now trying to disrupt itself by experimenting with its own search generative experience (SGE), which will also accelerate the disruption happening on a macro level. But when our content is summarized and served in this way, we don’t make any money to support our journalism.” Xeet away: “Political elite circles are on Twitter once again, only in a weirder fashion than before Elon Musk took over at the end of 2022,” Evan McMorris-Santoro and Alex Roarty write in Notus. “Users said Twitter is not what it was, but also it’s not as bad as it was in the most chaotic days after it became Musk’s to do with as he pleases.” Google it, eh? Meta has responded to pressure from governments by getting out of the news business. But Google doesn’t have that luxury, and is implementing plans to give away $100 million a year to Canadian news companies. | 
