Exploration #148

Hi all. This time around we’ve got Ken Burns talking media, attention spans, and rescission on the Mixed Signals podcast, Reddit’s tips for publishers, synthetic audiences, the returning relevance of Facebook (not a typo), make your own Wordle, and finally, the late Queen debuts on TikTok.

But First…

There’s still time to register for our November webinar. On Thursday, November 20, we’ll present Powwow Bound: Co-Creating Through Culture and Play. Join us for a behind-the-scenes conversation about Powwow Bound: A Menominee Homecoming, a new interactive story game developed through a unique partnership between PBS Wisconsin, Nebraska Public Media, Vision Maker Media, and members of the Menominee Indian Tribe of Wisconsin. Register here!

Panning & Scanning

No column this time around. I’ve got some ideas, but they aren’t coalescing yet, so I prioritized reading and reactions this week.

Okay, on to the links.

Webinars and Tutorials…

Powwow Bound: Co-Creating Through Culture and Play (Thursday, November 20, 1p ET / 10a PT) 
What does authentic collaboration look like in public media? Join us for a behind-the-scenes conversation about Powwow Bound: A Menominee Homecoming, a new interactive story game developed through a unique partnership between PBS Wisconsin, Nebraska Public Media, Vision Maker Media, and members of the Menominee Indian Tribe of Wisconsin.

This webinar will present a model for collaborative project execution that stations can emulate, highlighting how artists, writers, language experts, musicians, and cultural advisors from the Menominee community worked alongside public media creators to shape an authentic storytelling game.

The discussion will focus on lessons learned about building trust, sharing creative decision-making, and co-creating stories that center community voices. With perspectives from project partners and Menominee collaborators, this session offers a model for how public media can move beyond representation to true collaboration - creating content that is both innovative and deeply rooted in the community being served. Register here.

Thoughts on Public Media…

📺🎧 Ken Burns on the future of PBS, the new age of media, and why documentaries will outlast TikTok (Ben Smith & Max Tani - Semafor) 
From the Pod: "All meaning accrues in duration."
Why It Matters: I can't decide if Ken's quote on duration (above) feels more like a Rosetta Stone for understanding his editing style or his mission statement. I guess it can be both. Regardless, for those who haven't heard Ken's thoughts on our post-rescission moment, this is potentially useful, so I'm including it here. But for me the best part (if you watch instead of listen) is the dog who suddenly appears asleep on the couch behind Burns at about 27:34.

When public funding dries up, what becomes of public media? (Tom Davidson - Editor & Publisher) 
From the OpEd: 'I want to use this piece to ask a broader, strategic question: Can we rethink what “public media” is?...[W]e should rebuild ourselves, redefine our industry and re-envision how we serve our communities. And we should find new friends and partners who don’t worry about changing lightbulbs at the top of a tower or de-icing a satellite dish. We should start with the Carnegie definition: “Of human interest and importance which is not at the moment appropriate or available for support by advertising.” So, what does that mean in your community? And who else should you think of as “public media?”'
Why It Matters: It won't surprise any of you that Tom and I agree on a lot of points relative to how public media should address this post-rescission moment. And his assertion that we should embrace a broader definition of public media hits my confirmation bias in the sweetest of spots. Perplexingly (okay, not really), there are still people who want to maintain the status quo, ignoring that our model is close to a century old. The mission is timeless. The methods and the media must to evolve.
Related: Rodney Benson’s piece in Current, Why public funding still matters for journalism in a democracy, introduced to me the concept of civil society-owned media. It pairs nicely with Tom’s piece and reinforces why our mission is both vital and timeless.
Also Related: This manifesto (linked from Tom’s piece), Cooperation for Public Media. I’m digging the V for Vendetta anonymity here, though I suspect the open secret of who is behind this just hasn’t reached my ears yet.

Media These Days…

Reddit’s tips for publishers: ‘Contribute without disrupting the vibe’ (Alice Brooker - Press Gazette) 
From the Article: 'To succeed with Pro Tools, publishers must shift from “a self-promotional, owned-and-operated mindset to a community-first approach”, said Sands, head of news partnerships at Reddit....Sands added publishers will be successful on Pro Tools if they “act like they’re showing up to a cocktail party: take time to read the room, understand what conversations are happening, and think about how you can contribute without disrupting the vibe”.'
Why It Matters: Last week, I referenced a CJR article about Reddit's increasing relevance in search results. This piece also highlights the potential opportunity for us via Reddit. As we all confront the possibility of "Google Zero," a Reddit strategy for your organization should be a part of your overarching content strategy. But that participation has to be authentic to the community. This piece can help make the case for approaching Reddit the right way in your organization.
Related: Learn more via Reddit's "Upvoted" blog: Bringing News and Conversations Together with Reddit Pro Tools for Publishers 

Why The Economist isn’t doing AI deals but has launched on Substack (Charlotte Tobitt - The Press Gazette) 
From the Article: 'Bradley-Jones said they saw it as an “opportunity to sort of nurture more of a niche audience around a particular area of interest, which isn’t in any way going to cannibalise our core subscription base”. He added: “We think there’s a really large potential audience on Substack who are engaged in that form of journalism, really interested in data journalism, which is a real sort of flourishing space on Substack. “But also, when we looked at the consumption patterns of that journalism within The Economist’s base, there’s nobody just consuming that content. So they’re not going to spin down from The Economist to take out their Substack subscription. They’re consuming geopolitics, international economics, business and finance and so on. “So it was a sweet spot where we think there’s an audience to go after, but it’s not going to cannibalise what we offer through our core subscription.”'
Why It Matters: Substack is not without its issues, as is all social media. But it's typically associated with independent creators more than institutions. So, I found the strategy behind Economist's experiment an intriguing one that some public media organizations might be able to emulate.

‘TV’ today can be described as anything on a screen that feels relevant, authentic, and worth an audience’s time (Chris Arkenberg, Jeff Loucks, Brooke Auxier, & Doug Van Dyke - Deloitte) 
From the Report: "To stay relevant, studios, streamers, and advertisers should think less like broadcasters and more like ecosystem players—rethinking their business models to reflect a world in which “TV” is evolving to include short-form social video from an emerging industry of professional independent creators....Likewise, studios should be telling stories, growing IP, and minting fandoms designed for today’s ecosystem of TV—short form, long form, serialized, episodic, big budget, and indie. Studios, streamers, and advertisers should be working—and competing—with influencers and professional creators and creator studios. Such tactics can require a more comprehensive view of today’s media ecosystem—and an acceptance that premium TV may no longer be at the center."
Why It Matters: Last week, I featured Derek Thompson’s essay Everything Is Television. This report from Deloitte extends the themes of that piece with data. I had to check the date on this study twice as I was reading it though, because the advice feels like it was just as relevant a year or two ago. So, don't view this as breaking news. Instead, it's a confirmation of recent trends we've been seeing, and yet another sign that we need to accept that broadcast is a depreciating asset with a finite window of relevance remaining. GMs and underwriting pros should especially pay attention to this one.

The Future of Media…

How The Times is using AI to model synthetic focus groups from human audiences (Tim Peterson - Digiday) 
From the Article: "Synthetic audiences or synthetic research, either phrase refers to the use of AI to create an artificial – i.e. synthetic – audience modeled on an actual human audience so that a company can use that AI-generated audience as a sort of focus group, i.e. for research purposes."
Why It Matters: First, just to clarify, this is The Times in the UK. If some best practices or formal standards are developed around this technique, it could become a cost effective way for smaller, leaner, public media organizations to afford research on new content concepts.
Related: And them from the world of traditional TV, Matt Craig's report for Forbes, Why VideoAmp Thinks It Can Bust Nielsen’s TV Ratings Monopoly

The Creator Economy…

The Platform We Forgot About (Yoni Greenbaum - Backstory & Strategy) 
From the OpEd: "For newsrooms, that opens two questions. Who are the trusted messengers already reaching your audience? And are they on the same platforms you are? Facebook’s resurgence is one clue. YouTube’s endurance is another. Together, they suggest the creator world isn’t just moving forward. It’s expanding....And before anyone writes Facebook off for good, remember this: NewsWhip found it’s still driving more engagement with news than any other platform. In a year when everyone else is slipping backward, Facebook moved up. If the numbers say it’s alive, the real question isn’t whether to use it. It’s how."
Why It Matters: While I don't particularly want Facebook to succeed (see this piece on fraudulent ads), I really don't want public media to fail. So, if Facebook can suddenly provide opportunities to help public media again, then we should be talking about that. I also found Greenbaum's distinction between "creators," "influencers" and "trusted messengers" a helpful bit of taxonomical nuance that I hadn't focused on before.
Related: Caitlin Huston's piece for The Hollywood Reporter, Why Influencers Suddenly Love Facebook. (No Joke.) “It’s My Biggest Source of Income” 

Turning a layoff into a creator media business (Natalia Perez-Gonzalez - Creator Spotlight) 
From the Article: "For 22 months, Joon Lee was paid not to work. ESPN had laid him off, but he was still on contract; they had to keep him on payroll. A non-compete clause meant they had to approve any new opportunity or he’d risk breaking the contract and losing his income. They gave him veto after veto. No freelance writing. No escape hatch to another job. He wasn’t even allowed to make sports content for his own YouTube channel. So he trained."
Why It Matters: This is an executive summary of a podcast episode that offers a helpful example of early- to mid-career creators who don't necessarily launch into the creator economy with an established career as a tailwind.

AI + the Internet…

The AI Search Landscape, Beyond the SEO VS GEO Hype (Tracy McDonald, Alisa Scharf, & Marketa Williams - Seer Interactive Blog) 
From the Study: "The truths: [1] Search and other traditional or ‘pre-AI’ channels almost certainly are still majority contributors to your bottom line [2] AI as a channel is rapidly growing (despite its small share), it is gaining speed as a channel for your customers to find answers and to find you [3] AI is fundamentally changing the ways that people find answers in digital. The last point is the most important. Whether or not there’s a fundamental shift in investment and channel mix, that user behavior change is what will shape the future of marketing."
Why It Matters: We'll be wrestling with the impacts from AI on search and search optimization for years. It's best to get familiar with this evolving landscape now. This blog’s industry-specific examples don't touch us directly, but the data is still insightful, as is the section at the end on how fast you should prepare for AI.
Related: For those with and EMARKETER subscription, Nate Elliott’s report might also be useful: AI Will Dominate Search—Just Not in 2026 

How AI Browsers Sneak Past Blockers and Paywalls (Aisvarya Chandrasekar & Klaudia Jaźwińska - Columbia Journalism Review) 
From the Article: "AI browsers are still new, and we don’t know whether they will replace existing ways of searching the Web. But whether or not these tools achieve widespread adoption, one thing is clear: traditional defenses such as paywalls and crawler blockers are no longer enough to prevent AI systems from accessing and repurposing news articles without consent. If agents are the future of news consumption, publishers will need greater visibility into, and control over, how and when their content is accessed and used."
Why It Matters: I appreciated the distinction the authors made in explaining client-side approaches to paywalls versus server-side approaches. That unlocked some understanding for me. While AI search is one issue with which we need to contend, the new generation of browsers should also be on your radar. If you haven't had a chance to try Comet (from Perplexity) or Atlas (from OpenAI - MacOS only) you should check those out.
Related: OpenAI’s Atlas is more about ChatGPT than the web, by Ivan Mehta in TechCrunch 
Also Related: OpenAI’s Atlas browser promises ultimate convenience. But the glossy marketing masks safety risks, by Uri Gal in The Conversation.

AI + Us…

Learning to Work with the Robot: A Journey in Progress (Mark Laskowski - CDP) 
From the OpEd: "This exchange shows why it matters to thoughtfully craft the prompts you give ChatGPT. In fact, I’ve found that it’s key to prompt, re-prompt and then prompt again! The AI app’s output can be vastly improved by doggedly interrogating it. Don’t expect ChatGPT to deliver miracles — not on the first pass, or even the sixth. Do work patiently and incrementally — refining your prompts along the way. Don’t expect AI to be a magic machine that writes copy for you. Do treat it as a tool for revision that can hold up a mirror to your writing."
Why It Matters: I don't run across enough insightful revelations on using AI from our public media community. Mark's been grinding it out in public media almost as long as I have (we worked together in NJ some 🫢 years ago), and I appreciate that his experience with AI can directly be applied by our fundraising colleagues.

AI is changing who gets hired – what skills will keep you employed? (Murugan Anandarajan - Drexel University via The Conversation) 
From the Report: "Our research suggests that the skills most closely linked with adaptability share one theme, what I call “human-AI fluency.” This means being able to work with smart systems, question their results and keep learning as things change....The most successful companies make learning part of the job itself. They build opportunities to learn into real projects and encourage employees to experiment. I often remind leaders that the goal isn’t just to train people to use AI but to help them think alongside it. This is how trust becomes the foundation for growth, and how reskilling helps retain employees."
Why It Matters: What this piece is really calling for is culture shift within organizations. That's easier said than done given that the tech is evolving faster than culture could ever hope to match. So, what can you do? Organizations need to provide clear policies on AI that encourage experimentation and "human-AI fluency," and employees need to be cultivating that fluency through experiments with AI tools that can refine their own workflows. The research shows there's a double-standard when it comes to companies feeling comfortable with employees taking that initiative. That will evolve away in time, but everyone (wherever you are on the org chart) owes it to themselves and those who depend on them financially to cultivate their own fluency.
Related: Jeanne Beatrix Law's piece, also from The Conversation: AI chatbots are becoming everyday tools for mundane tasks, use data shows
Also Related: Specifically for the designers in the crowd, Erik Kennedy's Where’s the AI design renaissance? via Learn UI Design.

Is AI the New Frontier of Women’s Oppression? (Scarlett Harris - Wired) 
From the Article: "It’s a long, well-trodden pattern. We’ve seen it with the internet, we’ve seen it with social media, we’ve seen it with online pornography. Almost always, when we are privileged enough to have access to new forms of technology, there will be a significant subset of those which will very rapidly end up being tailored to harassing women, abusing women, subjugating women and maintaining patriarchal control over women. The reason for that is because tech itself isn’t inherently good or bad or any one thing; it’s encoded with the bias of its creators. It’s reflecting historical societal forms of misogyny, but it gives them new life. It gives them new means of reaching targets and new forms of abuse. What’s particularly worrying about this new frontier of technology with AI and generative forms of AI in particular is that it doesn’t just regurgitate those existing forms of abuse back at us—it intensifies them through further forms of threats, harassment and control to be exercised by abusers."
Why It Matters: I feel like the dark side of AI is omnipresent, but I don't necessarily call it out here every week. It's been a while since we've been reminded that AI use makes us more powerful. True, you can use that power to edit photos faster, or generate more engaging donor letters, but others can use it in other less savory ways. And that's where this article comes in.
Related: In the same vein, this article from The Conversation, by Olli Hellmann, feels very 2023 (even though it is based on new research): Historical images made with AI recycle colonial stereotypes and bias – new research

AI + Copyright…

Universal Music Group Settles Major AI Lawsuit With Udio After Song Theft Claims (Ethan Millman - The Hollywood Reporter) 
From the Article: "Alongside the Udio deal, UMG...also announced a partnership with Stability AI on Thursday to develop a slate of AI music creation tools, though the companies didn’t disclose what those specific tools would be. UMG and Stability said the new tools would be “powered by responsibly trained generative AI and built to support the creative process of artists, producers and songwriters globally.”
Why It Matters: Unsurprisingly, just as publishers of articles and of images have gone from adversarial to collegial with AI compnies, the music industry is now starting to shift as well. Most interesting to me in this piece was the announcement that StabilityAI was doing a deal. One of the original image generators from 2022 (alongside Midjourney and OpenAI's Dall-E) they’ve more or less lost the the B2C battle to their 2022 competition, but they are trying to pivot (somewhat successfully, I guess) to a B2B strategy serving partners in creative industries.

Getty Images largely loses landmark UK lawsuit over AI image generator (Sam Tobin - Reuters) 
From the Article: "Judge Joanna Smith ruled Getty had succeeded "in part" on trademark infringement in relation to Getty watermarks generated by users of Stable Diffusion, but she said her findings were "both historic and extremely limited in scope". She also dismissed Getty's secondary copyright infringement claim, on the grounds that "Stable Diffusion... does not store or reproduce any copyright works", which lawyers said exposed weaknesses in Britain's copyright protections."
Why It Matters: Though the ruling is from the UK and won't have direct precedent on US law, it does show how these issues are being legally parsed by jurists.

Perplexity strikes multi-year licensing deal with Getty Images (Rebecca Bellan - TechCrunch) 
From the Article: "Perplexity’s emphasis on attribution is part of its strategy of defending against copyright accusations by arguing its use of publisher content — including content behind a paywall or that publishers have explicitly indicated they don’t want scraped — constitutes “fair use” because publicly available facts are not copyrightable."
Why It Matters: There's not one-size-fits-all with any of these deals, but it's good to know how other publishers are establishing business precedents all the same. Also, it's worth noting that Perplexity, the first to take on Google in the AI search wars, continues to increase its mindshare (if not necessarily market share).

Immersive Media

Meta Horizon Hyperscape Capture review: an impressive way to capture and teleport to places (Tony Vitillo - The Ghost Howls) 
From the Review: "It is bad because, once they have this scan, they can potentially do what they want, like analyze what objects you have and provide you with a dedicated advertisement. Meta is still an ad company, and in the past, it has proven to be pretty aggressive about its data collection, so we must be aware of this risk."
Why It Matters: I suspect a lot of you are going to be tempted to gloss over this one. But there's an important point here that doesn't get discussed frequently. There is a quiet race to scan the real world into 3D and monetize that data as knowledge about consumers, or to monetize it as data for AI "world models." Google has been doing this with Google Earth for years (decades?) now, so has Matterport (and other virtual tour software), Epic Games, and Niantic (the company behind Pokemon Go). So, be aware.

Apple Shares Fascinating Developer Conference Focusing on Creating Immersive Content (Andy Stout - RedShark News) 
From the Article: "Create Immersive Media Experiences for visionOS was a two-day conference held mid-October 2025 at Apple's HQ in Cupertino. "Learn how to create compelling interactive experiences for visionOS and capture immersive video in this multi-day activity," ran the blurb for the developer-focused event."
Why It Matters: Apple's Vision Pro is technically advanced, and great at what it does. But the scope of its utility is limited. It hints more at the future than it serves the present. Not surprisingly, Apple has curtailed sequel hardware...for now. But if you look at Blackmagic's investment in camera hardware (and Canon's, to a lesser degree) and at developer conferences like these you can see that Apple is still very much investing in an immersive future.

Games…

You can now make your own Wordle puzzles (Jay Peters - The Verge) 
From the Article: "If you have an All Access or Games subscription, you can make a 4-7 letter puzzle with the NYT’s Wordle creation tool. (You’ll be able to add an optional clue if you want to give the people you share your puzzle a bit of help.) When you’ve made the puzzle, you’ll get a unique URL you can share with others, and they don’t need to have a subscription to be able to play it."
Why It Matters: Opening up your games to a UGC strategy can be a solid way to increase engagement with the game (and time on your site). I'm kind of surprised it took NYT games this long to cross this bridge, especially given that they do accept crosswords from the public.

And finally…

Queen First Vlog (Maxian_Futbol vis TikTok)
And finally, the Queen (RIP) is Vlogging and I can’t get the line “Straight out the palace…ceiling’s looking all drippy…chandelier’s doing the most.” out of my head.

Have a creative, productive week!