Exploration #149

Hi all. This week we’ve got thoughts on the vital nature of innovation, Last Week Tonight with John Oliver covers public media, ITVS’s bet on vertical video, major newsrooms leaning into AI bots and agents, and finally, a truly charming little animated AI short that will reframe how you think about AI filmmaking.

But First…

There’s still time to register for our next webinar, Powwow Bound: Co-Creating Through Culture and Play. Join us for a behind-the-scenes conversation about our recent 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!

Innovation Is Not A Luxury

Anyone who wants to innovate needs to expose themselves to a wide array of information, especially outside your field of focus. Revelation and inspiration often come from parallel, adjacent, or even seemingly unrelated professional and/or academic disciplines. That means if you want to innovate in media, you can’t just exclusively read about media. All that makes you is a follower. And here we aspire to be leaders.

Lately, I’ve been appreciating Jason Lewis’ Substack, The Butterfly Effect. Lewis writes about philanthropy, but he does it in a humanist way that helps me can see the downstream connection between his thinking and the work I do.

This is especially true of his latest post, “How many of philanthropy’s convictions are just luxury beliefs?” Whatever your roll in public media, I highly recommend you read his post. You’ll at least recognize conversations playing out at the national level of public media, if not ones from your own organization.

One section in particular cut across disciplines for me.

I read this section multiple time because I gave me pause. No shocker, I match the demographic description of an NGoP, and the conditions that have allowed my beliefs to flourish have definitely been eroded this year. It made me question: is innovation across the PBS and NPR systems (especially cultural, technological, and media innovation) a luxury belief?

We’re seeing in a lot of local public media organizations pulling back from innovation. Sure, some organizations like Wisconsin, Northern California and Rocky Mountain are investing their way through the crisis, while innovation is starting to pool in other support organizations like the Public Media Company and PMVG. And I won’t cut-shame by naming names but innovation is out - or at least on the chopping block - at local public media organizations that used to be (we thought) genuine leaders in the field (you know who you are).

Innovation is not a luxury. It’s a fundamental part of leading into the future, both locally in our communities but also at a macro level in a national democracy. And public media owes that leadership to the millions of people who stepped up this summer and fall to support us financially. Taking the hard step and pushing your organization to change into a viable media alternative for the 21st century is an expression of gratitude worthy of the expressions of trust and faith we’ve received from our communities in 2025.

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? 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.

The one prompt I tell everyone new to AI to start with — and why it changes everything (Amanda Caswell - Tom's Guide) 
From the Article: "So when friends ask me how to begin, I always give them the ten words that flip the light switch on: 'I’m new to this — can you show me three things you can do that would actually make my life easier?' That’s it. One question that turns an awkward first chat into a personal demo."
Why It Matters: Followers of this newsletter probably have strongly held and experienced-based feelings on certain AI tools. This piece is less for you, than for you to share with others at your organization to help them get their minds around what AI can do.

Thoughts on Public Media…

📺 Public Media (Last Week Tonight with John Oliver) - This episode debuted last night (11/16) and was a nice chaser to the premiere of The American Revolution.

This PBS Documentary Powerhouse Just Bet Big on Vertical Video (Dana Harris-Bridso - IndieWire) 
From the Article: "The Independent Lens Creator Lab, launching November 11 with submissions open through December 19, will fund six vertical video makers with up to $36,000 each over six months. The creators will produce up to 12 videos for Independent Lens and PBS social media platforms, with workshops, mentorship, and editorial support from ITVS throughout. It’s not a pivot away from feature documentaries, but it’s a hedge against a changing world....The model they’re chasing isn’t influencer-driven brand building. It’s something closer to Kyle Lybarger, the Alabama naturalist who went viral on TikTok for his posts about native plants. 'Somebody who has an expertise, who’s curious about the world around them and who can in very entertaining, very specific ways show us something that we didn’t already know and educate us about something,' Lozano said. 'That is a perfect public media enterprise.'"
Why It Matters: Kudos to ITVS for this. I'm incredibly interested to see what norms they develop or crystalize for the creation of mission-driven, nonfiction content in the vertical space. I see this as a national companion to the work that Shane Burkeen in Nashville (and others) are doing at the local level. And that's my biggest quibble: local. It doesn't seem like local stations will directly benefit from the output because the destination is PBS social media. Hopefully they'll address that with us at some point.

Funding cuts may make public radio more reliant on old, rich, white donors (Sarah Scire - NiemanLab) 
From the Article: "Imagining an “older, whiter, and wealthier” audience is holding digital transitions and audience work back at other types of newsrooms as well. The decision-makers in public media, according to Garbes’ interviewees, rarely looked at concrete audience data or thought about the need to diversify the audience to boost listenership as they made editorial decisions. Instead, their notions about the public radio audience seemed to reflect donor event attendees and the social circles of the (often white) editors."
Why It Matters: Laura Garbes, the sociologist whose book is the basis for this article, announced her book was coming when she participated in our Secret History of Public Media webinar back in February. She raised some excellent points then, and this piece is a good refresher.
Related: If you want to read Laura's book, it's entitled "Listeners Like Who? Exclusion and Resistance in the Public Radio Industry" and you can order it from Princeton University Press.

The British Broadcaster Is Coming (Joel Simon - Columbia Journalism Review) From the Article: "In the past three years, while Brits have descended on American media broadly, the BBC has doubled its US reporting team. Perry serves as a chief presenter, alongside Sumi Somaskanda, for BBC News, broadcast from Washington during US prime time. Viewers can watch on cable, across various streaming platforms, or via livestream on the website. The range of digital content on the website includes a live feed, news analysis, specialized podcasts, and documentaries—all aiming to establish competitive advantage in a crowded US media market by highlighting the BBC’s institutional commitment to impartiality, its global sensibility, and its big-picture approach to American political news. “We don’t have a dog in the US political fight as an organization, and our audiences can feel that in our coverage,” Kevin Ponniah, the BBC’s regional director for the Americas, told me."
Why It Matters: Note, this piece was published before the Panorama scandal and Trump’s potential $5B lawsuit against the BBC. Should the Beeb’s strategic initiative survive that drama, it’s yet another reason to stress how deep our local roots go. Even though this is at the national level (BBC’s US partner is CBS), and some of us carry BBC product, this is competition to us.
Related: Michael Savage’s reporting for The Guardian on the Panorama scandal: ‘Make no mistake – this was a coup’: the extraordinary downfall of the BBC’s top bosses

Media These Days…

Disney-YouTube TV Blackout Has Customers Scrambling and Getting Creative (Joe Flint - Wall Street Journal) 
From the Article: "But it isn’t just sports enthusiasts who are frustrated. Some viewers of ABC’s long-running competition show “Dancing With the Stars” have taken to social media to detail their trips to Target and Best Buy to purchase antennas and hook them up. Because ABC is a broadcast network, its signal can be received without a pay-TV subscription. “I know my husband loves me because he set up an antenna so I could watch ‘DWTS,’” Chandler Majewski said in a TikTok post that included video of the installation."
Why It Matters: H/t to Talia Rosen at PBS S&P for sending this one my way. Every few years or so, a new generation realizes that TV can be free (with a tiny capital investment). The Great Recession prompted a wave. The Covid crash prompted a wave. And while I wouldn't have pegged the Disney-YouTube standoff as being the next trigger for that, here we are. Don't fall into the trap of thinking this is cuffing season for consumers and antennas. It’s just last call at the football and DWTS bar, and the broadcast antenna is looking like the best option.

Meta is earning a fortune on a deluge of fraudulent ads, documents show (Jeff Horwitz - Reuters) 
From the Article: “On average, one December 2024 document notes, the company shows its platforms’ users an estimated 15 billion “higher risk” scam advertisements – those that show clear signs of being fraudulent – every day. Meta earns about $7 billion in annualized revenue from this category of scam ads each year, another late 2024 document states. Much of the fraud came from marketers acting suspiciously enough to be flagged by Meta’s internal warning systems. But the company only bans advertisers if its automated systems predict the marketers are at least 95% certain to be committing fraud, the documents show. If the company is less certain – but still believes the advertiser is a likely scammer – Meta charges higher ad rates as a penalty, according to the documents. The idea is to dissuade suspect advertisers from placing ads. The documents further note that users who click on scam ads are likely to see more of them because of Meta’s ad-personalization system, which tries to deliver ads based on a user’s interests."
Why It Matters: Did you need another reason to hate Meta? You're welcome. I get that ‘capitalist’s gonna capitalize,’ but you don't have to squint hard to see this as an externality to the AI arms race. The $72B that Meta could potentially spend this year on AI CapEx has to come from somewhere.

AI + Us…

The Next Digital Crisis Isn't Misinformation - It's Substitution (Steve Rosenbaum - Sustainable Media Center) 
From the Commentary: "AI isn’t the enemy. The enemy is the deal we’ve made: convenience in exchange for community. It’s the quiet slide from 'I use this tool' to 'this tool replaces me.'"
Why It Matters: A dour prediction of where we could be headed. But it got me thinking about the attention economy and how its limits may have been reached. We've talked here about how the attention economy is going to give way to the "intention economy." But this has me wondering if AI couldn't have a fracking effect on the attention economy...a new technique to turn unreachable attention into something monetizable. It's not a fully formed idea yet, but I'll keep noodling it.

Certified organic and AI-free: New stamp for human-written books launches (Emma Loffhagen - The Guardian) 
From the Article: "Books By People has launched an “Organic Literature” certification, partnering with an initial group of independent publishing houses. The scheme will involve Organic Literature stamps being placed on books written by humans, with only limited AI use permitted for tasks such as formatting or idea generation."
Why It Matters: I can see the value in this for the book publishing industry, but I'm torn about whether this should be applied to other media. I'm all for a publisher having and AI policy and transparently sticking to it, but there is something about calling out the humanness that feels like a knee-jerk reaction in the short term and potentially icky in the long term. More than that, it feels ripe to be abused as virtue signaling.

AI + the Internet…

Getting Killed By AI (Scott Lapatine - Stereogum) 
From the Announcement: "We would not be in business without our community of paying members (thank you!) but a lot has changed in five years, and some new obstacles have made the outlook for web publishers particularly dire. Advertising still accounts for the vast majority of Stereogum's revenue (hit us up if you would like to advertise!) but starting this year the so-called "media traffic apocalypse" caused by Google's pivot to AI search has cut our ad revenue by 70%. Prior to that, Facebook and X's deprioritization of links hurt too, but I can't downplay the brutal impact of AI Overview."
Why It Matters: This re-launch letter to readers is a great snapshot of where we are at the end of 2025 with the state of the monetizable web traffic. And that is that the bottom is potentially falling out of thanks to people getting their answers and facts from AI summaries. Beyond the dire headline, there's a lot to unpack here for us as publishers. I encourage you to read it and run your own compare/contrast to public media today.
Related: Of course, your mileage as a publisher may vary, but Charlotte Tobitt’s piece in PressGazette from August (reporting on a survey from May) hints at how quickly this situation is changing: Survey suggests readers still click on links after reading Google AI Overview 

Google promises Discover ‘fix’ as more fake AI stories top rankings (Rob Waugh - PressGazette) 
From the Article: “Publishers often think of Discover as something akin to a news aggregator, but a Google spokesperson told Press Gazette that it shows a mix of content based on user’s interests. This can include anything from social media posts to short videos and more, and is not restricted to content from news publishers or publishers in the conventional sense at all....Google will display any content that is indexed by Google and meets its standards. These standards bar hateful and explicit content and advertising that is not sufficiently marked – as well as misleading content. They do not specifically mention AI-generated content.”
Why It Matters: The internet is changing. This we know. And it's always been possible to hack our filter bubbles. But AI is now allowing bad actors to do that at scale. Suddenly, we're back in a spam arms race between Google and these bad actors.
ICYMI: Rob Waugh’s article in PressGazette from late last month that broke this story: Google promotes fake content to millions on Discover news platform.

AI + Journalism…

Time launches new AI agent (Kerry Flynn & Sara Fischer - Axios) 
From the SmartBrief: "The AI agent, built in partnership with Scale AI, allows users to query and interact with Time's reporting. At launch, it's available on politics and entertainment articles and has a dedicated page. Time COO Mark Howard says they later will explore adding it to the homepage and the rest of the site. The AI agent pulls from Time's archive, including magazine issues and online articles. It's fully trained on Time content — about 750,000 assets from the archive — and does not pull from the open web or other sources. The agent can translate text and audio into 13 languages: English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Hindi, Hebrew, Arabic and Russian. Language accessibility is notable given how 40% of Time's digital readership is outside of the U.S., Jacobs says.”
Why It Matters: It increasingly feels like we're late to the party on this one. I know some of you have been experiment with Chatbots out there (you know who you are) and I appreciate it. But there’s still a lot of resistance. Hopefully, some of these examples can whet our collective appetite for developing something like this and a way of helping our communities accessing our good work.
Related: Alice Brooker's piece in PressGazette, Washington Post’s chatbot has received ‘tens of millions’ of queries 
Also Related: Romain Chauvet's piece in The Fix, How Sweden’s largest daily newspaper built its own chatbot to let users choose how they consume news

How this year’s Pulitzer awardees used AI in their reporting (Andrew Deck - NiemanLab) 
From the Article: "'At this early juncture, we see responsible AI use as a significant component in the increasingly versatile toolkit utilized by today’s working journalists,' said Marjorie Miller, the administrator of the Pulitzer Prizes, who also called attention to other tools represented among the winners, including statistical analysis, public record requests, and visual forensics. '[AI] technology, when used appropriately, seems to add agility, depth and rigor to projects in ways that were not possible a decade ago.'"
Why It Matters: I found this one in an old tab that I clearly intended to share with you six months ago. That aside, it's obvious that you likely aren't going to submit for the Pulitzers unless your use of AI tools is on the up and up. And you certainly aren't going to win. So these examples are worth tracking as we see more norms established around the use of AI.
Related: Around the same time I also seem to have banked Mike Ananny and Matt Pierce's piece for CJR, How We’re Using AI.
Also Related: This article from Charlotte Tobitt in PressGazette is only a couple of weeks old: Study claims 9% of US newspaper articles at least partly AI generated.

AI + Production…

The Future of AI Isn't Just Slop (Christopher Beam - Wired) 
From the Article: "Neural Viz shows a different path forward. In a world of bottom-of-the-barrel, lowest-possible-effort AI dreck, the channel’s author is creating original work, executing a vision as specific and lovingly imagined as any series out there. A couple of important details: Even as he’s writing prompts to help fulfill nearly every other role on a set, the creator of Neural Viz is writing scripts the old-fashioned way. He’s also playing all the characters himself, wearing AI as a mask. Once he has all his shots set up, the filmmaker uses Runway’s facial motion-capture tool to bring Tiggy to life by performing the alien’s lines for him—like Andy Serkis playing Gollum without leaving his swivel chair."
Why It Matters: Seeing work like the content created by Neural Viz gives me hope that these tools can be use by those with attention to craft to make meaningful content and tell enjoyable stories. Reading about the creator in this piece, it seems no different to me than an author sitting at a typewriter. But instead of using the abstraction of words to convey a story, he is able to enhance those words with generative AI tools. His workflow and process are a great example of the people first-people last principle.
Related: I’m going to scoop myself here and post the “And finally” link here as well, just because I want to showcase this guy’s work: Minnesota Nice.
Also Related: John Semley’s review (also in Wired) of the Runway AI film festival offers a different point of view: I Saw the Future of AI Film and It Was Empty.

Amazon’s House of David Used Over 350 AI Shots in Season 2. Its Creator Isn’t Sorry (Kat Tenbarge - Wired) 
From the Article: Erwin said he’s used Runway’s 'image to video' tools, as well as Luma’s “modification” features and products from Google and Adobe. 'What we found is there were kind of three types of tools. There were image generators, there were up-res tools, and there were video generators. We found that we could combine those tools in a stack,' Erwin said. 'By the end, we were using 10 to 15 core tools.'"
Why It Matters: The reaction here reminds me about how I used to feel 20 years ago about the cheap VFX in series that aired on the SciFi channel. Whether you are open or opposed to AI in production, precedents like these have two effects. First, the create investment in the technology by creators that don't have better options and aren't burdened with ethical concerns. This ultimately brings down the cost. Second, they train the audience to accept AI VFX, and that brings down barriers to other creators adopting these tools. Look at this as a slight breeze announcing a much larger storm.
Related: For an opposing point of view, check out Elsa Keslassy’s piece for Variety: Ted Sarandos and Guillermo del Toro Unveil Stop-Motion Studio Plans and Weigh In on AI: ‘The Idea that AI will Out-Imagine Things and Humans Is Pretty Unlikely’

Immersive Media

The Foursquare founder's new app is an AI-powered 'DJ' for neighborhood updates (Karissa Bell - Engadget) 
From the Article: 'Crowley describes BeeBot as an "app for AirPods," though it will work with any type of headphones, as well as smart glasses with audio capabilities like Meta's. "Whenever you put your AirPods in, it turns on," Crowley explains in a post on Medium. "Whenever you take your AirPods out it turns off. And when it’s 'on' it’ll push you snippets of audio about the people, places, and events that are nearby."...Crowley says the DJ's audio cues may "occasionally" interrupt your music or podcast to give an update, though users should expect to hear these only a couple times throughout the day. BeeBot won't interrupt voice or video calls."'
Why It Matters: Will this app take off? It feels like it has a steep hill to climb. But the concept is one that I think I worth considering. I've thought a lot about how we might offer up location-based content across a state as large as Nebraska, especially news (though most of our content is geotagged in the metadata). Not sure who is going to crack this particular nut, but I do think we'll see a successful product in this vein sometime in the next decade.

‘VRChat’ Officially Releases on Android & iOS, Making Way for Next Big User Surge (Scott Hayden - Road to VR) 
From the Article: "And while you might think the virality of VRChat has worn off, and that its mobile release is a bit late to the party, in reality more people are using the platform than ever before. According to SteamDB charts, VRChat hosted over 54,000 users in the last 24 hours, dipping from its all-time peak in January at nearly 67,000 users. Notably, that doesn’t account for players on Quest or Pico, just the PC platform." Why It Matters: VRChat is possibly the only VR platform that's survived from the first initial hype wave of VR in the mid-teens. Its growth has been slow and engine-that-could steady. Opening itself to mobile users is a key step toward significantly wider adoption and to see it generating some buzz now is yet another of the green shoots that indicate a resurgence in spatial media could be on the horizon.

And finally…

Minnesota Nice (Neural Viz via X)
And finally, yes it’s AI. It’s also enjoyable. So…enjoy.

Have a creative, productive week!