Exploration #152

Hi all. Welcome to our newest readers from Wisconsin and NYC! This week we’ve got Paula Kerger on the Channels podcast, the enshittification of the internet, why updated AI policies matter, an effective way to work with AI, a breakthrough in AI analysis of handwriting, and finally, Pantone’s 2026 (non)Color of the Year.

But First…

Registration is now open for our December 11 webinar, SEO + AI: Best Practices for 2026. Join us for a talk about what is changing (and more importantly what is not) now that AI has entered the chat via search and web browsers. And there will be plenty of time for Q&A, so bring all your SEO questions (even if they aren’t specifically AI-focused).

A Bird’s Eye View of the AI Landscape

Originally, I was going to write about AI and Search/SEO ahead of this week’s webinar, but I thought it might be better to do that next week so I could bake in some of the webinar learnings. That leaves us sans column this week. But I did find an interesting graphic (see above) that I want to share, courtesy of the folks at Luma Partners, LLC. You may not agree with all the groupings, and there are certainly other authoritative ways to parse this data. But their “Lumascape” for AI serves as a helpful taxonomy for how to think about different categories of AI these days. I was especially intrigued by the “Answers Economy” grouping at the bottom.

You might also download the image for a compare/contrast after the AI bubble eventually bursts.

Okay, on to the links.

Webinars and Resources…

Claude for Nonprofits (Anthropic) 
From the Announcement: "From our partners, we know AI helps most when it fits into existing workflows, upholds the privacy their communities expect, and is affordable. Claude for Nonprofits includes three things: discounted access of up to 75% to Claude, connectors to new nonprofit tools—Blackbaud, Candid, and Benevity—and a free course, AI Fluency for Nonprofits, designed to help teams use AI more effectively."
Why It Matters: At NPM, our approach is still best described as 'use the frontier model suite that works for you.' But if your organization is looking to unify around a single platform, Claude's offer could be worth exploring. All AI companies infuse their values into their code, and Anthropic has historically taken an approach to generative and agentic AI that I've felt most closely aligns with the values of public media. It's not always been the "best" model when it comes to performance benchmarks and a multiplicity of product features, but its products are competitive and reliable.
Related: If you want to check out the AI Fluency for Nonprofits course independent of this offer, you can check it out at this link or watch the trailer above.

SEO + AI: Best Practices for 2026 (Thursday, December 11, 1pET/10aPT)
2025 was the year we all learned the phrase “Goggle Zero.” But whether you believe Google will completely stop delivering traffic to your organization’s website or not, AI is definitely changing how we get information from and find content on the internet. Join PBS’s Richard Traylor, SEO Manager, and Emily Clark, Manager of Multiplatform Marketing, for a talk about what is changing (and more importantly what is not) now that AI has entered the chat on search and web browsers. If you saw Richard speak at the PBS Annual Meeting in Atlanta, this will be an evolution, 6 months on, of the information presented there. And if you missed that one, you don’t want to miss this one. Register here.

Copyright Is for Kids: New Resource for Parents, Teachers, and Librarians (Allison Hall - Library of Congress) 
From the Blog Post: "Using this refreshed resource, kids can learn what copyright is and what rights copyright owners have: Coloring and searching activities help kids learn what subject matter is protectable by copyright; mazes trace a path from idea to authorship and copyright owner; spot-the-difference activities feature the Statue of Liberty (one of the largest works ever registered); prompts direct kids to create their very own original story or drawing."
Why It Matters: We probably don't touch on media literacy as much as we should here, so when this resource landed in my inbox it felt like a natural one to share. Pass this one along to your education or kids departments.

Thoughts on Public Media…

🎧 PBS Lost a Billion Dollars. Now what? With CEO Paula Kerger (Channels with Peter Kafka - Vox) 
From the Pod: "I think we have to plan the money is not coming back. But I think we work very hard to try to get it back. I think if we plan the money is not coming back and we build a strong foundation for how we operate moving forward, if we get any piece of the money back, that makes us even stronger.”
Why It Matters: Last week we had her appearance on Mixed Signals, and this week's isn't a cake walk either. Kafka comes across as supportive of the work of public media but skeptical of the government funding. Paula's counterarguments are good and she plays the hits (kids, emergency alerts and information, investigative journalism), listening to it reinforced for me that - absent kids’ content - the true unique value is local. Also, let’s just call bullshit on the headline/title for the pod. Not only is it factually inaccurate (CPB failed to get the money), but it shades the truth by making it seem like the money could have misplaced. (I know you get it, I’m just putting that out there for the bots crawling the internet).
Related: Here’s a Spotify link for those that listen to podcasts that way (I couldn’t find the show on YouTube this time)

Public Media Advertising: Fears of the Past, Hope for the Future (Richard Tofel - Second Rough Draft) 
From the OpEd: "While the public was providing funding to these broadcasters, that deal may have struck some people (say, the Congress) as appropriate. But in the absence of such funding, the restrictions are outrageous. And they are, I would submit, plainly unconstitutional.... Without the quid pro quo of public funding, I can’t see the justification for these restrictions."
Why It Matters: Tofel's analysis is refreshingly informed for an outsider. We should not plan for federal dollars coming back, but I do worry that if we start chasing the ad-money dragon, it’ll be a hard habit to break. And of course, many of us get state or university (so, quasi-state) dollars even though federal funding is gone. Tofel seems like he may mostly be thinking about community licensees. And then, from more of a values perspective, non-commercial media has historically traded on the trust that the storytelling is free from corporate influence. That sensibility (and the mandate derived from it) harken back to the perceived needs of another era. I'm trying to square in my own mind whether that matters in a media landscape now shaped by influencers, "authenticity," and "vibes."
Related: Not specifically about public media, but another interesting data point from Katherine Fink in The Conversation: Nonprofit news outlets are often scared that selling ads could jeopardize their tax-exempt status, but IRS records show that’s been rare 

Media These Days…

Why everything on the internet is getting worse (Cory Doctorow - The Gray Area with Sean Illing) 
From the Pod: "The formal definition of enshittification is both a kind of descriptive and theoretical idea. So descriptively, it describes how platforms go bad. That first they're good to their end users. They find a way to lock those end users in. And then they uh make things worse for those end users because the lock-in means that the end users are unlikely to depart. They use that new surplus to make things good for business customers. They lock those business customers in making them dependent on those end users. And then they make things worse for the business customers too...."
Why It Matters: I don’t here this term much anymore but years ago we used to talk about “planned obsolescence” in products. The idea (often discussed as it was a conspiracy) that products were engineered to break after a certain point. You can feel that there is a particular rhyming scheme between that and how good products and services go bad in the internet age. This conversation (and Doctorow’s book) gives you a way to talk about it.

Let It Burn (Zoe Scaman - Musings of a Wandering Mind) 
From the Substack: "But it’s not just about where the work lives. It’s about how it happens. The old model was a conveyor belt. A creative assembly line. Brief comes in, gets processed through a series of handoffs – strategy to creative to production to media – each department passing the baton to the next. Paint by numbers. Templated. Industrialised. Strategy wasn’t really strategy; it was a sophistication signal, a pitch-winning tool, intellectual seasoning sprinkled on the production line to justify premium pricing. Insights became SKUs. That model is dying because it doesn’t match the shape of the work anymore. The work now is faster. More fluid. More intuitive. It doesn’t move in a straight line from brief to execution – it loops and iterates and responds in real time to culture and data and platform changes. It requires people who can think and make across disciplines. It requires proximity to the brand itself – to the inner machinery of the business – not an external vendor three tissue meetings away from anyone who can actually say yes."
Why It Matters: Scaman's perspective is from the ad agency world. But her message, especially for those recently cut from their organizations, is sector agnostic. How we work is changing. This piece captures the emotions around that well.

Gen Z Hates the News (Brian Morrissey - The Rebooting) 
From the Piece: "It’s important to restate that news is a subset of publishing, which is a subset of a far broader Information Space. Everyone is competing with everyone for attention, ad dollars and influence. Professional news organizations don’t compete only with each other. It isn’t NBC vs CBS vs ABC. It isn’t MSNBC vs Fox News. It’s comedians with podcasts, white nationalists with Rumble talk shows, Tucker and Candace, Harry Sisson and Hasan Piker, and on and on. By the metrics, the institutional news industry is losing this battle badly."
Why It Matters: I read stories like these, and I think about the Newshour's Student Reporting Labs. For a decade we have cultivated that initiative as a part of our System, yet it feels sandboxed. We're aligned with a group that is training young folks across the nation in the basic principles of good journalism. What can they teach us about the media that creates maximum impact for them? Maybe we’ll make that one of our webinars in the new year.

AI + Journalism…

Why defining newsroom AI policy is more urgent than ever (Pete Pachel - Media CoPilot) 
From the Substack: "For most in the media industry, and especially newsrooms, there’s a presumption that if you’re submitting anything under your name, that you (a human) wrote the words, not a machine. This is more than an assumption—it’s a compact, one that rightly elevates the value of human output. Almost all writers understand this compact, and it’s not incompatible with being an AI enthusiast. The problem, as ever, is in the details, which are becoming increasingly gray as AI improves. With vague or nonexistent policy, there are ways AI can slip into publishable copy, even with good-faith actors on both sides...."
Why It Matters: For a while, back in 2024, we talked a lot about AI policy here in public media. It hasn't come up as much this year. So, I'll ask two questions. First, did your organization ever create an AI policy? If so, have you updated it to encompass, agentic AI, AI-augmented search, AI SEO, the advent of AI-native browsers and AI-infused browsers (like Google)? Spoiler alert: I’ll be talking about this more in 2026.
Related: Pachel references a recent Reuters study that, while from the UK, is still worth a quick skim if you run a newsroom or oversee someone who does: AI adoption by UK journalists and their newsrooms: surveying applications, approaches, and attitudes 
Counterpoint: Alice Brooker's piece in the PressGazette shows that maybe there is still hope, The Week Junior: Ten years of proving the young still read print journalism 

Studies on AI transcription and translation in journalism reveal “low-resource” language gap, new report finds (Andrew Deck - NiemanLab) 
From the Article: "English represents more than 50% of the domains on the web. Mainstream language models are largely trained on data scraped from the internet, which is one reason transcription and translation tools perform so well in English. ‘Low-resource’ languages are those that have comparatively little digitized text on the web available to train models. Even some of the most-spoken languages in the world, like Urdu, are considered low-resource."
Why It Matters: We haven't talked about AI bias here for a while, but this piece was a nice reminder that the leading AI models are heavily biased toward English as a means of communication and, as a result, western modes of thinking. Know your tools.

AI + Us…

Think First, AI Second (Ines Lee - Every) 
From the Article: "But buried in the study was a finding most coverage missed. The researchers also tested what happens when you sequence your AI use differently. Some participants thought first, then used AI (brain → AI). Others used AI first, then switched to thinking (AI → brain). The brain → AI group showed better attention, planning, and memory even while using AI. Remarkably, their cognitive engagement stayed as high as students who never used AI. The researchers suggest this increased engagement came from integrating AI’s suggestions with the internal framework they’d already built through independent thinking. Meanwhile, students who started with AI stayed mentally checked out, even after they switched to working on their own. Starting passive meant staying passive."
Why It Matters: I was glad to see this piece (and its cited studies) because it confirmed for me something I had experienced, the fact that text composed by AI doesn't stick in memory. Years ago, I did programming grids for station schedules. I could tell you instantly when something would air anywhere across any channel in a 2—3-month range. But once I moved up and started delegating, I couldn't retain a broadcast schedule to save my life. The act of creating the schedule tattooed it on my short-term memory (in fact, I still remember some of the tactics I employed back then). The point is, there is value in being engaged with the act of creation, and you can use AI to help you. We're just now learning that there is a more effective order for that AI assistance.

The AI glossary you now need (Reed Albergotti - Semafor) 
From the Brief: "It’s not easy to understand the current moment in AI, where tech is equal parts overhyped and underestimated.... So we thought it would be helpful to create a glossary of some of our favorite AI-related paradoxes."
Why It Matters: A better headline might have been, "7 AI Terms to Out-jargon Your Tech-Bro Relatives During the Holidays." There are useful terms here though. I've been citing "Amara's Law," for at least 15 years, as it is applicable to any technology forecasting.

Generative Buzz…

The Writing Is on the Wall for Handwriting Recognition (Dan Cohen - Humane Ingenuity) 
From the Article: "At this point, AI tools like Gemini should be able to make most digitized handwritten documents searchable and readable in transcription. This is, simply put, a major advance that we’ve been trying to achieve for a very long time, and a great aid to scholarship. It allows human beings to focus their time on the important, profound work of understanding another human being, rather than staring at a curlicue to grasp if it’s an L or an I."
Why It Matters: If I had a digital humanities section this would go there. This is for those of you that have labored, or paid others to labor, over nearly indecipherable historical texts. As public media continues to make content in the digital humanities vein, I can see how the use of text "decoding" like this could open up news stories, or new nuances to previously told stories. And that could be an interesting way to mine archival station content.

Rare look at how Hollywood is already harnessing AI (Nathan Rousseau Smith - ABC News) 
From the Article: "'There's somewhat of this old adage that says things that are evil, magic and a tool when a new technology comes out,' Mooser told ABC News. 'It's evil to the people that are being disrupted. It's magic to those who own it. And in the end, it just becomes a tool. And so that's the system that we're seeing right now.'"
Why It Matters: I watched The American Revolution last week, and honestly, everything but the interviews and some of the most famous portraits and depictions could have been AI generated. I don't expect Florentine would go there (yet), but the next Florentine could. The best practices and attendant ethics developed in production centers like Hollywood can trickle down to public media, if we are open to their experiences. So, it’s good to track how the state of the art is made manifest there.

The Creator Economy…

How a failed horror movie director co-founded one of the most popular yoga channels on YouTube (Simon Owers via Substack) 
From the Article: "The YouTube channel itself remains intentionally under-monetized. Sharpe and Mishler avoid mid-roll ads because they disrupt the yoga flow. Sponsored integrations are rare. “Keeping the channel clean and authentic is a better experience,” Sharpe said. And ironically, under-monetizing the channel increases trust and makes people more willing to pay for the app."
Why It Matters: That this guy is a failed horror film director is just a bit of trivia that makes a nice hook. He'll always win the icebreaker part of the meeting. But set that aside, and this struck me as an interesting case study from the Creator Economy. I think there are some ideas from their strategy which we could emulate.

This AI Grandma Is Going Viral. Is She the Future of Influencing? (Andrew Chow - Time) 
From the Article: "These new influencers don’t require salaries or wardrobe budgets. They can be “filmed” in locations anywhere around the world. They will patiently record dozens of takes, of dozens of different concepts, and respond directly to thousands of fans.... [T]hese types of AI characters are growing more and more commonplace—and the marketers who create them believe that a hybrid future is imminent, in which the faces that populate social media feeds will just as likely be synthetic as they are flesh-and-blood."
Why It Matters: This isn't the first AI influencers I've featured here, as this trend started back in 2024. Still stories like this, Tilly Norwood and Aisha Gaban show the state of the art is getting better. As we often say, AI today is still likely the worst it's ever going to be.

Immersive Media

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg went all in on the metaverse. Now Reality Labs is facing big cuts. (Jyoti Mann & Pranav Dixit - Business Insider) 
From the Article: "'Within our overall Reality Labs portfolio we are shifting some of our investment from Metaverse toward AI glasses and Wearables given the momentum there," a Meta spokesperson said. "We aren't planning any broader changes than that.' The overhaul comes on the back of Reality Labs racking up losses of over $60 billion since 2020 and Meta ramping up its AI spending this year in an increasingly competitive — and expensive — AI race.'“
Why It Matters: There's lots of schadenfreude kicking around about this news. Most of that is because it's easy to hate Zuckerberg. But I see this news as a public break that allows the next generation of the internet to really start to develop. The "metaverse" was never going to be Meta. It's going to be a collection of a lot of spatially oriented ("virtual") sites where part of people's lives will be lived. Meta's pivot to AI smart glasses and similar tech isn't contradictory to developing the metaverse, and you should fully expect them to be back into this space in the next 5 years.

And finally…

And finally, Procol Harum jokes welcome. Pantone’s 2026 Color of the Year has us asking, “Pantone, you okay?” Levity aside, if you want a more serious take on next year’s color I don’t have it, but Katie Harbath has got you covered with Pantone's 2026 Color Choice Is More Political Than You Think 

Have a creative, productive week!