Exploration #155

Hi all. I know. This time around we’ve got someone asking what if PBS implodes, troubling data on web traffic from Google in 2025, Grok (on X) used for violence against women, the new politics of truth, Adobe and Runway’s new partnership, legacy publishers building their own creator networks, a lackluster year for immersive media, and finally, the media that entered the public domain on January 1.

But First…

There is still time to register for today’s webinar, Innovate with Current: The Future of Public Media. And even if you can’t catch it live, you can register and get the link to watch later. This year didn’t go as many of us had planned. So, now what? How can public media position itself for a successful 2026 amid ongoing uncertainty and change? This session will feature a panel of leaders (Steve Bass, Nathalie Hill (KCRW), Eric Langner (Public Media Bridge Fund) and Loira Limbal (Firelight Media) sharing their perspectives on where the industry finds itself today and what may be coming next. This conversation is designed for anyone thinking about the future of public media strategy, audience, and sustainability and looking for candid perspectives on what comes next.

Vanishing Traffic? Your Mileage May Vary.

No column this time around (you can check out my last column in last Monday’s Exploration #154), but I did want to call your attention to the AI + Internet section below. Across the web, traffic from Google is evaporating. How much depends on a variety of factors, but I’ll just opine here that you should be engaging your teams to assess local impact and factor that into your strategies going forward. Maximizing traffic may not be the most effective way to create long-term impact, and we need to talk about what is next.

Okay, on to the links.

Thoughts on Public Media…

What if … PBS implodes? (Tom Davidson - Editor & Publisher) 
From the OpEd: "But today’s challenges are graver by an order of magnitude. Federal funding is gone; states and universities are pulling back as they deal with their own financial problems and politics. Audiences have fled our linear broadcasts to on-demand platforms where competition is essentially unlimited. Yes, stations are reacting with rounds of cutbacks and financial recalibration. But we’re missing the deeper question: What if the very structures that have served us for the past seven decades no longer work?"
What It Matters: Twenty years ago, public television programmers used to joke that a good night on local PBS was when 97% of the market didn't watch. A 3 rating? We'll take it. Today that gallows humor is only accurate if you bump the number to 99%+. Tom makes some points worth considering in this piece. Yes, the halo effect of national programming can carry us for a while longer, but we are valuable because of our local service. That’s what will carry us in the long run.

🎧 Frontline Puts PBS on YouTube (The Media Odyssey podcast) 
From the Pod: Raney Aronson-Rath on shifting Frontline to a YouTube focus: "So what I had to do at Frontline, and it was hard, but it was righteous work, was to shift our mindset. It's not a broadcast only mindset anymore. And really work the muscle of thinking in the longer term about you work. Coming up with ideas that have longevity to them. And what we did was we and I have an incredible team at Frontline, gotta give 'em a shout out.... We basically worked as working groups across the series. We created working groups and YouTube was at the center. All of what we did during those first years to really shift to broadcast plus streaming. And so that was our publicity efforts. That was our audience efforts, that was our editorial efforts. Everybody had to get in the game on streaming...." [Transcript edited for clarity.]
Why It Matters: I'd like to think we're all on board with making YouTube a strategic priority at this point. But just in case your organization is waffling, give this a listen. Also, listen to this as a chaser to reading Tom’s OpEd (👆). If Frontline is a hit on YouTube, and I hope it continues to be, how does that directly help local stations? The PBS brand benefits, and those stations who are brand-aligned with PBS might benefit. But that’s a trick pool shot at best.

Congress to continue funding Voice of America, despite Trump’s wishes (Matthew Keys - The Desk) 
From the Article: "The spending bill proposed over the weekend largely rejects Trump’s wishes to deprive USAGM of funding to the point where the agency collapses in on itself. But the amount offered to USAGM — $653 million in total — is around 25 percent less than the $867 million Congress appropriated to USAGM since 2023."
Why It Matters: I know that this isn’t exactly public media, but it’s adjacent. I guess you can choose to see this as a kick in the teeth, or as a ray of hope for possible congressional reinstatement of public media funding down the road. For now, I'm going to opt for the latter.

AI + the Internet…

Global publisher Google traffic dropped by a third in 2025 (Charlotte Tobitt - PressGazette) 
From the Article: "In the US only, referrals from organic Google search were down by 38% year on year and Google Discover was down 29%. Since May 2023, they were each were down by 22%. The report noted that publishers that specialise in lifestyle or utility content such as weather, TV guides, or horoscopes were more likely to have seen traffic declines, linking it to the arrival of Google’s AI summaries at the top of search results from 2024."
Why It Matters: As we say, your mileage may vary. But do check your mileage. And beware of bot traffic. I know it's supposed to be filtered out of Google Analytics but you may find that you check your traffic and your 2025 traffic is up. If you fall into that camp, check the source of that traffic. Is it China? And is the average time of engagement <10s?

AI isn’t taking your clicks. It’s taking your credibility (Pete Pachal - The Media Copilot) 
From the OpEd: "A foundational concept of copyright law is that, although works are copyrightable, the underlying facts and ideas aren’t. Except now those facts travel through someone else’s lens first. That lens becomes the “first draft” the machines reuse. Will it be incomplete? Probably. Will it still harden into the default answer as AI use expands? Also probably.... The legal fights tend to focus on consent, copyright, and compensation. Fair enough. But GEO makes the deeper contest obvious: Who gets to shape meaning at scale?"
Why It Matters: In AI (specifically machine learning), "ground truth" is the verified, real-world data (labels, facts, outcomes) used as the standard or generally accepted "correct answer" to train, test, and evaluate machine learning models; the reality the AI strives to predict. It's the benchmark of accuracy and public media should have an outsized role in establishing the ground truth for each of our communities. How we get there is an open conversation we should be having in our systems.

AI + Us…

Deepfake pornography and my experience of digital violation (Samantha Smith - The Catholic Herald) 
From the OpEd: "For me the scandal was personal. My own image was among the first to be manipulated. My clothes were digitally removed. My face was plastered into sexual situations I had no control over and no desire to be involved in. I remember looking at it and feeling exposed in a way that was difficult to explain to anyone who had not experienced it. It did not matter that the image was fake. The sense of violation was real."
Why It Matters: If Christianity is an important part of our identity (and especially if you are Catholic), you may appreciate the scripture-sourced perspective in this piece. Either way, this piece is a potent reminder that the vast majority of AI deepfakes are a form of violence against women.
Related: Hadas Gold reported the larger story in CNN's Elon Musk’s xAI under fire for failing to rein in ‘digital undressing’ 
Also Related: For a more global perspective Justin Hendrix and Ramsha Jahangir's piece in Tech Policy Press is worth a read: Tracking Regulator Responses to the Grok 'Undressing' Controversy 
Still Related: Siwei Lyu's piece for The Conversation provides a comprehensible explanation for why this is getting worse: Deepfakes leveled up in 2025 – here’s what’s coming next 
And for More Background: NOVA’s How AI Deepfakes are Really Made on YouTube.

Signal creator Moxie Marlinspike wants to do for AI what he did for messaging (Dan Goodin - Ars Technica) 
From the Article: "In much the way Signal uses encryption to make messages readable only to parties participating in a conversation, Confer protects user prompts, AI responses, and all data included in them. And just like Signal, there’s no way to tie individual users to their real-world identity through their email address, IP address, or other details."
Why It Matters: I am a big fan of Signal and I'm very intrigued by the potential here in Confer. But with Signal there are two humans on either end that are ultimately responsible for their actions. With Confer, there's only one human present, and I can see that being problematic. My only concern is the accountability (or values) underpinning the model I’m using. If Confer is akin to Claude, Gemini or ChattyG, that may be fine. But if I'm talking to something more like Grok, that concerns me. Still, I'm optimistic that the intent is coming from an equitable place, so I’m going to try it out and see how it plays.

Generative Buzz…

Adobe and Runway Ink Partnership Deal (RedShark News) 
From the Article: "Under the terms of the new deal, Adobe will be Runway’s preferred API creativity partner. This means Adobe can provide its customers with early access to Runway’s latest models. This starts as of now and thus includes Runway’s new Gen-4.5, which is now available for a limited time exclusively in Adobe Firefly. For the future, the two companies will collaborate to develop new AI innovations that will be available exclusively in Adobe applications, starting with Adobe Firefly. They also state they will work directly with independent filmmakers, major studios, and others to co-develop new video capabilities that will then sit at the heart of Adobe tools."
Why It Matters: Here's another plank in Adobe's attempt to be the one stop platform for content creators. This partnership announcement feels like it perfectly embodies Adobe's 2025. And I admire their persistence-of-strategy despite a stock price that has been halved by the market in the past two years. They are clearly playing a long game.

2025 LLM Year in Review (Andrej Karpathy) 
From His TLDR: "2025 was an exciting and mildly surprising year of LLMs. LLMs are emerging as a new kind of intelligence, simultaneously a lot smarter than I expected and a lot dumber than I expected. In any case they are extremely useful and I don't think the industry has realized anywhere near 10% of their potential even at present capability."
Why It Matters: This piece is a good view into how the smarter insiders are thinking about AI as we start the new year. Karpathy is an AI researcher/founder who is also an alum of the Stanford Vision Lab, Tesla, and OpenAI. He's regularly cited as a thought leader on the topic of genAI because his summaries are rooted in deep technical understanding but often written for a lay audience.

Media Rare…

When Seeing Is No Longer Believing: The New Politics Of Truth (Steve Rosenbaum - Sustainable Media Center) 
From the OpEd: "This is the first structural point we need to understand: Video no longer anchors reality on its own. It shows a piece of the world, but the meaning of that piece has become the real battlefield....We are no longer just dealing with media literacy problems. We are dealing with psychological operations that treat information as a weapon."
Why It Matters: The last week or so, I've been thinking about the Washington Post's slogan "Democracy dies in darkness." While I still believe that is true, the corollary to it is that democracy thrives in the light. Maybe this was never the case. Maybe it was just wishful thinking. Regardless, that's not the moment we are in today. Light used to equate to truth (e.g., "see the light"). Today there are multiple versions of the truth and there is no shame if your version is not verifiable. And this all doesn't even account for generative video. In the world of public media, good documentary sound (vs. artistic sound) always requires some ancillary interpretation. But video carried with it an assumption of truth. As we think about maintaining our level of trust with the audience (see also, Kristen Muller’s essay (👇), we need to think about the fact that we cannot rely on the video=truth assumption any more.
Case in Point: The Guardian reports on their own brand being hijacked for a deepfake in: After the Bondi attack, a deepfaked Guardian video went viral. It won't be the last 

Mediated Cringe (Lara Williams - Dirt) 
From the Essay: "Affect theory is a way of understanding our emotional and bodily responses to feelings, of codifying emotions or affects, and cringing is arguably an affective experience. One of the reasons we feel the violation of social norms so acutely as an empathetic response is because embarrassment is a deeply encoded evolutionary reflex—a 'social corrective…instinct [which] probably helped our ancestors stay in the group, which was critical for survival'. Cringe deployed as an affective charge can produce an interesting tension in art; forcing us to empathize with a subject, to question why we feel so uncomfortable with the breaching of a norm, and to draw our attention to that norm and how useful or fair it is."
Why It Matters: For me, the line between earnest authenticity and cringe is narrow. I'm not sure I'll ever lose my preference for irony. But this was a fun essay to read and reflect on how everyone's cringe is a little different.

Taking journalism down to its studs (Kristen Muller - NiemanLab) 
From the Prediction: "In our old model, journalists assumed their credibility came with their institutional affiliation. Building trust with your audience was not in our job descriptions. So we built our reporting, products and distribution systems on top of a foundation that didn’t really exist. Our crisis is not about technology or finding the right revenue model: It’s structural."
Why It Matters: Ultimately, I read Muller's essay as a rumination on Trust trust as a foundational value.

The Creator Economy…

Why publishers are building their own creator networks (Sara Guaglione - Digiday) 
From the Article: “Faced with collapsing referral traffic, platform algorithm changes, waning relevance among younger audiences and the growing dominance of individual creators, publishers are running out of options. The strategy also mirrors a shift in audience loyalty: people are increasingly following people, not mastheads. 'Publishers are leaning into what they do best — curation, credibility, and audience trust — while tapping creators for personality, loyalty and built-in reach,' said Alexandra Press, chief marketing officer at talent management group Mana Talent Group....'The reality is that creators have built the kind of direct audience trust that publishers are now trying to regain,' said Nicholas Spiro, chief commercial officer of influencer marketing agency Viral Nation Talent. 'Creator-first formats can move faster, adapt more natively to platforms and drive deeper engagement.'”
Why It Matters: It's increasingly looking like those publishing organizations that do not have a creator strategy at least in the chute (if not already deployed) are falling behind. Where is your organization on that spectrum? Are creators on your radar?

YouTube’s new search filters make clearer distinctions between long-form videos and Shorts (Sam Gutelle - TubeFilter) 
From the Article: "All of these updates point to the same issue: Shorts viewership has become so massive that it is making YouTube’s search results wonky. Deprioritizing raw view counts and providing the option to sequester Shorts from other results will serve users who want to see more long-form videos they’re used to. (Just don’t expect Shorts viewership to decline — we’re well into the era of short-form dominance at this point.)"
Why It Matters: For those with a YouTube strategy (which should be all of us at this point) this recent update could be impacting search results. It’s also a further sign that a YouTube strategy really needs to be a short-form video strategy.

New DJI (And Other) Drones Now Officially Banned in the US (Andy Stout - RedShark News) 
From the Article: "As an FCC Fact Sheet makes clear, despite UAS presenting 'unacceptable risks to the national security of the United States and to the safety and security of U.S. persons', existing machines can still be flown. 'This action does not affect any previously-purchased drone. Consumers can continue to use any drone they have already lawfully purchased or acquired.' ... As far as we know, there is no current US company making consumer-oriented drones, with most manufacturers concentrating on large machines for the industrial, agricultural, and government sectors."
Why it Matters: I don’t usually do drone tech here, but this policy change is significant, and you might have missed it during the holidays. If your organization is in the market for a camera drone, you might want to buy it soon. On the other hand, one wonders if a full-on ban on flying DJI drones could be in the offing, especially as we get closer to the midterm elections (I'll just let that sink in). Because you buy something today doesn't mean you'll necessarily be allowed to fly it in the future. Caveat emptor.

Immersive Media

Immersive tech in 2025 - Now what? (Tom Ffiske - Immersive Wire) 
From the OpEd: "Much of this comes down to the fact that the market lacks the exponential elements needed for rapid growth. When you compare this to AI, the contrast is stark. AI is incredibly accessible. Anyone can use services like Google Gemini or ChatGPT to ask questions, and implementing AI into businesses is relatively achievable, with provable effects. VR, by contrast, often requires purchasing expensive hardware, which is not always supported by a compelling or practical business case. It’s still not cheap enough."
Why It Matters: Tom's summary matches my observations. I had thought a couple of times last year that we might be seeing a thaw in the xR winter. I’ll cover it here when it does happen, but I'm now thinking crypto will come back around again before xR does.

And finally…

Lifecycle of Copyright: 1930 Works in the Public Domain (Ashley Tucker - Library of Congress) And finally, the new year always means that new IP enters the public domain. This year we've got titles from Hammett and Faulkner, the first Nancy Drew mystery, the Marx Brothers, and a Rube Goldberg film featuring the Three Stooges before they were the Three Stooges (I went and found it on Tubi, it’s weird).

Have a creative, productive couple of weeks.