Notes on the work

The United States filed a twenty-page statement of interest backing OpenAI's fair-use defense on September 1. Its argument that a ruling for the New York Times would hurt independent publishers rests on one example: a writer using a language model to make an image that would otherwise require a photographer or a license.

The clip will do bigger numbers on YouTube than it would have done on ABC. That is the problem. Nineteen Texas affiliates filed equal-time notices over a ten-minute segment they had no part in booking, and the audience that made late night matter politically is the one that does not go looking.

Three weeks, three stories, one river running out of room to compromise — from a hundred-year-low flow in Wyoming to a reservation near the Mexican border with the oldest water right in the Lower Basin.

Sixty-four years ago today Kennedy said the sentence this site is named after — "We choose to go to the moon" — and everyone quotes the line that follows it instead. The half that echoes in my thinking is the one that few remember: a hard goal with a date on it is a measuring instrument, and it is the only thing I have found that reliably finishes a film.

Sean Fennessey says there is an inherent conflict in a film show licensed to the studio whose films it covers. He is right. I negotiated archive access with ABC and Disney for a documentary about their own newsroom, and the constraint never arrived as a note on a cut.

Jim VandeHei's bet is that AI can automate everything a local market needs except the journalism itself. But what it automates is desk work, and the cost that actually broke local news is one reporter covering an area larger than Rhode Island.

Ask why Fox, CNN and MSNBC cover a story the way they do, and most people reach for ideology. A new study with Valerie Martinez-Ebers and Aida Ramusovic found something narrower, and more useful.

John Johnson was the only person to anchor at WABC, WCBS and WNBC. Getting his story on screen meant working archive by archive, and locking narration last, not first.

The story doesn't fail because the reporting was bad. It airs late, or airs smaller than it should, because the file couldn't move fast enough to matter.

The 1973 toilet paper shortage he only joked about is the story people reach for first. Until a study I co-authored in 2021, nobody had actually tested whether Carson could move opinion.