"Leaves" being another word for "fired"

The Muck Rack Weekly newsletter includes some of the most talked about stories in the journalism and public relations communities over the past week, and does not necessarily reflect the editorial opinion of Muck Rack.

Media statistic of the week

No surprise here, but this week’s issue is pretty AI-heavy, so we thought it would make sense to offer up an AI-related stat.

Muck Rack surveyed 1,000+ journalists along with International Journalists’ Network, Society of Professional Journalists and more to better understand the journalism landscape in 2024.

Out of the journalists who say they use AI, most rely on it for behind the scenes work. 

• 52% use it for brainstorming
• 51% use it for research. 

See the full survey here.

This past week in the media industry

More problems in AI land…

A few quick bullets on AI this week:

• “OpenAI is asking for proof that NYT articles are actually original — and the NYT is calling the request ‘irrelevant, improper, and harassing,’” writes Sherin Shibu for Entrepreneur. More details here. 
• The New York Times sued OpenAI, but they also seem to be experimenting with the product, according to reporting from The Intercept’s Nikita Mazurov. “The Times’s use of the technology came to light thanks to leaked code showing that it developed a tool that would use OpenAI to generate headlines for articles and ‘help apply The New York Times styleguide’ — performing functions that, if applied in the newsroom, are normally undertaken by editors at the newspaper,” Mazurov writes. See the rest of the story and the New York Times’ response. 

‘We don’t agree to questions in advance’

“The Philadelphia radio host who said she used questions prepared by President Joe Biden’s campaign in one of his first post debate interviews has left the station, WURD Radio’s president and CEO announced Sunday,” reports Gillian McGoldrick for The Philadelphia Inquirer. 

Here’s what happened: Host of The Source on WURD 96.1 FM/900 AM, Andrea Lawful-Sanders, said on CNN that she had received a list of eight questions from the Biden campaign. She used four during her interview with President Biden. 

"Leaves" being another word for "fired," writes Victoria A. Brownworth on X.

The Biden campaign’s response? “‘It’s not at all an uncommon practice for interviewees to share topics they would prefer,’ Biden campaign spokesperson Lauren Hitt said in a statement to the Washington Post. She added that agreeing on topics in advance was not a prerequisite of the interview.”

The New York Times’ Michael Shear has some additional details here. 

“When interviewing politicians in any party 1. We don’t agree to questions in advance 2. We don’t agree to questions in advance 3. We don’t agree to questions in advance 4. And we certainly don’t agree to asking questions they’ve given us in advance,” adds Chris Vanderveen.

More on Biden

President Biden sat down with ABC News anchor George Stephanopoulos for an interview after last week’s much-discussed debate. Alexandra Hutzler from ABC News recaps some of the highlights. 

"It was a bad episode," Biden said. "No indication of any serious condition. I was exhausted. I didn't listen to my instincts in terms of preparing and -- and a bad night."

“This is fine 😬” writes Alec Luhn.

Threads first year

Threads just celebrated its first anniversary. Platformer’s Casey Newton sat down with Meta’s Adam Mosseri to discuss the app’s first year and future.

Here’s how Mosseri summed up the first year:

“It has been a wild year. Given that we had 100 million registrations in the first four and a half days, expectations went through the roof immediately. Then, the product went through what every new product does, which is a novelty phase where everyone tries it out. After a couple of weeks, the numbers went down in terms of actual daily users. Then all of a sudden, we were a complete failure in everyone's eyes. And then when we started to really grow again, and actually get significantly bigger than even those initial registration numbers — all of a sudden, if we don't beat Twitter by the end of the year, we're a failure again.”

Threads has reached more than 175 million monthly active users, reports Alex Heath for The Verge. 

Over on The Washington Post, Taylor Lorenz writes that Threads is struggling to win over content creators.

“It’s an auxiliary thing, I don’t think any of the creators I have even post on Threads,” said Keith Dorsey, founder and CEO of Young Guns Entertainment, a social media talent management company in Atlanta that works with hundreds of content creators with large followings across multiple platforms. “We’d forget it’s there if it wasn’t for the automatic notifications.” 

News poems?

Poet and professor Aaron Dworkin says he “wanted to take a snapshot of an issue and express it through the medium of poetry,” so he dreamed up a new field and an institute to support it. 

For Nieman Lab, Neel Dhanesha spoke with the Institute of Poetjournalism founder, “Poetjournalism” slouches forth from Michigan to be born.

“Dworkin has big plans for poetjournalism: he’s currently courting donors to fund a $150,000 prize, which he says is the largest in either poetry or journalism,” Jess McCabe quotes from the piece, adding, “I don't know whether to say please do or please don't start pitching me news poems (newspoems?)”

A few more

• “It was snappy and colorful. It was new and different. And much of the rest of the newspaper industry seemed to hate it.” For The Washington Post, Paul Farhi explores the legacy of USA Today.
• A cool new feature for Spotify Podcasts: Spotify is launching the ability to leave comments on podcasts, reports The Verge’s Jay Peters.
• The Washington Post’s executive editor Matt Murray announced this week that managing editor Krissah Thompson will take a step back from some duties to run the newsroom process building “the third newsroom.” 
• An inspirational story from the New York Times’ Mario Koran writes about his unlikely path from jail to journalism.
• Chalkbeat plans to launch a new outlet called Healthbeat this summer for local coverage of public health, its co-founder Elizabeth Green told Axios’ Sara Fischer.

From the Muck Rack team

PR pros have to keep tabs on all sorts of topics and industries—including their own. That's why Muck Rack conducts an annual state of PR report, where over 1,000 industry professionals shed light on the current PR landscape.

You can download the full report to see the top challenges PR pros face, how they measure results, what’s next for PR and more.

To dive deeper, Muck Rack's CEO Greg Galant hosted a live panel to analyze the survey's results with three PR leaders:

• Michael Kaye, director of brand marketing and communications at ARCHER and OKCupid
• Fatou B. Barry, founder of PR Girl Manifesto
• Nicole Flowers, VP of Media Relations Services at Flowers Communications Group

Here are a few key takeaways on the 2024 State of PR live panel.