A slow descent into this confusing mess

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

A new Pew Research Center analysis of link rot and digital decay “shows just how fleeting online content actually is.” Among the findings, 38% of webpages that existed in 2013 are no longer accessible a decade later. 

Athena Chapekis, Samuel Bestvater, Emma Remy and Gonzalo Rivero go deeper on the analysis, which also revealed 23% of news webpages have at least one broken link, as do around 1 in 5 government pages. The ripple effect extends to Wikipedia, with 11% of all references linked on the Wikipedia pages they sampled no longer accessible: “On about 2% of source pages containing reference links, every link on the page was broken or otherwise inaccessible, while another 53% of pages contained at least one broken link.” 

This past week in the media industry 

Banned in the U.K

One of the big stories making the rounds last week was Rachel Aviv’s 13,000-word New Yorker piece about the Lucy Letby murder trial in the U.K. and questions surrounding the evidence, A British Nurse Was Found Guilty of Killing Seven Babies. Did She Do It?

Sarah Scire said that, until she’d read Aviv’s piece, she “might have described the Lucy Letby case as well-covered…Little of the coverage, however, questioned the sturdiness of the case against Letby as Aviv’s piece does.”

Scire spoke with Aviv about her reporting for a Nieman Lab Q&A, “Impossible to approach the reporting the way I normally would”: How Rachel Aviv wrote that New Yorker story on Lucy Letby.

“The only time I unironically use 🚨in the @NiemanLab Slack is when new work from @RachelAviv drops,” Scire shares. “On her reporting methods and why her new blockbuster @NewYorker article is banned in the U.K.”

As Gina Rushton says, “So many great insights into Aviv's writing process in this interview about the Letby piece.”

As for the banned-in-the-U.K. part, per Bron Maher of the Press Gazette, New Yorker defies contempt risk to publish Lucy Letby story in UK print edition: “The case may set up a showdown between England’s justice system and the magazine.”

Daniel Greenfield observes, “the UK, like Australia, seems to believe that it can and should censor the internet to prevent news it doesn't like from being published. and the more the internet is concentrated, the easier it will be to do.”

The 2024 rendition

Blair Pleasant isn’t alone in saying, “I'm not liking this - @GoogleAI will make it harder for real news organizations to survive.” She links to Oliver Darcy’s CNN story, News publishers sound alarm on Google’s new AI-infused search, warn of ‘catastrophic’ impacts.

The AI integration means “users will soon no longer have to click on the links displayed in search results to find the information they are seeking,” Darcy notes, and then he explains what that means for news publishers:

“On its surface that might sound convenient, but for news publishers — many of whom are already struggling with steep traffic declines — the revamped search experience will likely cause an even further decrease in audience, potentially starving them of readers and revenue.”

Dave Lucas thinks this is “Why your local news outlets (radio, TV and newspaper) are about to become more important than ever!” while Steven Waldman wonders, “Does this strengthen the argument for taxing tech companies to help save local news?”

In the meantime, “I keep hearing that 1979 song ‘Video killed the radio star’ in my head,” Karen Asp says. “The 2024 rendition? AI killed the journalist pros (sadly, my career has crashed as a result). This is downright scary.”

In his piece for Slate, Nitish Pahwa takes a closer look at What Google doesn’t want you to know about their huge A.I. update, and Danno E. Cabeza highlights the fact that the “article from @Slate about #AI news dropped the following bomb. This speaks to a trend we’ve long since noticed at @asforfootball, though I’m less sure what to do about it.”

“It’s true: Google search results are full of rubbish now. It’s been a slow descent into this confusing mess, starting in 2018–and it’s about to get worse,” says Belinda Barnet. On the plus side, “This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for Bing.”

And here’s one more, from John Herrman at New York Magazine, on Google’s all-in investment in AI. As he explains it, “the rise of the ai ‘assistant’ – and of the user as a training corpus – is a new sort of privacy disaster.”

Why not?

Last up, Michael Roston says he “had no idea publishers were getting paid to make specific content for Apple News,” which may be why Ben Smith is calling this a “Big @maxwelltani story on a huge, unnoticed story in media: The rise and rise of Apple News.” 

Check out that story from Max Tani of Semafor, As clicks dry up for news sites, could Apple’s news app be a lifeline? 

As Jeremy Rees says, “The news media has tried web, mobile, social media, aggregators, Google….why not Apple+?” 

While we’re at it, Alexei Oreskovic has come up with this “Dream news app -Monthly fee for customized bundle of publications: 1-2 local news sites; 2-3 national/international; 2-3 specialty news (business, sports, etc). -A la carte one-click payment for ‘out of network’ articles I want to read.”

But Rasmus Nielsen reminds us, “There are no platform opportunities without platform risks,” quoting from the piece, “Of course [Apple] could wake up one day and decide, like Facebook, that it no longer really wants to be in the news business.”

More notable media stories

• According to a recent Pew Research Center survey, 39% of Americans say it is at least somewhat important that they get news from journalists who share their political views.
• At The Nation, Jane Braxton Little examines how News Deserts Are Obscuring the Breadth of Climate Disasters.
• Benjamin Mullin of The New York Times reports on an anonymously-funded new editing layer adding angst inside NPR.
• Laura Wagner of The Washington Post has details on “latest revolt by journalists at a newspaper owned by Alden Global Capital”: Journalists sue Chicago Tribune owner alleging pay discrimination.
• From Charlotte Klein of Vanity Fair, meet Charlotte Behrendt, “the Inspector General” of the New York Times Newsroom. Bill Grueskin highlights “How NYT’s internal-investigations czar is described by newsroom employees: ‘Police interrogator meets prosecutor, ‘Management’s hammer, ‘Bullying/threatening, ‘Miss Chop-Their-Heads-Off, ‘Humorless lawyer from a union-busting firm.’”
• In a Washington Post op-ed, photojournalist Louie Palu writes about how the movie ‘Civil War’ gets war photography dangerously wrong.
• It’s got a name now, and “It's not ‘Spulu,’” says Todd Spangler, who links to his reporting for Variety, Disney, Fox and WBD Unveil Name of Sports-Streaming Venture: Venu Sports.
• Threads has started testing a TweetDeck-like feed of real-time posts. Tom Warren has details at The Verge.
• One more stat for you this week, via Eleanor Hawkins of Axios: “Eight in 10 Americans have been stumped by emoji use, according to a new report from language education platform Preply.” For the record, the most confusing emoji is 💅.

From the Muck Rack Team

As we celebrate Muck Rack’s milestone 15th birthday and toast to the future, we thought we’d mark the occasion by compiling some of the best PR advice from industry professionals. We asked communicators to share their best PR advice in 15 words or less to help you on your PR journey. Head over to the blog to find out what they said.