This is a long shot, but is anyone here in Boise, Idaho?

I’m hoping to go to a conference there April 18-23.

If anyone has a space to stay, or even if you want to swap houses for my place in SW Wyoming…I might want to do that?

I have a Flickr to post pictures of dead animals

When I have something else I want to host somewhere I put them on Flickr too

I took some pictures of my friends after we carved pumpkins just for fun on a rooftop

Some of the pics were cool so I put them on the Flickr

I look at my Flickr stats and BY FAR the most popular is a picture of my friend

???? He’s just sitting there smiling with his pumpkin

I tell him he’s somehow popular on Flickr?? Who of my network was looking at all this blood and guts and bones and decided to stop on a picture of a guy with a pumpkin??

He says “maybe the traffic is because I use that as my dating app pic and my potential matches are reverse image searching it?”

I remind him that if any of his potential dates find the origin of that pic, they will assume he took the rest of the pictures on the Flickr account

Which is mostly pictures of carcasses

The fellowship I did is open for its next round of applicants! I STRONGLY recommend this for any staff/seriously applying to be staff journalist.

• Your chance of getting accepted are VERY high. They accept like 50+ people per year and no one seems to know about this fellowship. Between me and the one person who took my advice to apply last year, the acceptance rate is 100%
• You get free training, a professional group, a paid mentor of your choosing, job references, etc. You can even ask for more (conference funding, classes.)
• Depending on how you swing it you could literally get $50k tacked onto your salary. At the very least your host institution will get a big financial break. Bay Nature got them to pay my entire salary. So, if you’re applying to jobs, you can tell them “Hey guess what, you can get an $83k journalist for $33k, I’m your most cost-effective candidate.”
• You can work at any real journalism outlet.

I’ve tried AI with art and AI with journalism, and their results seem to be the same:

Beautiful, but wrong.

I put in “Mount Diablo in the summer with golden grass in the style of the Hudson River Artists.” I get a beautiful image of a mountain that is not Mount Diablo.

Someone at the NorCal Science Writers Association got an AI to write about the NorCal Science Writers Association. The AI produced some lovely paragraphs that make perfect sense but half the facts are wrong.

So…is AI at least on the path to replacing journalists?

My opinion: It depends on what kind of journalism you mean.

TLDR:

Short articles with no original reporting: Maybe partially.

Real journalism: No.

Here’s what my job was at N*wsweek:

• Be forced to move so I could work in Manhattan for insultingly low pay
• Pitch ideas
• Editor says no, actually, she has a much better idea: the idea is something I had pitched yesterday so now we’re a day late to the party
• Find what is doing well online already
• Read what others have written and regurgitate it into my article
• Find the source and cite them (not sure whether the boss wanted me to do this but I did)
• Find the author of the study, schedule a phone interview that is very inconvenient for both of us, and get a quote that is literally the same as what the press release said.
• Write furiously, no time for fact-checking!
• Find a picture and video that we have the license to go with the article. Most of the time they were completely unrelated.
• Negotiate with my editor so the headline was technically true, even if it was grossly misleading. Most people took some terrible hit to their reputation for writing under a headline they didn’t choose.
• Check which potential words in the headline had the most google results, in a completely counterintuitive and made-up SEO idea
• Not tweet the article or tell the sources about it, nor expect the outlet to tweet it

These are mostly things that not only could be done by an AI, but maybe should be, if the AI is advanced enough and was checked by a human. All the young journalists who had their reputations tarnished are real human beings who were burned out and broken by their time at N*wsweek. The robot doesn’t care.

Alternatively, I’d consider discontinuing this type of content entirely. If you don’t have anything new to say, or a new way to frame it, don’t say it at all, you’ll just introduce error, whether you’re a human or a robot. Just get a content-exchange license and post the original article you’re aggregating. This wasn’t just make-work, this was actively damaging to all the writers and the readers.

On the other hand, here was my job at Bay Nature:

• Find a topic by cultivating relationships with real humans, reading, exploring nature etc.
• Discuss in a meeting whether the article is a good idea: Is it original? Is it important? Is there an ethical issue with reporting it? A lot of the ethical issues we considered were super niche: you probably wouldn’t think they’re issues at all unless you knew a lot about the bay area, nature, and journalism.
• Consider interviews carefully: who is a stakeholder? Who has a significant bias? Whose voice needs to be represented?
• Ask: What kind of questions are readers going to ask? Who is this for?
• Interview people in real life. Include details that wouldn’t have been in an email. Use your human brain to determine what is interesting and important. Sometimes things that seem irrelevant turn out to be relevant and engaging.
• Cite all sources. A different staff member checks each fact.

I do not believe this type of journalism could ever be done by an AI. Go ahead, find me an AI that can meet up with a trail runner, learn her life story, and select the facts that relate back to the topic of dandelions in a way that engages readers. I don’t think AI’s can really get any information that doesn’t already exist in text, although I know it can synthesize information and come up with new ways to say it.

And, I think this speaks to what the value of journalism really is. So many people think “I learned how to write an essay in high school, and my spelling and grammar are fine, so I’m basically a journalist, right?” No. That’s like saying “I can put paint on a canvas, therefore I’m basically a professional fine artist.” Yes, most people can do most jobs, but the value isn’t in having something technically done, it’s in putting your skills to work and doing something new, important, useful, and ethical.

That’s just my experience and someone who knows AI better, and also knows journalism, would probably give you a better answer.

Do you ever find as you get older that “fail” videos get less funny

In addition to the ones that are actually worrying/show actual danger, even the ones that don’t do that are so meh

Like oh that guy hit the bar while high jumping or pole vaulting? That’s how it works though, you keep going higher until you hit the bar. Literally every athlete hits the bar at least 3 times per competition (in high jump anyway)

Someone slipped on the ice? Yeah it’s ice

Someone messed up an art project? I mean yeah, art is hard

“Failing” has become such a normal and standard occurrence in my life that it really doesn’t warrant laughing or even pointing out unless there’s a better way to do it. I don’t even mean that as like, I’m offended by it, just, I don’t laugh when someone blinks either, it’s not rude, it’s just silly to act surprised when someone does something so common

thinking about the time I told someone I hadn’t written an assigned essay yet because it took the weekend to decide the topic.

Him: “Oh, that’s terrible that you haven’t finished your essay! Mine’s done!”

Me: “Yeah…what’s your topic?”

Him: “Oh, I haven’t decided.”

Pet epitath: My heart has been torn asunder from mine body, how I loved this furry creature with the intensity of a thousand suns, if love could have saved her she would have lived forever, the perfect creature gained her wings

Human epitath: Joan Smith 1968-2020

I think the expansion of remote work is great for journalism, and by that I mean both journalists and you, the reader.

I had to move to New York City to work at Newsweek. I stayed there afterward because that’s where the big, national news outlets are: AP, ABC, Fox, NBC, Time, Vice, obviously New York Times and Wall Street Journal, etc. (To be fair some of these have smaller branches elsewhere.)

I worked briefly at The Independent (US branch) and Vox, and had to bike in every day. If I had moved to Wyoming or Suburban California, I would not have had those opportunities. But there was nothing in the office that I couldn’t have done at home.

These are big national outlets, the voice of a nation, representing America. And a huge percentage of them are in the same city.

You’re not gonna get a lot of sons-of-farmers writing the news of the nation because they’re not as often in NYC. You won’t read the words of someone who needs or wants to take care of a family member outside of NYC. You’re not getting anyone who can’t afford the move, even in the rare occasions of the job paying well.

We journalists work a lot to minimize bias and improve fairness and accuracy. And there are tons of diversity initiatives. But the diversity of experiences and perspectives is inherently limited when you limit your staff to one city.

Someone just spent $105 on this angsty comic book I added English speech bubbles to (over the Russian)

It’s not a good business model,

it’s just interesting to see how much people will pay to be sad for 1 hour

The cool thing about hyperfixations is that, while they don’t always last long, they imbue you just a little bit of knowledge and skills that last last a very, very long time

Like I don’t actually know how to play piano but a few years ago I marked up a keyboard and watched a tutorial over and over and over for weeks until I learned Tranz by Gorillaz. Now any time I’m at a public piano I can play that, and people probably assume I know less obscure songs too

Like 15 years ago I decided I wanted to draw a different animal almost every time I made a piece of art so now I know like 60 different antelope species. Fun at museums

And last month I really wanted to read this Russian comic book so I learned Cyrillic and a few phrases. Just so I could troubleshoot Google Translate better

To be fair a lot of stuff I learned generally never comes up. But now I’m Talented And Interesting, and most of that can be explained by “once I was obsessed with…”

If you are going to college, please keep in mind the enormous impact the price will have on your life and don’t make any rash decisions! If you can wait a year and save $100k after establishing residency, do it. If you can find a program in another country that will be just as good and cost $100k less, do it. If you need to take a year to think or apply to more schools to negotiate financial aid packages against each other, do it.

A friend of mine is sad that her grad school is making it hard to reinstate her former acceptance, which happened at a time when she was supposed to pay $25,000. Newly accepted students get *paid* $12,000 to go. But she’s sad because she feels like there’s some metaphor of returning to the application she lost and wants to pay the original amount…what metaphor is worth $37,00???

Another friend of mine is married to someone who was working at a prestigious university and got free housing and tuition for a spouse. My friend wanted to go to Med school and got accepted to a different school across the country. Because he didn’t want to take the GRE for the prestigious school or stay in that city, he moved away from his partner and spent $300,000+ on the other.

If you’re young, you might understand having these feelings of catharsis and symbolism and just wanting to get out and go. Especially if your parents are paying your bills, prices may just look like arbitrary numbers. You may not understand the deep and long-standing impact that a huge amount of debt will bring you. I can tell you I’ve had a LOT of emotions about my student debt, real practical ones that won’t go away by reading a Medium article about acceptance. You can choose to be inspired by the better financial aid option, and you can get over the stress of a GRE in a few days, and sending one email asking for financial aid stops being awkward after a few minutes.

Debt doesn’t stop hurting after a few minutes. Student debt has harmed my physical health, because I couldn’t afford to live in an area without constant noise, resulting in years of sleep deprivation. The stress of nearly running out of money multiple times, spending so much time applying for benefits and getting crap food at the food bank. Trying to get yourself some $30 comfort then feeling guilty. Then eating cheaper food that goes against your morals and feeling guilty again. Spending a week sick out of work because you’re afraid of the copay. Spending a year in so much pain you take a ton of Advil and get ulcers because you don’t know how to afford the dentist, and then you miss work, and you’re afraid of getting fired and losing your income and housing…all this has negatively impacted my work, and didn’t I go to grad school to get a better job?

I just—please take your financial aid options VERY seriously. Your feelings may be strong right now, that you really don’t want to take some test or ask for financial aid, so you just pay the extra $50k, $100k, whatever, no big deal. But your feelings will be strong for the rest of your life when you figure out you can never afford children or property or chickens or art or basically human decency because you’re paying loans instead.

man i know we’re not supposed to gatekeep or anything but it’s hard to watch someone with no debt and tens of thousands in savings go on her third long-distance vacation in three months with her new boobjob after collecting $37,000 in donations from mutual aid sheets

once i met a con staffer who said “we don’t allow advanced dance moves on the dance floor because people could try it and injure themselves” 

and i’m thinking we’re underestimating people’s ability to see cool things and understand that they take practice/skill/research. like sure there is value in not promoting bad behavior and viewers not getting enough context! but!

please gang the real world is full of expert skiers on double black diamonds, we don’t have to censor them because some people can’t ski 

there are dog owners on the street who know how to take care of dogs, we don’t have to censor them because “someone might see them and get a dog without researching it”

please don’t turn the internet into a place where no one is allowed to post 10 seconds of the thing they spent 10 years learning because “someone could try it and get hurt.” take some responsibility for your self pls

Bleed Paint on the Manhattan Bridge. Stencilized art of Pseudomanitou.