I finished up my Balkan excursion with a weekend visit to Belgrade, where I’ve come for nearly 20 years now. One of the most striking features of Belgrade is how the urban landscape is another surface in the Information Space.
Belgrade has a vibrant street art and graffiti scene. With truly independent media sparse, the physical environment becomes a contested information space in a society perpetually caught between east and west and mired in historical memory and grievance while under sway of competitive authoritarianism. The streetscape becomes another battleground.
You’ll see graffiti from nationalists that Kosovo is Serbia, “death to NATO,” and even the odd 1389 reference to the origin story of Serbian identity. The country is going on two years of student protests following a train station canopy collapse that killed 16 and became a symbol of government corruption. Student protestors started tagging buildings “students are winning” and FCK SNS (SNS is the ruling party), only for the government’s supporters to overwrite it with “Serbia is winning” and FCK BLK (they call the students “blokaderi” for being disruptive) in patriotic colors. As my father-in-law tells me when I ask, “It’s complicated.”
I screwed up a couple things in my postcard from the Balkans: Andrić wrote about Višegrad, not Mostar; and it was just 15 years since the fighting in Croatia when I first traveled there. Izvenite.
Today: TRB Audience Summit is a month away, BTS moves from marketing to core to creative product, how publishers are managing AI and editorial trust, and a conversation with Famous Birthdays CEO Evan Britton on surviving Google Zero.
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The typical open, click, and click-to-open rates — and the range most programs land in
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The metric to trust (not open rates)
TRB Audience Summit is a month away
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On the latest episode of People vs Algorithms, we discussed the changing nature of provenance. The future of human creative production is to bring the audience into the process, ideally as participants. That’s the idea behind our PvA Field Notes, the private social network we’re building around PvA. It was there I was introduced to Bobby Fingers, an Irish artist who makes elaborate YouTube videos of miniature dioramas of pop culture ephemera. His appeal is in large part the absurd lengths he goes in his production – and he shows his work. My prediction: We’ll see behind-the-scenes content rise in importance and become less a marketing tool and more a part of creative product. Holding things back for a big launch is already falling by the wayside in game development. The neatly packaged finished product will lose out to an iterative process where the audience actively shapes the product.
Can publishers win on trust in the AI age?
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei this weekend went on X to address criticisms of Anthropic, including the charge that his doomerism about AI is a major cause many distrust it. Amodei disputed that his overall messaging around the technology has been “disproportionately negative” – on cue, Geoff Hinton popped up to say AI would cause “mass unemployment” – but situated the angst and data center backlash not to the CCP but “fundamentally a crisis of trust.” (His idea for improving AI’s image: cure cancer.)
“Ordinary people don’t trust companies, governments or the tech industry and always suspect that we are cooking up some new way to screw them over,” he wrote.
Publishers have felt that trust erosion for decades. AI is fascinating for news publishes because it’s equally a threat and an opportunity. The distribution threat is obvious. AI’s second-order impacts hit first with a reordering of search referrals. Even People Inc is down to 21% of traffic coming from Google.
Early efforts to embed AI into workflows have met derision from newsrooms filled with generally grumpy and risk averse journalists and, to be fair, I’ve yet to see how AI has led to breakthrough news products. The New York Post’s creation of an AI chatbot called Hamilton is welcome, although I have my doubts this will stop the bleeding.
In collaboration with our partners at WordPress VIP, we surveyed leading publishers about how they’re handling the balance of risk and opportunity with AI. Most were split.
The Financial Times had to post a humiliating editorial note on an opinion piece – from a Harvard professor, no less – that it was “condensed” by AI. Sure Jan, it was just condensed. Anthrompic’s move to watermark AI writing is not just a reaction to over-regulation by the European Union but a sign of how AI creative output is broadly distrusted.
Our research showed how hesitant news publishers are at going whole hog into using AI to produce news. Whale 60% said their AI investments had risen over the past year, the spending is directed at workflows and efficiency mostly.
The embarrassing scandal at Forbes after its editor in chief took a $6 million payment from a commercial partner in its accolades business is an example of the bigger threats to editorial credibility. This is a tough business. Making money requires compromises. The real risk to credibility is these rackets – I use the term broadly without value judgment – create not just the appearance of impropriety but the reality of it.
Why TIME’s email engagement is soaring
TIME’s newsletters reach millions of readers every week. But until recently, they were stuck with clunky workflows, limited insights, and flat engagement. After migrating 13 newsletters and millions of subscribers to beehiiv (with zero downtime) things changed fast. Open rates on “Inside TIME” jumped 63.8%. Click through rates across their portfolio increased to 11.7%. Editors now publish faster, with better tools and real-time insights. TIME proves that even the most established media brands can evolve and thrive when they own their email strategy.
How Famous Birthdays managed ‘Google Zero’
Famous Birthdays is a classic open web publishing success story. Evan Britton bootstrapped the publisher to fill a simple need: People were seeking out information about the new crop of influencer and creator celebrities. Traffic peaked at 25 million three years ago. Evan wanted to sale it to 100 million and be a top ComScore site. Now, traffic is down to 20 million. Now, it’s focused more on “intentional” traffic and building community around that while building out a B2B information business. “A lot of those users are coming to our site because they know Famous Birthdays,” Evan told me. “They didn’t just randomly stumble onto it.”
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