Notices by Brian Boyer (brianboyer@mastodon.social)

@skinnylatte I have found it to be positive. But also looking at old photographs hits like a ton of bricks.

Folks equate public media with NPR and PBS, but this ain’t about killing a couple Washington newsrooms.

If CPB is cut it would mean the death of most public TV and radio stations, nationwide. That would be the end of the only news source in many, many places.

The big city ones would survive, but the small ones (almost all of them) go kaput.

Not surprising that they’re gunning for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. I’ve got more than a little public media PTSD, but dang, this would be very bad. https://www.theverge.com/2024/11/20/24301975/elon-musk-vivek-ramaswamy-doge-plan

Add on the very real possibility that congress will hand the White House the ability to murder nonprofits on a whim, and we’re looking at some very dark times for local news. https://act.eff.org/action/tell-congress-not-to-weaponize-the-treasury-department-against-nonprofits

Map nerds: Let’s say I want to provide a way for people to find a free paper. Would it make sense to add newspaper distribution boxes to OSM? It seems there’s a method… https://help.openstreetmap.org/questions/72086/free-newspaper-distribution-boxes …but would they show up on maps that people use? (Google, Apple, etc.) Is there a better way to approach this? #OpenStreetMap

Say what you will about the pivot to video but AFAIK it mainly hurt the suckers (like my newsroom) who took the bait.

I’d be indifferent to the big media companies selling themselves off on the cheap to AI except that it seems like this’ll take the rest of us down with them.

Let’s say the AI crap worked perfectly. And all the training data produced good results. As a newsroom, what have you gained? A few bucks? At the expense of losing a direct relationship with your audience.

I mean, *maybe* the smart bet is to take the money and presume the tech shops will *fail* at disintermediation? But I doubt folks are thinking that far ahead. These seem like short-term bets.