Welcome to media_gossip, Embedded’s special weekly edition of … media gossip, sent every Friday. You’re getting this because you subscribe to Embedded, but you can opt out here.
“I’m in a lot of journalist groups. Journalists are using AI constantly. I think there are a lot of people who are very performative about AI online. They’ll spend all day shitting on AI 24/7, and then they’ll come into the group chat saying, ‘By the way, does anyone know how to use this new Claude tool?’” — Taylor Lorenz in On Substack
Nick’s Riff This Week
On shame and taking a “sexual inventory”: “We have changed how we talk and think about sexual conduct, but we haven’t bettered our actual sexual conduct. And avoiding each other is not the solution.”
Plus, I answered the Ask a Sober Oldster Q&A.
I try my best to keep my finger on the pulse, so of course I finally watched The Devil Wear’s Prada 2 on my flight home from Paris earlier this week. It’s certainly not good, the script propped up solely by the talents of Anne Hathaway, Meryl Streep, and Stanley Tucci, but its representation of journalism was much more palatable than, say, The Bold Type, which I had to turn off after five minutes.
It accurately paints the problems decimating the industry, but unfortunately offers no solutions other than “Maybe find a good billionaire to own your publication?” Those don’t exist. Next!
One thing I thought it illustrated well, though, is the media’s relationship with advertisers, a topic I was already thinking about after last week’s media_gossip, which included an item about The Cut posting a Meta Glasses sponsorship while publishing an article critical of “surveillance chic.”
When you work in edit, you’re often separated from the moves the publication’s ad sales team are making, which is precisely how these kerfuffles happen. But as the host of a podcast, I’m now much closer to these decisions.
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