Our coronavirus newsletter is better than yours

Technology, media and audio news digest. Also, what's behind the surge of the coronavirus newsletters.

Welcome to the FWIW newsletter about tech, media & audio written by David Tvrdon. 🌐 Read it online and consider subscribing.

This week is a little bit different because I had to tend to some family matters and so I put together “only” a tech / media / audio news digest. Don’t worry, more original essays are coming next week. Thanks for understanding.

---

Tech / media / audio news digest

Now almost every news organization has a Coronavirus newsletter. The New York Times has gone for the weekday format (same as The Washington Post), Quartz says they will send you information few times a week, BuzzFeed News will send you a weekly digest and also The Economist is preparing a coronavirus newsletter to launch soon. Of course, you could have a regularly updated article like this one from BBC News, though an SEO friendly story does not build a relationship with audiences, you want to start by getting to know each other and what better way than exchanging contacts. Digiday writes:

Publishers and the rest of the digital ecosystem are caught in limbo as they wait for Google to decide how to replace third-party cookies and whether they can effectively identify audiences in the open marketplace. This forces some to think more strategically about how they can “own [their] owned audience” and drive more email registrations.

🎧 AI in the newsroom. Part of the JournalismAI project at the London School of Economics’ media think-tank Polis different case-studies in using machine learning and AI in the newsrooms are presented. The latest comes from Finland, where the second-largest newspaper publisher Alma Media built a neural network, that could predict whether an article will be successful in converting the reader into a subscriber before the article was published. And it worked. [LSE Polis]

At first, we taught the Finnish language to the model with the full content of Finnish Wikipedia, then we taught it the correct news style with the full archives of Alma Media. We also used Universal Language-Model Fine-tuning, which allows the language model to be effectively used in other contexts. In the end, three different regression models were used for predictions. Finally, the model had to be fine-tuned and the prediction model changed to make it work in a daily newsroom. First, the predictions were presented as actual numbers, and that made users focus on the differences between predicted and actual numbers. When the model was changed to predict five categories, aligned with newsroom targets, it started to work well. The quote from Alma Media’s project lead was: “Expectations exceeded”.

🤦‍♂️ Tech Survey 2020. The Verge has conducted its first national tech survey. Americans believe that Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Netflix, and YouTube have an overall positive effect on society. On the other hand Twitter, Slack, Instagram, and Facebook came out as having a negative effect. The most trusted companies are Microsoft and Amazon. This is surprising most of all for Microsoft which fell from grace twenty years ago when facing an antitrust lawsuit. [The Verge]

ℹ️ Hey Google, read it. Google Assistant can now read or translate websites and Android app content, the new feature announced at CES has arrived first to Android phones. It’s available in 42 languages (Slovak included). You can trigger the feature by simply saying “Hey Google, read it” or “Hey Google, read this page.” [VentureBeat]

A golden age for Eastern European tech. Another venture capitalist is looking closer towards Europe, this time it’s Tim Draper, the billionaire Silicon Valley venture capitalist, with his Draper Venture Network. Draper, whose investments include Tesla, SpaceX, and Twitter, is not the only US venture capitalist to recently shift focus to Europe, in 2019 19% of funding rounds into European startups included an American investor, compared with just 7% a year earlier, according to Atomico’s State of European Tech report. [Sifted.eu]

---

Catch me on Twitter or LinkedIn. Was this forwarded to you? Subscribe over here👈