Study Hall Digest 1/7/2019

By Study Hall staff writer Allegra Hobbs (@allegraehobbs)

Welcome to the new year, friends. I’m sorry to report I become cornier and more unabashedly earnest with each trip around the sun, so I jotted down some resolutions on one of my neglected planner’s many, many blank pages — one of those resolutions is to better budget my time with the help of my planner, so I’m off to an underwhelming start.

I’m realizing how important it is for me to maintain some semblance of a routine and to be disciplined in my habits so my life doesn’t devolve into chaos. My biggest impediment is the fact that I don’t intrinsically respect lists or schedules, so I tend to make them, then casually disregard them. I’ve decided this is because the stakes are too low — so I’m going to be disappointed in myself? I’ve been disappointed in myself for 27 years. If anyone has any advice for upping the stakes of my fledgling schedule-keeping — like, short of a sniper positioned on the roof across from my apartment — I welcome any and all advice. 2019 is going to be the year I self-actualize. So far I’m seven days behind.

The Year in Media So Far

Robots continue their newsroom takeover, with Forbes becoming the latest digital publication to welcome AI tools for journalists. The site’s new CMS offers suggestions to reporters and even drafts article shells reporters can then flesh out — basically, it knocks out mundane but time-consuming tasks, freeing up human reporters to pursue more leads (and altogether produce more copy).

It’s not the first: A handful of publications already use AI to churn out short, low-stakes stories like, in the case of Yahoo, Game of Thrones and sports recaps. Reuters last March launched an AI service to analyze data and suggest accompanying story ideas.

Are there potential pitfalls? Sure — experts have expressed trepidation over the saturation of these tools, noting their prevalence will raise concerns about transparency and journalists will have to decide how forthcoming to be with readers about what is AI-produced and what is not. In a world where consumers are already deeply suspicious of the media’s mostives and honesty it’s not hard to imagine journalists facing accusations of being robots run by sinister algorithms. On the other hand, I’m not especially compelled to orient myself around “fake news” fears, and I don’t think other journalists should, either. These tools, so far, seem to be pretty benign.

More compelling to me is the fact that the objective of these new tools is, in large part, to grow in scale — to produce more copy — with less effort. Is MORE CONTENT a great objective? Probably not, but staffers are already churning out the clickbait without AI,  and maybe this way fewer low-paid writers will get yelled at to produce stories in 120 seconds.

The New York Times asks: Does it pay to be a writer?

The answer will not surprise you, but it’s still possibly worse than you thought. The median income of full-time writers in 2017 was $20,300, according to an Authors Guild survey, and $6,080 for part-time writers (a 42 percent decline in pay since 2009). This partially because everywhere is paying less, and there are fewer and fewer places to write for, but it’s also because of Amazon: small publishers don’t have the means to prevent their books from getting buried, and those lost funds hit the authors hardest.

The Ethical Shitshow That Is Facebook Dominated the December News Cycle

…and that has hurt the feelings of Mark Zuckerberg and other Facebook executives who are apparently fed up with the New York Times’s “anti-Facebook bias,” according to NBC. On that note, have any of you deleted your Facebook as a direct result of the recent reports on the company’s (evil?) machinations?

2019: The Year Instagram Kids Strike Back

A mommy blogger penned a piece for the Washington Post about how she will not stop writing about her fourth-grade daughter’s personal life despite the daughter’s wishes. Words like “amputating” and “abusive” are used with abandon in the writer’s explanation as to why she can’t stop exploiting her kid. The New Republic just last month explored whether it’s ethical for parents to share photos of their kids online, noting in France kids can sue their parents over the practice (and there’s a precedent: an Austrian 18-year-old in 2016 sued her parents for posting her baby pictures to Facebook). As more children of bloggers come of age, I suspect we’ll see more public drama (and maybe even legal entanglements) over these issues. Ethically, I’d say there’s a difference between posting a baby photo and, as in the case of the WaPo mommy blogger, writing about your daughter’s interpersonal drama with her school friends against her wishes.

But the latter seems to be connected to a larger discussion on the ethics of writing about others without their explicit consent.

Media consumption:

• I’m currently reading The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt (one of my New Year’s resolutions is to read at least 25 books in 2019) and am listening to the audiobook of God Save Texas by Lawrence Wright (have I mentioned I’m from Texas? I am from Texas).
• I saw The Favourite last weekend, then decided to be a killjoy and read up on the film’s historical accuracy (some…liberties were taken, and I’m NOT COMPLAINING, and also some of it was spot on!!)
• I’m, belatedly, watching Fargo, which I HIGHLY RECOMMEND if you want to watch polite Midwesterners respond to literal gruesome murders with “Aw, jeez.”

Remember, last week was just a test run. This is the first real week of 2019!! Go forth!