Tootfinder

Spain arrests two over data leaks targeting state officials, journalists https://therecord.media/spain-arrests-two-data-leaks-targeting-gov-officials-journalists

A look back at Craigslist's rise and newspapers' failure to respond to the digital shift; Craig Newmark says he's been unfairly blamed for newspapers' decline (Rick Edmonds/Poynter)
https://www.poynter.org/business-work/2025/did-craigslis…

Did Craigslist decimate newspapers? Legend meets reality. - Poynter
Craig Newmark’s simple site was hailed as a disruptor and blamed for the collapse of classifieds. But journalism’s business failures ran deeper.

NEWSAGENT: Benchmarking Multimodal Agents as Journalists with Real-World Newswriting Tasks
Yen-Che Chien, Kuang-Da Wang, Wei-Yao Wang, Wen-Chih Peng
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.00446

NEWSAGENT: Benchmarking Multimodal Agents as Journalists with Real-World Newswriting Tasks
Recent advances in autonomous digital agents from industry (e.g., Manus AI and Gemini's research mode) highlight potential for structured tasks by autonomous decision-making and task decomposition; however, it remains unclear to what extent the agent-based systems can improve multimodal web data productivity. We study this in the realm of journalism, which requires iterative planning, interpretation, and contextual reasoning from multimodal raw contents to form a well structured news. We introd…

Bill Moyers,
the former White House press secretary who became one of television’s most honored journalists, masterfully using a visual medium to illuminate a world of ideas, died Thursday at age 91.
Moyers died in a New York City hospital, according to longtime friend Tom Johnson, the former CEO of CNN and an assistant to Moyers during Lyndon B. Johnson’s administration. He did not cite Moyers’ cause of death.

Bill Moyers, the former White House press secretary turned acclaimed TV journalist, dead at 91
Bill Moyers, the former White House press secretary who became one of television’s most honored journalists, masterfully using a visual medium to illuminate a world of ideas, died Thursday at age 91.

Zonder verslaggevers gaat het beeld uit #Gaza op zwart.
"Wie journalisten dood kan de waarheid niet aan"
#Israël
#persvrijheid

Wat vindt NRC | Wie journalisten doodt, kan de waarheid niet aan
Oorlog in Gaza

How to tell a vibe coder of lying when they say they check their code.
People who will admit to using LLMs to write code will usually claim that they "carefully check" the output since we all know that LLM code has a lot of errors in it. This is insufficient to address several problems that LLMs cause, including labor issues, digital commons stress/pollution, license violation, and environmental issues, but at least it's they are checking their code carefully we shouldn't assume that it's any worse quality-wise than human-authored code, right?
Well, from principles alone we can expect it to be worse, since checking code the AI wrote is a much more boring task than writing code yourself, so anyone who has ever studied human-computer interaction even a little bit can predict people will quickly slack off, stating to trust the AI way too much, because it's less work. I'm a different domain, the journalist who published an entire "summer reading list" full of nonexistent titles is a great example of this. I'm sure he also intended to carefully check the AI output, but then got lazy. Clearly he did not have a good grasp of the likely failure modes of the tool he was using.
But for vibe coders, there's one easy tell we can look for, at least in some cases: coding in Python without type hints. To be clear, this doesn't apply to novice coders, who might not be aware that type hints are an option. But any serious Python software engineer, whether they used type hints before or not, would know that they're an option. And if you know they're an option, you also know they're an excellent tool for catching code defects, with a very low effort:reward ratio, especially if we assume an LLM generates them. Of the cases where adding types requires any thought at all, 95% of them offer chances to improve your code design and make it more robust. Knowing about but not using type hints in Python is a great sign that you don't care very much about code quality. That's totally fine in many cases: I've got a few demos or jam games in Python with no type hints, and it's okay that they're buggy. I was never going to debug them to a polished level anyways. But if we're talking about a vibe coder who claims that they're taking extra care to check for the (frequent) LLM-induced errors, that's not the situation.
Note that this shouldn't be read as an endorsement of vibe coding for demos or other rough-is-acceptable code: the other ethical issues I skipped past at the start still make it unethical to use in all but a few cases (for example, I have my students use it for a single assignment so they can see for themselves how it's not all it's cracked up to be, and even then they have an option to observe a pre-recorded prompt session instead).

The NFL says Nielsen is "systematically undercounting" millions of viewers of league games, as it experiments with alternatives to Nielsen for additional data (Joe Flint/Wall Street Journal)

Sky News expands its data and forensics team as part of the Sky News 2030 project to build a newsroom focused on premium video journalism (Charlotte Tobitt/Press Gazette)
https://pressgazette.co.uk/publishers/sky-news-data-forensics-journalism/

Sky News expands data and forensics journalism team
Sky News is hiring journalists to expand its data and forensics team as part of a plan to make premium journalism that people might pay for.

US v. Google: a judge bars Google from paying to be the exclusive search engine on devices and browsers but allows it to make payments for product distribution (Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/tech/judge-bars-googl…

Derk Sauer, a Dutch media entrepreneur who founded The Moscow Times and later supported Russian journalists in exile, died at 72 from sailing accident injuries (The Moscow Times)
https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2025/07/31/

Derk Sauer, Moscow Times Founder and Dutch Media Entrepreneur, Dies at 72
Derk Sauer, the Dutch media entrepreneur who founded The Moscow Times, died on Thursday at age 72, his family said in a statement.