Ben Werdmuller

Link: 'It's offensively cheap': How solar power is quietly becoming bigger than nuclear, by Jocelyn Timperley for the BBC This is something we should all be excited about: “The world's solar power is crossing a threshold.

Most Fridays, I share a handful of pieces that caught my eye at the intersection of technology, media, and society.

Link: The Three-Layer Cake: Public-Interest Information in an AI-Intermediated Age, by Gina Chua and Adiel Kaplan at the Tow-Knight Center for Journalism Futures Gina Chua and Adiel Kaplan at the Tow-Knight Center for Journalism Futures have put together a

Link: Team Dynamics Weaken When Employees Turn to AI Instead of Colleagues, by Kate Niederhoffer, Kristina Rapuano, Alex Liebscher, Alexi Robichaux and Jeffrey T.

Link: Some final words on Foursquare, by Dennis Crowley I freaking loved Foursquare.

Link: The News + AI Field Report, by Djordje Padejski for the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication The News + AI Field Report for 2022-2025, produced by Djordje Padejski in conjunction with ASU’s Knight Center for the Future of News,

Most Fridays, I share a handful of pieces that caught my eye at the intersection of technology, media, and society.

Link: Why We’re Banning AI, by Nathan J.

Link: Design Your One-on-Ones, by Corey Ford at Point C I like this approach to 1:1s.

Link: Two 23-year-olds used AI to create a daily audio briefing.

Link: Young People and the Future of Free Expression, by the Knight Foundation Worth paying attention to: “New Knight Foundation-Ipsos research among young adults and high school students points to a generation that strongly values free speech as a democr…

Link: Election Night 2026, by Graze Social This prototype from Graze is remarkable.

This January, I wrote a hypothetical story about how to keep newsrooms safe from raids the day before federal agents raided Washington Post engagement reporter Hannah Natanson’s home.

Link: Amazon pledges $1B to data center communities, warns that local opposition threatens U.S.

Link: OpenAI doubles support for Lenfest’s AI and local news fellowships, by Andrew Deck in Nieman Lab I participated in this program in my former role of Senior Director of Technology at ProPublica.

Link: First steps of the PLC organization, by Public Ledger of Credentials Organization Since Bluesky’s foundation, its mission has been to work on an open social media protocol that gives users a “credible exit” from any one company’s services while allo…

Link: Trump TV Draws Ire Amid White House Press Shutout: 'State-Run Media', by Casey Loving in The Wrap It’s not an accident that Trump’s move to ban CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the White House and, the same week, start his own friendly streaming channel

Twenty-two years ago this month, I moved house.

This is, perhaps, an unusual post for me in this space, but: I’m selling my home, it's a great house, and I want you to know about it. 7 Windsor Ave, Elkins Park, PA was built in 1925.

Most Fridays, I share a handful of pieces that caught my eye at the intersection of technology, media, and society.

Link: Seattle Times and Newsday are the latest publications to sue OpenAI and Microsoft, by Anthony Ha in TechCrunch I have some complicated feelings about these ongoing newsroom lawsuits against AI companies.

Link: LG TVs caught spying even when offline or on standby, by Dominic Preston in The Verge This is an enormous abuse of trust: “LG smart TVs are almost constantly logging and uploading data about owners and their homes, even when offline or on standby mo…

Link: AI safety is designed in the West, and failing users everywhere, by Rina Chandran in Rest of World Amnesty International believes that Facebook was complicit in the genocide against the Rohingya people in Myanmar: “In 2017, the Rohingya were killed,…

Most Fridays, I share a handful of pieces that caught my eye at the intersection of technology, media, and society.

Link: Can public media build its own social network?

On Thursday, I left my role as Senior Director of Technology at ProPublica, where I led IT, Security, and Engineering.

Most Fridays, I share a handful of pieces that caught my eye at the intersection of technology, media, and society.

Link: Leaders Are Leverage, by Corey Ford at Point C I’ve often shared Corey Ford’s pieces.

Link: US government targets Cop City protester over phone operating system, by Timothy Pratt in The Guardian This is worth knowing about and is concerning — but not necessarily for the main reason that’s being reported.

Link: Fed up with Big Tech, communities turn to data collectives for control, by Rina Chandran at Rest of World It’s interesting to contrast the current moment to the “information wants to be free” era of Web 2.0, twenty or so years ago.

Most Fridays, I share a handful of pieces that caught my eye at the intersection of technology, media, and society.

Link: How OpenAI’s human mistake led to the AI-powered hack on Hugging Face, by Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai in TechCrunch The biggest technology story this week was how a combination of OpenAI models hacked into third-party AI provider Hugging Face and…

Link: Staying in a job for the health insurance?

Link: This Conversation Is Being Recorded.

Link: China delivers a one-two punch to America’s AI dominance, by Robert Hart in The Verge AI models, as a product in themselves, have very little moat beyond what amounts to brand loyalty and superficial switching costs.