Good afternoon from the team at Press Gazette on Wednesday, 12 August.
🚨 When proud businesspeople started sharing on Linkedin laudatory articles about themselves that had appeared on obscure local editions of Forbes, something looked fishy.
Does Forbes really have Los Angeles and Liechtenstein editions? If so, standards have gone out of the window on these sites that are packed with AI-generated content and promotional articles not labelled as such.
Our latest Reality Wars investigation reveals that the sites are fake.
Other weird, similarly dubious-looking editions of brands like Vanity Fair, Fast Company and Variety have also been uncovered.
The sites look almost the same as the main editions of the relevant brands. But closer inspection reveals that the mix of topical and promotional content they are filled with appears to be all largely AI-generated.
Major PR outfit Baden Bower appears to be linked to the sites and to an organisation called the Global Recognition Awards.
Press Gazette’s investigation delves into the activities of a PR agency charging tens of thousands of dollars for paid editorial placements under some of the journalism world’s most famous mastheads.
📽️ Our latest What I’ve Learned interview is with Zak Garner-Purkis – who is taking old-school foot-in-the-door-style investigative journalism into the video age for the Express.
Garner-Purkis has investigated everyone from Albanian drug gangs to Russian billionaires and had a video hit with his exposé of the grooming gangs that London mayor Sadiq Khan said did not exist.
Asked what gets him out of the bed in the morning, he said: “The excitement of being at the forefront of a moment of real change in the industry. Being a journalist-creator brings greater opportunities for a tabloid investigations editor than have ever existed before.”
📉 The latest top 50 US news websites traffic ranking reveals Substack is the only top ten brand growing year on year (up 27%).
The year-on-year falls for some major brands are eye watering: with Newsweek down 77% year on year, Business Insider down 49% and Axios down 39%.
Dailymail.com is also falling down the ranking of top US website publishers, with 41 million visits per month in the US (down 47% year on year) putting it in 23rd position.
The US is on the frontline of AI disruption as the home market for Google and the major LLMs. It is also the major market where national regulators have shown the least interest in stepping in to help even up the playing field for news publishers - allowing Google and others to operate with a free hand.
As yet, Google is not offering US publishers the option to opt out of AI Overviews without harming their position in search.
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🤏 News In Brief
A coalition of almost 300 French newspapers has filed a complaint with the country's competition authority over Google's AI summaries, which launched there in July. (France24)
Perplexity has said it is blocking advertising created by Time that is aimed at AI agents, rather than human readers, and appears in the markdown version of its web pages. (Digiday)
The New York Post is launching an AI chatbot called Hamilton initially on its app. The new AI features also include personalised news briefing Post Express, a recommendation engine and an analysis discovery tool. (Axios)
Lawyers for Reform's Richard Tice have told The Guardian they will seek disclosure of documents that could reveal details about sources. Tice is suing the National Crime Agency, claiming information for The Guardian’s reporting could only have come from an NCA officer. (The Guardian)
South London Press owed staff (believed to be six people) almost £100,000 when it went out of business last year, according to liquidation documents. (The Greenwich Wire)
A US defamation case against the editor of Substack-based publication SpyTalk, Jeff Stein, has been dismissed after he was represented by the platform's Legal Defender programme whose lawyers described the lawsuit, brought by a former CIA executive, as a SLAPP designed to suppress reporting. (Committee to Protect Journalists)
Immediate, Bauer Media, Hearst UK and B2B specialist Shard Financial Media are the first publishers to offer placements through the new PPA Paid Work Experience Programme. (PPA)
Anthropic says it will add watermarks, which will remain even after copy-pasting, to text generated by its AI models to explain that the work was generated using AI. This will help the LLM comply with the new EU AI Act Transparency Code. (Techcrunch)
Media, production and publishing was the sector most hit by DDoS (distributed denial of service) attacks on websites hosted by Cloudflare (14.2% of the total recorded) in the first half of this year. (Cloudflare)
👀In case you missed it:
1) New visa rules limit foreign journalists to 240-day stays in the US
Self-censorship fears raised over need for regulator visa renewals.
2) Boston Globe invests in local news, politics and sport to boost subscriptions
CEO Linda Henry tells Press Gazette how Globe is responding to AI summaries challenge.
3) Top 50 English-language news sites in the world: BBC hits one billion visits
The BBC reached one billion website visits globally for the first time in 18 months in July.
4) Non-website audience is focus of revenue growth for new Business Insider CEO
Christian Baesler shares his growth plans for Business Insider after being named permanent CEO.
5) BBC World Service moves from seven apps to one multilingual version
One app to service all BBC language users outside UK and US.
📻Latest podcast
How Hello! fought back after saying goodbye to Google Discover traffic
Hello! magazine was one of many publishers that saw website referrals from Google Discover plummet last year.
Chief content officer Sophie Vokes-Dudgeon talked Press Gazette UK editor Charlotte Tobitt through the “year of transformation” that has followed.
Hello! has fought back by making the most out of syndication channels while building its own community for the future.