#53 Media Trends & Innovation
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AI in MEDIA
OpenAI’s Sora is now available in the EU and UK
OpenAI is finally making its video generation model, Sora, available to users in the European Union, the U.K., Switzerland, Norway, Liechtenstein, and Iceland. ChatGPT Plus and Pro subscribers in these regions will be able to create videos using the model. (Source: Tech Crunch)
Google’s Gemini now lets you ask questions using videos and what’s on your screen
Google is adding new features to its AI assistant, Gemini, that let users ask it questions using video and content on the phone’s screen in real time. As an example, the company showed a video of a user shopping for a pair of baggy jeans and asking Gemini what other clothing would pair well with it.?(Source: Tech Crunch)
Google Sheets gets a Gemini-powered upgrade to analyze data faster and create visuals
With this update, users can access Gemini’s capabilities to generate insights from their data, such as correlations, trends, outliers, and more. Users now can also generate advanced visualizations, like heatmaps, that they can insert as static images over cells in spreadsheets. The update is now available to all Workspace business users.?(Source: Tech Crunch)
OpenAI launches GPT-4.5, its largest model to date
GPT-4.5 is very expensive to run, OpenAI admits — so expensive that the company says it’s evaluating whether to continue serving GPT-4.5 in its API in the long term. To access GPT-4.5’s API, OpenAI is charging developers $75 for every million input tokens (roughly 750,000 words) and $150 for every million output tokens. Compare that to GPT-4o, which costs just $2.50 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens.?(Source: Tech Crunch)
BUSINESS MODELS & PERFORMANCE
Google Search tweaks have devastated a once-lucrative corner of the news media world
Google changed its rules around how product-review sites appear in its search engine … The goal, Google has said, was to give users higher-quality search results. The outcome was a crisis for some sites. Traffic for Forbes Advisor, a personal-finance recommendation site, fell 83% in January from the same month the year before, according to data firm Similarweb. CNN Underscored and Buy Side from WSJ, which is operated by Wall Street Journal parent Dow Jones, were both down by more than 25% in that period. Time magazine’s Time Stamped and the Associated Press’s AP Buyline, powered by Taboola Turnkey Commerce, ended their efforts in recent months. Taboola closed the commerce operation. (Source: The Wall Street Journal)
Daily print circulation at the L.A. Times is down to 79,000
Total circulation at top U.S. newspapers was down 12.7% year over year. Only five U.S. papers have a daily print circulation over 100,000: The Wall Street Journal (473,000), The New York Times (250,000), the New York Post (122,000), The Washington Post (111,000), and USA Today (103,000). (Source: Press Gazette)
Bezos' changes at 'Washington Post' lead to mass subscription cancellations — again
More than 75,000 digital subscribers to The Washington Post have cancelled since its owner, billionaire Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, announced on Wednesday that he would radically overhaul the paper's opinion pages to reflect libertarian priorities and to exclude opposing points of view. (Source: NPR)
YouTube says it now has more than 1 billion monthly viewers of podcast content
This milestone underscores how YouTube has come to play an essential role in podcasting for creators and audiences, and how our investments to improve the podcast experience on YouTube are paying off,’ YouTube said in an announcement. (Source: Variety)
DAY-TO-DAY OPERATIONS
The Washington Post’s TikTok guy will publish a Post-produced news series on his personal channel
Dave Jorgenson, best known as The Washington Post’s TikTok guy, has launched a new weekly news skit show called, incredibly, Local News International. The series will be similar to his other videos for The Washington Post but “it’ll cover news from all around the world with a sort of local news, lo-fi vibe,” Instead of running on The Washington Post’s channel, however, the series will be published on Jorgenson’s personal account. Previously, videos produced by the Post ran first on the newspaper’s official accounts. Most news publishers stop short of producing content for an individual journalist’s accounts. “Because, as the thinking goes, what happens if that person leaves and takes all their audience with them?”?(Source: Nieman Lab)
Jeff Bezos declares opinions questioning “free markets” no longer welcome at The Washington Post
Months after insisting he would never allow his personal interests to influence the Post’s content, one of the world’s richest men decides opinions contrary to his “will be left to be published by others.”?(Source: Nieman Lab)