jaredwiener

It's an extension of a longer-running project (https://www.forth.news) where it exposes and organizes 100s of newsworthy primary sources -- statements, press releases, press pool reports, emergency alerts, etc, whether from press email lists, X/Twitter, Bluesky, RSS, etc. The web UI is similar to TweetDeck - and it sends notifications.

Latest update now allows some panels to be based on an LLM prompt (i.e. "everything about the Iran War and its effects in the U.S.") which searches the entire catalog of sources as they are posted.

It's my project -- pulling in primary news sources (think pool reports, statements, alerts, press releases, etc) and mixing it with some trusted reporter info. It's all automated, which means its very fast to get breaking news out.

(There is also https://pro.forth.news which is more granular, includes searchable archives, etc)

If there are sources or areas we're not including that you'd like to see, please let me know - jared at forth dot news.

Looks like I didn’t rotate my certificate. Eek

The Pro site is all self-curated by the user, and forth.news is a series of LLMs doing grouping, summarization/headline writing, measuring urgency, categorization, etc.

Free, consumer website: https://www.forth.news Paid site with custom notifications and feeds: https://pro.forth.news

LLMs are great, but they aren't producing new information. You still need people for that. But if you cut down any incentive for the people to do that, the LLMs will starve.

Sure, you could technically redesign to handle the bot traffic, but if the bot traffic is just taking the data and reducing any need for humans to visit the site, why is he putting in the effort to maintain the site?

Or at least somewhere between that and full on protection racket.

LLMs come on the scene, hammer the site until it goes offline or racks up bills that threaten bankruptcy, and the solution then is to pay for an LLM to fix it and monitor it.

That's a real nice site ya got there, it would be a shame if massive datacenters going up around the world were to start hammering it from tens of thousands of IP addresses....

But there is more to journalism/reporting than what youre talking about. Reporters cultivate sources. They can do investigations. They go to places so they aren't relying on a stranger with a live stream.

"The product can be packaged for mass consumption with ads and subliminals and be valued according to the effective influence it has on either manipulating the audience, or resulting in some degree of commercial activity." is incredibly cynical -- and that i think is the problem. The reporting needs to be valuable on its own -- that is and has been my sole point.

Feels like https://xkcd.com/793/

Even the basic act of deciding which stories to cover can be seen as bias.

Which experts are we seeking out? What are their agendas?

Altering facts and statements is not bias, it is incorrect reporting. Anything reported as factual that is not is wrong, period, full stop.

But framing? You can frame a story any way you see fit.

And as I was trying to get to in the earlier comment, "bias" is in the eye of the beholder. What might be straight down the middle for one reader could be wildly biased to another.

This is sort of what I mean in one of the other comments regarding biases. This is an entirely subjective take, not to mention vague. Who redefined it? Whose journalism were they redefining? Everyone's, or specific people/outlet?

And who determines what is "unbiased?" If I don't match your biases, am I biased?

I don't mean that in terms of the craft -- I was a journalist for many years in the legacy media. We knew what we were doing, and were proud of our work. The issue is that like any other art/craft/trade, being good at it isn't enough. Is this a charity? A public good? A business? A hobby?

Good journalism is very expensive. It requires people doing real work who need to be paid, and sometimes big logistical expenses -- going into a war zone without body armor, specialized transport, security, etc., seems like a really bad idea.

If it is a business, then the questions every business needs to ask itself are "who is the customer?" and "what value are we giving them that they are willing to pay for?". Financial news does this really well. People will pay for the Wall Street Journal, or a Bloomberg Terminal, etc, because the news they get from these outlets helps them trade successfully. Some outlets are required reading for certain industries -- Politico Pro, the Information, etc. But who does general news benefit? How do we get them to pay?

Company replaces phone support with AI chatbot, then says "Call center interactions dropped 80%! People must really love our AI bot," even though they were given no other choice.

AI features are popular in the sense that people are using it. I think the popularity lessens when asked if people want these features.

My point being that people who visit chatgpt.com/claude.com/etc by their own free will are not the same as people who now have to use AI summaries on Google because they are just showing up there and making the ten blue links harder to find.

Gas taxes provide the revenue that help pay for road maintenance and the rest of the infrastructure that cars use. Gas taxes made sense -- the more you drive, the more you chip in to keep the road system going.

That infrastructure still needs to exist, and will still cost money to maintain -- but if fewer people are buying gas, then the funds will dry up, even as usage stays relatively the same.

It's not necessarily contradictory. I see this more like giving your employees cars, but telling them they are responsible if they get into accidents.

All of this is entirely predicated on expectation and responsibility. First, mark something as being AI if it cannot be verified, and verify everything that you can.

Forth is using AI so we can detect and push out stories as quickly as possible, getting breaking news out there as soon as it breaks. Our summaries are AI, but marked as AI. Our underlying source information is right there and cited. We try to be as transparent as possible about the tools we are using, and the tradeoffs.

Every journalist should instinctively and reflexively double check everything, regardless of the source. There's an old maxim, "if your mom tells you she loves you, check it out." Being from an LLM doesn't change that.

And thank you for flagging the scroll thing. I hadn't seen it, but will check.

That said, it's both combining various updates into a cohesive timeline of a story, writing the summaries, and assigning it an urgency level which helps in sorting and some other tasks.