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Claes Holtzmann

@claeshs.bsky.social
1.7K followers 719 following 836 posts

I've been working with journalism, business models, tech, and data since 2015. Here to find and share knowledge about that. Data- and analysis editor @ jfm.dk

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Claes Holtzmann @claeshs.bsky.social · 12/08/2026
You can't make this up. AI agents broke the story about OpenAI's rogue AI agents. "RuntimeWire didn't actually have anyone on the ground at the Mandalay Bay convention center. In fact, it didn't have any writers at all. It's an AI newsroom ..."
wired.com
Oh Lord, AI Reporters Are Actually Breaking Big News
Last week, an AI newsroom beat mainstream journalists—including WIRED—to a story about OpenAI and hacking. It’s just the beginning.
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Claes Holtzmann @claeshs.bsky.social · 07/08/2026
They really need to work on the marketing on this. "We are applying Palantir’s AI-powered platform to one of the largest opportunities in front of us, converting the sheer scale of our audience into known, orchestrated first-party relationships..."
niemanlab.org
America’s largest newspaper chain, USA Today Co., partners with Palantir to analyze audience data as search traffic falls
USA Today Co. has made a deal with software company Palantir to analyze and monetize user behavior, the company announced on Thursday. In its Q2 earnings call Thursday morning, USA Today Co. chairman...
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Claes Holtzmann @claeshs.bsky.social · 04/08/2026
Sad but true (in the US) "Our so-called free press can no longer do what it used to do. That's because it presumes an audience that agrees, at minimum, on factual reality as most of us see it. And that audience, a national citizenry that shares the same basic set of facts, no longer exists."
craigunger.substack.com
Nothing Moves the Needle
Not that long ago, the press could root out corruption, topple presidents, and end wars. Now, even the biggest scoops have little impact. Here's how and why the media lost its mojo.
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Claes Holtzmann @claeshs.bsky.social · 03/08/2026
Generative AI put to good use. "This year, though, generative AI tools and commercial large language models (LLMs) were more commonly used, largely to speed up the process of combing through document dumps."
niemanlab.org
A record-breaking eight Pulitzer awardees disclosed AI use this year
Five winners and three finalists detailed their AI adoption to the judging committee.
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Claes Holtzmann @claeshs.bsky.social · 30/07/2026
This is quite a big deal. "OpenAI will lower the price of GPT-5.6 Luna... by roughly 80%. Luna will now cost 20 cents per million input tokens and $1.20 per million output tokens."
axios.com
OpenAI slashes Luna pricing
Efficiency gains drive major GPT-5.6 discounts.
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Claes Holtzmann @claeshs.bsky.social · 26/07/2026
Let the big expensive frontier models do the thinking and the inexpensive guys do the heavy lifting. "The new swarm reached 1,000 commits per second, so Cursor built its own version control system... Total costs ranged from $1,339 for the Opus hybrid to $10,565 for GPT-5.5 running alone."
the-decoder.com
Cursor's agent swarm suggests cheaper models can handle most coding when frontier models plan the work
Cursor asked its upgraded agent swarm and its predecessor to rebuild SQLite in Rust using only the documentation, with no source code or internet access. Every configuration of the new system, which separates planners from workers, eventually scored 100 percent on the test suite. The old swarm choked on merge conflicts of its own making.
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Claes Holtzmann @claeshs.bsky.social · 26/07/2026
Tired: tokenmaxxing Wired: tokenomical "Being economical - or tokenomical - is a dramatic reversal in mindset. Just a few months ago, it was a badge of honor to be using AI so much that you spent a lot on tokens."
wsj.com
Corporate America Has Suddenly Decided to Stop Blowing Money on AI
Companies big and small are mixing models, and it’s changing the economics and power players of the industry.
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Claes Holtzmann @claeshs.bsky.social · 25/07/2026
Chinese models like Kimi K3 are impressive, but they are not open source. "Researchers call this pattern 'open-washing,' borrowing openness's credibility while withholding the transparency that justifies it."
techpolicy.press
‘Open-Washing’ Is Everywhere in AI. Four Criteria Cut Through It
"Open-source" is not a marketing register. It is a standard with specific criteria that must be met to earn the label, writes JJ Jasser.
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Claes Holtzmann @claeshs.bsky.social · 25/07/2026
Promising (though it has to run with auto mode) "For browser agents, the attack success rate hit zero percent across 129 test scenarios, per the system card."
the-decoder.com
Opus 5 may have solved browser-based prompt injection, the biggest security flaw haunting AI agents
Opus 5 combined with Auto Mode hits a zero percent prompt injection success rate for browser agents across 129 test scenarios. Without those extra protection layers, the rate is 3.7 percent. If these numbers hold up in practice, Anthropic may have cracked one of the biggest security problems facing AI agents that operate in browsers.
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Claes Holtzmann @claeshs.bsky.social · 25/07/2026
Yeah, me too
technologyreview.com
Google DeepMind is worried about what happens when millions of agents start to interact
The firm is calling for more scientists to study the risks of multi-agent systems.
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Claes Holtzmann @claeshs.bsky.social · 24/07/2026
Well, Fable had a good run www.anthropic.com/news/claude-...
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Claes Holtzmann @claeshs.bsky.social · 22/07/2026
It baffles me how many platform shifts some publishers have to go through before they accept that reach and page views won't turn into a sustainable business model. Reach, a year into its pivot: 40,000 subs. "really we've just launched paywalls - there's a huge amount of stuff that we need to do."
amediaoperator.com
Reach’s Google Traffic Referrals Fell 55%; Paid Subscriptions on Track for Target
Reach said its Google traffic in H1 of 2026 was down 55%, feeding into a 40% decline in the overall size of its on-platform audience.
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Claes Holtzmann @claeshs.bsky.social · 22/07/2026
Danish external examiners are warning about AI in this summer's theses at Copenhagen Business School. One who graded seven law theses: "In two of three theses, it was clear AI had been used to such a degree that the students could not account for large parts of what they submitted."
berlingske.dk
Censorer på CBS advarer om indflydelse fra kunstig intelligens
Flere censorer har efter sommerens eksamener på CBS advaret mod de studerendes brug af kunstig intelligens.
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Claes Holtzmann @claeshs.bsky.social · 22/07/2026
Well, have they tried making a rule that says the US and China have to play nice? "Europe and its decision-makers tragically confuse rule-making capacity with future-shaping capacity in AI."
techpolicy.press
Mythos and the Coming End of European Digital Sovereignty
Igor Sevenard and Richard J. Cook argue that Europe’s AI future depends on building domestic capabilities rather than relying on foreign systems.
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Claes Holtzmann @claeshs.bsky.social · 21/07/2026
Maybe not. But it helps. "Leaving Twitter also doesn't solve the problem. Misinformation and slop are everywhere, all the time."
niemanlab.org
The World Cup of misinformation
Misinformation doesn't just sow distrust between the public and the media. It robs us of the ability to trust what we see with our own eyes.
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Claes Holtzmann @claeshs.bsky.social · 21/07/2026
Welp. If you thought the first stage of disruption of media was fun... "The internet and social media did not disrupt us as much as … AI," said Tory Maguire, Nine's managing director of publishing.
theguardian.com
Nine to axe 30 jobs at the Age and SMH due to ‘extreme’ AI disruption
Staff told positions will be cut via voluntary and targeted redundancies as part of ‘evolution’
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Claes Holtzmann @claeshs.bsky.social · 20/07/2026
Counterpoint: Frontier labs are best positioned to dominate non-frontier markets. "I highly doubt that Chinese models are cheaper to serve on a marginal cost basis, they just seem cheaper because Anthropic and OpenAI are so supply constrained that they are charging far more than they would ..."
stratechery.com
Who’s Afraid of Chinese Models?
Everyone is worried about Chinese models, but the frontier labs will be fine; we need to enable open U.S. alternatives.
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Claes Holtzmann @claeshs.bsky.social · 20/07/2026
Frontier models are abundant, compute is not. "Moonshot, the AI startup behind the Kimi K3 model, has temporarily stopped selling new subscriptions. Over the past 48 hours, "demand has pushed close to the limits of our current capacity," the company announced"
the-decoder.com
Moonshot pauses new Kimi K3 subscriptions after GPU demand maxes out in 48 hours
Moonshot has temporarily stopped selling new subscriptions for its Kimi K3 model as demand nearly maxed out its GPU capacity within 48 hours. The company plans to split its subscription model to spread computing power more evenly.
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Claes Holtzmann @claeshs.bsky.social · 20/07/2026
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Claes Holtzmann @claeshs.bsky.social · 20/07/2026
The EU's transparency rules face their first stress test: the people who wrote them. "Parliament has not been immune to AI slop and misleading AI-generated content ... MEPs must lead by example as the AI Act's transparency rules become applicable."
politico.eu
The European Parliament’s answer to its AI worries: More AI
The institution is opening its doors to models from OpenAI, Meta, Anthropic and Mistral as it tries to bring lawmakers’ growing use of the technology under control.
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Claes Holtzmann @claeshs.bsky.social · 19/07/2026
This has real Kafkaesque potential. "Trump's administration is currently piloting a program in six states, using AI to reduce unnecessary medical spending."
arstechnica.com
Will AI fix prior authorization—or make it worse?
The government is piloting a program that uses AI for insurance-coverage decisions.
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Claes Holtzmann @claeshs.bsky.social · 18/07/2026
Increasingly happy I'm not in charge of cybersecurity. "a 100-million-token Cyber Range test cost about $85 with Opus 4.5 or 4.6, roughly $46 with GLM-5.2, and just $1.19 with DeepSeek V4-Pro"
the-decoder.com
Open-weight models now match frontier cyber performance from just four months ago at a fraction of the cost
The British AI Security Institute warns that open-weight models like GLM-5.2 and DeepSeek V4-Pro now trail closed frontier models in cyber capabilities by four to seven months. At the start of 2025, the gap was still six to ten months. It also found that safety measures on open models are largely ineffective, leaving defenders less time to prepare.
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Claes Holtzmann @claeshs.bsky.social · 17/07/2026
Inference is eating the world ('s compute). "Meta... is in talks to lease computing power to Anthropic in a potential deal worth as much as $10 billion over two years."
reuters.com
Meta, Anthropic in talks for potential $10 billion compute lease deal, NYT reports
Meta Platforms is in talks to lease computing power to Anthropic in a potential deal worth as much as $10 billion over two years, the New York Times reported on Friday, citing three people with know...
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Claes Holtzmann @claeshs.bsky.social · 17/07/2026
A point for the headline writer. "Anyone who has a problem can do the open-source thing and fork it. Or just walk away."
the-decoder.com
Linus Torvalds tells AI critics in the Linux kernel community to fork off
Linux creator Linus Torvalds has come out strongly in favor of AI tools in kernel development. "Linux is not one of those anti-AI projects," he wrote on the kernel mailing list amid a debate over Sashiko, the Linux Foundation's AI-powered code review tool. Torvalds said he would "very loudly ignore" anyone who tries to talk others out of using it.
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Claes Holtzmann @claeshs.bsky.social · 17/07/2026
Capitalize on growth opportunities and make sure you're able to weather challenges in multiple pillars. "Be flexible and informed enough to move with the tide, shifting product and audience strategies to stay relevant in a rapidly changing regulatory, cultural, and technological environment"
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Claes Holtzmann @claeshs.bsky.social · 16/07/2026
Schibsted: skip the fancy metered registration wall-solutions and just ask for money. "If you create a lot of friction to logging in, you may as well have at least a trial period subscription, and you achieve the same thing" - Schibsted's Gustaf Eriksson
pressgazette.co.uk
First-party data mastery: Tips for publishers from Norway's Schibsted Media
First-party data tips for publishers from Norway's Schibsted which has some 1.25 million paying online readers.
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Claes Holtzmann @claeshs.bsky.social · 14/07/2026
Claims like this used to get me in trouble with the micropayments mob "micropayments are hardly the silver bullet to put out the funding crisis of struggling news media... industry actors are probably better off spending their limited resources on solidifying the value proposition of subscriptions"
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Claes Holtzmann @claeshs.bsky.social · 10/07/2026
Photographers were often first out the door in layoffs. Now they convert the most free readers into subscribers at JFM. The recipe: huge local-event galleries where readers come to find themselves. "Photograph the ones watching. They're the ones who help pay for the paper." - Michael Bager (DK)
journalisten.dk
De ryger på stribe i fyringsrunder, men ét særligt greb har gjort fotografer til JFM's konverteringskonger
Deres titler er egentlig pressefotograf og fotojournalist, og det er også de titler, de bruger om sig selv.Men i de roller er de faktisk også endt med at blive kaldt konverteringskongerne i JFM.For Michael Bager, pressefotograf på Fyens Stiftstidende, og fotojournalist Jacob Schultz på JydskeVestkysten er de to medarbejdere i JFM, der er bedst til […]
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Claes Holtzmann @claeshs.bsky.social · 09/07/2026
Increasingly expensive frontier models... something's gotta give. "every path to foundation models having market dominance, strategic leverage, value capture, winner-takes-all effects, or anything else other than becoming commodity infrastructure, requires something to change."
ben-evans.com
Ways to think about token pricing — Benedict Evans
AI is in a supply crunch today, but what happens when we come out of it? How and where will supply, demand, price, capacity and capex get back into equilibrium? Today, model labs can name their price, but why won’t they end up as low-margin commodity infrastructure?
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Claes Holtzmann @claeshs.bsky.social · 08/07/2026
Many failed strategies have a "Netflix for ___" slide in their past. "While consumers might be willing to pay a monthly fee to Netflix to stream thousands of TV shows and movies, most gamers don't take the same approach, preferring to stick with a handful of favorite games they play on repeat."
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Claes Holtzmann @claeshs.bsky.social · 08/07/2026
This was always a key skill. Now it's one of the few things left. "the study points to the ability to come up with “original ideas” as an increasingly vital skill for journalists as AI-generated text, audio, and video floods our information ecosystems."
niemanlab.org
A new study looks at the skills journalists are losing (and gaining) because of AI tools
Last year, MIT's Media Lab came out with a buzzy study on a phenomenon that’s been coined “cognitive debt.” In short, the researchers found that when ChatGPT users offloaded essay writing tasks to the...
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Claes Holtzmann @claeshs.bsky.social · 08/07/2026
Performance matters. But so does pricing. "The pricing strategy echoes what Chinese vendors like Zhipu and DeepSeek have been doing: get close enough on performance, then win on price."
the-decoder.com
Grok 4.5 is so cheap compared to Fable 5 and GPT 5.5 that benchmark gaps may not matter much
xAI releases Grok 4.5, trained on tens of thousands of Nvidia GB300 GPUs. In coding benchmarks, the model trails Fable 5 and GPT-5.5 but needs 4.2 times fewer tokens than Opus 4.8. At $2 per million input tokens, it costs a fraction of the competition. EU availability is expected in mid-July.
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Claes Holtzmann @claeshs.bsky.social · 08/07/2026
Donations are an underrated news model. LAist ran the numbers on buy-vs-donate: "These weren't donations made out of goodwill. They were transactions. And the people most willing to transact were exactly the non-members we'd been trying to reach."
niemanlab.org
We asked our readers to buy, not donate. Here’s what it taught us about the new math of news.
We needed to test a question public media rarely asks out loud: if we offered these readers something to buy, rather than something to support, would they?
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Claes Holtzmann @claeshs.bsky.social · 06/07/2026
Retention is harder than acquisition - even when you’re Netflix. "One Piece, one of Netflix’s most-watched shows of 2023, lost more than 30% of its audience for the second season. Season two of Beef suffered a drop of more than 70%. The Night Agent shed 50% of its audience for the second season."
bloomberg.com
Netflix Viewers Are Abandoning Shows After One Season
Netflix’s biggest hits are losing more than half of their audience after one season
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Claes Holtzmann @claeshs.bsky.social · 04/07/2026
A little human nature appreciation thread. Yesterday evening we got stranded in a parking lot in Tuscany - a flat tire, three impatient kids, my arm in a cast. What was supposed to be a night out enjoying the Tuscan cuisine and culture was fast turning dire.
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Claes Holtzmann @claeshs.bsky.social · 04/07/2026
What could possibly go wrong? (Except counting the r's in strawberry and advice on walking to the car wash.) "The goal is a persistent, context-aware agent that acts on its own."
the-decoder.com
OpenAI cofounder envisions "almost no interface" future where nobody learns software anymore
Greg Brockman admits ChatGPT's plugins, heavily marketed in 2023, failed "because the models weren't ready." Instead of app extensions, he sees the future in an invisible, context-aware agent. But OpenAI's own Codex is still light-years from that vision.
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Claes Holtzmann @claeshs.bsky.social · 02/07/2026
One way to handle AI layoffs: try to think of something useful you can do. "To try to avoid eliminating more positions, they say they have encouraged workers to invent new, more valuable jobs"
nytimes.com
Can You Embrace A.I. Without Layoffs? This Company Says It’s Trying.
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Claes Holtzmann @claeshs.bsky.social · 01/07/2026
A two-way con: uses AI reporters to fabricate stories, and false copyright claims to bury the ones exposing it. "A Press Gazette article ... has been removed from Google search results after a spurious anonymous legal challenge."
pressgazette.co.uk
Spurious copyright claim sees second Press Gazette story removed from Google search
Claim filed under US law seeks to hide Press Gazette reporting about Clickout Media.
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Claes Holtzmann @claeshs.bsky.social · 01/07/2026
This has been an ongoing shift since I began as a journalist 21 years ago: Simple information has become less and less valuable. "...recent estimates that within the next decade only a tiny percentage of content will actually be created by humans."
wan-ifra.org
Signature journalism, strong brands, higher customer value: Mediahuis’s playbook for growth
Taking a pro-active stance to some of today's biggest challenges, Europe’s Mediahuis has developed a three-pronged approach that builds on their traditional strengths.
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Claes Holtzmann @claeshs.bsky.social · 01/07/2026
Bold move. Definitely more cost-effective than having agents read HTML. But where's the revenue? "Time... is converting all its webpages from HTML into markdown versions, a simplified format that AI systems and agents can process more efficiently."
digiday.com
How Time and others are rebuilding parts of the web for AI agents
Publishers are preparing for the agentic web by creating AI-friendly versions of their sites to stay discoverable in AI search.
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Claes Holtzmann @claeshs.bsky.social · 30/06/2026
Some nuance to the debate about the AI job apocalypse. "This paper does not show that AI universally creates jobs," the paper's authors admit, "but it does counter claims that AI will lead to broad job losses."
techcrunch.com
The AI jobs debate just got messier | TechCrunch
A new report finds "high-intensity AI adopters” saw headcount increase 10.2%. Among those companies, entry-level headcount rose by 12%, countering the rhetoric that AI kills junior jobs.
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Claes Holtzmann @claeshs.bsky.social · 30/06/2026
Looking forward to taking it for a spin and testing the claims. "Claude Sonnet 5 is built to be the most agentic Sonnet model yet. It can make plans, use tools like browsers and terminals, and run autonomously at a level that, just a few months ago, required larger and more expensive models"
9to5mac.com
Anthropic upgrades Claude with new Sonnet 5 model, details here - 9to5Mac
Anthropic is upgrading Claude Sonnet, replacing Sonnet 4.6 from February with Sonnet 5 as the best medium-sized model. Claude Sonnet...
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Claes Holtzmann @claeshs.bsky.social · 30/06/2026
Halving inference costs is a rather big deal. "OpenAI applied the new optimizations to ChatGPT, specifically for visitors who don't have an account. The number of Nvidia GPUs needed to serve those users dropped to just a few hundred"
the-decoder.com
OpenAI reportedly cut response costs for guest ChatGPT users by more than half
According to a report by The Information, OpenAI has cut inference costs for its AI models by more than half. The company applied the optimizations to ChatGPT, where the number of Nvidia GPUs needed dropped to just a few hundred at times.
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Claes Holtzmann @claeshs.bsky.social · 30/06/2026
What happened to good old data-driven transformation? 🧓 "Axel Springer said The Telegraph will... leverage AI to support innovation and growth"
pressgazette.co.uk
Axel Springer promises 'AI-powered transformation' as it completes Telegraph deal
Axel Springer's acquisition of The Telegraph will complete today, ending "three difficult years" without an owner for the UK newspaper.
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Claes Holtzmann @claeshs.bsky.social · 30/06/2026
In hindsight these early approaches to AI will often seem comical. Initially, only a limited number of employees were allowed to use the company's in-house LLM, Muse. This was done to protect their editorial content. "But it didn't work," Bakhouche said.
wan-ifra.org
Sipa Ouest-France’s AI lessons: Keep the rules simple and trust your people
Sipa Ouest-France shares lessons from two years of AI experimentation, highlighting simple governance, staff empowerment, training, and industry collaboration for publishers.
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Claes Holtzmann @claeshs.bsky.social · 29/06/2026
Well... The tech giants will be thrilled 😑 "the plan appears to be for Today to hear from, for instance Steve Rosenberg if Putin dies, only after Steve has satisfied people who get their news on TikTok"
theguardian.com
Today programme suffers ‘body blow’ as BBC prioritises social and digital content
Staff at Radio 4 show, which has 5 million listeners, told making content for likes of TikTok will take precedence for correspondents
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Claes Holtzmann @claeshs.bsky.social · 29/06/2026
Narrative violation: In Denmark the teenage "TikTok" generation prefers the public broadcasters for news. For the "adults" it's two tabloids. "Several studies show young people still seek trustworthy news sources and have high trust in journalistic media." - Niels Marslev, Danske Medier (transl.)
journalisten.dk
Mere public service, mindre tabloid: Her er teenagernes foretrukne nyhedsmedier
Der er ingen grund til at slå alarm, når man ser på de unges forbrug af nyheder på nettet.Danske teenagere på 15-19 år bruger nemlig de samme netmedier som resten af befolkningen. Bare ikke i helt samme omfang.Det viser en kørsel med trafiktal, som Danske Medier har lavet i Dansk Online Index for Journalisten.Flest sidevisninger […]
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Claes Holtzmann @claeshs.bsky.social · 28/06/2026
Austria proposes that EU hosts Anthropic. No easy feat. "The real question is not whether it is easy," Proell wrote. "The question is whether we Europeans are prepared to be the architects of our technological future, or whether we wish to remain mere administrators of decisions made elsewhere."
economictimes.indiatimes.com
Austria lobbies EU to host Anthropic AI after US curbs: Report - The Economic Times
Austria is pushing the European Union to consider hosting Anthropic AI system within its borders to counter efforts by the U.S. to block foreigners from using the company's most advanced models, Bloomberg News reported on Sunday.
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Claes Holtzmann @claeshs.bsky.social · 28/06/2026
We taught AI to search the web, then let the web fill up with AI-slop. You'll never guess where this leads. "AI search tools can experience "AI search collapse" when they retrieve AI-generated pages derived from earlier AI answers."
axios.com
AI's brain is getting bloated with AI content
Simulations show how repetition could turn into web consensus.
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Claes Holtzmann @claeshs.bsky.social · 28/06/2026
Cloudflare CEO divides employees into three groups: builders, sellers, and measurers. "The roles being cut at Cloudflare, and across the tech industry, fall overwhelmingly into the measurer category: middle managers, operations staff, finance analysts, and marketing coordinators"
thenextweb.com
Cloudflare
Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince says AI eliminates "measurers" while builders and sellers survive, as BNP Paribas data shows a 45 percent engineering surge.
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