Tag Archives: journalism

United States prosecutors have secured a deal with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange requiring the long-embattled publisher to plead guilty to one count of espionage for his role in making public classified documents concerning the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The agreement, which follows more than a decade of efforts …

Web crawling—the act of indexing information across the internet—has been around for decades. It has primarily been used by search engines like Google and nonprofits like Internet Archive and Common Crawl to catalog the contents of the open internet and make it searchable. Until recently, the practice of web crawling …

Phil Lewis never planned on leaving Michigan. Detroit was home. Still, he wasn’t exactly happy with the life he’d built, he tells me recently over Zoom. After graduating from Michigan State University, where he studied sociology, Lewis cycled through Teach for America and landed a gig as an elementary school …

Last week, an AI Overview search result from Google used one of my WIRED articles in an unexpected way that makes me fearful for the future of journalism. I was experimenting with AI Overviews, the company’s new generative AI feature designed to answer online queries. I asked it multiple questions …

Disinformation doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It feeds on times of crisis and when authoritative information is needed faster than trusted messengers can get it out. This couldn’t have been more obvious last week as police departments raided college campuses and pro-Palestinian protests across the country. That’s why I invited …

In his spare time, Tony Eastin likes to dabble in the stock market. One day last year, he Googled a pharmaceutical company that seemed like a promising investment. One of the first search results Google served up on its news tab was listed as coming from the Clayton County Register, …

Content warning: This article contains a scene including a graphic sexual assault. My friend sets aside his cocktail, its foamy top sprinkled with cinnamon in the shape of a hammer and sickle, to process his disbelief at what I’ve just told him. “You want to return to Russia?” he asks. …

In her new memoir, Burn Book, Kara Swisher cites a 2014 profile that dubbed her “Silicon Valley’s Most Feared and Well-Liked Journalist.” She might prefer to downplay the first and emphasize the second. Some people would switch that around. But there is no dispute about Swisher’s impact: When it comes …

Anyone who writes reviews for a living has heard it before, and plenty: “How much did you get paid to write this?” I’ve been a critic of many things over the years: movies, wine and spirits, and all manner of tech gear, for WIRED and other publications. And no matter …

What a heinous month for the media. Almost every day, a publication announces layoffs or shuts down. Sports Illustrated just let go almost all of its staff after weathering an embarrassing scandal about AI-generated articles. It's unclear what the desiccated magazine’s future holds, but the sad fate of another formerly …