DataDownload: New CEO Meredith Levien on NYT’s digital future

8 min readAug 1, 2020

DataDownload: New CEO Meredith Levien on NYT’s digital future A weekly summary of all things Media, Data, Emerging Tech View this email in your browser

It’s August.

I was thinking of going on a virtual vacation. But honestly, there’s just so much going on that’s complicated and interesting — I’m staying put.

Our friends at The NY Times are leaning in too. The future of news only works if you embrace the frothy nature of the world we’re in. And Congress seems to be in bipartisan agreement that big tech is too big. But what to do, well that’s another matter. WeChat thinks deepfakes could be good — but again, they’re here and not going away.

And then there are Barack Obama’s powerful words at the funeral for Congressman John Lewis. Don’t listen to the media clips or the “best of” cut downs. Just play the whole thing… the poetry and cadence will soothe and empower you.

Have a good week. Have an ear of corn, or a drink of choice, or an ice cream. There’s lots of work to do.

Steve (steve@nycmedialab.org)

Steven Rosenbaum
Managing Director
The NYC Media Lab
Steve@NYCMediaLab.org Must-Read Newsonomics: The New York Times’ New CEO, Meredith Levien, on Building a World-Class Digital Media Business — and a Tech Company

Meredith Kopit Levien — the new CEO at the NY Times — is the youngest chief executive in the paper’s 168-year history, and the second woman to head the business. Levien is taking over from Mark Thompson. Over the course of seven years, the two worked in lockstep to transform the Times’ ad and subscription models, and elevated the paper’s digital businesses to an enviable position.

Now, readers account for six out of 10 dollars of the Time’s revenue, a massive transition from when the paper leaned on advertising for 70% of its revenue; 3M people listen to The Daily morning podcast; and the Times has a million subscribers for crosswords and cooking products alone (and 5M+ digital subscriptions overall, with around a million print subscribers). Nieman Lab’s Ken Doctor interviews Levien about her new position, the road to 10M subscribers, the role of engineering at the paper (second behind journalism), diversity at the Times, and much more.

15 min read

This Wednesday some of tech’s more powerful leaders — Jeff Bezos, Tim Cook, Sundar Pichai, and Mark Zuckerberg — appeared before the House judiciary’s antitrust subcommittee, facing complaints of spreading fake news, “‘killing’ the engines of the American economy,” and censoring political speech. A brief overview of the lambasting:

“Zuckerberg faced repeated questions about Facebook’s purchase of Instagram in 2012…. congressman Jerry Nadler called the acquisition ‘exactly the type of anticompetitive acquisition the antitrust laws were designed to prevent.’”
“Cook, the Apple CEO, faced effective questioning from representative Hank Johnson of Georgia, who said the investigation had surfaced concerns that rules governing the App Store review process are not available to the app developers.”
“Bezos faced few questions following his opening statement, perhaps because of a technical difficulty with his video feed. Representative Pramila Jayapal pressed Bezos on whether the company used data from third-party sellers in making sales decisions.”

5 min read

Read More Tech+Media Facebook’s ‘Red Team’ Hacks Its Own AI Programs Last year Instagram users fell into a cat-and-mouse game with Facebook devs as the former began using subtle overlays to bypass the company’s AI-powered moderation algorithms. Engineers then trained their algorithms to detect such overlays, but users quickly adapted different patterns to push explicit content.

Facebook eventually settled on a second ML model to detect and remove such overlays, but the incident also prompted the creation of an AI red team. “We went from ‘Huh? Is this stuff useful?’ to now it’s production-critical. If our automated system fails, or can be subverted at large scale, that’s a big problem,” says Facebook CTO Mike Schroepfer. One of the red team’s current priorities is deepfakes:

“Facebook’s AI red team launched a project called the Deepfakes Detection Challenge to spur advances in detecting AI-generated videos. It paid 4,000 actors to star in videos featuring a variety of genders, skin tones, and ages. After Facebook engineers turned some of the clips into deepfakes by swapping people’s faces around, developers were challenged to create software that could spot the simulacra. The results, released last month, show that the best algorithm could spot deepfakes not in Facebook’s collection only 65 percent of the time. That suggests Facebook isn’t likely to be able to reliably detect deepfakes soon.”

8 min read Read More The Owner of WeChat Thinks Deepfakes Could Actually Be Good In a recent translated whitepaper, Tencent wrote that it sees AI entering a stage of “ubiquitous intelligence” — “artificial intelligence technology will gradually transform into fundamental service installations like the Internet and electricity.” Besides extolling the likes of NLP, computer vision, and other AI subsets, there’s a section on the beneficial application of “deep synthesis” (aka deepfakes). Tencent lists five examples:

Personalized entertainment: “As the viral app Zao showed last year, deepfake technology can be used to face-swap users into movies or video games. It could create a new genre of hyper-personalized entertainment.”
Improving e-commerce: “The technology is already being used to generate virtual models of different body types and ethnicities, as well as to let users digitally try on clothes for a more interactive online shopping experience.”
For creating realistic virtual avatars: “It has already been used to generate three-dimensional digital humans to perform as virtual pop stars and TV anchors, and to bring historical figures into virtual reality. It could also be combined with computer vision and natural-language understanding to create smart digital assistants capable of natural interactions.”
For helping patients: “Finally, the technology has shown potential for helping those affected by chronic illness. For example, it has allowed people who have lost their voice to ALS to communicate by using a deepfake of it.”

2 min read Read More The Star of This $70M Sci-Fi Film Is a Robot

BondIt Media Capital is pouring $70M into a sci-fi film, called “b”, that stars the first fully-autonomous AI actor in Hollywood history. “Erica’s” development was headed by Hiroshi Ishiguro, who leads Osaka University’s Intelligent Robotics Laboratory. Ishiguro’s other robots have performed in plays, sung in malls, and delivered the news.

BondIt CEO Matthew Helderman says Erica had no acting talent when they first met: “‘It was like teaching a child why we respond the ways we do.’ The team taught her how to perform over more than two years of daily sessions…. Actors explained out loud how they were feeling in each scene to Erica…. Their biggest challenge, he said, was hardly memorization — she immediately mastered her lines. But it took her months to grasp the concept of not just reciting a line, but speaking it softly or in full voice depending on the context.”

7 min read

Former President Obama delivered a powerful eulogy at Congressman John Lewis’s funeral: “I like so many Americans owe a great debt to John Lewis and his forceful vision of freedom…John Lewis was getting something inside his head, an idea he couldn’t shake, took hold of him, that nonviolent resistance and civil disobedience were the means to change laws, but also change hearts and change minds and change nations and change the world.”

40 min watch

Watch Now What We’re Listening To Podcast: Election Cybersecurity — How Ready Are We for November 3rd?

The Verge speaks with cybersecurity journalist Kim Zetter on the state of election security in the US: “What methods are being proposed to stop potential interference in the voting process, the problems with mail-in voting during a pandemic, and how voting machines are not always the best solution for a presidential election.”

50 min listen

Listen Now Virtual Events Virtual Event: NYC Meets Los Angeles Tech — Exploring Future Trends & Opportunities
Date: August 4, 6PM-7PM
A high-level overview for the NYC tech community to learn about trends, issues, and opportunities in the Los Angeles tech and startup ecosystem. Register Here.

Virtual Event: ETL Speaker Series — Michael Tubbs, City of Stockton
Date: August 12, 4:30PM
Upon taking office in January 2017, Tubbs became both Stockton’s youngest mayor and the city’s first African-American mayor. Tubbs is also the youngest mayor in the history of the country representing a city with a population of more than 100,000 residents. Watch Here. A Deeper Look Google’s Secretive ATAP Lab Is Imagining the Future of Smart Devices

Advanced Technology and Projects (ATAP) — Google’s research skunkworks — is meant to be “just like DARPA, but in Silicon Valley.” ATAP was led by ex-DARPA Regina Dugan, before she went on to start a similar group at Facebook. ATAP has been secretive for years, but senior directory Dan Kaufman has started to open up a bit about the lab’s works. Kaufman was previously director of the information innovation office at DARPA (Dugan was his boss). Now he’s overseeing projects like Jacquard, “which turns fabric into a touch-sensitive surface” and a mouse for spatial computing:

“Using items set up around his desk, Marks shows off his concept. He points his remote at a lamp to turn it on. Then he performs more complex maneuvers, including dragging the Star Wars theme from YouTube on his computer to the speaker where he’d like to hear it, and then to the lamp, which begins pulsating through different colors in a rhythm determined by the music.”